Ever since the Floods, Irene’s nightmares were worse than ever...

Shadowy figures on the horizon. Chasing her. Knifing through trellised shadows, craggy mountain tops, cold forests...

Irene didn’t know exactly who the figures were. She just knew they were after her.

The offenders she styled as hillbillies, country hicks. Rednecks. Some had skulls visible under their skin. Some were shadows. The offenders often emerging from afar, from dark air, running roughshod, like wolves, through the forest...

Her menacing hicks in grease-stained overalls ... Others berobed. In robes of red. Cold trickles and bloody noses peering from underneath the dark corona of their cowls...

... hicks lying in wait with crossed eyes, gaping mouths, cracked, dirty lips. Hicks whistlin’ Dixie in the darkness...

But the hicks generally wouldn’t scream or speak to Irene, aside from yeehawing. Most of the hicks only hissed like striking vipers ... venomous silvery sparks leaping with their spit as the hicks’ red robes went snapping with the wind.

The heaviest hicks stalking Irene under skies the color of a corpse...

... Hicks’ breath fogging, blood streaking down the bumpkins’ faces as the aggrieved hurdled toward her ... running as bulls escaping the rodeo ... the hicks’ pulling penis petting-zoos like pits of snakes ... outstretched hands clawing up from the ground...

The hicks’ cold fingers crawling up and over Irene’s limbs like cockroaches...

In these dreams she’d run. Barefoot. Through the forest. A hunted animal. Irene in Daisy Duke hotpants and a Hulkamania T-shirt. Freezing winds stealing her screams.

Her feet frozen, Irene ran wheezing, her wild bursts of breath becoming clouds of crystals sparkling silver-blue in the white wilderness ... The forest floor opening in front of her as a treacherous carpet of rotting leaves. An icy surface crackling, crunching. A minefield.

In these dreams, the Shania Twain song “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” was often following Irene, playing from somewhere above. The twangy guitar melody, bass pounding in deep booms. The song maddening her as she panted and ran on dumb feet; menacing hicks’ hisses sounding from all around, the cacophony of noise ever louder.

The hillbillies closing in.

Cold touching her skin, in these dreams Irene shook tremulously, puke caught in her throat ... In these dreams, whichever way she ran, the rednecks were there, in blood-colored robes, filthy overalls soiled as used toilet paper; their whiskery, leathery faces like ghouls.

But the hicks then burnished into the back of Irene’s eyes as she’d scream awake to silence. Her jaw then clenched with such force her teeth might shatter...

Tangled in her blankets, twisting this way and that, Irene would then clutch at her sheets like a parachute, waiting for lines of light, for night to melt into morning.

... waiting for her cornbread, for her hillbillies to hide like cockroaches from the sun.

Then there was the recent spate of truck dreams. Clattering along a crescent-shaped road in snow-capped mountains ... Moonlit hills ... Hoary peaks ... Colossal cauliflower trees growing taller. A pale white haze deepening the distance.

The vehicle, a Ford F-150 pickup, was covered in Confederate flags, MAGA stickers and was driving itself, forcing on, fast as a demon. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” again blaring ... An Irene’s hands handcuffed to the wheel ... Disdain stirring, tremors of rage overtaking her as she gritted her teeth. But she let the vehicle fall forward. Kept quiet as a painting.

After all, politeness was her pedigree. Even in nightmares, Irene would remain a smiling woman. Wouldn’t let the cracks show.

Even in nightmares, she knew a smile would be the perfect panacea. That a perfect smile could keep her teeth from falling out...

♪ ... Just like I should... ♪

... drew in a draft of wet air, felt her front teeth loosen along with the muscle spasms, then let the wheels rock on...

♪ ... if I can have you for life... ♪

The pickup shaking, rattling. A human shriek, then a “yeehaw!” coming from under the wheels ... Irene would worry the truck’s wheels might pop off and she’d be stranded in the cold mountains, alone. Alone and handcuffed to a heap of iron. Or chased into eternity by fat hicks piggybacking smaller hicks, mountain lions ridden by hillbillies ... Hunted like a pig by Forrest Gump in a Bigfoot costume...

An Irene vanishing ... a suicidal snowman jumping into a sweet tea jacuzzi.

As a city person, Irene had long been terrified of wide-open spaces, rural areas. Especially mountains. Mountains scared her most of all. The altitude. The dense thickets of trees, scrub, bushes. The invisibility. The likelihood of avalanches, forest fires, flash floods ... The inevitability of hicks, hillbilly sightings...

Just what were mountains anyway? Chunks of the inner earth jutting up. The Earth’s ugliest teeth ... The Earth’s vaginal dentata...

Mountain people especially horrified her. Scared her worse than circus clowns. Even before she watched the film Deliverance, but after that...

She pictured country folk as meth addicts, doomsday preppers, rapists, freaks who fucked their family members, tall obese men with scruffy ponytails, oil-stained overalls, mouthfuls of missing teeth. Mullet-headed monsters who smelled of body odor, ate roadkill, and watched NASCAR. People who belonged to hate groups. People who drove monster trucks with those big garish tires tall as boulders.

The sort of people who thought professional wrestling was real...

The news coverage of the Floods’ devastation was unavoidable, and Irene’s dreams kept sliding, becoming darker ... In her darkest dreams, be they alone in the woods, or in a bumpy truck, she could feel the creep of a colder emptying ... And the hillbillies were her culprits. Even if millions of hicks were amassed underwater, in watery graves ... or be they running toward the tornado in the trailer park...

Her hicks were privy, collecting Irene’s debts. Her every breath fueling their fury. Burning their Bibles. Her antagonists malicious, colder than shirtless men on Cops.

Irene’s scariest dreams had come to feature hillbillies’ tongues, their salivating, sloppy wet tongues licking over her naked body. The hillbillies airborne. In flight. Flying by her. Kamikaze. Fast as fruit bats. Hicks themselves slack-jawed and singing twisted, falsetto karaoke versions of Shania Twain songs to the sounds of distant farts and burps. The hillbillies aloft, tongues jutting out like madmen. The hillbillies licking Irene’s face and neck as they flew past before repairing to bare, snowy branches ... in distant trees, like the hands of skeletons clawing at the sky...

The rednecks hiding in tree branches, slapping their bellies, screaming snow off the mountaintop. The flying hicks barking like angry dogs yet remaining patient as vultures.

... or Irene alone, naked, lost in the woods. Freezing in blue skin. Seeing no hillbillies, but sensing and suspecting the mountain folk hunting, walking on all fours, peering from tunnels, abandoned mines. The hillbillies wiring banjo-bombs, setting beartraps, spitting watermelon seeds in her general direction.

“Not giving a fiddler’s fuck.”

In these dreams, smells were stronger, and Irene could smell alcohol, like a rubbing alcohol, and sense the hicks, in their hovels, sipping moonshine. She’d sense rednecks constructing outhouses with bed-of-nails toilet seats, torture chambers for urbanites...

Then there were her recent dreams of hillbilly sister-wives, daughter-wives, the hillbilly witches ... Irene was terrified of them too ... The vile, fat, bubble figures pointing at her from afar, hitchhiking via middle finger ... The witches creeping and crawling on the side of the road, slow as the tides...

Irene hated the witches’ round faces, their sickly ashen hues, their ragged clothes. The witches dressed in tattered robes of red. She knew the hillbilly witches were onto her, floating like ghosts up in the mountains ... Woods witches uglier than Marjorie Taylor Greene ... with broken teeth and blotched faces, close-set eyes and weak chins ... Cunts stealing the cotton from clouds...

Irene knew the hillbilly witches as total fucking terrorists, feeding on shadows. The redneck witches omnipotent as her every fear.