Salt Water Tears
Page 18
She collected the nine millimeter and its magazine. Both were slick with blood. She didn’t bother to wipe it from her hands as she shoved the magazine up into the handle. Worked the slide to chamber the first round. Set the muzzle against his temple.
“I do love you, Darcy.”
“I know.”
Gramps Goes Fishing
* * *
Beneath a wounded sky, where a bloodless moon settles upon the surface of a stagnant ocean, she waits for him. He comes through the dark water with the sleek speed of a torpedo, pushing before him a phlegmatic wave that rocks her fragile raft and sets the sparsely lashed timbers to separating. Her foot drops through. Before she can draw back, he takes it off just above the ankle.
She screams, but there’s absolutely no sound.
The raft disintegrates beneath her. Water closes fast over her head as she’s drawn down in the turbulence of his passage. She feels her nightgown slip over her shoulders, tangle briefly in her long hair; then vanish in the waves. What little light the moon still casts on the ocean’s surface retreats quickly, gathering to a refracted star on the glassine surface above. She’s acutely aware of a growing chill, as every inch of depth drops the water temperature several degrees. She kicks against the cold, but is hampered by the missing foot and a spreading paralysis. Her arms flail, but no matter how thick the black soup, they find no purchase.
She feels his turn in the water, a near-gentle caress as the sea transmits his movement. A second later, he’s there, tentacles clutching at her tiny breasts, teeth removing an arm as she tries to fight him off, a callous weight that spreads her legs, presses against her...
• • •
Mothers hands on her back were gentle and warm. “Tabitha, it was only a dream, baby. Just a bad dream. Shush, Mama’s here now.”
Beyond Mother’s radiance, in the shadowed span of the bedroom doorway, his eyes were dark. Hungry. Cautious and threatening at the same time.
• • •
She overheard them the next morning, their voices mingled with the clink of coffee cups and saucers, the tinny rasp of spoons stirring sugar and cream. She stood in the hallway in her nightgown, uncertain of the time, wondering if her father had already left for work. When she didn’t hear his voice or the brittle rustling of the newspaper, she decided he was gone.
“Maybe you could talk to her,” Mom was saying, her voice laden with concern that she’d kept hidden last night.
“Most times,” replied a scratchy voice she identified as her grandfather, “there’s an underlying reason for frequent nightmares like this. A repressed trauma or—”
“So you’re a psychoanalyst now, Dad?”
She imagined his expression, that look of thinly veiled sufferance and intolerable indulgence that he’d perfected shortly after being forced to take up residence in their guest room. “Tabby,” he’d told her just the week before, “there’s only one thing worse than growing so old you can’t wipe your own ass. That’s having your children treat you like you can’t wipe your own ass. Somebody ought to just shoot old people like me.” When she’d told Mother about it later, Mother had assured her that Gramps hadn’t been serious. What Mother didn’t know, however, was that Tabitha knew that. She’d only told her mother in the hopes that she’d treat Gramps with a little more dignity. It hadn’t worked.
“I’m just saying there’s a reason why she keeps having these nightmares. A nine-year-old’s life is fraught with more trauma than you realize. Check with some of her friends. Talk to her teachers at school. Hell,” and Tabitha imagined him looking at the empty cup, half eaten toast, and discarded newspaper where her father had been, “you might even talk to him.”
Heavy sigh. “Would you just talk to her? She tells you things she won’t tell me.”
• • •
“Dreams,” Gramps told her, “are a lot like T.V. shows. Somebody writes them. Somebody else gets a bunch of actors, cameramen, and stunt people together, and they make it all look real. But it’s not.”
“Who’s writing my dreams, Grandpa?”
He smiled. “Quick, aren’t you? That’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.” He tapped her forehead. “Your dreams are written right here. If you don’t like the script, change it.”
“It’s that easy?”
“Easier.”
“But what...” She hesitated. “What if there’s somebody really, really bad in my dreams?”
Gramps thought for a moment. “Well, I guess I’d take along someone really, really good and see if they couldn’t talk to this bad person.”
“What if they won’t go, or... what if they’re too old to go?” The old man smiled, his gums pink and powerless behind his thin lips, but the grizzled dimples in his cheeks hinting at years when he hadn’t been so fragile. “Tabby, it’s your dream. Make your friend as strong as a rhinoceros if you like. Make him young and dashing like that guy on 90210 you like so much. You’re writing the script, Sweetheart.”
She pursed her lips and pulled at her long strands of amber hair.
“You can do it,” he assured her.
• • •
There’s a brilliant orange disk sizzling on the horizon, its glow reaching across the dark water to touch the edge of the raft and light the face of the fisherman there. She moves closer, her hand small and inconsequential on his broad back. He looks back over his shoulder and smiles at her, the orange glow of the sun catching his teeth. “You want to hold the pole, Tabby?”
She takes it and has only moments before a wave larger than the surface turbulence approaches, its white crest tipped with the brissance of the sun, the vee of its coming an arrow pointing at the tiny raft.
“Steady now. Let’s see if he’ll take the bait.”
She trembles. He’ll take it. He always takes it.
The vee vanishes as the beast goes under. This is that point where the raft typically falls apart, where she sinks into the sea and his puerile grasp.
Today is different.
The rod bends double and the line screams from the reel.
“That’s it!” Gramps yells. “Set the hook on that baby, Tabby!” He reaches around and helps her haul back. The rod bends even more. With his hands lending strength to hers, she begins to reel it in. For a while the monster is strong, hauling the raft back and forth across a sea that has grown steadily brighter. The raft holds together. In the rising sun the tiny vessel gathers a substantial reality, begins to look more like a speedboat.
When the monster breaks the surface, it’s neither fish nor man, nor any comprehensible combination of the two. Tentacles. Teeth. Suckers and claspers, and male things for which she has only names taken from other children.
“Whoa, that’s an ugly son!” Gramps declares. “Big sucker, too.” He retrieves a harpoon from behind one of the aft benches. “See if you can pull him a little closer.”
• • •
There was a scream from her parents’ room that took her instantly from the dream to the dark purple reality of her bedroom. It was a man’s scream. Tabitha recognized her mother’s voice next, heard her scrambling for the phone.
Her nightmares were over.
In both worlds.
Version History
Version #: v3.0
Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2
Original format: ePub
Date created: June 25, 2014
Last edited: June 25, 2014
Correction History:
Version History Framework for this book:
v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.
v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being
used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.
v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.
v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.
v4.0 ==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.
Some additional notes:
vX.1-9 ==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".
Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.