“Hey, you.”  The voice floated like a boat on a lazy river.  An empty boat that, if it bumped into you, you couldn’t get angry at because no one was aboard to blame.  And besides, you were floating along the same river, too, and were feeling too laid back to get perturbed about anything.

 

“Hey.”  This time, the voice hung in the air like a heavy evocative evening mist, where the mist is everything: the unmoving medium, the opaque mood, and the surreptitious cover for anything to be undertaken, just steps beyond, unseen.

 

 “Hey.”  Yet a different intonation.  This voice rang clear like something sparkling, fresh like a new awakening, and it was petitioning nfp to surface from his long descent into meditative obscurity.  

 

nfp, still semi-stuporous, reflected upwards that there was something different about this persistent “hey” voice.  Something more compelling than all the legion of other voices that had jammed roughshod into his head, all jabbering articulations, all competing as enunciations, all sliding along as indistinct phonations, as he sat awaiting ghost-writerly inspiration.

 

Finally lightening up and coming back to some semblance of consciousness, nfp opened his eyes.  Before him, looking directly at him, stood the girl with the dog that had passed him by earlier.  She was standing a little bit down the hill from him, so that, even though he was seated and leaning against the old Wade obelisk, their eyes were about at the same level.  Her head was angled inquisitively askew as if to say “Are you there?” Her jaw was slightly lowered as if a word were about to drop.  Her left arm was upon her hip and the other was holding the dog’s leather leash folded like a strap. “Dark eyes, dark long hair, and a strap.”  That was nfp’s silent triangulation.  He always immediately triangulated everyone new he’d meet as he first met them.  And he had never before triangulated anyone else thusly.

 

“I’m sorry. I was floating in a pool of nether inspiration and didn’t realize that you had returned here,”  nfp finally responded.  The girl had said “hey” (or so he thought) three times and so it was incumbent upon him, he reasoned after all, to reply.

 

“I’m not returning,” the girl corrected nfp.  “I’ve been about this hillside for the last hour.  You just kind of went into a trance when I was first passing by and I was a bit worried about you.  So I lingered.”  She gave the leash-strap she was holding a quick, sharp snap and her dog, which once again had begun to wander away, returned to her side. 

 

nfp’s eyes wandered back to the strap.  There was something about that strap, something that made it special.  The girl noticed nfp’s redirected attention and didn’t hesitate to explain.  “Oh, that whip-snapping?  Well, my dog Denton is deaf and only responds to visual cues.  But I’ve got him trained to watch me so it isn’t a problem.”

 

“But,” nfp recalled, “before—when you first passed by—didn’t you call out to your dog, I mean Denton, ‘Come on.  Let’s go.’?”

 

“Why do you assume I was speaking to him?”

 

“Well, who else…” but nfp’s thought process was disrupted inexplicably.  And he felt a first wave of lust as he stared wordlessly at the denizen of dusk before him.

 

“My name is Roomya.  You can call me Rumi,”  she answered his stare.  “I’ve seen you here before, just before dusk.  But it always has seemed like just when I’m arriving, you’re leaving.  I figure that that’s probably because you want to get out of the cemetery before they lock the gates, at dusk, for the night.  On the other hand, I find my freedom here, to wander with Denton, after the gates are locked and all the drive-thru voyeurs have gone home to watch TV.”

 

At, after dusk?…nfp’s thought processes started churning again.  ”What time is it, Rumi?”

 

That was a purely rhetorical question for nfp to ask.  And as he asked it, he knew it.  And he didn’t even know why he was asking her  it, anyway. Except that maybe he felt compelled to acknowledge her by her name, “Rumi.” namesake also, he recognized, of the 13^th century Sufi master poet.  Anyway, he now realized that while he was ‘trancing’ that it had gotten late.  Much later than he would have hoped.

 

“Oh, the gates are locked already,” replied Rumi.  “Look there, to the west, over the lake.  The last glimmer of sunset is well below the horizon.”

 

And at that moment, as nfp looked at the last crimson kiss of the Sun dropping below the wake of the lake, Rumi took two quick strides up the hill, dropped the leash-strap, and slithered comfortably right aside nfp, sitting with her back also against the old Wade obelisk.

 

nfp felt a second wave of lust as he sensed Rumi’s proximate gaze upon him.  He realized it would be so easy, now, to just take this Roomya creature into his arms.  Just to take her into his arms.  No more conversation.  No questions answered-asked.  And then he suddenly amused himself by remembering  some lines from a Gregory Corso poem called ‘Marriage’ …

Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky--

 

 

“Whatcha writing there on your laptop?”,  Rumi asked playfully, fixing her attention upon nfp’s lap-ridden business.  “Looks pretty blank to me.”

 

—this is the third chapter of notforprophet’s ghost-written book—