Vodun Priest . Crimson Death . Yesteryear and Yore .

I dream of Beauty and the Beast. I dream of my mother dying. I dream of being chased.

I am running down the highway of dreams ... the Highway of Springing Gardens. I am being chased by an enemy, unknown and all red. They are beast and I am beauty. They are death and I am my mother. The crimson blood of their clothing is predator and I am prey. They chase and I run.

And presently I am running with others. Others are being chased with me. Others are the beauty, the mother, the prey. They are known and all white. They are the people of yesteryear and some are the loves of today. Me and my mate fall behind to protect our charges. One of the enemy, one of the Red, face off with us. It is a confrontation. A showdown. He is tenacious. I can tell.

He looks like a witch doctor in his blood red tuxedo garbs. He looks like a vodun priest of yore. He wears a top hat and his face is wizened ... senile ... insane. My mate and I transform into sparks and shimmer, unseen to all eyes but his own. I wonder in passing if this is how all the faeries died. Were they murdered by the priests who could see them, the priests who told everyone that they did not exist at all?

We obliterate our crimson enemy, vanquishing him though more of him still come. We rejoin the other people we defend, who greet us joyfully even as we run. I fly over head, my mate covering us from the rear, as we make our way through the Town of Bridges, leading my people onward as we go. I wonder briefly, shortly, if I have died.

I am dragged from the dreaming by the reality of oversleeping.

Kaili Kaos

Angi, I and the stolen scones

The world is a grey and damaged and desolate affair. I’m travelling through its debris and detritus with one Angi Sullins, who comes to withhold the doors of Dream where none can succeed, not even Herself.

We make our way to the belly of Destruction, to water-flooded-broken-lightning places, where electrocution dances in our reflection, and the smell of scones fill the dream.

We cut across the world through someone back yard, through their back door, through their back room, and before we resurface on the other side of their hovel, we partake of the freshly baked scones on the table in their kitchen.

Before Angi makes it out, the back door slams like the clapping hands of thunder and the woman of the house enters through her own back door.

She ignores the crumbs of scones upon our face, upon our hands, upon our grace, and accused us instead of being here to steal her doll, her daughter, her all. She is insane. We hurry from her hovel, her voices echoing egregious utterances within the wake of us.

We hurry out into the grey deep of a dead and dying world. I awake.

Alligator Love Affair on an Island in the Shade

There is an island. On this island there is a tree. At the base of this tree an ancient alligator sunbathes in waiting. The tree is swaying in the winds of change, blown against the psychic tides of what is and what will be.

I am aparted from my love. I must journey to the island with the tree, the island with the gator ... it is an island in the shade (sun does not exist here) where we will meet. I am swaying in the tree. The gator is flying. Its jaws snap to crush me, to squash me ‘tween its teeth.

I leap into the air bending the young sapling trunk from front to back, from side to side, narrowly escaping the jaws of life. Presently I sit on a branch and begin to cry into the sunset, and the gator, witnessing this, begins to stop.

It enters a humble hut on a hill of the island, a small shack, a quaint cabin, a shelter from the Tide. It transforms into the nurturer, metamorphoses into the Mother, into a transfigured Mrs. Went. It comforts me. It makes the sacred vow never to harm me again.

We return to the tree. It returns to gator form. It is now my guard. Arrived! My love is here! He has journeyed. We are joined. We are together again and at last. The sun is setting. The sun sets upon my dream.