do you know what it means to miss the Kingdom of New Orleans?

Dreamt I visited the Kingdom of New Orleans. A cloaked Mardi Gras cult kidnapped my girlfriend, ceremonially sacrificed her, then shot & left me for dead.

A princess in disguise as an urban "prince" found me, tending my wound. Waiting to regain her throne from the interim republic, she DJed dirty beats, living in a rundown five-story house where she threw underground parties & exotic illegal fundraising dinners in. The city was walled like Carcassonne with additional giant saurian sculptures, a much larger Vieux Carré inside accented by medieval stonework & gargoyles, neon & glass, the sprawl extending all the way down to the Gulf Coast. The suburbs were composed of both brownstone and the raised gabled roofed houses, with bright but peeling shutters the Big Easy's known for.

The city was attacked by a sorcerer who came from the West with thousands of troops and gargantuan automatons, and I thought the city was done for.

[Carcassonne lit up. The city walls were like this but with neon accents.]

Then the outer wall's saurian sculptures animated, slashing with claws and breathing fire in their city's defense. The troops got in via many of the entrances, but the citizens of N.O. were no slouches, all taking up arms to defend their kingdom. The princess discarded her disguise, donned ballistic armor, and organized the people more effectively under her royalist banner. We fought the troops, but the invaders were overwhelming. She used magick to phase us into the depths of the city, but somewhere along the way I found myself displaced back in our world.

Weeks passed, and the phone rang. "It's the princess on the line," my Dad said, pausing, then, "At least that what she says she is." She told me that the city had been kept safe and she'd regained the throne, and was wondering when I'd be back for cake, champagne, and her latest setlist. But I knew that I couldn't get back there, that however I got there in the first place wouldn't be available again for a long time, and I was left saddened by the lack of means to return ...

... or couldn't I?

This dream of the Kingdom of New Orleans was amazing and all-too vivid. It felt more real than imagined. Sure, I could craft a short story or novella from this New Orleans that never Louisiana Purchase-d, that was discovered by France pre-Columbus and broke away from European colonial rule early. Instead I'm inquiring about the realness of the city, the feeling of its being out there somewhere, a solid in the chaos of dream, a true place.

[Crescent City Bridge. photo by Fred Gramoso.]

We can entertain the possibility of another thread on the Web of Wyrd, a variant design woven by The Norns to awe & explore, a quantum tapestry warp & wefted of a differing time & place, a shadow of choices not made here but elsewhere, where another version of ourselves louches purple absinthe at Duke Lafitte's Parlour House and eats ghost pepper & blue okra gumbo on cobblestoned Saint Peter Street.

This seems akin to a geographic slippage from the Berenstein to Berenstain universe, the rustling of cousinly leaves together from near branches of Yggdrasil, touching and aware of each other for a long, strange, wondrous moment.

In its Calvino-esque way, this Invisible City of New Orleans overlays, nests within, or is hidden upon the one we already know. Could the Texan Wizard's attack & invasion be the destructive Katrina of that world? Could the defensive saurians be our Louisiana swamps' aggressive alligators, memories of ancient colossi, or perhaps fossils & petrifactions given life in our foreshadowed future?

[Pink Alligator sculpture by the Cracking Art Group.]

Maybe the calls that say nothing from unknown numbers on your cellphone are coming from there, the princess dialing, looking for sleeping tourists who were once heroes of her kingdom's greatest battle. The city & her androgynous princess will haunt me, and I will miss them. So we ask: Have you been to the Kingdom of New Orleans? And if so, how did you get there?

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By day, Guillermo Maytorena IV is a happy bookstore fixture, but at night he's an Investigative Norse Mythologist! He's also willing to entertain the idea of being an adult film star, gynobot tester, or a tour guide in Scandinavia. Should you have any interest in his expertise or opportunities in those arenas, do contact him.