C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

Spotlights swirled through my eyelids, bursting down from above the dance floor in a rainbow of colors. The beat caught me in the small bones of the ear, rather like my drum did, and I detached from my body.

Sound roared incessantly, as powerful as the dance beat, but without its rhythm. Instead it crackled and popped, heat encroaching with every hiss and snap. I opened my eyes, face still tilted upward, and saw a sky of blackness. Not night, not stars, but heavy pressing blackness, the color of sorrow and loneliness. Orange reflected high against that blackness, like city lights glowing against the night, but there was raw intent in this color.

From what I’ve tasted of desire whispered through my mind, and I lowered my eyes to the horizons, knowing what I would see.

I was wrong.

No. I wasn’t wrong. I was just woefully short in my expectations. Fire was all I expected, and it was there, raging on the landscape, but there was more to the world than I thought. Not just empty blackness like the sky, it was built with four mountains that, even scoured by flame, held their colors with resolve. To the east lay a white mountain, gleaming through soot, and to the west a sun-yellow one, defying the orange and red of flame. To the south lay a blue mountain, and to the north black so hard that even fire couldn’t diminish it. There was a semifamiliar flatness to all of it, a hint of the Lower World. It tasted of history and of magic, of mythology built up to create reality. Colors here weren’t real in the sense that I knew them, and the world had edges defined by those colors and by the mountains.

Between those four borders of the world, fire reigned. Everything burned. I stood at the center of it all, animals and insects fleeing toward me, their panic making my skin itch with growing fear. I saw no people, but I found myself leaning into the wind that fire brought, throwing myself against the destructive onslaught. All the power I could bring to bear, cool and silver-blue, as if it was the antithesis of flame, did nothing to quench it. Tears ran down my cheeks from the heat and I strained into it, gulping in rough breaths as I tried to stop what sure as hell looked like the end of the world.

A gigantic hollow tube settled over me, bringing fresh air with it. Creatures I didn’t think could crawl scoured the tube’s sides and clambered up, the air and walls thick with them. I couldn’t see where they were going, but I went with the masses, scrambling away from devastating heat toward a new world somewhere beyond the sky.

And gasped awake to find myself in the comparatively cool air of a Seattle night, nestled against Mark Bragg’s chest. Phoebe and Barb stood close by, faces concerned. “God, Joanne,” Mark said as my eyes opened. “Are you okay?”

“You guys didn’t…” No. Of course they hadn’t seen that. “I had a…” Visions weren’t really my thing. Well. Visions hadn’t really been my thing up to this point. I had no idea if they were something I’d get on a regular basis from now on or not. If they involved passing out in dance clubs, I hoped they’d be an infrequent visitor to my repertoire. “What happened?” Somebody else talking sounded good.

“You just collapsed,” Mark said in bewilderment. “One second we were dancing and you just slithered down to the floor. I picked you up and Barb and Phoebe cleared a path. Are you all right, Joanne?”

I started to lift a hand to rub my cheek, then realized I was still cradled against Mark’s chest. He wasn’t standing, so most of my weight was really in his lap, but he held me close, like I might be fragile. Since fragile and I had never really been on speaking terms, I felt a little silly, and tried squirming loose. Mark didn’t quite let me go, though he relaxed his hold some. “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I just had a little…”

A little psychic escapade. Phoebe’d seen me zone out in the locker room a couple weeks earlier, but I hadn’t explained it. Mark, thanks to Gary, knew a little about my shamanism gig. Barb had no idea. None of it made me want to confess to the truth. “I just got dizzy all of a sudden.”

Phoebe’s hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm. “Oh, my god. You’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” The question was filled with equal parts of horror, glee and interest.

Mark, holding me, went very still. My first thought, almost incongruously, was it might’ve been easier if even one person had reacted that way , and my second was that it would not do at all to reach out and throttle my friend. She could not possibly know the demons she stirred up with the question. It felt like it took a long time indeed to pull a sick smile into place and say, “Uh, no, I don’t think so, Phoebe. Maybe dinner didn’t agree with me.”

“You had shrimp in your salad,” Mark said hastily. “Maybe that was it.” Barb looked between the two of us knowingly, though she kept her mouth shut. That was good. I didn’t want to have to punch Morrison’s girlfriend in the mouth.

Well. All right, never mind that. “I’m okay,” I said after a couple of seconds. “But I think I might call it a night now. It’s been kind of a weird day.” Between Mark and Billy and unsaid things with Morrison and conking out in the parking lot and having a date and—yeah. Weird day.

“I’ll drive you,” Mark said, and I discovered I felt well enough to say “Like hell” in a relatively mild voice. “Nobody drives Petite but me.”

He chuckled. “All right. Guess you’re feeling okay, if you’re up to arguing about it. Barbie, I’ll meet you later, all right? Phoebe, it was nice to meet you.”

Barbie?

Mark helped me to my feet, and I had enough sense not to echo his nickname for her out loud. Or snicker at it, which was also high on my list of things to do. I wondered if Morrison knew his new girl was named after a toy.

I had a brief, unpleasant suspicion there was a word for what I was feeling toward Barbara in regards to her relationship with Morrison, and that only small, nasty people let themselves indulge in the emotion described by that word.

Fortunately, nobody ever said I was a good person. Phoebe hugged me, Barb shook my hand and Mark walked me back to Petite very carefully. It’d gotten later than I thought, pressing two in the morning, and the streets were empty as we drove back to my apartment, listening to music too loudly. A few blocks from the building Mark turned the music down and glanced at me. “So what really happened back there?”

I sucked air in through my teeth. “I had a vision.” It took a long time to say that.

Mark quirked a smile. “This is killing you, isn’t it?”

I hoped not, or that it was only figurative if it was. “Yeah. Look.” Apparently that word took so much effort I couldn’t say anything again until I’d pulled into my building’s parking lot and killed the engine in my usual spot. “Look,” I said again, then.

Mark said, “Hang on,” and got out of the car. Came around to my door and opened it for me, giving a little half bow as I chuckled and climbed out. He closed the door behind me gently, patted Petite’s roof, and then turned his attention to me. “Okay. Now go.”

“Why now?”

“Because it’s much less awkward to kiss you good night and make an elegant exit after your speech when I’m already on my feet,” he said, smiling openly. I stared at him for a few seconds, then laughed.

“Confident, aren’t you?”

“Hopeful,” he corrected. “So what were you going to say?”

“You know, I really don’t know.” The heel of my hand went to my breastbone and rubbed there, a nervous habit I hadn’t been able to break since getting a sword stuffed through me. “Just…”

“Joanne.” Mark lifted a finger, as if he’d put it over my lips but didn’t complete the touch. “You seem like a pretty solid person. Obviously this shamanism thing is important to you but you don’t want to talk about it, so how about we just leave it at that? You get to where you want to talk, well, I’m kind of hoping I’ll be around for that. In the meantime, I won’t push and I won’t roll my eyes and mutter, ’What a kook,’ when you’re gone, okay? Does that sound like a good place to work from?”