John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“Are they going to go to sleep soon?”

“They can sleep whenever they want. They can wait till morning to go to sleep if they want to.”

“Do they dream when they’re sleeping?” Soren lofted another nickel. It made no noise at all entering the Atlantic Ocean. “Do the fish dream?”

“Sometimes they do. If they’re tired enough.”

“What about?”

Soren’s father placed both his elbows on the warped railing. The wind moving over him and his son was slow and heavy with salt.

“They dream about what they already got,” he said. “They dream about swimming as deep as they can, down where the whales go, and they dream about watching the boats skimming by up above. They don’t dream about being on land.”

“Do they ever have nightmares?” Soren asked.

“Oh, no. No nightmares. They’re like you and me. They have so much fun, they can’t remember what they’re supposed to be scared of.”

After a short quiet, the waves lapping, Soren ran out of nickels. Soren’s father watched him crumple the coin wrapper and shove it in his pocket, and then his face changed. There was another roll in there. He’d forgotten about it. He seemed amused at himself, nowhere near his wit’s end. He peeled the wrapper back and held the nickels out toward his father.

“You want to try one?” he said. “You have to throw it right where I always do.”

“You know, if we throw enough of them in there we’ll fill up the whole ocean.” Soren’s father took a coin from the roll. “That’s the new goal. We’re going to fill this sucker up.”

The author thanks Paul Winner, Bess Reed Currence,

Brett Martin, and Heather Brandon.

John Brandon was raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. His two previous novels are Arkansas and Citrus County . He has recently spent time as the Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi and as the Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School in Baltimore.