by Corinna Craddock

Created on: July 10, 2009

Silly Scilla, silly Scilla
asked a fairy for vanilla
skipped da manners she was taught....
So empty cones is all she got!"

"Empty cones, empty cones," her ears took turns trying to kiss her shoulders, tossing her hair with rhyming youth.

"Scilly scilla," the spring time girl chanted, as she plucked one of the delicate blue petal-ed bells from its stem, before flipping it to catch an imaginary scoop of ice cream. He watched her raise the invisible treat to her mouth, admiring the way the missing vanilla complimented her terracotta skin.

Bobby could not hear her song. He did, however, know the words. He read each word that crossed her lips. His own lips mouthed a mute plea, begging her to remain facing him so he could catch all her verse. Her tempo, he marked, by the syllables that swan-dived one by one from her face.

Bobby believed in things he could not see, because he could sense things that other people could not believe.

Bobby filtered his world through a self-schema fully accepting of phenomena beyond the radar of human senses. Spirituality was not just all around him. It swam in the synovial fluid of his joints where it treaded water in slow motion, reducing proprioception to a trance like reverie. Proprioceptive awareness that hummed like a florescent light bulb, throughout his biological circuitry.

Highlights in Bobby's hair brightened in the sun, blending with the yellow grass that sprayed waves across the hillside. As he watched the perfect girl in her perfect garden, he imagined himself, undamaged before any disability, floating like an angelic astronaut. Gently drifting through an amniotic sea, to listen at the peep-hole of his mom's navel.

His fingers absently wiggled his lose baby tooth, while he watched the girl he wanted to marry. His eyes followed the hem of her blue and yellow dress, as it waltzed across the golden landscape. The valley that separated him, from his perfect girl, was so wide that no one else could see the glorious garden on the other side of the stream.

None of his neighbors knew it was there, because the valley extended beyond the range of normal sight. Like a balloon that ascends until it minimizes itself out of existence. To others, the garden was recognizable as only a purple smudge like from a smeared rainbow; like a grape jelly stain compromising the perfection of his illustrated backyard reality.

Here he would sit, painting their future together on the canvas of his mind. She was the only one he would

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