Schrodinger's Stories
  • Blog
  • Buy My Books
  • Free Fiction
  • Contact me
  • Copy writing samples

A Dream of Damascus

12/29/2008

0 Comments

 
I had a dream, in the early grey morning, that I was standing on a rocky hillside in the desert sun, with the smell of sage in my head. There was nowhere I had to go, and nothing I had to do, and I have always wanted to see Damascus, so I started walking north. In my dream, it was 30 miles, through stones and the wind-twisted trees that grow along the cliffs, past goats with their considering eyes and their secrets, and past the boys who watch them, who called out to me, laughing, asking for American cigarettes.

Finally, I stopped at the crest of a hill, in the ruins of a fort built before the Crusades, and sitting in the shade of its crumbled columns I looked across the valley into Damascus. It was a maze, a city of negotiations and promises and unspoken agreements, a Gordian knot of alleyways and market awnings, bright with airing carpets and bedding, crowded with stone-colored blocks of houses leaning shoulder to shoulder, the better to whisper. I watched the white towers of the minarets and the golden domes of their mosques flare in the noon sun and fade to the ghosts of themselves in the distance of twilight. I walked back to my hillside through the long silence of the desert at night, under an impossibly wide sky brilliant with stars. The silence soaked into my skin until I, too, was full of silence.

As I approached my hillside at last, I saw a small fire burning. The desert at night is cold, and the color of the fire after so much night and silence woke a longing I didn't know I had. I went to the fire, past a man who sat at the edge of its light, and reached to catch its warmth in my chilled fingers. I heard him walk toward me, felt him touch my hair. When I turned, he kissed me. He smelled like the smoke of the fire, he tasted like cardamom and honey, his arms around me closed out the high, wild loneliness of the night, and I wanted the kiss never to end.

And so I stepped back. "I am a woman who can walk to Damascus," I told him, "and I don't need love."
0 Comments

Endless Twilight

12/19/2008

0 Comments

 
The rain will get to you, they said. You'll find yourself beaten down by the grey days and the rain and you'll eventually move. But it isn't the rain, it's the perpetual twilight, the not-day that starts in the mid-afternoon and gets darker and darker until the sun finally lifts again sometime mid-morning the next day.

Of course, all through this past summer my surprise was renewed every day by how light it was, so late. The day seemed never-ending; I had to close the blinds just to cut the glare enough to read in the early evenings. I had no idea that this would be the price for that largess, that overabundance of sunlight. It was the same in Dublin, I remember, how late we could walk those unlit village roads at night in the beginning of fall, and how as Christmas closed in so did the night, until all I wanted to do was huddle in my blanket next to the electric heater with the red foil flickering to imitate fire, clutching a bottle of wine and trying to decide if whatever might be on BBC2 would be worth getting up and crossing the cold room for.

I have lived so many places since then, through many different kinds of winters: winters of sand, and snow, and equatorial monsoons. Winters of heartbreak, of children's delirium, and the winter my neighbor's chihuahua bit me while I was putting Christmas light in my yard (which actually counts as pretty damn funny, although it's left me with quite a prejudice against lap dogs).

This winter is hard. No matter how hard I work, nothing gets done and the bizarre centrifuge of daily life throws out more and more things that need to be done even as I fail to accomplish the things that were flung out before. I'm exhausted and overwhelmed, even as I recognize all of the things I have to be grateful for. I'm grateful enough already, dammit! What I really need is a few more hours of daylight. And possibly a chihuahua for comic relief.
0 Comments

    Torah Cottrill

    I read. I write. And sometimes I talk about it.

    Picture
    Contact Me




    Buy My Books
    (my stories appear in these)

    Picture
    The Awakened Modern
    Picture
    The Awakened II
    Picture
    Ares Magazine
    Picture
    (Issue #20 - free to read)
    Luna Station Quarterly
    Picture
    Stoneheart
    Picture
    (Issue #14 - free to read)
    4 Star Stories
    Picture
    Stupefying Stories
    Picture
    By Faerie Light
    Picture
    (Issue #25 - free to read)
    NewMyths.com
    Picture
    The Awakened
    Picture
    Dreams in Shadow
    Picture
    Stupefying Stories
    Picture
    Homespun Threads

    Archives

    August 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    December 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    May 2011
    November 2010
    November 2009
    March 2009
    December 2008
    May 2008
    December 2005

    RSS Feed

    The Far Side of the World:
    the blog of my Japanese adventures

    Read it Here
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.