Sticky Note Dreams pt.8

Sticky Note Dreams pt.7

Sticky Note Dreams pt.6

Sticky Note Dreams pt.5

Sticky Note Dreams pt.4

Sticky Note Dreams pt.3

a beginning

To say I met Nicky Magno when he killed my husband at a Guild Dinner would be inaccurate in two ways. We weren’t formally introduced until several weeks later. Moreover, Johannes didn’t expire at the dinner, merely took a violently ill turn face first into the fish course.

Recalling that night seems almost like squinting through a fog at some other girl now. But I do recall I had prepared for my father’s Quarterly Guild Dinner with my mother just as we had the three or four before it, ordering new dresses, my mother’s cut in the newest style to show off her husband’s business successes and my own demurely showing off what an example of womanhood I was becoming. In the week before, we’d organized extra staff to clean the Guildhall reception room and sent out three dozen or so invitations, making sure the local city elite would all be there, among them doctors, lawyers, magistrates, and magnates, many of them invested or soon to be invested in my father’s shipping business. Most important among them were the Herringers, Lord and Lady Herringer and their son Johannes, a year ahead of me and the golden boy of the city. We were to be married later that year, as soon as my father and Lord Herringer agreed on the taxation deal of shipping from our city’s docks abroad. My mother had already acquired three yards of Sevres lace for the occasion.

In an effort to not appear to eager, I was seated between a rather friendly businessman running his wife’s business cleaning the city’s docks and wharves and an elderly priest. My bid to be sat near the visiting northern Italian contingent of harmonics and scientists who were going to purify the city’s canals that Equinox had been denied by my mother as entirely too bookish for a new bride and I was sulking about it.

So the strangled cry and thump was rather a lovely diversion if I couldn’t interrogate the Italians about the harmonic effects of purification underwater or go back to my cozy little bolthole in the attic. I rather rudely cut off the docks magnate telling me about the ’84 strike on fish cleaners and half stood up at the table just to see the crash. Five years ago I could believe Johannes interrupting his father’s dinner, he’d always been willing to go on a dare his friends put him up to or some other jape around town. Just before he’d been sent away to London for economics schooling and then on his Grand Tour, he’d lit Captain Kleinschlinger’s boat on fire during the Winter Lights Festival just because Randolf Novik said he wouldn’t dare. Kleinschlinger had had insurance and the ear of the Magistrate, so he managed to get double the money back AND win the prize for Brightest before they realized it was a disaster.

Johannes’ father had scolded him, but secretly, I think, been quite pleased at his son’s daring. He was not pleased now. Johannes had been inducted that past September and was now supposed to be quite seriously pursuing the Herringer business affairs.

“Johannes,” he boomed. “Are you quite all right? Get your face up from that.” ‘That’ was the twenty-three inch salted whitefin that was the piece de resistance of tonight’s meal. From the dent Johannes face made in it, I didn’t think anyone would have any trouble resisting it after this.

“Darling, he’s shaking!” his mother said, clutching her violet and lace handkerchief to her bosom.

“Johannes!”

“He’s not shaking, Lady Herringer, he’s convulsing. Please everyone, give me some room,” said Doctor Crait, standing up from his seat briskly. By now I’d stood up and walked over to get a better view – and to comfort Johannes of course – and so was obliged to take a few steps back and murmur comforting words to his mother.

As I said who knows what to Lady Herringer, who was by now theatrically sniffling into her decolletage, my eyes swept around the room. All the guests were gaping at Johannes and Doctor Crait, nearly all standing up from their chairs, eyes wide. Johannes gave a choked cry and spasmed horribly, his voice gurgling. The noise made my shoulders hike up in tension as if a thousand metal plates had been dropped at once or clashing bells … out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the hundred silver goblets on the table quiver and shake, falling on its side. I turned away from the spectacle of the doctor and tried to block out Johannes cries, but nothing was moving when I looked at it.

He screamed again as the footmen with the stretcher came in to take him away and I jerked my head up looking at the crystals in the chandelier that was my father’s Mastery Gift to the Guild. I could swear it was moving, tinkling with tension. I took another step away from the dispersing crowd, leaving Lady Herringer and my mother. I squinted, thinking maybe I couldn’t catch what I’d seen out of the corner of my eye.

“Get the girl,” my father barked from the door.

“Ginger, we must go it’s not seemly,” my mother breathed, coming up behind me. “We’ll wait for word from the hospital about Johannes, don’t cry.”

I was not crying, but I let her lead me away, my eyes slipping down from the chandelier.

As they did they caught a pair of intent dark eyes from the opposite doorway. A man stood there, not frightened or craning to see where they had taken Johannes. Footmen and serving girls swooped past him carrying dirtied dishes, the salted fish platter and damp towels for women who had politely fainted at the spectacle. He just stood there like a rock on a stormy shore. He met my gaze seriously and directly, then jerked his chin back up at the chandelier. My ears popped.

A wail came from outside and I knew something had happened with Johannes. The sense of reverberation abruptly vanished.

I twisted to see him as my mother took my arm and began walking out and he met my eyes again, nodding to me as I was led through the opposite doorway. A darkly satisfied look flitted around his mouth and eyes, his lips nearly twisting into a smile.

I lost sight of him then, but I knew one thing in the marrow of my bones.

That man had murdered Johannes Herringer.

Cantata 2/2

One day my face pressed against cool tile

My limbs strewn all about me in a pile

I found myself in the waiting wood

And knew it to be not as any forest should

 

It was damn quiet in this forest that was why. There were no sounds of birds or wind between the tall branches and the golden sunlight that filtered down through the summer leaves was always the same full, golden afternoon shade, like a child’s memory or an old adventure movie. There was no shushing sliding step of rats or squirrels or carking sounds of frogs. 

Some days I think I’ll wake up like Dorothy gasp and sit up back in black and white and grey asking whether the tornado is over but some nights I sit shaking in my bed with furs and velvets dark and red and I imagine them extracting the hot copper from my bones and surgically declawing my spirit filing down its fangs so I can be a lost girl big innocent eyes in a child’s dress on a woman’s body looking desperately for the familiar features of my knights and sages in the suntanned face of the farm hands

He didn’t look the part of a Magician, that was for sure. The traveling ones who had come through town had all looked the same too me, robed and twisty with oiled hair and pretentious beards. Still, Annie the butcher’s daughter said that when he sang at the gate, the Cloister Bell on the hill had rung and so they let him in. 

Cantata 1/2

One day I found myself on the floor asleep

And I fell into a forest, dark and deep

 

I pushed my face up from the dirt, bits of damp leaf catching in the wisps of hair that escaped the braid. I was breathless as if from the impact of a great fall, but when I pushed myself to my feet, I found I was in no pain. It was a pretty kind of forest, this forest, with the long light of afternoon slanting over old knarled branches and shining against the weathered bark of elder trees. 

It didn’t strike me as unusual that I should be here and in fact, I was already losing interest in examining my arrival. The scuff where I had scraped a foot getting up on one knee was the only indication that I had been down there at all. To the left, the ground rose upward and at the base of the little hill leaves and sticks had collected. To the right were ferns, waist high, thickly growing and innocently undisturbed. I was in a kind of clearing, carpeted with leaves and moss and dusty ground. Without much curiosity, I looked upward to see where I might have fallen from.

The leaves gave the same answer that leaves always give. 

Smacking the dirt and determined leaves off my clothes and shoes, I decided to go forward, for no other reason than the forest looking thinner that way. I considered calling out for help, but I wasn’t in danger at the moment, I ought to move forward.  I passed out of that clearing and found the wood was much the same everywhere, uneven ground covered by ferns and thorny sprigs of things with buds of red or green greys. Moss grew on stones near a small stream I had to jump over and I slipped, dunking one scuffed sneaker in the water. 

My shoulders tensed then and I half wanted to apologize to the benign forest, because I felt aware that it was the silence of a symphony hall before a renowned opera star was to perform her famous aria. The trickle of the water was the murmur of people, its burble between stones the liquid spinning of the drums tuning and I was the unfortunate intern who drops a cymbal. But I walked on, one sock wet. 

As the stream faded, my footfalls were the scraping metronome before a child’s music performance, methodically moving through the thin blanket of leaves the forest floor had dropped to warm the earth. Step, step, step step. 

Faster footfalls joined my own, a staccato drumbeat of panic joined by the crashing of leaves and the snapping of small branches. A woman emerged from the undergrowth and headed straight for me at breakneck speed. She skidded to a stop in front of me, her many layers swaying with the force of her abrubt stop. She had a cloth bundle in her arms, its shape distorted by some kind of long stick threaded through the center. Her eyes were wild, the whites around her dark irises completely visible. She gasped and looked behind her in a panic before turning back to me. 

“You must take it,” she said in a low rocky accented voice. She held out the bundle to me and I took a step back, raising my hands. “They cannot take it from you, go to the town.” 

Before I had a chance to pull my voice from where it had settled low in my lungs, she thrust the bundle at me, looked once more at the gaping broken hole in the branches where she had come from, whirled back around, her fabric headress swinging in an arc, made one long look at me and ran. 

“Wait!” I managed to rasp out after her. I followed a few steps, climbing a rock and slipping down a ravine, but the sounds of her movement had ceased and I knew not where to follow. “What the fuck,” I grumbled, thoroughly shaken and all the skin on my body crawling with anxiety, my muscles clenched in tension. The woman had upset me in a way the forest could, disturbing it and breaking the warm expectant silence of this place. Now it eddied around me in swirls of confusion. 

48. Wishful Thinking (Seven of Cups)

Rider-Waite called them the seven strange chalices of vision, but I think of it more like the illusions at the bottom of a full cup. Maybe that cup is coffee and you’re dreaming of what might be in the liminal space before a workday begins. Maybe that cup is a glass of beer and hoping that lowered inhibitions will mean you can let yourself forget the stress of the day. Like Galadriel told Frodo in the Fellowship of the Ring, when you look into a vessel, you’ll see things that are, things that used to be and some things that may or may not come to pass.

I’ve always found tea drinking to be contemplative in a similar way, not so much that I look into it but that by drinking it I let my mind wander to infinite liquid possibilities and then add them to the mundane bulk of the body and then carry them into my day. But that’s an illusion too, just like the dream at the bottom of a dram or forgetfulness at the end of a full glass. It’s wishful thinking to reach for the cup that sits on a cloud and expect to get anything at all.