Last night I had a dream in which a wild-eyed prophet appeared before me and told me this story:

Once there were two people in a hospital room.

One had drawers full of pens at home. Not the cheap ones that come 12 to a pack for $1.99, and not $200 fancy-schmancy pens, but nice ones, in assorted colors and point thicknesses and types. Her favorites were Pilot G-2 07 — and she owned at least 50 of them, keeping them in every room of her house, and multiples in her carrying bag.

The other worked at a low-paying hospital job. His employer purchased cheapy pens that came 12 to a pack for $1.99. The pens skipped and blurped out ink blobs and were entirely unreliable, so he saved up the loose change he found in the parking lot of the grocery store or on the sidewalks when he was walking home. Finally, he had enough to purchase one Pilot G-2 07.

She hadn’t expected to be in a hospital room that day. She didn’t have her bag. She didn’t have any pens with her. When she was asked to sign some papers, she needed a pen. Almost as if by magic, this Pilot G-2 07 was placed in her hand, and she signed the various papers on the proper lines beside the hastily scrawled red X’s.

When she finished, she looked for the person who had handed her the pen, but everyone was gone from the room. Everyone. The nurses were at the nursing station. The housekeeping person was dry-mopping the floor. The transporter person was pushing the pen-lady’s family member to radiology.

She looked at the pen in her hand. It was a nice one. Blue. Fairly new. Shiny.

And she thought, “I could just stick this pen in my pocket, in case I need to sign something else today. Nobody will really miss it. It will go very nicely with the dozens of other pens I have at home.”

When the housekeeping person came into the room looking for the pen, the pen-lady pretended not to notice because she had the pen tucked neatly in her pocket.

“Wait — ” I said — in my dream, of course. “That’s not what happened. I did NOT keep the pen.”

“You thought about it,” the wild-eyed prophet said accusingly, and his wild eyes grew even wilder as he stared at me.

“It was a FLIT,” I said. “The thought flitted through. I never seriously considered keeping the pen.”

“You did. You lusted after that pen,” he said.

How can anyone argue with a wild-eyed prophet in a dream?! I found myself going back to that moment, when I held the pen and didn’t know who the owner was. In the space of a firefly blink, I had thought about keeping it — but then I set it on the stand where the owner could easily find it.

The wild-eyed prophet interrupted my mental replay of the situation. “You have a pen problem,” he said, much more gently now. “You have more pens than a person needs — and you keep purchasing more. You go down the pen aisle at Target, Office Max, even the Family Dollar, and you look at pens. You buy pens. You don’t need any more pens.”

“But… but…” I stammered, “I like pens.”

“Give them away,” he said, his voice growing distant as he seemed to be being sucked into a far-off light. “Commit to sharing your pens…. Carry them in your bag …. and give them away.”

Then, he was gone.

I woke up in a cold sweat.

What does it all mean, I wondered?

This post was originally written in June 2017. I even posted it because it has two comments from that time — both from siblings! I’m insecure enough about my writing, though, that I moved it back to the draft folder, probably within 24 hours.

Today’s Word of the Day prompt is Parking Lot. This post came up in the draft folder. When I read it, it made me laugh — in part because I DO have dreams like that, and in part because I still have a pen problem.