She told me of the hideous dreams
The story below is my submission to the STSC Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic this time is “Chimera”.
She told me — no, signaled — of the hideous dreams that kept pestering her. Night after night she tried to take flight but the wings, they were not there.
Her fingers were long and pink and unable to hold things. She tried. She tried to fold them so they would look smaller.
Her eyes were aquamarine. The color of something you once wished was real. They were filled with diamond tears.
Her hair wasn’t. It wasn’t hair. Instead coarse baleen strands hung across her head like a nautical curtain and cut into her soft neck and left whip marks. Lashes to remind her that she was an abomination to most who lay their eyes on her.
Her mouth — no, mandibles — were connected to the involuntary nervous system and moved nonstop. The sound of chitin and mucus interrupted the ebb and flow of the book lungs. Like a blacksmith bellows in and out. In and out.
Her feet were human and with them she spoke. She moved them in the air and formed shapes of letters. With great effort she spelled out her awareness of this world and what had brought her here.
She told me — no, signaled — that they had on purpose designed her body so that she couldn’t end her own life.
And then, one night, when she was more scared than usual, she told me what it’s like to know.
To know everything that could have been and everything that humans should never know.
To know what it means to be small and light and land on an orchid and sip dew.
To be fast and fierce and bite into a running gazelle and take over its life force.
To be airborne and see everything. Everything.
How air feels happy when it flows around your organs after rain, and oxygenates your eyes and makes everything sharper.
Or…
How the salty baleen hair roots connect to the brain stem and whispers about eons ago when we all swam in a kelp forest before everything else was here.
Or…
How the wounds of the clipped wings hurt so terribly at night when all angels fly.
She begged me to come hold her hand. She was frightened as a human, and she remembered long ago when someone held her hand. A warm and large and safe hand that reassured her.
A quick moment, like clouds racing across the plains in September, she was happy before darkness came to weigh her down again.
Sometimes, she told me before I left, she spreads out her missing wings and let the night breeze tickle them.
She sighed through the spiracles and her aquamarine eyes welled up.
Then I squeezed my daughter’s hand one last time and walked out.
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