Do Ghosts Dream Of Winding Sheets?

His sleep was a pure blackness that ever seemed to teeter on the edge of white. In any event, he assumed what he was experiencing was sleep. It seemed very much like it, except sleep consciousness was entirely new to him.

He stirred with the dawn cracking. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but its fanfare of known and unknown colours was.

Sleeping on the lush grass amid the daisies and beneath the stars was a perfect blessing - the weather never changed, the temperature held between the tolerances of night and day, the shades and hues both destructive and creative in their interchange. Strange that he could not recall falling asleep here in the first place and, even more strange, that he was not at all surprised waking up here.

The words in his ears were spelt with silence. He shook his head to make them sound inside. Eventually, he discovered that it was a girl’s voice articulating deathly secrets. He turned to squint into the rising rim of the sun’s birth only to find its bloodorange aura shimmering along the close reclining nudity of the one who spoke. Who wanted him to hold her.

The mystery deepened as, on top of everything else, he realised he had not been sleeping alone.



She woke dead. She felt dead. She was dead. The sun was just dipping below the horizon, shafting black sunbeams across the plain. Her consort in death held her in his arms, the love from his eyes still very much alive. Whilst the sun finally departed the Earth, snow descended in a groundswell fabric of minute stitched crystals to seal their eternal warmth.


(published 'Opossum Holler Tarot' 1990)