Rachel Maria Məráj Davis

Here and there Rachel Maria Davis picks up a rock and pretends a celestial being can hear her better when it’s being rubbed. Any celestial being and any rock, but preferably smooth in texture and in philosophy. So it won’t catch as much when put in her pocket. Rachel Maria Davis prays before bed. Only when everyone else is asleep. Rachel prays for her pets and parents and friends away in college in Minnesota and Utah State. She prays to always safely cross at cross-walks. She doesn’t carry rocks to bed for this purpose. Rachel once did keep crystals under her pillow, but these were to attract supernatural beings, not for discourse. Rachel Maria Davis once had a dream a woman in see-through purple robes floated in her window while she slept. Rachel Maria dreamed the woman picked her up and carried her to a moon-sized star. The star bubbled with iron and oxygen. Rachel dreamed that this was her true home. She dreamed that Rachel Maria was not her only name. She sewed herself a robe for when the woman would come find her. Rachel Maria Davis was 11 years old. No one that she knew of saw her drawings of the woman in the window. Her brother admired the sketchy pencil lines around the woman’s feet and hands without fingers or toes. Somewhere else a woman went to bed with purple pajamas. She dreamed Rachel Maria Davis rang her doorbell and handed her a bouquet of purple and white tulips. It was the middle of winter, but the snowflakes on their petals didn’t melt when she brought them inside. She could see the shapes the ice made like they floated right to her eyes when she looked at them. Rachel Maria Davis wasn’t invited inside, and simply walked away. She was barefoot. The woman couldn’t hear the crunch of the snow and ice under her heels. No one else dreamed of a girl bringing tulips that night. Many more people dreamed of themselves caught in a field of horses. The pintos and palominos ran through them like ghosts. The clouds were low. The sky inclined to be almost touchable. On some red ridge of distant sandstone, someone else laid on their back and dipped their hands into cumulus clouds. Their hands were cold up to the wrists. When they brought them down to their chest, they broke off in pieces of frosted ice. In their place grew silver fingers. They could dip their new fingers into their chest and feel their heart contracting. Their hands fell into the sand at their sides and they just watched the clouds waltzing above. Just below them, someone else was dreaming that God’s hands reached down to them in the middle of the night. He reached through a mountain and touched the top of their head. Like a kiss with His fingers. They felt a warmth course through them so hot they could almost see color—they could almost see red in the grays. Rachel Maria Davis was dreaming of summer by the horse dreamscape. The mosquitoes glowed as they emerged from a fire. They trickled into the sky and became stars. A sudden storm from white clouds brought down droplets of lightning. They landed on Rachel’s bare legs and freckled them with tiny star shapes with perfectly equal points. When she touched them they stung. The fir trees bent over and smoothed out Rachel Maria Davis’s legs, leaving only bright stripes of comet tails. When Rachel Maria Davis woke up, she picked up a branch from her favorite tree. Rachel Maria peeled off the bark and cut the broken ends. She sanded them by hand. Her fingers were tired and unfeeling for twenty minutes. Rachel was satisfied when she saw a star-shaped core that went all the way through. Rachel Maria Davis picks up the wand sometimes when she feels particularly spiritual. She points the wood into her chest and then straight up from between her breasts. She imagines spirals of light inkling out of the tip slowly then quickly like a spider’s web. She doesn’t imagine the end of the light strands. She also doesn’t imagine their infinity. She imagines disturbing the balance of the universe with positive crystalline energy. The strands of light disappear into the darkness somewhere above her. The sky ripples like disturbed still water. She sets the rod and the rocks on dark-wood shelves of her bookcase and then goes out. She kept her crystals in particular in a small box under her bed. Right under her pillow. She figures that it can’t hurt to leave them where they are. Sometimes she dreams that they whisper and then burst into thin pink shards that coat the entire street.