The Calling of Time

Future Paths

As the hours went by I fell into a kind of daze.  It was easy to let my eyes go soft and glaze over, staring out the window at the crumbling houses as they flicked by. We passed entire neighbourhoods of blackened, gutted houses. I guessed that people had been killed in the middle of making dinner, leaving their ovens on. Slowly their house had caught fire and the flames had spread down the row of houses until nothing remained but rubble and ashes.

So much ruin.

The sun sank behind the hills, and eventually we found ourselves driving through the night. Manda refused Jai’s offer to drive, claiming that she wasn’t tired. The headlights sliced a neon yellow path through the darkness before us. My body shook and swayed with the movement of the jeep, and somehow it must have lulled me into dreams.

I was standing in a bar.

At least, I was pretty sure it was me, but I was outside of my body, watching through some kind of window. The girl that was me was dressed in the clothes I was wearing, blue jeans and sneakers, a thin sweater. She had a tall, hooked blade in one hand and a metal hourglass in the other.

I…she…looked uncertain. Behind her stood Manda and Jai, and their faces were dark with emotion. Manda’s slim body quivered with pent up rage, and her eyes glittered. She looked like she was about to launch herself forward, coiled to spring like a lioness.

The target of her wrath was a man at the bar. He was one of the only ones sitting there. The bar tender took one look at the scythe in my hand and vanished into a room in the back. We watched him go, slamming the door so hard that light fixtures shook. The lone man at the bar shifted on his stool, as if he knew we were there. It was hard to tell what he looked like. He was hunched over, big hands clasped over his face, he kept shaking his head and mumbling, “No. No. No.”

Under his bulky plaid jacket his broad shoulders shook. He wouldn’t turn around, wouldn’t look at us. He just kept it up, the constant head shaking and mumbling. “No. I can’t face her.”

Face who?

The girl who was me stepped forward, and her voice was nothing like mine. It was firm and full of power, used to being obeyed. “Horace you WILL look at me.” She walked forward and something crunched under her feet. In a daze I looked down to see peanut shells thick on the floor.

The man’s back stiffened, and after a minute he pulled himself upright on the bar stool and turned to face the girl that was me. The man’s face was broad and unattractive, his nose had been broken more than once and his eyes were so dark they were almost black. “We failed you. I failed you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

 

 

I surfaced from the dream gasping, smacking my head painfully on the window when I jerked forward, it felt like I’d been drowning, pulled down by some dark undertow. That hadn’t felt normal, the dream had been too real. Why had I been outside my body? I clutched my head and groaned, blinking furiously to clear the blur from my eyes.

Jai turned around in his seat to look at me. “Kali, are you okay?”

“I’m…fine,” I muttered. “I just had a really weird dream. It was really vivid.” Jai and Manda exchanged a quick look. It wasn’t quick enough for me to miss though, and I narrowed my eyes at Jai. “What?”

He hesitated. “What was it about?”

It wasn’t vague and foggy like most dreams. Most dreams I have to struggle to remember, but this one was still crystal clear in my head. The dank bar we’d been in, the look on Manda’s face, my weird behavior and the feeling that I was myself…but I wasn’t in my own body. I shivered. It was all too creepy.