Emma Bull - Bone Dance

I stood up (as I did it, I heard that, too, allowed for in the drumbeat) and started walking toward the town circle. It was full dark when I reached it, but the torches, the lanterns, the bonfire, broke the darkness up into pleasing sections. The drummers were in an arc of the circle by themselves, playing fiercely, the big drums between their knees, the smaller ones propped on their thighs. The rest of the circle was clapping and swaying, and singing responses to one strong voice whose owner I couldn’t see. I slid through a gap and stood inside the ring.

The dancers were in the center, stamping, tossing their heads, working their shoulders. The strong voice, I found, was Sherrea’s, singing in a language I didn’t know. And I knew so many. The ring of onlookers had receded behind me; I was surrounded by dancers now. None of them touched me, but none had to. The force of their movements, and the rhythm they moved to, were like an assault.

I felt the rhythm pulling at my muscles. I felt my head yanked back and my spine arched as if someone had hooked my breastbone and was pulling it up on a rope. My legs were weak and weren’t answering my brain. And in all the split places of my skin, in the blood running its closed path beneath, in the straight, hard bones of my arms and legs and in the bone cask of my rib cage, the wasp-eggs of the beat were hatching out.

That was the third time, and the strongest. What I would have run from the third time wasn’t pain. It was the coming of the thing I had waited for all night, the thing Sherrea hadn’t talked about. The number of hoodoo is nine, because it is three times three, and three is at the heart of everything. Something said that, as an aside. I wasn’t listening properly.

The eggs hatched out in a stream of—I don’t know, I don’t know. How does the charge controller feel, when the current comes down the line from wind or water or photovoltaic cell, and it holds it back, feeds it steady to the battery? Is it hot like that, thick and hot and sweet in the mouth and the muscles? Is it clean and brilliant as a breath of ozone after lightning? Silly. It’s hardware. It doesn’t know. I knew.

I lifted my foot, and the power surged in me as if a turbine had spun. Any motion did it. Stepping, leaping, twisting like the upward reach of a lick of flame. Any motion. Would it work in one of those other bodies, the woman or the man? I couldn’t imagine it. Not those borrowed suits of flesh. Just this pure envelope of energy, engulfed and blinded in a rising tide of white light.

Sherrea was in front of me, dressed in white. She sang out a line and voices all around me answered. I laughed and dropped to my knees in front of her. She held out a mirror.

I knew my own face. I had always used mirrors, to make sure I was unobtrusive, to be sure I looked as much like the people around me as I could manage. And so I knew my face, not as mine, but as a mirror and a blurry print of others. Now I knew I had to search this reflection for the real skin and bones, eyes and nose and mouth. Working, Sherrea had said, with the whole mind…

As I found it, I built a replica of it in my memory, so I could find me again without the mirror. A high, smooth forehead fenced with thick, black hair; black eyebrows that arched high and even over large, long-lidded dark eyes; a thin, high-bridged nose and a thin, long mouth; an angular, almost fleshless jaw and chin. Bones and features, bones and features, and not much else. No extras and ornaments. The bones were tired of staying still.

In my right eye, I saw a spark. A reflection in the black pool of the pupil, a light; a little scene. I opened my eye wider and came closer to the mirror.

A riverbank, and a reflection off metal—there was a figure lying spread-eagled on the riverbank. It was transfixed with swords, the white metal bright in the new sun. The feet, the knees, the belly, the breasts, the hands. On the sand, silver-blond hair spread out in starfish arms, wet and clotted with dirt. One long bright sword stood upright in and through the open mouth, below the shocked, wide-open eyes.

It was Dana.

I was sitting up before I was awake, swaying and shaking. If I’d made a noise, it wasn’t enough to bring anyone else.

It was morning, late, and no sounds in the house; Josh, Mags, and Paulo had probably gone off about their respective businesses. It was hot, and the air seemed to weigh me down like rocks where I lay. I stood up and sat back down again. Oh, what a lovely headache. And my whole face ached, skin and bone. It had been a while since I’d been hungover, but it had never given me nightmares before.

I put on some clothes and wandered to the kitchen. Halfway there, I heard someone knock on the screen door, so I continued on a little quicker.

It was Sherrea. “Hi. Are you just up?” she asked through the screen.

“Um. D’you want breakfast,”

“No. Look, could you skip breakfast, for now, and come out here for a minute? I want to tell you something.”

I’d just opened the icebox; I shut it again. “Something’s wrong.”

“Not really. Could you just come?”

I stepped out on the back porch, and her eyes grew wide. “What?” I said.

“You look—I don’t know. You look funny. Not really funny, but…” Then she shrugged. “Forget it.”

The sky was white-blue, and studded in the southwest with muddled scratches of cloud. It was thick air to breathe, and motionless. Around front, on the steps, I found Theo and Frances. I wondered if I should feel ganged up on, or if they’d missed breakfast, too, at Sher’s insistence. They looked up at me, and Theo’s brows pulled together; Frances stared, her lips open as if she’d forgotten them, and said, “What did—” and stopped.

“Oh, what , already?”

“You look,” Frances said slowly, “most remarkably like you.”

“You look a lot like you, too. Won’t any of you guys make allowances for an ugly hangover?”

“Stop,” Sher said, “or I’ll forget some of this. And I think I’m in deep shit if I do.” She took a huge breath. “Okay. I had a dream last night. And I have to tell it to all of you, and all at once so I don’t leave something important out.”

Theo, Frances, and I exchanged glances, but we knew better than to say anything.

“I was down in the Deeps,” Sher began, “just the way they are now, and it was early in the morning, with all the shadows on the streets. I can see dark clouds between the buildings, and little flickers of lightning between them. I’m just outside of Ego when this woman comes hurrying down Nicollet toward me. She’s almost running. As she comes closer I can see she’s frowning, as if she’s worried. The wind picks up all of a sudden, and paper and leaves are flying around. She comes straight up to me and says, ‘There’s no time. Go straight home and give this to your friend. Hurry.’ And she hands me a postcard.

“It looks like one of the ones we found yesterday, with the buildings lit up, and the Gilded West right out in the middle. But the building that Theo asked about, that you knew the name of, Frances—”

“The Multifoods Building.”

“Right. That one wasn’t there.” She stopped.

We waited.

“Don’t you see !? It’s now, but with the buildings lit up.”

“Okay,” said Theo. I thought so, too.

“Why us?” Frances asked.

“Because,” said Sher, thoroughly exasperated, “she said ‘your friend.’ She didn’t say which friend.”

“And you thought maybe we’d be able to tell, when we heard it?”

“I guess if I did, I was wrong. Blast it root and bough.”

Across town, from the northward road, we heard the sound of a rough-running engine. “Huh,” said Sher. “Company.”