The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 448

Anemogram VI

And it came to pass that on the eighth day of his journey, a tired, gray pilgrim on horseback approached the home he had left in search of adventure and knowledge when a teenager. The Rider had unceremoniously travelled for what seemed an overly long lifetime, and only now had any inkling that, as a child, he was ridiculously and overly susceptible to the provocative, cackling, shrill, bugle wails of the disingenuous, painted sirens. The lures had posed on the steep mountainside outside of town, right on the slope where he was now perched, as the cacophonous sentries, positioned at the desired land’s gates made a mockery of the fixed, written words of the book he had favored in youth. The Rider pulled back the reins and dismounted his black, white, and gray spotted companion and together they took in the view.

His eyes panned over a setting which seemed to be other than what his half century old memory recalled. Below were the brown and the flimsy, which had callously encroached on the green and the sturdy which were what was in his mind. On the ground near him were the charred stumps and the haphazard, blackened, fallen logs. The visible insects had devoured the majority of the softer brown wood, but seemed to have no interest in the parts which had been scorched. These remnants, which were slowly being