I reach in and grab it gently, the tiny creature barely fidgeting, fluffing its fur and immediately cozying up to the warmth of my cupped hands.

“Where are your brothers and sisters?” I ask as I begin walking.

“They were taken by the big bird. Biiig, scaaary biiird… Oooh…” He trembles, no doubt reliving the abduction in his mind. Cute and helpless become dismal adjectives.

“How come it didn’t take you?”

“Because I’m different. Because I’m special.” He sounds quite sure of himself.  “See how tame I am? If you look into my eye, you will see in it the ineffable Seal of God.”

Worth a look. I raise him up to my face and amplify the image of his eye. The effect is that of riding a meteor as it approaches the atmosphere of an alien planet, the round of the cornea glistening in the light of space and flattening as I come closer and closer upon the brown wrinkles of the iris. The iris expands to form a mountain range surrounding a circular lake, Lake Black Pupil, resting beneath the beautiful bluish transparency of an airy surface marred only by… What? A little cloud…?

The seal is an oblong, translucent, iridescent shape floating on the cornea and surrounded by progressively fainter concentric rings. A gentle tilt reveals all the colors of the rainbow dancing within it; a subtle, exquisite, ever-morphing composition.

“I see it! It’s there!”

“I told you.” He asserts.

“So… What do I do with it?”

“Oh, nothing. You can’t do anything with the Seal of God. You can only look at it. And it’s everywhere. As a matter of fact, I used to have it on one of my buttocks.”

He pauses, becomes absorbed. Conjuring up the memory of a different body sets off a process of awakening, the little animal vessel stiffening up as he slowly begins to understand his new condition.

“How long has it been since my life?”

A breathless question.

It’s then that I recognize the voice. Of course. I’ve come across this spirit before. I have access to his records, and begin going through them in the back offices of my mind. The images in his file are of a white man in his late thirties or maybe early forties; a pleasant face with longish, straight brown hair. The last picture shows him looking quite tired in his blue hospital gown.

“Seven years.” I whisper it to him, no need to shock him any further.

He’s frozen in my hands, trying to come to terms with what he cannot understand.

“Oh, David…”

We have reached the farm house, and I set him down in the cage where I will keep him until he can take care of himself. I know that as soon as I utter the next phrase he will lose his memory and capacity for speech, but I utter it nonetheless. I have to. It’s my job.

“You are a rabbit now.”

:: :: ::

Dream Journal, July 9, 2010

“Why do you always look at me like I’m not real?”

Rather than answering I look out the restaurant window at the people pushing bales of hay up and down the street. The air between us has frozen solid, plastic toys and an old shoe are suspended in it. He says something else but I can’t hear it over the thunder of the waterfall at my back. I look down the sheer cliff, an immense drop to a pool of dark water furiously beating itself into a foam. My chair is at the very edge of the rock and the rock is wet, but I will not fall. I’m safe. Overspray moistens my face. I like it. Maybe I’m thirsty. I look at him again. Now he wears a silken hood over his head and is eating soup through it. How clever, I think. He lifts the spoon to his lips, the hot liquid goes through the fabric and into his mouth, cooling down in the process. He takes the hood off. His head is now a giant cigarette.

They call the door “The Egyptian Eye,” though it is not really a door nor does it look like an eye. A natural split in the rock wall, which the monks put an iron gate on long ago, hides in shrubbery by the side of the road. If you know about it, you come to it, shake the gate, and wait for the wordless monk. If he comes, reading you from the inscrutable darkness of his cloak, he may or may not let you in. Once in the garden you may get lost, as there are often fields of wheat taller than a man, and negotiating the narrow pathways threaded through them requires labyrinthine skills. From the esplanade beyond you can see the Capital, something of a medieval ziggurat, a massive rock complex  sitting squarely upon the Earth and boldly reaching skyward. The stairs are tricky, they look like one could fly up them, but they’re yet another laborious maze weaving in and out of the ornate facades. Up on the rooftop, you grab a chair and wait for things to be set up.

Five men dressed in red take aim at the bullseye painted on the man’s bare chest. He is strapped to a chair and they’ve put a bag on his head. “Fire!” The rifles bark in unison, a dull, muffled cough. The man’s chest bursts like papier-mâché, a cloud of fiber shreds swirling about him. He trembles briefly, starts falling sideways. The restraints hold him. Dead now, the men immediately begin disassembling the display. One of the reporters is sick. “He moved. I saw it. I didn’t want that.” So they’ve killed two men, the one in the chair, and the one who will now live with the memory of a sloppy execution.

:: :: ::

Reading the news before bedtime will do some strange things to your dreams.
I don’t think there is an absolute answer to the question of capital punishment, but I do believe that on a case-by-case basis there should be no room for ambiguity.

~A

:: :: ::

Striding confidently beside me was a longtime friend. He was a delight to be with as always; cultured, intelligent and congenial, a dashing presence not of our time. His fine, formal attire (pin-striped trousers, tail coat, top hat, immaculate white gloves) was as naturally becoming to his graceful, athletic frame as was his handsome face.¹ We were talking about our plans for the rest of summer when I stopped, in utter disbelief, before the house on our left.

“This is impossible… I lived in this house when I was a child!” The shock had turned my voice into a whisper.

Before us was an abandoned adobe building, a single-story row of doors and windows spanning half a block before turning the corner. The very first unit—one door, one window—had been my home, a place my mother rented for about a year when I was little. It was still the only part of the building painted a sickly pink, the color an incongruous touch on a facade of an otherwise uniform, dirty white.

I walked up to the door and pushed it. It was unlocked, yielding open without effort or sound. I stepped inside, surprised by how small the space seemed now. The two rooms, connected by a doorway, were empty. It was evident from the dust and debris collected on the floor that no one had been here for many, many years. The door to the back patio was missing, and through that opening I could see what was once an outdoor kitchen, the adobe forms long eroded by rain and neglect into shapes barely recognizable as a wood stove and bread oven.

My 18^th century companion leaned on the doorway, observing me gravely. He had taken his hat off and was slowly turning it in his gloved hands, strands of wavy blond hair now framing his face. He looked uneasy. I was too. It felt as if we were carrying out a desecration the moment I opened that door.

“These rooms are still haunted by that memory” He said.

I nodded. They were. The setting was home to my earliest memories of terror: my mother fell seriously ill for the first time while we lived here. I was six years old, and the place was said to be haunted then. It certainly was now. There was a strong, nauseating energy latent in it. The atmosphere felt dense, laden with something old and ill, something of death, an enduring, sad and immovable presence indifferent to our trespass but powerful as a curse. I feared this unctuous malaise would permeate my clothes, my skin, my body… that it would cling to me like an invisible madness and pollute the rest of my life. We had to leave.

Then, as if they had suddenly materialized, I saw the paintings.

Three framed oils on canvas, painted in the French realist style, hung on the walls of the first room. I had no conscious recollection of them until now. It all came flooding in, faster than I could process. The paintings had been there when we moved in, and were obviously far older than my memory of them. Whoever hung them placed one by the entry, one on the wall that separated the two rooms, and one by the door leading to the backyard. We never touched them, and evidently, no one else had.

“I can’t believe this… hanging, unseen, for decades…” I spoke quietly, absorbed. I turned to him. He held my gaze. We both knew, in that moment, that I would be taking the paintings with me.

The pigments had faded a great deal, but overall the images were well preserved. The frames were nailed directly to the stucco. A strange way of hanging paintings, I thought, as if the intent had been to crucify them.²

I carefully began to pull the first one from the wall. It was a bust portrait decorated with an oval mat. The sitter was a pale woman in a white blouse, her red hair pulled up about her head. Her gentle expression barely managed to balance the otherwise somber tone of the painting. She must have been in her late twenties when the portrait was made. Who was she? I wondered. The frame felt flexible, soft almost. The nails gave up easily, shedding bits of rust as they came out. I leaned it against the wall.

The next work was a small view of an old city, a patchwork of roofs, walls and cobblestone pathways. The town looked deserted. The picture seemed to have been painted from life, and the composition was strict: were it not for its painterly atmospheric depth and the rich detailing of its surfaces, it would have come close to geometric abstraction. It came off the wall easily as well.

The largest of the three paintings—and oddly for my taste, the one that fascinated me most—was a countryside view painted in thick impasto. Its execution set it apart from the other two: a hint of expressionism had made its way into the brushwork, with paint volumes accentuating forms and adding a contained dynamism to the stillness. In it, the dark brown planks of a wooden fence contrasted with the faded olive green of a grassy field behind, leading to a dark tree line beyond. Part of the horizon was visible, and in it, the faintest suggestion of a town under cloud cover seemed to tremble with the murmur of distant events. The frame was broken in places, I feared it would fall apart in my hands, but it held together as I pulled it from the wall.³

In the awe of the discovery, numbed by the unsettling atmosphere of the space, and fighting off the rising pain of memories unvisited for ages, I sought to understand the origin of these images; I felt it was my duty to do so before taking them—I felt the trespass warranted it. Someone before me had understood and kept them together. It was my turn to do the same.

What did these pictures have in common? They were obviously contemporaries and related to each other: depictions of a town, its countryside, and perhaps one of its residents. Although varying in approach, the brushwork and color palette suggested the same hand. Who painted them? When? Where? No signatures. No dates. Beautiful paintings marred by a lugubrious heaviness, the silence of loss.

Loss… The realization swept my mind like a tidal wave: The paintings were made after the plague. The portrait of the woman was posthumous.

Narratives began weaving in my head. I could only imagine the countless stories of pain and horror behind these images. They made sense. Perfect sense. I couldn’t bear to think about it any longer, not there, not in that place that was now more than ever a tomb in my mind. I stacked the paintings on each other and put them all under my arm.

“The plague…” He said as I turned to him. “I think so.” I whispered back.

On the walls, white rectangles of emptiness punctuated by stigmata screamed of undead nightmares.

“Let’s go.”

It felt good to get back on the street, out the ill atmosphere of the abandoned house. We walked briskly, our steps in sync. Interrupted by the archaeological find, our carefree dynamic could not be resumed. Its place had been usurped by the silence of complicity and a nameless, insistent concern. I couldn’t wait to get to my car, to put the paintings in the trunk, to shut them in the dark. I feared them. I feared that it was they who created the horror I felt back in those rooms, rather than being mere witnesses to it. They were alive with that sick energy and I had begun to realize it was a force that could not be contained or escaped from. I didn’t know what I would do with them.

I wanted to thank him for being my accomplice in the theft, but then I thought: Is this really a theft? I wondered if anyone had seen us. I wondered, strangely, if there were cameras monitoring the area, if the removal of the paintings had been recorded from a distance. Stranger still, I wondered if my handsome friend would even show up in such a recording.

We walked on, past the gates, into the city.

:: :: ::

1. I often wonder who these characters are who visit me in my dreams. The man in this sequence was not dressed in costume; those were his usual clothes. He made me think of the high society of early America. In the dream’s internal logic, I remembered him; we talked as if we had known each another well for a very long time. Perhaps he has been a recurring character for a while and my memory of him is crossing into daylight for the first time. Who knows? I do not recall a name.

2. Hanging is also an execution. Like the limp body of a dead criminal hanging at the square, paintings on display are captures and examples at once.

3. The first thing I did after documenting this dream was to call my sister in Mexico. I asked her if she remembered that house, if there had been paintings in it. She remembers the place but can’t say whether there were any paintings. She was four years old when we lived there, her memory of the place is much dimmer than mine. She does, however, remember the stories about the haunting.

What is haunting to my mind is how vividly I remember the pictures. They have the distinct quality of an unearthed memory; it’s hard for me to think of them as an elaborate invention of the subconscious. I could reproduce them easily. Fear of awakening something I may not be ready—or able—to deal with, and perhaps remaining figments of superstition in my otherwise empirical mind, prevent me from even trying.

It was at that house that I created a painting for the first time. I received a set of watercolors as a birthday present from my mother when I turned seven. It would make sense, if these paintings existed, that I would have been inspired by them somehow.

The building was demolished many years ago. My mother, the only person that would have been able to instantly demystify this dream, has not been with us for a long time.

Thank you for reading.

~A.V.

Senator Martin went in looking good. Her navy suit breathed power. She had put some starch on Gossage too.

Dr. Lecter sat alone in the middle of the room, in a stout oak armchair bolted to the floor. A blanket covered his straitjacket and leg restraints and concealed the fact that he was chained to the chair. But he still wore the hockey mask the kept him from biting.

Why? the Senator wondered. The idea had been to permit Dr. Lecter some dignity in an office setting. Senator Martin gave Chilton a look and turned to Gossage for papers.

Chilton went behind Dr. Lecter and, with a glance at the camera, undid the straps and removed the mask with a flourish.

“Senator Martin, meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

Seeing what Dr. Chilton had done for showmanship frightened Senator Martin as much as anything that had happened since her daughter disappeared. Any confidence she might have had in Chilton’s judgment was replaced with the cold fear that he was a fool.

She’d have to wing it.

A lock of Dr. Lecter’s hair fell between his maroon eyes. He was as pale as the mask. Senator Martin and Hannibal Lecter considered each other: one extremely bright, the other not measurable by any means known to man.

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris, 1988

:: :: ::

Who hasn’t had a fool in their lives? In their desperate search for validation, these characters will command all they can, which on occasion will include our presence. But never mind the fool: in and of himself he is inconsequential. Sure they meddle and complicate things, and make no mistake, they can be destructive, but chaos is order ineffable: in facilitating encounters of all sorts they act as the catalyst for change. Much can be gained from being drawn from time to time to places where rules—particularly ours—are being broken. There, a great experiment is carried out both on our behalf and in spite of our efforts to stop it. The mistake most often made when wandering into a fool’s reach is attempting to draw conclusions from the experience before it’s time.

As for the fool himself, not much can be said other than everyone’s fares to the chaos are charged on his account. In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris does us a sinister, yet amusing service, delivered perhaps more satisfyingly by the film than the novel. Chilton’s ultimate fate is our guilt and pleasure, leaning to the latter as it hints at a tantalizing possibility: a particular life form may experience a great deal of injustice during its existence, but the universe, in the end, balances itself out quite nicely.

With that thought, I leave you. I’m having an old friend for dinner…

Ta,
Angel Villanueva

:: :: ::

:: :: ::

::

Undead
You surface once again
But I have known you

You call your works the Children of the Spring
Children drowned
At the bottom of a well

Walk on
Spare me the vacuous inquiry of your stare
The treachery of your touch
The mimicry concealing rigor mortis
Of your signature approach

Spare me the tentacles of your deception
Spare me the righteousness of your reproach
The slithering dance of your tongue
Weaving a dazzling patchwork out of lies

Spare me the tedious record of your anguish
None for the better
The bait and switch
The concealed clockwork diligently ticking
Beneath the outward good of your intention

Spare me the horror
The murder of what’s good in those around you
You are a death heavier than any other
An end before the end

Cartography
The only cross I can lift up against you
The charting of a path which won’t cross yours
Is held up high

I know the blood of pain you cannot do with
Your talent is but one
To live from agony
Now let
The agony you live from
Be your own

Spare me the silent aggravation
Of witnessing your plunge

Back I say, back!

::

No longer hiding in forests, swamplands, or caves, today these creatures live in our midst, roaming the land in search for the child in us. In them lives on a predatory hunger, an urge that saw its dawn in a time long before ours. The one incantation holding sway against their lurid powers is distance.

Stay away from them, children, stay away…

~A.V.

2. I am sometimes afraid of the places where my mind goes—self destruction lurks in the shadows. I’ve put measures in place to keep that in check but the knots slip at times. I fear madness may be in my future.

3. Ominous as that sounds, the mind ventures in the opposite direction just as frequently. I have moments of intense illumination that leave me absolutely breathless, to the point that it is difficult to reconnect with my immediate surroundings at will. I hope and pray something like that doesn’t catch me while driving a bus full of people.

4. Life as a flatline is not something I’m interested in. That doesn’t mean I’m committed to going out on a limb to provide myself with thrills at the expense of others (though I’ve been guilty of it, and I regret that, I truly do). What it means is that I strive to experience as much of the spectrum of human existence as my time and capacity will allow.

5. Yet I wish I never had to sleep, eat, talk, have sex… I wish I could exist as a disembodied mind with the ability to see and transform matter, so I could focus on what I’m here for.

6. I have an undying love for the beauty of the desert.

7. I wish I had discovered Ayn Rand as a teenager…

8. …because I understand reality as something that exists independently from the mind. Moreover, I think ultimate truth (the structure of things) is a multi-level, multi-dimensional affair, its reach spanning far beyond our perceptual and cognitive bandwidths. Short of the Einsteins of our kind—whom are/were limited in their own way—most of us can at most aspire to deal with aspects, dimensions, fragments of the whole, which is a recipe for eternal confusion, conflict, and suffering.

9. I am happiest when I’m thinking, alone, and figure something out.

10. I have more art projects in my sketchbooks and notes than I could possibly accomplish in a lifetime.

11. I am well aware of the fact that some (sometimes relevant) people find me troublesome and contradictory, as if undefined or not-quite present. I simply have no reliable way of sharing my internal structure, and fear that even if I could they wouldn’t understand.

12. My particular brand of wicked humor has connected me (personally) with more people than anything else about me.

13. I’ve explored self-perception issues by obsessively photographing myself nude in all sorts of settings… I’ve gotten some interesting results out of that but have yet to decide what to do with the images.

14. Because I think images, in that sense, are ultimately a cop-out.

15. I’ve internally declared war on various causes, systems, and people over time, but get bored halfway through the effort and never carry it out.

16. I think of knowledge as something to be consumed.

17. My hatred for television peaks anytime I’m exposed to Latin American telegarbage.

18. I find it easiest to be friends with people I admire in some way.

19. I find it easiest to love people who share their processes of self-discovery and self-creation with me.

20. My life unfolds in 11-year cycles. I took possession of myself at 11. It was like waking up. That’s how I divide my life now: pre-11, post-11. 22 was quite the year as well. I think I know exactly what will happen at 33.

21. When I was 12 years old, my mother fell ill and could no longer take care of us. This is how I learned to cook, iron my clothes, etc. Today I can iron a dress shirt in 90 seconds (I’ve timed myself!).

22. I used to create land art as a child, using rocks, twigs, and earth. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, or that anyone would care to see it. I just wanted to put my signature in the land, to bring an element of creative order to it in some way.

23. I grew up in rural Mexico, in the Baja California desert. We lived for years without electricity or running water. My grandmother had a water pump in the patio. Shoes were something we would only wear to school. In the summer I worked picking cotton or harvesting grapes in the fields, along with other kids from my school; I remember it was grueling work under a merciless sun, but also a great deal of fun. People bartered food and services all the time. We used to get citrus fruit, cucumbers and fresh milk from nearby farms. We always grew our own chickens and often harvested wild plants to eat. Life was a day-to-day survival process that required a direct connection with the land and the people around us. For all this, I am grateful. I cannot imagine what sort of dull creature I would have become had I grown in the urban conditions that are known to me today. I cannot imagine life as a child without that great open sky, nights ablaze with stars, the riverbank, and the creatures whose secret lives I came to know. To me, civilization was a set of human dwellings that could be traversed from end to end by foot in minutes… then there were the fields, and beyond, the vast expanse and mystery of the desert. I lived in an ideal world and was immensely happy.

24. This is not a ‘woe is me’ note, I’m actually quite content today.

25. And, as Frida Kahlo once said: “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope never to return.”

The term urban grit, like most labels, functions as a kind of cognitive shorthand, a free admission pass to the claim of understanding what it describes. It has a faint ring of the inevitable, but it mostly conveys the notion of an evil that can be avoided through a careful routing of our experiences, should we be so fortunate.

The city resists this idea. From the loose debris unevenly coating the streets—a debris that includes human lives—to the steel and glass cages poised like great vessels in the sky, the city unfolds as a continuum, a tapestry with no clear edges. Urban grit as a realm is the result of a process, and it becomes integral to the world that cradles it. There will always be something occupying that space, and that something will always escape the boundaries of notion.

Like an interplanetary spacecraft, cutting across orbits, I traverse the city periodically and gather more data with each pass. Returning from each harvest, in the late hours of the night, I compare the readings in my memory with those captured by the lens. Rather than matching, they complement each other. A different picture emerges each time. It is like observing from the inside the ceaseless inner workings of a giant, undying organism, sprawled over the land. The city is far more than a structure: it is a living process… Its nature reveals the basic traits of the creatures that give rise to it and sustain it, and which it in turn sustains and consumes. The city is nature, in a different guise.

:: :: ::

I also find it useful to think of the city as a weather system. Here, currents meet and coalesce, sometimes becoming storms, sometimes merely dissipating in the night’s breeze. At any moment, a tenuous string may suggest itself between two entities, threading its way through the links between others.

:: :: ::

He’s following me, I think. Three blocks, four galleries, perusing some of the same artworks. Our eyes meet a few times. His are blue, intense or just cold I can’t say… No smile. Faces and voices around us become transparency and silence.

Strange alchemy.

I start to envision possible outcomes; including, why not, my lifeless remains in a body bag.

I recall a similar scenario, a lifetime ago it seems… It began in the desert , under a merciless sun, amidst a dense ocean of people. I think of that story and all that it meant.

I walk on.

:: :: ::

Me siento aquí, a la orilla de este lago
Arde en mis pupilas un lamento
En rachas de injusticia me deshago
Extracto de dolor es el momento
Que no hay más que este eterno desconsuelo
Que no hay más que memorias de una risa
Y sombras que se arrastran por el suelo
Presagios del gran buitre que aterriza
Que sobre mi cadáver se aposenta
Que sobre mi silencio se derrama
Que a través del hilván de otra violenta
Mercenaria inquietud me desinflama
Mis ímpetus se lleva para siempre
Hacia la noche eterna que me aguarda
Cuando cante emplumada la serpiente
Cuando en vano fulgor el hielo arda
Cuando en el horizonte se halle un hueco
Cuando no quede más que otra emboscada
Punto final donde se extingue el eco
Martirio errático de la jornada

Allá esperaré como si nada
A que me alcance rapaz pero sin prisa
Vejez o enfermedad inesperada
Eventualidad que me desprenda
De este fugaz regalo que he bebido
Que he tocado, masticado y escupido
Libertad en que me hallo sumergido
Existencia del todo planetaria
Del todo efímera, del todo agraria
Burlesca incomprensible e insensible
Merodeante y retórica, insensata
De todo y de nada predecible
Alegórica y bruja enajenada
Aquella lágrima tornasolada
Que en la faz de una verde hoja se posa
Y que al evaporarse me destroza
Me desgrana y se lleva mi alborada
Mis esperanzas en la madrugada
En el momento en que el cielo se hace negro
Segundo en que el olvido me suplanta
Sobre el desierto el polvo se levanta
Y la rugosa opacidad del viento
Sin cantar, ni mentir, me vuelve nada

~A.V.

I emerge into a night in the remote past.

Something smoky and acrid about the place, as if everything had been replicated correctly except the smell: the scent makes me think of an industrial plant. I expected antiquity to smell like an ancient scroll pulled from a cave by the Dead Sea.

I am not part of the tableau. Perhaps I am merely a set of eyes in a fresco on the wall.

It is a bar, a meeting place for men. It is very dark in spite of the torches, as if the light had to fight its way through liquid. Tall wooden stools and tables, stone floors and pillars. The space is long and narrow and mostly empty. There are maybe a dozen patrons, all of them young Olympian athletes. Their bodies are muscular and graceful, bare under short sleeveless robes, feet clad in sandals. They lounge about the space, their youth and the outlaw nature of the place evident in their air of nervous uncertainty. They do not speak. They are not here for each other.

When he walks in, the space becomes charged with tension, a silent mix of terror and fascination running through the young men. He moves with the destructive self-confidence of a volcano, all thunder and internal fire, his stride the summation of masculine arrogance. With casual calculation, he takes the center spot.

He is far more massive than them, all biceps, pectoral muscles, and giant thighs. His legs are dark, and they are lost into the dark below. The head is monstrous: a bull head made of shadow, his face is shadow, and like shadow it reflects nothing back. Around the pinpoints of light in his eyes the silhouette of it is a vacuum of darkness, more a portal to oblivion than the head of a bull. The set of curved horns at his crest end in sharp tips, their glossy surface increasingly coarser as it approaches the thick root, a handlebar of death, so strong and solid it could probably break through the very rock walls that enclose us in the night.

The Minotaur is here to pick up dinner.

He could have all of them right here, but he prefers to play with his prey. Both hunter and bait, he waits for them to approach him: he knows their fascination will eventually outweigh their fear. And they are all visibly mystified, although caution keeps them at a distance. “Not for long,” seems to be his thought, as his head turns from one meaningless detail of the place to the next. It is fascinating to watch that massive bovine head move so gracefully, so unified, so effortlessly supported by that great dark neck protruding from human shoulders.

To any of the young men, approaching the beast would mean certain death, but his magnetic allure makes them want to believe otherwise. Soon, one of them will give in, come close enough, and be swept off into the night, never to return.

But not tonight.

The newcomer walks in with a difference kind of confidence: the confidence of purpose. He is oddly dressed for the setting: he wears dark pants and a sort of vest made of black leather straps, a garment clearly meant to hold weapons. He is very pale, his head is clean shaven and there is a stern look on what would otherwise be a handsome face. He is also muscular, more than the young men, but not as large as the beast. His arms are covered in symbols, the shapes outlined with remarkable precision against the white skin. There is a contained energy to his movements that reveals training.

He stops a few feet from the beast. The Minotaur turns to face him, and freezes… it is impossible to know what thoughts are forming in the deep, dark nebula behind the pinpoints of light.

When the man speaks, the anger in his voice is the first sound to pierce the silence of the night:

“I knew I’d find you here, you goddamn floozy! Get in the car!”

:: :: ::

The children had been missing for four years. One day they showed up at their parent’s front door, as if nothing had happened.

They will not speak at all.

As we enter the experimental facility I am puzzled by the presence of multiple polyglass walls defining an enclosure that extends beyond my field of vision.

I am part of a team, three other people walk in with me: a doctor, a psychologist, and a reporter. I am the artist. We will each evaluate the children, then our reporter will compile our findings and submit them to the powers that be.

We turn a corner and the kids’ enclosure comes into full view: the girl is about twelve years old, the boy eight or nine. Their glass prison is filled with toys and comfortable furniture, just like a normal living room, here awash in clinical light. There are cameras and massive banks of electronic equipment beyond the transparent walls.

I wonder what the reason is for keeping the children in a bulletproof cage.

The boy sits on the carpeted floor. His eyes are fixed on me. As I am cleared to enter the glass enclosure I recognize him.

Years back, before his disappearance, we played with crayons and paper at someone’s house, at some sort of gathering, perhaps a birthday party. We doodled and colored farmhouses, mountains, trees, cattle, flowers, birds… I remember he was perfectly articulate and extremely bright.

He stands up and goes to a corner, where he keeps a box and a big sketchpad. He takes them and walks back, sits where he was before, and looks at me again. It’s almost a command. I walk over and sit next to him. He opens the box: it is full of crayons. He then finds a blank page in the sketchpad. He does not invite me to draw with him. Instead, he picks a crayon without even looking to see what color it is, and gives me a look that can only mean: Are you paying attention?

I realize with a chill that he is about to tell me, in drawings, what happened to them during those four years.

::

That’s it. That’s when I woke up. My subconscious mind often weaves these mysteries and then catapults me back to daylight without an answer. It somehow feels perversely planned… I tried falling back asleep, concentrating as much as I could on the last image in the dream, but of course that would not happen. Nothing left to do but write the vision down before it faded into nothingness.

~A

:: :: ::