Fantasmic

We waited.  Around us lingered a bubble of calm amidst the bustle and bright lights that fight the advancing darkness.  We waited, for years it seemed like.  Years of waiting, for this, for other things too.  We waited in daylight and twilight and the dim, flickering light of a hellish limbo, wonderful and horrible and absurd.  But for this we waited in the night.  It was the only thing we could do.

Listen- there, did you hear?  A promise.  Soon, they said.  We won't have to wait much longer.

And then.  The bright lights go out.  The storm of color and water begins.

Music vibrates in my eardrums, pounding, repeating those words with sly insistence- imagine, they tell us, dream.  Seductive, they call us to believe that what we see is real.  Believe.  My instincts rebel and shout that it's a lie, can't I see?  But the music drowns them out, the familiar songs warped and changed but still themselves, still a part of me or what once was me.  Dream, they call, and we dream.

A boat- no, three, passing us by.  Their passengers both familiar and strange.  They sing us the music we know and don't know, weaving their songs with light and color on the still water.

Another boat amidst fans of water and light.  They fly here, fight here, jump here, standing on the edge with what others say was one time empty but here is filled with the little boy.  Woman.  Whichever serves the purpose.

The light, the music, the water.

Wait, something is wrong.  The man next to me laughs, his whole body in his laugh, and I jump.  Something has gone bad in the dream.  The music tells me this, something's wrong.

A woman.  On the island.  Familiar from long ago, though not beloved like others were.  No, not at all.  She calls to a reflection, her laugh echoes the man beside me.  High pitched and unnatural.  The darkness stains the colors purple and green, sickly and unearthly hues.  She screams and laughs and the water responds, spraying up at the sky in fans once again.  A fine mist drifts over us.

Another woman- why are they all women, the ones that poison little girls and seduce little boys.  Another woman, even more familiar and dramatic; she doesn't call the water for she is the water, water and light and darkness.  She calls on something more terrible, from the pit of darkness and bullied childhood, rising up like a mountain with those first chords of music.  I stand, tremble, because this is no strange, corrupted scene of amused fear.  This is the scene from childhood, the I-couldn't-look-away-or-else fear I remember.  The mountain, the terror, he brings with him his demons and toys with them, as the chords call forth the last, the dragon.  And this one is real.

She rises up out of a woman, the dragon screeching at the sky so much closer to her than to us.  She screeches again, and what once was water is now fire, spreading rapidly across the still surface.  Perversely we step forward, mesmerized by the hellish beauty.

Flash.

The dragon screams, but the sword of light has cut through her.

Flash.

The fires die down and she screams again.  She collapses into herself until there is nothing left, no fire nor dragon nor chords of demons.

The music begins again, calling on us with sparks of color and light and water.  We stare.  Believe, it calls.  Dream.

And then it's gone.

We blink, awaken.  The lights, the bright ones, the real ones, pop back to life.  We remember now.  It wasn't real.

Around us, the people who had paused continue on their way, the dream commented on and then, almost immediately, forgotten.