Well, it’s been done on the whistle forum, so why not flutes, too? This has to be my first dream (nightmare, actually) centered around trad flutes. Has anyone else had interesting flute dreams? And try to keep a lid on the Freudian crapola, fer cryin’ out loud. To paraphrase the man himself, sometimes a flute is just a flute. It is for me, anyway.
Putting aside the more superfluous and Escheresque details, here ‘tis:
I had two well-made flutes, blackwood with an embarrassment of keywork and no lip plates (apparently allergies don’t apply in my dream worlds). Well, whatever I was doing, the head on one (maker not to be revealed) cracked! Teeth on edge, I packaged it up in bubble wrap and a manila envelope, and brought it to a cheap desk-cum-file cabinet in a dusty office and used by the maker’s shady, gold chain-wearing subaltern (who sidelined in real estate or something out of a concrete stairwell), and locked it inside for future shipment to the maker with the key provided to me for the purpose.
Pressed for time now and with the other flute (maker also not to be revealed) in hand, I was running to yet another session or ceili or something when, with a loud pop, the head of it fell off and landed in my hand! It was awful. The tuning slide had been sheared off due to some kind of controlled explosion, and this was evident in the remaining bit of slide left in the barrel, for its exposed edges were ragged and splayed-out. Now this is clearly an impossibility: I don’t run if I can help it. Arthritis will do that to you. Anyway, upon closer inspection, the head itself was now covered with a network of cracks that exposed a blue anodized metallic lining beneath, and the wood of the headjoint was revealed to be no thicker than, say, the breadth of a toothpick. I was most unhappy by this point.
Thinking that the other flute might with luck be playable somehow, I went back to the desk where I encountered the subaltern’s subaltern, a woman in a snood, a drab dress and sensible shoes who busied herself by basically rearranging the piles of disarray. Even though I explained everything and showed my key to her, she was having none of it, and wouldn’t let me retrieve the flute from the desk.
Crestfallen, I wandered into a humid and mossy environment, a sort of man-made grotto with crumbling tiled floors and artificial lily ponds. Next to a small, forgotten pool, I saw lying there on the floor a flute (maker to be unrevealed yet again) belonging to someone I knew but do not, disassembled but arranged in a more or less flutelike layout. It was showing signs of dust or mildew, and the keywork had become very dulled. Of course, it wasn’t mine to borrow. I thought to myself, “Oh, well; at least it’s taking on a nice, aged patina.”
After that, I woke up aghast, my cat curled up snug against my back.
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Any others?
