centre of the universe - the dreaming: Blow, ye winds, Blow

07/11/2008: "Blow, ye winds, Blow" No one ever told her it was irrational to be petrified with fear at the thought of a tornado scooping up her house in the dead of the night and dashing it to smithereens eighty miles away. All things considered, perhaps it wasn't an *irrational* fear; rather an extremely unlikely fear. She'd heard a man at the county fair...he was up on a rail car with curtains strung inside to make it look like a stage. He was reading from a book, and behind him were acrobats pantomiming the story. In the story, a tornado picks up a house and sends it far away, where no one can find it.

After she saw that man reading that story out of a book at the county fair where the sun beat down relentlessly and flies were biting, she begged her husband to tether the house to the land, like her father had done back east on the rock. But he laughed and told her the house wasn't going anywhere. She pleaded, begged him "just for this one thing, please, just this one thing", day and night. It was the first thing she said in the morning and the last words out of her mouth every night. "Please, Marek, just this one thing."

He was able to laugh it off for a while, then got angry, finally shouting at her: "Look! Look at this dust!" Kicking clouds of dry earth up throughout the yard. "Even if I wanted to tie your damned house down, there's nothing to tie it *to*!"

So she lived on in fear that one day, she would wake in the morning in the middle of a hot field, not knowing which way or how far it was to go home. Worse yet, she might never wake again, if the winds tossed her house up in the air like a cat with a ball of yarn, only to drop it again in shards on her sleeping form. When her husband took his grain to the elevator, she slept under the bed, one wrist lashed to the bedpost.

"SShhhhhh." "Anemophily"

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Der Kaptin , on Friday, 11th July:

Little did she know that the man she danced with, heel and toe to the fiddle and bow, at the weddings and anniversaries in the little prairie town, and took to her spartan mattress-on-a-base-of-planks bed most nights, calling his name out loud in laughter and sometimes in tears, although he was to all appearances an ordinary enough man, perhaps a little flyaway in the manner in which he kept his hair and prodigeous beard, was actually Marek, god of heaven's breath, the wind, and not just his namesake as he claimed. He'd blown into town from his mountain abode one starless night, intending on merely whistling through a few old window jambs, and giving the galloping roadrunner ornaments sprinkled across languishing lawns the ride of their lives. But he bounced off of her brocade bedspread pinned to the line for an airing, and wound up caught in her tangled thicket of hair. She shook him loose with such animal grace that he'd thought to give physical form a try for a while, feel for himself the solidity of sliding feet into tender furrows of earth instead of just striding the dust devils in endless tumbleweed roundup. Small wonder, then, when he'd swept her up in his arms, that she'd end up dreaming of gales, and pondering what winds might wend between the stars.

It was his trouble-making half-brother Loki who sized up the situation and set himself the task of scattering this house of illusory cards. He created his tornado show for the county fair, and used his storytelling gifts to whisk tendrils of fear into the cavering spaces of her hyperventilating mind. He laughed at Marek's attempts to jolly, then bluster, her out of her heaven-sent trepidations. For what woman can ever, once fastened on fears she has apparently apprehended through her own intuition and insight, be convinced that they are, in fact, groundless, flights of fearful fantasy?

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