Chapter three:

A Dream and a Memory

Incondescent did not sleep well. She dreamed she was standing in the woods at dusk and went to brush a small limb from her hair only to realize that it was a long copperhead snake. She looked around her and saw that every tree, every branch, every root, every vine, every blade of grass was a copperhead snake. She screamed, but the sound came out as a dry heave.

She woke up in the middle of a straining silent scream. Outside the night was magically bright. The moon glinted off the windshield of the rusty trucks sitting in Troy Boy’s front yard. The stand of pine trees lining the long dirt driveway looked like how she had always imagined Russia. It seemed strange to her that something as familiar as her back yard could look so foreign.

As her breathing returned to normal, she turned her head from the strange world outside her window and tried to go back to sleep. But it was no use. It was three o’clock. She had to get up in two hours to go to work.

She sat on the cement block steps leading to the back door of her trailer and lit a cigarette. Troy Boy’s television was still on; she could see its inconstant light glowing through his thin living room curtains. It was fall, but it felt like summer. The night was muggy and thick and the leaves drooped on the trees. Some had changed colors but most were brown. They reminded Incondescent of the oily rags that hung at her cousin’s garage.

Incondescent’s thoughts drifted to her dream. It was still clear to her, as if it had actually happened. This caused her almost as much discomfort as the dream itself. Usually, if she dreamed at all, the images left her head the minute she tried to recall them. But not this one. The light, the place, the trees, the snakes, the feeling, even the smell, were all still intact.

She remembered something she’d heard one time in Bible School about a king who saw a hand writing on the wall of his palace and he had no idea what it meant, so he called up Daniel and he interpreted the writing, just like he had interpreted the king’s dreams before. She stared into the distant pines and wished Daniel would walk out of them; walk out into the moon light and through the rusty trucks, across the back yard to where Incondescent was sitting with her pack of cigarettes. He would squat down like an old farmer and keep his eyes down, only stealing the occasional glance upwards straight into her eyes. And he would tell her what she had dreamed and what it meant. Then he would stand up, scuff the toe of his boot over the little marks he had mindlessly scratched in the dirt as he had interpreted, and he would disappear into the pines.

The cigarette she was holding burned her fingers and brought her back from her trance. She flicked it into the yard and lit another one. The memory hit her like a sucker punch from a parent. Grey. “Racer.” The man with the tattoo of the yellow rose. Now she remembered. He used to work for her cousin, the mechanic.

He called himself a prophet and he preached at an old cinder block store that he’d made into a church by painting a picture of a raily Jesus on one side and a golden cross on the other. Her cousin said he was crazy, but not bad crazy. The kind of crazy that always went around handing out tracts and telling people their futures and inviting them to his church. Her cousin went once and said he would never go back. “Grey and this fat fella reached in a old crate they had up there and pulled out a rattle snake a piece and got to jabbering on and on, and I got up and hit the back door running.”

Not long after that, Racer found out his wife was running around with a roofer down in Greer. He followed her one night, broke into the man’s house and dumped a crate of copperheads on them while they were asleep. Neither died, but Racer went to prison.

Troy Boy’s television went off. Incondescent took a long drag off of her cigarette and flicked it out into the yard. She felt unsafe although she didn’t really know why. It was as if Racer had tried to attack her through her dream, or at least that somehow he knew she’d dreamed it. She felt a connection, though a severely unwanted one, between herself and the prophet.

editor@darkcornernews.com