The story-teller's apprentice

A number of discrete visions circulate amidst each other, none yet subject to the magician's synthesizing spell:

The old folktale in which a farmboy, bewitched by love, leaves everything he's known to follow a dark-haired stranger into the night. My favorite recent rendering in Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

John, Erica, and I dancing on the crowded floor of the Walnut Room. And side-by-side on the sidewalk after: a tiny coterie of fatherless children.

The Irish custom of leaving for the fairies a saucer of milk on the sill at bedtime.

My face in a mirror at Pearl Vision, my eyes framed by a new pair of glasses (the first since Blake misplaced the last pair four years ago).

The most recent in lost or stolen mail: an Oxford Annotated Bible. While walking to Old City alone, my head still drunk with thoughts of John, it occurs to me that I've been the object of some epistolary curse, and that the curse will undo itself when I have ascertained its reason.

Jeehyun in Ithaca where no light obscures the stars and the Gorges and Falls are still visited by spirits. The dark: her torso leaning out a window, the wind dancing in her hair.