Alex Bledsoe - Wisp of a Thing

Rob looked back at the little man. “You’re all trees?”

“Sure.” Wincing, the old man pulled off one of his boots and propped his painfully swollen foot on another nearby root. “’Scuse me while I git comf’table.”

Rob turned, and now Bliss sat at the picnic table, her chin in her hands. She was dressed as she’d been at the Pair-A-Dice.

“Are you the picnic table?” he asked.

She smiled. Her teeth were even, and white, and now shaped into little triangles, like shark’s teeth. “No, I’m just me. The real me.” Something rustled behind her, and he thought he caught a glimpse of shimmering, diaphanous, tightly folded wings.

Something leaped onto the table, and Rob jumped back, startled. The movement and color were identical to the mysterious shape that caused him to run off the road.

It was a teenage girl, with a halo of short, dark, and ragged hair around her face. She had enormous eyes, and she huddled behind Bliss, peering over the woman’s shoulder. She wore a tattered orange dress, and her skin was dark from both sun and dirt.

Bliss turned very serious. “This is Curnen. She’s my baby sister.”

“Nice to meet you,” Rob said. In dream-memory, he vaguely recalled that he’d heard the name before.

“Be nice, Curnen, and say hi,” Bliss lightly scolded.

The girl rose so that Rob saw her whole face. It was small, and gentle, with full lips on a tiny mouth. Little bits of spittle formed at the corners.

“She doesn’t have long before she’s lost for good,” Bliss said. “She wanted to meet you. That makes you special.”

Suddenly Curnen leaped over Bliss, nimble as a monkey, and hit Rob hard. She wrapped her arms and legs around his upper body and they fell together to the ground.

Curnen crushed her lips against his, like someone who’d only seen other people kiss, and he was too startled to react. He hit the back of his head painfully, right on his injury—

And snapped awake in his bed, the girl hunched over him, her lips pressed to his.

Rob struggled to free himself, but the girl’s wiry arms encircled his neck, and her legs locked around his waist. Her skin was slick with sweat and dirt. She smelled like a stream.

He got his hands between their bodies and felt the grimy texture of the ragged dress. It took all his strength to push her off him, and she landed silently on the balls of her feet and her fingertips, like a monkey. She stared at him, eyes wide, and he got his first clear sight of her: an unwashed teenage girl with the glazed look of mental retardation.

Her eyes cut toward the open window. Rob, still a little disoriented, realized a moment too late that she was going to leap for it. He reached for her just as she did, and his hand brushed her leg as she sailed past him.

She landed on the sill, again reminding him of a particularly graceful simian. The sky beyond was dark blue, nearing the cusp of sunset. The girl looked back at him, tensed to jump again, and he blurted, “Curnen, wait!”

She hunched down even lower against the sill and stared at him.

He blinked the rest of the way awake. Was that really her name? How did he know it? Wasn’t that the word he’d heard in his mind at the graveyard? No, wait, in his dream Bliss had told him her name, and even introduced them… hadn’t she?

“I won’t hurt you, you just startled me,” he said, keeping his voice even. He knew she could vanish out the window in an instant. “Please… come back inside.”

She looked down, then out at the night, then back at him. Her eyes were too big for her head, and slightly glassy, and he wasn’t sure she understood any words other than her name. But he knew now she’d been his mysterious mud-footed intruder.

“Come on…,” he prompted, hoping he didn’t sound too much like he was calling a dog. “That’s a girl, come on….”

She lowered one leg. Her foot seemed elongated, the toes like a child’s fingers. She flowed to the floor with feral grace and crouched low beneath the window.

He talked softly as he moved around the end of the bed. “Hey, it’s okay, everything’s okay, I just want to see you, that’s all, just see you….”

He knelt in front of her, and she trembled like a nervous colt. Grass and leaves were matted in her hair, which had been raggedly hacked or torn off short. Trickles of sweat wove tracks through the grime coating her skin. She should have been the rankest thing in the world, but this close, she smelled deliciously like freshly turned earth. He felt a weird, instant affection for her.

“Shh, that’s okay, don’t worry,” he said, barely above a whisper. He reached out his hand to her, palm down, like he would to a strange dog. And that’s how she responded, leaning close and sniffing it.

He slowly turned his hand until the palm was open to her. She leaned her cheek into it and closed her eyes. Her lips parted, and a sensual little moan escaped her. He risked stroking her with his thumb.

“Can you talk?” Rob asked softly. “Can you say anything?”

She responded with a sound that reminded him of a cross between a sigh and a purr.

“You’re going to be out that window like a shot if I do anything else, aren’t you?” he murmured. He moved his hand a little and scratched behind her ear. She leaned into it, and he saw more of her lithe, oddly shaped body. Her legs and arms really did seem too long for her, and she looked as comfortable crouched on all fours as most people did standing.

“So how do I know I’m not imagining this?” Rob asked in a whisper. “Or that I’m not still asleep and dreaming?”

The room phone rang.

Rob jumped. The girl shot through the window. When he looked out, he saw no sign of her. He slapped the sill in frustration, then answered the phone.

“Mr. Quillen,” Peggy said brightly, “you have a visitor.”

“I do?”

“You do. She’s waiting on the porch. I’ll tell her you’re on your way.”

“But who—?” Rob started to ask, but Peggy had already hung up.

He sighed, stared at the window, then went into the bathroom to freshen up. Whoever it was could damn well wait a minute.

Bliss Overbay reclined in one of the rocking chairs. She wore jeans and a black tank top under a denim jacket, and her hair hung loose and shiny. She was breathtaking, and he actually spent a moment just staring at her. “Wow,” he said at last. “What a surprise.”

“Pleasant one, I hope,” she said.

“So far.” She stood as he approached. Her smile, all dazzling Tufa teeth, was luminous. “So what brings you around?” he asked.

“Thought I’d see if I could take you to supper.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah.”

“Does the word ‘supper’ mean something different where you’re from? Because here it’s just a meal at the end of the day when you’ve finished working.”

He wanted to blurt out what had happened in his room, but fought down the urge. “Look, my head hurts. I don’t think I’m up to a verbal skirmish right now.”

“Here, let me see.” She stood on tiptoe to check his injury. “Appears that you yanked on the stitches, but they didn’t pull loose. What did you do?”

“Tripped and fell,” he said, and left it at that.

“Did you get dizzy?”

“No, just clumsy.”

“Well, you were lucky. So how about that supper?”

He was still fuzzy from sleep and the abrupt awakening, but she looked so adorable, so sweet, that he couldn’t resist. He looked up at the sky. The sun was low, almost touching the mountains to the west. “Well… all right.”

“Great. Come on, and bring your guitar.”

Rob placed the instrument in the back of her truck, carefully nudging it down between the side panel and the old spare tire. The dream had almost entirely faded, and as a result, he was ready to accept that the girl Curnen had been part of it, too. He shook the guitar slightly to make sure it was snug.