Her favorite daydream puts her on the beach at sunset, her body slowly releasing the heat of a long afternoon.  “This is how a clay pot must feel,” she tells herself.  “When it is just released from the kiln.”  And then she laughs, in her dream, an airy, lilting laugh that drifts slowly away across the incoming waves.  Seagulls twist and arc in an impossibly blue sky, their aerial acrobatics set to some ballet music just outside the range of human hearing.  They shorten into specks, then disappear, far out to sea, before materializing again in another segment of the horizon.

There is a dog, of course, for what is a daydream about the beach without some mongrel in need of grooming, dashing into the surf to rescue a broken stick?  One eye black, one blue, always returning to her with the briny limb, never tiring of the chase, only pausing to nibble granola and lap bottled water from her palm.  Its tongue is slick like sea foam and its tail never stops stirring the air.  Her arm tires until one throw plants the stick like a javelin into the wet sand short of the surf.  The dog sniffs at it, loses interest, investigates the pull of the tide. 

Her favorite reverie always culminates with a magnificent tan and a quiet mind, and she emerges from it focused and quiet.  For some hours she moves slower and more surely, with a Mona Lisa smile twined behind her lips.  She radiates a calm that touches those around her, that even seems to seep into the air and woodwork.  For an afternoon or evening or hour she is light, walking into the distance with a sodden dog, until both disappear into the dark. 

– Robert L. Penick

Author’s Note: “Fancy” is simply about a place we all go to in our heads when we can’t be there in reality.  It’s a shelter from stress and sadness.