Daydream Believers

Sophie tucked in for an afternoon nap. She didn’t like the noise of the squabbling. It was disagreeable to her. She didn’t like noisy train stations. Tried to hustle through them with cotton in her ears. But the sleeping cabin was warm, not too warm, and the noise was held to an acceptable level, with the aid of two cotton balls, stuffed.

And so, for her, it was off to dreamlan…

And she was flying free in her beautiful balloon. In the sky bluer than blue. Azure blue. It was she who dotted the sky rather than a cloud. She was the cloud, hung in the sky like a painting, brushed. Her balloon a part of her, and she it, joined. 

A museum piece, lifelike. Stippled. Hatched.

Below the people looked up at her. But there would be no fireworks in the day. That would be a waste. In the night she would wow them. Give them something to see. To remember. To mis-remember. Always.

And she was approaching San Francisco.

She had always wished to be here. A city of dreams. She knew the city by the way the arterials circled and dipped as they approached the city by the bay. A strange city. Separated by water. An inland island. A literate people.

She was in San Francisco. Looking for a place to land. In a city famous for streets going up and down at strange angles. The buildings sprouted up straight but they appeared at ground level to grow at odd angles, together. Something to see on the ground as well as the sky. A tangle of streets, poles with wires, and few obvious places to land. The city was not designed for ballooning, yet it was a modern city regardless. She landed on a rooftop to avoid the tangle of wires. She liked rooftops anyway. She dropped her rope ladder. Climbed down.

On the ground she looked around for maniacs with lanterns. She was in San Francisco. 

The great San Francisco fire had been started with a gas lantern. By a cow, they say. Or was that Chicago? Same cow? And it changed the face of the city. Leveled it, though it is hard to tell now. But the city was today free of cow-herds.

She was in San Francisco. And the city was rich with culture. It was terrible to think of all the books burned in that fire. But today there were more bookstores than ever sprung up from the ashes. Including books about cows burning down the city, if that is the subject someone wishes to read. There were factional accounts of the disaster as well as tomes dedicated to the theme of cows and fire, fiction.

Metaphor. Parable. Even meta-fictional accounts.

There were also banks. But those vaults were not stuffed with knowledge. Those marble palaces were filled with coffers. A blight upon the city where capital is hidden away. Stratified. It is true that books were exchanged for money, but worth is another matter entirely. Worth is subjective. Variable. Subject to tremors. Quakes. But a book is always more valuable than a penny.