Fight the Drift

The man in the yellow suit, selling boxed dreams from the girls he once adored, was smelling like potatoes to me.  His greasy handkerchief falling out of its careless-tucked-in-pocket, his heart the same falling out of his chest.  His eyes were black ice.  I couldn’t look away.  Inside I saw words and letters etched onto his pupils, in languages I’ve never known.  In tongues I’ve never seen.  He moved like a marionette, jittery in all his creases, jiggling just to show you he’s supposed to be alive.

 

“Will you give me your dream?” he said to me, waiting to capture it in the new-vintage cigar box rusted from tears and time.  Ready to snap it shut.  To snatch.  To sell.

 

I said that it won’t fit in a box.  It won’t be held hostage in a tin sanitarium.  It won’t be shackled to the earth and tamed into domestication.  It won’t sit pretty on the shelf, over the mantle, on the nightstand, a picture of what never was.  Wings clipped and declawed.

 

It beats my heart.  It pumps my blood.  It brings breath inside of me.

 

“I will not give you my dream.”

 

And with a puff of smoke, the wave of a hand, the passing of a magic wand, he disappeared and was gone, leaving just the fluttering flapping sound of my dream stretching its wings, almost ready to fly.