The Pure Life of Dreams

February 29, 2024April 7, 2024

The Mouth of an Actress

Her hair is short straight, dirty blonde, and combed back exposing a pale white forehead. An actress she is; her right cheek is close to the camera, angled up at her from below, showing the sharp line of her jaw.

On the tip of her nose, there glistens a single tear drop, hanging.

June 23, 2023July 1, 2023

The Frog and Cat – Part 2 Back at the Hotel

After dozing off again, I find one of the frogs back with me in the hotel room. I have to let him lie in a small container of cold water for a while, to let him recuperate.

I put him in a long rectangular Tupperware, and put a lid on it so he cannot escape, but every time I put down the container, he starts hitting the lid with his head, almost knocks it off.

So then I fill the bathtub in the room, it is filled quite high, and I let the Tupperware float in it so that this time, if he escapes, he will only escape into more water.

The bathtub is only filled with water from the tap and is not the boiled, sterilizer water I used for him but I’m sure it will be OK for the time that he needs to get better.

Then I leave the room.

And it is only when I get back that I see the horror.

Artie is floating under the water of the bathtub his small body rotating slowly under the surface, the frog paddling around him, the Tupperware up-ended.

Artie must be dead, I think, as I pull him out. A bit of claw catches my hand and comes away from his paw, lodges with a piece of fur at the soft base of my thumb.

I lie Artie’s limp body, belly down, across the lip of the bathtub. I stroke his back, and press hard, up from his hind legs with both thumbs, push his fur up towards his throat until the water ejects from his mouth into the bathtub. And I repeat it again and again until the water spurts out, until after the third or fourth time he splutters into life, and rolls out of my grip onto the floor.

“Oh Artie,” I cry as he walk away.

He no longer has his buff coat but looks more tabby and smaller than he was before; when he was chasing the frogs.

I leave him to return downstairs where they have the constructors out on the patio. They are mending the tiles, resurfacing them with white squares in a diamond shape, white to match the balcony wall which surrounds the patio. And I want to see how the construction is going.

When I get there I’m surprised to see Artie once more. This time he is lying on his back, his body splayed across the balcony wall. A small but deep gash is visible across the white fur of his belly, bleeding,

“Artie,” I cry out once more as I rush towards the wall.

Next to him sits a contractor and, at the far side of the patio, two more. They wear grey hard hats and are eating sandwiches, it’s their lunch break. And they stare back nonchalantly at my commotion.

Then a second cat bounds out from the French doors of the hotel, across the patio and up onto the wall to my dead cat. Only it’s Artie who ran out of the hotel and the dead cat is not Artie after all, although he shares the same tabby markings and size.

Artie sniffs at the dead cat briefly before leaping towards the two contractors at the end of the patio. He ducks between them as they slouch and chew their sandwiches.

“Catch him!” I yell before he disappears under their legs.

Photo by Eu_eugen via Pixabay

April 20, 2023May 2, 2023

Attacked by a Drone in the Old Fort

Attacked by drones in the old Moroccan fort.

Siobhan, Liam, Lizzie and I went on holiday to Morocco or a place like that and after we had arrived and settled into our hotel, we went wandering around the souk. It was nearby and still filled with people in colorful costumes so we took lots of candid pictures.

The souk was quite open plan but still dusty, and had rich ornate rugs swung over the wooden frames of the stalls to protect the shoppers from the sun’s dusty glare.

The locals’ costumes were many striped, in reds and orange, golds and blues, the colors of the rainbow, and you had to be fast to get the pictures but I played with the iPhone buttons instead of the app button and snapped them really fast. I was not even looking to frame each picture so that even if a head got in the way I would still snap it.

I looked at one photo and sure enough I had frozen it in time. The focused head of a man captured through a blur of people. I was proud to have gotten a good picture just like the kids showed me.

And later on we walked over to an old fort which had a broken wall and an old blue door; you could walk around the right side of the wall, to the other side without opening the door. Behind the wall was a moat and a series of steps that went down to the water line and then came back up again to the rear side of the door. And intersecting the moat was another wall that acted as a bridge, that you could walk across the top of, that was quite wide and able to accommodate all four of us side by side.

We walked along the bridge and a drone flew by; and the drone was bowl shaped and black with a yellow trim up by its wings. It hovered briefly over the water before snapping out of sight.

And once we turned back and were returning to the fort’s front wall we noticed the water level had risen, perhaps because of the tide, and the drone was back again. This time it was a bit more menacing. It flew closer to us, just missing Lizzie and I, and then it went after Siobhan who had walked ahead. She was up by the intersection where the bridge and the wall’s steps met.

Siobhan ducked down to avoid the swoop of the drone and dived into the water which now covered the steps. Then she surfaced where the steps rose up close to the door. Only her head and right arm visible, she was holding onto the top step, but also she looked dazed.

Liam and I ran back along the path and I thought to walk down the first set of steps and up the second to where she was. But then I would have gotten my camera wet because all but the top steps were covered in water. I didn’t think it would survive that amount of time in the moat.

Then Liam had an idea. “Why don’t we try the door from the front?”

And so we walked back around the wall. And the door was old with chipped paint and we weren’t sure we were allowed to open it. I turned the heavy round silver knob of the door and we stepped through.

No one stopped us.

“Good idea, Liam,” I acknowledged as I closed the door behind us.

Next to the door sat an old cart leaning with its wheel barrow handles on the path. It was right next to where the steps began, where Siobhan held on.

But there was no trace of Siobhan.

A few bathers were paddling out in the moat but she was not one of them. We looked out across the water, and briefly one woman in the same dark brown bathing suit as Siobhan surfaced, but she had long dark brown hair.

Perhaps she had slipped unconscious while holding onto the step.

We peered into the water but it was murky and there was no way to see anything deeper than a few feet. And this time I thought to dive down to see if she had drowned.

Then Liam cried out.

“Mama,” he wailed in a plaintive voice.

Photo from Wallpaper Flare

April 5, 2023June 9, 2025

The Last of the Fairground Events

As the fairground sights wound to a close, the sun hit the stalls with the setting shade. Up on the hilltop ridge, the students piled back heading home, cast in shade, shadows of bodies.

February 16, 2023March 30, 2023

Stuck in the Mud

Siobhan wants to take Liam shopping for clothes and new glasses. He is excited to go, but first he suggests a bike ride with me.

So we head downtown on our bikes, just me and him, and we glide through the Rock Creek underpass, taking the first corner one way through a concrete tunnel, then double backing the other way.

I take the first bend a little too fast, but slow up just in time to avoid a concrete step on the right side of the tunnel. Liam is behind me. He too, takes the bend well, but then we come out of the tunnel onto a wide, open field and hit a muddy patch.

It’s not too bad; thick dark mud, semi dry like Van Gogh splashes of paint. We can ride our bikes over them.

But the next area is wetter.

“Oh no!” Liam cries out.

It is just swampy grass and water pools and it is harder to pull the bikes through.

I navigate a long wet grass puddle to the right side of the field, but Liam takes a different path bearing leftwards and further into the center. As I come out to the edge of the field, Liam loses his footing and his bike goes under.

At first it is ok. I watch him as he looks for a place to avoid the watery grasses.

…I am high up now, and see him trying to get out of the field, same as I did.

He starts to climb one of the slopes, a slick grey mud incline that is shiny like brown plastic garbage bags.

“Why are you doing that one? It is too steep!” I cry out to him, and he slides down back into the mud.

He comes closer to where I am, though I am really high up and away from him now. And he tries a gentler slope but again he slides down, ducks under the water. And this time he swims. I can see his tall body under the brown water, a breaststroke shape with purpose, swimming, until he arrives at the water’s edge to try again.

The new slope starts at less of an angle. It rises to my left a hundred yards away from me, and is half as high as the ledge on which I stand. And when he gets to the top of the slope, he comes to a ladder which is positioned against a house that overlooks the muddy field. The house is painted red, has large high ceiling windows, and is another two hundred feet above the top of the slope.

Liam starts to climb the ladder, on and up until he is higher than I by some distance.

I can’t see how he will get off. The ladder is too straight.

And once at the top his weight pulls the ladder away from the house. Liam and the ladder fall towards me, down to the muddy edge of the field. I hear the crash onto a white concrete ledge, hundreds of feet below.

I look down to see him face up, his body and limbs at odd broken angles, like he cannot have survived the fall, so sudden was the drop.

And I am in terror; I fear the worst. My dream cannot end like this.

Then he turns onto all fours, and gets up from the ladder beneath him.

Photo by Eirian Evans via Geograph