Cannot Afford These Artifacts

I am staying in a huge manor house filled with many guests. There is an event happening, but a mystery as well, a game like Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. The guests are all very well dressed and walking through the gardens, seeing and being seen. They are erecting a pavilion there for a wedding. People are arriving for the celebration, and many porters hustle back and forth, lugging carts of leather, traveling trunks stamped with exotic locales. Next to the brass and shiny buttons of the porters' uniforms, these world beaten trunks thump of authority and safaris and old money.

I grow bored of being underfoot, dodging all the hustle and bustle, and wander. The house and grounds are filled with all kinds of odd artifacts and curiosities. In the garden and all around the reflecting pool are perverse and beautiful sculptures, terrible likenesses and abstract emotions. Inside the manor, the rooms and hallways twist and turn disproportionately, long sparse halls and spiral staircases and windows in odd places. Every room is filled with knickknacks and immense furniture of history: Americana bottle caps and gentleman's dart boards from the 1700s and potsherds and tiny stone great mother sculptures and giant replicas of Andy Warhol's Chairman Mao paintings.

Everything, absolutely everything has a tiny white price tag, attached with some light cotton string.

I wander up and down the hallways, through the galleries, seek out odd doors. In every room, I look at the items that catch my eye; I look at the price tag. I try and figure out the person who has priced these things, valued them in such bold, black script.

A family-heritage King James Bible. A Tibetan thangka. An old lithograph in a beautiful but battered frame of a strong jawed woman with smooth dark hair, holding a grinning baby. Books, piles and piles of books. Preserved circus posters. Music boxes, old dusty mirrors the size of entire walls in huge gold frames. Priceless pieces and dime store junk, I look at all of their prices.

Then somehow I am there with her, the woman who owns all this. She is the intended bride, determined to have her wedding. There is another woman, a mistress, and they are fighting for a man who is oblivious to their war. Somehow they know I know, they unite in their desire to kill me, I know their secret. They think I am going to tell.

The woman marrying the man wears white and red for her wedding dress, and the woman losing the man is dressed in bridesmaid pink. She is having her dress fitted, we are discussing last ditch efforts. The wedding is drawing close; she is starting to give up. She is bitter. They trap me in a tower with a metal spiral staircase. They seal me in and intend to flood the tower, but I escape through a window and manage to climb by ivy and stone and scraped knees down into the garden.

I cannot afford their artifacts anyway, I think to myself as I run away from the manor. It is only by cunning and climbing that I will be able to stay alive.

I am just a girl then, with colorful mismatched clothes, running through the garden

~ Dream, The Agency of Bliss, 2012