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TRANSFORMATION: A Dance

Short Story by Rob Mohr

latino woman

 

We reached cruising altitude, when, seated in my refuge-window seat, I was focused on the fields and forest as they peeked through surrounding cumulus clouds that formed the front edge of an approaching hurricane. Each glimpse revealed land and foliage painted with variable shades of gold and orange flames created by the rising sun. My view was framed in part by the black silk hair of a girl I had noticed earlier in the gate area. She had looked at me and smiled as we stood waiting to board the airplane.

She now lay, by the hand of providence, nestled against the aircraft bulkhead in the seat in front of me. As we boarded she had been impossible to not notice, slim, dressed in slacks and an off-white silk blouse. Her clear, brown, handsome face, intelligent eyes, soft mouth with just the right red lipstick had reflected all of the qualities of a well-groomed Latin woman. She exuded the fresh, alive qualities, a female, keenly aware of herself, can. Now, clearly asleep, she made the soft sounds of dreaming.

While focused on the jewel like fragments of land and foliage shielded in part by the front line of clouds, I suddenly realized that the substance of the young woman’s dream had begun to invade my senses—a faded cloth without the clarity possible in my own dreams—but intriguing all the same. Without warning her dream surged, then spread—a matrix—cancer penetrating my mind with ancient Coptic power.

In that moment I was inside her dream, a part of her fabricated, illusionary world. Somehow I had been pulled into her consciousness. Aware of the aroma that saturated the space around us, unknown forms began to take shape, as sounds new to my experience filled the air, and substances with taste unknown to my pallet were being consumed by the two of us. The nerves along my spine exploded with activity never before experienced. All she felt and understood and sensed were incorporated into my being, my consciousness. Her dreams, mine now, were fully in place, developed, and inhabited whole cloth, woven, within both of us.

Transformed, I became aware of my subtle, soft, rounded form, with just enough breast volume, and lift, to entice. My skin, brown with a natural glow as a result of the work of the early morning and late afternoon sun, the only light allowed to touch it, was in every way wholesome, and I suspect, a delight to touch. My hair was black silk, hung in a curve around my face that highlighted its perfection. And as I licked my lips the realization that my mouth, a perfectly shaped, deep soft red, made me the object of every male mouth I passed.

The dream continued to expand, now filled with the sounds and smells of an Oceanside village. As I, we, walked men’s heads turned and women showed envy of the package the gods had allowed me to be. A man, quite handsome, tall, broad-shouldered, narrow hips moved in my direction. Was he someone I had met? He extended his arms in what was clearly an invitation to dance. My arms slipped gently around his shoulders as we began the slow turns of a classic waltz in harmony with music drifting from a twelve string guitar being strummed by a young man seated legs crossed on the sand of a beach to the right of the Malecon, the stage upon which we had been placed.

At that moment the airplane shuddered and bounced as we passed through the leading edge of the encroaching hurricane. This violent jarring motion forced us to awake.

With a sense of knowing, she turned in her seat, and rose up on her knees, with eyes, glistening in the low light, intense in their focus, she looked back at me. Her spreading smile pulled me into the whole of her being.

“I’ll wait for you at the end of the ramp.” She whispered, her intent clear.

“Yes,” I replied, realizing that we had entered a new and unexplored world.

“Oh,” she asked, “was that a god playing the guitar?”