“Hey! Wait a minute!” she shouted, as if the snowmobile’s departure were mere carelessness — a failure to notice that the passenger was not on board.
It took Heather ten seconds to realize that the snowmobile was not going to stop, another ten to claw her clothing into place. She stumbled through the snow, hollering, “Don’t leave me here!” She chased after the Ski-doo, the diminishing roar of its motor humming in her ears even when it had disappeared behind a hill.
After disbelief, shock set in. The truth swept over her, buried her like an avalanche. She was alone in the middle of a frozen lake. The Ski-doo’s track, a long scar in the white snow, was the only sign that it had ever been here. Everything else seemed like a bad dream. Only the track was real, and only it could save her. She had to follow that track, and quickly, before drifting snow erased it.
Which way should she go? Forward or back? It must be twenty miles back to Osprey Lake.
Forward, she decided. There would be a town beyond the next hill. She would come upon it soon. Snow swirled in every direction. Soon it covered the snowmobile’s track.
Heather walked and walked until she lost all sense of time and place. There was a buzzing in her head. Images swam vaguely in her mind. For a while, someone seemed to walk beside her, a presence felt rather than seen. When she turned her head, nothing was there but swirling snow.
Then a heavy drowsiness came upon her. She felt her knees give way and her body sink into the softness. Rest and sleep, she thought. Rest and sleep. Memories passed like strands of mist, like fragments of a dream. It was summer, and Don lay beside her on the plaid blanket, down by a river, just past a little town that was out of sight behind a hill. She made an effort to touch his face. But she was too tired.
There were voices in the wind. They came from above her and from every side, chanting in a language she did not know. She heard drums too, but that might have been her blood beating in her ears, fainter now and far away.
Dead medicine snake woman
by Gerard Houarner
New York, New York
She was a different kind of incoming, bursting like a hungry T-Rex through the City Hall subway platform crowd thick from track pit to tile wall with suits and stiffs. Her eyes zeroed in on half a dozen guys, me included, for a split second before dismissing us all. We weren’t on the menu. I wouldn’t have minded, even after she near knocked me over chasing a train that hadn’t come in yet.
Funny how little of my life sticks with me. But, of course, things sticking to me isn’t the problem at all.
She put a good lick into me with her shoulder. Played some games, that one. Curtain of black hair had my heart racing before I remembered her lips, thin because they were pursed, and her small nose, nostrils flaring like a horse in full gallop. I liked the way her hips shoved the sides of a loose cotton top out as she bulled her way through a New York crowd that really didn’t give a shit about being pushed around by her.
Almost like they forgot she’d been there as soon as she passed. But I didn’t.
Wake up, white man, and see what’s coming.
That’s what Grandpa said, inside my head. Normally, I’m sleeping when I hear him. Usually, I’m dreaming when I see the world so sharp it hurts, in a quick-cut slide, down a looping water ride that doesn’t ever want to stop. Like a house-to-house fire fight. Or an RPG blazing a smoke trail for a Humvee parked at a market.
Grandpa says I should take up the pipe if I want to understand where I’m going and what I’m seeing in these dreams. Then he laughs when I think about it, and tells me I don’t have enough First in me to handle a pipe. Yeah, and you weren’t there when I needed you, ghost warrior.
I couldn’t remember the last time he warned about something in real time.
I turned, a little slow because I didn’t want to let go of her, and looked. Got two looks in, really. First take was of a big, goofy, golden-haired boy with porcelain skin and muscles on top of muscles packed under a shiny custom suit, slipping and sliding his way through the crowd like a king snake with a thousand excuse-me’s slithering from his mouth in a few different languages. Pretty. Officer candidate material. The type that goes down hard and doesn’t bounce. People didn’t look twice at him either.
Second take went toward the same place as Grandpa’s voice.
I never saw nothing in any dream like what was coming on my second take. Sure, I’ve spent time with ravens, cougars, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, even talking water bugs. Trees and leaves turning into freaky faces, speaking words I can’t understand, and even when I do, I still don’t get what’s up — yeah, plenty of that.
But this check-off got me a vision full of toothy, mangy, wild-eyed wilderness surging like a market crowd running from a bomb blast. Where the eyes were supposed to be in the lump that might have been a head, there were holes, red-rimmed fire pockets like sniper muzzles loaded with bullets with names on them.
Two faces. Walking in the waking world.
Something inside me felt cold, but it wasn’t really me. Grandpa was upset.
The station already smelled like meat turned bad from the mass of sweaty bodies perfumed for the day at the office, but what I saw pushed out a shockwave stench like a body cooked in burning wreckage. Or a fresh, dug-up grave stacked with the dead.
Two-face didn’t single me out. It was stalking the woman.
I moved. Didn’t think twice. Not scared. Hell, Grandpa’d been talking to me since I was a kid, saying he’s in my blood and telling me I should do this or that crazy thing. Scared always bounced off of me, even in that shit-and-rock country they sent me to after I enlisted. This was just one more dream I was walking through.
I left a wake of curses. Guess I was the only one running who wasn’t invisible. Put out a hand, caught a flap of cloth that felt slippery. Kept the other tight for a punch to what I hoped were ribs.
Two-face raised an elbow and I barely cleared a broken jaw. The thing shrugged and I heard the buzzing of a nest full of hornets barreling into my ear drums.
I went down, sparks flying. No concussion or ringing eardrums, no smoke curling from singed cloth. No flashbacks either. Got up quick. People muttering didn’t bother me. I’m used to folks thinking I’m crazy. Best four years of my life were in the service. I was normal there. Bugfuck as I wanted to be. Grandpa didn’t visit me. Not even in dreams. No signs or warnings. Reality was the dream. I’d been sent all alone to the mountaintop in a shit storm to find my way, my tribe, my vision.
You had to make it on your own, is what Grandpa told me when I came back and he started speaking to me again.
Where’s my way, my tribe, my guide?
You on the path for it now.
Thanks for nothing.
I followed in the big man’s wake, catching up, thinking about what I was going to do — jump up and grab the choke or go low and take out the knees. He stayed mostly man, which made it easier to think. Of course, when you have to think about these things before you do them, they don’t turn out well.
I wasn’t fast enough. Good thing, or else I wouldn’t be talking about it now. And the woman, she’d be dead.
He caught up to her and shoved. She screamed as she went flying into naked air, and when she stopped flying she vanished into the track pit.
A gust of warm, humid air blew in, then surged out of the tunnel.
The man kept moving on through the crowd as I came to the platform edge. A few suits shouted, stirred from their iPod cocoons by a sense of having just missed something. I knew the feeling. A young girl in a school uniform pointed down at the tracks. A knot of teenage boys whooped and laughed. Maybe there was something down there, maybe there wasn’t. A fat rat plodded away to the other side of the station. Fast food wrappings and newspaper pages danced in the air. A roar was building.