Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: The Flying House

A sliver of cheddar, melted to a lurid midnight hue, becomes the opium that detonates a housewife’s slumber. Brick walls sprout riveted wings; the mortgage papers mutate into aeronautical blueprints; the marital bed levitates through a skylight transformed into a cathedral of constellations. Oneiric machinery—cog, piston, brassy bellows—devours the couple’s clapboard cottage, thrusting it skyward, past church steeples that bow like penitents, past fiscal clerks brandishing promissory notes as if they were papal bulls. Over oceans the edifice drifts, skimming whale spouts that hiss like punctured debts; over deserts where sand dunes rearrange themselves into ledgers of compound interest; finally breaching the lunar crust, where a crater yawns open like a creditor’s grin. In the vacuum of Selene, the house finally settles, mortgage calcified to crater dust, the dreamer’s eyelids fluttering as gravity reasserts its fiduciary grip.