Sip

by Brian Allen Carr

  Drummond

  Captain Flamsteed wore wire-rimmed glasses, had a face like a bird and the crown of his head was shiny bald.

  “Off and on?” he said again. “You’re sure? This is highly preposterous even for out here. It doesn’t jive with the literature we’ve accumulated. I’m reluctant to assume you’re correct.” He stood behind a desk. Jostled papers. It seemed his mind was elsewhere.

  Drummond shifted. “I’m sure that’s what my eyes saw, but I’m not sure I trust ’em.”

  “I’ll appreciate if you follow me now.” Flamsteed led Drummond into the sun. He contemplated the ground. “Spread your legs,” he said, and Drummond did. “Arms out at your side.” Again, Drummond followed orders. Flamsteed investigated Drummond’s shadow.

  “I’m not on it,” said Drummond.

  “Under circumstances such as these, I’d suggest speaking when spoken to.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s just . . .”

  “The notion that you were reluctant to shoot the creature is positively absurd.”

  “I suggested it to my guard.”

  “Suggested? Doesn’t that seem mild? You are his superior.”

  “I told him it was protocol.”

  “It is most certainly that.”

  “There was debate about it.”

  “Ridiculous. Why would the matter be given any consideration beyond ensuring true aim?”

  “We thought you should be informed. On account of the blinking.”

  Flamsteed stomped. “Ridiculous,” he said again.

  The only sound was the train’s eternal circling—a pulse made by machinery, a bizarre preaching of friction. Chugga-chugga whee. It went. Chuck-chugga whee-chugga.

  Mira and Her Mother

  Mira’s mother woke later, mouthy and alert, sort of annoyed. “What was that you gave me? The dreams spun circles.”

  “Buzzard.” She was sitting in a chair near her mother, peeling carrots with a knife, dragging the blade across the dirtied skin of them. “You like birds.”

  “But buzzard?” said her mother. “Shit. Them things are rats with wings. Lucky I didn’t dream of rotten dog ass.”

  “So lucky,” Mira said. She finished up, dried her knife with a rag.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “The sun was going down. Was all I could find.”

  “I’m just a chore to you, aren’t I?”

  “Stop.”

  Mira made to stand and go inside to the kitchen

  “I wish I wasn’t, but I’m a brutal chore.”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “Exactly. And it should be me taking care of you. But it ain’t worked out like that.”

  “You do, kind of.”

  “How?”

  Mira thought better of answering. She set her knife and her bowl of carrots on top of the broke-down TV. “Tell me what brings the best dreams?” She sat back down.

  Her mother understood. “You see,” she said, “you can’t even answer me.”

  “What brings the best dreams and tomorrow I’ll find it. Then maybe you’ll feel better, and drop all this.”

  Mira’s mother’s eyes flashed lethal. “Seagulls bring dreams of water. Squirrels, the limbs of trees. Eternities of them. Thickets and thickets. Rabbit shadows make me dream about holes and nooks and tunnels, but not in a bad way. It’s warm. Before, when I could sleep my own sleep, I’d dream of home, which sounds like it would be good, but it wasn’t. I’d dream your father’s face, and it only broke my heart. You have his face but my manner, so it gladdens me, and if I could dream your face, it’d comfort me, but I can’t, and you can’t understand.”

  Mira just waited for the real answer to come.

  “Water,” her mother finally said. “Water’s a good thing to dream over. Multitudes of it. Vast expanses. Every direction. Endless. What about a gull? Is that asking too much?”

  “A gull?” said Mira. “I can try.”

  “You sure?”

  “I suppose.”

  “I don’t want to be a burden.” She touched Mira’s smooth chin with her fingers, her skin the color of pecan wood.

  “I know.” Mira said a little prayer in her mind that a gull would come her way from the coast, the prayer sort of dancing in her eyes.

  “What about tonight?” said her mother.

  “What about it?”

  Mira’s mother took a book from beside her. An almanac. She set it in her lap and it fell open to a marked page. She read. “Moon’s out, just waning.”

  Mira laughed. “You want me to find a gull tonight?”

  Her mother tried laughing too. “No. No.”

  “Good.”

  “Not a gull.” Her mother could sense Mira’s sorrow at the request. She flashed her teeth as though pained, the ruinous color of them off-putting. “It can be just anything,” she said. “Just try an hour. If you can’t find anything, come home.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m a burden, I know. The whole world’s a mess. You would’ve loved to know me before. When you were inside me. Or even just before all this.”

  “I did know you before.”

  “You weren’t but a child. And look at you now. Basically a lady. You never saw me with adult eyes. You saw me as a child sees its mother. With eyes that hadn’t learned to judge.”

  “I don’t judge you.”

  “Not meaning to,” said her mother. “It can’t be helped. I bet the errands I send you on make you mad enough to cuss.”

  “I never cuss,” said Mira.

  “Sure.”

  “Never about that.”

  “Fine.”

  Mira wasn’t ready to go back out so she made to change the subject. “I went to the train today.”

  Her mom had fidgety fingers. “You crazy? Wanting to get killed? Way Murk tells it, they shoot our kind.”

  “Not today,” said Mira. “Even spoke to one of them domers.”

  “Spoke to one?”

  “Named Bale.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Don’t act dumb. What’d he say? Why they out here even?”

  “It didn’t get to all that.”

  “What’d it get to?”

  Mira took the book from her mother’s lap, set it off to the side, hoped it wouldn’t be picked up again. “He had orders not to shoot me, and he wanted to know my name. That was about it.”

  “You didn’t ask him about fixing it?”

  “Fixing it?”

  “When they went in there, in them domes. That was supposed to be part of it. Figuring out how to get stolen shadows back. And not with toad licking and burying pubic hair at midnight and everything else I tried. Eating hand sanitizer. Moonshine eye drops. They were supposed to fix it with medicine.”

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “How could it not’ve?”

  “I’d other things on my mind.”

  “You gotta go back.”

  “Now?”

  Her mom shook her head. “Course not.”

  “Good.”

  “But tomorrow.”

  Mira was silent.

  “Promise.” She grabbed up one of Mira’s hands, held it between her palms as though praying with it. “And this time, ask.”

  Mira pulled away. “I’m busy tomorrow.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking for a gull.”

  “Oh, forget that gull a bit. This is important. They know how to fix this, you won’t have to be looking for any shadows for me no more no how.”

  Mira considered it. What if it could be fixed? What if her mother could get her shadow back and sleep again on her own, dream her own dreams? Wouldn’t that solve most everything? Would she even want to get shot at the tr
ain then? “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  “Good,” said her mom. “Be back in an hour?”

  “An hour?”

  “Yeah, don’t stay gone more. And it can be anything,” she said. “Anything but a cat. They have absurd dreams, leaves me puzzled. A bunch of touching the same thing over and over just to know that it’s there. Looking around and wondering what to pee on.”

  “Oh,” said Mira. “For tonight.”

  “Yes, for tonight,” she said. “You’d understand if it was you. It’s not fair for either of us, but it’s less fair for me.”

  “Okay,” said Mira, and she walked barefoot away from their house and back out into the thicket of mesquite and into the moonlight, and, as soon as she was far enough away that her mother couldn’t hear her, she made fists, and, “This is bullshit,” she said.

  Bale

  Captain Flamsteed asked again, “Please walk me through the logic of your decision.”

  Bale thought about it. Replayed it in his mind. “I thought Drummond told you. The shadow. Thought someone should know.”

  “Someone did know,” said Flamsteed. “You were well aware of every portion of the puzzle at hand. She came to the warning track. She was not one of ours. It’s really pretty plain. In every training procedure you’ve undergone, the rules of your post have been broadcast to you loud and clear. Shoot to kill. Those are the orders.”

  “In Bale’s defense,” Drummond said, “it was peculiar.”

  “These shadow-sucking vagrants with their blackened eyes and hearts. These people with their horrific, damnable minds. Has some part of you become sorry for them?”

  “Not at all,” said Bale. “It was just out of the ordinary.” He rubbed a hand across his short brown hair.

  “Have you forgotten what they’re capable of?”

  Bale had never seen it, but he’d heard it told. “No, sir,” he said. “I could never forget.”

  Night Hunting

  Mira couldn’t figure why her mother cared where the sleep came from. They kept chickens, rabbits, and goats, but Mira’s mother forbade that. “We take enough from them already,” she’d said. They ate them and milked them and stole their eggs. But, when it came to shadows, Mira’s mother drew the line.

  It hadn’t always been that way.

  Mira was young when her mother had her shadow swallowed off her, and, back then, Mira couldn’t hunt out on her own. Her mother would send her into the yard to get mouthfuls of chicken shade so she could rest on the porch, swallow that dream of feathers and noise.

  Mira brought her home the shadow of a wild bird once, she couldn’t even remember what kind, and after that things began to change. Her mother would request certain shadows, and sometimes Mira could find them. Either way, her days and nights were spent on these ridiculous errands—the moon-made shadows less potent, but still.

  Only creatures with consciousness worked in this regard, though Mira’s mother regretted it. “Can you imagine the sleep bluebonnets would lead you to? Dreams of meadows and sun, soft breezes. Or sunflowers? Head high in a warm prairie? The smell of grass and all that sky?”

  “Or cactus?” said Mira.

  “Cactus? No no. That could only bring thorny dreams.”

  “Yup,” said Mira. “Safe thorny dreams.”

  Mira thought back to the men who’d come around when her mother was still well. Pale-bodied. Black sunken eyes. Their sick, twisted veins just pulsing in plain view.

  Shadow Addicts

  The main memory of it was this: Mira hid beneath the bed.

  Wild knocks came at the door, and Mira’s mother dragged her under the mattress, suspended above them on its frame. Mira sort of tinkered with the box springs. When the door kicked open, she began sobbing.

  “We hear you,” one of the thieves called. “Best make it easy.” They laughed odd-shaped laughter that brought chills to Mira’s skin.

  Her mother’s eyes were red, her face trembling. Hands reached for her beneath the bed. She kicked wildly. “No,” she screamed, “go away,” she cried, “leave me be.”

  They grabbed hold of Mira’s mother, dragged her from beneath the bed, and she wailed and shrieked, and they beat her legs until she let go of the bed, and pulled her into the yard and Mira ran to the window to see.

  Two men held Mira’s mother by the wrists, her face toward the sun.

  “Relax,” said one of the men who then dropped to his knees. He lowered his face to her shadow and began hogging it up.

  “No,” screamed Mira’s mother. “Don’t take it all. I feel it,” she said. The man on his knees drinking. “Leave me some. Don’t make me like that.”

  When he was done, they dropped her.

  “Dammit you were supposed to share,” said one of the men who’d held her.

  “I’m no good at sharing.” And they walked away, the non-sippers grumbling.

  Mira’s mother searched around. “Mira,” she cried out. “Mira.”

  Once the men were gone, Mira ran outside to her. “There only needs to be a little bit,” her mother said. “If they left a bit, I’ll be okay. I don’t need the whole thing. I’m not like that. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be whole.”

  They investigated the ground, but there was nothing but light. Wherever she stood, it was as though she wasn’t there. Her shadow was gone. It would stay gone forever.

  “It’s not fair,” Mira’s mother said. “It’s not fair what they’ve done to me.”

  Night Hunting Too

  But that is far removed from the night when Mira’s mother sent her out into the scant moonlight to collect a shadow so she might sleep. Far removed, though it is the cause.

  Mira is in the fields.

  In the midst of swarms of dark.

  The panic and the dim light.

  The crescent moon above her, grinning. The stars twinkling, many of them suns with their own planets close by.

  Mira flirts with this notion.

  On every planet is it the same?

  On every world are girls like her hunting shadows for their mothers?

  Mira sees a rabbit in the field. It is frozen, its ears aloft like antennae, searching the sounds Mira’s steps make. It turns to her, and even from that distance, because she has spent so much of her life with rabbit shade in her mouth, has swallowed some of it into her soul, she can tell the animal: I need your help.

  She doesn’t do it with language. She doesn’t do it with signs. She doesn’t know exactly how, but it happens.

  “What kind of help?” the rabbit asks.

  Mira explains. She needs shadow. For her mother, she needs it.

  The rabbit looks up at the moon.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Nah,” says Mira, “not really.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “You ever spoken with someone like me? Has this ever happened?”

  “There are plenty of things that happen for the first time,” the rabbit says. “There are things that only happen once. Just because it’s rare doesn’t mean it’s special.”

  “Then ask yourself. Does it seem like I’m lying?”

  The rabbit’s nose twitches, its whiskers go side to side. “No,” it says. “It doesn’t.”

  “Then you’ll help?”

  “What do we do?”

  “First,” says Mira, “I need you near me. I can come to you, or you can come here. Whichever you prefer.”

  “I’ll come to you,” says the rabbit, and, slowly, it makes its way.

  “It won’t hurt but you’ll never be the same. I’ll just take a bit, and I’ll never ask you again, but if I accidentally do just say, ‘I’ve helped you before,’ and I’ll say, ‘much obliged,’ and you can just go on.” Mira keeps still in the night, waiting for the reply to come. The smooth skin of her
shoulders aglow with moonlight. The music of night birds warbling all around.

  “Okay,” the rabbit says, and Mira lowers her head. She takes a mouthful of shadow from the ground in her cheeks. She holds it. Then the rabbit’s on its way.

  Mira walked through the field back toward home. But as she moved, she heard a sound. A humming. A tune. A song.

  “A world with two suns,” she heard, “that is the dream.”

  Mira walked along.

  “What’s this?” Murk asked, hobbling up. “Mira, you out turning tricks?”

  Mira showed him her middle finger.

  “Ah, what’s wrong?” Murk tapped her shoulder. “So quiet,” he said, then realizing, “Ah. Mouth full of dark? Swallow it. We’ll go get in trouble.”

  Mira pushed him.

  “I like ’em rough. What’s it you got?”

  Mira held two fingers up behind her head.

  “Rabbit?” said Murk. “For your mom?”

  Mira could only nod.

  “Tunnels and burrows and darkness and warmth.”

  Mira shrugged.

  “Was that you at the train today? They sped it up.”

  Mira moved along, and Murk followed in his limping way.

  “Then thanks.”

  Mira rolled her eyes.

  “You should go every day,” Murk said. He pointed at her full cheeks, began to sing. “A world with two suns, and both are for me.”

  Mira spit out the shadow and it evaporated, disappeared. “I’ve told you that song is bullshit.”

  “You’re talking now?”

  “Don’t think I want to, but I got a question.”

  “I’ve got loads of answer.” Murk stretched in the moonlight.

  “Loads of shit more like. Hairstyle thief.”

  Murk kicked dirt at Mira with his peg. “It’s from the damn album cover,” he said. “I already told you.”

  “Then that guy’s a hairstyle thief.”

  Murk tucked his hair behind his ears. “He died like a hundred and fifty years ago.”