The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  I look at the breachdive, anchored on the beach, and wonder what Prudencia is thinking. I hope she’s okay. If she needs help processing, or just wants to talk, I’ll be there for her. It’s the least I can do for her.

  El Cuento de El End of El Cuento

  Together, El Coco and I walk among the palms, I bearing my headless baby on my hip. The headless bodies of the children disport all around us. They pay Coco and me no mind, too fully absorbed by the rules of their recondite games. The children’s heads watch their bodies play from the trees, blinking serenely.

  “They like you,” says El Coco. “They haven’t been this easy in a long time.”

  “I am so sorry,” I say, “for abandoning my baby.”

  He shakes his head, having none of it. “All parents are driven to distraction by their children from time to time. Connie told you that Ela was crying nonstop.”

  “But I thought—” I say, and discover suddenly I have no way to complete that sentence. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to fix everything.”

  The vines around my arm squeeze me affectionately. “That’s why the children like you, you know. You try so hard, Julito. And your heart is as big as the sea.”

  We stop beneath a cluster of napping infants. Among the heads sleeps my baby girl’s.

  What peace! But if she starts wailing, what destruction.

  As if reading my mind, Coco pulls me close. The vinous fingers on my arm spread and grow all over my back. With his other hand, he reaches upwards. His fingers extend, all the way to the top of the tree, where the children’s heads hang huddled.

  He strokes Ela’s face. In response, her body giggles.

  Oh! I drop the handheld, let it hang pendulously from the strap around my wrist. El Coco, who always knows what I want before I do, lets go of my arm, so I may hold my headless, happy baby aloft. Ela loves it, pounding her fists and kicking the air with the exuberance of a body delighting in its agency.

  I could break in two, watching her reaction.

  “Coco,” I say, “this is all I want. All I want is for my baby to be happy. I just want to do right by her.”

  “You will,” he says, still rubbing Ela’s face. “All that’s left is for you to get her head down from the tree.”

  I turn to Coco, startled. “What do you mean? How do I even do that?”

  Though his face is always shocked, Coco’s voice is always soothing. “When Ela speaks, she is ready to leave. You need to talk her down.”

  I’m still holding my baby girl in the air. She kicks, and her neck makes a whirring, questioning noise, as if she doesn’t understand what the holdup is. I cradle her body next to mine as I call to her head. “Ela. Ela, mi niña, Ela bellísima. Come down. Come back to your papi. Come be whole again.”

  Ela looks at me, wide-eyed, unfearful, interested. But she does not speak. She remains part of her tidy cluster of infant heads in the tree.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask El Coco. “What am I doing wrong?”

  He takes me by the arm again; his rhizomatic fingers spread all over my back and pulse with the muted, wet energy of fungal life. “Nothing, save that you are impatient, Julito. You are her father, yes. But you are also still something of a stranger to her. You are only just getting to know each other. You must take your time. Let her learn that your voice is a voice of love and comfort. And most importantly, get closer to her.”

  I turn to Coco. I know, I think, what I must do. But I still ask him, “How close?”

  He tilts his head. “As close as you can.”

  It’s just as I thought. So okay then. For my baby girl, anything.

  “Will you hold her a moment?” I ask Coco.

  “Por supuesto,” he says, untangling his fingers from my back and taking my baby girl’s headless body from me. He cradles her like an experienced tío; she tucks right in to the crook of his arm.

  In the meantime, I pull off my head.

  It doesn’t come off easily, but it also isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I pull straight up, then hold my head above my shoulders as high as my arms will stretch. From this new height, I take a moment to survey the island.

  The children. They never stop playing.

  I turn bodily, one slow step at a time, until I am facing El Coco. “Will you lift me to her?”

  “Por supuesto,” he says once more. Then, extending his arm, his fingers grow out of his hand and entangle my head. They keep growing, bearing my head, until they are long enough to reach the cluster of infant heads in the palm tree. I am inset there among them like a gem. I feel the back of my head attach itself to the trunk, and in a rush of life and vigor, I am part of the tree, its ancient sense of time, the titanic grip its roots have on the earth beneath. Dumbstruck, dazzled, I inhale deeply—my mouth sucks air as if I still had lungs to serve—and take in the sights and sounds from my new vantage.

  El Coco is still rocking Ela’s body. “Shall I give her back to you now?” he asks me.

  My body is standing like a beheaded statue next to him. I try to lift my arms, and sure I can lift them; they are my arms just as much as they have always been.

  “Do you mind holding her for a minute longer?” I ask El Coco. And of course he doesn’t.

  I have my body gather the handheld hanging from my wrist and point it at my face. Or I try to. I can’t tell exactly where the camera is aiming without a head on my shoulders. So I have my body point the lens generally at the cluster of heads in the palm tree and say, “Prudie, we may be here a little while. Is that okay with you?”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting for a response, since the handheld has no speaker. But I get a response just the same: ten blasts from the breachdive’s horn. Three long blasts, then two short, then three long, then two short.

  That’s Morse code for “88.” And 88 in Morse code means “love and kisses.”

  Good old Prudencia. “I’ll send my body over to you to work on fixing your communications array,” I say to the handheld. “I need to tell NOAA I’ll be using some of my sick days. And Connie: I need to tell Connie that Ela and I are all right. I need to tell her I love her.”

  “Love and kisses,” says Prudencia’s horn.

  Relief washes like a heatwave through my face. My baby girl’s head must feel it, and it must feel good to her, since she turns and nuzzles her forehead against my cheek. If there is bliss in this world, I have found it.

  “Okay, baby girl,” I say to my Ela. “You want to talk? You want to get to know your papi? Have I got a story for you. It’s called:

  “El Cuento de Cómo Julio Became a Coconut for His Baby Girl.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  As a kid, I thought our hundred-pound bag of rice, which lived in a rubber bin in our kitchen pantry, was alive. I would talk to it as I picked up handfuls of rice and let the grains hourglass through my fingers. I thought the ever-shifting faces I discovered in the stucco ceiling of my bedroom were spirits. I’d speak with them, and they would answer. Really nice people, the stucco faces, and really funny—though they sure loved to argue with each other. In my chest, right now, I can still feel the presence of my stuffed bear, Canda the Panda, as strongly as I can feel the souls of my sisters and brother.

  So when my aunt Carmita told me the legend of El Coco—her version featured a coconut-headed boogeyman—I formed a wholly idiosyncratic relationship with him. Sure, El Coco stole away misbehaving children, but that didn’t scare me. Mami had craved syrupy canned coconut the entire time she was pregnant with me (on saltine crackers—blech). I was born with a special affinity with coconuts.

  I had lots of opportunity to talk to El Coco. Not uncommonly, my childhood kitchen had coconuts stacked in baskets on the counter. I liked to drop them “accidentally” and laugh as they complained, looking up at me accusingly from the floor. But they never held a grudge. Like all the inanimate objects of my childhood, El Coco was funny, kindly, and full of great advice when I felt sad and alone.r />
  In households where mental health issues are a daily reality, children create coping strategies, some healthy, and some perhaps less healthy. The way I used to talk to coconuts gives me a wistful sort of comfort. Once upon a time I was surrounded by all sorts of benevolent spirits. But they don’t answer anymore. I miss them.

  * * *

  CARLOS HERNANDEZ

  HE FELL HOWLING

  BY

  * * *

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  YOU DON’T KNOW ME, BUT you do.

  Walking the path from your father’s house back to town, there came that certain span of steps where your back straightened, didn’t there? Your skin came alive, trying to feel every breath of air. Some of those breaths were, as you now know, mine.

  Most nights I’ve let you pass. Not this night.

  Zeus thought that by forcing me into this form he was punishing me.

  He was liberating me.

  He said I would be hunted.

  Instead, I’m the hunter.

  Before, my lands were bound by walls, and my men had to patrol those walls on a daily circuit. Now my land is the night.

  By changing me into this form you perhaps recognize from legend, from your own nightmares, Zeus granted me access to realms I’d never considered. You no longer need to call me Lycaon. My name now is your sharp intake of breath when you realize you’re not alone on your long walk home. If you hear my footfalls or my breathing, it’s because I mean for you to.

  This is Zeus’s grand and just judgment against one who would feed him human flesh in his stew, mixed in with the lamb and vegetables. It wasn’t the smell he’d recoiled against—in the kitchen, I’d sampled a spoonful myself, and it was fine—but, evidently, the idea. Could he not in all his wisdom discern my true motivations? That I was honoring him by having my own son sacrificed and butchered? What more meaningful offering could I have made, I ask? What else could have been in keeping with his might? Would mere lamb and vegetables not have been an insult to one such as he?

  So I thought at the time.

  Sitting across from him that day, king to king, his wooden spoon dipping down into the bowl, I was as content as ever I’d been.

  I still am. Or, rather, I am again.

  Yes, as he wanted, as you can see before you now, my true nature is expressed in this lupine form, which was his judgment: that I no longer be able to hide who I truly am. All who see me, fear me.

  As far as mighty Zeus is concerned, the story of Lycaon was over the day he, in his laughably obvious peasant form, flipped my table over, stood from it to his true height, and glared down at me, my limbs already creaking and breaking into the shape he thought more fitting, his voice booming down to me about what I’d almost done this day, how I didn’t know what it was that I’d attempted.

  Our story was not over that day, however. Yes, with a flick of his finger he stripped away my human form, bent me forward such that I rested on four paws, not two feet, but that wolfen form he initially damned me with turned out to be the exact means for me to finish what I started that day he knocked on my door in beggar rags.

  You see, mighty Zeus, playful Zeus, crafty Zeus, he can’t help but dress up like this and like that, adopting whatever raiment allows him to gain his impulsive ends or satisfy his fleeting curiosity or quench his childish need for entertainment.

  With my new senses, though, I can now smell through such trickery.

  I’ve watched him couple as a swan, I’ve tracked him from shore when he swam as a bull. I even listened to him sneak into the locked room of a high tower as a ray of sunlight, and I recognized him not because a ray of light makes sound, battering into motes of dust, but because mighty Zeus was chuckling to himself low enough that only wolf ears could register it.

  But maybe, if his judgment against me is just, maybe I’d had these ears all along, yes?

  Maybe like can hear like, monster can hear monster.

  Either way, Zeus had forgotten poor Lycaon, meting out the rest of his days on four feet, chasing down beasts of the field for his dinner.

  It would be his undoing.

  * * *

  As a man and a king of Arcadia, I had near fifty sons—minus one for the pot, yes?

  After Zeus reshaped my limbs, pulled this canine muzzle forth from my face in a tearing of skin and grinding of bone that near erased my mind, he, in his wisdom, felled all those sons of mine with a sweep of his right hand, so as to once and forever terminate my family line.

  In the field and the woods my boys fell as one.

  Next, Zeus ravaged my lands, collapsed my home and outbuildings, and scattered my wife and her family to distant shores.

  When I could stand again that evening, the world came at me in a rush—the smells, the sounds. I could hear the massive footfalls of spiders, their webs ringing like harp strings, and I could taste the smoke of fires two years old—poachers in my woods, who had . . . yes, who had spirited away a stag I’d had my eye on.

  My lips peeled away from my teeth, and saliva descended onto my forepaw.

  The first step I took on my new legs was stronger than I meant, and threw me into the rubble that had been my kitchen, further collapsing it.

  No one was around to document this.

  That painting you’ve seen, of a moment from my fall, an instant of my transformation?

  The painter wasn’t there. He couldn’t have seen. Had he been there, I would have ripped his right arm from his body, lapped his blood from the dirt, my eyes locked on his as he died, to drink his last moments as well.

  This is what wolves do.

  Standing among the wreckage of my home, I may not have known my limbs nor my senses yet, but I knew my role in this new world I’d been delivered to.

  Still, the rabbits of the field and the deer that had formerly been mine, they knew me for what I was, knew me before I knew myself, such that when I padded out into the night after them, they were already gone, were already burrowed into their safe places, were already fleeing onto other lands.

  For three nights I tried to ambush one, just for a single mouthful of raw meat, but they had been running this race for untold generations, and evaded me time and again. My new senses only served to torture me, as I could hear their fluttery hearts beating, could taste them on the air. But catch them I couldn’t. Not yet.

  On the fourth day, perhaps just as wise Zeus had designed, I had to take what food I could catch: the decomposing bodies of my sons, lying where they’d fallen in the fields, under tumbled-over walls, in the backs of wagons that would never move again.

  Is it punishment to have to eat exactly the meat I had formerly tried to feed the peasant who knocked on my door, his sides starved down enough that his ribs were near-visible?

  If it was, then it was sweet punishment.

  The muscle and organs of children I’d fathered myself, it nourished me in a different way.

  Over the course of the week, and in spite of the putrefaction that only made the muscle sweeter and less resistant, I tore my sustenance from the bones of my sons, and licked the insides of their skulls for more.

  If this was punishment, then punish me more, please.

  On the eighth day of my repast, a townsperson showed up with a weekly delivery. He stood from his cart and eyed the ruins. From the shadow of one of the few walls left partially standing, I watched him.

  My belly was full, but my mouth still watered.

  He came back the next midday leading a detachment of soldiers, and I watched them from the trees, growling my displeasure. I still considered this my land, see. My home.

  That night, after they’d set up tents in order to further investigate in the light of morning, I crept in, the darkness as the day to my new senses. The horses screamed with my approach and pulled their pickets free, crashed off into the night, back to the safety of town.

  The soldiers circled around behind their spears and shields and stoked the fire higher and higher, and the whole night I only circled t
hem.

  Just before dawn broke, then, the part of my mind that thought like a wolf presented an obvious fact to me: if the soldiers were here, then they weren’t protecting the town, right? And, without mounts, they wouldn’t be tonight either.

  I left them to their slow investigation of the ruins—really, they were plundering what they could from the rubble—and that night began my days-long siege of the town. I picked off those who wandered out to the edges, the children playing games, the women walking out to the hill to see if their soldier husbands were approaching, and then, never mind that my hunger was long sated, I picked off those who came looking for the children, the wives.

  They didn’t nourish me the same as my own sons had, but I learned to draw pleasure from their fear. It was enough.

  When I’d gorged myself on the town such that I was only pulling the tongues and certain organs from the bodies I’d plundered, I padded back to my lands one last time and—just because I could, because I knew now that I was larger than any of the wolves I’d used to hunt from horseback—I crashed into the sleeping soldiers’ camp and tore whatever flesh flashed in front of me, not even eating it, just destroying and destroying.

  As a child, from a high place, I’d once watched a pair of wolves move through a herd of goats, killing for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.

  Now I was that wolf.

  I don’t bite holes in the world because I dislike the world, I bite holes in it because I have these teeth.

  That night with the soldiers is probably where the connection was made between the former king and the current monster, too. Since a head injury in my middle years, I’d always had a narrow blaze of white at a distinctive angle through my black hair. In my new form, as you can see, that blaze persisted and revealed my true identity to those soldiers.

  Such are legends born. Such do necessary truths begin to get told.

  * * *

  As a king of men, my sons had numbered enough to form their own phalanx, nearly.