Discover Top Posts Tagged with #092615

4. HEIST

I am awestruck by the woman in white. She is spellbindingly glamorous in her oversized, round sunglasses, the lenses so dark that it’s impossible to tell which way she’s looking. She carries a fur clutch, white, and wears an expensively fitted pantsuit, white. Even the click-click heels with the sharp toes that she wears are white as pearls. Her silk-soft hair is white blonde and her skin is unpainted porcelain. The only color she wears is a pristine red lipstick. When she beckons to me her teeth flash moon-white behind her scarlet smile and I am hooked.

“It’s simple,” she promises. “When you check in to the spa, choose the shortest treatment. Say you’re in a rush. When the attendant leaves the room, go out the other door.” She takes my hand in hers and runs her thumb over my manicure, a glittering solar system painted across all ten nails. “The code is here. When you put your hand on the sensor it will read the microchip under your nail polish.” She turns my hand over and folds a heavy felt bag into my fingers. The glass marbles inside clack and grit against each other as I squeeze them tightly. “This weighs the same as the gems inside the safe. Switch them carefully so you don’t set off the alarm. Just like we practiced; breathe slow and don’t shake.” I nod, resolute, and she smiles again. “You’re going to make us rich,” she says and pats my cheek. For her, I would steal the stars.

#dreams #mine #writing #092615

3. BOX

A peddler’s van is parked at the end of my driveway. Its doors are swung wide to reveal shelves of trinkets, polished and grimy, broken and brand new. There are chairs stacked upside down on top of each other like puzzle pieces, necklaces hanging tangled from the ceiling, gauzy and gaudy costume dresses used to cushion delicate vases.

And there is the music box.

Small, wooden, white. When I pick it up it is familiar in my hands. I feel that I could trace each petal of its painted pink roses with my eyes closed. When it opens I hum along to the tinny song that plays as the blue-dress ballerina inside twirls in front of her tiny, oval mirror.

What fills the insides of the music box are the only things unfamiliar about it. When I wind the key to let the song play again, a secret compartment clicks open. Sharp and glittering, the gems that spill out of the satin-lined drawer are cold in my hands. Unlike the dresses that soften the peddler’s van, these are no costume pieces. Rubies and emeralds and diamonds, blood and seagrass and ice purer than any colored glass could be.

A shadow falls across my jewel-heavy palms and I jam the stones back inside the box, snapping the lid shut to mute its off-key tinkling. The peddler smiles at me and shakes his head when I start to put the music box back.

“Keep it. It was always yours.”

#dreams #writing #mine #092615

2. TUNNELS

The stairs cut through the mountain. Steep, narrow, infinite, they spiral up-and-up-and-up into the cold stone. I am one of many strangers on the stairs; we have been climbing for hours, maybe, or days. Inside the mountain there is no way of knowing.

The air is stale but not stifling, neither warm nor cool, unmoving. A constant dim glow keeps the tunnel lit from just around the corner, but no matter how far we climb we cannot catch up to its source. There are air shafts cut diagonally from the ceiling of the tunnel. No light comes through, but we still breathe. The shafts stretch out away from our heads toward where the outside of the mountain should be.

Directions are strange in the tunnels. We have twisted and circled and looped so many times that no one can be certain of where we started or which way we now walk. All we know is to continue upward. When we reach the end of the stairs we have been climbing for days, maybe, or hours.

We are in a small room, dark, cold, empty. A rough ledge has been carved into the walls of the room and I climb onto it to see above the heads of the strangers who crowd in beside me. From my new vantage point I can see that the room is not entirely empty after all. Against the far wall there is a wooden cot, rotted and splintered with age. There is no bedding; maybe it was once here and has since deteriorated, maybe there has never been any.

I am alone in the room. I turn back and start down the stairs.

#dreams #writing #mine #092615