When the dreams I kept dying in
carried over into waking life, your tulpa
had me believing in you, sleepwalking, talking
backwards in circles until your face was stuck that way—
a leering smear suggesting a pathology we had to end.
That was always the burden of the dreams: to choose
which of us would die and who would do it.
We created the wraith wishing other realities
into existence, imagining this one would be any different.
Meanwhile, the three of us wondered how many more
legs you could remove before it killed me.
Jimmy Huff is a writer and musician from the Missouri Ozarks, USA. His stories, poems, and essays have received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best-of nominations and appear or are forthcoming in *82 Review, Third Flatiron Anthologies, The Cabinet of Heed, and many other stellar places.