Snail Trail

To them it was undying moonlight on stars; except they were whelked beneath the paradise garden and the stones thus studding out across these imagined depths of sky must have possessed an imagined light, too. But which imagined and which was imagined, neither could argue their case to the logical conclusion. Undug vistas reaching from their own nadir of existence to even a dream's mistaken zenith.

Arthur, as a child, vowed to dig towards them, intent on rescue. He, too, had dreamed: a dream that took him further and more seamlessly than the more normal dreams that often made the sleep of bigger bodies so uncomfortably chimneyed with interludes of anxious waking.

Arthur was in the garden, when he should have been in his bed. And the evening shivered with magic. Paradise was not the word. This was better. He had left his sister Amy staring at the dull and shrinking eye of reality. She promised to hold it steadily away from him, thus releasing his own adventures from any concerns of wear and tear. She did this from the goodness of her heart. Her adventures were stories in real books and there would be plenty of time to stock up with those during daylight hours.

Thus allowed to figure in his own dream with independent knightly bravado, Arthur took his favourite trowel and commenced a new mine system, threading the clammy soil with precarious shafts. He needed to reach the overlapping spirals of glisten that would betoken trails. Where each trail led was yet another trail, with no obvious creatures to have made them or to use them. A tiny train might use the sleepers as tracks but its steam funnel is lodged against a stone and it puffs uselessly in another mine that Arthur forgot digging the previous night. Tonight there were snails he sought. Not trains. And once he had a specific goal, all other goals became the obsessions of someone else. Other times, other places.

Amy was suddenly disturbed by a grown-up figure telling her to stop sitting up in bed and go to sleep. So, just at this crucial moment, the trapped reality fled her heart-felt grim resistance within the optic fuse.

Arthur's eary shape indicated he was asleep already in the other bed, so the figure finally withdrew with the hush or hiss of a finger to the lip. And, with a gust of release, the trails tangled beyond control; each a maze of glisten thickening out into slime. Breath came in fitful puffs, without obvious vents. Large inquisitive slugs squirmed into a risk of reality, coiling sluggishly from mine-riddled minds.

The paradise garden is a magical place. We can only dream when there, but we can't dream of it.