Kyle & Jasmine

Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.

There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.

The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.

The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.

The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.

Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.

The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.

Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.

The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.

As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.

The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.

Ghost Town

Sirat, somehow, found herself lazily wandering through the dusty alleys of an old west ghost town. She didn’t remember what had brought her there, nor, she realized with a sort of panicky horror, anything prior to that. She felt blank, a simulation of someone else named Sirat, a pale imitation with just broad strokes to fill in the huge white expanse of identity. And she didn’t like that. Around her, a crop of empty husk, hastily constructed buildings stood sad and rotting as a dim-bulb yellow sun hung low in the sky, hovering over the horizon and flooding the blasted desert landscape with a chalky glow. She felt ill at ease, isolated and strange. Nothing seemed quite right, and while she was tempted to blame her hole-riddled memory, there was a nauseating impermanence to her surroundings and herself. She saw vultures overhead that seemed to blink in and out existence. Things seemed fuzzy on the periphery of the desert, as if the world just came to a stop. She looked at her hands and didn’t feel like they fit with the rest of her personage. They looked different, somehow. It was only a moment, however, before they seemed to change and conform to her specifications. She felt, maybe, like she and the world were being pieced together at the same time.

With little else to do, she began to silently explore her environs. There was a smell to the place, a kind of stench of antiquity, and it stung her nose and made her eyes water. Each whiff carried with it a collection of memories that raced through Sirat’s head in a way that made them feel important and frustratingly intangible. It didn’t take long to acclimate to it, to put it aside and ignore it, but every now and then, a whisper of it would find its way to her brain and restart the memory show. It was disconcerting, but at least it was interesting. At least she felt something other than abandonment and disorientation. The town was small and trite, more like a movie set version of the American west than anything real. There were typical buildings: a jailhouse, a brothel, a post office and a saloon. Hitching posts and water troughs lined the dirt main street. Sirat could picture men in ten gallon hats with holstered guns prowling the alleys, and ladies in their corsets and finery trying to woo them to bed. It seemed so silly in that context, the way real people and real events were distilled to some basic essence of their existence and then launched forward, forever, as a default representation, a perpetual archetype. It struck her then that she, here, was no different. She was an essential part of someone real, someone else who was, no doubt, slumbering peacefully in a bed far away while Sirat wandered through the ghost town. Sirat was suddenly aware that she was a dream, a bit of fluff given form and the semblance of someone else’s life and forced to interact with an imaginary world… she felt inconsequential, then, ashamed of her own lack of solidity. She was angry at having been called into being at all, and saddened that her existence would surely end the moment the real she woke up.

But the dream Sirat, solely through that realization had woken herself up and removed herself from the control of another Sirat’s dreaming mind. She was no longer tethered to the brain that had invented her. Her existence was her own. This was not a concept she readily understood. If there was a difference in her before her self-realization, it was too subtle to notice. So the dream Sirat still felt very limited even as she stepped out from her real self’s shadow to become something greater that the woman that had birthed her.

Sirat, strangely self-aware and anxious about her fate, struggled with meaning. She felt faced with an existential crisis, saddled with a condensed life that she felt needed some purpose, some goal, some form of achievement in order to validate its having happened at all. Lost amidst the ruins of a never-was town, however, she wasn’t sure what to do. She rushed from building to building, hoping that beyond each door there would be some sort of sign or direction. She flung open old doors to musty pantries, to outhouses, to bedrooms and to jail cells and found nothing but dust and dirt and ghostly white cobwebs strung between chipped paint and molding wood. With each failed door, she grew wearier, more frightened and more distraught. Her eyes began to feel heavy, her legs, leaden. She moved with slack muscles and pained joints and felt like collapsing. In the corner of the old saloon’s dining room, beyond a busted player piano, Sirat found a dirty blue mattress, stained with blood and bile and coated in a fine layer of deep gray dust. Depression and fear overtook her. There was no point to this brief exercise in existence, she told herself. There was no end goal, nothing to do, nothing to accomplish. Tears rolled down her cheeks and her whole body shook with heaving, anguished sobs. She was convinced her time was near an end and she had nothing to show for it. There had been nothing, here, in this dirty ghost town… nothing but empty rooms and debris.

Sirat took a deep breath and slumped herself, morose and worthless, into a heap on the mattress and fell into the dreamless sleep of a dream.

As Sirat slumbered, her mind set on pause, time, in its weird dreamy way, still flowed about her. Though she was no longer engaged, the world of dreams was still in motion, and a shadowy little creature, a shadowy little imp, had made her way into Sirat’s ghost town. Once, she had been the consort of a fellow imp, a dastardly little creep that demanded to be called “Thimble,” even though it wasn’t his name. Her name, however, was no secret. She was called Shair.

Shair, like Thimble, had been crafted by dreaming magicians, by men and women who dedicated themselves so wholly to the arcane arts that they practiced those arts even whilst asleep. Imps were the dream-toys of these magicians, built for purpose, to fetch and to test and to serve. Some imps fled their dreaming masters, some were emancipated upon their owners’ deaths. Others, like Thimble and Shair, had slain their magicians to gain freedom. Once, the two imps travelled the land of dreams together, side by side. Thimble, though, grew weary of their partnership and sought out the company of a newly wakened dream, a woman named Kara Frost. He abandoned her in a swirl of formless fog, and she hadn’t seen him since. Travelling alone, Shair would sometimes hear stories amongst Woken dreams, she would hear of how Kara Frost and Thimble had saved so many from the death of oblation. And so Shair, jealous Shair, dedicated herself to the opposite. She had slain her master with no remorse. Surely the destruction of those her former lover and his new escort had rescued would ease her suffering. She was pitiless in her hunt, tracking down those who bore the salvation offered by Kara and Thimble, obliterating their minds and their memories and taking their heads as trophies. In a black bag slung over her bruise blue shoulder, Shair carried the heads of a hundred dreams touched by the waking hand of Kara Frost. Even with so much death on her hands, however, she still felt the sorrow of abandonment.

Eventually, Shair began to wander, lost in confusion and sadness, and in those wanderings she stumble across the ghost town built by the dream of Sirat. Shair loved these places, these miniature hollows of human dreams. She loved exploring the streets and alleys, loved how they ranged from so simple to so convoluted. This one, however, seemed drearier and emptier than most. She was shocked that no one wandered the streets. She was amazed that the place was so lifeless. Like Sirat had, Shair walked amongst the buildings, opening doors and looking for a reason to be there. Eventually, she came across the slumbering form of Sirat on the mattress.

And Shair, then, saw a similar confusion and a similar sadness on the face of the woman lost in her dreamless sleep. She felt an inexplicable kinship with Sirat, a tether she hadn’t felt since walking with Thimble. She smiled for the first time in a long while, and she bent next to Sirat and kissed her softly on the cheek. Shair felt a shock go through her, a wave of cold as she appropriated the sadness of the woman. Shair ran her clawed hand through Sirat’s black tangle of hair. She drew in the dread and the gloom that had afflicted Sirat, and expelled it into the dreamscape as black crepe exploding from her talons. Sirat stirred, her weariness abated, her sadness expunged. The act, for Shair, was redeeming, powerful in its kindness, and Shair suddenly felt a profound hollowness that had come from slaying the dreams saved by Thimble. A heavy remorse set in, a sickness of consequence, and Shair was overtaken by the memories of those whose heads she carried in her bag. As Sirat woke, newly and confusingly content, Shair cowered back into another corner of the musty saloon. A floodgate of guilt had opened upon the poor imp.

Sirat, aware now that Shair had stolen her anguish, saw the imp cowering and felt a wave of sympathy. She could see the hurt in the poor creature’s black eyes, and she wanted, now, to help in any way she could. So she offered herself up to Shair, she offered her assistance as payment for the kindness Shair had extended to her. And Shair, then, knew how she could atone for her sins.

She asked Sirat to lay, again, on the mattress. Sirat complied, nervously, while Shair retrieved her bag of trophy heads. Shair asked Sirat not to move and Sirat didn’t, even as, one by one, Shair removed the heads of the slain dreams from her bag and cracked them, like fresh eggs, over Sirat’s body. She emptied the contents of each cracked head onto Sirat. From one, microscopic cities of glass fell like twinkling dust and dug into Sirat’s skin and eyes. Another produced liquid volumes of chromatic essence, which stained Sirat like a painter’s rag. Others released models of staircases, dollhouse furniture or tiny soldiers determined to die in some far off conflict. One merely produced the smell of French bread and cobblestones from a faux Parisian alley. All of these, the contents of all one hundred heads, were absorbed by Sirat and became part of her.

And Shair explained:

She had obliterated these dreams, destroyed their minds and befuddled their memories. But the essence of them, of who they had been and what they had created, still existed inside of their heads. By releasing them, Shair had given them to Sirat, breathed new life into them as a new life took them over. Sirat was a library, now, of these dead dreams, and Shair was convinced that they could remake them all, if only Sirat would accompany her to the places she had taken them from.

And Sirat smiled, broadly. She was suddenly full of purpose, full of meaning, and full of direction. With no reason to remain in the ghost town, Sirat and Shair set off to old parts of the dreamworld, intent on restoring what Shair had, in madness and in sorrow, so cruelly destroyed.

The ghost town crumbled behind them as they left.

Unstuck

Slowly wandering through the yard at dusk, Annette looked up into the darkening sky and tried to maintain a sense of self even as the barely visible panoply of stars above made her feel tiny, insignificant and alone. If she had been the crying type of girl this would have been a moment, maybe, when a tear or two would have streamed down her soft cheek. She couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t sad, exactly, and not quite upset. She was just slightly overwhelmed and slightly underwhelmed and she felt a bit of a mess inside. Annette was not the crying type of girl, however, and whatever difficult-to-express emotions she was feeling, she kept them as tightly bottled as usual.

The word she used to describe this unpleasant and annoying sensation was “unstuck.” Annette felt unstuck rarely, but when it happened, it was hard to remedy. It was a vague sense of non-accomplishment, of disgust at her own perceived mediocrity, of nebulous worry that she was missing something better and a prickly fear that she had settled for too little. She wasn’t displeased, generally, with the state of her life, but she did, at times, ache for something grander or bigger or more exciting than her day to day routine could throw at her. While most of the time that routine settled on her shoulders easily, like a comfortable shawl, other times it felt like an unbearable burden of obligation and repetition. And when she acknowledged that weight, she felt herself becoming unstuck from her life. And she disliked that feeling a great deal.

And so, as the world draped itself in its starry quilt, Annette moved in slow motion through the cooling evening air, feeling every footfall as it sent tiny shudders through her bones and nerves and muscles. She was very aware of the cricket chirps, a far off freight train, the cries of children at play and the low level hum of traffic on a nearby busy thoroughfare. She was very steady in her breath and very measured with her heartbeat and she felt uneasily at ease, a condition that she was all too accustomed to. It brought with it a sort of melancholy nostalgia, the type of creaking bone weariness that falls like soft rain in a crackling, black and white old film. It brought with it a set of memories, of half-forgotten waking dreams that began to unspool in her mind’s eye. It brought with it a heaviness that made her slump, cross-legged, on the newly damp grass.

Things were fine, she would tell herself in those moments of being unstuck. But they weren’t fine enough. As she sat on the lawn, her hopes, usually tamped down by reality and subverted into half-attempted hobbies and diversions, rose up out of her like curling steam breath on a frosty winter morning. Her eyes, normally heavy lidded and rimmed in sleepless black circles, opened wide and began to sing out with brilliant color and radiance. She was almost luminescent, barely lit by a sliver of silver moon, but somehow glowing of her own volition. Her veins were lit from the inside, spidery highways of hot pink and electric blue showing through the pale shell of her skin. Shafts of white shot through from her fingernails, phasing through the night air and rising up to the spackles of drifting black clouds like ten miniature spotlights. Quicksilver seemed to pour from her shimmering mouth, lifting up into the air, zeppelin-like and beautifully awkward, and it formed unheard notes from some imaginary symphony still being composed in the recesses of her brain. Owls beat their wings above her and flew from the crests of nearby trees to form a halo of ghostly feathers around her flowing, liquid hair. The bones of dead things rose up from the ground beneath her, clattering and yellowed with age. They seemed to build up a cage around her, a barrier wall to protect her. The air around her crackled with electricity and power. Her neighbors’ televisions lit up with white noise static. Their phone calls were shredded with a squall of shrieks and whistle. Annette, unstuck and unglued from her life, was Screaming Potential, a being of pure creative energy, like a pocket of God alight in the midst of her tiny suburban neighborhood.

There she saw it, every thread, every conceivable movement and motion and possibility. Reality lilted around her, made of nothing more than crepe streamers of reflective chrome, filaments of pulsing emerald, drizzled lines of deep crimson and shadowy strings of smoke and soot. They drifted about in insanely intricate patterns, forming geometric webs and slippery amoeba wheels that spun into amorphous nonsense before reverting, strictly, back to grotesque organization. It was revoltingly complex and disturbingly simple and it would have driven Annette mad if her brain were still designed with folds of gray matter and neurons firing across synapses. She was greater than it, now, though… aloft in the formless and rigid sea of creation. Her life, her tiny little life, was spilled out in marvelous array across a hundred, a thousand, a million… an endless parade of happenings and moments and instances and events.

Her childhood rewritten in every conceivable language.

Her first kiss, retold in infinite variety.

Each and every version of her love and her desire and her want and her need flashing in seizure strobe chromatic chaos across the depth and breadth of all time.

She saw the best of it, the worst of it, and the crushing middle space in between it all as she stared off into the types of woman she could be, should be, could have been or would become. She felt it, then, the twinge of insignificance burrow into her skin and cut, razor sharp and scalpel accurate into the deep gory bends of her soul. And all at once, the power was cut, the show was over, the damage was done and the curtains, singed by the stage light heat, were drawn. The potential drained out of her, lost through the pores in her skin, through her nostrils and her lips. She felt a nauseating loss of control and a wave of gut-kicking dizziness that sent her crashing, still cross-legged, onto her back. The cold dew of the grass was refreshing and the stars above were still lovely and still gapingly vast in scope.

Things were fine, she told herself. The world righted and she sat up, barely aware of what had happened but aware enough to still need to stifle the urge to cry. She wouldn’t cry about it. There was nothing to be done now. Choice after choice, circumstance after circumstance had led her here. And it was ok. Not because of anything she’d done, not because of any fate or destiny or reasoning or plan, but solely because it had to be ok. She was blinking and she was breathing and her heart still pumped and warm blood still coursed through her veins. She had no choice but to accept it, to break down the wild hopes and stuff them back down where they belonged. She had a life and it was enough, even if it hadn’t been the bliss filled adventure she’d been promised as a little girl. She swallowed her dreams back down, felt a shudder of regret or remorse or worry or something maybe a little like all three and then held her breath as some dark tufts of cloud shut out the moon and left her alone in the dark.

Things were fine, she told herself. She lifted herself up from the ground, brushed herself off and meandered inside the house. Things were fine. But they weren’t really fine enough.

A Bride Of The Stars

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time in the woods and bluffs in central Wisconsin. There was something, as a child, palpably magical about that area… a feeling born, perhaps, out of my awe for the indigenous cultures of the region. There was still a lot of wilderness out in that part of the state, then, and I believe there is a power in the unsettled land, a sort of natural magic that gets tamped down or suffocated wherever our mystically sterile civilization lays down its sewers and roads and power lines. In the middle of the woodlands, though, there was an energy not easily described, but simple to experience. It was an energy that filled your bones and muscles, lifted you above animal instinct and deposited you somewhere else entirely, a full step above the dirty ground we wander on for most of our lives. It was a realm of spirit, of nature beyond biology. I couldn’t put any of this into words, back then… but I knew it was different than where I came from. I knew that, while I was out amongst the wooded frontier, I was basically living in another world entirely.

I had my own small tent when we camped out, and it was a frightening and freeing experience, being unbound in the dark, wild nights. While my parents slept some distance away, I found myself freakishly attuned with the night, my senses heightened, my brain far more aware of my surroundings than I was necessarily comfortable with. I was listening for every cricket hiccup, every owl shriek, every twig snapping in our vicinity. I was on edge in a primal way, on guard, protecting something spiritually valuable from cruel and hungry flesh and blood. In this way, I would eventually fall into an approximation of sleep, a hypnosis or trance that rendered my five senses active and watchful even as an essential part of me drifted, no longer incarcerated in that base, bodily prison. Again, I didn’t know this at the time… but in retrospect, it’s clear that my soul walked free in those mystical woods. And when I would rise in the daytime, my arms and legs and lungs would be absolutely exhausted, but I would still feel refreshed in an entirely different manner. Even as the dark circles would form under my eyes, and I would be unable to stifle chest racking yawns, I would feel more alert, more cognizant, more alive than I ever felt after sleeping in my bed at home.

My travels, at night, were understandably remembered as dreams. They were, I suppose, a form of dream… the experiences I had, there, were not “real.” They never truly occurred in any physical way. And yet they happened, and I remembered them… in that way, those travels were no different than any other dream. But there was a much stronger clarity to them, a vividness that I do not come close to replicating in my normal dreaming. There was something intangible about them that, now, leads me to believe that these dreams were not manufactured by own imagination, but were, instead, moments that I lived. That delineation, I suppose, is moot. Either way, I have memories of my soul walks, and that’s all that matters.

By far, the most memorable of these events occurred when I was nine.

We had spent most of the day hiking through grassy, blunted hills under a gorgeous red rocky bluff. Eventually, we came to a river, a deep hewn ribbon of clear water that was wide and shallow and full of migrating schools of blackish fish. A golden eagle periodically dove into the water and retrieved one of the dark fish in its talons, its meal’s scales suddenly bursting with color and sparkle in the midday sunlight. There were, according to our guidebook, numerous Indian mounds nearby, and I would’ve sworn there was something almost holy about that place. It felt like a convergence of the magic I described earlier… as if it somehow pooled up and stagnated right there at the riverside. I felt strange being there, as if I were a trespasser or an interloper… as if I didn’t belong at all. But there was nothing unfriendly or unwelcoming about it. It was more, I suppose, that I was unworthy of being there. It felt, maybe, like I hadn’t earned the right to be in that sort of sanctuary. My parents may have felt the same way. None of us spoke for a long time. It wasn’t awkward or unpleasant… it was more reverential. I think my folks had similar experiences in these places, but we never talked about it. I’m sure we all felt a little bit crazy for feeling it.

We returned to our campsite, made dinner over the fire and watched as the dusk caressed the sky to sleep. There is a different sort of completeness to the day when you don’t have artificial light to eat into the nighttime. It feels as if living through the twilight is a sort of accomplishment, a notch to mark off or a box to check on your list of goals. The rhythm of night and day, in the wilderness, is more noticeable and more real than it is where I live. Our lives, in cities and towns, blur the definitions of the world in motion. We exert our control over darkness instead of letting it hold sway over us. And while it may make us feel as if we have a dominion over nature, there’s a different sort of satisfaction to be had by succumbing to the night and laying down to sleep when the fire burns out. Relinquishing that false authority we try to grab, here, has amazing effects. I may not have known, then, why it felt so good to sleep in the pitch black of those woods… but my guess, now, is that by falling back into our rightful place, into our role as subservient to the planet, we gain a measure of security and comfort that we lose when desperately clinging to power that isn’t ours. The anxiety that comes from feeling alone in a world of billions is all but erased when you remember you’re not isolated from the world in any way.

That night, again, my body stayed wide awake while my spirit fled.

And where I wandered, that night, was to the sanctuary at the riverside. I remember feeling called there, as if I heard someone summoning me to the grassy banks of the shallow water. It was serene, there, under the moonlight. Everything was white and deep blue, all washed in the color pallet of dreaming. My heart soared just being allowed there, again, and I sat amidst a thatch of cattails and reeds and dipped my bare, spirituous feet in the cold river.
I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing in the air of trees and flowers and rushes. It felt like mere minutes, but the moon’s movement overhead contradicted that assumption. Eventually I was joined by a chalk white man wearing the elaborate and beautiful costume of a medicine man. He sat next to me on the bank of the river, aged and gouged with kindly wrinkles. He was radiant and warm, and I was happy to see him, even without knowing who he was. He had a strong, weathered face, but he smiled with such sincerity that I had no choice but to feel at ease. He had a long staff, decorated with beads and feathers and tiny leather pouches, and he dipped it into the river water, rippling the reflection of the moon.

He spoke, then, in a language that seemed older than time, and although I shouldn’t have understood a word of it, it made perfect sense to me.

The shaman said, joyfully, that he had been called to that place, that night, to perform a wedding. He shook his staff as he spoke, letting loose a very primitive sounding rattle that reverberated through the river valley and was echoed in the throats of owls and raccoons and other nocturnal creatures. Soon, many of those animals had gathered themselves by the river, as guests, the shaman said, smiling, of the bride.

I asked, then, bolstered by the kind demeanor of the man, where the bride was.
And the old man looked at me with eyes darker than the sky and pointed upward. The Stars, he told me, were to be wed tonight.

And who is the groom, then, I wondered.

The old man closed his dark eyes and laughed. He told me that the groom had not shown himself, but would. He said that many suitors had been rivals for such an amazing lover, but only one would have the honor of making the Stars his bride. Those suitors, he told me, would arrive soon, and I, apparently, was there to greet them all.

It wasn’t long before the shaman's words proved true. A great bear, tall, regal and imposing and possessed of slick, black fur, made his way from the woods to the opposite side of the river.

“I am Bear,” he stated plainly, and in a strong and fearsome voice. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

From out of the tall grasses of the fields came bounding a dappled, brown stag. He stood next to Bear on the riverside, his coat and impressive rack of antlers gleaming in the moonlight.

“I am Deer,” the stag said, proud and arrogant in his beauty. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

Slinking from the rushes came a smaller figure, a gorgeous red fox with a thick tail and a sly, angled face. He stood between Bear and Deer, grinning with a cunning that sent a shiver down my vaporous spine.

“I am Fox,” he stated. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

Rising from the ground came a small whirl of bellowing breeze, strong enough to topple some of the long grasses and bend the stems of the wildflowers across the river. From it appeared a noble and cool looking warrior, blue and vaporous and impressive in his stature.

“I am Wind,” the man said with a ringing fury in his words. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

And finally, amassing like fog on the bank of the water, gray swirls of ether came together, clinging and heavy, eventually drizzling into the form of a young man, thin and sallow, and appearing very tired. He was far less than the other suitors in every respect. He carried himself with little power or confidence, and he certainly didn’t strike as startling of a figure as the great Bear or the beautiful Deer or the intelligent Fox or the stately Wind.

“I am Cloud,” he said, almost sadly. “I have come to wed the Stars.”

The shaman looked at the gathered suitors with a critical eye. "Only one among you," he said in his ancient language, "is worthy to make a bride of the Stars. Only one among you shall have such an honor to live with her in the sky." The old man punctuated his declaration with a rattle of his staff, and stretched his arms out toward the light spackled heavens. He stayed incredibly still for a moment, his beaten face beaming with a sort of barely contained joy. He was listening to something that none of the rest of us there seemed to hear. "The Stars," the old man said, finally, "demands a tribute of you! What would you offer for her hand in marriage?"

Bear spoke first. "I can offer my strength, dear Stars," Bear said loudly. "I am the strongest creature in the forest, bigger and bolder and braver than anything."

The shaman listened again. He shook his head, then. "The Stars has no need of a mate with strength," he said. "She is strong enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, Bear. I am sorry."

And Bear hung his great head low and sulked off back into the forest.

"And you, Deer?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Deer lifted his majestic head up with a definite arrogance. "I can offer my beauty, dear Stars," Deer said proudly. "You will be given the gift of my graceful form."

The shaman listened to the Stars and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with beauty," he said. "She is beautiful enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, too, Deer. I am sorry."

Deer's brown eyes filled with tears and it bounded away, wounded and sad.

"And you, Fox?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Fox grinned slyly. "I can offer my intellect, dear Stars," Fox said. "I am the smartest creature there is, full of cunning and wit."

The shaman listened to the Stars again and shook his head. "The Stars has no need of a mate with intellect," he said. "She is cunning enough on her own. The Stars rejects you, friend Fox. I am sorry."

Fox scowled, angrily, and slunk into the woods, offended.

"And what of you, Wind?" the shaman asked. "What do you offer the Stars?"

Wind took a deep breath. "I can offer my power, dear Stars," Wind said. "I am the most powerful thing there is, able to bend trees to will and bring up waves from the deepest lakes and rivers."
The shaman frowned. "The Stars has no need of a mate with power," he said. "She is powerful enough on her own. I am sorry, Wind. The Stars rejects you."

The Wind was crestfallen. He moped and wandered back into the woods.

"So it is up to you, Cloud. What do you have to offer the Stars?"

Cloud looked up the Stars with his big, wet eyes and said, meekly, "Privacy is all I have to offer you, dear Stars."

The shaman looked intrigued. "Privacy?"

Cloud smiled. "When the Stars are shy, I can be there to cover her. When she is modest, I can hide her from the prying eyes of all you, here, below her. I can blanket her, keep her safe from your watchful gazes. And when she is proud and boisterous in her beauty, I can step away and I can let you all bask in her twinkling glow. When The Stars wants to be seen, I can open myself up like some great curtain, letting her luminescence spill out upon the earth. And when she becomes shy again, I can be there to block her from view. I can offer her privacy. I can offer her control."
The shaman grinned widely, his mouth a locked cavern of yellow stalagmites and crooked stalactites. He was pleased with Cloud's response. Out of all of her impressive suitors, the humble Cloud had the most to offer the strong, and beautiful, and brilliant and powerful Stars.

"You have much to give, friend Cloud," the shaman said, happily. The Stars accepts your hand. She shall be your mate.

Cloud was beaming with happiness. A cheer went up from the gathered animals at the river, and the shaman opened his hands in dutiful benediction. There was a tremendous gladness that settled on the holy place, and I couldn't help but be warmed by it. The old medicine man began to speak his ancient language, but its secrets were hidden from my ears, now. The beautiful, timeless words spilled from his papery lips and filled the night air with a resonant sound that blurred into a droning, cicada-buzz chant. Soon all the creatures joined in and the scene was staggering in its alien beauty. There was a rattle in the old man's hands, and a shaker of beads that signaled the union of Cloud and the Stars. And when it had commenced, and when the gentle cacophony of the shaman's chants were finally complete, Cloud ascended from the river up into the sky to take the hand of his new bride. Another cheer burst forth from the throng of animals, and they returned, then, to their woodland homes.

The shaman smiled at me, then, and thanked me for my attendance, once again speaking a tongue I knew. He had a tear of joy running down his battered, leathery cheek. He put his spindly arms around me, and hugged me tight. I didn't feel I had much choice but to hug him back.

He gave me one final nod and then made his way back into the wilderness, leaving me alone, ghostly and content at the sanctuary river. I looked up into the sky and saw Cloud joyfully embracing his new love.

My body, then, awoke and my spirit was ripped from that place and was plunked, unceremoniously, back into my squishy, fleshy form. And I struggled, then, as the sun approached on the eastern horizon, to make myself believe I had really been there and that it hadn't been some mental fabrication. In the end, of course, it didn't matter. Daylight took up its reign in the sky, and The Stars were sent away for the time being, while Cloud remained behind, like a gentleman, protecting his new bride as she made her exit. And I watched, and I thrilled for them, happy in their happiness, smiling in their completeness. I spent the days that followed whistling the wedding chants I'd heard in my dreams and wondering who'd make a husband, someday, of the Wind.

Stolen Heart

It was not in Christian’s nature to pray. He didn’t believe in it. He didn’t think it was anything but a whining plea to God, the fussy mewling of children unable to deal with the unswerving harshness of reality. It made him angry when people claimed to have had their prayers answered. When his family spoke of the healing power of prayer, it made him wonder why so many people who had just as many prayers muttered on their behalf still succumbed to cancer, or AIDS, or sepsis or influenza. He thought it seemed awfully arrogant that any one person would truly think their trivial concerns were getting through on God’s hotline. So he refrained from it, mostly. Every now and then, though, a prayer would escape his lips.

The last time that it happened, Christian was in a church, of all places, which was already quite a departure from his normal routine. He was there for a wedding, unsure of why he had been invited and even more unsure of why he was attending. The bride was an acquaintance, a friend of a friend’s, and he barely knew her at all. What’s more, he didn’t much care for the icy girl or the mousy little engineer she was going to marry and certainly subjugate. They weren’t horrible people or anything. He just didn’t care for their casual haughtiness or the way they disdainfully called waiters and waitresses by their first names. He didn’t like that, underneath a faux-liberal exterior of leftist politics, they were really just money-hungry borderline racists. He didn’t like that the groom cheated at Scrabble by playing proper nouns and then throwing a virtual temper tantrum until his opponent just gave him his points. As Christian sat in the church, listening to the excruciating self-penned vows, he realized, in fact, that he didn’t care for the couple very much at all. Given the sparse population of friends and family seated in the chapel, he assumed he was not alone in this verdict. It also probably explained why he had been invited at all.

Although Christian was hesitant to admit it, he knew that he had only come to the wedding in the hopes of meeting a girl. He felt silly about it, and understandably desperate, but it didn’t stop him from searching the small church for any signs of a single young woman. Clutches of older, or attached (or both) ladies dotted the pews. Haggard aunts of the bride seated with their husbands flanked pretty young cousins of the groom who had their heads on the shoulders of disinterested boyfriends. It was not a promising arena. The annoyance of it was twofold. Lonely Christian was not only shut out of potentially dating any of the girls at the ceremony, he was also subject to their fawning displays of lovey-doviness as the preacher read from the “Song of Solomon,” and then launched into a long sermon about the various glories of being in love. As Christian sat, thumbing through a hymnal and wishing he had just stayed at home, he looked up and noticed just how beautiful the stained glass windows of the sanctuary were.

The one closest to him, in fact, was especially gorgeous, although it seemed to be in no way related to church. He stared at the window, antique and ridiculously lovely and practically bursting with mosaic filtered sunlight. There was a woman pictured in the glass, and she was absolutely stunning. She had the look of an art nouveau advert girl with a serenely beautiful face and skin so milky white that it rivaled moonlight. Her hair was dark blonde and soft, and her eyes were nearly glowing with emerald illumination. She looked proud and strong and noble as she arched her back regally, her lovely curves accentuated by a clinging white and gold gown. Around her head, a golden halo fired its rays into the brilliant cloud-dotted azure skyscape behind her, while a lush garden of rich pink and purple flowers sprung up like fireworks around her feet. She was alluring and mystical, a creation of flawless artistry that seemed strangely out of place amidst windows depicting lambs and anchors and tablets of commandments. Christian was suddenly mesmerized, taken aback by her, and he found himself muttering, “God, I wish I could meet a girl like that.” He had said it quietly, but aloud, and the moment the words spilled out, her swung his head frantically, checking to see if he’d been heard to determine whether or not he should be mortified with embarrassment. If anyone nearby had overheard his accidental prayer, they weren’t snickering about it, so he went back to gawking at the woman in the window.

She looked different, somehow, now, as if she had moved. He couldn’t remember her exact position prior, but her eyes seemed lower now, more like they were looking at him. His face flushed and he felt extremely stupid. Infatuation was one thing, but he decided he should really reserve his unrequited love for breathing human beings and not exquisitely rendered works of art. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and as he scanned her, he felt as if she was, almost imperceptibly, moving. He decided it must be a trick of the light, maybe an illusion created by the motion of real clouds outside. But it was hard to deny that she looked different moment to moment. Her eyes seemed to be following his, and her pale pink lips, emotionless and cool to begin with, seemed to be loosening into a very pretty smile. She was moving. She was moving and she was looking at him. And Christian unconsciously began to inch away from the window, toward the center of the church, staring intently as the woman in the glass as she very obviously stared back at him. He wanted to scream or to yell, but he was certain what he was seeing wasn’t real, so he kept his mounting fear to himself. If anyone else was seeing what he was seeing, they didn’t seem to think it was odd. Not a single person in the church seemed even slightly perturbed that this gorgeous, unreal girl was crawling out of the glass and carefully stepping down from the window’s sill to the green carpet of the sanctuary.

Christian didn’t think his eyes could physically open any wider and he had crowded all the way to the church’s center aisle as the woman from the window, still as luscious and as fabricated as a painting, calmly walked toward him and sat down at his side. His skin was a topographic map of goose bumps and shivers and she gently wrapped her cold, crystalline fingers around his. She smiled, her expression stalled out somewhere between sweet and sinister, and kissed him on his cheek. He felt science fair explosions go off in his stomach and his brain just sparked and reeled from the sheer improbability of what was happening. He assumed he had lost his mind, but as her drawn glass form began to soften into real flesh and blood, as her crystalline fingers became warm digits of skin and bone, he no longer cared. She was incredible. He could just tell. It was as if he’d known her in a dream or in another life or from some long forgotten childhood event. He was melting in her presence, his rationality snapped in half by a lightning bolt of suddenly falling madly and dizzyingly in love. If he had been thinking logically about any of it, he would have found it absurd and wholly unacceptable. As it was, his heart was twittering and every one of his nerve endings seemed to be lit up like a white hot sparkler.

“My name is Simone,” the girl cooed in his ear. Even her breath was sweet, like honey and lilac, and her voiced slithered into his brain and then fizzled into something effervescent and tickling. Christian couldn’t stop smiling. Any attempts at putting the situation into reasonable terms were thwarted by a mad sort of love-sickness that had entirely overpowered him. He felt as if his prayers, his trivial prayers to alleviate loneliness, were somehow being granted. There was a ballooning gratitude in his heart as she nuzzled her perfect head on his shoulder and he ran his fingers through her soft, sienna hair. Spiralbound trills of birdsongs and liquefied melodies slid down the bones in his spine and he shuddered from something he assumed was the genesis of boundless contentment. The world around him had gone fuzzy and indistinct, but that didn’t matter.

And although she’d said no more than four words to him, Christian knew Simone was everything he had ever been looking for. Her green eyes just sparkled with intellect and wit and inquisitiveness. Her voice was a summer-drenched purr of slow burning charm and molasses calm guile. She held herself with the proud rigidity of a queen, with the sparkling detachment of self-awareness and the soft-eyed look of rare and precious compassion. Christian could tell. She unlocked her hand from his and ran her fingernails along the back of his neck. He responded with the eyes-shut muted elation of a scratched pet cat. As she touched him, she spoke again. “You and I, my dear, are so very much alike. I wonder how long ago it was that I was seated here, like you, wallowing in the self-pity of being alone? I was so sad, then, so unhappy with my solitary lot. I would spend my time praying, like you, just praying for some salvation from this isolation. And then he came… he came and he stole my heart.”

Christian opened his eyes, then, with a vague fear suddenly rumbling through him. It was instinctive paranoia, and absolutely correct. Simone’s nails, as she finished her sentence, dug into Christian’s flesh hard. He felt a jolt of pain and flinched forward, trying to free himself of her talon grip. It was only a moment before tiny droplets of blood beaded up from the wound and ran in warm streaks down his collar.

Simone’s smile was wild, now. Her eyes were flaring with opportunity. “Up there, he was… another victim, I suppose, of his solitude. He called out to me while I bemoaned my fate… Oh, it was such a ridiculous prayer. I remember it so well. I remember begging for him, begging for rescue… from this sad situation. From the company of myself. I just begged. And it was like a miracle when it happened… like it was for you, just now. I saw him slowly descend from that beautiful perch, and he was a miracle. I was… I fell in love with him, on the spot. He was everything I’d ever wanted. And he stole my heart.” Simone grabbed Christian’s wrists, stronger than he could have imagined. She licked her pale lips and looked at Christian with a terrifying lust. “He stole it right through my chest.” She moved Christian’s hand toward the neckline of her gown, and with his flailing fingers, she pushed it down just a bit, straight under her left clavicle and showed Christian the shattered glass hole just above her breast. It was a surreal vision, as if a window of her skin had been pierced with a hurled rock. A spider web network of cracks and fissures radiated out from a hollow black void, marring her perfect white skin with a frighteningly incongruous wound. “You felt me do it to you, didn’t you? Did you feel yourself fall? Did you feel yourself surrender to me? You poor lonely soul. You poor, praying fool.”

Christian felt a horrible sense of panic and nausea wash over him. He was scrambling, trying to free himself from her tightening and increasingly painful grip. Her green eyes were narrowing with malevolence. Her figure was somehow more serpentine, suddenly, a living weapon of arching grace. She was still beautiful, but she was also dangerous and terrifying. “Now, sweet boy, I’ll steal your heart, too.” And with that, she lunged at his chest with her mouth, ripping open his shirt while he bleated in fear. Then, with an unrelenting fury, she smashed open the suddenly glassy form of his skin with her bared teeth. The pain that Christian felt was unbearable. Time froze as he focused on the agony. His whole being was stark white with hurt… his nerves jumped like downed wires while Simone rooted in the hollowed cavity of his chest and ripped out a pumping, blood red mosaic of foggy glass. And as she released him from the bond of his own heart, Christian felt an amazing release. He was free of any need for friendship, for companionship, for love. She had torn it asunder, leaving him broken and unbound. Christian stared at the gaping, shattered window hole in his chest. He looked aloof and remarkably unconcerned.

Simone looked at him, smiling with pride, bits of jagged red glass stuck to her lips and cheeks. “You poor lonely soul,” she repeated.

Christian felt nothing, then, for her. The unbridled lust, the desire, the head-over-heels madness of his brief love was extinguished, replaced with a calm void of presence. He felt at peace. He was unjangled, unexcited and pleasantly cold. And he tried to thank her, but she wasn’t really there anymore, if she ever had been at all. He was, he discovered, alone in his pew, still inundated with the long sermon about the power of union. Christian smiled, no longer bothered by the displays of affection and his utter lack of it. Instead, he was content to smirk, inwardly, at the stupidity of it. He didn’t need his heart. Simone had stolen it, and he was no worse for the wear. He persevered through the remainder of the ceremony, congratulated the unpleasant couple and went about on his merry way.

He never even noticed the resemblance that the figure in the window now bore to him.