Chapter 8 #2
Could I? I considered as my lungs involuntarily sucked in, taking on more dirt and grime.
It tasted like a dust storm I’d been in when I was a kid.
My parents and I had been driving through Kansas.
They’d ignored the weather warnings because they thought every news station exaggerated reports for listeners.
“You learn more from experience, not from reports,” my dad had suggested, because life was one big adventurous game, and the winners were those who could figure out their own way through.
We almost didn’t make it out of the storm, stopping at an abandoned gas station for shelter.
I’d coughed up dirt for days. Neither of them seemed concerned. It was a lesson. An experience.
In the dream, I frantically dug. The top couldn’t be far. I didn’t want a lesson or firsthand experience on live burials.
I clawed faster, interrupted for a second when one of my fingers entangled with something long and soft. A shoelace. I gripped the shoe, feeling the tongue and pressing my fingers against the stiff sole.
A shoe. Whose shoe? Her shoe.
I didn’t know who she was and why it mattered. The shoe was the least of my worries as my lungs gave out. I wanted to scream despite logically understanding there would be no reward and all risk. And yet, my body ultimately didn’t allow me to have the final say. Lesson. Experience.
My mouth opened for the scream, filling it with damp earth and the taste of isolation.
You could—
“Octavia!” A hand was on my face. Another one on my chest. Both as hot as fire, burning scars on my skin.
“Is she breathing?” someone else asked. They were far away. Not as far as older me had been, but far enough that they couldn’t be of help. But they wanted to. So did the person with warm hands.
“Open your eyes.” Their thumb traced circles on my cheek.
There were tears there. The warm wetness felt good against the cool, sticky mud of my grave…
no, this wasn’t a grave. It was soft. Not that a coffin wouldn’t be soft.
But I assumed it wouldn’t be this soft. Did the dead need silk sheets?
Maybe. I guess getting through this world once warrants something luxurious for one’s final resting place.
“Open your eyes,” that deep voice urged once more. “You can do it. You will do it.”
“I think she’s stuck,” someone else noted. “Do we…can we wake her with…”
“Give me a second to think,” the deep voice insisted, sounding far less sure than when they spoke to me. Both of their hands were on my face. I trembled, depending on their warmth.
“Octavia,” they whispered. “If you give in to this, you’re not the woman I thought you were. And that can’t be true because I know how to pick them.”
I floated back to the surface. My stiff fingers gave in to a bend, curling around something soft and steady.
A waist. A woman’s waist that curved out, perfectly molded into the palm of my hands.
My fingers pressed into her, the warm skin a lifeline after the cold dirt.
When I opened my eyes, they watered, cutting through trails of sand.
“Hey,” Rae said, using the edge of a blanket to wipe away the grains. “There she is.”
I continued to tremble, the darkness and suffocation close enough to still grab me and pull me back into the nightmare.
“I can’t do that…” I whispered, my throat raw from swallowing dirt. “I can’t do that…again…I can’t…”
I cried in front of a relative stranger, clinging to her even though I didn’t believe she could help me. I didn’t believe anyone could help me. Because at this point, I was losing every part of me. All my surety in what was real and what was a haunting dream.
“You won’t,” she said sternly, as if she were more than ready to put up a fight against any and every challenger. Rae pulled me to her chest. “You won’t have to do that ever again.”
“I can’t…” I sobbed, clutching her closer as I found my way back to solid ground.
Rae’s tight embrace kept me tethered to this plane of existence and sanity.
“Did you leave?” My hot tears carved lines across my cheeks.
She was quiet for a second, fingers entangled in my locs.
I wanted to be close enough to her that I couldn’t feel or hear anything but her heartbeat.
I didn’t like the smell of my apple spice soap or the white noise of the fan overhead.
Wilson was downstairs, pots and kettles banging as he rummaged in the kitchen cabinets.
Jonah searched in my closet, using something that beeped every other second.
“Not for long,” she whispered in my ear. “I was back the second we saw it on the camera.”
I sucked in a breath. Being this frustrated made no sense. Nor did being this distraught over a nightmare. And yet, I oscillated between gut-punching rage and heart-aching loneliness. “That wasn’t fast enough.”
“I know.” Rae rocked us back and forth. “I know.”
I was lucid enough to loosen my grip on her. My fingers burned, and I examined them. There was dirt underneath every single nail, packed in tight as if I’d been working in the garden from sunup to sundown without gloves.
“I took a shower,” I whispered to myself.
Because I had, hadn’t I? But coming out of the bathroom and talking to Rae seemed like months ago. As more air filled my lungs, feeling returned to my toes. The bed underneath me became solid.
It’d been a dream. All a dream that’d sewn together memories and Rae’s bedtime story of near drowning.
I must have said that last part out loud because Rae frowned and said, “Octavia, you’re covered in dirt.”
“I work on a ranch.” I wiped the back of my hand on the bedsheet. “Of course I am.”
Of course I am.