While They Sleep
Sitting in the dark while the house sleeps, its even breaths and snores like a rhythm in my ears, with only the light of a computer screen, I let my fingers carry me to distant places. I let them take me to places with colorful flowers and sparkling waterfalls. Places where I can be the princess and I don't have to kiss a frog if I don't want to! They take me to places that are dark and barren and with my sword I slay fire breathing dragons and creatures with three eyes, whose names haven't yet been tapped out on the keyboard. I run through crowded streets where I smell spices and sand pelts my face so I have to close my eyes but that's ok because I can see with my fingertips as I chase the school of fish that is running on fins with ten toes. I am lost in a land where shelves upon shelves surround me and the books sit on them while they watch me and whisper to each other.
"Do we know her, Alice?" asks a rabbit wearing a huge hat.
"I don't think so but maybe Tom does. Can you see him? He's so small," answers the girl with the long blonde hair as a boy, as small as my thumb, peeks out from the pages of his dusty book.
I can go where the Incas ruled, high above the clouds, and chase away the gold-hungry men with the funny hats because I'm not dizzy and my head isn't light. I trained for it with a little green man with long pointy ears and backward speech. Train me he did! In a land that I reach by walking through a wrinkle in the horizon, I rescue the prince and he asks me to stay but I say, “Not now because I have to sleep but I'll be back tomorrow.” So he tells me he'll leave the wrinkle be until he sees me again but he gives me a pebble to show the guard at the gate upon my return.
So now that it's late and I must sleep, I close the computer and rest my head. I let my dreams take the place of the keys under my fingers as I clutch the pebble tightly in my hand and sleep.
