The House of Discarded Dreams (21 page)

The two grandmothers in the kitchen argued about what needed to be done food-wise, seeing as how they only had some preserves and canned soups and ramen and a bag of flour left. They compromised on pancakes but barely spoke to each other afterwards. Felix retreated to his room, but seemed to be in high spirits—the universe around his head, drained and ravaged and discarded, had been growing again, and Vimbai supposed that soon enough it would resume its normal undulation—although without Balshazaar, whose demise in the hands of
wazimamoto
passed unlamented by anyone; only Felix was kind enough to acknowledge that he had ever existed.

Peb would not stop babbling now that he had his tongue back, and he traveled all over the house, his many limbs bristling like the fins of a lionfish, yelling cheerful nonsense about brimstone rivers and blue electrical storms, of the worlds made of ball lightning and fire and of black unfathomable chasms populated by creatures capable of swallowing entire galaxies.

Maya’s dogs and Vimbai’s horseshoe crabs remained outside—the former curled up on the boards of the porch, their bushy tails covering their glistening wet noses from the cold, their eyes looking up wetly at whoever ventured onto the steps. The crabs stayed hidden, but Vimbai could imagine the restless churning of their legs, the clusters of their soul shells waiting for them on the ropes, waiting for the day that it was warm enough for the creatures to become whole again.

Maya and Vimbai had left the kitchen with its squabbling old women and the overexcited Peb, and sat on the porch, under the stars, the hunk of land black against black sky, its outline only hinted at by the absence of stars. In the darkness of her room, Vimbai smiled at the memory, at the contentment she felt whenever she and Maya could be away from everyone else and sit side by side, listening to the quiet sluicing of the waves and talking in low voices, as if sharing secrets even though they discussed quite mundane topics.

“What will you do when we get back to New Jersey?” Maya had asked. “I mean, besides going back to school and freaking out that your mom would yell at you.”

Vimbai smiled at the barb, at the fond familiarity of it. “I will start looking into horseshoe crab conservation. I mean, there are initiatives now—like they don’t allow fisheries to use them as bait anymore, but I’m sure there are more things I could do. And no one thinks that the medical research is damaging them, but I know it does—you can’t just drain away most of someone’s blood and think that you’re not harming them.”

“I’ll say.” Maya’s face was hidden by the night, but her voice was smiling.

“Anyway,” Vimbai said. “Shouldn’t you be spending more time with your zombie grandmother?”

“Not when you put it this way.” Maya laughed softly. “No, I will. I’m just . . . it takes getting used to, you know? And then there are all these crazy notions that she would be disappointed in me for not finishing college, for not making more of myself.”

“You still can.”

“I know.” Maya sighed. “Still.”

“I’m sure she won’t be disappointed.” Vimbai continued.

“Well, maybe not. But it’s strange for me too, having her back and yet not quite knowing if it’s really her, you know? How did you cope with your grandma?”

“I barely knew her when she was alive.” Vimbai stroked the wooden plank by her side. “I don’t know if it’s really her, but I can’t know—I have very little idea of what she is supposed to be like. But you’ll figure it out.”

“I guess so.”

“But again, does it even matter?” Vimbai said. “Isn’t it better than having no grandmother at all?”

“You’re right.” Maya shifted in the darkness, petting the dogs, and stood. “We better turn in—we’ll be there tomorrow. Need to get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Vimbai said and rose too. “Good night, Maya.”

And now she lay in her room, her mind racing. Occasionally, she drifted into brief snatches of sleep, and dreamt of the crabs coming ashore where Vimbai’s mother waited for her, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun, forever vigilant, forever waiting. She dreamt of the sun rising and touching the silvery ocean surface behind her back, lighting the land outline in front of her. And as she dreamt, the house touched the beach softly, its porch sliding over the sand compacted by the surf, over the tops of the dunes, until it found its old foundation, left free of sand. The house sighed and creaked and stretched its roof corners and its wainscots as it settled into the familiar grooves—but carefully, as if afraid of disturbing the delicate contents that filled it to brimming.

The half-foxes, half-possums crawled under the porch, sighing contentedly, as they curled up in the familiar dark cave, the sand underneath still wearing the rounded troughs left by their bodies. They wondered if they would be allowed back inside, and if they would go hunting tomorrow, fording rivers and running across the great golden plains of straw and couch cushions.

The horseshoe crabs remained underwater, sleeping, soulless for now, under the freezing waves, and dreaming of the days when the sun would rise high and warm the chilly waters, when the tides would rage high on the beach and they would put on their soul shells and perhaps fix them with the remnants of the souls still sluicing in these waters, become themselves again and come dancing through the surf, raising their legs high like chitinous ballerinas. They dreamed of the bygone days when wave after wave of spawning crabs flooded the beaches and crashed upon them in a frenzy of whipping tail spikes and burrowing legs, where the eggs of the crabs outnumbered the grains of sand.

The ghosts in the house slept too—unusual for the ghosts, but they welcomed the relief. Peb curled in the
chipoko’s
lap as she nodded off in a living-room chair, and both dreamed of the branches of jacaranda trees. Maya’s zombie grandma closed her terrible white eyes for the first time since she walked again, and she conjured up visions of downtown Newark and church service on Sundays, of the gospel choir whose singing reached through the honking, screeching traffic, all the way down the street.

And the human inhabitants . . . their dreams were more vague, more difficult to pin down—but they were the ones that filled the house with the forlorn memories of the past and the regrets of the present, they were the ones that gave the walls and the valleys and the ridges their shape. They were the namers and the creators, the wills that shaped the house so that it could remain itself, even now, when it was moored securely on solid land, in the forever shifting dunes.

About the Author

Ekaterina Sedia
resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed novels,
The Secret History of Moscow
and
The Alchemy of Stone,
were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to
Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom
and
Clarkesworld,
as well as the
Japanese Dreams
and
Magic in the Mirrorstone
anthologies. She won a World Fantasy Award in 2009, for
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy.

BOOKS BY EKATERINA SEDIA

The Alchemy of Stone

Heart of Iron
(forthcoming)

Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
(edited)

Running with the Pack
(edited)

The Secret History of Moscow