Where the Drinking Gourd leads you.

It made sense that I was the passenger.
We were on a two-lane highway somewhere.
It also made sense that said highway resembled
the one I take to work every day, but
we weren't going fast so we weren't going to work.

Something was hunched over the double-yellow
ahead of us. We veered around it just in time.
I snapped my neck around to look through
the rear windshield, my eyes weren't to be trusted.
They told the same story the second time, though.

"Did I just see that?" I asked the driver, a nondescript man whose
bland features resembled no one in my nightmares' usual cast.
He nodded his clean-shaven face without looking at me
and kept driving. I watched the spectacle behind us in horror.

A fuzzy brown head atop a slimy pink body.
It was playing with a pile, brown and red.
The creature took a bite from the fleshy suit in front of it
turned and made eye contact with me, smiling.

Then the baboon pulled its skin back on like over-alls and walked away.

I woke confused to the sound of my progressively loudening alarm.
The crescendo climaxed as my fingers fumbled for the button
after stumbling to my desk in the dark.
That's what happens when I go to bed still in my cups.