C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

His height was compounded by a ranginess that I shared, both of us lacking my mother’s elegance. He wore his hair long and smooth beneath a bandanna, just as he had all through my childhood. I’d loved it when I was little, though not enough to try to grow my own out. Long hair on men was in at that time, and it suited my father’s angular Cherokee features. The rest of his clothing was conventional, nothing native about it, but his hair and cheekbones set him apart. He couldn’t have been older than I was now, if that.

I turned away from him when another car door slammed. A little girl, maybe five years old, came around the vehicle’s enormous hood from the passenger side, her palm flat against the hot gold-painted surface. Blunt-cut black bangs were nearly in green eyes, the sides of her bobbed hair hitting a baby-round face just at chin length. She stopped in front of the Oldsmobile’s left headlight and stared at me, defiant to the point of excluding curiosity. My stomach did another lurch and flip, though the reaction seemed in both cases to be my own; the dreamer wasn’t surprised or confused at all. How I could separate myself from the dreamer, I didn’t know, and for a moment teetered on the precipice of a mental death spiral about the philosophy of dreamers and dreams.

The kid saved me from it by thrusting her chin out and saying, “Hello. I’m Joanne.”

A thunderclap sounded, ripping the sky asunder. Starlight fell down from the blue, making a blazing path that ran from me and under the little girl’s feet, then farther and farther into a blazing future I couldn’t see. A coyote appeared before me, standing between little Joanne and myself, his every strand of fur so sharp and vivid it might have been etched in pure copper. He brought with him air too hot to breathe, the weight of it pressing down and making the sky turn white with expectation. I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, wondering how I kept my feet as he paced forward to stalk around the dreamer me. I watched him as best I could without moving more than my head, and when he’d made a full circle, he stopped and let out a single bark that broke the world in half.

A second path shot up out of the darkness that made up the earth’s insides. It ran at right angles from the first one, burning through the sand into a different future. I could see farther down that path: the little Joanne wasn’t in the way, and I got sparks of information: family, community respect, long life, satisfaction. I felt joy down that road, and a lot of years of laughter. Looking back at the other, all I could see was the little girl, so vivid and clear that nothing beyond her was visible.

Coyote sat down between the two paths, arranged his paws mathematically, and waited.

A warning of imminent danger splashed over me, darkness suddenly cutting through the brilliant sky and the brighter paths that lay before me. I flung a hand up, knowing which road I intended to travel, but before a step could be taken, a raven made of thin glowing white lines and avian grace fell down out of the sky and dug its claws into little Joanne’s shoulders.

Agony knotted my shoulder muscles, just as if the raven’s talons had buried themselves in my flesh and not in young Joanne’s. I felt like I was being dragged skyward, the raven’s wings whispering against desert air that thinned and turned bluer as we rose into it. The world hollowed around me until it had cylindrical walls, just like the vision I’d had in the dance club. There was nowhere to go but up or down, and the raven kept climbing higher. I set my teeth together and tried not to either squirm or scream, afraid the former would get me dropped and figuring the latter to be pretty much pointless.

I didn’t know if a bird could actually wheeze from breathlessness, but by the time we broke out of the cylinder into a blue world, I had the impression that was exactly what the raven was doing. Well, I hadn’t asked it to haul my hundred-and-sixty-pound self through the sky.

As if in response, it dropped me and I tumbled down to the earth, bumping and whacking myself on mountains along the way. Clouds wafted above me when I finally came to a rest, lying on my back and staring up.

I’d called it a blue world, when we broke into it. Normally that would mean I’d been looking skyward, except I hadn’t been. I had no need to watch a raven’s butt as it hauled me around. I’d been looking down, and the mountains and the dirt and the plant life had all been different shades of cerulean.

The sky, it turned out, was also blue, though not a typical Middle World blue. It was a hard flat blue, dark enough in hue to be pushing dusk, except the sun burned down, blazing so white the edges of its corona were—I regretted the descriptor, but it was true: sky blue. I turned my head, looking for a horizon, expecting it to be like the Lower World’s horizon, like my last vision’s horizon: too close.

I found no horizon. There was instead a lithe, long cat staring at me. For a few critical seconds I forgot how to breathe, my heart clogging my throat and cutting off air. Another cat padded up, standing above me with the blueeyed curiosity of a wild animal. Another and another appeared, all of them watching me as if to see if I was about to become dinner. Their stomachs were pale, almost white, and their faces and the tips of twitching tails were dark.

Dark blue, actually. So was the rest of the fur on their bodies, paler blue instead of tawny like I expected it to be. Mountain lions didn’t come in blue, as far as I knew. Not cobalt and powder-blue, anyway, as if somebody’d carved them out of this strange sky and made them into cats with clouds for underbellies.

The first one, delicately, put a large paw onto my chest and pressed. I hadn’t been breathing, anyway, but the weight brought that home, and I gasped. He shifted forward, liquid movement that took his bulk from long hind legs and leaned it into me. This was not a spirit animal. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt pretty confident of that. It was something entirely Other, belonging to a world that wasn’t my own. Spots danced in my vision, blocking out his wide eyes.

Thin voices cried out from the mountains around me. I turned my head the other way with effort, to find other humans pinned to the ground in the same manner I was. Innumerable Prussian-colored cats leaned into uncountable people, squashing the life from them, and like me, they all seemed too frightened to fight back. I twisted my head forward again and wrapped my hands around the cougar’s paw, pushing back enough to drag in a lungful of air.

As if my inhalation called them down, sparrows flocked from the sky by the thousands, sparks of darting sapphire against the stillness of the dusky sky and blue-smoke mountains. For a moment I thought they would attack the cats, but instead they swept down to the captive humans, pecking and plucking at tender flesh and tasty eyes. The sky blotted into darkness from their numbers and from mortal screams.

Then the sky broke apart, fragile as an eggshell, and black poured in.

I flung my hands up, half warding off sparrows and half as if I’d catch the sky. Power came without bidding, spilling from my hands as I pushed toward the pieces of sky as they fell. I tried to shore up the world, and it almost worked. For a few seconds destruction came to a halt, and the people around me cried out in gladness.

Then a huge whacking straw burst up through the heart of the world and shattered the remaining sky into a billion pieces. Sparrows and cats alike chittered and yowled with fear, springing away from the men they held captive and feasted upon. All around me, people scrambled to their feet and ran for the tube that pierced the sky, while I lay there heaving with a useless attempt to save the world.