L E N A
the love of heaven makes one heavenly

She dreamed of many things. Vibrant, dancing hues, beams of light that waltzed and sprinted beyond the stars to realms of aspirations that she could never touch herself, stalwart chambers that invoked the warmest reveries. Incandescent, luminescent whims of staunch cavalcades, festivals of merriment that sparkled and chimed with the wind and the rain, petals that opened amidst the tender embrace of the sun and the glory of the moon. Haunting, melancholy shades of darker days, where worlds crumbled beneath the masses of bliss and humanity, forgotten and discarded, awakened to the anarchies and lawlessness of terror and iniquities. Like moss, stuck to the floors of forests in a plague of soft exposure, betraying ebullience and exuberance for the taste, the touch, of barbarity, for savagery, when she’d given in to the hark of animosity and war. So too did the visions and fantasies conspire evenings of yesteryear, with their flickering ides of canopies drawn to hide a child of behemoths and monsters, to shelter from the raging turbulence of belligerence and hostility. Pictures of brethren, past and present flickered against her closed eyes, dipping over into slides of the known and cherished, some gone but not forgotten, some disappeared into the mist, some just over the glades and auroras. Then, there was the strange, fixating glimmer of another, wavering tails that twisted and turned, that distorted and consumed, deceitful, guileful, specious, gleaming tides of an unfamiliar creature. She thought for a moment to reach for the spectacle, to cave into the bubbling laughter, the mirth that it invoked, the quick, swift merriment of mischief that it invoked into the stupor of her hallucinations. But what was real, and what was not? The churning balm, calm, of honeyed, dewy whims, the dark, tainted parlors of her corruptions and heritage, the companions of here and now, or the startling, wily, artful clamor of the exotic vulpine.

Lena opened her eyes, allowed the lashes to curl upwards towards the colored horizon, downwards again to float against her cheeks, until they finally awakened in the slate of dawn and day. Her cordial stare searched the plains for the edges of fantasy that clung to her gaze, for the foreign essence of laughter that did not belong to her, but bobbed and weaved along the trees and mountains. Had she been tricked, toyed with, manipulated and immersed into the wiles of another’s caprices? Her brow arched and her head swung, pinpointing towards the heavens and back towards the forest floor, when they caught the idling fox kit standing at her hooves, crackling with all the duplicity it had bestowed and inspired in her listless trance. Calmly, gently, she lowered her noble head towards the babe, nestled her soul into the regal geniality, benevolence, of her beloved grace, maw resting inches away from its furry complexion. She whispered to the child, low and soft, dulcet and smooth, satin and silk rummaging from her vocals, an inspiring murmur charmed by the ambiguous presence of this crafty, calculating creature. “You are real.” She paused, breathed in the runes of the day, and continued onward in this ambivalent puzzle and labyrinth of truth and lies. “What do you want of me?”