A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson

Author:Kai Ashante Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

He awoke in blue gloom, slow to remember (which) self, where (in space), when (in youth, in age) he was. Himself; the Sybil’s cave, poorly lit by weak godslight; soon to celebrate forty years of life. He was in Daluz. This was his life, wherein he’d only known contentment—up until the fierce onset, in the last year or two, of second thoughts.

But where were they now? The anguish and desperation he’d felt earlier this same morning, when he’d begged the Sybil: “Did I choose right? Or should I have stayed in Olorum?” No regrets, now! He wanted no life but the one he’d lived!

“Well?” The Sybil stirred in her glass. “There it is,” she said. “Such life as you’d have lived, if you’d chosen Olorum.” There was no saying how one knew her for female, for the Sybil’s speech was inaudible, of projected image and emotion, of alien thoughts sent into the mind. And dark was the glass of her jar, dim the shape within it; scaled, grotesque, nothing human. “Now you’ve lived to the end of that other path, do you still covet it?”

Aqib made to speak and found, as when one has breathed by mouth the night through, his tongue all pasty, and throat utterly dry. He had to work his tongue awhile to rouse enough spit to answer. “No,” Aqib said. Then he reached out a hand suddenly, grasping at nothing. “My daughter!”

The Sybil mocked this outcry. “Not yours,” she said. “The pride and joy of that other man. You are daughterless.”

That was just noise to Aqib. His heart spat it out for nonsense. Lucretia had clutched no fingers but his, toddling her first few steps. He had carried her bloody to the healers, when she’d faced down and slain the marauding lion. And he’d spoken such bitter words—though in truth admiring her, envying her—when she’d refused marriage to her cousin, the Most Holy of Olorum, City and Nation, in favor of unwedded freedom. They were his grandson, his great-grandchildren . . . but in this life there were two other, more proximate youngsters, weren’t there? Covering his face with his hands, Aqib said, “It was just a dream, only a dream . . .”

Croakingly the Sybil laughed. “No indeed!” she said. “It’s you who are the dream, that other man who is flesh and real, the dreamer.”

Existential horror seized Aqib. At her words, he thought he might vomit forth his soul onto the floor, and his body break up into its constituencies: here a soft heap of empty flesh, there neatly stacked bones, his glistening organs all colorfully in a row, and the divided whole of him pooled around by lacquered blood . . . That other Aqib was the dream, or he was?

Giddy with malice, the Sybil clicked her talons against the jar’s insides, then scratched dreadfully at the glass. “You’re the dream,” she cackled. “He is real!”

And didn’t Aqib remember longing for this self and this life and these outcomes, mere fantasies? Then how, but who .

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