This is a tale told with inkbrush calligraphy and vertical neon characters . . . 

The Pilgrim welcomed villagers and tourists, the busy and the lonely to the Chapel-in-the-Dunes. The flinted walls kept out the heat that sweltered. They drank cold peach tea from a glass urn and listened to this tale from the land where the sun rises:

She was anything but subtle and elegant. He knew that before she even walked into the airport lounge. Her voice, her scent, her personality came first to announce her presence before her feet.

Perfumed with the outbreath of heat-drenched sand, something rich and salty and humid rising from her ankles to the coils of her hair, she arrived. No-one needed to  declare she had had come: not the way her lips rolled back from her smiling teeth, sumptuous and plush and self-assured.

She walked surrounded by applause from the wide gold bangles at her dark wrists and the sussurations of her skirts. Pride held her neck in a transparent necklace. Light from her oiled braids rose in the invisible minarets of a crown.

They gave her a wide berth, the tiny bird-girls of Narita, some unspoken recognition of her alien majesty. The wide peaks of her shoulders, cuffed in bright upstanding cloth, passed above their heads. Loud and unrestrained (for who can hold back the thunder?) her voice rolled along the  ceiling.

“You called and I have come. “

One man swallowed and packed his small magicks away in his bag. His fingers trembled. He had not expected it would really work. His head and his soul bowed, deep as if she were the Emperor of the land.

‘Welcome, Mami Wata.’

*************************************************

 Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/midorisyu/