Pitch black. Black. Dark grey. Grey. Clotted cream. Pale white. White.
“Ohhhhhhhhh.” The latter hurts his eyes.
“It’s all right,” a low, masculine voice reassures him.
Maybe, but Johnny Three Spirits doesn’t feel all right, although he is encouraged.
“Grandfather, is that you? I thought I’d killed you.”
“Yes, grandfather, here. For awhile there, thinking you had killed me. As it turns out, though, I’m alive and well, and possibly more enlightened from having had my near-death experience.”
“Where are we?” Not the sweat lodge, unless the rocks are cooled, the heat all gone, electric lights installed.
“Back at my house.”
“You carried me here?”
“Actually, it would seem you carried me here, and then collapsed.”
“I’m sorry. I lost control — again.”
“Not as badly as the last time. Last time you were snake, and cougar, and wolf. Last time, you bit Melissa Remoth. This time you were only snake and didn’t bite grandfather. Progress. Or, so we shall see it until it is proven otherwise.”
“What keeps happening that so puts things out of whack?”
“An answer which obviously still needs more searching.”
“Did chant-to-see-the-future tell us nothing, then?”
“Snake interrupted chant. In afterthought, I’m thinking we need call upon a source far more insightful than chant.”
“Such a source exists?”
“If I can still believe my dreams.”
“You had a dream?”
“If dream is what can occur when losing consciousness from life-sucking squeeze of form-changer grandson as snake.”
“And what did you dream?”
“Of you and I scooping warm wax of angry scrubland bees. Of you and I working the wax to make it malleable. Of you and I rolling a waxy column of crusty gold and creamy fragmented honeycombs with wick.”
“A candle, you mean?”
“So it would seem.”
“Have you become a candle-reader, then, between sweat lodge and now?”
“No. Have you?”
“Not that I’m aware. And for as long as I can remember, I have heard you and the other elders complain because our people have been deprived of one for more than three generations. Which was why we set out to snatch Melissa Remoth to know her latest reading, yes?”
“Possibly why, in my dream, grandson, it’s Melissa brought with us to do the reading.”
“Unless, of course, I again spoil things by snatching her sister.”
Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE
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