by Anthology
So silly, I thought. Did I really think this would work? I sat there for a while. The knot in my stomach slowly grew. The feeling of failure was a thin blanket over the truth—the realization that I had spent the last six weeks trying to avoid the unavoidable. That this was a well-meant gift from my father to occupy my mind and get through the hardest part of the grieving process. It had worked. Up until now. The tears blurred my vision. It was as if the ground below me gave way and I’d dropped into a dark nothing. The pain, as excruciating as it was when I had felt it a few weeks ago, was so powerful now that I keeled over in my seat. I opened my mouth but no sound escaped it. I couldn't breathe or form words or even thoughts except the one that I would never see my dad again. Ever. That he was gone and I had no way of feeling his hand on my shoulder or him ruffling my hair.
I began to moan. It seemed to help with the pain. My moans became louder. I saw my hands holding the bars of the seat on either side. I didn't feel the cold of the pipes beneath my fingers. And when I could not hold it in any longer, I screamed. It was as if all my pain, my heartache, and the loss of my father's love, my father's big love, was in that scream. My voice was raw and I let it swell to a high-pitched sound while everything poured out of me and into the world. At that moment, it was as if he had called me and I had answered…
The blue spark was blinding, and even though it was brief, I couldn't see anything for a few seconds. It was followed by the sound of the arc—the moment the welding rod connected with the steel. It obliterated my scream for an instant. A second spark followed. I could see that it came from the front where the battery compartment was installed.
And then, through the blur that was my tears, I saw the charge leave the capacitor and rip across the top of the cabin to the back. I felt my hair standing up in all directions. A snapping sound was followed by a deep humming sound. The light in the storage room was suddenly so bright that I had to close my eyes. When I opened them again, the walls of the shed were bathed in golden light. The machine was activated.
When I lifted my left foot, it shook uncontrollably. But I was afraid the activation was only temporary and I wanted to go back as fast as I could. I put my foot onto the pedal and applied the tiniest amount of pressure. The alarm clock display moved. First, it was only a few minutes. Then a dozen and, next, an hour. I took my foot off the pedal. The display moved another hour before it stopped. Saturday, December 22nd, 3:08AM. I didn't see anything different in the shed. The light was as bright as before. I pushed the pedal down again. The display went back a few more hours and into Friday the 21st. I increased pressure and skipped three days at once before I slowed down again.
Gently, I reminded myself.
I figured it would be best to go back to a weekday morning, maybe three months ago. I would be at school then and my dad would most likely be in his shop. I could tell him that I had come home from school earlier and he wouldn't get suspicious, especially if I came in through the main front door. I pushed the pedal down again, this time a little harder. The days became a week, then two and three. I slowed down again, applied only minimal pressure until I came to September 14th. I stopped at 10:52AM. For a moment, I wasn't sure whether to turn the machine off or not. I decided to leave it on. Other than someone actually stepping into the shed, nobody from the outside would notice it was there.
I moved the cabin top to the side and climbed out. I tried to look at the centrifugal rotor but the light was too intense. I would need a welding mask to be able to see it. I left through the back door and was hit by a breeze of warm air. The snow was gone. The trees had not even started to yellow. My mittens. I’d completely forgotten to take off my winter clothes. I decided to leave my gloves, wool cap, and jacket next to the door of the shed. I still felt a bit overdressed.
My heart was pounding as I walked around the barn to the front door. I felt like I had sawdust in my mouth. I heard the metallic banging sound of a hammer on steel before I reached the door. I couldn't remember having ever heard something that made me happier. I opened the door and stepped inside.
He stood next to the forge, a large hammer in his hand, wearing his leather apron and a short-sleeve shirt. He saw me and without stopping, he said, "What are you doing here so early?"
I couldn't answer. I tried to smile but my face muscles didn't follow my order. They began to twitch suddenly.
"Oh, Dad," was all I could whisper before I ran to him and held him in my arms. I couldn't stop the tears from coming. I didn't want to cry. I didn't want to make him suspicious that this was anything other than an early dismissal from school and me being happy to see him.
"There, there," he said. "What's the matter?"
He placed the hammer on the side of the forge.
"You okay?"
For a long time I couldn't say anything.
"Yes," I said eventually. "I'm okay. I just wanted to say hi and see how you're doing."
"I'm doing fine. But I need to get different coal. This one burns too dirty. Can you smell it?"
"Yeah," I said, suddenly happy over the sulfury smell in the shop.
"Is everything all right? You seem upset."
"I'm okay. Just missed you, that's all."
"Okay. Then let me get this formed before it cools down too much."
"Okay," I said. "Sounds good."
He picked up the hammer again and pushed the metal piece he was working on back into the embers.
"See you later," I said.
"Yep. See you later."
I left the barn with the sound of the hammer ringing in my ears. As I walked around back, I felt lighter, as if a burden had been lifted from me. When I looked through the dirt-smudged window, I saw my father stop hammering for a moment. As if he’d just thought of something. Then he shook his head and continued.
I stood behind the storage shed for a few minutes and let the sun warm my face. Then I entered, picked up my gloves, jacket, and wool cap and climbed into the machine. I closed the cabin top and began to push the right pedal down. The days on the display passed by. When it moved into December, I slowed down. I don't know what had changed, but I wasn't sad anymore. Maybe it was knowing that I could visit him whenever I wanted. Or maybe it was good enough to see him doing something he had loved so much.
My eyes were fixed on the display. I felt the pedal beneath my right foot, the pressure of the forward motion against my leg. When December 22nd approached, something in me clicked. The Traveler must exercise the greatest caution to not set off a chain of events she cannot foresee. I realized that he must have known, that he must have thought this encounter to be too strange to have been a normal occurrence. Did my visit, as brief as it was, change his outlook in any way?
And while I pondered the ever paradoxical nature of travelling through time, I knew, suddenly and unmistakably, what he had said back in the hospital room. He didn't say, "Draw." Nor did he say, "Drawer." It sounded like it because those were the only words I could think of at that moment. No. It wasn't druh, it was trah. It was the way he pronounced the ‘a’ differently. More like an uh. He must have known that I had built the machine and came back to him.
It wasn't drawer. It was traveler.
David Bruns
http://davidbruns.com/
The Water Finder's Shadow(Novelette)
by David Bruns
Originally published in Tails of the Apocalypse
A Finder without the Gift is nothing—less than nothing. A freeloading, water-consuming drain on their clan.
I lost my Gift a long time ago. But no one knows that because a friend entered my life at exactly the moment I needed him the most.
He whined softly on the floor next to me. I knelt down and stroked those long, velvety ears. How many times had I petted that heavy head, held that jowly face, pulled on those wonderful ears? Eighteen years was a long time for man or dog these days, and we both showed our age. His muzzle, once jet black, was snowy with the passing of time. My shaggy hair was mostly gray now and much
thinner than when he found me.
“What is it, boy?” I whispered to him. “Do you need to go out?”
Shadow thumped his tail.
I gathered him in my arms. In his prime, Shadow had weighed more than fifty pounds; he was barely half that now, a collection of bones and flaccid muscles under a bag of loose hide. He let out a little wheeze when I hoisted him up and I felt a warm wetness run down my arm. Shadow closed his eyes with shame.
“It’s okay, buddy.” I kissed him softy on the side of his face.
The chill of the desert air invaded my robe as I squatted down to let Shadow toddle around the yard. His back bowed in the middle, and he walked with stiff legs on a slow circuit around the perimeter of our small enclosure. I bit my lip in joyful sadness when I saw my friend lower his nose to the ground and start sniffing. Always searching for the next Find. His tail wagged slowly as he breathed in the scents of the morning earth.
As long as he could still sniff like that, I wasn’t going anywhere. My escape plan was set, but I was staying right here until my friend passed on to the next life, or wherever we go when we die. Yes, I was risking everything by staying, but after a lifetime of faithful service—a lifetime of keeping me from being sold to the slavers—I owed him that much.
“You should put a collar on that dog.” Dimah’s voice was husky with sleep. She pressed herself against my back and slipped a hand into my robe. Her fingers were cold against my skin and I shivered.
“Never. Collars are for animals.”
I could feel her face pouting against my shoulder blade. “He’s a dog,” she said.
“He’s my friend.” I pulled her hand out of my robe, and tightened the tie around my waist. Maybe I was a bit short with her, but this was not the first time we’d had this conversation.
“I don’t understand, Polluk.”
In truth, that was the crux of the problem: she really didn’t understand. For her and the rest of the clans, if you wore a collar you were one of two things: a slave or a meal—sometimes you were both. The day that Shadow saved my life, I took off his collar and vowed I would never put it back on him again. I’d kept that promise.
I took Dimah’s hands in mine and faced her. “My little raincloud.” I used my most intimate Finder voice when I spoke her pet name. “It’s a complicated matter for Finders.” That was the go-to answer for anything a Finder didn’t want to talk about. No one wanted to mess with the clan’s water source, so most of the time that little deflection worked with small groups of people. Used in a one-on-one setting, it was hit or miss. On Dimah, my lover for nearly two years, my success rate for the strategy was one in ten.
She adjusted her robe in a way that let me know she was naked underneath. “You love that dog more than you love me.” She turned, swinging her hips as she made her way back into the tent. “I’m going back to bed.”
Shadow, his tour of the perimeter completed, snuffled at my knee. I dropped down to put my arm around him. “She’s right,” I whispered into the ears that hung down like velvet. “I do love you more.”
***
When I say Shadow entered my life at exactly the right time, I mean exactly. My Gift began to fail me before I was thirty years old. When we were in training, we were told that the Gift was like a switch, and it was either on or off. My experience was that the Gift was more like a muscle, something that peaked in performance and then declined with age.
When I was in my prime, I was the best Water Finder anywhere in the known world. But being the best Finder is not just about finding pockets of moisture under the dirt; it’s about showmanship. You have to inject a little tension into the performance, make them think that you might not find anything this time. Make them think that they might have to move camp again.
They never really taught us that in training. The course of instruction at the Finder’s Temple was hocus-pocus bullshit about respecting the Gift, giving thanks to the Great Ocean in the sky, and reading the texts about the Great Water Hold, a cache of water so large it could re-green the whole world.
They showed us pictures—color pictures—of ordinary people jumping into open pools of water. Of water sloshing onto rocks and nobody there to lap it up. The pictures were printed on ancient, flimsy paper that crinkled when you held it, not like the hides or thick pages of pressed fiber we write on these days.
As boys, we Finders-in-training soaked up the Water Scriptures and the religious instruction. After all, we were going out to save the world, to bring life to the clans.
All that idealism ended when we did our first apprenticeship. The Finders—the best ones, anyway—were really just con men with a side order of talent. They knew how to put on the kind of show that made the clans pay top price for their services: the best food, the best tent, the best companions to satisfy whatever nighttime needs they had.
My first master was Ghadir, a matronly woman who liked to hint to the clan leaders that the source of her Gift was her enormous breasts. She usually dropped that piece of information as she leaned forward to pick something up, giving Mr. Clan Leader an eyeful of milky-white cleavage. Although the clans were pretty evenly split between male and female leaders, when I was with Ghadir, we never played once in a matriarchal clan.
“Forget what they told you in training, kid,” Ghadir said in a rare moment of honesty. “Find your schtick and make it work for you. They’ve got to love you or you won’t be successful in this business.”
“Schtick? I don’t understand.” I was twelve.
Ghadir hefted her boobs in front of my face. I blushed and turned away. She grabbed my chin, twisting my head back to face her. “Look at me when I talk to you, kid. They don’t remember me, they remember these.” She squished her breasts together. “This is my thing, my schtick. I know one guy who does animal noises, another who only searches for water by walking on his hands. That’s their thing. I don’t even know their names anymore, I only know what they do.”
She patted my cheek. “Find your schtick, kid. People with schtick get paid.”
I stayed with Ghadir for two years, two good years. I was a decent Finder in a technical sense—better than average at finding water, actually—but I had no showmanship. There was nothing to set me apart from the other Finders. Not that I didn’t try. I juggled, I sang, I did cartwheels in the dirt, but nothing worked. I got polite clapping and a few smiles, but I always needed Ghadir to come in to close the deal with the clan leaders.
My schtick found me when a small dog wandered into one of my shows. He was nothing but a pup, maybe twelve weeks old and small for his age. I found out later that the only reason Shadow hadn’t been slaughtered yet was that he was the runt of the litter and the butcher wanted him to put on a few more pounds before the dog went under the knife.
***
When a Finder visits a clan, it’s a big event, probably the most excitement the clan has seen in months. Usually the clan leaders give their people the afternoon off so they can see the show, and the day Shadow found me was no exception. Most of the clans arranged their tents such that there was a clear oval in the center of the village. That’s where we performed. This time there was a decent-sized crowd of maybe a hundred people or so. Ghadir had done the scouting, and they’d been without a Finder for months. Water was beyond scarce; they needed a new Finder now.
“You close this deal, kid,” Ghadir said. “It’s time you earned your keep.”
So there I was: smiling, doing cartwheels, making small talk with the crowd, trying to build some anticipation for the moment of the Find. But in reality, I was dying. Ghadir was shifting in her seat. I knew that look: I had about a minute to make some magic happen before she took over.
And then Shadow walked in.
He’d pushed his way through the outer ring of children into the performance oval. His squat, black body looked like it belonged to a larger dog that had been cut off at the knees. Shadow sat facing me, and he frowned as if he’d found my performance lacking. A collar of heavy stee
l had worn the fur off the back of his neck.
I put my hands on my hips and looked down at him. “And who might you be?”
The dog laid down and put his paw over his eyes. The children erupted with laughter. I decided to milk the opportunity. I knelt in the dirt before him. “Oh come now, I’m not that scary.”
He peeked out from behind the paw, then covered his eyes again. Another burst of laughter, this time deepened by some grown-up voices.
“Hmmm.” I stroked my chin and stood back up. Shadow peered up at me with a “what’s next?” look on his face.
I cocked my head; he mimicked me.
I scratched my head like I was thinking; Shadow swiped at his ear with a paw.
“What say we go find some water, little dog?” I asked loud enough for the crowd to hear. Shadow jumped up and barked. The crowd clapped. Ghadir clapped as well, and winked at me.
I spread out my arms parallel with the earth, slowly turning my body clockwise, chanting the words of the Finder’s Prayer:
Mother Earth, the Source of all,
From your bosom flows Life.
I call on you to show me the way.
Show me Life.
I closed my eyes, and let the magic happen.
The trick to Finding is not the prayer or the way you hold your hands—it’s not thinking. You have to let it happen. I don’t find the water, I let the water find me. Nothing good comes from inserting your brain into that process.
It usually started with a tickle under one of my feet. I zeroed in on the right direction until the sensation was equally shared by both feet, then I walked forward, feeling the energy crawl up my legs as we got closer to the source. I opened my eyes to see the little black dog trotting along ahead of me, his nose to the ground. We reached the Find together and I turned to the crowd. “May you drink from the blessings of the Mother.”