GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

it sounded like something haunted. Rooooopenfeld! What followed was a lurid, horrific dream and the boy woke from it bleating like a lamb being slaughtered. When his parents eventually came in to check on their still-crying child, he told them all about it. Both of the adults smiled. Mr. Haden thought it very fitting and patriotic that his little son should have his first cry-himself-awake nightmare in a town called Ropenfeld. Mrs. Haden just thought Simon had an overactive imagination.

Oddly enough for such a mediocre unimaginative person, it didn’t end there. For the rest of his life, many of Simon Haden’s nightmares took place in Ropenfeld. He never understood why things happened there but eventually he came to accept it as part of his chemistry.

Sometimes he dreamed of drowning in Lake Ropenfeld. Sometimes he crashed in a plane that was about to land in the town. The pilot would make his announcement—“We’re making our final approach to Ropenfeld airport.” Then there would be the dire sound of a giant metal part breaking, the plane would lurch to one side, and they would fall into an endless nosedive. Haden had several plane-crash dreams and at the time took it to be a portent of how he would die eventually: in a flaming spin from five miles up. How dismayed he would have been to learn that in real life he would die of a heart attack while going through the last rinse cycle in a Los Angeles car wash.

Sometimes in his nightmares, a fifteen-year-old Haden walked naked down the halls of Ropenfeld high school carrying only his textbooks. Beautiful clothed classmates pointed at him and laughed hysterically. One time they laughed, then all of them pulled out switchblade knives and attacked him. In another dream, a car full of his mothers slammed on its brakes right next to him as he walked down Ropenfeld Street. Mom after mom jumped out, like a clown car in the circus. They kept coming and coming. All of his mothers screamed at him for not having done a hundred thises and disappointing them for another hundred thats.

The bear hesitated again, unsure whether what it was about to say was allowed. All of this was brand-new territory for Bob. It was new territory for all of them.

“I shouldn’t tell you this.”

“Tell me what?” Haden showed only irritation. He thought the bear was going to try a different way of persuading him.

“Sooner or later you’ll have to go, Simon. That’s how it works here: everyone who has died must return to their Ropenfeld and confront what happened there. Find out why you dreamt those things when you did. It’s an essential part of understanding who you are through who you were. By returning to the nightmares you had and working through them bit by bit, you learn to understand certain important aspects of your life. That’s part of the process here.”

“Yeah? Well fuck it, Bob. I think I’ll wait another thousand years or so before I tackle that aspect of my life. Just being here is enough of a nightmare for right now. My plate is full—I don’t need a second helping.”

“You can’t wait; you have to go there now.”

Before he had a chance to say no again (and again and again), Haden began to rise off the ground like a slowly filling hot air balloon. Instantly he knew what was happening. “No! You can’t do this!”

“I’m sorry, but you have to go. You’ve got to try and save Isabelle.”

Haden rose higher. He flailed his arms as if somehow that could stop or control what was happening to him. But it couldn’t.

“This isn’t fair. It’s wrong.”

“I know Simon, but it’s necessary.”

Haden wanted to answer but fury silenced him. When he’d risen about five feet above the ground, his body stopped and then began moving forward in one direction. He was being steered. The office window was wide open and he sailed through. It would have been a delightful sensation if he hadn’t known where he was going—toward all those shitty, shitty things: the monsters seen through the 3-D eyes and imagination of a scared child. The terrors, the relentless moments of failure, humiliation, confusion, and worse that he had experienced in his many nightmares over the years. Haden was going toward all of them, toward Ropenfeld. There was nothing he could do to stop it. And for what, to save Isabelle Neukor? Save her from what? Yes, he knew the secret of the universe, but how did it apply here?

Celadon

John Flannery was late for his meeting with Leni because he was hit by a car. A brand-new Porsche Cayenne, no less. One of those four-wheel-drive, eighty-thousand-dollar Jeep-y testosterone-turbos that rich men drive to show the world they’re larky, adventurous, but don’t forget I’m rich too. A “Weekend Rambo” vehicle. This one was so clean and new that it had only two hundred and thirty-nine kilometers on the odometer when it blew through a red traffic light at Schwedenplatz and hit Flannery square on while he was in the middle of a pedestrian crossing. The car knocked him back onto the sidewalk into a huddle of shrubs.

A lot of people saw it happen. Some of them screamed. Others gaped, fascinated by this unexpected turn of events as they were walking across their day. A mother with two children turned around and ran in the other direction with them. The kids kept trying to look back over their shoulders to see if the guy was dead.

He certainly looked dead. Flannery lay unmoving, sprawled over the bush like some kind of lumpy tarpaulin. The driver of the Porsche panicked. For a split second he thought Floor the accelerator and get the hell out of here. Fortunately his good sense prevailed. After taking a few deep breaths, he slowly and carefully got out of his sleek new car that had just become a deadly weapon. Terrified, he walked toward the body. He felt as if his insides had turned