Kasey’s Weird Dream Of The Colosseum

Kasey careered down the smooth stone steps of the Colosseum, her feet bare and blackened, her dark blonde hair billowing wild behind her, and the once-white and flowing dress, now torn off above her cracked and welted knees, cloyed at her dripping skin in the sweltering, airless heat. 

Her thumping heart was clamouring through the echoing hallway of her chest as she wiped her gleaming brow with the back of a brown, filmy hand, and the dust and moans of the long dead wailing gladiators and condemned beasts swirled around her and through her, in her, and the thick, ancient dust of limestone and powdered brick disturbed by her pounding feet stung her eyes and coated her furiously blinking lids.

This vast amphitheatre was empty and yet the baying and cackling of the blood-crazed multitudes had her reaching to cup her ears. As if that might drown out this piteous cacophony

The stench of decay and death lingered still and suffused the ancient Roman air, for all the soggy red mosh of sawdust bearing the day’s blood, entrails and shattered bones had been sloshed and sluiced with water and vinegar down the opened, algae-encrusted sewers.

This 19 year old girl, in the last decaying days of her teenage years and already traded in innocence would have run her stiff smooth tongue along the crumbling cascade of her collapsing teeth — if she could.

But her tongue was incapable of movement, pinned to the floor of her mouth as if by a jagged poisoned trident as the numbness spread, and the baying, slavering ghouls above this godless pit raised their thumbs to signify her demise or her survival.

Running hard and scared, and yet curiously immobile and barely awake, her cracked lids flickered as she felt herself falling, falling away even as the faraway buzz of the surgeon’s spinning saw came towards her.

Kasey’s tongue piercing had crumbled and the central piece had lodged in the blubbery pulmonate, which had already closed over, and so she lay there now, just the latest sacrificial victim in this over-sterilised modern arena of measured blood and sacrifice, her untouchable teeth an untended graveyard of collapsed and age-stained tombstones.

Oh, what dreams were coming now as the voices above her faded and dissipated — like those gladiators and disembodied beasts — and she stumbled and staggered further into the labyrinthine depths beneath this most unnatural amphitheatre, into the sewers, tunnels and mysterious pathways of her drugged other-worldly consciousness …

Picking her way now, timidly, tinily through the giant calico lilies on the overgrown plumage outside that abandoned house she often passed on the harbour road, she barely avoided a giant mollusc as she slid and sloshed across its slimy unguent silvered slipway.

The thick grass and giant lettuce-like shrubs, enormous shimmering buttercups, vast parasol-like sashaying daisies and the rustling decayed leaves parted easily enough, but then there came a fierce shaking and the high grass shoots seemed to bristle and tremble, and the nearby clearing reverberated with thundering menace. 

A giant furry marmalade paw appeared, out of which, amid the densely coated sinews, glinted the curved polished ivory of impossibly long and pointed stalactite claws, each one longer than Kasey’s entire body, and the beast behind it was pounding towards her, the vast undulating marmalade body and the other enormous shaggy forelegs all in a deadly synchronicity of purpose and intent. 

This fearsome beast was running in her direction and she dived headlong into a soft pink and yellow tinged rose that closed around her.

Even in her terror, she realised she had never felt anything as soft as these enormous petals, which made velvet seem abrasive and rough, like that old jute sack she found in Granny Molly’s turf shed.

Not that she had time to process these contrasts and correspondences just yet. Right now, she grabbed onto one of the petals and there was just enough tension for her to yank herself to her feet, ready for action or further evasion.

Mere inches back from the path, she pulled a dark waxy leaf across her for desperate cover, gripping the quivering stem with both hands, and ignoring the reefing brush of an enormous thorn that had scraped across the palm of her soon crimson-rivuleted hand, she held on with every rippling sinew of her filthy arms as the giant cat with the enormous fiery faraway eyes and dilated pupils dashed past her, all rolling grace and danger as the immense tail disappeared around a farrago of unkempt marigolds grasping for sun and sustenance.

This giant creature was running from something, or for something, so did not stop to coldly sniff out a minuscule girl’s pounding terror and her numbed helplessness, and then flip her into the air with a desultory paw  — and catch her in those razor fangs before devouring her limb by limb and stretched out sinew by stretched out sinew — like that bird she saw shredded at the bottom of their garden that time.

Only now the cat had gone, did Kasey tumble headlong from the shielding rose, onto the overgrown grass, and for the first time, she inhaled the heady scent of the nearby lavender bed, and she could even taste it on the curiously numbed bedding of her tongue.

Gathering a fallen rose petal big enough to swaddle the Baby Jesus in his crib, she sunk her bleeding hand into it, in an effort to salve the deep red surface wound.

The bleeding soon stopped and she wiped her hand on her well-stained dress and darted over to the faded black oak front door of the house. It was so rotten she passed easily though a gaping crack and into the hallway, the thick dust and sand on the square terracotta tiles tickling her bare feet.

No-one lived here now, only the gossamer-webbed memories of a once proud home now shamefully and hopelessly neglected.

Inside and out of harm’s way in the immediate moment, she reached into her pocket and drew from it at a large crumb of chocolate, which she index-fingered into her parched mouth  — and felt herself suddenly sprouting up and up, thickening and widening — like Alice after she ate a piece of that cake.

“Eat Me” it had told her, and how could that girl, adrift yet passionately awakened and emboldened, have refused such a temptation in that land of visioned dreams, riddles and commands to be obeyed or defied?

Through the living room doorway on her right, the dust and destruction was no more as Kasey came upon a bright blue-eyed little girl, no more than four or five, dressed in a weirdly familiar light purple summer dress with daisies on the bodice.

This chubby-cheeked cherub was poised, one leg in the air, the dimpled crease at the junction of thigh and the back of her knee so cute. She smiled up at Kasey, and twinkled a bright and wide-eyed ‘Hiya’ at her and beckoned her in closer.

The better to whisper her gratitude that she had come back to see her.

“Who are you?” Kasey asked this vivacious creature with her tumbling fair tresses and wide blue-grey eyes, like a brightening winter sky, turned down slightly at the corners, and those curling lashes, though she fancied she already knew her. Had always known her.

“I am you are we are you are we,” the little one trilled, as she began to pirouette in grinning, spinning, accelerating circles of delight and pure, blissed out pleasure.

A clock struck in the hallway outside, and the small one dashed from the room. 

‘Wait!” Kasey called after this compelling little creature.

She ran through the door to follow her, but rather than the hallway she had left to enter the room, the dust was thick and sandy now, and the cawing of circling seagulls drew her gaze upwards and outwards.

She was on a large stretch of familiar undulating beach, the tide out way beyond her vision, but she could still hear the swish and sway of the far off waters. The sand was damp and there was something so reassuring in the soft give of the packed ancient grains beneath her toes. She turned to gaze behind her at the translucent perfect footprints she was leaving in her wake.

She was not alone now, as she noted the woman with her back to her, near the huge rocks that signalled the end of the grass verge and the beginning of the beach.

This woman wore a light pink peaked corduroy cap, and across the back of her tan collarless jacket a downy-haired baby’s head peeped out from a harness.

Kasey called out to her, but the woman did not hear her, or ignored her, and walked away towards the smooth stiff stone steps and railing leading to a carpark, with just one car in it.

A red one with a curved roof like and Easter egg, exactly like the one they used to have when they first moved to their town. Kasey would have been three or so.

A shrill, trill of delight caught her ear, and she looked out towards the sea, and could just make out the little girl in blue denim dungarees and a matching powder blue top.

She moved towards the girl, and could see that she was standing in a shallow rock pool, and the cry she had heard was obviously something to do with the wet top knot atop the little one’s head.

Kasey laughed as, having enjoyed the experience, the tiny one dipped down at the waist and again swept her top knot into the salty water, and stood up, giddy with pleasure.

The little one squealed with joy and mischief, even as a laughing Kasey tried to admonish her but rather revelled in the utterly unselfconscious way this little mite splashed and played.

‘Wouldn’t it be great to be able to enjoy the moment, just like that, all the time?’ Kasey observed, as she turned towards the woman and the baby.

But they were gone … no car either. Just a lolling marmalade cat with an immense tail strutting across the deserted carpark, and who made her shudder momentarily.

She turned back, and she was alone on this beach.

But she didn’t feel alone, as she communed with the now lengthening shadows of evening. The sun was a mesmerising marmalade orange fortune-teller’s bowl in the horizon, the sky vividly red-yellow and darkening navy blue.  

“I am you are we are you are we,” she whispering to herself, her morning-sky eyes shining.

A lone black seagull shrieked high above as it swooped into view, wings playing off the pungent, heavily-salted breeze, soaring above it all, as Kasey flipped in and out of past and present … purposelessly adrift on the soft winds of reverie. 

‘Who will call home this errant bird or tame the black gulls ghosting across my being,’ she asked the no-one there. 

‘Oh, sky where is they squall to mirror my tempestuous world?’ said Kasey, as she stepped away from sun, sea and lessening torment.

Somehow, these were feelings no longer, but rather felt more like words chosen to convey her moods and visions.

To compose and convey the wonder and the terror of how she met the world.

A light with which to illuminate and negotiate the sewers, tunnels and mysterious pathways of her labyrinthine depths.

Stranded on land for now, but with visions of mothers, spinning cherubs and the random clarities of angels in fair view to guide her now beyond these anxious tides.

And maybe one day home to herself, she thought, as the faraway voices grew louder and her tongue began to stir, and her teeth felt strong as polished ivory, only white and gleaming, and destined to smile anew.