Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,19
again, the sunspots were gone. I pulled off my t-shirt and wadded it up against the hole in Mason’s chest. Red stained the cotton, ran under my nails, slid between my fingers. Hot; cold, where it thinned and the air wicked away the heat.
After that, his eyes were empty and dark.
II
And while the hunter is thus prostrated on the ground, it approaches and sticks a small thorn into his hand or foot, and by so doing bewitches the hunter and transmits to him the power of doing evil to others.
- “Myths of the Louisiana Choctaw,” David I. Bushnell, Jr.
ELIEN (1)
In the week that followed, I ate, I watched TV with Richard, I made Sazeracs and chopped bell peppers and bagged them for Richard to take as a snack. Day-to-day stuff. Sure, little things were different. Richard asked me more often if I was all right. Richard insisted on doing the dishes. One night, Richard and I were watching Shark Tank, and I started hyperventilating and had to run outside to stand with the St. Augustine grass needling my bare feet. I met with Zahra—once in person, at her office in DuPage Behavioral, and then once over Skype, the night I ran out into the darkness. But mostly, day to day, it was normal in spite of everything that had happened.
When I slept, though, I dreamed. Every night, the same dream: the hand around my neck, the hand over my mouth, the smell of fried catfish, the taste of grass, the dumbass whose name I’d forgotten, the dumbass from the club, deep inside me, pounding, pounding, pounding, until the world came apart. I was whimpering into his hand as I came down from the orgasm. He was still thrusting. The taste of grass in my mouth was stronger now. A soft thud punctuated his grunts as he came and went still, his chin against my back, his stubble rough against sensitive skin.
And then, bathed in the light of the clock radio—firefly blue, when a part of my brain stubbornly insisted it should have been green—I lay still, the dumbass’s weight on top of me, and listened to a steady drip, drip, drip.
In the dream, I already knew what was going to happen. In the dream, I already knew what I was going to find. I wanted to scream, but the dumbass still had a hand around my throat.
Dreams never had the same logic of sequence and event, cause and effect. In real life, I had elbowed the dumbass in the ribs, and he’d pulled out and stripped off the condom. He’d tied it, swung it back and forth, and landed it in the trash can. In real life, the dumbass had been proud of his little post-coital display of hand-eye coordination. He’d wanted to tickle me. He’d run his hands over my collar bone. He’d asked about my neck, and I’d said I needed water; did he want a glass?
In the dream, though, all of that got edited out. One moment I was lying under him, tasting grass in my mouth, smelling the fried catfish on his hand. The next moment I was already out of the room, stepping lightly through my parents’ living room, picking my way over the boards I knew squeaked.
In real life, I had been worried about waking them.
The drip drip drip came from the kitchen. That night, I had imagined a leaky pipe; I thought maybe Gard hadn’t turned off the tap all the way. In the dream, though, I knew.
I found my mom first. She had fallen halfway out of a chair at the kitchen table. Blood pooled on the wooden seat of the chair, beaded at the lip, and dripped steadily onto the floor. The graying fringe of her hair touched the pool of blood on the boards. It reminded me of the bristles of a paintbrush.
In real life, I had tried to help her. I had found her nightgown stained with a red oval. I had found the gunshot wound to her chest.
In the dream, I drifted on.
I found my dad next. That part was flat-out untrue; in real life, he had died in his bed, shot in the head while he was still asleep. I had found him last. But now, in the dream, he was in the kitchen too, lying spread eagle on the floor, his head blown open, brain and bone and blood like grayscale confetti on the boards.
The door to the porte cochere was open; it was December, and