Dreams

Hestia, she was always the Cassandra of the little Playgroup.

The other day, during Practitions of Kinematical Ability, she ran sobbing to the Playcircle and announced to the class, "A Mercedes Benz R350 just came out of the waste paper basket!"

The scene of the crime was unsurprisingly devoid of any such improbability, though. We stood reproachfully around the offending basket and ignored the sobs of the betrayed Hestia. Miss Moppets, our teacher-in-charge, tapped a red-painted finger on her full lips and considered the surrounds.

"For once, I think Hestia did see what she just saw."

Miss Moppets was a formidable force in our collective sight. At One Point Six Emm she towered still over us like a vengeful giant bent on destruction, her reproach sufficient to annihilate cities. But notwithstanding her vastness the most remarkable thing about her was how she housed her abdominal regions within the confines of a 3-inch cylindrical aluminum pipe, making the two bulbs of her body resemble twin globules of sweetness on a giant lollipop. When she walked on her platforms they wobbled precariously to and fro. Often during our darker moments we shared this collective vision of her vulnerability and traded dark stories on her history.

Presently we stared at her, faculties skeptical but inquiring. The silence was enough to say it all.

She pointed a red finger at the floor, where two streak marks, fresh, graced the delicate granite. Our eyes followed her to the north wall, amalgamation of centuries-old tapestries.

"Observe closely, children." Her voice was marigold on tinted silver and reverberated painfully in the room. It filled us with a sense, an image, of great red dark fleshy organs and squelching blood palpitating in the depths of her trachea, where indomitable golems of bloodred flesh laboured quietly to belch forth patterns of sounds that would rise sickly, bubbly, up to her lipstick-smeared mouth, past her rows of glinting, wet teeth and rolling, wet tongue-stained with black cigarette smears and green mint, forward, blowing back the uvula and making it bounce back and forth like a punching-bag, forward, whistling through the jagged gaps of skin-flaked lips and-

There was something strange about the wall. We stared closely. "Concentrate," she breathed.

Some got it first, others later, but we all did get it in the end. There was a hole in the wall, except that-

It wasn't there.

Miss Moppets placed a hand on her abdomen, which is to say, the aluminum pipe, and announced that she was proud of us. "Only," predator's teeth bared in feral grin, "my children would have seen it."

A voice from the back whispered, "What is it?"

The grin widened. For a moment Miss Moppets resembled a Great White, alien, hostile, and exultant over a prospective meal. The caverns of her satisfaction opened, and for a while, we were defenceless, alone, vulnerable before her infinite might.

Pronounced from the deadly caverns of her satisfaction: "It is a quantummechanical effect."

The illusion shattered. There she was, back again, Miss Moppets, hand on aluminum pipe. "The car exists, or did not. It came, it did not come. And what it did, it could not have done, for it did not exist. The wave function does not collapse, here, in the Playroom."

Seeing our confusion, she pronounced, "The mind cannot comprehend the spatialics of the Higher Dimensions."

Our notebooks were busy for that moment. Hestia's sobs receded into snuffling. "Hestia." The sudden import of sound was earsplitting. "Come here."

Hestia went, shaking with fear.

Miss Moppets regarded her from above. "You showed remarkable potential, Hestia. The ability to dictate quantummechanical reality. I have decided that you shall ascend, despite your lack of training. Children," she addressed us, "Hestia is leaving. Her delusions have not, in fact, been delusions. Her fancies have been realities. She has the ability to conjure dreams from reality, and reality from dreams. She shall Ascend."

Hestia disappeared, then.

Years later she is an idea, a representation of a quality, a force. Like Minerva, she spawns from dreams. She spawns dreams. She is a goddess, and she has become endemic in the minds of men.

***
Okay, got the idea from American Gods.