Adding a cut because there’s a bit of gore/violence in this post and some people might not wanna see it on their dash? I don’t think it’s that bad, but this is me we’re talking about, and I am attempting to learn social niceties. :O

If you are on mobile and this cut doesn’t work for you, uh, sorry.

I don’t dream much any more, almost never–and I know someone’s going to say we always dream we just don’t remember it, but to me there’s not a lot of difference in those states of being–but I woke up just before 7 this morning because I had a short dream startling enough to wake me.

In it my sister & I had a cat like my friend mysoulforcoffee‘s, a big fat gray Maine Coon cat but at least twice as large as he is in real life. On our way out of the house I saw it on our kitchen counter and playing with our sink. I figured it was just hunting fruit flies so I left it there to entertain itself in our absence.

When we returned we passed something odd at the door that I know I got from scrolling through the Sandsvendor’s Tumblr (this lumpy thing) the other day. I was like “Not really sure what that is, but I’ve got an armload of groceries I need to hurry up and put down.”

I went into the kitchen ahead of my sister, found what looked like another piece of the lump, and then as I was setting down my bags and straightening I realized there was blood everywhere. On the floor, the front of the dishwasher, the counter, the wall near the coffeemaker. In the sink around the drain, thick and red and clumpy as it started to dry.

And I realized, That’s my cat’s paw.

I’d left the cat alone on the sink and it’d gone after something in the garbage disposal and it had torn most of its paw off trying to get free again. Sent my sister to figure out where it’d slunk off to while I collected the pieces. Woke up the second my hands closed on the third little toe pad.

And then I was lying there thinking Probably should’ve shooed the cat out of the kitchen before we left, and my mind made the connections between the dream, the knowledge that somewhere some sociopath has probably done that to their pet on purpose just because they could, to the Yulin Festival, and then finally turned towards unwarranted gratuitous violence against human beings in general.

Guess that means my mind’s finally in the right place to work on Elysium for real. Took it long enough to get back here.

For the record, violence against animals is something I’m pretty sure I leave out of all of my stories these days, because few things will piss me off faster than hearing someone tell me about the time their ex-boyfriend sprayed paint thinner in her cat’s eyes and set it on fire because he was pissed at her for breaking up with him ((true fucking story I’ll kill him if I find him))

but Elysium, for a story that is technically about a war, is to me truly about its Nightmares, and I’m going to need to keep my mind in this space for a while if I’m going to pull it off right this time.

((Now if only I can wake them up.))