DREAMERS…

    

    On Delos the shepherd Dinos Siriandu dreamed he caught a chicken in his yard for dinner. The chicken had led him a merry chase. He cornered it, finally, against a bale of wire by the side of his hut.

    The chicken did not die right.

    He put the bird to the block and beheaded it with a single short stroke of his hatchet. The head fell away.

    Normally the body trembled, the legs tried to run. It was a while before the chicken knew it was dead.

    But this bird did nothing. It just stopped.

    Normally there was blood.

    This chicken had no blood.

    In his dream Siriandu was repulsed. He threw the bird off the block. He crossed himself. He kicked away the carcass.

    The carcass struggled to its feet and walked away.

    He woke, listening to what his wife called Hecate’s wind howling off the mountain.

    

***

    

    Tasos Katsimbalis lay sleeping in his Athens bedroom dreaming of his friend Jordan Thayer Chase.

    He saw an island rising out of a dark starlit sea, rising to a single peak. At its summit, by torchlight, a group of ecstatic naked women- Greek women, young and lithe-slaughtered a huge black bull with their bare hands. By sheer weight of number they pulled it to the ground. They tore it open. They drank its blood and ate handfuls of its living flesh. The bull bellowed. Tasos watched them carry pieces of it away with them and down the mountain.

    The bull rose up bloody and maimed on its hind legs, its intestines dangling, steaming, and slowly became a man. The man was Jordan Chase. Tasos waved to him and Chase waved back. And faded.

    

***

    

    In Heraklion Lelia Narkisos dreamed herself lying naked in a driving wind, a brutal stinging sandstorm, and impassively watched the force of it tear at her and the hot winds crumble her to dust.

    Then she was whole again. Lying in a dark sudden silence. In a hotel room in Heraklion and on an unknown mountain all at once.

    Powerful. Cruel.

    Inevitable.