dream girl//prelude
In a moment they were everywhere.
The irregular shapes of cotton-pressed paper dance tauntingly, words spilling like honey from the milk-white pages. The chorus from the buzzing hive of ink hum the scripture of sugary psalms, the love scraps. Soon, though, their faces muddy into haunting unison, the sound crowding her mahogany room. Hungrily, the voice becomes a chase, a hunting gale from the clearing on the east mountain and into her corner of the thick natural brush. The dew-ridden earth is sedimentary, but the discrete wooden dwelling rocks and knocks to the movement of the shattering cry. The deep silken purple curtains flutter, the latch of the window snaps, and the world spills relentlessly into her sanctuary, calling her from her mould beside him in their mess of pastels.
The swallowing mattress moans with a sorrowful ache as she swiftly escapes her place beside him. His gentle face is the color of well-aged sequoia, his deep ancient dream ebbing and flowing from the rise and fall of his broad chest, shaped like the landscape of a plateau. That palace in the sky, woven in the tight kinks of his recently shaven curls, continuing the story of time before him, the one he picks up every night. He isn’t troubled by his own scrap of paper, words lovingly etched however furiously scratched onto the page, twirling above his turned cheek, sweetly cooing how he had left her for that mountain clearing for days. Later, he would come to, unravel himself from her bed, trudge in his sunburnt truck eastward, and await the call. An endless nightmare it must be, sleepwalking in pitiful bliss and chasing a voice like something he once had or someone he was yet to meet.
Yet, here it is, and it raptures her. What haunts him and consumes her, begs her to be a curious fool to this sweet sound. The voice is delightful, ravishing, so she wraps her long body with a pale yellow cloth. Her steps across her room are childlike, clumsy and stubborn, stepping and stomping on the dampened letters without remorse. She flies down the staircase, bare footsteps hardly pressing against the surface as she is careful not to disturb her grandmother too greatly.
Eagerly, she turns the handle of the door, a wave of fresh rain rushing over her nightdress. In the midsummer’s shade of dusk, the patches of green before the cottage and the soaring pines are dimmed, yet vibrantly alive. Peepers screech to sing against the crashing of the flooding lake. The cry, suddenly urgent and demanding, topples her body towards the growing body of water, and she welcomes a good pushing.
She is bewildered before the lake, the rains quickly flowing through every row of her braids. There is nothing to see, but, oh, how she feels it all coming now. A tranquil scene sprouts, and the voice is a lullaby that could put her to sleep. The serene memory of crowded canoes and tiny reed boats gently emerges in the cool gray, becoming warm orange lanterns held by tiny brown hands, excited to free them and too anxious to discover its afterlife. There is one aged canoe after another, painted over again and again in the colors of summer. Mothers join in laughter, the chuckles escaping from the hearth of their chests, the sound bright. Hushed whispers mature into a buzzing hum that could be grown talk, except their youthful pitch gives them away. The splashing and swimming and singing, a night lasting forever every heated July, encroaches until it rings inside of her.
When she rushes back into the cottage, her sunken cloth a bursting sunflower yellow zipping up the ancient wooden steps, she bursts through her precious door and goes to recall the cry - but he has already gone.
