Blue Mirror: NCSSM’s journal of art and literature

“How ya been sleeping lately?” she asks me.

“Every time I close my eyes, I start spinning,” I answer.

There is only darkness. Phssst, a match is lit. The smoky sweet smell of sulfur fills my nose. Fingers come out of nowhere and pinch the flame out. A trail of smoke slowly disappears back into the darkness.

I chase a rabbit down through a manhole. We end up in a room full of blue and orange cables. The rabbit turns into a small man with a mouse head and coattails.

“Banana nut butter bread!” The funny mouse man says and turns and runs down the tunnel. He dashes into a side room.

I follow him. The room is full of televisions: flat screens, plasma screens, VHF TVs, portable DVD players, and projection TVs. On every screen is a real beating heart. I spot the mouse man inside one of the television sets. I find myself in the TV with him.

“Peanut brittle cookie jam!” The mouse man says directly to me. It reaches up behind its head and unties a ribbon. A mouse mask tied on in blue ribbon begins its slow descent towards the ground.

When I look up, she is there. She is crying. She reaches down and hands me the mouse mask.

“I’m tired of being whatever you want me to be,” She starts to walk away.

“Wait!” I try to say, but nothing comes out but the chirping of a bird.

A jewel blue snake slithers in front of me, mocking me. He sticks out his forked tongue, “sssss-sss-sssurender.”

She is crouched down in the corner of a cinderblock room. Her hair is dyed red and curled. She is smoking.

“Smoking is disgusting,” She says, grinding her cigarette butt into the ground with her five inch heel.

“Let me tell you who I really am,” She says, “I have blond hair, first off.” She runs her fingers thorough her hair and it turns blond and straight as soon as her fingers stop touching it.

“I’m quite a bit shorter,” She says, shrinking, “and most of the time I wear jeans.” She tugs on the hem of her short, red, revealing dress and it changes into a peace sign shirt and jeans. Her heels turned into hightops. The pearls from her grandmother appeared around her neck.

She reaches her arms out to me, but I pull away.

She is wearing a flowing white dress at the beach. She walks into the water without looking back. Her head disappears below the surface of the water. She keeps walking in a straight line. Her dress and hair float on the currents. She walks, and the sand becomes tightly packed.

She walks for hours, breathing the water. She reaches the continental drop-off and trips, flying out into the mid-Atlantic. She lands gracefully on the ocean floor and continues walking.

Fish swim around her; eels, sharks, and jellyfish follow behind her, like an underwater game of follow the leader. She walks clear to the mid-ocean ridge, the sea life abandoning her.

The hot springs and vents sing her praises. She walks over the molten lava without flinching. She scales the side of the mid-ocean ridge.

I am on the other side. I watch her, blue in the ocean light. We are so close, yet we can’t be together. We are separated by a bottomless pool of molten rock. It will harden and form new rock, and we will stand here and wait. It will never connect us, just raise us higher and push us apart. There will always be a deep river of lava between us.

I am standing in an open field. The grass is green, lush and studded with yellow flowers. In the center of the field is a buffalo. She is beside me.

“You have to catch him,” She says, “He is your demon.” I realize she is holding a red collar out to me.

“You want me to catch him with this? That’s impossible.”

She nods, “Just try it.”

I walk towards the beast. He shows no sign of seeing me approach. I come so close I can almost touch his brown head grazing in the ground, but when I blink, the buffalo is far on the other end of the field.

I figure I should get the buffalo to come to me, so I hold out my hand to it. It looks at me for a second then begins to graze again. I try to run towards it, but it stays at the same distance from me.

Finally, I walk up to it, staring it in the eye the whole time. I slip the collar over its head. It generates a blinding light. It becomes a white buffalo, sacred to the Native Americans.

“You’ve done it! You’ve saved him!” She hugs me.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asks me. “You were talking in your sleep.”

I smile at her. “Yeah, I’m okay.”