Sturdy Dreamers (Excerpt)

Her dreams always began in the city.

She would stand on the edge of the downtown, the skyscrapers mountains in front of her, the streets empty and dark in their shadows. She would smile and the silence around her would turn to a roar of air as she flew into the sky. In the sky, she spiraled over the city, surveying everything with eagle eyes, buildings and streets and pavilions all belonging to her, under her protection. Always, she would pause, hovering over her domain, closing her eyes and reveling in the feeling of the high wind on her face. She would take in a deep breath and then, things would begin.

In this dream, she did not stay long above the buildings in the city. She aimed herself at one, one of the tallest, and found as she flew that her hands and pockets were full of tiny thin seeds. She opened her fists, seeding the ground far below as she went, pulling somersaults in the air to empty her pockets, then sped on to the building. She laughed as her face grew larger and larger in the reflection in the windows.

She pulled up short of the glass, just below the roof, straightening and watching her reflection. She allowed herself to drift down towards the ground, floating past window after window after window, blinking when the thick black bars blocked her view of her own reflection. She watched as the world sunk down behind her until she touched down softly on the concrete. Then she turned, inch by inch, to see what had grown on the ground as she flew.

The narrow street had opened up into a park with the greenest of grass and on that grass stood hundreds, maybe thousands of people, each one with a can of paint. They held still, almost at attention, each one with two hands supporting their can of paint.  She walked through them. No two cans of paint were the same color. After a minute, she turned to the man on her right, the one with a familiarly unfamiliar face, and smiled.

Within seconds, they were all covered with rainbow splotches of paint from the people around them. There was laughter and screaming and yelling and gigantic splashes and she danced through it, clapping her hands in delight as she watched the festivities. She soon saw that the largest of paint attacks come from catapults on a hill. There were committees of people working to set off huge bowls of paint at the end of the catapult’s arms, large primary colors of blue and green and red and yellow. Entire trees were covered with the colors, dripping large gobs of paint down onto the people taking shelter under their branches. Occasionally the wind would pick up and the leaves of the trees would shake, showering down paint onto the revelers, who would stop and look up and laugh, holding their hands out like they were collecting rain.

She walked through as a protected observer, completely untouched by the paint. The people would turn the other way when she walked past, finding a new target on some other lawn to fling color at; distant throwers with good arms would tweak the arc of their paint missile to land just far enough from her that the splatter would miss her entirely; and the people controlling the catapults would always swerve their arms out of her path, even if it meant having their loads collide with one another mid-air. Those were her favorite, the explosions of combined color that covered anyone in the vicinity. She would pause when those happened, watching people duck out of the way or cover their heads with their cans of paint, hoping to ward off most of the blast. She glanced up to catch a blackbird in flight above the paint war, dodging the colors with sleek wings or flying silhouetted against fireworks of liquid color.

She found a hill to watch from, and a tree on top of it, but getting up it took longer than she thought it would. As she climbed, she could hear the noise of the paint war behind her, but now, all that was before her was the hill and the tree and the sky. The sky was grey, as it had been all dream long, like a dawn that never broke. She looked at it as she climbed, thinking that the clouds were now missing, and the birds. She shook her head, thinking and climbing.

When she reached the top of the hill, she turned back around to see the progress of the colors. She had had her eye on the blue catapult, wanting to see if it was able to drown out a particularly thick patch of greens just west of it, but when she turned, the battle stopped. The people again stood in silence, looking at her, waiting.

She looked the dripping paint, at the happy but tired faces, and took this as a sign. She clapped her hands twice, two slow, measured beats. She heard the whoosh of air as the buildings of the city rose up behind her where there had only been sky and the crash of the windows as the clouds escaped from the buildings. She ducked, covering her head with her hands, but the shattered glass turned into raindrops as it fell to the ground. The people raised their hands in silent salute, the rain washing away the battle scars from their skin.

She spun slowly back to the tree on the hill, now her last bastion before returning to the city, and looked up. The leaves had melted in the rain, revealing hundreds of ravens in the tall bare branches. She closed her eyes against the sight, worried that they meant to fly down to the people below and cause harm, ruining the colors mixing into puddles with the rain. She saw the ravens beginning to take flight and gasped when she heard the cheers of the people in the land below just as the light broke out from the still grey sky. Funny that the sky should stay grey when the sun was so bright...

The warehouse was just a block away from the water of the harbor, but it wasn’t a part of the waterfront that Brian had ever been to before. He could smell the bay down here and it wasn’t anything he wanted to smell again. The dull metal walls of the warehouse blocked him from seeing much, but the smoke stacks of the big shipping boats peeked through when we walked past the streets on either side. There was a dim reflection of the dawn on the high steel walls behind him, the ones that had followed him from the light rail station, separating the docks from where the dock workers lived.

            He had paused when he saw the warehouse, nervous for the first time, and he had spent upwards of five minutes staring and shaking his head. Figuring now that he had delayed long enough, Brian straightened his shoulders, shifted his pack, and cleared the distance to the main warehouse door in half a minute. He stood off to the right of the door for maybe ten seconds, took a deep breath, and stepped in front of it.

            When nothing moved, he looked around for a scanner- maybe it was blocked or maybe he was too close to the door to be picked up. He was, after all, basically nose-to-nose with the unwashed ridges of the entrance. But he couldn’t see any electronics anywhere, not even a hole in the metal where a camera could be hidden. He stepped back and folded his arms, raising an eyebrow as he studied the situation. After a second, he leaned forward, noticing an indention in the door itself at stomach height, maybe about three inches tall and an inch wide.

The door opened with a rattle as he was bent over surveying the indention. He jumped back out of the way. A blonde woman a little shorter than him came through the door, collar of her patched coat pulled high. She frowned when she saw him, but held the door open. Brian caught it with a hand and she walked out into the morning. He looked at the door, looked back at the woman, and then stepped inside.

            It was just after dawn, but there were already maybe fifteen people inside. Brian stepped away from the door and found a place behind a man in a trench coat. The line in front of him led up to a dented metal desk, its mint green paint chipped and scratched on all sides. Behind the desk was a small-looking man. He was brushing what was left of his light brown hair across the crown of his head as he listened to an agitated young man standing on the other side of the desk.

“But they’re retro, Mr. Finch! Retro’s been a hit this month!”

“I hear you, Kenneth, but, like I said, I just don’t know if I can take one with the zombies,” the man at the desk said. He settled back on the chair, regarding the tall, thin jar in front of him. Green and white vapor danced around inside it. “People used pay to see movies with this stuff, but I’m just not sure if they would pay to dream it. That brings the zombies to their heads, see, instead of safely on the screen where they belong. It makes ‘em real. No one thinks up zombies anymore. No one wants to. They just pull the props out from the back.”

The man on the other side of the desk stepped closer and leaned his palms on the desk. “Please, Mr. Finch, you gotta take this one,” Kenneth said, lowering his voice. “Sally... well, Sally’s not been doing well and this dream’s all I’ve got.”

Brain took in Kenneth’s appearance. All he had on for a coat was a worn plaid flannel shirt, torn at the bottom and leaking strings out the sleeves. His shoes were just as ratty, with small holes on the outsides where his pinky toe had worn down the canvas and torn it away from the sole. His eyes were red-rimmed and had these dark marks under them that Brian had never seen before, like bruises, almost. He had a cut on his arm, dark dried blood making a thin streak nearly from elbow to wrist. Brian shivered, but couldn’t look away, fascinated by it.  

Mr. Finch muttered something across the desk, shook his head, and pulled out an envelope from a drawer. Kenneth leapt back and punched the air. “Thank you, Mr. Finch, thanks! It’ll surprise you, I promise. Zombies are retro and retro’s been selling this month!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mr. Finch replied. He slid some paper into the envelope. “Check back tomorrow for the second half, if it sells.”

“I will, sir. Thanks again!” Kenneth left and Brian shifted away from the back wall as the line moved forward. Looking around, he could see that he was the youngest person here, maybe by a decade. There was an old lady in a threadbare tweed coat, a few businessmen in suits with scuffed black shoes, the tall man in front of him in the trench coat and hat, scarf wrapped around his face so that only his bulbous nose was showing, and maybe seven people who could have done anything down here at the docks- rough, sturdy people in rough, sturdy clothes, holding delicate glass jars in the crooks of their arms or the palms of their hands. The desk was off to one side of the room and behind it and beside it were stacks upon stacks of crates, some made of new wood with deep black ink, some greying and greening with destination stamps long since faded. Most of the latter were behind the desk. Brian could see a path through the crates that cut back to an office and another, much wider, that lead to the loading bay doors.

He turned his attention back to the line. Mr. Finch had moved on to the next person, who he let go with just a glance at the dream, a sentence of explanation, and some paperwork. As time went on, most of the line went like that, but from a few he required detailed summaries. A tall, thin woman in her late middle age handed over a mason jar with stacks of black, white, and a disturbing mix of grey and a deep red. When asked, she said it had a serious couple of moments involving an empty picture frame and some stools that came and attacked the dreamer who had been sitting on a couch. The dream ended up with the picture frame and the stools sitting down on the couch beside the dreamer, merging and morphing into a familiar person who started a conversation. The lady would pose as she described the dream, making a frame out of her fingers or mime dodging a flying stool as she talked. Mr. Finch rolled his eyes at it but took it anyway because, as he said, “Someone always buys it.”

Most of the line was less imaginative than the Mason Jar Lady. Middle aged salesmen and strong-arms alike turned in dreams about boats and parks and flashbacks to high school, though one businessman, addressed as Mr. Friday, had a bright purple dream that involved the dreamer singing and dancing at a mall like they’d never danced before, with a rainstorm in the middle that turned into a sea of multicolored candies on which the dreamer and their friends danced, each step a crackle and smash. Brian smiled when he heard that one.

Mr. Finch was in a deep conversation with the man in the trench coat about whether he could take a dream that had a unicorn in it without a promise that it gored no one when the sirens started outside. In an instant, the man in the trench coat had vanished into the warehouse, melting somewhere into the rows of boxes, leaving Brian frozen alone in the middle of the room.

Mr. Finch looked up from gather his supplies to see Brian still standing there. “What are you doing, kid?” Mr. Finch said to Brian in a harsh whisper. “Ditch the dream in a box and get out of here!”

“I-” Brian started, but he didn’t know what to say and his feet were glued to the floor. He stared. Mr. Finch snatched his bottle from him.

“Once.” Mr. Finch held up a finger. “Go!” he pointed at the loading bay door.

Brian nodded and turned. He sprinted the length of the warehouse, tripped, and rolled off the edge of the loading dock. He landed on his left shoulder and lay there as silent as he could while the warehouse door slammed open and the police shouts echoed around the metal walls. He heard Mr. Finch reply to the cops in his reedy voice. There were more slams and heavy footfalls, but a few minutes later, the confrontation was over, the pounding of Brian’s heart the only evidence it ever happened.