Nonya was in a fugue. It was past midnight, and the night hung thick and dark. There was a gentle snowfall outside and her blue-black rose with turquoise thorns lay on the pillow next to her. It was withering now, and she’d have to throw it a few days later. But for today, it stayed. It kept her company as Nonya wafted in and out of the suburbs of memories. Then, maybe at some point, when the last snowflake touched the ground, Nonya slept.
It was a strange, lucid, vivid, sparkly kind of somnambulism. She was aware of her being Nonya and asleep next to a blue-black rose with a snowy, frosty world outside her window. Her own existence shimmered around her. It felt as if the inside of her eyelids were dusted with the golden eyeshadow she loved so much. Everything in her inner world seemed sparkly. Then she sensed it – something big, quiet, and stunning in her room.
She opened her eyes and sat up. At first there was nothing. Just the faded wallpaper of roses and lilies, some silk shirts strewn on the iron board, half-opened bottles of perfumes…and then she saw it.
Lining the periphery of the room was the long glistening body of a thick, powerful, muscled python – with a trapeze pattern in ebony and cobalt blue on its hide. It glistened like canals that carried moonbeams.
Nonya was surprised but not scared. The snake lined the wall such that it was all around the bed – like some ancestral boundary. And it continued outside the bedroom too. So she got up and followed it. It was all along the wall of the corridor and the kitchen and the guest bedroom and the library and the living room. And around the picture of a glacier she had spotted ten years ago, she saw its head – large and beautiful. Wise and knowing. Silent and symphonic.
It looked at her and raised itself – so high that it touched the ceiling. Nonya knew that a blue-black rose with turquoise thorns was ready to bloom somewhere. Again.
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