Apex Magazine Issue 125 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

Evangeline ran to tell her mother, to finally tell her about the woman in her dreams. She wanted to tell her all about herself, ’cause maybe Marie didn’t know dreams weren’t storybooks. The door was locked. Evangeline yelled for the first time in her house: “Mama! Mama, open the door! Mama, I want to see you! Mama! I want you to see me! Don’t hide!”

Her voice cut through the darkness in the room. It cut through Marie’s darkness. Marie could not respond. They were coming too fast on her—the colors and sounds from all her lost souls. But mostly from the first, from the one who traveled the waters.

Marie saw her mother, a young giant with wings enough to protect her from the waiting world. She saw the day that she closed the door between her selves, heard the reverberation of silence all over again. She saw her woman for the first time again: the strongest part of her spirit reaching out to touch her face when she was just a girl, five years old, picking blueberries in Mr. Jackson’s patch. She saw the splotches of blood on the tablecloth where she was born. The man in New Orleans who reached out to her then pale lemon hand: “Hey girl, you want a daddy?” The minstrel show that played out in the clearing. Choked on her first swig of whiskey that signaled her manhood in a remote village where green rolled strong and proud ever toward Macgillicuddy’s Reeks. The little girl she’d seen cut in two by a train when the hulking monsters were still new to the world. Felt the heat of the brick oven the master’s food simmered in. Tasted the sweat on her mother’s breast when she came to her a few precious moments between sunset and rise. She even reached back and saw the water before the darkness that was her only ally when the hold doors closed, sealing the tomb of living bodies.

Marie tried to clear her mind, regain control. She took a deep breath, and the reek of human waste filled her nostrils. She closed her eyes, and there were the bodies. She started to hyperventilate. Each breath was another face. She reached out to grab hold of something and the curd of excrement was pasted across her hand. Marie could not hide. She reached her depth. Compelled by all that lay inside her, she began to remove her illusions.

Outside the bedroom, time continued to slip into the past. Evangeline gave up her hoarse words at the door. Edward paced back and forth downstairs, eventually coming to rest on the other side of the bedroom door, his legs tucked under him, the right side of his body against the wood. He slowly sang a song he thought he’d forgotten the words to, his cheek brushing the wood: “Marie ... Mae ... Marie … Mae ... Marie may I come in? Marie ... I ... Marie ... I ... Marie I’ll soothe your skin ... Marie .

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