Black Water, Silver Stars

        Black Water, Silver Stars

         Singer Chloe Kalmare dreamed about floating in ebony water, not knowing how she came to be there. She was not trying to swim. She felt the cold but did not shiver as she stared at the crystalline stars scattered across the vast clear black sky.
         Her dark eyes opened wide, seeing shadows on a hotel room ceiling instead of stars and feeling tangled sheets instead of water. For a moment, the bed seemed to move beneath her on an ocean tide and she gripped the edge of the mattress with her long pale fingers.
         She caught her breath and tried to brush off the dream as a side effect of the sleeping pills she had taken. She only took them occasionally, usually to cope with a change in time zones, and she didn’t have much of a tolerance for them. For a musician, she had few vices. She sometimes drank strong black coffee or Scotch, only a few sips at a time, not for the caffeine or alcohol effects but because she had a strange compulsion to burn her throat or taste bitterness.
         The next night, in a different hotel room and a different city, the dream returned, just as vivid. She stepped out of bed, wanting to feel the solid floor beneath her feet. She picked up the black burnout velvet shawl that she had thrown across a chair earlier in the evening and wrapped it around her slender body, over her thin white nightgown. She slipped onto the balcony.
         This was another of her compulsions. Her bandmates were used to her slipping out of a recording session or a rehearsal for a few minutes after saying, “I want to be outside,” with an agitated edge in her voice. On a tour bus or an airplane, she would press a hand firmly against the window, focusing her eyes intently on trees, lakes, or sky.
         A slight breeze stirred her wavy silver-blonde hair. She gripped the iron railing with both hands. More solidity. The dream sky was filled with stars, but the sky in this light-polluted city was the purplish-yellow colour of bruised skin and no celestial objects could be seen.
         “What does it mean?” She mouthed the words instead of speaking them aloud. But no one was there to answer and the chilled night air was reaching under the edges of her shawl, so she got back into bed and fluffed up the thin hotel pillows. She fell into a restless sleep.
         The dream continued for nights on end, taking her to the immense black ocean. Creases and shadows appeared around her eyes. She painted makeup over them. She worried about her audiences hearing a catch in her high, sweet voice. She wondered whether sleeping pills would give her more rest or keep her in the cold sea for a longer time. The people around her mentioned that she looked tired, but she just forced a smile and either remarked that she wasn’t 20 years old anymore or said that she looked forward to getting some rest after the tour.
         The tour ended and Chloe returned to the house where she lived alone. She settled into her antique brass bed. The bedroom was scented with vanilla incense; a beaded and feathered dream catcher hung on the wall above her.
         After waking up in the dark and realizing that the dream had followed her home, she turned on the fringed lamp next to her bed, reached into the drawer of her night table, and took out a notebook with white unlined pages and a black liquid ink pen. She had a laptop, but this had always been her preferred method of writing songs even though the ink sometimes soaked through the page or left smudges on her hands. She sat on the floor and opened the book. A chorus appeared on the page in sweeping script:

         Black water, silver stars
         Icy waves caress my arms
         Constellations fill my eyes
         As I float beneath night skies
         
         The morning after completing the music and lyrics, Chloe woke from a deep sleep without remembering any of her dreams.
         Black Water, Silver Stars was the final track of her next album, recorded in just one take with no accompaniment except her acoustic guitar. It became one of her most-requested songs over the next few years. People sometimes asked her about its origin during interviews, but she never told them about her recurring dream or how the song had seemingly exorcised it. “Some part of me experienced this,” was all she would say.
         No matter how many times she performed the song, her dream did not return.
         The cause of the plane crash is undetermined now, a few weeks later. All anyone knows so far is that it was a swan dive into the Atlantic Ocean on a winter night. The weather does not seem to have been particularly hazardous for flying.
        The sky was clear, filled with stars.