birds singing in the sycamore tree

[baedalites]

As night falls on Baedal, the city is almost quiet. The streets have a few last minute workers returning home, but by now, most citizens have already gone by the temples and picked up their vurt, ready to lay down and dream.

After placing a not-feather in one's mouth, there's a moment where it fizzes against the tongue before sliding coolly down the back of the throat and pulling the user down into sleep. A series of impressions, more sensation than anything concrete, appears before the user and this is how one chooses which Dreamer to enter.

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[selfmadman]

Don's a light fleck in this landscape of flinty hills with streams like scratches too shallow to draw blood. He sits hunched outside a lopsided stack of rough stones arranged around a wood door. The structure's roof threatens to slide off. He wears a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. The sun's at his back; his hair stirs in the wind. His face inspires a vague recognition—oh, it's him—but is difficult to place. He's smoking, gaze distant.

[obscuredvision]

It's Ava, only less so: a simple sundress instead of her usual dressing-to-the-nines, her hair loose and tousled by the breeze instead of its usual not-a-one-out-of-place. She wanders--along this path, into this dream, half-distracted by the way the sun both washes over her surroundings with a warm conformity and how it highlights each detail differently in doing so.

The smell of smoke, wafting on the the air, draws her in that direction. She was always curious but her father said no, her grandfather said no, and she was a good girl who always minded her elders. She follows the scent up a path, shielding her eyes from the sun; when she does so a figure is revealed, framed by the door of an off-kilter stone building.

"Oh," she says, she smile on her lips as ethereal as her recognition, "it's you."

[selfmadman]

His arms rest on his knees, one hand dangling limp. He holds the cigarette the way an artist grips a pastel: loosely but with purpose. He exhales. The smoke drifts, twists and thins. It flickers—almost—one moment cloudy gray, the next a ripple in the air insubstantial as the outline of a breath. Back and forth it shifts, voice and echo.

Don's eyes settle on her. “Cigarette,” he offers. He doesn't smile but there's a satisfaction in how it's said.

[obscuredvision]

Her gaze drifts, chasing the play of light and shadow on the landscape, the way the sun kisses things with its glow and the way the breeze shifts things subtly. She feels it when she breathes, too, in and out, in and out, the air circulating, the edges of her nostrils cooling like the shadows with each inhalation and warming like the sun-dappled rocks when she breathes out.

And there's his voice, calling her back, her attention drawing back in to focus on him. All over again she thinks he's like something out of a magazine somewhere, so nicely framed by the door behind him. Maybe they are on a page somewhere, the envy of some reader's eye.

Her eyes take in the details of his face, then her gaze catches the curling smoke, following it down to his hand, and "Yes," she says yes, "thank you," because she's a good girl who always minds her elders only her elders aren't here, she says "yes" because there's no one to tell her "no", to decide anything for her.

[selfmadman]

His shirt pocket sags with the pack. There are the land's creases, hard enough to shred light; then there's the gap his hand dips into. The unsteady line of the cloth vulnerable as a child's jutting lower lip.

He offers a box stamped with the name—ringed like a target—Lucky Strike. The words draw the eye. The world narrows around them, crowds out wind and shadow.

“It's toasted,” Don says. It has a nursery-rhyme lilt, like the words were waiting for him. His whole face changes with his smile. His features are less muddled, his expression relieved.

The pack's down to its last cigarette; he's feeling for his lighter.

[obscuredvision]

"I'll get you more," she says, because this is the last one and she can't take his last without knowing she'll replenish them. The logo holds her attention as she slips a finger into the packet, until she's rewarded with the drag of paper under her fingertip. The cellophane rustles and she thinks of the wind, the wind catches the ends of her hair and she looks up, watching it move through his like a doting mother's fingers.

"Do you like it here?" She holds the cigarette vaguely like a pencil, isn't that how you do it, couldn't she draw with the smoke once it's lit? "You're different. You're you, but different."