Oh, lady, will you weep for me? Lady, tell me true

I dreamed this morning about a middle-aged man who ran a thrift store in a small town in New Hampshire or Vermont, one of these little saltbox and brick-built places on a steep-dropping river that had been a mill town a hundred and fifty years ago; mostly it was poor now, but it had a man who could walk through a stand of cornstalks and they doubled and whispered heavily behind him, I watched from the next street up the hill as he circled a rowan tree in a stranger's backyard and its twigs bloomed with berries like pomegranate seeds. His lover was a barber and the same sullen high-school kids came in for haircuts and brightened up picking through old D'Oyly Carte records in his store, but it was a closer-kept secret that they were lovers than that one of them was a witch, or whatever he was, and the pack of strangers who might have been crows—only one of them was dark-haired and they dressed as motley in denim and chinos as anyone else in the dream, but they were fast-talking and raucous and they ate whatever was left out, even if not for them; the one with reddish hair had an owl's wing she used to twirl like a conductor's baton as she spoke, until she started to pick it apart from boredom and her fingers were speckled with blood and soft feathers all the time after that—blew apart all their secrets simply because they could, and the secrets of anyone who interfered. I don't even remember what the mayor's hidden life was, but I remember him crying on a slope of sugar maple and white ash with the album cover for Iolanthe between his hands. And whether the situation was precipitated by the well-meaning strangers who arrived in town a few days before the might-have-been-crows, or whether they simply made everything worse once the trouble had started, I couldn't tell you, but I like to think that the thrift-store owner might not have vanished—died or disappeared, I don't know, and I'm not sure I even knew in the dream, except that something shy and precious had clearly been destroyed—if he had not been so clearly slanted toward the tragic by their presence. Because there were more complexities, misplaced trusts and attractions and betrayals, ironically metaphorical witch-hunts and high-school kids on their own are quite capable of hurting whatever looks vulnerable simply because they can, without any supernatural encouragement at all, but the strangers with their damning good intentions were from Star Trek, and nothing says lessons learned from some other culture's disaster like William Shatner. I woke up and I thought, I cannot remember enough of this fast enough to write it down (and What the hell was Star Trek doing in that dream?), and I haven't. But it's more than I thought would stick, at least.