Three Keys One Lock

Carella Keil

I dreamt about you again last night. It's always you. You said you can't dream anymore, so "How could it possibly have been me?" and "Are you sure you aren't confusing me with someone else?" Of course, you didn't look like you. More my memory of you, my feeling of you, although you're more of an abstraction in reality than you are in dream.

. . . .

I'm awake. I think I'm awake.

I could teach you to dream with your eyes open. A part of you must already know this, you keep coming to me in the night.

. . . .

The last time we met, was in a matchstick house during the Third Reich. It was inevitable we'd both end up in flames. I was a Jew girl with cumulous eyes and dirt on my cheeks. My fingers had learned to plead with the officers and my tongue to spell out survival. You wore your mask differently. It was too tight around the lips and restricted your eyes. You weren't ready to take it off, but you realized this identity was not your true face.

You could never love me without breaking your own heart, and so I never quite let you. You wanted to save me, and that act more than the others welded me onto you.

We barely scratch the surface; it's enough to light a spark.

. . . .

"They sent her to the ovens," you looked outside your window and you didn't have time to cry. But that night you dreamt of a boy in Pompeii, covering his eyes. His eyes became sunsets, and I knew you knew.

"Next time, I want to come back as ice," you whispered, and the goddess obeyed.

You're the color of heartbreak when the sun rises. "So let's stay in bed all day," I say. Hips over legs over lust over lips. The goal of the game isn't to win; it's to keep playing.

And you agree but the doorbell rings, and there she is, dressed only in fantasy. And you'll take her to bed, and still summer will out-sleep us all, dreaming up the firmament and cementing plans we never make.

The ocean is pretty, but the sea leaves scratch marks on the shore, and I'd rather be chasing her tide than the slowly turning, cold shoulder of the moon. From this vantage point, I can feel nothing but the wind, and I like the way his cold caresses me, in a warning warming sort of way.

Hate is to love without desire, and desire is to pity what can never be. I was searching yesterday for the cabinet where my mother folded up our wings, and laughed to find them dangling from the treetops. Like summer kites we used to fly. Mothers don't forget.

You know, burnt cities leave behind years of ash, while melted ones leave nothing. I thought I was wise to chose fire rather than ice, but perhaps you were the one with mercy in your heart. I wanted to go back, again, but this time the doorway had turned to stone.

*This story first appeared in The Stripes Magazine Issue 2 Vol. 3

AUTHOR BIO