It is a terrible thing to be in the thrall of one of the Fearless Ones. Their smiles edge you toward your own animosities and make your nightmares sweet as the scent of their skin. Your raw materials, while frequently forgotten, were at least appreciated.
He’d been on a secondary avenue when they’d collided. He’d slipped on peacock feathers trailing from her skirt, and he dropped everything; cracked cell phone, torn jacket, and shattered glasses lay on the grimy pavement.
She, the emerald beauty, said, “I’m an artist,” and whisked him to her lair where she built a collage of his glass, fibers, and silicon splinters. He hadn’t asked for recompense, so she gave him this collage, which she laughingly titled “Window into Fearlessness.”
It didn’t seem strange that they talked, nor that she poured aged wine into antique glasses. Later they danced under throbbing starlight amidst freaks and beauties, and it seemed natural. He slept in her bed for the next five months, wine bottles and empty vials rattling underneath when he shifted. Someone may have called, but, he had no phone to pick up. If anything looked like artifice, his myopia concealed it. And she’d taken his jacket, so he stayed close to absorb her glittering warmth, pressing so near that sometimes he burned.
Through her feathered eyelashes, she watched him unravel his mind and body. He had given her so much raw material, so she continued to build with the debris of his life. He, blood-soaked and dazzled, watched as she unfolded her 10,000 dimensions, each spiraling into the breath of gods and the mathematics of the universe. He lay back and watched cross-eyed as she knit tesseracts with his hair, looping and pulling until he was used, rendering him an obscure mathematical concept necessary for her unorthodox construction. The ghetto streets outside, so built up with detritus and shallow ambition, became stairways of junk under her hand, ascending into gardens and tide pools, columns of numbers and lines of linguistics. A fragile but scalable mess, propped up with his broken bones. He hadn’t even felt them break.
Eventually, she climbed over this towering mass toward her now-realized goal: the Primary Avenue out of this tertiary world. She looked back over her shoulder as she crossed, but of course she had already forgotten his theorem and anyway, what was left of him was blind and buried. For her kind, looking back at all was remarkable.
Musical Inspiration: Crystal Castles— Suffocation
I love the name Crystal Castles because the name makes me think of my third grade Trapper Keeper, which featured a unicorn blazing across space exiting the sparkly rainbow castle hovering somewhere near Saturn. But when I actually listen to Crystal Castles, it seems like the unicorn has been pieced together and reanimated after a brutal dissection, and the castle is inhabited by an ice fairy on heroin.
Photo Credits: Jenniffer ClarOscura
The photo above is of my friend Jenniffer ClarOscura of Dream Pioneers. She is much sweeter and kinder than the character in the story, and extremely knowledgeable about dreams and lucid dreaming. Isn’t she beautiful?
