C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

Instead a robin twittered violently, the first animal I’d ever heard in my garden, and I tripped over my own feet as I jolted around looking for it. It peered down at me, one beady black eye and then the other, and chirruped again as if its little red-breasted life depended on it. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the fog. I rocked back on my heels, huffing a laugh as I looked at the ground. A robin; a garden. I knew a cue when my subconscious gave me one. I whispered, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” and a glitter of silver in the damp earth caught my eye.

I tilted my head at it just like the robin had at me, taking a few seconds to convince myself to kneel and curl my fingers around the bit of metal. It was cool and heavy and felt solid in my palm, and for some reason holding it made an ache in my heart I could hardly breathe around. “Maybe it’s been buried for ten years,” I murmured to the robin, because that was what I was supposed to say, though I knew it was closer to thirteen years the thing had been buried and ignored.

“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, still to the robin. “The key’s supposed to be outside the garden, not in it.” There was no answering chirp, and I pushed my way back to my feet feeling older than my twenty-seven years. “Close enough, eh?” I asked the silence, and stepped forward through the fog to brush a sheet of ivy away and reveal the door.

It opened upward, into the peak of a vast crater. I came through cautiously, feeling like I was caught in an Escher painting. My center of balance swerved dramatically and my stomach muscles constricted as I rotated onto the landscape, the world itself pulling me around until I was vertical by its standards. The door closed behind me, though by the time I looked down I was standing on it, the key still clutched in my hand. As I watched, the door faded into striated dirt, becoming a perfectly ordinary crater center.

Oddly enough, for the second time, I knew where I was.

It took rather a lot of huffing and puffing and even more sliding down the crater’s steep sides before my stride remembered the ground-eating run I’d learned when Coyote had led me through the desert and to this place. I had to keep reminding myself it was a matter of will, of my own desire overriding the evident reality of the situation around me, that allowed me to move anywhere in the psychic realm. I suspected that subconsciously I’d expected the door to open in the crater, and if I’d been more focused, I could have just walked through into the desert.

Instead I went leaping and bounding over hill and dale, until the air went sandy and dry and the landscape below me turned beautiful orange-red. I skidded to a halt in the sand, tilting my head back at the sky, blue as robin eggs. Heat poured down from the white sun, too much for comfort, though I wasn’t even sweating. There were no coyote tracks in the sand, no footprints left from my last visit here, although no wind blew to erase them. Then again, I wasn’t sure this place existed except when people came to visit it, so the idea that it was remade new and whole each time someone encountered it seemed completely plausible.

I chose a patch of sand that looked as much like where I’d lay dying as anywhere else, and flopped onto my back. Grit seared through my shirt and jeans, bringing stinging prickles of heat rash to my skin, but I ignored it. The suntan I sported was thanks to a mystical desert heat considerably more antagonistic than this one, so I figured I could handle a little itching. I dropped my elbow over my eyes so the sun didn’t make red spots through my eyelids, took a deep breath, and bellowed “Coyote!” into the desert air.

Only that wasn’t what I did at all. It was the equivalent, maybe, but it felt completely different. It felt as if I was spread thin as hot butter over the sand, sending my consciousness over the whole surface of the desert. I could feel lumps and scrapes of earth beneath me, all over and everywhere. Curious lizards ran over my skin, hardly aware I was there. Water bubbled up through me in a few precious locations, and the dry earth considered whether I was something that could be drunk down for nourishment. It found the coil of power beneath my breastbone and tugged at it curiously, but I envisioned titanium shields protecting that power. Shot-blue sworls slipped into place, blocking the desert’s hold, and it relinquished it without argument.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, very privately, I wished to holy living hell I had a nice sturdy-vehicle analogy to work with here, but my psyche and my power seemed to be getting along just fine without my metaphorical grasp on things. I didn’t want to think any of it too loudly, in case my brain should notice I didn’t really know what I was doing, and stop doing it. I had this idea I’d end up like so much hamburger all over the highway if the desert-wide awareness stopped suddenly.

Crap. Now I had the idea of a car wreck smeared across the desert in my mind. Well, I’d wanted a car analogy. That was what I got for wishing. Since I was stuck with the idea, anyway, I leaned on the horn, vibrating out a call to my spirit guide with all my will.

A tiny reverberation of recognition bounced back at me from what felt like somewhere around my left knee. I gathered the idea of the smashed-up car together in my mind, rebuilding the vehicle, purple paint shimmering bright in the harsh desert sun, in that place where I’d felt an answer.

The sensation that followed felt very much like watching Stan Laurel take a long slithering step across the movie screen. It began with inching a black-clad foot across the floor, then slowly whiplashing his whole tall thin body to its new destination. I expected to hear a bloop! sound effect, or at the very least a soft pop of air, as I reconverged on a completely different spot in the desert.

Usually I wasn’t so much for telling one spot of desert from another, but this one had potential shade from rounded rocks piled up into wobbly pillars and hills, sculpted and buffeted by wind until they looked soft to the touch. The sun came down at enough of an angle to drop cooler shadows into hollows in the stone, a few of them big enough for a coyote to curl up in. Add a water source, and it would be a perfect hideaway in the landscape of the mind.

I should have been able to curl myself up in the idea of becoming a coyote, and fit into one of those little hollows all comfy and snug. That was one of the things about shamanism, shapeshifting on at least a psychic level. I’d read it could be done in the real world, too, but I wasn’t exactly a believer on that particular topic yet. Thus far, my internal shapechanges had been either accidental or the result of having been eaten by a particularly huge and powerful spirit animal, the latter of which was not on my list of things to do again. I wanted to be able to coil up in one of the coyotesize shallows in the rock, but not enough to convince myself I was a coyote. Instead, with a sigh, I fit my Joanne-shaped-self into one of them, folding my arms against a higher curve of stone and resting my head on them. It wasn’t all that comfortable, but as I settled in, I started to feel like I at least belonged there.

All I needed was a way to search the area. The heat made me think of waves boiling off a car’s hood on a hot summer day, the physical pressure of over-warm air something that could be used. I slid myself into the idea of that pressure, trying to feel the world from its perspective instead of mine. I wanted a hint of Coyote, something I could follow back to his consciousness. I wasn’t sure what I’d do after that— probably read him the riot act for not talking to me for weeks on end—but I had to start with finding him.