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“Then the wars for the water came. America reached up and started sipping on our lakes with a great metal straw. And where were the freshest lakes and the cleanest rivers? On our lands, of course.
We needed to remember Story. It was his job to set the memory in perpetuity.
“After the rains started and the lands shifted so that some cities fell right into the oceans, people had to move around. Diseases spread like crazy. With all this sickness and movement and death, people got sad. One of the ways the sadness came out was when they slept. They stopped being able to dream.
Soon they turned on each other, and the world changed again.”
From where we were now, running, looking at reality from this one point in time, it seemed as though the world had suddenly gone mad. Poisoning your own drinking water, changing the air so much the earth shook and melted and crumbled, harvesting a race for medicine. How? How could this happen? Were they that much different from us? Would we be like them if we’d had a choice? Were they like us enough to let us live?
“Do you think circumstances make people turn bad? Or that people make circumstances bad to begin with?”
That’s what they were calling the dreamlessness when it started, a plague of madness.
This space felt untouched. We could feel the thrum of old activity sliding along the floorboards, caught in the keyholes of closed doors. Everything had been shut tight while so much was still supposed to happen. The intent and plans hadn’t had time to vacate. And here we were now opening the lid of a sealed jar, and all the anticipation of a tomorrow planned a thousand yesterdays ago came skittering to our feet like slick-shelled beetles.
“everyone tells their own coming-to story. That’s the rule. Everyone’s creation story is their own.”
“The Earth was broken. Too much taking for too damn long, so she finally broke. But she went out like a wild horse, bucking off as much as she could before lying down.
So much laid to waste from the miscalculation of infallibility in the face of a planet’s revolt.
a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.
“At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?
“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
I reverted to the books I loved, those rare and impractical luxuries I’d happened on a few times in my life and hoarded until they fell apart, all pulp and tears. “It’s weird when you come to a spot in the story where the plot could go either way, you know?”
There is a feeling that has no name because, really, it is such an absence that it exists only in a vacuum of feeling and so, really, can have no name. It sucks you inside out and places you in a space where touch and taste and sound and sight all turn to ash. I was there now, alone. There was no mooring, no ground, no sky. There was just me and the boot, and then, suddenly, the warm weight of the rifle on my back.
I remembered the way my mother had changed when Dad didn’t return. Her skin turned to paper, and on it was written all the worries that’d ever crossed her mind and heart.
“Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.”
How could anything be as bad as it was when this moment existed in the span of eternity? How could I have fear when this girl would allow me this close? How could anything matter but this small miracle of having someone I could love?
And I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream. And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all. Anything. Everything.
