Lord of Shallot

A grasshopper bounces against the road side curb, attempting to reach the tall grasses and the waist high weeds. A cigarette butt is thrown from a red truck and it smolders in the ditch. The tobacco gives of the last puffs of sweet smoke into the breeze, never to a light a single blade of grass. And a young man sits in an apartment attempting to write a story about a fantastical universe. He looks up and sees a small field. Button tansy blossoms wave next rusty brown yarrow dead heads. He remembers they use to be so white when they were first in bloom. He crossed the road and picked a few to add some wild life to his studio. But that was months ago and where the summer had its numerous stories told, his pages remain blank, blank as snow.

Across from the field is a small stand of trees. Pines, beach, bitch and maple so densely grown together they give the illusion that a real forest stretches out from behind them. But the storyteller knows better. Beyond the field and the trees are not more trees and more fields but a subdivision. And behind that, a church, a mall, two gas stations and yet another subdivision.

He contemplates this as a vanilla scented incent stick burns away. Smoke twists and dissipates in front of him and the blinking cursor on the screen, but he is lost in thought and pays no attention to either smoke or computer.  He wants so much more than this repetitious stench of urban, suburban sprawl. And so he attempts to write in the words of his favorite author “I want it all to be true because the world really does need griffins and monopods and unicorns and fire-breathing dinosaurs and rivers of stone and impossible and beautiful stories in it. And so she wrote a book”. And so did he. Or at least he attempted to.

When not writing or attempting to write or thinking of amazing and awful things to write about, he tried to make his world as impossible and beautiful as they are in the fairy tales. He grew his hair long and got an apartment on the top story of a six floor building. Surly with his hair bushing his belt loops and with his desk by the window, this would attract a prince or two to come along and rescue him from the monotony of twenty-first century living. And really, it doesn’t even need to be a prince. The floor length mirror and tapestry would certainly be reminiscent of The Lady of Shallot. Gazing at the city in the distance, his Camelot, the stream two blocks over, the wild flowers and grasses with the amber seed heads. All of these reflected in the pages in books of poetry and prose upon his bookshelf.

And so he works by night and day, weaving stories and sending them to publishers to pay rent and student loan debt. Slowly altering his world to include all the wondrous thing which the pages in his books project into the theater of his mind. Perhaps one day, he will get up from his desk, break his mirror and leave the apartment. He will get a canoe and paddle down the stream, to the river and to a place where the world is new and fresh and renewing. Away from his Camelot and his high towers. If he can over come the curse the lady or all those princess who sleep forever and are incased in glass coffins. He will shatter all the glass and tear up all the pages and truly write something new.

He might find himself in the middle of a wooded glen, alive and not dead. Build a hut and raise chickens and a hog. A summer sun will shine through the canopy and autumnal leaves will church breath feet, cloven or otherwise and he will be happy; the baba yaga before she grew old and wicked. And perhaps he will give shelter to a hunter and will repay him with a stag and with his happily-ever-after love. And ivy will climb up the chimney and he will cut his hair and grow pumpkins, as big and as round as the moon.