8. The Dream
Letty was in familiar rooms in the library at the University. She was regarded as someone who appreciated books more than people and the library staff, cut from the same cloth, left her alone. The smells were so potent. The books dust and sunlight. Perfect! A beautiful, sunny early fall day spent indoors amid the rustle of old paper and the unmistakable rhythm of the man reciting poetry.
This was how she knew she was dreaming. No one ever spoke much above a whisper at the school library and no one ever recited poetry. Especially her own! This was a secret she’d not even told Emily. A poem about poetry and dreams beginning.
“We never remember dreams beginning and
Forgetting them
They never end.”
“That’s –” she said and then they were dancing. Like you can be in dreams.
With the sunlight streaming in through thick-glassed windows. Now a waltz of some kind at just above a whisper and a man breathing in her ear.
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. All the words are yours and, because I have a library card, they are mine too.”
“You’re a – ”
“Thief. Yes.”
“I meant to say you’re a borrower.”
“No. I’m a thief.”
“Will you steal my heart?”
“Yes, Darling Letty. That and more.”
“Will you steal me away?”
“I believe the verse is sung thusly:
‘Away he came
With book and chain
And evil grin
He came again – ’”
“’To steal my heart’,” continued Leticia Walker Reed.
“’Which was his art’,” added the handsome stranger.
“’He took it all
Left me in thrall…’”
“Oh, continue, Darling Leticia. The song is in your voice.”
She continued.
“’I took it in
My only sin
To hope he’d see
My chastity’”
Then he sang the next verse of the tone poem she’s told no one about.
“‘And take it still
As was his will
Devouring me
Deliciously’”
And they both whispered, they were dancing in a library after all, the final lines:
“‘And totally
And totally’”
But before she could ask the handsome, dangerous man in indeterminate age, the diary was in her hands as it can be in dreams, and, as in dreams she could understand it.
“Read,” he said.
