Sarabande
by Andrea Broxton
Usually it was the peacocks that woke her. This morning Celestine dreamed hard and furiously into the day, stirring only when the lion roared for his breakfast. She propped herself on the pillows, stretched amid the tenuous membrane of dreams and foggy lucidity. Her eyes blinked at the cherubim tossing rose petals from the mural on the bedroom ceiling. The lion’s violent interruption heralded from the adjoining landowner’s ménagerie. His roar scattered her dreams quickly, just as Viscount Shadow’s animals fled his plane when it circled, and then landed in the pasture next door. A moment of panic would ensue among the startled inhabitants of the landscape, which gradually progressed into a weary and worn melancholy.
Celestine wandered onto the porch in her underwear with her coffee and a pear. She watched the clouds gather and the escaped peacocks from Shadow Manor glide through the grass while she sliced the fruit with her knife. There was a white one today. They were Viscount Shadow’s pride and joy, the albino peacocks, but their freakish lack of pigment had always been a disconcerting to Celestine who dreamed in color. The colorless bird seemed a harbinger of hopelessness, particularly since she had been so close this morning in returning with Maurice in hand.
Her mother had been clairvoyant and when she died she left an unforeseen inheritance. Celestine found she would obsess about some remote person from her past and the next day they manifested as she made her rounds through reality. Intrusions would swirl about some erstwhile, schoolyard acquaintance while she painted her murals on the walls of Viscount Shadow’s mansion, and then without warning the same said friend would be waiting at her door as she returned along the trampled grass path to her cottage on Shadow’s estate. However, it was her dreams that became vividly concrete, not mere Jungian clues. The waking world receded to a muddled obscurity.
She sensed she had misplaced something, and gradually she knew it to be a man called Maurice. At night, after the last of the querulous racket of Viscount Shadow’s animals dissipated, she would reach her hand across the expanse of the tester bed in an involuntary impulse, just as the lion yawned uncontrollably and laid his head down on his pillowy mane. Increasingly the dreams became less foggy and her focus sharpened. She started to locate Maurice in her dreams deep in the evening hours which curiously coincided with the appearance of the peacocks and their subsequent invasion her land.
The first time Celestine encountered Maurice she felt someone accept the extended hand as she drifted into the meandering current of sleep. The threshold of consciousness was still a flat world, and she would glide over its edge each night. Then one evening he reached for her just as she toppled from reality. She snapped with exacting trajectory,like elastic retracting, until she plunked right into the middle of Maurice’s dream. She landed in a room decorated with her own murals with the love she suspected she had been in possession of since time began. They kissed with such fervor, Celestine presumed they invented the feat. She would have stayed asleep for months, perhaps forever, if the cries of the peacocks had not awakened him. Maurice would throw back the covers and busy himself. It irritated her that he couldn’t ignore their calls, even though many times he began the day doing something nice for her. He would iron the dress she was to wear that day.
“But I only wear knits or jeans. There is hardly any wrinkling in my real life so you don’t need to iron,” she protested against dream rationale. “Please come back to bed.” Maurice would continue his task with meticulous precision until the peacocks roused her from her own sleep and she grudgingly departed for the day’s labor at the Manor.
Celestine found her love caused her to be obsessed, jealous of losing him to the waking world. She longed to touch him with a supernatural craving that nibbled away the former serenity she possessed while composing her drawings on the walls of Shadow Manor. She left notes taped to her sketches to account for the details she knew about him. She painted clues into the murals she brushed onto the walls of the manor house. She tried to leave any hint that crossed her mind transcribed into palpable reality in her daily rounds. Her waking life became a disjointed trail of unintelligible bread crumbs that lead nowhere. She desired nothing more than the completion of the murals in the Grand Hall of the manor, but her patron, Viscount Shadow, kept bringing home new creatures which he gleefully wanted to be rendered on the walls. Viscount was a trophy hunter of sorts, however he was far too kind to hurt a creature, so his murals, along with his zoo, continued to proliferate.
She wanted to remove the peacock murals of Maurice’s dream bedroom because she suspected the birds tired of their sedentary life on the walls and woke him in the mornings, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would only say, “I love the peacocks, they are what drew me to you in the first place.”
Maurice was never very helpful, only extremely complacent. She endeavored to give him earplugs, but he reminded her that they were just as ineffective as mittens in one’s dreams. They lay side by side in the night and she covered his ears with her hands. Once again, hearose with the whooping of the birds then he started grinding coffee beans.
“Please come back to bed,” she said.
“I am grinding the beans for the French press,” he said. “They need to be a coarse grind.”
“But I told you, I bought a coffee machine that grinds the beans and the coffee is already made when I wake.” Maurice’s kindness could be so infuriating. She longed to sustain the moments when she slumbered, tucked in Maurice’s dream. It was the only reality where her footing felt solid, where she believed in the ground that rested under her feet.
She sat up in bed, awake now, and staggered toward the kitchen to pour her deliberately prepared coffee. She rubbed her eyes then opened the door of the hall closet retrieving a shotgun and shells from the back. She sat the china cup and saucer on the porch rail and took aim at a peacock trailing its long train along the grass. The bird turned and looked at her. It fluttered its feathers, turned its regal crowned head and smirked as if to say: if I go away, then he goes away. She kept the bird in her aim until the spell was broken by the roar of Viscount Shadow’s plane and the noisy avian intruders dispersed as if real shots had been fired.
She pulled a freshly ironed dress over her head even though she knew it was ridiculous attire for a muralist, as she wondered what had become of her jeans and ordinary clothes. She gathered her paints and drop cloths and headed for Shadow Manor. The plane meant Viscount was home with a new animal. He would be expecting her to add its likeness to the walls of the great hall. When she arrived she saw Viscount Shadow’s veterinarian was examining a dainty deer-like creature.
“Peacocks got loose again,” she hinted.
“Yes, they did,” Shadow replied with his sweet smile. He raised his outback hat and patted his bald head with a handkerchief. “He’s a beauty isn’t he?” He beamed at his terrified new acquisition as he leaned against the plane in another of his silly safari outfits. That was the trouble with Viscount Shadow, aside from his propensity to dress like a perennial scout, he was always so kind and he felt compelled to agree with everything that was said, so Celestine could never be cross or argumentative.
She asked Maurice once before she woke: “Do you ever think of me during the day?”
“How do you expect me to remember my waking life when I forget to stay asleep each morning?”
When Celestine woke this morning she divined that Viscount Shadow would pack his khakis and fly away. She also knew that the answer to her conundrum might be found at the village fair. She pushed through the thick market day crowd, a cacophony of women carrying baskets and men who pulled goats with clanking bells through the cobblestone streets. She found the stall for the gypsy woman who would consult the stars. The gypsy read her palm and charted the planets. She said, I see lovers, but they cannot always reach one another.
“Bingo! That is my problem. I never know who Maurice is with or what he’s doing when he’s awake. I can’t bear to be away from him since I found him in my dreams.”
“The stars yield no direct message today, my child,” said the gypsy shaking her head, the coins on her headscarf jingling. “Yet they tell me your answer will be revealed only when you seek the seventh son of a seventh son.” Wind chimes clanged from the adjacent booth and the clock in the tower chimed the hour. For a second, Celestine thought she was back in her dreams, but slowly regained her focus.
Celestine knew of such a man. He lived at the edge of the plains, just before entanglement of branches wherethe dark woods began. It was the forest where the peacocks nested. She picked her way to his door, alternately stepping over and shooing peacocks. Their smell aggravated her allergies and the racket was loud enough to awaken the dead. She told him about the problem that confounded her. She sneezed into a meticulously starched handkerchief. She held out the beautifully ironed linen and cried, “Look, we don’t even have Kleenex anymore! We can’t stay asleep. Am I the only one in this village that’s noticed we have a bit of bird problem? Just look at our shoes…” Celestine’s reddened, sleep deprived eyes stared into his ancient milky half-blind eyes. Moments passed and just as her patience was about to expire, he broke into an ecstatic anticipatory smile. He curled his finger and beckoned her to come closer. His shaky, barely audible voice whispered, “Peacocks love to dance in the rain.”
She said, “You must return with me tomorrow. It is going to rain.” She clasped Maurice’s hand fiercely all through the night, secretly wishing they had been kinky enough to employ handcuffs. She dreamed only to be disappointed when the lion roared and she found herself alone again in her bed.
She smiled while she watched the birds as she ate her fruit. A gust of wind blew violently and the leaves on the trees started to tremble. Heavy clouds gathered and she smelled the scent of rain on the wind. The peacocks stared up at the sky as if foreseeing the storm. Heavy drops pelted the parched earth and the frightened birds began to jump from the trees running around themselves. Gradually, the ferocity of the storm diminished and, one by one,the birds began to flutter and dance. They fanned their iridescent plumes and bowed and bobbed their crowned heads as they swirled between the raindrops. At last there was peace. Celestine ran for her sketchpad. She composed her drawings.
For lunch she indulged heavily on turkey, wondering maliciously if one might also eat peacock, and downed it with a cup of mead. Celestine packed her paints and brushes for her tryptophan trip. When she grew sleepy, she assembled her things in bed beside her and lay down for her nap. She awoke in the dream room she shared with Maurice, paints and drop cloths beside her. She became aware that, once again, she was dressed foolishly in another crisply pressed white linen frock. She groaned when she saw that even her drop cloths had been ironed. What was he trying to do, open a laundrette? She painted the dancers with their plumes twirling in the raindrops, like a ballet, they fluttered their fans between the droplets. She executed the backup plan too, just in case the old forest geezer had been completely daft. The forest floor was rendered beautifully too, but only a trained eye could see the sprinkling of chamomile and Ambien crumbs amongst the leaves and grains of sand. Exhausted, she collapsed into bed when she was satisfied.
Viscount Shadow landed the plane. He watched the veterinarian approach while he beamed at his new impala, affirming it to be a fine acquisition. He fanned himself with his pith helmet as he suffered the humid air left behind from the rains. He patted beads of sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief. Usually she would be here by now, Johnny-on-the-spot, arriving with her paints and brushes, but he stared in vain at the path to her cottage. The Viscount noted that the landscape was eerily quiet, without so much as a peep from his birds. He tapped his dusty Timberlands on the gravel in unaccustomed impatience. Little did he know that locked away in a dream, a sleeping couple was surrounded by peacocks mesmerized in their baroque courtly dance, bowing to each other and swirling their fanned plumes. Viscount Shadow could not have anticipated the hypnotic effect of the rain. Celestine held her love and dreamed undisturbed reveries as they moved further into the bottomless collective memory of time.
Andrea Broxton lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Like most writers, she lives alone with her dog. Her mother always nagged her to write. The first story she ever workshopped ended up in a literary review. Sadly, this only encouraged her. Recently published in Eclectica, Skyline Review, Bicycle Review and Literary House Review and other publications.
by Andrea Broxton
Usually it was the peacocks that woke her. This morning Celestine dreamed hard and furiously into the day, stirring only when the lion roared for his breakfast. She propped herself on the pillows, stretched amid the tenuous membrane of dreams and foggy lucidity. Her eyes blinked at the cherubim tossing rose petals from the mural on the bedroom ceiling. The lion’s violent interruption heralded from the adjoining landowner’s ménagerie. His roar scattered her dreams quickly, just as Viscount Shadow’s animals fled his plane when it circled, and then landed in the pasture next door. A moment of panic would ensue among the startled inhabitants of the landscape, which gradually progressed into a weary and worn melancholy.
Celestine wandered onto the porch in her underwear with her coffee and a pear. She watched the clouds gather and the escaped peacocks from Shadow Manor glide through the grass while she sliced the fruit with her knife. There was a white one today. They were Viscount Shadow’s pride and joy, the albino peacocks, but their freakish lack of pigment had always been a disconcerting to Celestine who dreamed in color. The colorless bird seemed a harbinger of hopelessness, particularly since she had been so close this morning in returning with Maurice in hand.
Her mother had been clairvoyant and when she died she left an unforeseen inheritance. Celestine found she would obsess about some remote person from her past and the next day they manifested as she made her rounds through reality. Intrusions would swirl about some erstwhile, schoolyard acquaintance while she painted her murals on the walls of Viscount Shadow’s mansion, and then without warning the same said friend would be waiting at her door as she returned along the trampled grass path to her cottage on Shadow’s estate. However, it was her dreams that became vividly concrete, not mere Jungian clues. The waking world receded to a muddled obscurity.
She sensed she had misplaced something, and gradually she knew it to be a man called Maurice. At night, after the last of the querulous racket of Viscount Shadow’s animals dissipated, she would reach her hand across the expanse of the tester bed in an involuntary impulse, just as the lion yawned uncontrollably and laid his head down on his pillowy mane. Increasingly the dreams became less foggy and her focus sharpened. She started to locate Maurice in her dreams deep in the evening hours which curiously coincided with the appearance of the peacocks and their subsequent invasion her land.
The first time Celestine encountered Maurice she felt someone accept the extended hand as she drifted into the meandering current of sleep. The threshold of consciousness was still a flat world, and she would glide over its edge each night. Then one evening he reached for her just as she toppled from reality. She snapped with exacting trajectory,like elastic retracting, until she plunked right into the middle of Maurice’s dream. She landed in a room decorated with her own murals with the love she suspected she had been in possession of since time began. They kissed with such fervor, Celestine presumed they invented the feat. She would have stayed asleep for months, perhaps forever, if the cries of the peacocks had not awakened him. Maurice would throw back the covers and busy himself. It irritated her that he couldn’t ignore their calls, even though many times he began the day doing something nice for her. He would iron the dress she was to wear that day.
“But I only wear knits or jeans. There is hardly any wrinkling in my real life so you don’t need to iron,” she protested against dream rationale. “Please come back to bed.” Maurice would continue his task with meticulous precision until the peacocks roused her from her own sleep and she grudgingly departed for the day’s labor at the Manor.
Celestine found her love caused her to be obsessed, jealous of losing him to the waking world. She longed to touch him with a supernatural craving that nibbled away the former serenity she possessed while composing her drawings on the walls of Shadow Manor. She left notes taped to her sketches to account for the details she knew about him. She painted clues into the murals she brushed onto the walls of the manor house. She tried to leave any hint that crossed her mind transcribed into palpable reality in her daily rounds. Her waking life became a disjointed trail of unintelligible bread crumbs that lead nowhere. She desired nothing more than the completion of the murals in the Grand Hall of the manor, but her patron, Viscount Shadow, kept bringing home new creatures which he gleefully wanted to be rendered on the walls. Viscount was a trophy hunter of sorts, however he was far too kind to hurt a creature, so his murals, along with his zoo, continued to proliferate.
She wanted to remove the peacock murals of Maurice’s dream bedroom because she suspected the birds tired of their sedentary life on the walls and woke him in the mornings, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would only say, “I love the peacocks, they are what drew me to you in the first place.”
Maurice was never very helpful, only extremely complacent. She endeavored to give him earplugs, but he reminded her that they were just as ineffective as mittens in one’s dreams. They lay side by side in the night and she covered his ears with her hands. Once again, hearose with the whooping of the birds then he started grinding coffee beans.
“Please come back to bed,” she said.
“I am grinding the beans for the French press,” he said. “They need to be a coarse grind.”
“But I told you, I bought a coffee machine that grinds the beans and the coffee is already made when I wake.” Maurice’s kindness could be so infuriating. She longed to sustain the moments when she slumbered, tucked in Maurice’s dream. It was the only reality where her footing felt solid, where she believed in the ground that rested under her feet.
She sat up in bed, awake now, and staggered toward the kitchen to pour her deliberately prepared coffee. She rubbed her eyes then opened the door of the hall closet retrieving a shotgun and shells from the back. She sat the china cup and saucer on the porch rail and took aim at a peacock trailing its long train along the grass. The bird turned and looked at her. It fluttered its feathers, turned its regal crowned head and smirked as if to say: if I go away, then he goes away. She kept the bird in her aim until the spell was broken by the roar of Viscount Shadow’s plane and the noisy avian intruders dispersed as if real shots had been fired.
She pulled a freshly ironed dress over her head even though she knew it was ridiculous attire for a muralist, as she wondered what had become of her jeans and ordinary clothes. She gathered her paints and drop cloths and headed for Shadow Manor. The plane meant Viscount was home with a new animal. He would be expecting her to add its likeness to the walls of the great hall. When she arrived she saw Viscount Shadow’s veterinarian was examining a dainty deer-like creature.
“Peacocks got loose again,” she hinted.
“Yes, they did,” Shadow replied with his sweet smile. He raised his outback hat and patted his bald head with a handkerchief. “He’s a beauty isn’t he?” He beamed at his terrified new acquisition as he leaned against the plane in another of his silly safari outfits. That was the trouble with Viscount Shadow, aside from his propensity to dress like a perennial scout, he was always so kind and he felt compelled to agree with everything that was said, so Celestine could never be cross or argumentative.
She asked Maurice once before she woke: “Do you ever think of me during the day?”
“How do you expect me to remember my waking life when I forget to stay asleep each morning?”
When Celestine woke this morning she divined that Viscount Shadow would pack his khakis and fly away. She also knew that the answer to her conundrum might be found at the village fair. She pushed through the thick market day crowd, a cacophony of women carrying baskets and men who pulled goats with clanking bells through the cobblestone streets. She found the stall for the gypsy woman who would consult the stars. The gypsy read her palm and charted the planets. She said, I see lovers, but they cannot always reach one another.
“Bingo! That is my problem. I never know who Maurice is with or what he’s doing when he’s awake. I can’t bear to be away from him since I found him in my dreams.”
“The stars yield no direct message today, my child,” said the gypsy shaking her head, the coins on her headscarf jingling. “Yet they tell me your answer will be revealed only when you seek the seventh son of a seventh son.” Wind chimes clanged from the adjacent booth and the clock in the tower chimed the hour. For a second, Celestine thought she was back in her dreams, but slowly regained her focus.
Celestine knew of such a man. He lived at the edge of the plains, just before entanglement of branches wherethe dark woods began. It was the forest where the peacocks nested. She picked her way to his door, alternately stepping over and shooing peacocks. Their smell aggravated her allergies and the racket was loud enough to awaken the dead. She told him about the problem that confounded her. She sneezed into a meticulously starched handkerchief. She held out the beautifully ironed linen and cried, “Look, we don’t even have Kleenex anymore! We can’t stay asleep. Am I the only one in this village that’s noticed we have a bit of bird problem? Just look at our shoes…” Celestine’s reddened, sleep deprived eyes stared into his ancient milky half-blind eyes. Moments passed and just as her patience was about to expire, he broke into an ecstatic anticipatory smile. He curled his finger and beckoned her to come closer. His shaky, barely audible voice whispered, “Peacocks love to dance in the rain.”
She said, “You must return with me tomorrow. It is going to rain.” She clasped Maurice’s hand fiercely all through the night, secretly wishing they had been kinky enough to employ handcuffs. She dreamed only to be disappointed when the lion roared and she found herself alone again in her bed.
She smiled while she watched the birds as she ate her fruit. A gust of wind blew violently and the leaves on the trees started to tremble. Heavy clouds gathered and she smelled the scent of rain on the wind. The peacocks stared up at the sky as if foreseeing the storm. Heavy drops pelted the parched earth and the frightened birds began to jump from the trees running around themselves. Gradually, the ferocity of the storm diminished and, one by one,the birds began to flutter and dance. They fanned their iridescent plumes and bowed and bobbed their crowned heads as they swirled between the raindrops. At last there was peace. Celestine ran for her sketchpad. She composed her drawings.
For lunch she indulged heavily on turkey, wondering maliciously if one might also eat peacock, and downed it with a cup of mead. Celestine packed her paints and brushes for her tryptophan trip. When she grew sleepy, she assembled her things in bed beside her and lay down for her nap. She awoke in the dream room she shared with Maurice, paints and drop cloths beside her. She became aware that, once again, she was dressed foolishly in another crisply pressed white linen frock. She groaned when she saw that even her drop cloths had been ironed. What was he trying to do, open a laundrette? She painted the dancers with their plumes twirling in the raindrops, like a ballet, they fluttered their fans between the droplets. She executed the backup plan too, just in case the old forest geezer had been completely daft. The forest floor was rendered beautifully too, but only a trained eye could see the sprinkling of chamomile and Ambien crumbs amongst the leaves and grains of sand. Exhausted, she collapsed into bed when she was satisfied.
Viscount Shadow landed the plane. He watched the veterinarian approach while he beamed at his new impala, affirming it to be a fine acquisition. He fanned himself with his pith helmet as he suffered the humid air left behind from the rains. He patted beads of sweat from his bald head with a handkerchief. Usually she would be here by now, Johnny-on-the-spot, arriving with her paints and brushes, but he stared in vain at the path to her cottage. The Viscount noted that the landscape was eerily quiet, without so much as a peep from his birds. He tapped his dusty Timberlands on the gravel in unaccustomed impatience. Little did he know that locked away in a dream, a sleeping couple was surrounded by peacocks mesmerized in their baroque courtly dance, bowing to each other and swirling their fanned plumes. Viscount Shadow could not have anticipated the hypnotic effect of the rain. Celestine held her love and dreamed undisturbed reveries as they moved further into the bottomless collective memory of time.
Andrea Broxton lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Like most writers, she lives alone with her dog. Her mother always nagged her to write. The first story she ever workshopped ended up in a literary review. Sadly, this only encouraged her. Recently published in Eclectica, Skyline Review, Bicycle Review and Literary House Review and other publications.
