A flying dream - Part 1

The dream. It was a childhood nightmare. She had other dreams, of course, for who has only one dream in her life? There was the dream about her father, visiting from heaven or nirvana or wherever -he smelled of tobacco and coffee. His mouth didn't move, she heard his voice and hearing, could not distinguish one word from another, yet she was always comforted by the dream. An early experience with evangelistic sentimentality after his death left her always imagining he had wings in the dream, great, feathered wings which would carry them both into softness of clouds.
There was the dream about Ernest Hemmingway, tanned brown from baking in the African sun, the licorice smell of absinthe or lime and scotch held in his beard, bent in an indulgent, avuncular smile. He was her Virgil, taking her to foreign lands, far from her native Indiana, filled with pygmies, outlandish mythological creatures, and hills, mountains, gullies, ancient trees and monumental ruins.
The dream she first had a few weeks after her eleventh birthday. A confusing rush of falling, falling and caught by the image and ideal of Cary Grant, Tony Bennett, John Lennon, and Leonard Cohen amalgamated into some composite ideal of quality of voice, trueness of spirit, reassuring masculinity, and impassioned devotion. Falling, spinning, wondering if her father's wings could return her to flight, and waking up, covers kicked away, pajama bottoms tugged down and tangled around her knees, her body-length pillow clutched with one arm, the other pinned across her waist, ankles crossed tight. Panting, wondering if she was damned. If it was sin even though she hadn't meant to. Later that day her mother noticed a change, the precocious, energetic daughter had turned a contemplative eye at all things, inward and outward. For the first time, she spoke to her mother with the seriousness of the first, tremulous steps toward adulthood. They spoke about her father's death.
Her older sister, nineteen at the time and finishing a degree in social work, later consoled her and offered assurances about the naturality of her experience, that she was on the way to becoming a woman. She took her shopping and bought her a book on adolescent female sexuality written by a famous female sex-counsellor. Her sister threw her a menarche party two months later.
There were other dreams of course. Thousands forgotten, incorporated into a poem here or a sketch there or released like a well-loved bird to carry on to somewhere else, hopefully better but different at least. This dream, however, was more terrifying than usual. She and her father were flying, she had her own wings and the doctors held her down with the detachment of trauma surgeons. Their instruments were mercilessly sharp, clinically designed to do to her an act of pure torture with no physical pain at all.
As the surgeons explained that the operation went well, that her wrists and hands would require physical therapy, and that she might even be able to drive a car in a year or so, but so sorry, her new impairment would invalidate her pilot's license all she could see was a large cloud, falling like thousands of wide, moist snowflakes, drifting ever so slowly to carpet floor, trod upon and unseen by the doctors and nurses -feathers.

Rough horror bit

"Celine." Her name hung, soft and seemed to fill the room.
"Celine." He repeated the name after her, taking comfort in its sibilance, the long sound of the last syllable. It occurred to him that the name, the sound of her voice, was almost all he knew of her. He knew one other thing -she was a survivor like he.
"What did you do that first day?" Again, the softness of her voice, the human warmth that crept into the darkness of the room. He could almost feel her breath, though she was a few meters away, out of reach.
"I ran. Had never been in a fight, not really. Learned hard and fast this last week."
"How many?"
"Five. Adding the one that came down here some time before you arrived, six. I killed that one with a post or something, sticking out of the ground over there. God it stinks."
Silence. She shuffled a bit and he heard the sound of a foot striking something soft.
"I'm glad you're alive," he added.
"I'm glad too."
"Well, aside from the obvious, I'm glad it was you who came down here and not another one. I don't think I have the strength. I haven't eaten in a while, days maybe? I can't tell time down here. My leg is broken, so even if I got over the fear, I can't go foraging."
Silence. Breathing moved closer and the sound was accompanied by small, sharp crunches. She stopped on the ring of glass, each fragment as thin as an eggshell. Slid her foot one way, the other.
"What's with the glass?"
"I broke the light bulbs so I could hear what was coming. Saw it in a movie. Tom Cruise, maybe?"
She was now maybe two meters away and sighed.
"You're dead, you know that right?"
"Thanks."
"No, really, you can't move. I can't carry you. You're either going to starve down here or more of them will find you down here and..."
"And what, Celine?"
"...and the military isn't moving here," she finished lamely. They both knew what she meant. There was no doubt.
"Nevertheless, I'm happy you're here, alive. I mean, you're human. That has to count for something."
"It's reassuring to talk. Hear a voice. Do you have any weapons?."
"Just these weak hands. I lost my hatchet in the one before I made my way down here."
"Yeah. I've been through three or four weapons so far. All I have is a big kitchen knife. It's getting loose around the handle." She moved closer, he heard the metal of the knife press on the bare concrete as she scooted a little closer. She was still a meter and a half away.
"You're not thinking euthanasia are you?"
"No, sorry. I just...you know, feeling of security and all."
"Sure." If he heard the next line of glass crunch, he knew he could reach her. Her heels scraped and he could envision her sitting on them, crouched and uneasy.
"You know, I almost can't believe you're real. I think I'd like to touch you."
"Can you put the knife down?"
"Right, sorry." He heard the sharp noise of it striking the concrete, and the almost imperceptible sound of her picking it back up. "There, all better."
"Careful! Don't touch the leg closest to you. It's the broken one."
She moved again and he heard the glass of the closest ring, felt her empty hand come down hard on his leg, twisting and shoved his hand across to catch her wrist. Their arms met, the knife hit the wall behind his head, snapped, and he butted her in the jaw. They twisted together on the floor, rolling on the glass and scrabbling like starved animals, clawing and biting at one another. Falling apart from the fruitless exertion, he leveled an accusation at her.
"You're not alive."
"And your leg isn't broken."
"How long?"
"A day, two. Yourself?"
"Three weeks." The anger in him cooled, recessed as his instinct for survival uncoiled with the new thing within him.
"So we can't eat them, can we?"
"No. We can't."
"I've only eaten once. I'm starving. Ravenous. What happens if we don't eat?"
"We start turning into them. We get stupid. Our senses get very sharp, but instinct takes over -worse than a comedown off crack. Bare minimum we need to eat three times a week. If we can manage to eat everyday, we'll heal a bit. Look human."
"Who says we aren't?"
"Haven't you noticed that you don't think of humans as people already? They're food, they hold for us, guard jealously to themselves, the key to our life. It's the infection or whatever, it's changed our brains. Probably some hormone or another is overproduced or not produced, it's changed the way we think, what we feel."
"Hell, maybe it's Voodoo."
"Might as well be. So, Celine. Nice name, I don't care if that's the name you had before or if you made it up to get close to me. I'm Mik now. I don't care what the people who birthed me told the nurse, that guy is gone."
"It was Michelle."
"Fuck that. Forget it. You're not human anymore, you're some fucked up predator who needs live flesh to keep yourself together."
"Takes one to know one."
"Abandon that shit, drop it all. We don't need to be nasty anymore, we don't need to try and manipulate each other. It's us against everyone, because our wandering stinking future brothers are mindless and useless, and the living are gonna shit fire when they find out we exist. Sure, they'll be scared at first, but then they're gonna see us for the threat we are and they are gonna make god damned sure they incinerate us and pound the bones into dust, which they'll probably mix with battery acid when they're finished."
"You've been alone too long. OK, we're predators, probably not technically human anymore, but there's gotta be a meaning beyond animal survival. Once that goes I'm buying myself a one-way ticket into a running wood-chipper."
"Fine. Whatever keeps you motivated. How about company-in-kind? You and me, nothing else I know is like us. Let's see where this goes. We'll play a game. We'll call it, 'How Many Days And Nights Can I Keep This Shit Up.' and God'll give us a nice fat lie to keep us quiet when we land in hell because of the disease he created."
"How about you and I stick together so I can smack you around for philosophizing. Let's go hunt."
"And reason speaks."
"By the way, I like it when you're nasty -reminds me why I was a lesbian."

Exercise in Futility

Ran into a novel idea -posting fiction on a blog instead of the details from my own life. The fiction, naturally, will come from the details of my life but drawing the connections backward hardly seems like an exercise anyone wants to attempt. So. Friction posts Fiction.