A dream of feathers
by Tichfield
for R and her mention of lacking romance
Labyrinth and all associated characters are the property of the Jim Henson Company, and not mine.
Chapter 1
No more my little song comes back;
And now of nights I lay
My head on down, to watch the black
And wait the unfailing gray.
-Dorothy Parker
The owl outside my window brings me words. Each day, a new one. Tuesday he fetched 'panoply'. Thursday was 'salacious'.
No one knows but me.
He'll come up to the glass and flutter - the ledge is much too narrow. He'll lock my eyes with his, those crystal moons, and in them I will see his simple message.
Simple, but so beautiful... the words he grants, they make me think of things. Of halls not painted white, of beds I make myself and worlds without the constant stream of nurses. Worlds where others see what I see.
I don't know how to tell him this. I do my best. I write new poems each night, but when I read them in the morning I am always disappointed. The gifts I'd made for him, the lines and verses, turn to scratches.
I can't understand them.
He comes to me before the morning rounds, when night has only just retreated from its battle with the dawn.
Should I sing to him? There's something musical about his movement. Rhythm in his wings, a tempo in the cocking of his head this way and that suggesting there's a song to find. If only I knew where to look.
I should, I really should... but I am frightened. If the nurses hear me, they may bar the window, or worse yet remove me to an inner ward.
There are many different types of white. Some are hostile, like the walls around me. Others, like in teeth, are friendly when not dangerous. There's white of snow, of childhood memories. A white of purity, the white of shrouds.
His white is that of open canvas. Of excitement. Promises, potential, a way to bring what one imagines to true life. That's what a painting is, isn't it? You take the pictures in your head and put them onto paper, and then if you're good enough the others will look at it and say 'oh, yes, very nice' and appreciate it and not never ever call it yet another fancy and insist you see the doctor...
I'm not that good a painter. I was always best at acting.
That, I hope, will bring me out of here. If I act as they wish me to, pretend to be of Them and Their world.
I could do it, too. I know I could.
But then, how would he find me?
I could leave a trail of peppercorns...
Too risky. I don't want to lose him.
I don't think he wants to lose me, either. His talons scratch against the window, flexing open then together, as if he wants to grab me. To hold me. To have me, as he has his mice.
What would he do, if it were open?
He brought me food.
A mouse.
I think it's food.
I found it on the ledge. He cooed all dawning from a branch beyond my vision.
He wanted me to find it.
It's a mouse. A dead one. Slashed across the gut.
I don't know what to do with it. I hold it by the tail, swinging it back and forth, back and... and...
It's mesmerizing.
Still, I'd rather have a word. And I'm not hungry.
I hope the nurses find the mouse, and scream and run away. Then maybe I can fetch Sir Didymus from where they've hidden him. He must be lonely, in that locker.
Every day the nurses tread the self-same pass. Their feet have traced their prints into the floor, though I don't think they notice this.
It's subtle; just a slight impression... but I've walked where tiny steps astray would lead you to eternal stench. I look for tiny things, for difference.
I leave the mouse upon their path.
I know he disapproves. The owl, I mean. He ruffles all his feathers, making himself out to twice his size, and hoots. He's angry.
I am not. And I look forward to the early day, when first the white-hats come on rounds.
The doctors asked me many things. About the nurse who slipped; whether I liked her.
I liked her well enough, I said. Did I like mice? they asked.
No, mice are much too soft and smell of attics, I replied.
They frowned at this. Do you catch mice? they asked.
I'm not a cat, I said.
You claimed to be one just the other month, they answered.
They've got me there.
The owl had brought me 'predatory', and that night I dreamed of cats. It was a vivid dream, in Egypt. I saw Ludo. He enjoyed himself. The pyramids were friends of his.
On waking, I could feel the fur I'd worn, the tail I'd curled around papyrus.
It was a natural mistake; I told the doctors this, and they agreed, but still they brought me more blue pills.
He brings a word. "Exasperated."
His eyes are rimmed with red, his poses not as confident as is their wont, and I can see within his feathers just the subtlest hint of age.
My gaze outstays his visit. I look into the dawning light and think of castles ringed by walls.
There's something I'm forgetting. Something that I should remember, though the doctors think it ill.
I'm tired, oh so tired.
For lunch, there's lemonade.
Another mouse. This one is tied with ribbon.
Where an owl finds a ribbon, I don't know - except it's white, and satin.
I take the ribbon for my hair and put the mouse into the toilet tank.
I wouldn't wear the ribbon right away, of course. I need excuses. So I wait until the mail, and I pretend that Toby sent a ribbon with his drawing.
The nurses think the drawing's of a church and congregation. So I tell them.
They are wrong.
The figures are not crouched; they're goblins - and the gothic architecture's really made of stairs that wander every way, and beautiful lost men who wander on them upside-down and wear a cape of feathers.
He knows, and he remembers.
Another dawn. The owl comes early, bearing something heavy in his claws.
He lays it on the tiny ledge and hovers, stable as he may, within my sight.
No waiting in the tree this time, no distant coaxing. He's impatient, and he's angry, and he wishes that I take his gift.
I understand this, though I lack the language of the birds.
He has outdone himself.
A china dish, a mouse without its skin, its muscle cooked to vibrant redness - and there's something in its mouth. I dare to open up the window, slightly, so that I may take a peek...
A slice of peach. The whole dish smells of it.
Delightful. Of a sudden, I am hungry.
The owl maneuvers, awkwardly, and tries to touch my nose. He fails. I quickly bring my head into the room and snatch the dish, then latch the window shut.
It wouldn't do to have him here.
I don't know why, but I am certain there is danger in his beauty.
He hoots, frustrated, and I'm scared the nurses will take notice.
Two mice, by chance, are savaged by a cat. That is explained.
A mouse that's skinned and cooked and dressed, presented filled with peaches on a fancy dish? This not.
I raise it to my lips and take a bite of tender flesh, surprising in its melting on my tongue... and in its taste.
Peaches, yes, but also soapy bubbles, and there's something extra, something bitter that I half-remember.
I leave the dish beneath my bed and furtively retract a snack until there's nothing left but bones and porcelain.
I hide these in my pillow.
That night, I sleep more deeply than I have in years... and oh, the dreams.
Everything is blue. I lift my fingers and I find them half transparent, glowing a cerulean hue I'd only seen before in sapphires.
I see my hair, out of the corner of an eye. A stray lock blows toward the window - there's no sense in that. Behind me is a door, beyond a hallway, all inside the institution. There is no chance of wind or breeze... yet there it is; I see it plain in darkness as in daylight.
I stand. The floor is cold. My patter echoes and I am afraid that I'll be heard.
Then I remember that I dream and I walk forward, unafraid.
The only other sound's a tapping at the window. Beak on glass. I have my guess as to the source,
A curtain shields the window. I try to push it back, but where I touch the cloth dissolves to cob-webs. Through the gap I see his eye.
It looks at me, unflinching.
I tear through the rest of the curtain, but no matter how quickly I work there's always more fabric, always more obstruction to my view of my...
...my?
Of him. Of his own self. His arrogant pose and way of making worlds from single words and what would a feather, just one of his feathers feel like on skin, on a cheek?
The curtain melts and falls about my feet in a tangle of fur and cotton candy.
He's there at the window. All of him. An owl and a man, behind a pane of glass. His wings are outstretched, and one of them holds up the moon.
His talons find a fragile purchase on the shallow ledge. Some trick of the eye, some combination of those claws and the scenery behind them, makes it look like he wears boots.
But what would an owl want with boots?
His chest is pressed against the window, flattened. Its feathers are of different colours. Their distortion, how they're pressed, somehow clarifies their message. Dark on light, a twisting, jagged script that spells a word: "rapture".
His beaks open and closes, but I hear no sound.
I made him. I remember that. I shaped him.
And I know I want to know this form, that I must know it.
I press my fingers to his wing, and fancy I can feel it through the glass.
There's rain, outside. I had not noticed. Lightning flashes; that is what reveals the patterns in the water - framing his round face, streaming and streaking into patterns suggestive of...
Another soundless cry. I press my ear against the pane and hope to catch his meaning.
What he shouts, I do not know, but through the glass I hear a whispered "Within".
I lift my head, remove my hand, and shake a prompt negation. This thing I cannot grant.
His wingbeats grow furious now. The window-frame shakes, and I fear it might buckle. What will the nurses think?
I move back toward the bed, but trip as my feet snag on the remains of the curtain.
As I sit on the ground he breaks through. A crystal crash, a yell triumphant and his beak is in the room. He's made a small hole in the window, and scattered shards across the floor.
He struggles, looking for purchase, for food, for something to bring him into the room from the world without... but he is wet, and we couldn't have that, could we?
That'd be ever so improper.
Still, it tugs at me, to see him hungry, see him reaching eagerly into the air, his tongue darting and searching for something to taste, for anything.
I have a lot of things. Most of them bitter, some of them not. There's soap, and pills, and biscuits.
I know, from inside, that none of these would fill him.
He brought the mice. He caught the mice. But did he eat the mice? There's still the one in the bathroom tank, unless it's since dissolved.
His motion grows more frantic. What for now is a small fracture may grow larger, and I know he'll bring the lightning. There are always sparks, where e'er he walks. Or is that sparkle? And does he ever walk, these days?
I lift myself from where I fell and clutch a thread of tattered curtain to my breast, as once I held my teddy bear. (They took him from me, in adjustment's name.)
I draw my face as near to his beak as I dare. Its snaps at me. I flinch, despite myself.
"Behave," I say. He calms a bit.
His breath is heavy, warm and smells of rotten peaches, flesh and stone.
I inhale. Though foul, the scent is precious, for it's natural and decadent and most importantly unclean. They polish every surface in my room with bleach. He'd never be allowed.
Something in my stomach turns and wakes. I stumble slightly. It is not unpleasant, not exactly.
Something's moving in my gut. Turning, kicking, making known that it wants out.
I don't know what to do.
I plan to ask my owl, but then I see his eyes and I am frozen. He is waiting. There is something that he knows that I do not, and he is waiting.
The man in the moon wears eye-shadow, and smirks.
A lance of pain in my esophagus, and then another, slightly higher.
It's the mouse. The mouse that earlier I ate, now answering the call of its master and re-shaper.
There's triumph in the owl's face; his frame of lighter feathers never looked more like a halo.
I want to protest, to deny, to exert my power over that I have ingested - but I cannot. The mouse chokes me with his climbing, with his progress.
I'm thankful for small blessings: his furlessness, and how I scorned two earlier offerings.
At last he's in my mouth. I want to bite, I should, but can't. He fills it all, with no room left for utterings or curses. His paws upon my tongue, his nose upon my uvula. Such a funny word, isn't it? And seldom used. And yet I cannot laugh, nor wish to...
His tail escapes my lips, and beckons to the owl king's beak.
A victory. He screeches - this, I hear - then closes firmly on the tail. He pulls and yanks me forward, 'til my mouth is flat against the opening and I feel rain upon my lips.
His world.
He steals a kiss and flies away.
The mouse dissolves inside my mouth, back to the boneless mash of acid muscle that it'd been before his magic brought renewal.
The rain is cold. It tastes of life.
And then I wake.
End Chapter 1
Author's Note:
This will only have two chapters, and is very much a work in progress. When I upload the conclusion (later this weekend), I'm also likely to substantially revise the first chapter.
Description is my weakness - I'm not a very visual thinker, so I often forget to put it in altogether. If any reader cares to point out places where I could add descriptive text to good purpose, I'd be much obliged.
Also? There are far too many compromising owl videos on YouTube.
-T.