Dreams are funny things. No matter how I try, I can never control the content of my own. A kaleidoscopic spectrum of colors, shades and hues engulfs my sleeping world. Faces appear before me. People I know and people I love dance and sing and laugh. They speak without words, rejoice in silent rain drops, float high above me or far below me. Gentle breezes flutter through stray strands of auburn hair, and flap ivory aprons and violet ascots. Men kneel down by the rushing waters of rivers and streams to drink cool fresh water. It drips silver down their cleft chins and barrel chests. The sun has lost its acrid glare and adopted a golden glow that lights us all from within like living lanterns. Black barked trees stretch up through the atmosphere, shooting spiny green limbs up and down and sideways. The trees reach down for us, offering tender branches as boosters while we climb higher and higher. From the top of my luscious oak perch my arms sprout silk feathers. I practice letting the breezes catch them and drop them while I look out over the whole of Kansas. To the horizon there are rolling amber wheat fields, dotted intermittently with vibrant green gardens, and crystal blue creeks. The scenery is moving, breathing.
And then Mama is there, on the branch beside me with silver wings of her own. Her ruby lips spread into a serene smile revealing opalescent teeth. Her button nose crinkles while she squints out a look at me that says, "I told you I'd see you again." At once she begins to flap those magnificent appendages, slowly but with determined force. The air she displaces swooshes around me in whirling base notes. She gathers momentum and without warning is thrust upward into the aquamarine sky. I can make out only her silhouette against the patrician light. She arcs in high graceful waves over me, trailing tangerine streams in her wake, making figure eights and daring loop-de-loops on the wind. She is an apparition, a phoenix rising, burning through the open air with mastery, surveilling all before her. I wait now, with my back pressed up to a weathered red barn, for her descent. She comes in slow drooping spirals down to me. As she lands softly in the grass I can see its not Mama at all, but Daniel.
His suit is clean white linen. He radiates white hot light. Under the brim of his Stetson his emerald eyes flame. His smirk draws one corner of his chestnut beard into asymmetry. I hold my breath. My silk feathers are human arms again, covered in goose pimples and shaking. My hands are empty. I have nothing to offer him and no means of flight. His spurs glint in the sun as he steps toward me. I am momentarily blinded and he is upon me, breathing heavily onto my face, my neck, into my ears. I wonder why I haven't seen Philip, and then I am awake.
The room was dark and hot. I closed my eyes. How can an entire world evaporate so quickly? I could still feel Daniel's breath, but the water, the air, the color was all gone. I opened my eyes to the worn wooden floor boards. I was expected at the Binghams by six o'clock.
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