C.E. Murphy - Thunderbird Falls

Once in a while I tried to will the tree to fall over, or the rope to stretch and put me on the ground. I was starting to feel very at home there, like a nineteenth-century outlaw waiting for the coyotes to come nibble his eyeballs out.

Coyotes!

My eyes popped open. “Coyote! Hello? Help? Look, I know I never call, I never write, but I’ve been kind of busy the last few days.” I wasn’t in daily contact with my spirit guide anyway, but since last time I’d ended up in a desert—one completely unlike this one—he’d been the one to get me out, I figured it was probably my best shot. “I got a teacher!” I yelled. “That’s a good sign, right?” The desert swallowed the shouts up without effort. “Hello? Coyote?”

There was no answer whatsoever, and I started to wonder if doing a spirit quest would wake my spirit guide up to my predicament. While I wasn’t exactly in a sweat lodge, the out-of-body surreality surrounded me in spades, which seemed like a good place to start. For a few seconds I got distracted by how many levels removed from my body I actually was, then decided down that path lay madness. Assuming I wasn’t already totally nuts. Either way, I certainly wasn’t going to get back to myself by hanging around in a desert wondering when the hero was going to show up and rescue me.

After another ten seconds, I realized I was holding my breath and waiting for Morrison to interrupt my trance, as if my thoughts could conjure him.

Another ten seconds after that I couldn’t decide if I was relieved or horribly disappointed that they hadn’t. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying out a crooked half smile at myself. I could afford that here, somewhere so deep and private that nobody but me was ever going to see it. My shoulders relaxed and I sighed, drifting past caring whether or not my skin was burned to the bone or my wrists were numb from the ropes around them. My mouth was too dry to make any saliva at all. When I swallowed it felt like double-sided tape closing together and trying to pull apart again. My shoulders relaxed again, falling another centimeter toward my ears. If I could just take a little nap, it’d turn out all right, whether Morrison rode in to save the day or not.

If my inner self had any sense of dignity at all, it would allow my brain to cook to a crisp rather than let me wake up, go to work, and face Morrison with the knowledge that he’d featured heavily as the White Hat in my damsel-in-distress fantasies.

Someone sucked all the air out of the desert. I inhaled and began coughing, the air suddenly so much hotter that it was like sticking my head in a furnace. Tears rolled down my forehead again as I pried my eyes open. The whiteness of the sun and earth was no longer what I had to struggle against. Now the heat itself stuck my eyelids together and pressed my eyeballs farther back into my head. I whimpered, a genuinely pathetic sound, and the heat added thunder.

It was a physical presence, pushing into my body with a rumble I couldn’t even hear, only feel. I couldn’t breathe. Spots swam through my vision, black and red boxes with sharp edges like pain. The air itself had malicious intent, squeezing down on me. Lightning split the empty white sky, a bolt of brightness against the already impossibly bright world. My eyes ached, but the heat had seared away the last of my tears. I tried to think of last words, sure that the thunder and air and lightning would crush me into lasting oblivion.

“Well, fuck this,” I croaked. A final show of defiance would have to do. Go, Joanne.

A coyote trotted out of the desert.

It wasn’t my coyote.

This one took up more space than my coyote, although he wasn’t, at an upside-down glance, any bigger. When he breathed, the air seemed to expand around him, shimmering like a heat mirage. Every piece of fur on his body gleamed and bristled, like they’d each been individually dipped in gold and bronze and copper. The play of muscle under the gold-dipped fur was incredibly precise, as if every bunch and release was calculated and thought-out ahead of time. Coyotes, with their long legs and skinny bodies, weren’t animals I thought of as beautiful.

This one was.

The air he brought with him was cooler, just within the upper ranges of tolerable. He sat down six inches from my head and I gasped in a grateful breath, never once thinking he was there to rescue me. It was probably a little late to judge somebody who’s already been hanged, but the coyote was jury, judge and executioner. His eyes were gold-flecked, stars in blackness. He felt a little like Cernunnos, and more like the thunderbird. I could only see the surface, but if I relied on the knots in my belly instead of my eyes, I could feel that he tapped into something much larger, part of the raw primal force that made up the universe.

“Oh, for sweet pity’s sake,” I said in a normal enough voice that the shock of it sent racking coughs through my body. When I finally undoubled—and doubling up to cough while suspended by your feet is not something to be recommended—the coyote was watching me with his head cocked very slightly to the side. Exactly like my coyote, only much, much bigger, metaphysically speaking. “I honor you,” I grated. My throat tasted like I’d swallowed a cup full of iron filaments. It was a flavor I associated with running, and it made bile splash in my stomach.

Coyote tilted his head the other way, looking amused. I wrinkled my eyes shut, trying to think of what I’d said, and if it had been wrong. “You honor me?” I tried. “How can I honor you?” I opened one eye. Coyote still looked amused. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, what do you want? Nobody ever gave me lessons in talking to archetypes, but honestly, I respect the shit out of you and I’d really like to go home now, please.”

Coyote barked and snapped his teeth, which looked very large and very white and very much like Little Red Riding Jo should stay far away from them. I swore I could hear the dried earth crackling and breaking apart when he snapped his teeth together. “I’ve already been eaten once recently. You don’t have to do it again. Really.” I cranked my head up, wondering if the thunderbird might fall out of the sky and rescue me.

It didn’t. I let my head drop back down and sighed. At least with Coyote for company I’d regained some equilibrium. “What do you want from me?” I asked again, more subdued.

Coyote—I was going to have to find something else to call my coyote; after this, calling him Coyote would be like calling a mountain lion “kitty”—Coyote leaned forward until my eyes crossed, and put the slope of his forehead against mine.

Fragments of memory shot through my brain, sharp as shrapnel.

Sara Buchanan’s angry eyes, blaming me for a decision that already terrified me.

A desolate garden coming to life.

A dark-haired woman with a silver choker and a ready laugh.

Dusty highway roads stretching in front and in back of us as far as I could see. My father, slender-shouldered, quiet and thoughtful, tapping out a tune against the steering wheel. I didn’t know where we were going, didn’t recognize where we might’ve been. The story of my childhood, never belonging, in a more literal sense than most lonely kids feel. A bitterness old enough to feel tired filled my throat. I turned my head away from Coyote, dry spitting the taste of resentment from my mouth.

The images blasted on, undeterred by breaking contact with Coyote.

A baby boy, his sister too small to live.

Getting off a plane in Dublin, searching for features that might be at all like mine. Not finding them, even when the mother I didn’t know touched my arm and asked, “Siobhàn?”

SIOBHÀN

I flinched so hard my whole body cramped up. My name thundered through the recesses of my mind again, echoing and slamming against the inside of my head. I doubled again, trying to twist my arms around somehow to protect myself from the huge sound. My own name tore at me, pulling images from beneath my skin, faster, like tenterhooks with no regard for pain.