Magical Dresses

Dress in Prism Light

If I can figure out a way to make magical dresses, I will, and for a while at least, this is all I will do.

I will make these dresses out of wrinkled secrets and cobwebs and prism light and the crickets’ black songs, out of dark photographs of stonewashed streets after midnight. I will stitch them with threads the mourning doves drop by mistake. The little Husky Star sewing machine wll buzz and whirr into the wee hours with only the Pleiades for illumination. All of the cats who have left me: Dylan, Harvey, and Carlie will curl up on the rickety sewing table and tell me about heaven and what they are served there for breakfast and cocktail hour, what the chairs are like, also the saucers and the spoons.

Magical dresses journey to imaginary places far away from the grocery store and the mechanics’ garage, far away from the unmade bed and the dust under the dresser, from pots and pans, and the routine morning toilette. These dresses have a life of their own whether you wear them or not, making a ruckus in the closet, shimmering on a wall, turning a hall tree on its head, knocking over the bread basket.

You probably only want one because that’s all you need to captivate a handsome fellow and at the very least, compel him to declare his love forever.

In fact, each dress will come with a tag replete with caveats: never wear when the moon is full or when the wind picks up; never wash with water, only with blue ocean air; watch out for humming birds who may nest in your hair; tread gently in gardens or parking lots; wear with great caution on birthdays or the solstice; and above all, pay attention, don’t drift off into reverie or once-upon-a-time or heaven knows where you might end up, since these dresses are already inclined to wander.

When a dress is complete, I will take it out for a twirl in the backyard (keeping my wits about me, of course). And I will listen to what it has to say about itself and the whole wide Universe and the person it is looking for. Magic is indeed looking for us; I didn’t know this until the dresses informed me that magic is incomplete until it is shared…kind of like pancakes and pizza and love.

They’re out there, these dresses, and when you pull one over your head or step into it, you’ll look in the mirror and discover someone you barely recognize but know you’ve met once in another chapter, another country, another lifetime. One of these dresses will call your name in a strange language you’ve never heard before but manage to speak fluently. Magic is like this: a palm outstretched, holding a quite impossible world. Ours for the taking.