This dream may come.
It is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, as well as Shakespeare's birthday. So I give you a piece a few of you have seen before, and hope you all enjoy it. About four hundred words of chimerical faery tale, with Alice and Dorothy in for the trip.
Tick-tock, says the clock
by J. C. Runolfson
They say you heal, when you sleep. They say you grow. They say all dreams are now and time is an illusion and you wonder. If you sleep for one hundred years, and you dream for all of them, will you dream in the blink of an eye? Will you wake before you blinked? Will the prick in your finger, tiny little wound no bigger than a pore, bleed backward, scab over, spread a membrane of dried blood across you like some exotic new skin treatment? How long will you fit in your bed?
This is assuming, of course, that you fit there now, the now of the dreams, the now of the illusion. This is assuming you aren't already jammed up against the sundials and the hourglasses and the grandfather clocks stuffed into every corner of the chamber in which you lie, bleeding or unbled or scarred. Perhaps the scar is too small to see, but it aches when it snows. It aches when.
In your dreams, you suck at your finger and don't know if you're tasting blood or roses or ash from the grandmother dragons lashing out with teeth like thorns. Maybe that's you. They say everything in a dream is a representation of your psyche. The dragons and the thorns are green. The roses and the blood are red. Your dress is blue now, pink now, and you keep growing out of it, except for how you don't change. You can't wear a dress anyway, not when you're so many things sharp and liquid and hard and fading.
Well. That's not strictly true. Roses don't fade in dreams.
Actually, that's not true either. Dreams are now, but dreams are an illusion, and time is an illusion, and what's true is this: they built a tower around you, too big to fit in the castle. They filled it with sundials and hourglasses and clocks, promises of a finite curse, meant to keep track of a century passing. The clocks have stopped, the sand sits unstirring, and the sun has never moved. You don't know when. Now it's all still, still it's now.
You dream timepieces and tower, the bed you don't fit in, the body growing, thorns and roses, blood and dragons. You dream a they and a you, the wound that never keeps happening, once and after.
You dream ever, wait for somebody to say when.
END
Be sure to check ipstp for more goodies.
Tick-tock, says the clock
by J. C. Runolfson
They say you heal, when you sleep. They say you grow. They say all dreams are now and time is an illusion and you wonder. If you sleep for one hundred years, and you dream for all of them, will you dream in the blink of an eye? Will you wake before you blinked? Will the prick in your finger, tiny little wound no bigger than a pore, bleed backward, scab over, spread a membrane of dried blood across you like some exotic new skin treatment? How long will you fit in your bed?
This is assuming, of course, that you fit there now, the now of the dreams, the now of the illusion. This is assuming you aren't already jammed up against the sundials and the hourglasses and the grandfather clocks stuffed into every corner of the chamber in which you lie, bleeding or unbled or scarred. Perhaps the scar is too small to see, but it aches when it snows. It aches when.
In your dreams, you suck at your finger and don't know if you're tasting blood or roses or ash from the grandmother dragons lashing out with teeth like thorns. Maybe that's you. They say everything in a dream is a representation of your psyche. The dragons and the thorns are green. The roses and the blood are red. Your dress is blue now, pink now, and you keep growing out of it, except for how you don't change. You can't wear a dress anyway, not when you're so many things sharp and liquid and hard and fading.
Well. That's not strictly true. Roses don't fade in dreams.
Actually, that's not true either. Dreams are now, but dreams are an illusion, and time is an illusion, and what's true is this: they built a tower around you, too big to fit in the castle. They filled it with sundials and hourglasses and clocks, promises of a finite curse, meant to keep track of a century passing. The clocks have stopped, the sand sits unstirring, and the sun has never moved. You don't know when. Now it's all still, still it's now.
You dream timepieces and tower, the bed you don't fit in, the body growing, thorns and roses, blood and dragons. You dream a they and a you, the wound that never keeps happening, once and after.
You dream ever, wait for somebody to say when.
END
Be sure to check ipstp for more goodies.