John
The slick rushes down by the lake cut at his ankles as he runs, young and free. He’s young and he’s running, and he’s just done something bad.
The moon fat as a orange air balloon grins in the sky, the chickens are in bed and he is not, and the night is deep. The stars, like teeth, grin down at him. The barn is on fire.
Oh, the cows are long gone. Maybe a one-eyed tomcat or two, wild as a bobcat, still lived in its creaky rafters but they were smart enough to get out. He couldn’t imagine anything killing those old bastards.
He runs, and even as he runs, he knows it’s a dream. It’s a dream he’s had before, almost a memory. He knows the next part by heart.
He runs and runs. He knows in real life, the forest was barely 50 yards from the house, and the curve of the lake was mostly on the other side of where the trees started, but in the dream, the forest is some ways up ahead when he sees a light flashing in it, and instinctively slows.
From a distance he admires his own young body, moving into the trees, the natural feralness of his wild youth adapting itself easily into a stalking creature. Then, voices. Unnaturally loud.
He feels the surprise, though there’s no surprise left. There shouldn’t be voices out here, not in the night, near the lake, after having set the barn on fire. There shouldn’t be…
Another voice, light, feminine. Is that…
A shape in the forest ahead, and a voice he recognized, and it couldn’t be…
John woke up, in a hotel in Providence, RI shaking himself from his dreams. The phone was ringing.
“Hello? Yes, I just woke up. Yes. Okay. Laugh all you want, I didn’t get in until midnight last night, I… could you…okay… okay, I’ll be there in thirty. Just…okay.”
John put down the phone and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. At last he got up.
Walking to the bathroom, he relieved himself, then took a long, searching look at his pale, unwashed face in the mirror. Same thatch of brown hair as everyone in his family, more or less hanging on. Same dark circles under his eyes that his dad always had, as long as he could remember. He was 31 years old, and he’d recently been told by a dental hygienist that the quantity of saliva he produced was abnormal.
“This is why your wife left you,” he said to his reflection. “It’s because you have too much saliva. At her age, she realized, time is too short not to be with a man whose saliva is appropriate and inexcessive.”
He splashed water on his face, but unfortunately it didn’t turn into anyone else’s. Walking back to the bed, he popped a mini-whiskey out of the mini-fridge and threw it back. He sat down.
He still found it hard to believe the old man had finally passed on. It seemed like he’d go forever. Then again, he thought, he’d fought in World War 2. There couldn’t be too many of those left.
At the last family gathering, he’d noticed babies, something he’d never noticed before. He had the uncanny feeling that the room he was in was the ghost of another room, thirty years ago, when his parents were having them. In all likelihood that room was the ghost of another one thirty years older, when is parents had been children, but that was a room he couldn’t imagine.
And before that, he pronounced dramatically in his head, another room one can’t imagine, forever.
Well, it would be nice to see the rest of the family again.
Would it? Right now?
He thought about showering, remembered that he’d rinsed when he’d finally gotten in last night—getting a direct flight to Boston, then taking the bus, had seemed easier than a long connecting flight until he’d found himself crammed between two large women with two large suitcases on an 11 pm Greyhound—and figured, good enough.
He threw on some clothes and walked out the door.