Come With Me

“Come with me”. Shay heard the words in her mind as if they had been spoken aloud. “Come with me”. The words of invitation were a purr, wrapping themselves around her consciousness with feline seductiveness. She felt, rather than saw, a lithe spirit dancing around the edges of her awareness beckoning to her in a most beguiling manner. If she would just heed the words and follow the spirit then something magical could happen, but She was tired, oh so tired.

Shay sat on cross-legged on her bed, her back leaning against a pile of pillows. Even though she had an immense, lovely house with many rooms in it, she loved her bedroom most. It was the only room in the house that she never had to share with anyone else and it was filled with the things she loved best. The furniture was an odd mix of pieces gleaned from various second-hand stores and garage sales. It all needed refinishing and Shay kept swearing to herself that next weekend she would start that project, one piece at a time. When the weekend came, however, she was never quite sure just exactly what look she wanted the furniture to have, and so she would put it off again. She wanted the furniture to go with the accessories in the room, but how do you match varnish or paint to scented candles, stained glass, gossamer and velvet bedclothes, bordello style lamps and pictures of sorcerers, dragons, and worlds with 3 suns? How, exactly, does one coordinate such solid pieces of furniture with such intangible otherworldly trappings? Shay was never quite sure how to pull that off and so her mish-mash collection of furniture remained unchanged. What she didn’t realize is that the odd collection of finishes, mismatched hardware and conflicting designs of her furniture somehow pulled the room together in a way no coordinated set-up bought from Rooms To Go could ever have managed. She sighed at her perceived lack of decorating prowess as she looked around the room.

In front of her, on the bed, were the trappings of a writer. There was her laptop computer, a legal pad with lavender sheets of paper, and a half dozen pencils of the mechanical variety. Shay hated to sharpen pencils; it somehow felt like a waste of time to her. A well-worn thesaurus and a dictionary lay on the floor next to the bed. Books lay in stacks on the headboard. There were even some colored pencils and a sketchbook, for those moments when the words wouldn’t come, but the pictures would.

Today, nothing would come. Her mind was a void, bereft of both images and words. But there were sounds of breathless whispers and seductive murmurs.

“Come with me”

Shay’s eyes swept the room and came to rest on the pencils. She picked one up. It was a blue Pentel 0.7mm lead. It was a pencil she had first used in drafting class some years back. Shay loved the way the lead felt when she drew with it. It was a little on the soft side so the edges of her drawings were never razor sharp. She liked the slight fuzziness. It was her minor rebellion against the structured world of mechanical drawing. Once she had tried writing with it, Shay found that she not only liked the feel and look of that pencil when she was doing her drafting, but it somehow seemed to make the words flow easier when she wrote.

Shay seemed to feel vibrations emanating from the pencil into her hand. She grabbed one of the legal pads, pulled it over, placed it in her lap and stared down at the untouched pages. She positioned her hand at the top of the first page and began to write, not words, but feelings. She wrote quickly and without thought. The floodgates burst and words began to fill the page rapidly. The cat leapt onto the bed with a ballerina’s grace and looked hopefully at Shay. Getting no reaction, the cat glided over and snuggled her body along Shay’s hip. Still receiving no reaction, the cat gently reached out with one soft paw and patted Shay’s leg. Still no response, so the smallish gray and black cat with the triangular face and yellow eyes snuggled closer to Shay’s hip and went to sleep.

Shay was lost in her writing and the whisper still beckoned.

“Yes. Come with me”.

It was well after midnight when Shay looked up from her writing. Three quarters of the pages of the legal pad were covered with words. Shay looked at the volume of her work with mild bewilderment. Surely she hadn’t been writing long enough to produce all that. Her hand wasn’t even cramped!

“Well”, said Shay to the still sleeping cat, “It seems I’ve written an entire epistle here.”

The cat blinked sleepy eyes, yawned, stretched, gave Shay a reproachful look for disturbing her slumber and put her head back down as she returned to her kitty dreams. Shay scratched the cat’s ears absently as she tried to remember what she had written. No luck. She didn’t even remember writing, so how could she remember what she wrote?

Shay flipped back to the first page and began to read.

“My name is Ola. I was a high priestess in the service of the Earth Mother many years ago in a beautiful land held apart from the rest of the world. Not many people of that time knew of the existence of this place. Still fewer people know of it today. Those who know, believe it an elaborate myth. This is my story.”

“Come with me…”