Sharing Nightmares

L.M. St. James || The First Witness

The First Witness by 3stPoet

I

t's the middle of April, 2:49 A.M. Behind the gates of a quaint suburbia, a cold wind picks up. Both children and adults try to shake off their sleep long enough to unfold their blankets and burrow deep within them. Outside, the fallen leaves scuttle across the pavement, carried by the wind's wandering fingers. Stray dogs and lost souls alike
shiver in their sleep, their aching bones feeling the wind's chilly caress. They dream of warmth. And high above the dreamers, dead stars try in vain to shine through the city lights.

Boys who don't know better would've told their friends that tonight's breeze could be equated to a woman. In their eyes, her cool kisses are a soothing balm to the heated skin of the working man. Within her walls, there should be only comfort. But these boys are yet to realize that a woman is more than what a man makes her to be.

The "woman", that is the wind, dances through the empty streets to the rhythm of an ageless, nameless song. The train of her gown is littered with dead leaves, and her hair has long since come undone. She carries with her the smell of the city--of sewage, smoke, and burning rubber. In this new stage, she breathes in the smell of trampled
grass, wet fur, and laundry detergent. All of these things the wind weaves into her train.

By the end of this story, she should have carried the suburbia-smell with her far away
from here and into a new place, where she will breathe in the aromas of her new stage. Time has borne witness to the wind bedecking herself with the breaths of everyone that she has ever danced with. She has adorned herself with laughter and lamentation. She has kissed away their tears, and the salt on their cheeks has become crystals upon her raiment. For in the same way a woman should be more than what a man makes her to be, the wind has built herself into something more than what she was Created for, and she has become a queen.

Now deep within the suburbia, resting atop a low knoll, stands a proud stone house. Tall and imposing, it stands, kingly, next to the low houses neighboring it. A wrought iron fence wraps around a trimmed garden; artfully decorated with foreign blossoms.

The wind takes her dance over to the sharp, iron rods, where she wraps skilled fingers around each and every one. The iron sings to her, and she breathes in the smell of their paint. The topmost windows of the house are open, but iron bars are welded into the frame to protect the house's inhabitants from looters and thieves.

The wind drags her train through the carpet of grass once before flying up to the open window. Inside, a little girl is sleeping. Her short, black hair has become ruffled in her slumber, and her mouth is slightly open. Her blanket has fallen to the floor, and she shivers in the breeze coming in from her window. There's a desk pushed up against the
wall at the foot of her bed. A lamp is plugged into a socket in the wall, but the bulb is not lit. The wind drags into herself the smell of something burning.

The wind takes everything in. When she finishes doing so, she bids the sleeping girl
goodbye with one last fleeting kiss that ruffles her hair. Breathe in. Breathe out. The
woman that is the wind drags into herself the smell of something dark.

Rot. Decay. Blood. Fire. The darkness smells of death.

No man can touch the wind. But now there are hands dragging her down, pulling at her hair and unraveling her train. Everything that our queen, that is the wind, has built for herself the dark hands unravel.

She struggles against the darkness binding her. It smells of something older than the wind herself. The wind has borne witness to the dawn of the ages. She herself helped sweep away the primordial waters to form a vault in the heavens.

She is old, and she is powerful--

But this is something older than her. The darkness whispers to her the story of stories: its own story.The darkness describes itself as a gormless beast, a leviathan that created itself to slumber underneath the formless waters of the deep. It is upon these waters that the Spirit of God hovered, waiting for the beginning to begin. But when Adam was created out of the dust of the earth, it took the shape of the tree that housed the serpent from
whence sin sprang.

It thinks of itself as a man now, an usher waiting for his cue. The wind can see him, standing in the shadows behind the burnt out lamp. It is his
hands that are dragging from the wind's body her ageless cloak, wrapping her arms in shadowy chains. He is a tall man, a shadowy man wearing a coat that writhes against his stovepipe of a torso and a large hat that covers his eyes. She doesn't think she'd like to see his eyes.

Shadowy hands break her legs, and they force her to kneel in front of the sleeping girl. Her sleeping face remains angelic, but now the naked wind can see the darkness slumbering within the girl, enshrouded within the depths of her purity.

Upon the little girl's forehead is a name shrouded in mystery. Before the shivering girl, the wind trembles. The man with the coat that writhes laughs at her fear.

The child's eyes remain closed, but as she breathes in, the wind can taste that which
has taken ahold of the child. It is not the same darkness that holds her down. It is an old
darkness, yes, but not of the man with the writhing coat's. She knows this darkness.

The darkness that the wind knows speaks to her with the voices of a legion. The angel asleep beneath the sheets is oblivious to the evil speaking from within her. She's deaf to the voices, but the wind is not. With its broken legs, it is forced to submit to the dominion of the voices within the child.

The voices coil around the wind's heaving throat. Shadowy hands take the wind's breath and fashion out of it a shadowy noose. They lasso the wind, who is no longer free, and impose upon it the role it is to play in the second coming. She will be their
herald. They will ride the wind, calling out in a loud voice: "Come and see: the mother of darkness reborn."

The child sleeps on.The man with the coat that writhes steps out of the shadows and
into the, now windless, night. Under the dead stars, his coat of crows cry havoc.