Mystic Waters
877 Words
Finger by finger, I release my hand from my mitten, letting it fall to the snow when I'm free. I watch, almost as if I'm outside my own body watching from a distance, as my bare hand rises toward the water's surface, trembling. Maybe from the cold, or maybe out of fear. I can't tell.
For once in my life — just once — I want to act on impulse. I'm so tired of being reasonable.
But nothing prepares me for the response I receive.
As I reach out to touch the water, it reaches back. A tendril of it rises from the basin, defying gravity itself, stretching toward my outstretched fingers like a living thing. When it touches me, the first thing I feel is warmth. Impossible warmth— not lukewarm but hot, like boiling water on a stove top. But it doesn't burn me, instead it flows through my fingertips, up my arm, into my chest, and through the rest of my body.
I try to pull away, but it pulls me in instead. Not gently, no. It wraps around my wrist and grabs a hold of me, yanking me hard, and suddenly I'm not standing at the basin's edge anymore. I'm falling into it.
The world around me dissolves, and I try to scream as it all folds in on itself and vanishes. The void swallows my scream as I fall through a velvety darkness, warm, soft and yet terrifying. There is no up. There is no down. There is only the sensation of falling, endlessly. The music swells all around me until it's not just sound but a full vibrating sensation that is unavoidable.
Every note vibrates in my bones. Every chord resonates in my blood, calling to me. I feel myself coming apart, atom by atom, unmade and yet remade. It should hurt. It should be terrifying.
The scent of roses and wine, lofts its way through the void, filling my nostrils. And then silence. Stillness, blinding light.
All motion suddenly ceases, and I feel solid ground beneath me. Cool and smooth marble. My palms press against it, my knees ache from the impact, my lungs burn as I gasp for air. For a long moment, I forgot how to breathe at all.
I open my eyes and what little breath I've gained catches in my throat at what I see before me. I'm in a ballroom. And not like any ballroom I've seen in New York — not the grand spaces of Manhattan's elite. This is something else entirely. Something that makes my artist's brain stutter in appreciation.
The ceiling stretches upward impossibly high above me, so far that it might as well be the sky itself. And perhaps it is, because painted there, or projected more like, is a night sky that moves. Stars wheel slowly across the dark blue background, constellations I don't recognize shifting and realigning as I watch. A comet traces a brilliant arc from one end of the ballroom to the other. While a nebula pulses with vivid color.
Chandeliers hang suspended in midair, with no visible chains or wires holding them there. They're made of light, not crystal, but pure light, casting illumination throughout. Everything it touches looks like a painting. Or like a dream.
And everywhere — everywhere — there are dancers.
Hundreds of them, spinning across the marble floor in elaborate gowns and formal wear that spans centuries and continents of history. They're all masked. Every single one of them. And as I watch, frozen on my hands and knees on the marble floor, I realize they're all watching me back.
I risk taking a quick glance down at myself.
My peacoat is gone. My jeans, scarf, and worn winter boots — all vanished. In their place: a gown. Deep blue fabric that shimmers with trapped starlight, flowing around me like water, pooling at my knees in waves of midnight and sapphire with flickering white orbs throughout.
Sitting back, I raise my hands to examine them as they tremble, their gloved in silver silk to my elbows. The fabric clinging to my skin like a second skin.
The music starts up again — the same waltz that drew me in, that pulled me to the fountain — but it sounds different here, cleaner, brighter. Fuller. More alive. Like it's been waiting for me to appear to be complete.
I scramble to my feet, the gown tangling around my legs. The dancers flow back into rhythm all around me, like water around stone in a river. Their masked faces are curious, appraising as they pass. A man in a wolf mask bows as he passes. A woman with real honest-to-goodness, butterfly wings — real wings, iridescent and fluttering — brushes against my arm and whispers something I don't understand.
I spin in place, looking for an exit, a door, a window — anything that might lead back to the fountain, to Central Park, to the world I know.
There's nothing. Just the ballroom, stretching endlessly in every direction, walls of marble or moonlight too far away to reach. And the dancers keep spinning, and the music keeps playing.
Where am I?
How did I get here?
And how the hell do I get home?
- Writer
