Unquiet Dreams

 

 

A Murmuration of Unsettling Tales

by K.A. Laity

 

 

Published by Tirgearr Publishing

 

ISBN: 9781301518685

 

 

Author Copyright 2012 K.A. Laity

Covert Art: Amanda Stephanie

Editor: Kemberlee Shortland

 

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

 

 

For Robert,

brother and friend

 

 

for Ray Bradbury

Mother offered up a daily bounty. Her gifts varied; some days they fed him, some days they earned him scorn from the Man, who would cuff his ear and spit angrily through the gap in his teeth, threatening dark prophecies and secret pain. Occasionally, her offerings puzzled him. White, shapeless objects, their soft, soaked secrets brimming with her waters—they pleased him enough to ignore the Man's shouting and to poke tenderly the bloated surface, wondering. At least until the inevitable gruff rebuke, when the Man would slap the offending entity from his curious hands and stalk off, muttering ruin and starvation.

Not today; today her treasure came to him. He gazed at it and felt a deep sound, unheard, uncoil within his belly. It was a like the ringing of the train crossing's warning bell, a sound he heard only when the winds were fierce from the south. It echoed within his gut and shook his bowels and gave him a kind of excitement he had never known in his short life. He could not tear his eyes from their hungry appraisal of its surface. He did not know what it was, truly. He only knew it was her face, the face of the hungry waters, of the Mother. It was as changeable as her waters, mysterious and fluid. He held it in the shadows, then in the light. He was eager to see it in the murky darkness under the overpass, but before he could tuck it under his ragged coat, the Man noticed his inaction and grumbled toward him, cursing the boy's slothfulness. He would never have a secret while the Man was around. At that tired realization—a thought much repeated—the boy knew that one day he must kill the Man or he would never escape. Not now, but someday when he was bigger and stronger, he would do it. It was the only dream he had.

"Whatchoo got there, boy?" the Man rumbled gruffly, swiping at his head perfunctorily. The boy just as habitually ducked his blow, and reluctantly turned to show his prize to the Man. For once the Man did not immediately grab the gift from his hands, but paused. If the boy had had a word for it, the word would have been awe. But he knew respect—the Man complained often enough about not getting any—and he knew that the Man had found something worthy of respect. "Damn, boy, whatchoo find there?" He almost seemed squeamish about touching it, gripping instead the boy's wrists and bringing them up to his squinting gaze.

The light caught it differently then, and it seemed to change its shape a little. At first the boy would have said it had a face, or was a face, but now he could see that it was something else. Oh, it was still her face, it was still the face she showed the world, her heart, her soul—if you believed the Savers—but it was changed. The Man's jaw hung open, his eyes transfixed. He couldn't resist any more than the boy could, but reached out a tentative finger and poked its squishy, waterlogged skin. The boy could hear the Man's sharp intake of breath, but already knew the surprise: the feeling as if it were alive. It wasn't. The boy was pretty sure of that, but it did have that eerie feeling, like it might move, or worse, like it might squeak out some kind of wet, burbling sound, a sound that would make the boy shiver, he was sure. The sounds that Mother made in the night, or the sound of impending flood; sounds that weren't fishes or the gators, those were the sounds it might make. Not splashes, but gurgling and gasping like something moving under the water with a mind. It was kind of hypnotizing, waiting for it to do something.

But it did nothing.

The Man was no less fascinated, the boy could tell, yet he made no move to snatch it away from the boy's hands. Normally, there was no stopping him. Why, he'd just grab whatever the boy had if it looked at all promising. Whoosh, it was gone. He seldom found anything really worth something. Most often the Man would seize it, smell and weigh it, then throw it back to him. Sometimes, the Man would secret it away in one of the countless pockets in his coat, an architectural wonder that he never removed even on the most doggy of the dog days of summer. The boy would strip down to his smalls when it got too hot, and burn red in the early part of the hot season, but be deep brown by the time the cool returned for its short visit. The Man, however, never removed a stitch. The coat was his treasure trove, but the boy could not understand why the Man might not remove his other clothes and avoid the rivulets of sweat that plagued him every day and created an elaborate network of paths through the venerable grime on his face and neck, all the flesh that was visible above his collar. His fortunes were just too precious, he supposed.

Yet the Man made no move to possess this gift. There was something undeniably eerie about it. Even if it didn't really have a face, now that he looked at it again, it did have some kind of personality, he guessed you might say. It had something that made it seem alive—and looking, almost. There was the whole thing about sound, too. It might make some sound. Not that it had done so, but there was some certain glow to it that suggested the possibility; not speech, no, probably not that, but some kind of gurgle or burp, surely. Not that it was alive—what that dwelt so long in her bosom and was not fish could live?—but that there was something beyond mere living and not.

He had no time to puzzle out these oddities, though, for the Man was formulating ideas. He was at his most dangerous then; he expected things. Whenever his hopes went up, the Man was much more inclined to get angry. His audacious strategies seldom amounted to anything more than half-assed thoughts, but the boy could not complain. It wasn't as if he had any ideas of his own. All he knew was the Man and the Mother, her moods and her offerings, her floods and swells. His moods, too, and their hidey-hole under the overpass. The other Men and the few women around the bayou left them alone mostly, and they did the same. There was never a time, the boy could remember, when things had been any different. He knew the world was out there, the world the Savers lived in and the people who walked by the Mother, and drove their cars over the overpass. But he knew, too, that he had no part in that world and its mysteries. Sometimes he looked up at the billboards and pondered their messages. Mostly they were unclear, but sometimes he knew they were stories of hooch—not the hooch like the Man liked to drink with the others—but a special kind of hooch that those other people would drink, because the pictures looked like them, smiling and laughing, not fighting with knives like the Man always wanted to do. Sometimes, when the floods came, all manner of things appeared after the waters receded, bits and pieces of the wide world out there—small people you could hold in your hand, shoes, boxes with pictures of food.

"We got us a money-maker, boy," the Man said at last. "Yup, there's a rare kind of quality in this…here thingee. I expect folks will be willin' to give us a quarter—mebbee even a dollar—to see this thing, hell, to touch it." The boy only nodded, for her knew that was what the Man wanted. "Smarts," said the Man, pointing significantly at his own head, "Smarts is takin' advantage of opportunities what come your way. I do that, boy. This time we won't need to be diggin' in the dirt no more, ye see, no more siftin' through the gator waters. Folks is gonna come to us." He rubbed his hands together in a greedy spasm of self-satisfaction. "What we need is a jar or something. You don't wanna go touching that thing too much, might…might…" he paused, and his face looked puzzled again. He swallowed. "Well, you don't want it to lose any of that specialness. Folks go touchin' it too much and it'll get all dirty." He looked pointedly at the boy's filthy hands, but did not demand the treasure from him.

The boy did not understand why the Man did not claim possession, but he reveled in the handling of this precious object, loved being its keeper. He knew it forged a closer connection to the Mother, for it was her particular gift, her treasure, a true reflection of her ever-changing face. She blessed him, he knew, in the way the Savers talked about their Man, but she blessed him in the way of the Mother, which was much more mysterious, but a lot more friendlier, too. He felt a kind of odd excitement, like when you knew it was finally getting cool, when the nights would be sweet and fresh, and the days not so sweltering. It was a kind of anticipation, but he did not know what for. He would have to wait and see, as life had always told him. Things happened to him, he did not make them happen.

They returned to the overpass and frightened a pair of squirrels who had taken an interest in the system of boxes heavily coated with pigeon droppings. The vermin hardly did any real damage—the two were too well-prepared for such thievery—but squirrels were a nuisance all the same. They took stuff and hid it, or chewed holes in their boxes and bags. It was a constant battle, but one so much a part of daily life that the two would have only noticed its absence. Like the mice who found their way into every crevice, there were certain indignities that simply had to be endured. What did it matter anyway; they rebuilt the burrow every few months, whenever Mother rose up from her banks, washing away everything in her path, but leaving new gifts and wonders behind.

The Man at once began to paw through the heap of bottles anchoring the far corner of their warren. A cascade of green, brown and clear glass rolled away from his burrowing hands, but he did not seem to locate what he needed. From time to time he paused, held up a bottle or container for closer scrutiny, but each potential candidate had to be dismissed after a quick glance at the prize. There just wasn't one big enough. The Man stopped for a moment and rubbed his chin, cogitating. The boy thought about it, too, but no miracle seemed forthcoming. Then his eye alighted on their cooking pot, heavy, blackened, and deep.

"We could put it in the pot," he suggested hesitantly, his unused voice croaking unsteadily. The Man looked ready to cuff him out of habit, but then seemed to consider the possibility. He could see the Man had had his heart set on a jar or a bottle, so you could hold it up and look at the treasure from all different sides. Yet a jar that big, it would be kind of awkward. If they set it down in the pot, you could gaze down into the depths and… well, it would kind of add to the mystery of the thing.

"We'll need some water," the Man said at last. The boy made to hand him the thing and go fetch, but the Man twitched away from his gesture. The boy felt his own eyebrows raise unexpectedly. A curious feeling arose in his chest. He would not have recognized it as power, for that was an unknown quality in the boy's experience. He'd been on the receiving end of it most of his life, but it was not a tool he had ever wielded himself. All he knew though was that its glow was pleasant, and that there was an unexpected joy in watching the Man grumble to no one in particular, turn, and head down to Mother with a couple of bottles under his arm. The Man was afraid! It was not a victory of his own; no, it was more proof of the power of the Mother, her boundless love for the boy. As he watched the retreating steps of this conundrum, he had another realization. The Man's momentary absence would also leave the boy a little time to examine the thing further, and he reveled in the chance for closer observation.

It was whitish, but it was not entirely without color. No—more like it was a kind of elusive shade of grey, but one that had some other possible shadings. Oh, it was impossible to describe, the boy thought helplessly, he just didn't have the words. His tutelage under the Man's harsh rule had left far slighter impressions on his grey cells than on his back and arms and legs. He did not have the words to say how it was both alive and not alive, not dead, but somehow, well, outside the life he knew. That gave it knowledge, Her knowledge. Was it a part of her? Why, yes, that must be it. That was why he loved it already—and why the Man feared it. Just as he hated and feared Her, though they were all dependent upon her largesse. Mother fed them, drowned them, and sometimes, she surprised them all.

The Man returned, lugging containers full of Her waters. Without a word he poured them into the cooking pot, then nodded to the boy. With a gentleness worthy of a newborn's father, the boy laid the treasure in the mouth of the pot and there it floated with seeming contentment as the water lapped the coal-colored sides of the pot. Returned to the water, it gave off a whiff of the bayou smell, equal parts trash and rotting vegetation baked by the constant sun. It was the scent that filled your nose as you stood on the banks, while all around you trees hung low over the lazy waters as if bowed down by their sorrows. The boy shivered. Surely it was a mystery.