the girl in the green dress.

He would often find himself writing when he was flying in an airplane. He didn’t know why this was but he knew it would happen and he accepted the fact. He liked to travel with a small red notebook that he would use to record whatever it was that he would write. It was a special notebook that somehow calmed him.

Sometimes the writing was easy and thoughts would flow from his mind to the paper in smooth flowing rivulets. Sometimes he sat perched over the red note book with only a look of concentrated constipation to show for all his preparation and expectation. This was one of those times alas and he decided to close the notebook and slip it into the blue vinyl seat pocket alongside a dog eared in-flight menu.

He rested his head back in the head rest and pressed the button that allowed his seat to recline. He shut his eyes and sleep came almost immediately. In his sleep he dreamed of the girl in the green dress. This was a recurring dream that he never fully understood. But then, how many dreams were ever dreamt to be understood, he would later muse.

The girl was walking in front of him by about 10 steps and he watched her light flowing dress and long straight hair billow gently in the warm summer zephyr. She seemed to sense his eyes upon her, for after a few more long confident strides, she turned around to look at him. He would panic at this point of his dream but when she had turned around and was looking directly at him he realized again, with some dismay, that he could not make out her face. He awoke with a violent twitch that threatened to dislocate his neck and then began to reacquaint himself with his mile high environment.

He saw the red notebook in the seat sleeve and he reached out a pins and needles hand towards it. Maybe this time, he thought. But the yellow bic with the black snakelike head simply sat coiled above the lined paper of the notebook. It hovered there cobra like, poised to strike, ready to kill with an unseen strike from its single ink filled fang. Buts after a while however he realized that his snake had no venom and it was simply an impotent biro for which he had created a virile andslighly rediculous illusion.

He thought about the girl in the green dress and he wondered about the nature of dreams. He fell asleep again in an even more contorted position and dreamed he had been wrongfully arrested and placed in a set of stocks in the middle of the town square. He was confused but not surprised to see the girl in the green dress throwing rotten tomatoes at him with commendable accuracy. He tried to look up at her from his near prone position, through the acidic sting in his eyes and the lurid pink hue of the tomato pulp, but she had turned and was walking away by the time he had cleared his vision. He did not see her face.

An airline hostess with impossibly white hair was now in the town square as well insisting that he put on his seatbelt and return his chair to the upright position. His eyes snapped open when he realized what was happening and the first thing they saw was the edge of the red notebook sticking out of the blue vinyl seat sleeve.

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