A slip of moonlight finds it's way through black curtains and moves stealthily across the room to the foot of her bed. It creeps over blanket mountains and is lost in the dark mounds and valleys of her body until a pale finger of it strokes softly at her eye lids, playing at waking her. But she is sound in her sleep, untouchable in her dream.
She walks but does not feel the earth. She sees but can not view what is below. The frustration of it is making her strain to open eyes shut tight.
A shift in her body and the bedscape changes the fall of the moon's ray, now illuminating matted bits of fine silver threads on her head, woven into a mass, wet with sweat that stick to her forehead. It plays off gleaming bits of moisture composed of the elements of a Cambrian sea, the original salts of creation.
She is in this sea now, with the creatures that first blessed the earth. They levitate before her and she can sense their shapes rather than see them. She senses their presence and scans their sleek bodies with the radar of dream. Not monsters. Not this time. The largest creature, a platypus with fangs smiles and she cannot see it but knows it and moves with it to the surface, hoping to drink the night air, but at the sea's surface is no atmosphere, only space. Dark except for the moon.
Her hand wards off the creature and the the suffocation of her death and a bit of moonlight illumines her palm, the life line of which is long and deep. For a moment, the moonlight forgets her age, that tonight is her last, and mistakes her for someone youthful and bright. Bright like it is.
She opens her mouth, a cave without stone, black and stale of air. She is lifted above the level of the sea, unmindful now of any void and looks down on the mountains and valleys of the sea scape, of salt and bone and fang and hair, of blanket and body. The moon guides her and she closes her hand on the beam, capturing it in the dark of her fist. It pulls her along, a silver rope taking her home.
She walks but does not feel the earth. She sees but can not view what is below. The frustration of it is making her strain to open eyes shut tight.
A shift in her body and the bedscape changes the fall of the moon's ray, now illuminating matted bits of fine silver threads on her head, woven into a mass, wet with sweat that stick to her forehead. It plays off gleaming bits of moisture composed of the elements of a Cambrian sea, the original salts of creation.
She is in this sea now, with the creatures that first blessed the earth. They levitate before her and she can sense their shapes rather than see them. She senses their presence and scans their sleek bodies with the radar of dream. Not monsters. Not this time. The largest creature, a platypus with fangs smiles and she cannot see it but knows it and moves with it to the surface, hoping to drink the night air, but at the sea's surface is no atmosphere, only space. Dark except for the moon.
Her hand wards off the creature and the the suffocation of her death and a bit of moonlight illumines her palm, the life line of which is long and deep. For a moment, the moonlight forgets her age, that tonight is her last, and mistakes her for someone youthful and bright. Bright like it is.
She opens her mouth, a cave without stone, black and stale of air. She is lifted above the level of the sea, unmindful now of any void and looks down on the mountains and valleys of the sea scape, of salt and bone and fang and hair, of blanket and body. The moon guides her and she closes her hand on the beam, capturing it in the dark of her fist. It pulls her along, a silver rope taking her home.
