A Cup of Normal (25 page)
Authors: Devon Monk
Tags: #Fantasy, #fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #General
“What about the girl?” he asked.
He didn’t ask about the bowl. Didn’t wonder where the magical instrument had gotten off to. Of course, he shouldn’t wonder. He held it against his heart.
“A snake who had been resting on the edge of the world whispered for her to get up just as the Sun came into the waking world and discovered the spilled dreams. Sun was angry, but the snake told Sun it was not the girl’s fault. Instead of killing the girl, Sun bound her to guard the moon-strung bowl, to keep it hidden from Wind and Shadow, and most of all, from Moon.
“The girl did this for a long, long time. She hid the bowl in all parts of the world, but always, always, Wind and Shadow found it. Always, always, they lured a child to play the music for them and jealous Moon.”
“They still want the Sun’s dreams,” Julian breathed. His hands clutched the bowl so tight, his knuckles were white.
Jai did not want to tell him the rest — the worst. “No mortal can endure playing the instrument for long. Maybe a day, maybe a week. But Sun’s dreams are so pure, so strong, they burn flesh and bone to dust.”
“I won’t play for them,” he said.
Jai’s skin chilled.
“I’ll break the bowl, cut the strings, or, or throw it back over the horizon.”
“No mortal power can break that bowl, boy. No answer as simple as that.” Poor, sweet bird, she thought, what more could she give him? What words to guide him?
“Teach him,” Sath whispered.
Jai knelt at the boy’s feet and placed one hand on his knee. He was trembling. “I can teach you how to survive this night,” she said.
“What should I do?”
“Don’t say no to the wind, child. Don’t refuse the shadow. Play the music for them, let them have their song through you. Bend like a blade of grass, and they’ll let you free for at least a little while.”
Dark eyes searched hers. “That’s never worked before, has it?”
Wind tore at the shakes. Shadows spread like spilled ink across the ceiling.
“We’ll make it work,” Jai said. “You are strong enough to bend.”
Julian closed his eyes, his mouth tugged down. When he opened his eyes, Jai could see his fear, fresh and sharp. A fear she shared.
Shadows licked out. A lamp dimmed.
“Did you try to break it?” he asked.
“A hundred, hundred times.” Beyond the living room, the front door bucked beneath pounding gusts. Instruments within the room rang out in answer.
Julian stood and walked into the living room, facing the door, his back to Jai.
“Did you play the music for them?”
“For a thousand, thousand years.” She stepped up behind him and placed her hand on his thin shoulder. Sath had wrapped around Julian’s waist and rested his head on the boy’s other shoulder.
Hinges groaned, darkness swallowed lamp light.
“Did you try to play it wrong?” Julian asked.
“There is no wrong way to play a dream, child. There is only your way.”
The door burst open. Wind stood beyond the doorway, larger than the room could hold. His arms and legs were ragged tornados of dust and dead grasses, his face the flat cold mask of storm. Only his eyes seemed solid, and those were bottomless swirling vortices that drank thought and emptied minds.
Behind him skulked his brother, Shadow. Against the dark of the night, Jai could only see Shadow if he moved, a nightmare shaped like a great cat or monstrous dog, with only the razored glint of fangs and claw to show his passing.
Wind and Shadow strode toward the house.
“Bend child,” Jai said, wanting to close her eyes and run from here, but unable to do either beneath the hold of Wind and Shadow. “Play for them.”
“Your way,” Sath whispered beside the boy’s ear.
“My way,” Julian said.
He placed his fingers against the strings. But instead of plucking, his fingers lay flat, muting the music, denying the gods.
Wind howled. Shadow swelled and grew, filling the air, until it felt the house would crush beneath the weight of the night.
Jai squeezed Julian’s shoulder, hoping to hold him steady against the gods while Sath whispered to him.
“Play,” she said again.
Music, soft as a sigh, rose to fill the room. It was not the burning power of Sun’s dreams pouring through moonlight strings. It was a softer song, a child’s melody. A lullaby.
Julian was singing, his voice sweet and clear, like river against stone, like time against the world.
Please, no,
Jai thought,
don’t fight the gods
. But Julian did not stop singing. This was his way, his denial of the music, his choice to stand strong and not bend. Just like her other oak-strong boy.
And Sath was singing with him.
Jai could not let them fight alone. She added her warm, low voice to their song. The instruments on the walls echoed the lullaby. Note by note, they stood against the gods. Wind tore at the room trying to stop them. Shadow crushed down.
Still, they sang.
In a moment of song, in a beat of three hearts, Wind and Shadow pulled away from the house.
Julian swayed. “Are they gone?” he asked.
But Jai knew that in only a moment, a beat of three hearts . . .
Wind struck the house. The door exploded. Splinters of wood knifed through the room. Julian cried out, turned toward Jai.
Shadow leapt through the doorway, so hard and cold, it was as if the air was made of claw and ice.
Blinded, deafened, Jai pulled Julian behind her and reached for the bowl in his hands. Her palm touched the strings and moonlight left blistering burns. Wind snatched the bowl from her fingertips and hurled it against the wall. Wind struck her and Jai fell to her knees, holding Julian close to protect him from Wind and Shadow.
Julian struggled free of her grip.
No! she tried to say, but shadow clogged her mouth and the wind stole her words.
One step, two, and Julian was gone. She could not see him, lost to Wind and Shadow, but she could hear him, his halting voice, his soft song.
Wind and Shadow saw him too. They tore out of the house so quickly, the natural darkness brought tears of pain to Jai’s eyes. In that light, she saw Julian. He stood in front of the open the door, his clothes tattered, his thin body straight, bloody, Sath wrapped around his chest like braided armor.
In his hands was the moon-strung bowl. He lifted the bowl up above his head and called out.
“I have them! I have all of Sun’s dreams and all of the songs.”
From the black sky, Moon woke. Moonlight poured over him like platinum fire, the cold cruel eye of a jealous god.
“Julian!” Jai called. “Come back.”
He glanced over his shoulder, his dark eyes filled with fear, his mouth set in a thin line. Sath lifted his head and whispered, “Good-bye, forever-companion. I am sorry.”
Then the boy turned back to the door and held the bowl out in his hands.
“I won’t play for you,” he said. “They aren’t your dreams to hear.” Julian softly sang the lullaby.
Moon’s anger was like sharp fingers pressing into Jai’s ears. A snap, a flash of pain, and her ears popped and bled. Beyond the door, Wind roared like a great ocean, and the air filled with Shadow, choking out all light except that single beam of ice surrounding Julian and Sath.
Jai pushed up to her feet. She had to pull Julian and Sath away from the moonlight. She couldn’t let them die.
Wind and Shadow and Moon pulled back to strike.
“Now!” Sath hissed.
Julian yelled and held the bowl before him like a shield. Wind and Shadow struck. Moonstrings snapped. The bowl shattered. A thousand, thousand glittering dreams fell from between the splinters of wood. All at once, beautiful notes cried out, the pure, the last song of Sun’s dreams.
Wood and moonlight sliced through the room, whipped by the wind that battered Julian down to his knees. Jai stumbled toward Julian, but could not reach him through the flying debris.
The walls groaned. Instruments fell and shattered against the floor.
Wind and Shadow clawed into the room, snatching at the remaining bits of the bowl — wood and broken strings that would never sing again — then screamed away to the distant face of Moon. As if released from a spell, clouds crowded the night sky and smothered the moonlight.
When Jai could hear again, when she could see, she found a lamp and match and brought both back to find Julian lying dazed in the middle of the destroyed room.
He was covered in dust and splinters of wood and reed, Sath still wrapped around his thin chest and waist. A trickle of blood ran tracks down his arm and hand, too dark to be his own.
“Sath?” Jai said. Her hands shook as she ran fingers against Sath’s cool glossy scales trying to find the source of the bleeding. Not a fast flow, she realized. Just scratches, no deep wounds.
Sath shifted, his head appearing from near the boy’s neck. “The child?”
Jai brushed dirt and wood from Julian’s hair and felt for his pulse.
“Fine,” she said, her voice trembling with relief. “He’s fine.”
Julian looked up at her, his eyes wide with shock. “Should I go now?”
Jai brushed the dust from his cheek. “No. I think you should stay right here.”
“You said there was no place for me here, and your house, the instruments, Sun’s dreams. I broke them. I ruined them all,” he whispered.
“Hush, child,” Jai said, “you didn’t ruin anything. You made it right again. Something I’d never been strong enough to do.”
“But the music, your music . . .”
“The music wasn’t mine. It was Sun’s.”
She drew him into her arms.
“So I can stay?” Julian asked softly.
“Yes,” Jai said.
“And so can the snake?”
Jai brushed her fingers across the top of Sath’s head, remembering the hurtful things she had said to him. “If he wants to stay with such a foolish girl.”
Sath tipped his head to one side, his dark eyes warm and deep. “I promised a brave girl I would be her forever-companion. My home is here with her.”
“Thank you,” Jai whispered. And she held the boy and the snake in her arms until Sun walked to the edge of the waking world and brought with him the warmth of day.
The heart of this story came from the concept that life often forces us to change and grow, and sometimes, so does death.
HERE AFTER LIFE
It took the four of them half the day
to convince Jim he was them, they were him, and they were all dead. It finally hit home when the twenty-four-year-old guy in cut-offs and no shirt shoved the baby in Jim’s hands and said, “You can fucking argue all you want, but I am not looking after this kid anymore.”
Jim blinked at the cold familiarity of those words. God, he had been a dick at that age. Luckily, the baby wasn’t very heavy, and Jim managed not to drop him. “What am I supposed to do with him?”
“You’re the oldest now — you figure it out.” Twenty-four- year-old patted the pockets of his cutoffs and fished out a lighter and a crushed pack of cigarettes.
“Hey, I quit,” Jim said, nodding toward the cigarette.
Twenty-four-year-old flicked, puffed, and took a long, deep breath. “When you were thirty.” The cigarette bobbed between his lips as he spoke. “Too bad for you.”
Jim could have strangled him then, if he wasn’t, if they weren’t, well, if things were different.
Jim looked over at the thirteen-year-old boy who paced at their maximum distance from each other — about four feet. He was mohawked and studded, chains connecting distant body parts. One look brought back the pain, the itch — worse — the snags and embarrassing rips.
Six-year-old Jimmy stood next to Jim and stared at him with a thoughtful expression.
“So this is me — I mean us?” Jim asked Twenty-four-year-old. Talking made his head hurt. They’d said something about a car, but Jim couldn’t remember anything before the last few hours when he’d opened his eyes and realized he was sitting out here on the grass median in front of the hospital, surrounded by the four of them.
“That’s right,” Twenty-four-year-old said around the cigarette. “You catch on quick for an old guy.” He walked a short distance away and sat on the fake boulder in front of the Mercy General sign.
The baby in Jim’s hands squirmed. Jim looked down at him. Man, he was an ugly kid. Yellow skin, yellow eyes and a head shaped like a number two potato. Jaundice — that’s what it was called, a failing of the liver that’s usually taken care of with sun lamps and fluids. Had he had a serious case of it when he was born? Jim tried to remember if his mom had ever mentioned it. His thoughts hit a slick wall, and he gave up trying.
Baby made a sour face. He looked like he was going to cry or puke, but instead stared, glassy-eyed, over Jim’s shoulder. He seemed awfully calm. Maybe being dead did that to a kid.
“You okay?” Jim jiggled him, but the baby just stared.
“Of course he’s not okay, he’s dead,” the thirteen-year-old said.
Jim managed to tuck the baby up against one shoulder. “Hey, Kid. Since you know so much, how about giving me a hand with the baby?”
Thirteen-year-old stopped pacing. His shoulders hunched in the loose black t-shirt, then he slowly turned, all attitude and hypo-allergenic steel. Black streaks ran down his cheeks from the inmost corner of his eyes, and Jim tried to remember why he’d done the Alice Cooper look. “The name’s Fly,” he said.
Jim laughed. He’d forgotten about that.
Fly flipped him off and went back to pacing.
Which left six-year-old Jimmy.
“He’s okay,” Jimmy said. “I watched baby before Fly came, and he watched him until he,” he nodded toward Twenty-four-year-old, “got here. It’s not hard. You just have to carry him. He doesn’t eat or mess his diapers, you know.”
Jim didn’t know, but it made sense, if any of this did. “So you’re the smart guy, huh? Do you have any idea why we’re here, all of us — I mean me — broken apart like this, or what we’re waiting around for?”
Jimmy’s brown eyes lost their shine, and his mouth turned down. Six. The year Dad had flown to London and stayed there. The year he’d caught pneumonia so bad he passed out when he tried to stand. His first ambulance ride, his first breathing tube. Six came rushing back to Jim in a way he hadn’t wanted to feel, taste, or remember in years.
“We’re not dead enough. Part of us is still alive in there.” Jimmy pointed toward the hospital, and the room Jim vaguely remembered. Surgery? Had his heart cashed in on its cholesterol count? No, an accident. Car. Head on. Fifty miles an hour around the curve from the airport bar. Driving hard. Driving away from Lucy.
“Jeezus,” Jim said.
“It’s pretty boring most of the time,” Jimmy said. “I kinda hoped we’d die in the car wreck, but we got you instead.”
“Thanks,” Jim drawled.
Fly scoffed.
Jimmy tipped his head to the side. “Sorry,” he said. “It hurt a lot, didn’t it?”
God, Jim thought, how did a sweet little kid like that turn into thirteen-year-old rivet-face over there? That thought made Jim think Twenty-four-year-old probably wondered how come he had to end up forty pounds overweight and saddled to a go-nowhere mail-clerk job.
“I don’t remember the pain much,” Jim said to Jimmy. Not the pain from the accident. Strangely, the pain he remembered was Lucy’s handshake, her tears, her good-bye that ended a five year relationship. A relationship he’d hoped would last forever.
Jimmy nodded, an ancient six-year-old pro at all this.
“She was neat,” he said softly.
“Lucy?” Jim asked, surprised Jimmy knew what he was thinking.
“Yeah. Why didn’t you just give her the ring?”
“People change,” Jim said, done talking to the sweet little kid now.
“Hey, Smokes,” Jim called to Twenty-four-year old. “What are we doing here?”
Twenty-four-year-old got to his feet with a smooth motion Jim had given up thirty pounds ago. “Let me go through this once.” He walked close enough that Jim should be able to smell the cigarette smoke, but no matter how hard he inhaled, he couldn’t smell anything.
“We’re dead. Can’t eat, piss or bleed. We can’t get any farther away than about four feet from each other, and have to stay within a couple blocks of our real body — the living us — him.” He nodded toward the hospital and took a drag off the cigarette. “My guess is we’re stuck this way until the living us — him — dies for good.”
“So why aren’t we in there?” Jim asked.
“I hate hospitals,” Twenty-four-year-old said. He gave Jim a look that said you should know, you should remember.
“I don’t care,” Jim said, “I’m not just going to wait out here until I — we — die. I want to go in. I want to see me — us — him with my own eyes.”
“Weren’t you listening? We can’t go anywhere unless we go together, and I’m not going in there.”
Jim opened his mouth to tell him exactly where he could stick his attitude when Jimmy spoke up.
“Something’s wrong with Baby.”
“What?” Jim shifted the baby down from his shoulder and held him out along his hand and arm again.
Baby was still yellow, but his eyes were shut, and he seemed even more still than he had been. Jim shook him gently.
“Hey, guy. Wake up.”
Baby jiggled, but his eyes stayed shut, his chest still. Jim felt a chill wash over his skin. Baby wasn’t breathing.
“Oh man,” Fly said, his voice cracking.
“Jeezus,” Twenty-four-year-old exhaled.
“Is he . . .are we . . .?” Fly said.
Jim took a breath, held it a minute, trying hard to feel Baby’s heartbeat, and not sure that he’d had one before.
Baby began to fade, the edges first, wisping away like fog before a wind, fingers, arms, feet and legs.
“This hasn’t happened before,” Twenty-four-year-old told Jim, eye to eye, man to man. He tried to look like he could handle it, but he was scared out of his skin and Jim knew it.
“What are we going to do? What’s happening to us?” Fly had worked himself up into a scream, and his eyes were suddenly as young as Jimmy’s.
Thirteen. The year he’d found Mom’s body. The year he’d realized how little justice was in the justice system. The year he’d washed a bottle of Sleepeeze down with two bottles of Nyquil and woke up for the stomach pump.
Jim could taste the charcoal in his throat, the greasy grit against the back of his lips, coating his tongue. He suddenly realized the charcoal streaks down Fly’s cheeks weren’t mascara.
Fly’s hands shook, the chain between his eyebrow and bottom lip trembled. It looked like he was ready to run. Fact was, Jim wanted to run too. Turn his back on all this, on all of them, and just get the hell away from here.
Jimmy’s small hand touched Jim’s free hand. “Are we dying now?”
The last bit of Baby, his chest and stomach, faded from Jim’s left hand and forearm. Jim stared at where Baby had been only a moment before, and felt the dull ping of something deep within himself falling away. Emotional vertigo. He shook his head to clear it, to deny reality, then gave up and let his arm drop.
“Maybe this is the way it works.” Jim used his calm voice for Fly and Jimmy, the voice even Lucy believed. “Maybe we’ll go one at a time, and that’s okay. I mean, Baby lasted thirty-eight years, right?”
“Or there can only be four of us at a time,” Twenty-four-year-old said. “Maximum spirit capacity, or some such shit.”
Jim voiced a much darker thought. “Maybe something is happening to the living us. A stroke, brain damage, heart attack.”
“Fuck,” Fly said. He really looked like he needed a smoke.
“Smokes,” Jim said, but Twenty-four-year-old was already handing Fly his cigarette. Fly took a couple deep puffs and tried to pull himself together.
“Thanks,” Jim said.
Twenty-four-year-old nodded. “Now what?”
Jim could feel Fly glance over at him. Jimmy squeezed Jim’s hand.
Twenty-four-year-old didn’t break eye contact. He tipped his head toward the hospital. He looked calm and together about it on the outside, even though Jim had a pretty good idea what he felt on the inside.
Jim looked away from him and forced a cheerful note in his voice. “Time to pay ourself a visit, boys.” He could tell not even Jimmy bought it.
The three stayed close to Jim. They crossed the thin grassy strip between the parking lot and ER driveway. Their feet made no noise over the grass or the pavement. At the door to ER, Jim put his free hand out to push the door open.
“You don’t —” Jimmy said, and then he realized he didn’t — didn’t have to put his hand out, didn’t have to brace for anything — because he was through the glass doors without opening them. He looked over his shoulder and shook his head. Zero sensation. No heat, cold, or anything that indicated they’d just passed through something solid.
“Is it always like that?” Jim asked.
Fly shrugged. “What did you expect?”
They walked through the hospital, and Jim had the strange feeling that the building moved around them more than they moved through it. After a few floors, he got used to the way it worked, and then it felt predictable, if not exactly normal. Except for having no need to open doors, they navigated the hospital like living people, hallways and doors, white signs with arrows and names. Jim took his time, trying to think.
Why hadn’t he just died like he’d always thought he would — in one piece, at one time — at least as one person for Godsake. Was he afraid to die? Despite Fly’s reaction, he’d never really been afraid of death, had long ago accepted its inevitability. What then? Why was he becoming ghosts of himself?
Fifth floor. Jim could feel a difference here, and knew without looking at the sign-in board that his living self must be close. He made his way down the hall, and took the turn to the left. Outside a plain blonde wood door, he paused.
His heart, which he hadn’t noticed during the walk, the stairs, or any other time, suddenly squeezed tight, like the stress-attacks he used to get.
“Damn,” he whispered.
Fly nodded, and Twenty-four-year-old said, “Did I mention it hurts?”
Jimmy’s hand seemed lighter all of a sudden.
Jim looked down at him, and Jimmy tipped his head up and smiled. Jim swore he could see the shine of the floor through his face.
“I’m okay,” Jimmy said.
Did he seem more pale than he had been moments before, his skin translucent? Jim hesitated.
“Listen,” Twenty-four-year-old said, “Either get this over with now, or we’re getting the hell out of here.”
Jim suddenly remembered Twenty-four. The year he’d gone fishing with the guys on the North Santiam. The year the air was filled with a mother’s scream and a little girl slipped through the rapids. He had jumped. A face flashed by, then the orange of a life jacket. Jim grabbed. The girl slipped from his grip, and he was pulled under into cold blackness. Two months later he woke up in the hospital. He’d missed the girl’s funeral, and spent his last year of college learning to walk again.
Twenty-four-year-old exhaled, long and slow, like he didn’t know what Jim was remembering. “Well?” Twenty-four-year-old asked.
Jim took a deep breath. This was like that jump, except there was no way he could guess at the dangers beyond the door. He tightened his grip on Jimmy’s hand and walked through.
All the things he’d expected to be in the room were there. The bland wallpaper, the dull glossed floor, the I.V. stand, the bed. And in the bed, a man.
Jim stared across the room at himself. The pain in his chest tightened. He felt too hot, too cold, and sick enough to puke. He had accepted that he wasn’t alive, but to see himself lying there, bandaged, tubed, but breathing, and so utterly alive — it all seemed wrong.
This, this . . . imposter was going to finish his life, make his decisions, do the things he’d put off for later, or worse, never do them at all.
Screw that.
Shock gave way to anger.
Jim strode forward. The pain in his chest tightened the nearer he came to his living self.
He leaned over the bed, his hands extended. He didn’t know exactly what he was planning to do — maybe shake him, maybe choke the life out of him.
Just before his fingers touched his living flesh he heard Twenty-four-year-old say, “Do it.”
Fly said, “Shit,” and Jimmy whispered, “Oh, no.”
Jim did it anyway. His hands sank into his living chest. A hot electric wave crashed down over him. There was a slippery moment of vertigo while he fell and fell, too far, out to the edge of a shocking coldness. Then he turned and willed himself up, to the heat, to the electric pulse and buzz of blood and cell, to the cluttered, noisy thoughts, the pain, the breath. To living.