He wants to laugh and Sereia may see a whisper of it along his lips. It encourages her own smile and it grows wider and more lovely yet and such a far cry from her too-wide smile in her waking hours.
There is nothing hungry in the way she watches him. There is no part of her that rises, monstrous, from within her - a crocodile launching out to catch its prey. She closes her eyes for a moment and relishes being just a girl beside just a boy - even if he is imaginary. Sereia is content, she is delighted with the conjurings of her mind. But dreams are always strange things, are they not? Even when they give you the happiest of moments, they always take something and make it strange. They twist reality in the most unexpected of ways.
That is when the boy begins to change. It is a curious and grotesque thing to behold. Sereia wants to look away but dreams never let you, do they? The girl stares as the boy’s body morphs. The dreamworld seems to tremble around him, the air fill with a scent, with a power that is like nothing she has seen. Sereia’s heart stutters in her chest, it feels alive and sorrowful at once. Her eyes grow wide, filled with the awe of this strange becoming. The smile upon her lips, lovely and vribrant as it was, is gone, twisted down into an apologetic frown.
She steps closer to him, to this changing piece of her dream, “Oh, no, no- I am sorry. I quite liked you as you were…” She watches as he continues to change and wonders how she can change her dream to make him return to how he was - oh to be able to transform him back. Yet her dreams are untameable things! They are like the sea-dragons she and her sisters tried to ride and to tame. They were too big and their self-appinted trainers so small they were but fleas upon a dog’s coat. The dream does not head its mistress and the boy continues his sad change.
“I am sorry, I cannot -” Sereia had begun to say, but all at once the boy has stopped his change. He is not a boy anymore but a great looking glass. It is not the forming of the glass that stops her, but the pictures it shows. A world stretches out beyond the glass, sand and stone laid upon each other until they form great, broken walls. Canyons stretch as far as the glass will let her sea. The world glows hot beneath the sun, oranges and golds blending beneath the sun. great towers, the last remnants of ancient stone cliffs are all that remain, pointing up to the sky like fingers heralding the gods.
But then the glass is sweeping her away upon the wings of a bird. She watches lands shift beneath her, canyon into desert, rolling dunes that shift as waves and then on into a sandstone city. Trains of caravans camp beyond its walls, camels and horses gather at its stone gates. Sereia presses in, closer, closer, drinking in sights she had only ever been able to imagine. Before her gaze lushious gardens, rich with greenery lay out like patchwork quitls and the palace is gilded by the sun who watches on, bathing all in light and warmth.
The mirror carries her away from the greenery and down into the slums where homes are made with walls of corrugated iron and roofs are cloth tied to sticks. Then on to places where houses are small stone squares with open windows and open doors and citizens mill in thick crowds upon the streets.
When did she stop breathing? When she first swooped between the two great canyon walls? Or when the saw the poverty at the city’s edge? Or maybe when she saw the throngs of people laughing on the streets? The stalls with wares so richly painted, - has she not seen the sea-worn ancestors of those pots before when she picked they up from the ocean bed? Then there is the boy, the boy she first met at the start of her dream. He emerges from a doorway, stepping toward the looking glass, through the glass which melts into his skin. Sereia staggers back, away from the disappearing glass she had pressed up to. Only the boy remains and all of her sacred cave seems so dark and dim and lifeless. Except this strange boy her mind has conjured (for still she does not think, nor even know to believe in boys who can walk into her dreams) he stands as plain and yet so wonderfully strange that she cannot take her eyes from him.
She stares, unmoving. The girl turns to stone in the heart of her dream, she hears its beating, but it sounds like the wings her flew her through Solterra on. It sounds nothing like her own dream should. “Dune.” Sereia repeats his name, letting it fill her lungs and tasting it upon her tongue. It rolls like the sand-waves she had just seen, it seems fitting for his name to be thus. “It suits you.” The girl says with a smile, delighted with her dream.
“Dune.” Sereia says again. This time she says his name boldly. This time she is a girl too hungry to ever let a dream’s conjuring be enough for her. “Solterra,” The sea-girl breathes with the reverence of a prayer. “You only make me want to go there more.” And Sereia is sighing, wantonly. Her eyes wander over his skin, as if it might turn clear again and another world would gleam within him. “I should like to dream of you again” She says, even as she steps forward and reaches out to touch him, wondering what his dream-skin is like - glass, or sand, or skin, just the soft hazy, nothingness of dream material?
@
~Anna Funder
