Four leaf clover

   1985 was a good year. I'd just moved to Colorado. A little college town called Fort Collins. Their football team was suffering and they had high hopes that I could bring them back from the dust. As if I had a chance. Sure, I was good, one of the best out of high school that year, scholarships all the way. But one man can't carry a team.

   So you see, I was doomed from the beginning.

    Not long after that I had a dream. A nightmare, or a vision maybe, whatever you want to call it. I don't know. I don't question these things. All I know is that it happened, and things like that don't happen to me. Usually.

   I'm a light sleeper. I wake up at the slightest fright. I've never slept long enough to have any nightmares, but I had this one. I went to sleep one night and in that space between waking and dreaming I felt a presence behind me. I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn't move.

   There was a window above my bed and I could feel someone looking at me. I felt a probing of my soul, like someone was looking into me. Like I was made of glass.

   I tried to get up, to look out the window and tell who, or what, ever it was to get the hell away from me- to leave me alone. I was ready to grab my baseball bat and have some midnight practice swings. But I couldn't move. Couldn't even turn my head. That was the first time I knew true fear.

   I lay in my bed, shaking, staring at the inside of my sheets, when I rose up out of my body. I turned around and I could see myself there in bed, under the covers, still as a stone. I pitied myself, so helpless and weak. So stricken with fright. I'd never thought of myself that way, and it was a shame.

   Then I looked out the window. And standing there, fogging up the glass with it's breath, looking down on me there in bed, was a man. A leprechaun maybe, I don't know. A shadow of all that is good. He wore a dark green fedora, and had the stature of a midget, even though he must've been a good six feet off the ground to see in my window like that.

   Who are you, I wanted to yell, go away! But I couldn't. All I could do was watch. And then it happened. He shifted his gaze from the me under the covers to the real me, standing at the foot of my own bed watching myself. He looked right at me, and smiled. I felt myself being sucked into his gaze but I was powerless to resist. I mustered up one last bit of strength and let out a yell and woke up in a pool of sweat, shivering like a leaf on a tree in December.

   The sun was coming up and I was alone in my bed. I pulled back the covers and looked up at the window but there was no one there. I went outside to look for footprints but all I found was a four leaf clover in the clover patch.

Like I said, I was doomed.