Brick dreamed of the night his wife gave him the news. Everything was as he remembered it. Except this time they were the only ones in the restaurant. And for some reason he was eating grits, which he hated. And it was at Church’s Chicken instead of Red Lobster.
But the conversation was the same. She started off with the crying and the apologies. Then she transitioned to making those feeble excuses movie characters make. Finally, she offered to let him run around on her for a while, as some kind of restitution. But he would have none of that. He had never cheated on anyone before and wasn’t about to do so now. Brick had plenty of flaws: Sometimes he drank too much. His temper was terrible to behold in the right circumstances. He wasn’t very sentimental. Gambling addiction. Not much of a cook. Almost never flossed. Fidelity, at least, was a quality he could choose to have.
As he finished his 1st beer, which had started him on the road to destruction that fateful evening, he refused her offer. She seemed to will her eyes dry then, as she had done in real life. Then came the anger. She berated him for the better part of an hour, listing all the aforementioned flaws and many more. It had been embarrassing then as it was now, even without an audience. His reaction was the same: staring at the table and finishing beer after beer, which in the dream seemed to come out of nowhere. Originally, he had finally stood up, threw a hundred dollar bill on the table and cut her off with, “You know what? I’ll just walk back to the base. Maybe I’ll stop by the motor pool…” and walked out.
But now his dream suddenly became lucid near the end of her tirade. As soon as he knew it was a dream, the scenery changed. They were still at a table, but now they were in the Death Star, where Emperor Palpatine had died. Brick slowly and methodically stood up, picked his wife up over his head, and walked to where Luke Skywalker had been saved by Darth Vader. Laughing like a madman, he tossed her into the reactor shaft, and she fell screaming into the cold, metallic abyss.
“Hehe, sweet,” he muttered weakly, before his eyes were even open, as he slowly began to wake up. He opened them a crack and the flood of light brought with it a pounding headache.
