H. M. Patterson / Sailing by Night

Sailing by Night by H. M. Patterson

CONJUNCTIONS:54, Spring 2010 Perhaps it was some childhood backmind cinema of the snowpack that had been melting from the top of Roan Mountain that springlike winter—two wholefainéant feet of it lollygagging its way down to the Doe River like a little girl picking mountain flowers—that caused me to dream my dream so deep: Our kitchen pooled with the oaky aqueous collection, then the hall, then my room, and in I slipped from my bed’s edge, sank down opposite bubbles breaking away from my cowboy-clad pajamas. I breathed in the mountaintop’s sweat. My lungs waxed with the earthy wet of it.       Meemaw’s antiques grew. Her mammoth cupboard contents bobbled by. I clamored aboard a colossal ultramarine-colored teapot, hefting myself up, trembling and coughing, by its swan-neck spout. There were others inside the porcelain vessel, peeking out from beneath the half-fluted lid, neighbors, and some folks I didn’t know: a flannel-shirted man holding a writhing, venomous serpent, a boy in Mac-Alpine tartan—redheaded, with a crescent-shaped scar on his chin— playing cat’s cradle, and a stunning, big-busted lady working her wavy auburn hair into a bun. Our helmsman, an orange-toothed beaver, rode the handle and steered us with its waffled rudder tail.        A pirate, ocular socket patched and velvet vested, stood balanced atop the baluster kettle in stereotypical high-seas freebooters pose, pointed his sword in the direction he required we travel—he had a peg leg, too! … no parrot—and he winked at me with his exposed eye. We wove through the misty, swollen gorge before the real-life cloudburst sluiced in, and Meemaw nudged me awake and whispered … flood.