Xanadu

Wanda Olive  Coleridge hated her nickname. Her mother's friend started it as a joke before she even went to school. Get it, her initials in reverse are COW.

"I want to be one of those girls who stand up on the ponies in fancy clothes," she said at the circus on her 10th birthday.

Then Cirque de Soleil came along and blew her away. Literally. "I imagine myself, dropping from the sky, moving in slow motion to the sound of my own heart beating," she said at her 18th birthday party.

This made sense to Little Wanda-Cow as she was known in her crowd because she had developed a nasty drug habit before she dropped out of high school. She hid her secret at the Dress Barn where she worked 30 hours a week, so she would have, ahem, money to live on. Then she got busted for shoplifting and the judge said rehab or jail.

"I'm not stupid," she told the judge. "Rehab. Here's the thing, dude. How would you like my name?" Her 'tude tipped the scale.

"Your name is Wanda Coleridge. What's wrong with that?" he asked. "And, young lady, you'll also do a year of community service. Note: Do not call a judge, 'dude'."

Little Wanda Cow whined and sulked in group at rehab. It was the best she could do, what with withdrawal sapping her powers. "They called me COW," she snapped at the girl with tatts covering both arms. "They thought it was funny."

"So what," tatt girl said. "Do you drink a lot of milk?"

"No," Wanda  said. She had to think about that.

"You don't even know your own name, Wanda Coleridge," the tatt girl mocked. "I mean like, there's a famous poet with your last name. If you don't believe me, Wikipedia it."

After dinner Wanda what-ever-her-name-is searched for her name. It took her awhile, all she knew how to be was a gamer, but what she found took her breath away.

Kubla Khan; or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 at a farmhouse near Exmoor (wherever that is), England.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, a sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to sunless sea.

"Wow," Wanda said out loud. She felt his vision. "That is really beautiful."

She read some more...

For he on honey-dew fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

In group the next day, Wanda read the poem. "Maybe, he's like, my great-great-great-great grandfather," she said when she finished reading.

"I'm really into genealogy," tatt girl said.

"I think maybe the dude smoked," a guy with glasses and bandages around his wrists said. "Opium."

Wanda sighed. "It's still so cool," she said to everyone in the group. "I mean, like, someone could have called him STD, you know what I mean, as a joke. But he wrote this great poem anyway."

And that is true. To some extent.