She woke with the taste of feathers in her mouth.

Dinah was lying on the other pillow, curled into a ball, and she opened her eyes when Sarah turned over.

"Good morning," Sarah said, then remembered the night before. "Hey! How'd you get back in last night, hm?" Again, Dinah didn't answer, and just tucked her nose firmly under her paw and shut her eyes again. Sarah snuggled close and tucked her own nose into Dinah's warm fur, and fell back asleep.

An hour or so later, she woke up for good, and was amazed to see that she'd slept almost the whole night through, only waking up once. Maybe this was the beginning of the end of her insomnia, or maybe it was just a fluke. It remained to be seen.

She'd been in such a hurry to get into the house last night that she'd forgotten to check the mailbox, so she pulled on her old silk dressing gown and tied it as she walked through the house to the front door. She opened the door and, still looking down as she tied her robe, and almost tripped over the man sitting on the front step.

"Shit!" she yelled. She stumbled back through the door and started to slam it shut, but Dinah streaked out through her legs and while she was trying not to shut the cat in the door, she looked out and saw that it was the man from the bookstore.

He looked like he'd been awake all night. The circles around his eyes were more pronounced, the sockets deeper. And she thought there were more lines around his eyes than there had been the day before . . . she started and pulled back as she felt herself being pulled into his eyes. "What . . . what are you doing here?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I meant to be away before you came outside, I didn't expect you to wake so early. Please forgive me." And he stood and started down the sidewalk toward the street.

She let him go, standing in the doorway, one hand on the doorframe and the other holding her dressing gown closed. What was this? Was he stalking her? Was he homeless? Was she going to have to call the police? She waited until he had walked down the street out of sight, then she hurried down to the mailbox and grabbed the handful of mail inside, then nearly ran back to the house, and this time she did slam the door.

She flipped through the mail, throwing away most of it--the catalogs and advertising flyers went straight into the trash. A couple of bills went into her "to be paid" basket on the kitchen counter, and the one piece of personal mail, a note from a friend, she stuck in her tote bag to read later, when she got to work.

She suddenly remembered the crystal she had dropped into her pocket the night before. She found her skirt draped over the back of a chair in the bedroom, and she put her hand into first one pocket, then the other, and pulled out the heavy stone. She wrapped her hand around it; it fit nicely in her fist, and felt cold and smooth. She opened her hand and looked at it closely--it was as clear as glass, with hair-thin veins of silver running through it. She polished it on the sleeve of her dressing gown, then put it on the shelf in the bedroom that she thought of as her personal altar.

On it were a jumble of things--pretty seashells she found on beach walks, beach glass, a feather, small stone carvings. There was a tiny dish that she kept filled with water (when she remembered) that she thought of as an offering to whoever watched over people who lived near the ocean, and there was usually a candle or two. Also, and most importantly, there was a small sterling silver frame holding a photograph, which she brushed with a fingertip as she walked away.

Just as she was walking back into the kitchen, the phone rang. The phone was on the kitchen wall, with a small table beneath it that held pens and paper, a scatter of discarded envelopes and notes, and an empty coffee mug. She picked up the mug and placed it in the sink, then picked up the phone. "Hello," she said. "Hey, Sarah, it's Jason," said the voice on the other end, one of the two young people who worked part time at the shop. "Hi Jason, what's up?"

"I just wanted to remind you that you need to pick up some cat food on your way in this morning. I gave Sophie half of my bagel this morning, but she wasn't happy about it."

"Oh, I did forget! I'm sorry. Apologize for me--I'll go by the grocery store on my way in. Do we need anything else? Coffee?"

"I think we're okay for coffee . . . you might get some teabags, though. Oh, and . . . "

"Some more bagels?" She smiled into the phone. Jason was twenty and perpetually hungry.

"Yeah, if you wouldn't mind. I'm still hungry."

"I'll probably be in around 11:00. Can you hold the fort 'til then?"

"Sure, no problem. See you then."

She started to put down the phone, then said, "Oh, hey, Jason? You still there?"

"Yup."

"I just remembered--there was a kind of weird guy hanging around the shop last night. Tall, dressed all in black, with an overcoat, if you can believe that."

"Overcoat? In Florida? That's weird."

"Yeah, I thought so, too. I'm not sure what this guy's story is, but I just wanted to mention it in case he shows up again. If he does, keep an eye on him, okay? I don't think he's dangerous, but there was something about him that just wasn't . . . right."

"Okay, sure, no problem. See you later." Jason hung up the phone, and after a moment, so did Sarah. She thought again about the man from last night. There was something about him, but what she had told Jason wasn't really the truth. She didn't feel like there was anything wrong about him, just something different. Like he was from somewhere else and didn't quite know the language or the customs, like he didn't exactly fit in.

And then with a start she remembered finding him on her porch this morning. How could she have forgotten that? Okay, maybe he wasn't just different, maybe he was dangerous. She was going to have to keep her eyes open and stop being so flaky. And try to get more sleep--last night was wonderful, and she hoped it was the end of the insomnia, but she didn't really believe that. Most nights, after she finally got to sleep, she found herself waking up nearly every hour. And the dreams! She usually didn't remember her dreams very well, but she suddenly remembered that she'd had a very memorable one last night, and she wanted to write it down before she forgot it.

She grabbed a pad of paper and a pen from the telephone table, then sat down at the kitchen table. The old, white-painted kitchen table had once been her grandmother's. Her grandmother's things. She had quite a lot of them. Her dishes; a motley collection of souvenir salt-and-pepper shakers from the 40's; a box of old buttons and sewing supplies. And she also had her grandmother's love of all things unusual and unexplainable.

She picked up the pen and started writing down the dream.

Angels. There were angels. Not the cute little chubby cheeked cherubs that you always saw on greeting cards, but big, monstrous, masculine angels with glossy black wings. Monstrous? That didn't seem the right word to use to describe them. Huge, anyway. Larger than life. Awesome, in the real meaning of the word, not like the teenagers used it now. "Awe inspiring."

In her dream, they were sitting around a table, talking, but she couldn't hear--or couldn't understand--their words. All she could hear was a low rumble, almost an electronic buzz. There were candles in sconces on the walls, but they didn't burn cleanly, they were sending off plumes of sooty smoke that had stained the plaster walls. One of the creatures was throwing a penknife into the table in front of him over and over again, making a series of evenly-spaced cuts in the wood--pulling the knife out, then throwing it again and again, until one of the others clamped a hand down over the hand of the one holding the knife and glared a warning at him.

And Dinah was there, winding through their feet under the table, meowing and rubbing her head against their ankles. One of them reached down and scooped her up, then settled her on his lap where she appeared to go to sleep as he stroked her. The black of her fur blended into the black of his feathered wings, and when she closed her eyes, she completely disappeared.

Sarah sat back. Wow. That was an amazing dream. She wondered what it meant, if anything, and got up and went into the living room and pulled the dream dictionary off the bookshelf.

In its best sense, the appearance of an angel often precedes a revelation/insight and heralds the need for, or represents the active process of, spiritual transformation; a wisdom message.

Angels represent invisible energy forces at work, which have become temporarily visible; therefore, unconscious material coming into consciousness . . . . Angels, or other winged humans, may represent high or spirited ideals; lofty goals; religious aspirations; feeling a need for guidance.¹

Hm. Fairly obscure. Well, something to think about anyway.

She put the book back on the bookshelf, washed the tea mug, and went off toward the bathroom to shower and get dressed. On the way, she picked up her journal from the bedside table and dropped it in her tote bag. If she had a free moment later in the day, she would transcribe the dream in more detail. At least she had made some notes so she wouldn't forget it again.

-----

¹Sandra A. Thomson, "Cloud Nine - A Dreamer's Dictionary"

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