Daily Archive

The Management of Il Taverna di Muse would like to thank all the participants at Sibyl’s First Salon.    We had a rollicking good time and hope to do it again in the future.  

Sybil, I have destroyed the video of you dancing on the table so you need not worry about it showing up on YouTube.   To the woman in the neon-pink feather boa, you left behind your boomerang.  You may retrieve it at Lost-and-Found in the foyer.  Pretty cool trick you did with it —- you must be double-jointed!

The Taverna is open 24/7 and stories, poems, reviews, art, and photography may still be posted at the Salon. 

Cheers!

Lori Gloyd, Tavern-mistress  

a moment in time, a site containing pathways to all time?
peacebird

Memories of warm summer nights, sitting on the bench circling the tree on the village green and gazing up through the branches into the night.
peacebird

Maggie didn’t want to carve it at first. She hated taking direction when she had a vision. She did consent to listening to the dream. Once she heard it, she told me she’d carve the figure, but it would be her interpretation of my dream.

A month later, a box arrived with Maggie’s return address. There, nestled in cream-colored mulberry paper, was the Dream Woman. She was carved from a fossilized walrus tooth. She was perfect in every respect: big hands, wearing a shawl, and on the back, an intricate and complete constellation Orion. The constellation had magic figures and sun sign icons carved into it. I was speechless.

That night, I tucked the amulet under my pillow. I fell asleep almost immediately. I awoke at 2 a.m., sure someone was in the house. All three cats lay in the bedroom, fast asleep. They miss nothing, no one was there. I fell asleep to fitful chase dreams. I awoke exhausted and tired, as if I had been running. Today was a training day, and I had to be sharp. I left the amulet under my pillow, drank two cups of coffee, and dashed off to help 12 adults learn how to write.

I arrived home, exhausted from lack of sleep and the effort of training. A short nap was interrupted by the feeling someone was next to the bed. No one was.

That night, and for the next three nights, the dream repeated itself. I was being chased through a house I had never lived in. I could describe the house in detail, but did not recognize it. An older model car pulled up, headlights shining through a low hedge. The chase would begin. A small, dark-haired child darted under furniture. I had been blond as a child.

On day four, I pulled the amulet from under the pillow, wondering why the dream that created the amulet and the dream she carried were so different. The creation dream had been peaceful and mysterious. These dreams were harsh and cruel.

At breakfast, a chilling idea hit me. I left my cereal uneaten on the newspaper and raced to the computer. Opening a blank email, I typed, “Maggie, when you were young, did you live in a house with a full front porch? Did the porch have a lattice that led to a crawlspace? Did you have a brown plaid couch? Did you ever have to run from someone?”

Two hours later I had my response. “You are dreaming my life when I was 8,” Maggie wrote. “I was thinking about it when I did the carving.”

Once Maggie told me her life, I waited for a full moon, wrote down Maggie’s story, dug a hole and put the story of the dream in it. The amulet lay on top, protecting the story as it returned to the earth. I never had the chase dream again.

–Inkspirit