“Who will come to find you first
Your devils or your gods”
-Tracy Chapmen, Crossroads
The crows cawing woke Simp from his nightmarish sleep, a dreadful night of tossing and turning with eyes clamped shut beneath the pillow. But now, or so the crows said, it was time for him to rise and face the mess that had become his life.
Simp sat up and uncovered his head to see—a black couch, six bikes laying bout, an empty brown coach, and a time-painted 50 gallon drum, as cold as an ashtray.
No dolls hung from the trees.
No slain hoodrats littered the killing ground.
No giant mugger rapist lay dead on yonder brown couch.
Reggiemon Thom was nowhere to be seen, although his shopping cart of supplies could be seen over behind the trunk of the willow tree.
“Speaking of which, where are the dolls?”
“Did I have a reefer-madness malt liquor nightmare?”
Lacking full confidence in either his present faculties or his remembrance of last night’s events, Simp stood and castoff the—castoff white lady rose on white quilt that Reggiemon had always worn—and surveyed his surroundings.
Things were strangely still, with only six crows cawing up in the weeping tree beneath which he slept.
“Where are the dolls?”
Simp walked over to the cool burn barrel under the frosty dawn sky and looked in to see if the dolls were in there. All he saw was a half-drum of ash, upon which rested a piece of metal, kind of silvery, which seemed like it might be a treasure.
“Well, look at you, pretty fellow! I bet Reggiemon left you for me to pawn down at the shop, so I can get some proper boots.”
Simp reached in and picked up the five-inch wide disc of round silver and turned it over, only to see himself in the reflection of this mighty fine mirror with no ‘made in China’ stamp or anything.
There was only the reflection, of him, but with a beard, a thick beard of hanging ringlets, which kind of set Simp off, wondering if he had done a Rip Van Winkle and slept all winter.
He looked closer and noticed that his beard was luxuriant in the mirror where he had none in actual fact, and that his eyes blinked cat-like, with large black pupils split by yellow vertical slits and surrounded by a rim of bright ivory.
“Well, who are you?” Simp asked.
To his surprise the face creased into three dimensions and spoke, the surface of the mirror having all the moving texture of a high-headed face with deep set eyes, and finely chiseled features that seemed less like Simp with every word its spoke,
“The Negro of the Sand,
You rain maker…”
