a lifetime of waiting alone. Night after night, they had awakened. Wave upon wave, they came.
“The ground gon’ sour?” Rachel asked as she opened Big Daddy’s passenger door.
“Not the ground. Us.”
The humming rose, a hymn that seemed to sing the world anew. Up from the jagged edge of earth, a great figure climbed out, six gigantic, jointed legs lifting it up and out of the land Doc and his people had once proudly claimed as their own. Iridescent wings unfolded from its wide, curved back. They glistened and sparkled in the night, unearthing mountains of soil and roots and old things not witnessed since the angel poured its first bowl over the sun, and the moon had opened like a great eye in the sky. Free from its dark sleep, the giant unfurled its wings and thrummed a deep tympani-drum sound that the little ones echoed and joined in, their song a bellowing in the air.
Rachel and Doc covered their ears and watched in wonder, as it raised its great, jewel-encrusted head and turned to them. It seemed as if a million eyes watched them from all directions, all at once, then within minutes, the creature stomped across acres of what had once been the town’s most fertile land. The ground shook beneath its many feet, and the others raised their drumsong as it headed toward the Viscerol plant.
Safe in Big Daddy, Rachel and Doc stared at each other, not speaking in the airless truck. They held each other for a long, long time, and for an even longer time, it seemed like neither one of them breathed. Then they jumped, a startled, delayed reaction after they heard the thunder, a rush of mighty wings as the last of the Viscerol plant and its signature water tower crashed to the ground. The earth rumbled one final time, and Rachel and Doc shook in the truck that rattled like a great tin can. The wind howled, a loud keening, and the old trees lay low, then all was still and quiet, and the only thing they could see was the white mouth of the moon.
Rachel rolled the window down, hands shaking, the old handle squeaking. She started to crank the truck up, but Doc reached for the keys.
“Come on out and let me drive, girl,” he said.
Tired as she was, Rachel didn’t even have the strength to argue. She just shook her head and looked at him. “Daddy, you ain’t driven Big Daddy in years.”
Doc wiped a layer of gossamer threads from around his jaw and his throat. His hands looked smooth, sturdy. His heart felt ripe and strong. “When I leave, you leave,” he said. “Step on out, Slick Bean, and let’s get up out of here.”
Rachel stared at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “Doc?”
He hummed a happy tune as they drove off, some of that old country music Rachel pretended she couldn’t stand. Big Daddy groaned down the road, only empty shells and withering husks remained. But above them and around them, hidden in the dark earth and in the green branches of trees, something like hope remained, listening and waiting for a warm spring night, and a mischievous wind to return again.
AUNT DISSY’S POLICY DREAM BOOK
“Want some candy?” Aunt Dissy asked when I was seven. Delighted, I thrust open my hand.
“Let me see it,” she said. She grabbed my hand before I could hide it in my pocket, forced me to reveal the map that was the dark life lines of my palm. Aunt Dissy shook her head and laughed, her face like water, rippling between a smile and a frown. “See here? I told your mama when you were born.”
The women in my family aged like trees. To Mama, Aunt Dissy was like a grandmama, more big mama than sister. Aunt Dissy was strong and clever, nimble-minded and sure. She pointed at a dark groove, a short river rolling across my palm. “Your love line all broken, your life line zagging, too,” she said. She traced the pattern with the red tip of her nail. “It’s all writ right here,” she said, her face resigned. “Cassie, you ain’t never going to be lucky in love, and you sho’ll ain’t going to be lucky in cards either. But don’t worry.” She leaned over, blowing peppermint and something stronger in my face. My bottom lip trembled, her bright jewelry banged against her chest. “You got the best luck of all, child, the best.”
Luck? I was only in the first grade, and hope rose above my fear. Maybe if I raised my hand in class I would always know the right answer, I thought. Maybe if I didn’t know, I could be invisible. Aunt Dissy stared at me, her eyes wide, knowing, bottomless mirrors. I wished I were invisible right then.
She dug her nail into the fat meat of my palm. I tried to focus my eyes on her thick silver ring, not the pain.
“You got the Sight.” Her tongue held onto the “t,” the word itself an incantation.
My face crumpled, my palm raw, exposed. For a moment, Aunt Dissy’s eyes softened. She passed me one of her hard candies then stroked my palm with her rough, bejeweled hand, tugged at a loose plait curled around my ear. “If you don’t understand right now, rest assured, babygirl. One of these nights you will find out in your sleep.”
The red twisted wrapper fell from my hand. I stood petrified under the hard gaze of several generations of Aunt Dissys, hanging on the wall. Behind her heavy choker, I could see where there had been a deep gash in her throat. The scarred skin was raised and thick like a rope. Maybe the Dissys looked so sour because they were all cursed with the same “best” luck.
“Go on, play now,” she said and frowned, as if she’d heard my thoughts, but I was frozen, didn’t close my eyes for more than a few minutes for three whole days. Instead, I stared at the dark portraits that hung in heavy frames along the walls of every room. Imagined the navel names of the stern-faced women. Before, when I asked Mama about their names, she answered with one sharp word. “Dissy,” she said and shrugged. So I fought off sleep making up a litany of names and stories about the Dissys’ mysterious lives. And when the strain of wakefulness became too much, Mama found me passed out under the sink in the back bedroom, owl-eyed and babbling.
“What did you do to her?” she asked and carried me away. Aunt Dissy bit down on hard candy and grinned, the sound like crushed bones. I didn’t find out until much later that Aunt Dissy poured whiskey in my tea, an old Dissy trick to force me to fall asleep. “The Sight’s coming one way or the other, Faye.” Mama unbuckled my overalls and put me to bed. “Even a mother’s love can’t change a child’s fate.”
Mama didn’t speak to Aunt Dissy for six whole weeks. Didn’t matter no way. Aunt Dissy had told me something else that scared me that first night. Peppermint couldn’t mask the whiskey on her breath, nor those words she had whispered, as if they were a gift. “And with the Sight, you’re going to live longer than the richest woman, deeper than the sweetest love.” Coming from Aunt Dissy’s lips, that didn’t sound so good.
All day long Mama had tried to protect me, but when my eyes closed, I was on my own. And like all the others born before, not long after Aunt Dissy read my palm, the Sight came to me, just as she said, deep in my sleep.
That night I dreamed my room was alive. The walls, the doors, the ceiling pulsed and heaved as if they were flesh and breath. The room rattled like the tail of a snake. In the night, dark as the inside of an eyelid, I willed myself awake, refused to sleep for fear I would dream the dream again. But when I grew weary of fighting off sleep, I woke to a room that was collapsing all around me. Chips of paint floated down like peeling flakes of dry skin, decayed flesh. The walls hissed and screamed. I scratched the paint chips off of me, but they kept falling, dark and jeweled snowflakes.
My
