The others have gone back down, and I am alone on the mountaintop with a strange young woman, dressed all in white, who shows me how to survive on nothing but snow left over from the long winter. The snow stands two feet deep among stone ruins built by a vanished race of miners, and it is gritty with dust from the atmosphere. Those are aerial plankton, she says, the microscopic corpses of our only real angels. The snow keeps them fresh. Eat it and live.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
Is this based on another of your vivid dreams? It’s very engaging.
Thanks. Yes, this was a dream last week.