The Feast of Numbered Days

Halloween's pumpkins had become Thanksgiving's pie with the linear procession of lichen years swelling between the masonry of time and resolving itself in the Feast of Numbered days; for despite the warmth of sunrise, the guleing tombstone remained ice cold to the touch. A singular chut of smiley-spade in the ground grave evidenced nothing other than brief thieves had begun to dig and wisely changed their minds. Perhaps an occasional someone or something had frightened them away?

"That's it! Pack up! We're leaving!"

Wobble-clown-wheels go, squeak-squeak-squeak. 

* * *

At the Art Institute in August, Anna had stood with Chance before a two hundred year old mirror in the Colonial furniture gallery. Being a younger woman, she was impressed with antiquity. Bending forward to read the description, she gathered her long, aurburn hair to one side and tucked it over her shoulder. Much to his delight, she made a clever observation.

"Apart from the craftsman and generations of owners, think about all of the visitors that have passed through this hall and gazed into this very looking glass, including now ourselves."

Imagine further he did. "Mirrors are portals to the past."

Though the sign said, 'do not,' she reached forward and tickled the frame. "What if we went inside?"

"How would we survive in such a strange place so long ago?" he wondered.

Confident as always, she comforted him. "The fortune teller would give us the proper clothing and instruct us how to live."

Latter that dry and sticky evening, in a failed effort of creative progeny, their bodies polished away at clarity in order to arrive at the conciseness of Dream.

* * *

At this late November moment, it stormed in the cemetery, so Chance filled himself with raindrops and, as if he were something cuddly, endured being hugged, scored one hundred percent on the spelling and possessives quiz, pummeled bloody a formidable foe at recess to impress the herd, stealthily piloted a stratospheric prototype, fiddled over a bonefire of twenty years of matrimony, bound newspapers into stacks to mark the passage of years, mouthed agape at platitudes of preachers and politicians, apologized for peers hardened by their educations, remained astonished by the selfless joviality of prostitutes, winced skeptically at entourages and strove for consciousness.

"Sweet meat, moist meat, cranberry tart."

Have you heard as I, the moving ever closer across the dreamscape in the smallest hours of the night, the deadly, tiny harlequin in the lime truck with swirling peppermint wheels, nodding its head forth and back, grating and grinding its teeth? Erased from downwards upwards, the dreamer could not feel its feet. There were to be no recent photographs. The celebration having claimed both legs, the Feast propelled its torso thusly on the soiled psalms of hands.




©2018 by L.P. Van Ness. All rights reserved.


[ genre: weird fiction, the original text,
hand written notebooks of L.P. Van Ness ]