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I think it would be much more dramatic to announce my upcoming disappearance and then actually, haha, disapear, but maybe I'm just not very good at drama.
So, to test this theory, I wrote a Sandman Thing which is maybe not so much dramatic, but felt like being written anyway. I'm not sure if I've actually proven anything by this approach, but much fun was had by all. If, at least, by all, you mean me...
She knew the right herbs and the words so old all that remained was their magic; and she had used them before, because there had been a time when the moon and the blood and the power became death as she slept, and it spilled into the day, and she needed a silence in her mind to decide if this was a threat or merely the echoes of her own thoughts. But that was another time, and long ago, or at least long enough ago to be passed and past.
This time, she had been walking along a beach at midnight, and people milled around her in Day-Glo orange bikinis and bronze armour and white robes that touched the sea foam but remained immaculate. A woman in the colours of Athens had impaled a beach-ball on a dented sword; it bled green and red and yellow into the sand next to a cart where a centaur sold hotdogs and ice-cream made from goat’s milk. And the sky was heavy with clouds, but she knew the moon was full because the moon was always full in her dreams.
There were neon lights from a nearby city which burned the clouds white and silver and green, but there were still shadows running through. The clouds moved a little until there was a patch between them where she could see stars, and then something shifted and there he was, looking down at her from the sky. Some might have wondered which was real, the stars or the eye, the dream or the man, but she had a much different understanding of reality than most people. And she knew that dreams follow their own rules.
The lines of his face were familiar but almost right, as though she was looking at a portrait that had yet to be finished. Or as though she was seeing a second portrait of the same thing, painted by a different artist under different lighting.
He took in the whole of the beach, and then focussed on her alone. You hurt me? he said, and there was something soft and detached about the words that turned them into a question, but one he was asking himself.
If they had been her words, she would have used them differently.
He considered her for several long seconds in a timescale of his own devising, and she glared up at him, concentrating the useful pieces of her anger because just because something puts itself in the sky doesn’t mean you don’t have a power over it. And then he came to a conclusion, or another, and nodded to her with an air of finality. And then she woke up.
And now she mixed the potion in wine, because wine at least is the right colour, and intoned the names of things that had never been gods, and slept in eight hour stretches of nothingness.
Because sometimes it’s even worse to wonder what dreams may come than to know the ones that won’t.
Edit: This belongs to Thessaly, or Larissa if you prefer. I tried going back and putting her name in it, but I couldn't get it to sound right.
So, to test this theory, I wrote a Sandman Thing which is maybe not so much dramatic, but felt like being written anyway. I'm not sure if I've actually proven anything by this approach, but much fun was had by all. If, at least, by all, you mean me...
She knew the right herbs and the words so old all that remained was their magic; and she had used them before, because there had been a time when the moon and the blood and the power became death as she slept, and it spilled into the day, and she needed a silence in her mind to decide if this was a threat or merely the echoes of her own thoughts. But that was another time, and long ago, or at least long enough ago to be passed and past.
This time, she had been walking along a beach at midnight, and people milled around her in Day-Glo orange bikinis and bronze armour and white robes that touched the sea foam but remained immaculate. A woman in the colours of Athens had impaled a beach-ball on a dented sword; it bled green and red and yellow into the sand next to a cart where a centaur sold hotdogs and ice-cream made from goat’s milk. And the sky was heavy with clouds, but she knew the moon was full because the moon was always full in her dreams.
There were neon lights from a nearby city which burned the clouds white and silver and green, but there were still shadows running through. The clouds moved a little until there was a patch between them where she could see stars, and then something shifted and there he was, looking down at her from the sky. Some might have wondered which was real, the stars or the eye, the dream or the man, but she had a much different understanding of reality than most people. And she knew that dreams follow their own rules.
The lines of his face were familiar but almost right, as though she was looking at a portrait that had yet to be finished. Or as though she was seeing a second portrait of the same thing, painted by a different artist under different lighting.
He took in the whole of the beach, and then focussed on her alone. You hurt me? he said, and there was something soft and detached about the words that turned them into a question, but one he was asking himself.
If they had been her words, she would have used them differently.
He considered her for several long seconds in a timescale of his own devising, and she glared up at him, concentrating the useful pieces of her anger because just because something puts itself in the sky doesn’t mean you don’t have a power over it. And then he came to a conclusion, or another, and nodded to her with an air of finality. And then she woke up.
And now she mixed the potion in wine, because wine at least is the right colour, and intoned the names of things that had never been gods, and slept in eight hour stretches of nothingness.
Because sometimes it’s even worse to wonder what dreams may come than to know the ones that won’t.
Edit: This belongs to Thessaly, or Larissa if you prefer. I tried going back and putting her name in it, but I couldn't get it to sound right.
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