Now & Then by Jacqueline Sheehan

Author:Jacqueline Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

They slept amid the ruins, huddled together as tightly as bark and tree, sleeping on a mass of grasses and dried plants, anything to keep their bodies off the cold slab of stones. They put one blanket beneath them, one on top of them, and both their capes on top of that. Anna waited for Glenis to fall asleep, which she did almost instantly, issuing a deep sigh and giving a jerk with her legs, as if she entered sleep by falling off a cliff. When Anna was sure that Glenis was asleep, she drew even closer to her, pressing herself into Glennie’s back, letting her right arm fall across the woman. Anna held on for dear life. If she could keep hold of Glenis through the night, then she’d be brave enough to sleep. But she could not let even Glenis know how afraid she was of traveling the road at night, the possibility of getting caught with the black market goods, of never finding Joseph, of her brother wrangling with traumatic brain injury in their time. She breathed into Glenis’s neck and fluttered into sleep.

The dream. Oh, she was pregnant again, and when the baby came out, it was as small as a kitten. No, it truly was a kitten, a dark tabby with eyes squeezed shut and tiny claws in the limp paws. She had nothing to feed it, no milk in her breasts. The kitten was weak and hungry, and Anna fled to find a grown cat to feed it, to keep it breathing.

Anna was jolted out of her dream by a deep, guttural howl that vibrated her ribs. Glenis threw off the covers, bumped Anna aside, and sat up.

“Oh, Jaysus! Oh, only a dream,” Glenis said, rubbing her face.

“What? You had a dream? You howled like someone about to be killed. What did you dream?”

“Dreams are a jumble of nonsense,” said Glenis uncharacteristically. Under all other circumstances, Glenis willingly saw omens, spirits, and troubles carried on the breezes and every other thing and place. Anna doubted her lack of interest in dreams.

“Tell me,” she said, stretching her legs out as her racing heart began to slow. “Then I’ll tell you mine.”

Glenis stood up, shook out her considerable hank of hair, and brushed her skirt.

“Well, it makes no sense, but I was so awful afraid that my heart felt ripped open. There was a man, see, and I loved him, not that I don’t love my own dear husband, Tom, because you know that I do, but in this dream there was this other man and his eyelids were so swollen that I could only see the center dots of eyes through these slits, and he was looking directly at me like he knew me stem to stern, like he’d seen me naked. And he had snakes or something awful coming out of his head. More like black ropes and from his heart too and right out of his arms. Oh, it was a frightful sight. He couldn’t speak and I knew that, yet I could hear him in my head.

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