He lies in bed a long time afterward with his eyes closed, feeling the acidic trails of tears on his face, the thudding of his heart, the melancholy and hopeless fear this dream has always inspired.What health issues are common to this area of the head? Damian watches with detached curiosity the stars scatter and assemble again and again. Stars poise motionless before zipping around, only to rearrange in a new pattern on the sky. Stars orbit one another and whirl across the horizon, closer and closer to one another, but they never collide. They swing from side to side as if suspended on invisible strings, and then they are in motion, flying in trajectories of some complicated geometry. Their color reminds him of reflective chrome, like shapes wrapped in foil paper. But the stars are visible and enormous, the stylized seven-pointed stars of cartoons and religious iconography. The sky is flattened by a single shade of pastel blue. It has not occurred to him what he would want to say to her if he could, so many years have passed since last he tried. When he tries, nothing comes out and panic rises up his throat. He would like to speak to her but has never been able to speak in this dream. Damian sits beside her on the bench and puts his arm around her.
But now he is an adult and she is small and dark and freckled with dimpled cheeks, kinky hair, and a white dress. As a child, he sat on her lap and she seemed large, kind, knowing.
It is only he who has aged in the last four years. The woman is older than him-more than ten years, less than twenty-but in the years Damian has had this dream her age and appearance have never changed. He sees the dreamscape and he feels the bed-linens and he contracts into a fetal ball. In bed he twists among the sheets and rolls over. He is aware of his sleeping body and he knows he is dreaming a familiar dream from his childhood. The sun is high and dazzling and where Damian lies in bed, dreaming, he feels it fall through slatted blinds hot and white across his eyelids. He sees the distant wharf and street-traffic. The sea is nearby and a salt breeze strokes Damian’s face. Deep in the sky dreams the sun and deep in the ocean the earth dreams of a sea-tortoise dreaming a wooden bench, painted white, dreaming of the dreamer. It is a brooding and an elongated meditation on thaw. Amniotic water incubates the quickening earth. Slowly, with time, the sun warms the crucible. Please reload the page and try again.īook I of the seven novel series, The Chemical Marriage, is coming out in print and e-book April 2022.
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