I’m in a metal box. It’s raining outside, maybe. No one is coming. Not ever.
Sleep provides a refuge in which the mind becomes one with its [our] habitat. I must emerge in my dream because The Jewel is coming. I buzzed her in. Soon she’ll enter through my hotel window.
I selected her from thousands of possibilities. It’s how it’s done nowadays. Click on the image or hesitate too long and she’ll show up at your window, even if it’s four in the morning.
She reads me the tarot. She brought them in a little purple velvet pouch tied up with string. She spreads on the bed, pretending her cards can save me. Queen of Cups. They’re a channel for the world beneath the reality grid: a complete set of symbols the police don’t know. It’s too late for me, of course, so I smile politely and drink in the esoteric security they give her.
Oh God, I could listen to her read poetry all night long. Such energy! She tingles with it. Waves flow through her. Wobbly. Passionate. Emotion is her purpose. If she loses her rhythm, she’s lost; but she never does.
We are spinning sisters.
Twisted sheets all perfume seem cold here. Unfriendly, generic decor and furniture that was never loved don’t deserve her.
An actual human body with no plastic, no metal, no ornamental trash. Flesh, bruised and forgotten, coming alive with a touch.
Human stasis device.
She whispers it in my ear like it’s sweet and nothing.
[hammer]
Her heart sounds like a train chugging along. She screams like the slamming breaks in my soul. She takes a look around, noticing detail that is only a blur to me. Coving, a crack in the wardrobe, a cigarette burn on the carpet. And here I am casting shadows on her floor.
Then all is still, or so it seems. Still moving. A tune plays in my head, and I know that the waves go on. In the corner of my eye, micro bots and bio in my blood, somewhere beyond the veil.
I can’t remember my own name.
Words, sentences, paragraphs cut from manuscripts and journals. Stitched back together to make something new or the very thing they were always supposed to be.
The painting in the header is my own.
C.R. Dudley 