Asks the Dream © James C. Stewart 2011, Paranoia Press 2015.
__________
"Identity emerges from itself in search of itself, and every time it is about to meet itself, it bifurcates."
- Marcel Duchamp
"...what is real asks the dream..."
- Skinny Puppy
1968
They were girls. Twins to be precise.
She saw them for a moment...shrieking, slimy red and purple pink snatches of flesh bundled into blankets and whisked forever from her life by masked figures wearing white.
Exhaustion and loss crawled through her. Silent tears blurred a matronly nurse's kind face, and a pinprick needle sliding cold under her skin painted the fluorescent sky a narcotic black.
__________
A persistent noise from faraway roused her.
She awoke in bed, only vaguely aware of the passage of time. The room was clinical white--like the masks the doctors had worn--except for a dark shape in her periphery, a shape she more felt than saw.
"Congratulations."
She turned her head. The form slowly came into focus--a man in a black overcoat with pinched, cruel face lined by years. His eyes glinted cold bordering on malicious.
Her voice came hoarse, "Who are you?"
She suddenly realized how thirsty she was.
He ignored the question. "I understand they were twins. I'm sorry you had to give them up."
Thin lips curled into a humorless smile, a smile that suggested he wasn't sorry at all. She asked the question again, pushing herself into a sitting position, "Who are you?"
He sighed and seemed annoyed, "I'm here to see you don't leave us prematurely."
The noise from the other side of the wall continued. He shot her a persecuted glance and went to the door, opening it, leaning out to nod at somebody. She concentrated on the sounds--a howling electronic alarm and boots running on tile.
She resisted the temptation to hope.
A nurse entered cradling one of her newborns. A soldier, a young, good-looking man in combat fatigues, accompanied her. The rank at his shoulder suggested he was an officer.
Her heart sank. They still had the twins. They still had her daughters.
Cruel Face was talking, "...and I don't think they'll get very far. In the meantime, perhaps you'd like to tell us more about your infant snatching friends."
They'd managed to get one.
Thank God.
Her eyes went to the crinkled tiny face, its blue pools of confusion blinking beneath the lightest fuzz of blonde hair. She smiled. The baby seemed to smile back. Still smiling, she shook her head, her eyes slowly meeting his, "I don't think so. Even if they only have one, the prophecy can still be fulfilled."
Cruel Face shrugged, "Suit yourself."
He swept out of the room. The nurse followed on his heels, disappearing with the child.
The young army officer unholstered his sidearm, walking toward the end of the bed. He fumbled in a pocket, producing a black tube he stoically screwed onto the barrel. There was a name patch sewn above his left breast pocket: Rusk.
YOU ARE READING
Asks the Dream (Science Fiction - Novel Excerpt)
Science Fiction1984. New Amsterdam, a city on Variant 23, also known as Earth. Cara and Charity are an adolescent yin and yang in every way, from the color of their hair, to their taste in fashion. But they do have one thing in common, one thing that sets them apa...
