A Strange Land

Perfumed in moonlight and rain she approached.  “Come, waltz with me” she whispered and her breath trailed like warm silk across my skin.   The invitation beckoned, tantalizingly at the tips of her fingers as she extended her hand to me.  It was not a waltz she offered.  It was a chance to dream with her, a choice to be ensnared. 

Smelling of autumn and spring time she breathed, “Come, waltz with me”, luring me into her world of mystery and delight.   She shed dreams, like a tree shedding leaves.  The older ones lay scattered around her, dry and brittle with the musty scent of disuse while the new clung, fresh and pliant, scented with possibility.

I watched as she spun slowly, her long skirts sweeping the dreams as they drifted around her.  Trailing her finger down my forearm, disturbing the fine hairs there, “Come” she sighed.  Dreams, fears, memories glinted in her eyes, but I watched as she slipped into the mist alone.

He sat by the side of the school, waiting.  He and the clusters of other students that milled around, some raucous, some aimless, some like him carefully timing their entry into the line of students waiting for a parent to pick them up.  He had learned to time the line.  Sometimes it worked.  Sometimes he failed miserably.  Even when he was very young, he had known which parents he liked, and which he did not.  By the time he was ten, he had begun to try to get picked up by the parents he preferred.  Now, he had been watching the patterns for years.  He could feel the flow of them.  He had his favorite parents.  He knew if he timed it right, he could spot the car of a parent he liked as it rounded the turn coming up to the school.  He had to keep track of the cars as they appeared and disappeared approaching the school.  Keep track of the place in line of the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t, and then match those places with the line of students.  It was a more difficult puzzle than anything school ever presented.  On a good day he would go home with a parent he liked.  Some days it didn’t work.  Some days he ended up being picked up by some one he didn’t like, or worse, by someone who hated him.  If you timed it wrong, when you got to the front of the line, you still had to get into the car that was there.  But, he had been around a long time.  The bad days were rare.  He had learned the parents’ patterns and he played them.  Sometimes he worked the line sending his friends home with the good parents.  It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.  It was supposed to be random.  Each parent taking home whichever child was first in line at the time they arrived.  After all, it takes a village to raise a child.