Oracle
—Anne Sexton
It rained all night and by morning the trees had turned to glass. It was a brooding, melancholy start to November.
I had another of those dreams that seemed more far more frequent now—strange rambling dialogues with a beautiful woman whose face I could never recall, let alone the details of our conversations.
Her aura persisted though, long after waking, and pervaded everything like morning mist and dampness.
She was at the tip of my tongue, on the edge of my mind, hidden in lonely gray distances that harboured mystery and in rain trails blurring and marring familiar things.
I met Mireya and Rab at The Bakery hoping the steaming coffee and blueberry scones would restore a sense of normalcy, but even the morning routine seemed tinged with a sepia ambiance of another time, and I couldn’t shake the feeling.
But finally, back at the agency, amid the subdued chaos of a Monday morning, I was distracted enough to finally relax, let go and find me, and by the time Mireya phoned at noon wanting to go antiquing I enthusiastically agreed.
“You seemed preoccupied this morning, Cole—more bad dreams?”
We were browsing through curios at Bygones and Mireya was gently probing my mood while trying not to dig in too much.
“It’s not so much the dreams are bad, Mir, as they’re damned perplexing. I feel a need to recall the content, but can’t remember even one simple thing.”
“You seemed depressed,” she whispered.
“I don’t know if that’s from the dreams or this dreary weather.”
“Well, you know today is Día de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead.”
I chuckled at her Latin tendency to verge to the dark side. “We called it All Souls Day when I was growing up in Catholic parochial school and saw it as a holiday to eat our Halloween candy—that’s all.”
Her eyes were dark and somber. “Not for us, my friend, it’s much more than that—it’s the autumn rites associated with remembering the dead and the after life.”
As she was talking, my gaze fell upon an antique Ouija board with the familiar arcane letters.
“Well, speaking of the dead—look at this. “ I held up the board and said facetiously, “you could celebrate the dead, or, on the other hand, using the centuries-old tradition of a mystic table, you could go one better and summon them.”
I said it with the requisite levity and sarcasm meant to lighten her morose mood, but my words had the opposite effect.
Her eyes grew huge and she turned pale. “You musn’t joke about such matters, Cole—it’s not wholesome to contact the dead.”
I should have dropped the ghoulish subject there and then—I should have respected her feelings.
if I had, I would have been better off, but I've always been a rebel.
And that impulsive decision haunts me to this day.
One thing common to your characters that I like, they have flaws and know them.
that's very observant, Arthur - and they are inevitably conflicted