Dreamseller
There are 6.7 billion people in the world. All of them dream. When the singing started, the boys lurking outside 'Respects Nothing' housing stopped kicking around a broken Barbie doll, looked up at the empty road and then dispersed without a word, pushing through blankets hung across the empty doorways of their homes. When the singing grew, brought into the housing tract by a wet, dirty wind, Sunkmanitu stood up, creaked across her living room, scattering wide-eyed grandchildren from her lap and ankles. She snapped the living room window shut, staring for a moment across tufts of khaki-colored grass to the steel grey wall of clouds on the horizon. A large brown spider skittered down the road, angled legs and bulbous body stretching out on the colorless earth, only a shade or two darker than the sky. When it passed her house she looked away, coughing to push the low, reverberating music it brought with it from her ears.
“Don’t any of you put one brown toe out the door today.” Sunkmanitu turned on her daughter’s brood of children, slapping the eldest boy in the back of the head. She set her arms under the rise of her breasts and grinned when he rubbed at his uncut hair, mud brown eyes setting sulky in his face.
“Why should I listen to you, old woman?” he muttered, under the youngest two whining “Why? We’ve got a coat! Why can’t we go outside?
“Because the spider god will eat you.” Grandmother Manitu replied, making the act of pulling a blanket over the window pointed and slow, all the humor running out of her like silt in the snowmelt.
“Eh! There’s no such thing as a spider god!”
“No such thing!”
Rat pulled another half-hitch over the faux bark wheel, short, scaly fingers shoving faux sinew between the coils of the leather strip. She ignored the twanging of twine stretched almost too far. Rat also ignored the ominous singing; because it had become such a common distraction in her life, it was almost easier to overlook than the strings pressing into her hard, dry hands.
The singing stooped into a feverous keening, all vibrato stamped with that particular blend of irritation, and Rat gritted her teeth. From where she sat on her living room floor, Rat's round black earth eyes darted to the closed and locked front door before she returned to glaring at the dreamcatcher in her grip, feeling less blasphemous than long-suffering. The sound of the mysterious, lilting voice grew louder and then fell away in the time it took for the shadow in the crack under her door to transform from the elongated crown of a head to two black lines of legs, dancing where the dull light fell on her graying low-pile carpet. There was a long moment of silence when the creature on her stairs tried the doorbell (jammed by the punks from #6 three days ago), followed by the quick rapping of a 'Shave and a Haircut', light but still enough to shake her pasteboard front door.
Rat pulled another half-hitch on the loop, bunched her skirt more comfortably under her thighs, dug her toes into the carpet and, transferring the string from her fingers to her teeth, leaned to pluck another bead from the beading kit.
“Okay, funny,” the thick voice on her porch admitted. “Now let me in.”
“I don’t associate with American Idol rejects,” Rat called around the thread in her mouth.
“Pehh!” The shadows of legs under the door shifted, one foot scratching at a calf. “I was an idol before America existed!” Even muffled by the walls of her bungalow, his vowels were three times as long as his consonants—a whine that managed to be smug as well. “Why you always disrespecting me Hitunktanka?”
Rat threw down the near-finished dreamcatcher, leapt over the myriad collection of beads and stomped to the door, her single, disheveled braid swinging out behind her. She jerked the door open and leapt over the threshold, grabbing his dark ear and twisting it all in one smooth motion.
“Call me that again and I’ll poke your eyes out.” She twisted a little harder. “All of them.”
“But—Owwwweehh!—it’s your name!” he complained, flapping his long, thin arms around like a seizure victim, but when his iridescent eyes caught hers they were narrowed at the corners with satisfaction. “You opened up so quickly this time Hitunktanka. Admit it; you miss me when I’m gone!” His grin was a flash of bone white in a dark coffee face, all-knowing and insufferable. When Rat dragged him into the bungalow she could only be glad he had an ear to pull—last time, she’d spent two hours arguing with a peacock.
“You know,” the spider god drawled when she finally set him free from her grip with a shove, “I could make you disappear under mysterious circumstances for this treatment. This is deity abuse. Capital offense!”
“You’ve been watching CSI,” Rat muttered, throwing herself back on the floor amid the twine and leather.
“Law and Order, Woman, Law and Order.” The spider god draped himself across her sagging couch, smacking his lips and rubbing his bare, dirty feet on the arm as if he owned the place. Which he didn’t. Anymore.
For a long moment he did nothing but stare at her ceiling. Rat pulled a new loop on the nearly finished dreamcatcher and steeled herself—if he couldn’t spit out the demand immediately, it was bound to be something she wouldn’t want to do. When he finally huffed, sat up, and slapped his knees, Rat made no sign of paying attention to him except for a flicking of her eyes. Like a poorly trained dog or child, attention only justified his bad behavior. She wondered briefly what a shock collar might do to a shapeshifter.
The spider god cleared his throat and began with: “Hitunktanka, hopa, kazunta yeto.” And now he was speaking in Lakhota, thick and slow, full of flattering words and masquerading this all as a request, when they both knew he was serious, more serious than she had ever seen him. His normally upturned lips pressed down into a thin line; his shoulders pulled taut as he used the old words, the words of the way. They flowed out of him heavily, settling and filling up the air between them like the thunderclouds gathering on the horizon.
“Kazuntaun winyan—my weaver—I’m going to give you a wonderful dream.”
Rat narrowed her hooded eyes, clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “What are you getting at, you ugly bug?” She concentrated on slipping another glass bead onto the sinew, wondering—as she always did when he visited—what in all the worlds had convinced her to take this job.
She had gone to college, studied history, had been hell-bent on being something in her life. Being a Dreamseller was something, she supposed—the sort of something you became when, for all your framed diplomas, even the McDonalds wouldn’t hire you. As a child Rat had never dreamt of spinning dreams for people she would never know or care about, but for the price it paid...
“Hitunktanka,” he had continued, “I would trust no one but you with this dream. It can change the face of our world. String it with all your skill—forty rows at least. Use every bead I give you.”
Rat felt as if she’d put her hands on the lid of Pandora’s jar and was tugging as she scoffed. “What’s so special about it?”
When he didn’t answer, she thought perhaps the myth had gotten it wrong, and that it was hope that had flown out and all the horrors that remained inside, a jug of curses squatting in the middle of her living room, no one really sure how to handle them. He bounced his knees under his hands before standing, a restless cant to the way he stepped over the papers—books, clothes, scraps—spilling out across her floor.
“This dream,” he managed finally, “is not to be sold. It is a dream for you. Consider it a gift from the great lord Inktomi.”
“Inktomitanka? Does your father know you promoted yourself?” Rat’s smirk was toothy, quick to cut to “You’re still paying me.”
“Hehhh!” he groaned, waving a hand dismissively in her direction. “Do you make everyone else pay you before you take their gifts?”
“I’ve read the stories,” Rat muttered, tying off the final loop on the dreamcatcher and tugging the rows of web even. “You haven’t given a gift in a thousand years.”
He stilled, crushing a week-old newspaper under foot. In the dim light she could tell his eyes were narrowed, the darkest parts unmoving from where they focused on her. Rat would have thought she’d hurt his feelings, but he was always like this: in diametric opposition to the easiest mood, dynamism to her apathy, as if the two of them could never be in the same range of emotion at once. “Then it’s about time for another gift,” he muttered, his voice a little less rose-tinted now.
Rat’s bead tray rattled in response to the brown paper bag that suddenly fell on top of it, despite the fact that his open hand was on the other side of the vaguely coffee-table-shaped mount of clutter between them. Rat did not even blink, by now used to the appearance—and disappearance—of items in Inktomi’s general area. She reached out and grabbed the bag, unrolling the top to peer inside.
After a moment she looked up, her dry lips pursed. “TiVo. I want TiVo.”
Inktomi wrinkled his nose. “I’ll send someone to install it.” Rat nodded, held the bag up to her face to inspect its contents. Pushing against the paper sides was a metal hoop, a duller, older color that spoke of silver instead of steel. The bottom of the bag was coiled over by strips of black leather and twine, a night sky starred by clear glass beads. Rat could feel the dream as she had always felt them since the moment she had accepted his offer: the weight of eyes on her back, wolves circling a camp in the night. This dream was begging to be charmed, pawing and stamping its eagerness. It was deep and strong.
“What are you getting out of—”
“Keep it,” he pressed, voice coming from farther away now, “for as long as it takes.”
When she lifted her head to look at him, to demand an answer (or at least to demand he hurry with her payment), all Rat saw was her front door swinging shut, a dark brown blot rushing along the road. Shaking her head, she reached into the bag, scaly fingers closing over a silver charm crudely carved in the shape of a spider. Outside, thunder began to toll.
It took her eleven days to weave the web of forty lines and almost fifty rotations, translucent beads gathering like dew on the strands, opulent raven pinions dangling below. It took her eleven days—longer than any dream before. On the night she finished the black dreamcatcher, Rat hung it above her bed and went to sleep.
In a dream Hitunktanka is high on the top of a hill on the back of a painted horse. A warm, wet wind lifts the dusty earth in clouds and turns the horizon a ruddy brown. Beneath her, the horse stirs, paws at the ground, liver-colored mane tossed from one side of his neck to the other and back by the breeze. Tall, dry grass brushes her feet in patterns of prickling and smoothness. Below the hill the land stretches on unbroken, a long plain of rattling grass. A herd of buffalo—slow brown blotches from the bluff where she waits—browse the plain, lie on it, roll in the dirt. Hitunktanka has to concentrate a long time to see the white form of the newest calf. The paint horse knickers softly, shifting its weight from side to side so that Hitunktanka can feel the muscles moving beneath the blanket that separates her from the bare back of her mount. The wind picks up again, ruffling her rabbit fur coat, the white feathers braided into her black hair.
Not too far in the distance she can see two young men on horseback, more interested in trying to knock each other to the ground than in guarding the herds. From between the legs of one of the herd guards’ Paints a working dog—probably more wolf than dog—darts out to snap at the heels of a buffalo that has wandered too far. The horse steps back; the guard stops his mock-battle for a moment to pat it in reassurance. Beyond this Hitunktanka sees very little, as if nothing else exists, as if the world ends a mile or two beyond the buffalo’s plain. Pricking and swiveling, her Paint’s ears follow the sound of thunder grinding like a mortar in a full bowl. It is the pleasant sort of thunder, the kind before a welcomed summer storm.
For a long time Hitunktanka surveys the earth and then, when one of the guards finally succumbs and tumbles off his horse and the dogs bark at the buffalos’ surprise, she is overcome with a sudden and relentless desire—Hitunktanka throws a closed fist into the air and screams “HOKAHE!”, tightening her fingers in the horse’s mane and kicking it into a plunging gallop down the hill. The herd guards laugh in delight, shake their own fists in answer.
“Winyan witko—crazy woman!” the one on the ground shouts fondly. The only thing she thinks of when she leans tight against the horse’s neck with the wind bringing tears to her eyes and the grass tearing at her knees is that the word tawaic’iyapi—freedom—must have been born in a moment like this.
Hitunktanka and the Paint tear past the herd of buffalo and beyond, cresting another hill and dropping down into the valley of the city. The old paved highway into town has not been repaired, and everywhere it cracks and crumbles, overgrown in some places by switchgrass. Antelope alongside the road spook at her coming, bounce out of sight in seconds. There is almost no one in what remains of the old town, the housing tracts spread across a few miles crumbling in disrepair. Farther out now there are bands of tipi, smoke coming from their tops, horses and laundry lines strung up around them.
In the remains of the city there are only three buildings: the empty liquor store—someone has broken the front window; someone has written “Keep your poison” on the wall in red Puccoon dye—the court house—which is now a smoke house—and the burnt out shell of a WalMart, charred black, roof sagging, shopping cart wheels melted to the floor. The WalMart parking lot now is a dumping ground for the bodies of old trucks, still in working order except for the fact that gas, like electricity, is a thing from the Time of Being Owned.
Hitunktanka and the Paint march past this, past the tipi and the hunched backs of women pulling weeds between the thigh-high rows of red corn, to the edge of the plateau that overlooks another sea of grass, all of which, she thinks, is ours and no one else’s. Then she sees—and though nothing in front of her changes, in a second everything she feels and thinks has changed.
In the distance there is a line, past which the plains become a freeway blurred with SUVs. Before this line, there is a fence. In the fence, there is no gate.
Hitunktanka thinks Tawaic’iyapi. We belong to ourselves. We belong to ourselves. The first drops of rain are cold on her face and neck. |
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=Org-infinity's #192: Rhexsa, the Loquacious Literatus.
Irohani Ketsugi in ~TheReapersGame.
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