Signs of Summer

She lay on the carpet right in the middle of one of the science fiction aisles in the bookstore. Not sitting on the floor reading a book as one sometimes finds people doing in bookstore aisles, but laying fully prone on her stomach on the carpet as if beside a fireplace at home. She was dressed in a sleeveless black summer dress, her raven hair off to one side, her bare lower right leg swinging up and down keeping time to some inner music. I stood frozen in pleasant surprise for a few minutes, taking in the contrast between her pale white skin and the black dress, the firmness of her lower leg muscles, the sensible open-toed sandals on her feet, the delicious athletic form of her prone body. Fortunately her feet were towards me and so she could not see me staring at her. Mind made up, I walked the few steps to the next aisle and then across to double back into the science fiction aisle several feet in front of her. I wanted to see her face. She smiled as she read, raising her head up every now and then to drink iced-tea. I pretended to browse the bookshelf whilst looking at her surreptitiously. Her unadorned neck. Her beautiful eyes riveted to her book. The curve of her breasts pressing into the carpet. There was something about her complete abandon that captivated me. She was lost in her book and I became lost in her. I flipped through the random book I had reached for, my attention fixed on her even though my eyes were not.

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A rush of cold air swept into the bookstore as someone walked in through the front doors. Instinctively, I pressed the front of my down jacket together to stay warm. On looking back down, the aisle was empty. She was gone. Stunned, I sat down in the aisle with my back against the bookshelf. Snow was falling outside. I could see it come down from the sky through the big window at the end of the aisle. How could this be? It had been summer just a few moments ago. I sat there looking out of the window, disbelieving reality.

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"Found what you are looking for?", she asked. There she was again, laying on the carpet a few feet from me in the aisle. Gorgeous eyes smiling into mine.

"Everything," I whispered. Pausing for a few moments, I searched her face with my eyes before continuing, "I have found everything I am looking for."

Other me

(For a change, not a vignette but a decree).

What use are dreams if I cannot dictate their content? What cruel joke does biology play on us? For when we are most free from the constraints of reality, when we are most free to conjure up any fantasy we wish, we are also most at the mercy of the uncontrollable whims or fancies that seed our dreams. If it isn't me that lives my dreams, then who is this other me? Be he demon or deity, I wish to trade places with him so that he may taste what it is to live within the bounds of reason and society, and I may taste true free will. So that he may walk, and I may fly. So that he may be true, and I may lie. So that he may deal with the world as it is, and I may fashion a world as I want it to be. For if I am to make conversations and have coffee, make love and have fights, if I am to do with others all the things that one does in the realm of daily living, then I want the realm of dreams to be for you and for you alone. If I was the other me then you would be my life.

Does the other me dream? It must be so, for to claim otherwise would make me and my kind special and separate. If nothing else, Occam's razor or in other words the simplicity that science demands of explanations would assume that my other me dreams and then so does his other me, and so on, ad infinitum. I hereby decree that all the other me's inside of me must dream of you and you alone so that I can be with you infinitely.

Fine Line

It's a dangerous game, it's a very fine line
and if one step is wrong, I'll have no cards to play
That's why I have got nothing to say tonight

                  --- Riot on an Empty Street by Kings of Convenience

I no longer know if it can happen, you and I.  It wasn't that I had no choice, it was that all the choices I had involved disregarding the soft lonely voice of reason.

I put a hand on the top of the barricade and leaped over it bracing for impact as I fell the nearly two-story drop onto the concrete pavement below. Despite landing into a crouching stance, the violence of the sudden stop traveled instantly through my bones all the way into my skull jarring my brain loose, or so it felt.  Images, like shards of steel-edged glass, flood into my mind.  Rain. You are dancing in the rain on a springtime hilltop, your wet dress clinging to your curves. Summer rain. You are in my arms on our beach watching the sea swell up from the battering coming down from the sky. Glistening sweat. Your raven hair clinging to the sides of your face as you thrust your hips upwards to meet mine, your swollen nipple filling my mouth. I fall over into a fetal position, clutching my head in a futile attempt to shield it from these image fragments. Fear. You looking back frantically while running hard in desperate stumbling strides alongside a long white fence. Frame after frame of fear and running and the pristine white fence. Low moans. Your hands in my hair as I bury my face between your legs suckling greedily on the moist trough between your lips. Frame after random image frame coursed through my mind. Even in the midst of the pain I can tell that some of these images are not from the past.  I shake my head to drive these images away but the pain only gets sharper. There is a little bit of you in everything.

An unheralded urgency somehow brings forth the strength from inside me and I get up on my feet. I have to find you tonight. Unsteady, I see both the images my eyes are seeing and what my untethered mind is creating for me. I would have fallen but for my groping hands finding a fence to steady me. An idyllic white fence that seems to stretch endlessly into the future. I stagger back in disbelief. Drawing my dagger from underneath my shirt I run wildly alongside the fence, bumping into it every few steps both to make sure that it is really there and to keep from falling. Suddenly I see you  running in front of me, red gashes on your arms. I can see the terror in your face as you look back. This can't be happening for real. I stop and shake my head to be able to see properly again. There is only the fence stretching in front of me. I keep running, dagger gripped firmly in my right hand. I can hear you calling out my name.