Honored Guest by Joy Williams

Author:Joy Williams
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780307763839
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There was still no coffee. She wasn’t going to waste her time looking for coffee when there wasn’t any. A moth was floating in the sheltie’s water bowl. This was one of those recurrent things. She went into the bedroom and lay on the unmade bed. She wanted to sleep. She could no longer fall asleep! Insomnia, of course, was far worse than just being awake. She thought longingly of those two stages—the hypnagogic and the hypnapompic, although she could never declare with confidence which was which once she’d been informed of their existence—on either side of sleep, the going into and the coming out when the conscious and the subconscious were shifting dominance, when for an instant the minds were in perfect balance, neither holding dominion. But she couldn’t sleep, she lacked her escorts, the hypnapompic and the hypnagogic—who had of late been acting more like unfriendly guards.

The sun was slipping into the afternoon, exposing the dirtiness of the windows, which she never cleaned in the hope of dissuading doves from crashing into the glass. The doves flew undissuaded. The many blurred impressions of their dove bodies depressed her but she was convinced that sparkling windows would be even more inviting to them as they attempted to thread their way among the houses in their evening plunge from the foothills to the valley below.

She had removed the tape from the dusty little bag and played it. It was a formal exercise—familiar, pleasant, ordinary playing. It didn’t cast a spell or create a mood. It was not the kind of music that tore hungrily at her. It did not appeal to her at all. Much of the tape was empty of all but hum and hiss. The playing had simply stopped and had not resumed again. There was no applause, no exclamations of approval, no sense of an audience being present, least of all an impressionable child. Darla had certainly taken that kid for a ride. Had she confounded everyone she met in her brief life or only him? Probably him alone. She didn’t think Dennis even knew this Darla very well, not really. He had a collection of queer memories—a girl leaping in place to what avail—of no more value than bits of broken glass. He had nothing. Darla inhabited his world more than he did, for she infused it, doing what the dead would like to do but in most cases couldn’t, which in Francine’s opinion was a very good thing. As far as she was concerned, though, Darla, her quenched double, was a disappointment.

She played the tape again and it sounded even less interesting than before and briefer as well. She didn’t know what was missing, it had just become, was becoming, more compressed. She began to play it once more, then thought better of it. She ejected it from the machine and put it back in the Baggie. Locating a pencil, she tore an envelope in half—another unpaid bill!—and wrote:

Dear Dennis. We appreciate the work

you’ve done. Good luck in raising

security cactus! Good-bye and all best.

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