Tom groaned and sat up, peering at the old man. “What’s going on?”
“The inipi were calling you in your dream, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, but they couldn’t cross the cougar tracks.”
“Huh.” Tom saw Joe’s teeth flash in a smile. “Good. Let’s get hunting then.”
Once they were done with their morning chores and had something to eat, Joe built up the fire. He chanted in a language Tom didn’t know, tossing sage onto the fire. Then he gathered something from within a basket and cradled it in his hand. Gingerly, as if handling a precious egg, Joe transferred a ball of fluff to Tom’s hand.
“It’s eagle down. Put it in your mouth and swallow it.”
Having seen what eating a cougar track could do for him, Tom willingly did as he was told. He worked his mouth, trying to get up the spit to swallow.
Something crawled in his mouth.
He started to spit it out, ready to dig at it with his fingers if he had to, but Joe caught his wrists.
“Swallow it! You must swallow it,” he said, shouting in Tom’s face. “This will protect you from the inipi while we hunt.”
Tom swallowed, again and again, gagging a little until all the dry fluff and crawling things were gone.
“What was it?”
“Eagle down.”
“And…?”
“Ants.”
Tom was on his feet before he could register he wanted to be. “Ants? You fed me live, crawling ants?” His stomach did a little flip, and he put a hand over his mouth.
Joe brought him a drink and patted him on the arm. “It is an age old custom that saved plenty of people from sickness caused by inipi.”
Tom sat down, hard. He look a long drink, wiped his mouth. “You never did tell me why you’re here, if you’re not inipi.”
Joe looked over, tipping his head to one side. “Just an old man who got tired of the world the way it was,” he said with a little shrug. “I was getting a little lonely before you showed up, though. How do you feel now?”
Tom was staring at the sky, and Joe’s voice seemed a long ways off. “What did you put in my water?” he asked, but his words oozed like sap in a cold pine tree, and his mind went away from him.
He saw the inipi again. They called to him, trying to tell him something over a great distance, but he did not understand them.
He also saw a cougar stretched out in the sun. “Good day, brother.”
“Good day,” Tom replied. It seemed perfectly normal to be talking with this animal in this place. Cougar groomed his front paw.
“What are you hunting?” Cougar asked.
“My water sense.”
Cougar gave him a look of disdain like only a cat can do. “You don’t have water sense,” he said, as if it were obvious.
Disappointment flooded him. “I kinda figured that, but I still hoped.”
He came back to the fireside, back to his body. Joe hovered over him, tapping at his forehead and poking him in the belly. “Hey, stop.”
Joe sat back with a frustrated sigh. “You are not Kawaiisu.”
“I know,” Tom said, sitting up. The world spun, tipped, and then settled.
Joe frowned. “You always knew?” he asked, a note of anger in his voice.
Tom blinked at him. “No. But Cougar just told me I don’t have water sense, and all the Kawaiisu have water sense. I’m an orphan, and no one can really tell me much about my parents, so my guess is I’m not Kawaiisu.”
Joe was nodding, his smile back. “Cougar told you? That is good, very good.” His smile faltered. “Except I do not know how you will ever get home again.”
~*~
Tom dreamt of the inipi pair again that night. This time, when they stopped at Cougar’s tracks, they knelt and cupped sand in their hands. They seemed to offer it to him, their faces more clear to him than they’d ever been before.
“What do you want of me?” he asked.
“You must know who you are,” they said together. Their voices made gooseflesh rise on his arms and neck, and he shivered.
“I am Tom. What more do I need to know?”
“You are our Tom, and you are not Kawaiisu.”
Tom stared and stared. “Your Tom…” he said, taking a step closer, wanting to see their faces better.
“Come be with us, Tom. We miss you so much.”
“Mom? Dad?” He took another step.
“Yes. Come, you are so close now.”
“Tom! Tom! Tom, wake up!”
He blinked, thought he’d suddenly gone blind, then realized it was the dark of night. “My parents! Joe, the inipi are my parents!”
“And you were going to them,” Joe said.
Tom was glad of the darkness to hide the tears that sprang to his eyes. “Yeah, I was going to them! They’re my parents!”
“They were your parents, but they are inipi now. If you go to them, you will wander the Otherworld as a spirit yourself.”
Tom wanted to shout and pace and throw things about, but it was dark and cold and as he thought about everything he realized maybe Joe was right.
“They said what you said. That I am not Kawaiisu.”
Joe just grunted, obviously now tucked back in his sleeping furs.
“But if I’m not Kawaiisu, then who am I?”
He lay and thought about it until the song birds woke and light changed the world once again. He dozed off then, and saw Marie, her right eye swollen shut and her lip cut. Charlie loomed up behind her, and Tom came awake in the full sun of morning shouting, shaking with fear for her.
“I have to go back,” he told Joe.
Joe followed him down the deer path, and when the empty plain did not change Tom rounded on the old man.
“I saw you that day. You made Charlie stop beating me, you scared him. Why? What did you do?”
Joe’s lipped thinned out, and his eyes narrowed. He looked angry enough to make Tom let go of him and step back.
“It’s not what I did, it’s who I am… or was.” Joe wouldn’t meet Tom’s eye. “Charlie is my grandson. My daughter died too young, and I did what I could to teach him other ways, but his pa was mean, and Charlie grew up mean too.”
“You’re an inipi? How did you resist my sage and tobacco?”
Joe shrugged. “When a shaman becomes an inipi, he is a little stronger than a bit of weeds.” He almost smiled.
“You have to cross back over and stop Charlie from hurting your great-granddaughter.”
“I can’t. They don’t see me.”
Tom stared at him for a long moment. “You have to try.”
Joe agreed to try, and they went down to the valley’s edge. The inipi shaman crossed into the world and back again to affirm that they were in the right place, but he could not bring Tom over with him. “They do not see me,” he admitted.
“Did you see Marie? Is Charlie there? Is she okay?”
Joe looked sad. “She is there. Her pa has just come home with too much beer in his belly. She’s hiding behind his shop.”
Tom swore softly. “Go scare him again!”
“I told you, they don’t see me. It was you that made me visible that day.”
Tom growled and scrubbed his face with his hands. “How could it be me?”
“You came here.”
Joe’s words sunk in, teasing at his brain. He shook his head in frustration. “Then I must be able to go back.” He thought of Cougar, and how he ate the wildcat’s track. He thought of his inipi parents, and how they offered him handfuls of sand. He thought of the water, and how he never understood the Kawaiisu’s water sense.
“But I still don’t know who I am!” he shouted.
Then he heard the song, and saw his inipi parents on the ridge singing.
Sun be sun, rain be rain,
Neither alone can bring the grain.
Earth, water, wind, sunfire,
Each sense comes from the sire.
Four Peoples, four Ways,
Ea
ch from something depraved.
Four other senses.
He knelt in the sand, the ever-present sand, and placed his palms upon the earth. He could feel the power of it, the way it pulsed deep into the bedrock. He remembered his inipi parents offering him handfuls of sand. He had first seen Joe when he’d been down, his hands in the sand. Joe said he’d made Charlie see, too. He must have come from a wet place, where dry land would be a luxury, something to covet, just as water was here. And in this moment, he had an abundance of earth.
Tom took up two handfuls and stood, then scattered the sand into the wind before him. The air shimmered, and the familiar house and shop appeared. He could see Marie crouched behind the shop, and Charlie calling out for her.
He had found his earth sense. He ran for Marie.
~*~
Adria Laycraft is a grateful member of IFWA and a proud survivor of the Odyssey Writers Workshop. She co-edited Urban Green Man, which launched in August of 2013. Look for her stories in Tesseracts 16, Neo-opsis, On-Spec, James Gunn’s Ad Astra, Hypersonic Tales, DKA Magazine, and In Places Between. Author of Be a Freelance Writer Now, Adria lives in Calgary with her husband and son.
~*~
The Cartography of Shattered Trees
Beth Cato
Since that terrible night six months ago, Vivian had tolerated her body as a foreign, broken thing. She took care to never look at herself naked, yet as she stepped from the shower that morning, she glimpsed something strange in the mirror and paused. Instead of mere scars, a map adorned her skin. A highway of red traced the curve of her breast and flowed down to her belly button. The flecks and scars of wooden shrapnel had shifted to create the outline of hills and the undulation of a river. Her city rested above the knoll of her heart, thatched by cross-streets and byways.
Her fingers glanced her skin. The scars felt like divots, the fern-like spread of her burns in soft ripples. According to doctors, the Lichtenberg figures should have faded months before. Now those fractal burns had metamorphosed into something more.
Repulsed and fascinated, she followed the red route south to her navel. Did the map go where… it happened? Shuddering, she clenched her fist.
“I need to get ready for work,” she said aloud.
Yet she still stared at herself, mesmerized. Despite the burns, despite the horribleness, there was something beautiful about the map.
She reached into the darkness of her closet and pulled out her old portfolio. Disturbed feathers of dust were set adrift in the air. She propped a large pad of paper against the bathroom counter and, with glances at the mirror, began to sketch. Her head pounded as it had so often since the lightning strike, and she furrowed her brow as she struggled for focus.
The line veered, gouging at the paper. She flung the pencil away with a wordless scream.
Vivian used to draw, paint, exist for the muse that overflowed from her fingertips. She used to live.
Her therapist had told her that if she wanted to create art again, she would find a way, even with the lingering nerve damage. Such trite, arrogant advice from a man with an illegible signature.
She didn’t just want art again, she wanted her old life back. She wanted her innocence, for her body to be a clean slate, free of burns, free of the lingering memories of Andrew’s heavy hand dragging her down.
Vivian ached to feel whole again, to fill the emptiness that constantly echoed beneath her breast.
She scrambled into her work clothes, smothering the memories beneath cotton and polyester. Her feet knew the path to work. She needed no map.
~*~
The throbbing drumbeat of pain worsened as the day continued.
The pain itself was nothing new; it had been a constant companion all these months. Doctors had bluntly informed her that she could experience dementia, chronic headaches, motor impairment, personality changes, or even amnesia—oh, how she prayed for the latter.
On the contrary, Vivian remembered every detail of that night. The throbbing pain made it easier to fall into the past, when the agony had been fresh and intense. If she could still paint, she would have portrayed it with a foreground of bobbing blades of grass and a high, stark wall of trees beyond. It had been the first day of May, everything green and lovely beneath the moon.
And then Andrew’s fingers jerked her down like manacles and the tree trunk scraped her elbows and she screamed, “Help me! Someone help me! Get off, Andrew, get off me—” and a bird’s silhouette swooped against gray swirls of clouds and thunder rumbled and…
Vivian shivered out of the memory. Chatter continued in the surrounding cubicles, everyone content in their carpet-walled boxes. She was content here too, usually. The mindlessness soothed her. No need to think. Just read, type, code.
Heat flared just above her heart and, like a dragging finger, seared its way to her navel. She curled against her keyboard, gasping through the agony. As suddenly as it had appeared, the pain was gone.
Headaches, she knew. This—this was something more.
Vivian shoved away from her desk. She kept her gaze down, avoiding eye contact that might have raised questions or concerns, and staggered down the hall to a singular bathroom. Another hot wave arced down her chest as she turned the lock. Moaning, she crumpled to the floor. When the spasm passed, she clutched the lip of the counter to pull herself upright. She tugged off her shirt.
The hard line of the roadmap glowed in ugly red. All around it, the divots of her scars radiated blue like stars against a pale sky.
On that night six months ago, lightning had channeled through a tree and blasted into her and Andrew. A brilliant flash and crackle quivered through her marrow as part of the tree exploded, piercing her with shrapnel beyond count. The doctors never removed all of the splinters. Her body would work them out in time, they said.
Now those splinters—or where they once lay—shone like a thousand distant constellations, tiny pinpricks aglow. Vivian splayed a hand against the lights. Her skin felt normal in temperature, the texture as mottled as it had been that morning.
The heat returned, and like a laser beam, the pain traveled from her heart to her belly. The map burned within her flesh.
“I don’t want to go there,” she whispered to herself, to the strangeness of her own body.
The pain lashed her again. Again. Again. She braced against the counter and rocked with the waves. It was strange, really, to feel something so intensely after such emptiness, but the agony brought no relief, no catharsis. Sweat slicked her fingers and coursed the taut lines of her neck.
“And what happens if I go there?” she asked herself. Vivian had long avoided the sight of her own skin, but somehow she knew the map hadn’t been there before today. It had waited until now, until Halloween.
The blue lights sparkled with such intensity that they radiated through the thick cups of her bra.
~*~
Vivian had loved Andrew. In hindsight, she understood it was a naive, stupid love, that she had been desperate for anyone to love her or show the slightest interest. He was a brooding artistic genius in the university fine arts track, the person she admired from afar since their freshman year. At the end of their first date, she dismissed the roughness of his kisses as mere eagerness.
On their second date, May Day, he drove her south. “To find a good make-out spot,” he said, as the road curved through the hills.
Suspicion quivered in her belly but she wore a smile. In her senior year high school yearbook, she had been described with one word: ‘Nice.’ Nice to a fault. Nice in the most gullible way.
Andrew said he liked nice girls.
Now, six months later, she drove south by herself.
At the fringe of the city, she passed children in costume, their treat bags in hand. One little girl wore a purple witch’s hat that shimmered in the glow of passing headlights. It almost made Vivian smile. During her teenage goth phase, she had tried to summon spirits on this night with its thin veil between the real and the spiritual. Afte
r hours of chanting and giggling, the only thing she and her friends successfully summoned was the pizza delivery man.
As she drove onward, the physical pain withdrew but memories gouged her. She knew these landmarks, not only from the map on her torso, but from that distant night. She recognized the particular bow of an old oak tree, and the gas station with its neon sign screaming CERVEZA. She knew the long curve of the road as it followed then crossed the river, just as the line flowed over the ridge of her ribs as it worked southward.
Vivian’s arms, rigid as rebar, gripped the steering wheel. She wanted to stop, but feared if she did the pain would return and paint her world in red dapples. She felt used. Herded. Just as Andrew forced her on this route, now something inexplicable was forcing her again.
The realization caused her to lurch to the side of the road. The car braked with a violent crunch of gravel.
What if Andrew was doing this again?
This was Halloween, the night of ghosts and spirits. What if he awaited her? What could she say to him, what could she do?
She opened her car door and retched.
Andrew never acknowledged that he had done wrong, never had that chance. “I drove you all the way out here. Isn’t this a romantic spot?” he said, pointing to the beautiful oak that towered overhead.
“No,” she said. “No. I want to go home, I don’t want to—”
She had always admired his hands in class. One usually thinks of painters with long, delicate fingers, but Andrew had the wide mitts of a football player. He gripped her slender wrists so tightly his fingers touched.
He had died with his pants wadded around his ankles.
“No,” she said, punching her ribs and the map. “I’m not going. You can’t make me.”
Vivian backed up the car, the tires grinding as she angled them north. Pain crashed into her again. She had enough presence of mind to lay all her weight into the brake. The scars, hidden beneath her shirt, flashed so brilliantly they illuminated the blackness.
“No. No. No.” She panted as she leaned on the steering wheel. She had repeated those words to Andrew, and they were just as effective now as then. Maybe she was the ghost.
A light reflected against the silver hood of her car. She looked up. A full moon gleamed through skeletal branches, as though it were snared in the spindly grasp of twigs. Watercolor clouds in hues of black, purple, and navy softened the sky.
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