The Sand Man

[Kikuyu_Black_Paws]

The SandMan

 

His hair hangs long and wavy about his face, dark chocolate brown with caramel glittering in it. His eyes are fathomless depths of black, swirling with the galaxies and stars. He stands with one foot in the darkness and another in the light. Hawkish features are divided in half, shadowed upon the darkness side so that you can barely see them, and luminous on the light side. The sharp line of a jaw rimmed in fire, a strong nose, and above it all his fathomless eyes. In his hands are a set of obsidian weights and a small golden globe with silver lands decorated upon it. His billowing white shirt has many folds in it, and each is filled with trickling sand. The sand is black, as if from a volcano.

 

He is the Sandman, the bringer of dreams. But if you think he stays in one place at all times, in that uncomfortable region between light and dark, you are mistaken. Very often he pulls one foot from the one or the other and places both feet firmly in a single shade. That is where fantasies come from. That is where nightmares come from.

 

It is said he can bee seen on a day in the desert where the sand looks darker with the sun. He sits upon a dune and watches the sky, shimmering in a silver-lined sort of way. Whenever he goes into the desert he is always cloaked in red and he sits cross-legged, barely making his long legs bend. The sand caresses and moves about him as if it knows him, and he stares without blinking at the horizon. Fire does not hurt him, sand cannot harm him. He can turn into sand and dance with the sand-people, and he can go where the dragons are hatched.

 

I will tell you of a time when I saw the Sandman, a time when he pulled one foot from the light and placed both in the darkness, turning to face it so that his face was hidden in shadow. Only his gleaming, fathomless eyes could bee seen then, the galaxies and universes glittering out at me.

 

He sent me a nightmare then. He threw his arms out wide and the globe and weights fell slowly, as if time had turned the air into jelly. I watched them move with frozen breath until they landed in the darkness.

 

All fire seemed to break loose. All of my most horrible memories, my fears and terrors, my haunts and those demons who hang around my head came swarming down upon me. I strove and strove to wake, but to no avail. The Sandman had me in his nightmare. There resided the feeling when you try to wake up before the worst happens, and you cannot. It is a sticky, horrible, gut-wrenching feeling, and it struck me then.

 

And then it was over. I opened my eyes and there he was with his feet in either area. He looked at me with a test in his eyes and then pulled his foot from the darkness and faced the light.

 

All bliss took me and I was floating. It was the perfect dream where nothing is wrong, and you have no sensation of waking up. Magic twined around me and I saw mystical creatures with no name take flight, or run along the ground faster than light, their manes streaming out behind them in gossamer wings of silver.

 

I looked up and the Sandman was standing again evenly distributed between light and dark. And then I woke and was in my own bed again. I looked out my window and there I saw a red-cloaked figure melt into sand, swirling away on a whirlwind, riding the dust-devils.