The Death's Head Dominatrix Joins Me on the Plane

 

I had been leading a creative writing retreat at magical Mosswood Hollow, a private retreat center in a red cedar forest eats of Seattle where I have led adventures for many years. Too goose myself to do deliver some fresh pages myself, I started writing a bunch of stories within a frame story. The frame story was that a writer has made a deal with Death according to which he will be allowed to live only as long as he goes on producing stories that entertain Death. Familiar? Certainly. It's the story of Scheherazade and I felt I had been living it for many years. 

Within the frame story I started banging out tales that now came to me. One of them featured a Roman centurion in the time just after the crucifixion. His girlfriend was a Phoenician witch who was good with dreams. 

After closing the retreat, I boarded a plane at Seattle airport to fly home. As always, I was curious to see what unfolded in the Bardo of air travel.  A plane is not a bad place to talk to strangers and to chance an encounter. You have a somewhat protected situation. It’s limited in terms of time and space. You can talk to someone and never see them again. You can cut off a conversation if you don’t like it. It's a contained environment. On this particular plane ride, however, the chance encounter did not feel like chance and was not safe at all. , 

When I took my aisle set the two seats between me and the window were vacant. Then a very tell woman came strutting down the aisle. She was made taller by her high-heeled black boots and her top hat. She wore black leather over a bustier. When she sat down next to me, after parking a pudgy little man by the window, I saw her gloves. They had the fingers cut out and huge death's heads on their backs. 

She ordered crème de menthe. Told by the flight attendant that the airline did not carry that, she ordered  a double vodka. She craned her head, inspected the cabin, and introduced herself to me by saying. "I like this flight. All the seats are full. Actuarially, if the plane is going to crash, twenty percent of the seats will be empty."

She sucked her vodka. I said, "You look like a magician." 

"I can make magic." she told me. "You could say that spankings are my friends."

I got the hint. The lady with the death's head gloves was dominatrix. Not my scene. The conversation that followed was staccato, sudden gusts followed by long pauses.

She leaned into me and asked, "Do you think the dead appear to us in our dreams?" 

I had told her nothing about myself. I said, "Absolutely."

"Oh, good. My dead husband showed up in my dreams last week. He was shot in the face in a diner in Seattle last year. He was in the papers. He was a musician. He turned up by my bedside and he said, ‘I’ve got a really cool job.’ He said, 'I’ve got a job doing music and special effects for dreams that are being produced for people living in this world.' What do you think of that?" 

"I think it's entirely possible." And a fascinating story.  

Conversation lagged for a bit. She ordered more vodka. Then she stared at me and said, "I would love to read a story from the point of view of Jezebel." 

This came with no context. I was trying to remember what the Bible says about Jezebel when she added, "Those Phoenician witches were very good with dreams."

I was astounded. She spoke as if she knew what I had been writing earlier that day, in the spirit of Scheherazade. Was her dead husband whispering in her ear?

Conversation continued like this, billowing and lulling, until she addressed me as follows: "I like crows and ravens." 

"Of course, you do," I said. 

"Yeah. Do you know what the collective noun for a group of crows or ravens is?" 

"Well, it’s a murder of crows and an unkindness of ravens." I was pleased with myself for knowing both terms.

She sniffed. "Everybody knows that. There’s another collective noun for both groups of birds. Do you know what it is?"

"You are going to tell me."

"Yes I am. It’s a storytelling of crows or a storytelling of ravens. Do you know why?"

 "You’re going to tell me that too."

 "I saw this once. I saw a gathering of crows, a storytelling of crows gathered around a storyteller crow. He was doing his best but he was an unsatisfactory storyteller because when he was finished they pecked him to death." 

Did I want a little edge for my writing efforts? I got it on that flight. I later expanded this episode into the lead story in my collection Mysterious Realities. This is the simple, unvarnished account of what happened on that night flight from Seattle to Chicago.

I left out of the longer version, "A Storytelling of Crows", the final incident on that flight. As we landed, the little man who had been parked in the window seat roused from his long nap. 

"This Homer," the dominatrix introduced her companion. 

I could not resist saying, "Enjoy your odyssey, Homer."

Homer rubbed his eyes and said, "All I want is a bowling alley."

"A bowling alley?"

"Yep, a one-lane bowling alley. Something to do when you get old."

As scary, in its way, as the storytelling of crows. 

You can read the expanded version of this episode, "A Storytelling of Crows" in Mysterious Realities: Tales of a Dream Traveler in the Imaginal Realm by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photos by RM

 

Flying with the Death's head dominatrix

My neighbor on my first flight home is wearing black, from high boots to top hat. She has Death's heads on her black gloves. She might have stepped out of the scene in The Master and Margarita where Mephistopheles puts on a magic show in Moscow.
    I tell her, "You look like a magician."
    "Retired magician," says her male companion.
    "So what does a retired magician do?" I ask a bit later.
    She considers this for a moment before she replies, "Let me say that spankings are my friends."
    I am not immediately inclined to pursue this conversation. I note the title of the book I have brought for in-flight reading. It is Peter Kingsley's A Story Waiting to Pierce You. Life rhymes. I smile at the thought of how Peter might twitch at the thought that his book about ancient shamans could be misidentified as an S&M romp.
    My neighbor cranes around, inspecting the rest of the economy cabin. "I have a good feeling about this flight," she announces. "Every seat is taken. When a plane is going to crash, on average twenty percent of the seats are vacant, because people sense something wrong and don't show up at the airport. There was a special on the Discovery channel about this."
    "Very interesting."
     I put my nose back in A Story Waiting to Pierce You until after take off, when she starts talking about crows and ravens. It seems she watches them very closely. She says she knows a big raven with a large harem. I point out that this would be rare indeed, since ravens generally live in couples and - like many other birds - mate for life.
    She wants to tell me about a place she knows where crows are sometimes so thick on the ground that they cover a whole field. "I've seen one crow talking while all the others are listening. I think of that one crow as the storyteller. When the crow speaker is done, sometimes all the crows take off at once. But sometimes they fall on the crow speaker and peck him to death. What do you think of that?"
    Before I come up with a response, she adds, "Native Americans say that when the other crows kill the speaker, it's because he is a bad storyteller."
    Now this is a story that pierces me. Over the previous week, at my writing retreat at Mosswood Hollow in the foothills of the Cascades, I created a "frame" story within which I could write other stories. In the frame story, inspired by another recent plane trip, the narrator is riding with Death in the darkened cabin of an airplane. Death reminds him that they have an arrangement: he must keep coming up with stories that entertain Death, or else his life will be over. Now the Death's head dominatrix is telling me about how a murder of crows deals with a storyteller who fails to entertain.
    She has story ideas for me. They come from her uninvited, after pauses in the conversation, blown on a strange wind. "I would love to read the story of Jezebel, told from her point of view," she announces. "I am fascinated by the Phoenicians." Can she possibly know that one of the stories I was writing for Death last week opens in the Phoenician city of Sidon?
    The conversation continues in gusts. She says, "Do you believe that dreams show us what happens after death?"
    "Absolutely. In dreams, we receive visitations from the dead and we travel to places where they live. I have written books about this."
    "My first husband was shot to death at breakfast time in a diner, with a cup of Americano in his hand, by a crazy guy who was looking to kill someone else. I grieved so deep I thought I would join him. Then I had a dream that was more than a dream. I sat up in bed in the middle of the night and he was there. He looked good. He wanted to tell me what he is doing where he now lives. He was a musician. He told me that now he works up music and side-effects for dreams that are being produced for people who are sleeping."
    "Great job," I say. "And I think that is absolutely possible. There are many kinds of dreams, and some feel like productions custom-made for the dreamer. I have always been curious about who is in the film crews."
    "I wasn't really a magician," she tells me before landing. "I worked for a circus as an aerialista. But I did magic, especially on that massage table I had going at the same time." She plays with a long braid that escapes the top hat and comes back to the spankings. "How do you tell a stranger you're a dominatrix?" she muses. 
     "When and how did you recognize your calling?"
     "Growing up in in the Deep South with Jehovah's Witness parents helped. Then people kind of got me typed when we played cops and robbers as kids and I always wanted to be the cop with the handcuffs."
    Hard not to feel that the whole encounter was created for me by one of those teams of dream producers. 

    
    photos (c) Robert Moss