I was visiting my sister, who lived in my old apartment complex down by the Astrodome. She was having a shoe party. Like, a Tupperware party, but with ladies' shoes. I'm not big on shoes, really, but there was a very cute pair of flats in a sort of navy blue and black houndstooth tweed that were the most comfortable dressy shoes I'd ever worn, so I bought them.
I walked down the parking area, out to a plaza where the cathedral stood. I was doing a rough sketch of the façade, with arched openings along the top where a covered terrace ran inside the walls. I was drawing from both life and a photograph, and I'd roughed in the shapes of my composition. I was ready to start a clean drawing on nice paper, and I was trying to decide if I should keep the aspect ratio I had, or go narrower and use a standard paper size.
The original was about four feet by two feet, but the nice paper only came in 18 inch wide or 30 inch wide. I laid a sheet of 18 inch wide over my rough drawing, but for some reason, when I did that, the drawing perspective shifted, and instead of looking the row of arches straight on, they were shown at a downward slant. So I chose a wider paper that I would just trim in the end. It was a pale gold, and I did my drawing in sepia water colors. I was working in a community studio by then, and hung the finished product with my other work for that weekend's show, just as people started to trickle in.
I left to go to my basketball training in the woods. A friend of mine stood down in a wide pit, about eight feet deep, that got broader and shallower on the other side, until it was just a step down from the forest floor. The ground was sandy and thick with pine needles and newly fallen maple leaves just turning from green to gold. I threw the basketball down to my friend, who batted it directly back up at me, and I smacked it back down at him, until one of us missed.
Whenever I missed, my friend handed me up a few round, black berries, the size of large marbles, with a dull, velvety sheen. I had to eat them. They weren't bad, really, but kind of bland and chalky and creamy at the same time. The ball was a little bit flat and lumpy after a while, so we called it a day.
My friend handed me up the last of the berries and two tiny turtles. One was a rich green with a round, hard shell. The other had a soft leaf-shaped shell of pale yellow with brown speckles. I held the turtles in my hands, but suddenly they started to squirm. The turtle witch was coming, and they felt her call. But I couldn't let them go to her, or she'd put them in her soup, so I held on tight. The witch passed by within yards of me. She wore a tattered golden gown, brown and green and scarlet along the edges like the autumn leaves. She wore a tall, bony headdress draped in the same leafy silk. She sang a strange song, but she didn't seem to care that I was keeping my turtles from going to her. They were very small, and she'd have plenty of larger ones soon.
When it was safe for them again, I dropped down into the pit. There was a few inches of dark water at the deepest end, and I placed my turtles gently beside the pool. I walked out of the forest back to Rice campus. There was a Phils concert going on at Will Rice College, so I stopped to listen to that. When it was over, the audience and singers all sat down and pulled out copies of Anna Karenina, because there was going to be a lecture and reading workshop. I stayed for that, because I've never finished reading that book, and wanted to find out if other translations might be easier to read and enjoy than the one I have.
After a while, the lecture/workshop gave way to a jewelry market. I began to show my rings and bracelets to one of the vendors. I suddenly had about four rings on each finger of my right hand, some in enamel, some set with gems, in red and green and blue. I also had a bracelet that was a woven string of tiny chili peppers carved out of carnelian. But as I showed the woman all of this, the rings started to fall off of my fingers. A friend of mine who was passing by noticed I was upset about this, and he came and put an arm around me to comfort me. But all my rings fell off, and my bracelet fell to bits, and he held me while I cried.
He was working as an assistant band director at the University of Texas, so after I'd cried myself out and gathered up all my little carnelian peppers and rings that would not stay on, he invited me to come watch the band rehearse. I got as far as the bleachers, and then I woke up.
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