Forgotten Things

She walked around the toy store, letting children’s voices and warm forced air dry her clothes from the rain outside. There were colors everywhere, a rainbow of possibilities. Purple, blue, green and sparkles. She picked up a small stuffed wolf from a high wooden shelf among dozens of other animals and held it in the crook of her arm, holding it there as she looked at picture books and soft felt puppets shaped like peacocks and octopus. The small wolf, a little bigger than a football, stayed in place, a soft comforting presence at her side.
She fell into it.  The warm stuffed cuddly possibility of its unrequited love. It felt good, though she didn’t know why. It was somewhere hiding in the folds of thick blankets, furry friends and clean blankets. It was years in the past.
The wolf was intended as gift, but part of her regretted wrapping it up in pink and purple and waiting for another day, a coming night among family and a round table and birthday chanting. She wanted to take it to bed, have it sit next to her as she read another novel that took her into Greece forty years before. She tried to remember playing with toys, and she searched her mind for a memory when her parents had taken her to a toy store. Nothing came.
Later that night she called her mother.
“Can you remember any toys I used to play with?  I can’t remember playing with any toys.  I only have a memory of playing with that red sand I brought back from the Nevada desert.”
“Oh sure, you played with lots of toys,” her voice got very soft, with an undertone of defensiveness. “You played dress up and went to Deta’s for tea and worked in the garden. I bought you Jenga. You played with Blackstar. You had a bike and a scooter and skates. How did this come up?”
“Don’t worry, this isn’t a critique on your parenting, I just couldn’t remember playing with toys. I was walking around a toy store and couldn’t remember ever being in one. I couldn’t remember any toys I used to have except for a few Barbies.” 
Later she searched the motives in her words. It had been a critique, however baseless. She had wandered around the toy store, a little jealous of all the children inside picking out toys. She wanted a stuffed bear.
“You had Legos.”
“I never had Legos.”
“Yes you did.  I remember picking them up.”
“Well, it must have been when I was really little. They must have been the big kind.”
“Yes, they were. And you had a big dollhouse, several of them actually. Your dad was so proud when he brought it home for you. He was sitting next to you drinking a coffee while you moved the furniture all around. He was so proud.” 
Her voice was light with sweet memories.
The thought of her father sitting there so happy with his little girl brought the prickling pain of tears to her eyes. They had all come so far from then, down the dark road of adulthood and clashing politics and the black space that their words could not fill. Three strangers constantly filled with misunderstanding, doubts, anger. Her dad now could not sit next to her comfortably, he couldn't just sit and feel his love for her, feel her love for him. 
“You also had that big cardboard doll house when we lived in Sharon. It was big enough that you could get inside.”
“Yeah,” she said, remembering the structure in the attic with one small window in their three story house.  Remembering her sister there, just a baby. “I do remember that.”
“Oh, you do?”  There was a moment of quiet between them. “I think we watched too much TV together though.”
“Yeah probably.”
“I think that being an adult is much more interesting and challenging though. I can’t remember my childhood either. I think the further you get away from it, the less you remember. I can’t remember a thing.”
“Really?”
“Not a thing.” 
She knew her mom had blocked out the painful past. The weekends she had once talked about when her mother would leave her at home with frozen dinners, alone and scared while her mother went to the theater. There where other memories that perhaps she had forgotten, forced away, hidden. 
They hung up and she lay in bed, still only remembering a select sliver of her own childhood. She grabbed a pillow and tucked it into her arm, pulling it tight.

Beyond The Red Door

There was a faint depression on the surface where its handle should have been. She knew then, as she knew now, that it was meant to be left alone.
The great room of glass jars, sealed boxes, chests with rusty locks, cabinets full of spices, roots, herbs, leaves in soft leather bags, the entire room was a mystery. But on this day, it was speaking to her, touching her curiosity, pulling on her body with gossamer coils.
When she passed the threshold, she felt as though she could breath, perhaps for the first time in her life. Then she found the red door about fifty steps across the stone floor. Out of all the things she wanted to open, the leather bags to sniff, the cedar boxes to explore, this door was the most inviting of all at the edge of the sun-lit room. She ran her hand over the cherry wood, felled from a great tree on the edge of the village, and knew it must be meant for her. What other purpose would there be for an unlocked room, a deliciously inviting door with no handle in the most alluring and eye-catching of colors? It was as if all arrows were pointing her in this direction, and here she stood, high noon in front of this place, this door, now open, as the other door to the great room had been. Was she not supposed to enter?

She pushed on the thick slab of wood, looking down the steps aglow with the candlelight of hallway tapers. It was dark and full of flickering shadows. The stairs descended, seemingly into an abyss which might be without end. The bright sunlight of the other chamber was gone, there were only a few narrow slits in the stone revealing the blue sky and then the stairs descended deep into the earth. 
She took one step down cautiously, then another. The great wooden door closed gently behind her. She wound down the staircase until she reached the bottom, where Master Lacledi sat on a wooden chair, a leather wrapped book in his hand. He looked up, not exactly surprised to see her there, though a hint of excitement crossed his face. 
“You’ve found me,” he said.  “On this day, you have decided to come.”
“What is it you do down here?” she asked, though he did not answer. She looked into his black eyes and saw what could not be said. Between them grew the flame that language does not bear to understand. He smiled.
“Would you like to learn my ways?” 
She was unsure exactly what he meant, but she nodded, knowing it felt right.

He opened a dark wood cabinet embedded in the stone wall.  The hinge had a slight high pitched squeak which echoed in the small chamber and gave her a quick set of chills.  She could see several rows and varieties of glass bottles: blue, dark brown, an opaque white and a rusty orange color. 
He reached for a bottle slightly hidden behind a large dark blue jar, he grabbed it with his forefinger and thumb and brought it close to his face, then put it back where it had been.
“If you are ready to step through the door with me, go back to your quarters and bathe and relax your body as much as possible. Later tonight, long after the moon has risen, I will send one of the ravens to fetch you, listen for his tap on your window.  Then, bring yourself back here, and we will open the door together.”  She nodded and smiled slightly, a nervous sensation in her chest. But she looked into his dark eyes and saw only kindness. Whatever he was offering, she was willing to take, she wanted to learn what made him as he was.
“I will see you tonight when the stars are high.”

She turned away from him and went back up the stairs, through the laboratory and down the long series of hallways that eventually led to the eastern quarters of the manor.  She took the long, winding stairs to her room and asked the handmaiden to draw a bath. She looked out the narrow window and saw the river not too far in the distance. It was bright blue and she knew that the current would be more cleansing than any wooden tub of tepid water.  The breeze outside would calm her and prepare her for whatever lay ahead. 
“Never mind Griselda, I’ll go to the river instead.’

Just a little while later she was in her favorite spot where a bend in the river was surrounded by several large boulders. It was well off the path and she came there with some frequency, especially in the summer.  Her mother had brought her there when she was young and they used to play together for hours when the summer breeze would rattle the treetops like cathedral bells. It was fall now and the waters were quite a bit cooler than those fond memories, though she was still more than happy to disrobe.
The first pleasure was the wind, a cooling kiss on her stomach and legs. The sun was weak, though with a bit of attention she felt its warmth.  She tested the water for a moment with her toe, then went in smoothly and quickly, not giving her mind enough time to register the icy bite of the river’s touch.  In a second she was up to her neck, moving her arms and fingers through the silky water.

*  *  *

Go ahead, tell him all of it… she thought to herself.
She had once been a little girl watching him walk through the graveled and moss covered grounds, he in his earthen brown robe stained with powders of every color.  He had no woman to wash his garments, and she noticed he asked none of the servant women to do it either. It had always baffled her, she knew no man who would ever hesitate on such things, but she felt like it somehow seemed to fit.
She imagined him going to the river for his bathing and washing, perhaps entering the pale blue waters fully clothed, letting the swift cold current do the work of a dozen hands.
She looked deep into the deep black pools of his piercing eyes, two portals which contained staircases and hidden rooms and knowledge acquired from a thousand lifetimes, maybe more. There was so much more to him than the body, the stained clothes. She knew it then and she knew it now.  Radiating from him was kindness, pure in motivation, desiring nothing from her but her attention and effort. 
She thought to tell him everything, the experience of her birth, the days before the Iron Wars, the struggles of the Orange Sun, the first impressions she had had of him when he came through the woods and found their small enclave. She thought to tell him all of it, but then wandered down the forking paths of her thoughts, several scenes moving in parallel. 

She wondered what he saw in her small white form. If he could read the thoughts in her eyes, if she was an easy book to read with her brow and cheeks and lips telling the story that somehow remained sealed in her mind. 
She attempted to open her mouth so the words could spill, to let them tumble into his arms without restraint or hesitation, but then he would smile or she would see a sparkle in his kind eyes and she would feel like it was known, that all she could say was already understood. And not just that, but completely accepted, taken in with curiosity and interest, like he could hear a complex symphony in the thoughts that remained inside.

When she awoke he was beside her. She looked down at her skin and looked for the colors which had been there the night before. She looked and there he was, only more real, more alive than she had ever noticed.  She was changed, no longer the same girl which had found him in the morning. She was reborn into the body she remembered, only her eyes were different. It was the same stones all around her, all the same fixtures and books, yet each one seemed slightly different.
She reached down and touched his robe. The fibers were soft and worn on her fingertips, somewhat silky and smelling of sunshine and smoke. The light was bright, coming in through a few very narrow slits by the top of the stairs. They revealed blue skies. She saw that he was watching her. 

“How are your new eyes?” he asked.
A slightly bashful smile spread over her face. She was warm and surprised by her sudden embarrassment.  “It feels strange, I must admit.  I am not sure of my place anymore.”
“Perfect. If you feel different, it is because you are different. You have seen what exists beyond language, the conflict you feel is your body trying to re-adjust to language. Let your eyes wander, let them take in what they thought they knew.”

*   *   *

“Indulge an old man’s whim,” he whispered to her as he gently nudged her towards the path lined with blackberry hedges.  She smiled and held onto his arm, occasionally needing to give an abrupt tug on her long skirt when a long stemmed thorn held onto her hem.
He reached out often, plucking juicy purple berries from their thrones in the sun. His forefinger and thumb were soon stained purple and he added spots of dark pigment to his already stained frock as he wiped his hand.
She plucked the harder blackberries and dropped them into her apron pocket, intending later to make mead, or perhaps give them to Griselda as a gift. The sun was low in the sky and she could smell the fires of the bread bakers. 

“What we shared the other night, I hope you know, is something I have been able to do very rarely with other people. In my life there have only been a handful of people able to meet with me at the exact right time, in the exact right place…there have been just a few rare moments of convergence. I have spent most of my life exploring alone.”
She gripped him a little tighter and thought back to the day she felt almost fell into his workroom. There were no words to describe the feeling, but the rightness of her actions was now manifest. She looked back with a sense of mystery at the day’s events, which had begun almost like every other morning but for that cord which now seemed attached to her chest, a sort of freedom and relaxation of her movements. 
She had never entered his space before, and of course had never walked through the red door. She had never even noticed the depression where a handle should have been. 

“You did a fine job following your inner guides, I was surprised to see you that afternoon. I had been prepared for a journey myself, and then there you arrived, at the exact right time, willing to follow me though the door. I am glad you came.”
She looked up at him, the beard going at all angles, then looked past him at the woods in the distance, a palette of colors from white to black and a dozen shades of green. He plucked another berry and handed it to her. Gingerly, she took it from him and felt an explosion of sweet tartness fill her mouth. 

The Ghost Of Fasler Cove

There is something rather extraordinary about my hometown of Fasler Cove. It is a phenomena that flows from the gift given to one ordinary man.
Walter Pedington was not the sort of fellow to rock the boat. How many people, if you gave them the gift to travel forward and backwards through time, would stay in the same small town doing the same small things that could have been done anyway?
Some people will tell you that they would go back to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, or Adolf Hitler. Others would want to go back and see a dinosaur. Most would be bent on increasing their own wealth; perhaps collecting antiquities to sell in a future where they are valuable or bringing a handy gadget from the future into a past where it can be passed off as their own invention for profit, or even playing the stock market or betting on ponies. Some would try to rule the world, others save it, which might amount to the same thing.
But when Walter Pedington received his gift, none of these things apparently interested him or crossed his mind. This perhaps, was the very reason he was trusted with the gift, for that we know of, he never abused it for profit or to change the course of history.
It was common to see Walter at age 54 sitting on the porch swing of his parents' house on Behemoth Lane conversing with Walter at age 7.  He very much enjoyed talking to himself. Indeed, you might run into him at Morey Point watching himself painting a picture of the sea, or catch him at the Fallout Cafe playing a game of chess with himself while a younger Walter shared a cigarette with a pretty girl outside and a fourth sat brooding by the window, remembering that same girl's death. Walking your dog along the path from Pelican Landing to  Frost's Wood you might  be passed by Walter at the age of 10 zipping by on his bike only to then pass Walter at age 64 sitting on the bench before finding Walter at 18 laying on a blanket in the grass with a sweetheart.
There is a possibility that Walter is guilty of that sin for which I acquitted him, for if he had already altered the course of history and ruled the world before I was born, I would have no way of knowing it. I have often compared the face of 19 year old Walter to a photograph of a bust of Alexander the Great. It is possible that after 12 years of conquest he was prepared to live a quiet life again in a world shaped by his own youthful ambitions. But how would I ever know? And further, Walter has always seemed more interested in introspection than in governing others.
His funeral was a mind bending affair. Walters of various ages were in attendance and out numbered other funeral goers. He outlived his friends and lovers and left no survivors. Once he was married to a young poetess but she left with a younger version of himself before filing for a divorce later that year. Likewise he never had children, for he had himself all those years and always kept a ball and mitts, bicycle, and snacks on hand for when he visited and even drove himself to his own sixth grade piano recital. There were days when his yard was filled with a chorus of his own youthful laughter while six or seven young Walters played capture the flag or kickball.
Even after his death we continue to see Walter, in line buying tickets at the new Cineplex, hiking the trails in Frost's Wood, eating a banana split at the ice cream parlor. It is impossible to imagine Fasler Cove without him, though as time passes, we see less of him and he is more often alone. I imagine that in another 20 years, there will be no one left here who remembers who he is, no more grandmothers who can point him out and say that their mother went to school with that boy, or kissed that young man at a barbeque 100 years ago.
He is like a ghost from a time that has slipped into the realm of fantasy, but soon he will be such a ghost that his presence will go unnoticed and seem utterly ordinary.

All Seeing Eye

Frederick locked the door, put the key in his pocket and walked away from apartment B6 as quickly as his legs would carry him. The sound of his shoes clopping down the wooden stairway echoed loudly in his ears.
The verdant green hue of the stairs would be emblazoned upon his mind for quite some time afterwards. The door that led out of the building and into the street was red, somehow a reflection of the stairs, he thought, because red and green had something to do with each other, although he could no longer remember what.
Outside the street was still moist from some very light rain. The smell of the moldering autumn leaves had been refreshed by this latest shower.
Coming up the sidewalk towards him was a woman still employing her yellow umbrella. It struck Frederick that she could walk along that way, apparently unaware that whatever rain there had been was now ended. His mind oscillated wildly between believing in one of two possibilities. The first belief held that the open umbrella was the result  of a sad mechanical nature, that the woman was so void of volition, like a wind up doll, that she had no choice but to continue woodenly down the street unaware of her surroundings, unaware of  recent occurrences in apartment B6, and of the man stepping out of the red door. The second was that she was utterly aware of all these things, that she was omniscient, that the open umbrella was an intentional communication to him, a way of showing him what she was.
He paused in front of the door and let her pass him by. As she passed she turned her eyes on him in a quick flash. It meant either that she was for the most part ignoring a stranger on the street or that she was toying with him, carefully timing a significant glance.
To hide the trembling of his hands, Frederick shoved them into his pockets and hastily crossed the street, running a little on the far side to avoid an approaching car before reaching the sidewalk. The park yawned before him like a dark forest, a beast with an immense maw open  for his entry. He hastened into the thick of the trees, glancing backward over his shoulder to assure himself that the street, that the building with the red door, the green staircase, and with it apartment B6, were banished from his sight.
The tree was one of a small collection of young redwoods that sheltered a stone bench in the park's depths. Frederick took the key from his pocket, dug it a shallow resting place at the tree's base, and lay it within. He hesitated for a moment, then spread the soil and rust colored detritus from the tree over it.
Standing he brushed his knees and palms clean. His eyes lingered on the hiding place, his body felt pulled to the key as if by magnetic force. The impulse to dig it back up and return it to his pocket held him riveted to the spot as it struggled against his will to leave it buried. This collision of impulse and will held him in stasis for just a minute before he turned his back on the tree and it's new ward to walk briskly away from the redwoods.
Frederick emerged  from the other side of the park onto South Menigen Pass. He could see the Professor  seated at a table in the front window of the cafe, sipping  foam off the top of an oversized blue mug. The Professor stood up and shook his hand when he came in.  Frederick felt self conscious of the dirt from the park left under his fingernails.
"Would you like to order something?" the Professor asked gesturing to the counter and bored baristas.
"Not presently." Freddy answered. "If the weather was better I would like to sit outside and smoke."
The professor nodded. "It's not so bad out." He said, "But if you don't mind, I'd rather we didn't. My asthma."
"Of course." Frederick gestured to the little wooden chairs. "I can smoke later."
The two men shuffled awkwardly into their seats around the small table. The Professor took another sip of his cappuccino. Frederick agonized over what to do with his hands and the filthy fingernails. Deciding there was no point in hiding them, he set one hand on the table and rested the other on his knee.
"Well." the Professor said. "I suppose you want to hear my comments."
Frederick nodded.
"I don't understand the sequence. Whether that is a shortcoming of my perception or a lack of organized structure I'm not sure. Is it a purposeful obfuscation? Or simply chaos? I can't tell."
As the Professor spoke, Frederick noticed the umbrella stand by the door and in it a yellow umbrella. The Professor continued to speak, his voice washing over Frederick like a drone as the younger man scanned the cafe and found her, the woman from outside the building with the red door and the green stairs, the building that contained B6.
Perhaps, it is a different woman, he thought, but soon he was utterly convinced that it was none other.  She sat alone looking at a newspaper. This fact stood out,  just as the umbrella had. Who read newspapers anymore?
Frederick ceased to make even an effort to pretend to be listening to the Professor and fixed his eyes firmly on her, waiting to see if she would look at him.
 "I have been thinking," the Professor's voice became discernable to him, "perhaps hoping, that when something is contained, isolated, then the Big Other cannot see it. Maybe cannot see it, maybe cannot see it as well, maybe there are gaps, maybe there are shadows, maybe there are places for hiding. Pockets of resistance from the regimented gaze of the all seeing eye. Maybe. " 
Frederick dropped his eyes from the woman and fixed them on the Professor.
"Excuse me?" he asked.
"Hm?" the Professor sipped his cappuccino.
"Nevermind." Frederick took a deep breath and shook his head. "Excuse me Professor. I'm afraid I'm not feeling well. Please excuse me."
He stood abruptly and headed for the door. On his way out he stole another glance at her, but her attention remained fixed on the paper.
Frederick hurried away from the cafe and turned onto a cobbled street open only to foot traffic. It was a narrow little street littered with stationary stores, bookshops, antique dealers, and clothing boutiques.
He stopped under the canopy overhanging a closed sewing notions boutique and fumbled for the package of cigarettes in his inside coat pocket. With some difficulty he managed to extract a long thin cigarette and lit it, exhaling a plume of clove scented smoke into the cool fresh air. He closed his eyes and smoked. It was a coincidence, he tried to soothe himself.
He heard footsteps scuffing along the cobblestone. A shopper, he thought hopefully, but the footsteps stopped in front of him. He kept his eyes closed a moment longer and exhaled another plume of smoke. He knew who it would be, but pretended that he didn't,  just to give himself a few more seconds of ambiguity. Then slowly, deliberately, he opened his eyes and found himself face to face with the woman with the yellow umbrella.

Struggles With Mother

She has always wanted me to be different, I understand that more clearly now. I didn’t have the words long ago to describe the repeating pattern, the predictable questions and requests sewn together like a simple quilt of three colors that followed me at first, then absorbed silently into my skin, tempering me with its weight and threads. 
I see it now from a slightly objective angle, my eyes just barely reaching above the gray fog and swirling shapes, the unsaid yet clearly defined goals that propelled me to a university and into the angst that would endure for decades, a sort of uneasy darkness that was just under the skin and could ooze out, thick and black if scratched just slightly. 
I didn’t understand it then, could not see the words making up the sentences that rolled through her head like a conveyor belt, getting more and more worn and rusty, but rotating nonetheless. As a baby girl she must have looked at me with all the hope and wonder in the world, projecting onto the blank screen of my white naked body all she saw as right and just, all perhaps that she had done and enjoyed and wished to repeat, all that she had not done but hoped to do through my skin and eyes.
As a young woman, both headstrong and naïve, I pushed against what I thought were inequalities, the mores of American society that everyone I knew seemed to accept and go along with, nearly universally without question.
She tried to keep me as a girl for as long as she could, even when my breasts started to bud and poke out from smooth cotton t-shirts.  She would not let me shave, and then when I did on my own, without consent, she looked at me sadly, finally relenting to the unstoppable flow of womanhood and said, ‘now you can never stop.’ 
Five years later, a head full of simple feminist ideology, unanswered questions and a body and mind full of open, bursting wonder and tinged with a splash of vehement anger, I stopped.  There was a contradiction I could not reconcile…I could not quite understand why when I looked at a man’s leg, covered in hair, why was I not repulsed?  Why did I have the opposite reaction seeing a slightly smaller leg, one of a woman, covered in hair? I decided it must be the culture, it must be a shared, accepted concept of beauty without anything behind it but current fashion and taste.
She did not see the young girl struggling to find her place in the symbolic order. She did not see the exploration, the push and thought against culture and the play with body and definition and experimentation with beauty and expectations, the transgression of a young girl in a society that demonized questions and moving against the wind. 
Then, as now, she could only see me through the eyes of others. She wondered and worried about how she would be defined and judged, how she would be one of the mothers that failed, who had not properly created and raised a young woman ready to join society beyond the safety of four walls. It was she who was the voice of society, she who demonized me, who pushed back against my own conviction with equal force, who judged the hair, who looked at me in disgust.  It was she who could not, who refused to see the thoughts behind the action, the tension and struggle.
I had thought it was them, the great nameless of society, thinking, moving, bulging as one big mass. I never thought it would hit so strong, come right back without ever leaving our house, come with such force from the single person tasked with guiding me through the world.
She has always wanted me to be different.  After nose rings and tattoos, it is now her obsession to hide my trees and mermaids from polite society, to hide me from the bikers and drug addicts they will attract, to hide my transgression and keep it locked in the dark attic of our household. 
This is not the girl she imagined, not the girl she wanted, the girl who would travel Europe- not Mexico. The girl who would go to a university and get a career and a Jewish husband, who would provide grandchildren. 
These wishes, pushed onto me since birth, have gone unanswered. I am not what she wanted. I am asked to hide myself, to shave, to wear long dresses, to go along with the lies she has woven about career and status. I have lost interest, the sting has dulled though every rematch is a burden- the tug and pull of my own thoughts wondering if I should please her, shock her, ignore her, and which one of my actions is coming from which thought? 
What hurts more? Covering myself time and again or seeing the disapproval in her eyes, the ashamed glance down as she looks at my skin? She has never taken me as I am and I have never cut the string, the threads of just a few colors which bind us together.

Journey

We are walking hand in hand through a meadow. I feel your cool, firm grip on my delicate pale fingers.  Your skin is like the touch of an electric moon, passing the voltage of pure white light into the center of my palm. I open up like an exposed portal, your energy flowing into me, brightening me from the inside. The grassy hills are wet from the dark night. We walk.
There was no beginning to this journey, we walk as we always have, your hand firmly holding mine, my fingers gripping back just as tightly. In the far distance is a wall of trees, looking now in the night like a black wall with peaked tips just barely glowing by starlight. Closer to us is a small cluster of tiny things, I can’t tell exactly what they are, my eyes and mind search for meaning and then in two steps we are almost upon them. There is a taut pull of your hand and I jump towards you, just barely avoiding squashing the gathering with the heel of my boot.
What I see now is a funeral for a tiny creature, a small bird with feathers that look as dark as the grass in the dark night.
We keep walking through the meadow, the trees on our left.  We are exposed to the moon and the night sky of a thousand stars. My cheeks are cold and flush, though I feel a deep warmth in my chest, a brightness and aliveness which runs like a channel down my arm and into my palm and fingers which hold on tightly to you.
We come upon a collection of rectangular structures, narrow trailers made of a cheap metal and planted shallowly upon the earth. There are a few dozen, all densely packed together. We pass one, the only one with a bright porch light. Its yellow glow reveals the neglected state of the home, the walls left without sheen. One woman stands by her front door, looking out into the empty dirt streets.
We walk on, the path now worn and without grass. The narrow homes give way to a large collection of military tents. Even without light I can feel the green of their canvas walls. An aroma of campfires and cigarette smoke and alcohol lingers close to the earth, a smell of men in old, worn uniforms. 
I study the tents as we walk, all of them dark and without light or fire to warm up the darkness. I feel you pull me towards the left, just off the path where it is nearly black, you push aside a heavy canvas wall and we step into a large tent. 
It is bright inside from overhead lamps, their light bouncing off the white fabric walls.  I sit on your lap.
There are a dozen people, perhaps a few more sitting in a circle, some on the ground, many in chairs. 
I realize then that you are across the room, sitting on the other side of the circle. There is a girl wearing all black, her shoes, her shirt, her tights, her skirt, her hair, her makeup, all of them are black, all but her skin and eyes. You start to kiss her, gently stroking her cheeks and pushing her hair back lovingly. I see you then kiss others, then stand briefly as you kiss small objects and bottles. 
I turn my attention to the center of the circle. There is a woman dressed as a bird on the ground.  From across the circle I see you looking at her and you begin to sing to yourself softly, keeping your eyes on the bird.
I am moved and get out of my seat and enter the circle, I lay on the ground and start singing. I try and help the bird to fly. I push and pull but the bird will not stand, it will not get off the floor. I relent and lay on the ground with it, clutching it. I wrap my legs around it and hold it like a pillow, like a lover. I sing a wailing song because the bird is dead.
I close my eyes, I watch the melody in my mind, watch it  move like a journey, watch it move through a meadow, down a dirt  path, through houses and tents and into a circle.  I sing until it ends, then I open my eyes. No one says anything, you are turned away from me.

Dances On The Water

H: I dreamt I was walking through water.

The stoplight is red, and for a moment, there is stillness.  A momentary glimpse up, a moment to escape the metal and movement, the identification with gravity and all lines and shapes. Up there is a heart that moves like a winged bird, the white fluff that dances on the water of the lake.  Up it moves, past other birds and demons, mermaids swimming with only pale tails and wild scattered hair that covers the sun. There, way above, each second transforming, a heart becomes a curling, nameless animal with horned tail and teeth which lose shape with each exhalation of the mighty myth. 

V: The monks continued with their prayer, seemingly oblivious to the changing light.

Maybe the clouds will birth the objects spoken in prayer, maybe the idol of stone will laugh, maybe the invisible which cannot be proven by any measure will split open and bleed.  Is the stain on the tortilla enough?  The bush that burns?  The fluttering heart that can only be described as man and beard?  Sit in the temples, rise and fall at the command of the man dressed in white.

H: I thought to myself, this feels so good.

Now it gathers strength, shifting as always, needing just moments to metamorphose. A light flashes, brightening across the sky, end and beginning are the same, moving without thought or implied intent. There are technicalities explained in myth. Shape without rationality.  Words without meaning.  Their beauty easy to read, the colors easy to spot and wish upon, though expect nothing in return.

V & M: Their robes fluttered, ignited in the brilliance filling the landscape of barren hills.

They search in the clouds for the source of the twinkle.  Behold the blackness of space he called, the limitless that cannot be understood.  It is not for you to know.  Shopping carts and diapers, packed stadiums of hungry onlookers, waiting for a preacher to deliver the message of god.  We are a pack of wolves, the body wants the taste of flesh.  Each prayer is an invitation to death, open the book and begin to sing. 

K: I felt the rush of cool on my skin, brightening me from the outside in.

Do it because you are told, do it to raise your children well.  Do it because everyone else does.  They will mark your house with stones, the windows will be broken, the lawn dug for your grave.  There is no choice here, not in this country of laws, not in this places of worship.  Thought is for the heathens, questions are for the devil. 

M: A long, resonant tone escaped.

There is only one path and it has already been chosen.  The way is cleared, swept by slaves and those already condemned to death, they wait in cages until the flames rise with the call of the chosen.  Your dress will be torn when we arrive, your lips will be chapped, you will be thirsty, prepare for the voyage and bring the book.

H: I dreamt it lapped at my ankles, cool and vivid.

Wisps colored by the sun in varying moments of movement, a continuous smooth wind takes it, transforming it into the magic of light and moistened clouds ready to spurt their seed.  There may be rain tonight and if there is, I will stand by the window naked, my skin desperately fighting for warmth while my ear and nose take in the newness of the shower, covering it all with a light washing.