The cigarette and the hand
The cigarette and the hand
I was awakened by the smell of cigarettes. This was unsettling to my subconscious since my flatmate was in Shanghai, and neither of us smoked. So I jerked wide awake and looked around. At the foot of my bed next to my foot was a hand sticking out of my mattress, with a burning cigarette in it. Holy shit!
I leaped out of bed, heart racing, wondering what to do. So I batted the cig out of the hand and yanked as hard as I could. First came an arm, then a shoulder, then an entire body. The thing I pulled out was ghastly. Completely white and plasticky with no features except two eyes and a nose, covered in little droplets of blood. No discernable mouth at all. Cold deep blue eyes. Kind of like looking into the eyes of a rabbit.
I ran out of the room and noticed hands sticking up all over the living room. So I ran and pulled all of them out of the floor like large human-esque weeds. Some were larger, some smaller, and you could discern that some were children, some women. Damn! I pulled up a whole family of ghostly things. Now there were all standing there in my apartment looking at me.
The one I pulled up first slides over and bites me in the arm. Suddenly I see a flash of all sorts of terrible unsettling visions, and I somehow understand. He's communicating with me. What I saw was his life.
I open the door, light a candle, and wish them on their way, saying "I'm sorry for what happened, but you can't stay here. You have to go." They leave, and I wake up.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
