Stacy--Part Seven

Splog # 21

Seven

   And then she found that the mist was lessening. And, as it lessened, two things happened. Both the smudges and the whispering achieved better definition. She began to see vague shapes in the smudges. They seemed to have two dark spots towards the top and a line at the bottom. And the line seemed to be in movement. And there were sounds in the whispering that she started to recognize. She might be hearing "cat", "mum" and "mame" with a couple of other syllables that she couldn't yet decipher. And the smudges with the dots and the lines. They looked like - they were - faces! There were maybe twenty or thirty faces all around her in the mist. Their mouths were moving and the whispering was coming from them. And she was starting to understand what they were saying. "Cat mumbo mame." Were they speaking another language? All the eyes were looking straight into her face. They desperately wanted to communicate something to her. They wanted something badly. Perhaps they needed help of some kind. But if they spoke a different language, how was she to help them? 

   Stacy was beginning to feel a little frustrated, sitting in her rocky chair, surrounded by a lot of faces floating in a mist, apparently without bodies attached to them. She realized that she was starting to see the faces fairly clearly and that, by observing the movement of the mouths, she could get a better idea of the words which were being formed. And the rhythm and beats were strong enough that they should help in deciphering the words, if they were in English. But they must be! If this was a dream, she wouldn't be dreaming in another language. And if it were something else (she wasn't ready to decide exactly what), well, if these people spoke a foreign language, then they would probably be appearing to someone who understood that language. Wouldn't they?

   All she could do was try to understand. "Can you speak a little slower?" She looked straight into one particular face and asked this question. Nothing seemed to happen. The eyes stared at her and the mouth kept moving at the same speed and in the same pattern. She looked into another face. "Are - you - speaking - in - the - English - language?" She spoke slowly and tried to form the words as she would for a lip reader. Again, no response. The faces did appear to have ears, but who knew if they heard anything? She looked at another face. She would have liked to try talking to a woman, but there was nothing in the faces to help distinguish one gender from another.

   She stood up to try to get closer, but when she did all sound stopped and the faces disappeared. The mist seemed to get thicker all at once and she felt completely enclosed. She didn't know what else to do so she sat back down and tried to think of a solution to this dilemma. As she was wondering what the best course of action might be, the faces and the sound gradually reemerged from the mist. As she gazed at a face in front of her, not really concentrating on it, the sound and the movement of the lips started to come together, without her being conscious of it. A cat - rumumbo - mamame...aCAT - ruMUMbo - maMAME. But the lips were making no "m" in the middle of the third phrase. My name. Rumumbo must be remember. A cat remembers my name. But there was no hiss of an "s" anywhere in the whispering. A cat remember my name? She started to speak it with the faces. And then it made sense. A became I. Cat became can't.

   "I can't remember my name!" she spoke loudly and triumphantly. As soon as she finished the last syllable, faces, whispers and mist all vanished instantly. She found herself sitting on a white marble chair, on a white marble platform. In front of her were three wide shallow marble steps leading down to a marble path that curved upward in an arch that led to somewhere that she couldn't see from where she was sitting.

   And there was someone coming towards her along the arch. At first, she could see only a hat, then a head, then a body in a long gray coat, and finally a pair of black boots. "Well," she thought, "at least it's a whole person."