for that moment, I’m solid light, innocent and newborn, a burning Midsummer fire in the shape of a woman.
And then I wake up, back home again.
I lie there in my bed and look out the window, but it’s still the dark of the moon in our world. The streets are quiet outside, there’s a hush over the whole city, and I’m lying here with a hazel twig in my hand, a stone in my mouth, pushed up into one cheek, and a warm burning glow deep inside.
I sit up and spit the stone out into my hand. I walk over to the window. I’m not in some magical dream now; I’m in the real world. I know the lighted moon glows with light borrowed from the sun. That she’s still out there in the dark of the moon, we just can’t see her tonight because the earth is between her and the sun.
Or maybe she’s gone into some other world, to replenish her lantern before she begins her nightly trek across the sky once more.
I feel like I’ve learned something, but I’m not sure what. I’m not sure what any of it means.
“How can you say that?” Jilly said. “God, Sophie, it’s so obvious. She really
Sophie slowly shook her head. “I suppose I’d like to believe that, too,” she said, “but what we want and what really is aren’t always the same thing.”
“But what about Jeck? He’ll be waiting for you. And Granny Weather? They both knew you were the Moon’s daughter all along. It all means something.”
Sophie sighed. She stroked the sleeping cat on her lap, imagining for a moment that it was the soft dark curls of a crow that could be a man, in a land that only existed in her dreams.
“I guess,” she said, “it means I need a new boyfriend.”
July’s a real sweetheart, and I love her dearly, but she’s naive in some ways. Or maybe it’s just that she wants to play the ingenue. She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical.
Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real. I can’t believe what Jilly now insists is true: that I’ve got faerie blood, because I’m the daughter of the Moon.
Though I have to admit that I’d like to.
I never do get to sleep that night. I prowl around the apartment, drinking coffee to keep me awake.
I’m afraid to go to sleep, afraid I’ll dream and that it’ll all be real.
Or maybe that it won’t.
When it starts to get light, I take a long cold shower, because I’ve been thinking about Jeck again. I guess if my making the wrong decision in a dream would’ve had ramifications in the waking world, then there’s no reason that a rampaging libido shouldn’t carry over as well.
I get dressed in some old clothes I haven’t worn in years, just to try to recapture a more innocent time. White blouse, faded jeans, and hightops with this smoking jacket overtop that used to belong to my dad. It’s made of burgundy velvet with black satin lapels. A black hat, with a flat top and a bit of a curl to its brim, completes the picture.
I look in the mirror and I feel like I’m auditioning to be a stage magician’s assistant, but I don’t much care.
As soon as the hour gets civilized, I head over to Christy Riddell’s house. I’m knocking on his door at nine o’clock, but when he comes to let me in, he’s all sleepyeyed and disheveled and I realize that I should’ve given him another couple of hours. Too late for that now.
I just come right out with it. I tell him that Jilly said he knew all about lucid dreaming and what I want to know is, is any of it real—the place you dream of, the people you meet there?
He stands there in the doorway, blinking like an owl, but I guess he’s used to stranger things, because after a moment he leans against the door jamb and asks me what I know about consensual reality.
It’s where everything that we see around us only exists because we all agree it does, I say.
Well, maybe it’s the same in a dream, he replies. If everyone in the dream agrees that what’s around them is real, then why shouldn’t it be?
I want to ask him about what my dad had to say about dreams trying to escape into the waking world, but I decide I’ve already pushed my luck.
Thanks, I say.
He gives me a funny look. That’s it? he asks.
I’ll explain it some other time, I tell him.
Please do, he says without a whole lot of enthusiasm, then goes back inside.
When I get home, I go and lie down on the old sofa that’s out on my balcony. I close my eyes. I’m still not so sure about any of this, but I figure it can’t hurt to see if Jeck and I can’t find ourselves one of those happilyever- afters with which fairy tales usually end.
Who knows? Maybe I really am the daughter of the Moon. If not here, then someplace.
In The House Of My Enemy
We have not inherited the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.
The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the pawprints of memories scattered helterskelter—here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations. There is no order to what we recall, the wheel of time follows no straight line as it turns in our heads. In the dark attics of our minds, all times mingle, sometimes literally.
I get so confused. I’ve been so many people; some I didn’t like at all. I wonder that anyone could.
Victim, hooker, junkie, liar, thief But without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I’m no one special, but I like who I am, lost childhood and all.
Did I have to be all those people to become the person I am today? Are they still living inside me, hiding in some dark corner of my mind, waiting for me to slip and stumble and fall and give them life again?
I tell myself not to remember, but that’s wrong, too. Not remembering makes them stronger.
The morning sun came in through the window of Jilly Coppercorn’s loft, playing across the features of her guest. The girl was still asleep on the Murphy bed, sheets all tangled around her skinny limbs, pulled tight and smooth over the rounded swell of her abdomen. Sleep had gentled her features. Her hair clouded the pillow around her head. The soft morning sunlight gave her a Madonna quality, a nimbus ofBotticelli purity that the harsher light of the later day would steal away once she woke.
She was fifteen years old. And eight months pregnant.
Jilly sat in the windowseat, feet propped up on the sill, sketchpad on her lap. She caught the scene in charcoal, smudging the lines with the pad of her middle finger to soften them. On the fire escape outside, a stray cat climbed up the last few metal steps until it was level with where she was sitting and gave a plaintive meow.
Jilly had been expecting the black and white tabby. She reached under her knees and picked up a small plastic margarine container filled with dried kibbles, which she set down on the fire escape in front of the cat. As the tabby contentedly crunched its breakfast, Jilly returned to her portrait.
