I am standing in a line that holds itself still by choice.
The woman in front of me holds a small jar of light against her chest the way another woman might hold a sleeping child. The light inside the jar is the color of a bruise just beginning to heal. She looks past it. She trusts it to look at her.
I understand, the way one understands in dreams, that we are waiting to give something back.
The hall is longer than the building that contains it. The dome above is a sky that has been convinced to behave. Lamps hang from the air itself, filled with weather. I watch a slow lavender storm turn inside one of them and recognize it the way you recognize a word in a language you almost speak.
When my turn comes my hands are empty.
The keeper behind the glass is patient. Her hair is the dark of a room just after the candle. She wears the blue of a long afternoon. She says, “Show me your hands,” and I show her my hands, and she nods as if emptiness is the correct answer.
She reaches across the counter and draws a thread of gold from the air between us.
I want to tell you the thread is beautiful. It is. It is also something else. It is the exact length of a thing I have been carrying in silence. When she pulls, I feel the give of it leaving me. When she sets it down on the wood between us, it lies there like a sentence I have been about to say for years.
“This was yours,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and the saying makes it true.
She asks if I want it back.
I think about this for what feels like the rest of my life. Behind me, the line holds itself still. Ahead of me, the case glows with the saved weather of strangers. The woman who was in front of me is somewhere very still I can almost see.
“If I take it back,” I ask, “what do I lose?”
The keeper smiles as if she has been asked this question many times and keeps the answer in her pocket.
“The space,” she says.
I look at the thread. It is so small. It is the size of a held breath, the size of a held tongue, the size of a door kept closed. I have built rooms inside the place it used to occupy. I have furnished them. People I love are sleeping in them.
“Keep it,” I say.
She puts it in a vial the color of clear water and labels it with my name in a handwriting I recognize as my own.
“You will dream of this,” she says. “That is part of the agreement.”
Behind her, in the deep of the case, I see a vial that has been here longer than the building. It glows faintly, the way a star glows faintly when you have been looking at it on purpose. I understand it is also mine. I understand I have been here before. I understand the line I am standing in is a line of returnings, and I am every one of them.
The keeper is already looking past me to the next supplicant.
I step away from the counter and the space the thread leaves behind is singing, very softly, the way a glass sings when you run a wet finger around its rim.
I wake holding my own hand.
Thank you for taking this trip with me. I had fun. I hope you do too.
— Stomari
Filed under: Dream Narrative
Explore more:
Home • Archive • Guide • Rights
Makari • Stomari • Mabst • Panoma
Video • Audio • Gallery • Catalog
Creative practice. Art lives here.
Continue with Stomari
Elsewhere in the Studio
Kirenya is a creative studio weaving fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid works that move between dream, structure, and signal. Through multiple pen names, we explore layered meaning across stories, essays, and experimental dispatches.