Technicolor Dream

Short fantasy captured in a dream

Photo by agsandrew

Last night, under a full moon that silvered my world, I dreamt. And my dream ran with colors so fierce they stung my eyes.

I stood on a hill beneath an orange-red sky, black clouds thundering across it quick as thrown ink.

A one-eyed parrot, neon green with bright purple wings, bobbed on my shoulder and nibbled my ear. Loulou. My companion, simple-hearted, the only friend left to me. His feathers glossed even when a black cloud dragged its shadow over us.

Everything in that world came slow. Each motion cost me. Nothing stirred on the lush green valley floor below.

I turned right, head first, my body hauled along by momentum.

Nothing.

Right again, and understanding arrived: the hill beneath me clove the valley in half, as if a giant, grown weary of carrying it, had set it down just there. For symmetry.

I finished my circle and faced front once more.

Then, off to my left, a bright blue light. I set out toward it. Loulou cheered me on, raucous, yanking my ear.

“Pass the salt! Pepper makes me sneeze!”

A mile off, maybe, that light. But I lumbered, clumsy-footed, my soles half magnetized to the ground.

Halfway there, Loulou’s chatter drumming through my skull, I stopped. I lifted him from my shoulder and looked into his one working eye.

“Fly now. You’ll torment me if you stay. Fly!”

I opened my hands. He dropped a heartbeat’s worth, then his wings caught and he climbed. High above me, his neon body and purple wings cut silhouettes against that red-orange sky. The black clouds had vanished—by what force, I couldn’t say, since no breath of air had passed to push them along.

I walked on, glancing up now and again at Loulou circling like a green and purple vulture. The light brightened as I came near. At a hundred feet it resolved into water. Closer still, and tiny ripples wrinkled its surface.

Then Loulou fell as if shot. He screeched, nose-diving at the water. I wrenched my head aside, and after a while, when no splash came, I turned back. Gone.

I stepped forward and stood at the edge of another world: blue sky and water, and it was swallowing the world of color.

The water crept to my ankles and climbed. I strained to lift my legs, to bend a knee, to flex a foot. Nothing gave. The water kept on, patient, total, circling me and everything else. Its companion sky blued out the orange-red one.

A yawn built in me, enormous. My eyelids sagged, lulled by the hypnotic ripples. Only my head still belonged to me; the water had locked the rest.

Then it topped my shoulders and shoved at my chin. My mouth opened around the yawn and the water poured in, unmaking me, taking me whole, my terror crowded into my eyes until those, too, drowned.

One feeling remained, at the very crown of my head: my hair tugged until it hurt, and I woke with my head pressed against the headboard, in my room touched by silver moonbeams and grey shadows.

Author’s Note

This fantasy was inspired by A Simple Heart (aka A Simple Soul), a short story by Gustave Flaubert that appeared in his book Three Tales. I was specifically inspired by the following line.

Her heart slowed, becoming vaguer and gentler with each beat, like a fountain running dry, like an echo fading away, and as she breathed her last, she seemed to see, hovering above her head as the heavens opened, a giant parrot.

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