Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Red Girl and the Dark Panther

I am the Red Girl. I am red because I am wearing a red hooded coat, and so the Red Girl is what I am called. I am a waitress in a tavern, the walls are made of red clay brick and the interior is duskily lit from the lanterns’ lights’ muted glow, creating a cozy, bronzed atmosphere, almost as if we were in an underground cavern, deep within the earthen bowels.

I serve a tray of food to a man and his woman seated on the far right of the cavernous tavern, beneath a lantern light’s muted glow. On the tray is a dirty baby turtle. He is alive and wading in stew. He is adorable. To my horror the man plucks him out of the sauce and pops him into his mouth, commenting as he chews with his mouth full how delicious and succulent live, baby turtles happen to be.

Then he plucks the baby turtle out of his mouth, seemingly unharmed and still alive and offers me a taste. Naturally I couldn’t bear to eat anything alive, least of all something so cute, so I pop it into my mouth, with a sigh of relish and a rub of my tummy and a nod in thanks and walk back to the kitchen in the black back of the building before I remove it from my mouth and place it gently on the kitchen floor.

To the far left of the tavernous cavern, lit by the light of the lanterns’ glow throughout the room is a thick, heavy wooden door, held to the wall by a thick, heavy, corded rope. Releasing the knot that kept the door shut, I slipped outside of the tavern into the shadows of the beyond night. Here it is like a junk yard but without the junk, just mounds and piles and heaps and stacks of rock and rubble and stone intermittently peopling an otherwise empty space.

It is here, to the far left, in the deepest shadows, I espy a silhouette of a large, cat, a dark cat … The Dark Panther. He has sighted me. He is now slowly, slowly, slowly coming. I run back to the thick, heavy wooden door, yank it open and make to retie the rope. But the rope is no longer there. There is now a string, thin, light, weak string, that couldn’t possibly hold the weight of the door closed to the wall.

I try valiantly to bind the door closed with the flimsy, fragile twine, knowing that with each passing moment the dark panther, made of shadows, made of menace, was nearing the door, nearing my doom. The door keeps slipping open as the corded string keeps slipping loose. He is here. He is behind the door. His intent is overwhelming. I can feel his breathe through the cracks of the wood. His strength is my weakness.

Suddenly he rears up and what was a mere moment ago an animal is now a man, yet retaining his bestial being, his primal, instinctive essence. Now I am on the outside, on the other side of the door. Now he is slamming me against the thick, heavy, wooden wall of it, just as he slams his tongue into the depths of my open mouth. I feel plunged into, I feel wrench away from myself to float in the mindless, sense-full, rapture of the moment. His eyes echo eternity as they behold me and I am flung without ceremony from The Dreaming.

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