Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa

Author:Deborah Taffa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Part

3

The author (front left) with her sister Lori; her father, Edmond; and her sisters Joan and Monica, circa 1976, in Farmington, New Mexico.

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The recurring nightmare came with certain fevers in my childhood, the heat making my eyes sink so deep into my head that I couldn’t open them. No matter how hard I tried to stay awake, I became blinded to the outside world, able to see only the back of my glowing red eyelids like they were a big movie screen.

The dream starts with the outline of a girl on a Friday after school. She’s a new classmate, a stranger who asks me to spend the night at her place. I beg my mother to let me go, but once we arrive at her house, and I walk through the front door alone, I know that I’ve been tricked. The walls fall away to reveal a long cave, and the girl, seeing how the cave makes me sick, says she knows that it hurts but someone is coming. She puts me in an old hospital bed with an iron frame like the kind we keep on the Cry House grounds. She leans over the bed to stare, her dark eyes and scary smile spinning past me like her face is in a flip-book. I lie on the sickbed, too weak and frightened to fight back. My fingers grope the cave wall. Its texture reminds me of clay, and the gumminess is threaded with something that feels like hair. I touch it, and as I touch it, I taste it like iron in my mouth. I curl into a fetal position, my hands feeling and my teeth gnawing on the wall like it’s gum. A tall stick man enters the cave. He puts a cold hand on my forehead and talks to me in a language that I can’t understand. There are generations of sadness here. I’ve never felt such nostalgia in my life. When I wake, I feel his cold hand still. But then I realize it’s Mom, using an icy compress to cool me off so I can come home.

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