Nine Bar Blues. Sheree Renée Thomas
of my brain like a waking snake.
He watches my face, unaware that I am still dreaming even as he sneers at me. He tries to look indifferent, but his eyes are now as sad as his mouth.
I try to recall the woman’s shimmering steps. In the dream her path is the same. Down a road she doesn’t want to travel, with branches for legs and twigs for hands. Raven’s feathers pour from her mouth. A filthy starless sky of rain and blackbirds pierce the clouds, dark ribbons of flight.
I shake my head, try to think of another dream, something of comfort, of resolution, to cut off the images that unfold before me, a troubling silent movie. One of the Dissys, from the seventies, swore by iron and copper. A disc of metal to block dreams. The trick never worked for me. Even as I finger the heavy key around my neck, I can feel my Sight uncoiling and writhing in the air around me. And then they come. The wet mud shining underfoot. Trees twisting in the wind, the twig limbs reaching to grab his hand.
“Are you going to choose the final card or should I?” His voice sounds far away.
His hand covers mine and the shock of his touch pulls me from the vision, his dream.
“I know you saw her,” he says. “I can see it in your face.”
There’s no telling what I look like. I want to speak, want to tell him how she hurts and for how long, but the words get stuck in my throat and slide down to the bottom of my belly.
How to tell him that she is lost to him? That the love he seeks is already a dry husk, gone for many seasons.
He must have thought he was reaching back into the past, that she would be as he remembered her, whichever spring it was when their future was green. Who is she? I do not want to know. I just know she does not want him.
All night, while sleep carries others to dreamland, I work at remembering, rewinding to study others’ dreams, to rework the scene. But some signs you do not want to see. I told him a lie because the truth was too expensive. His presence fills the space inside my mind as he sits, arms crossed, legs tucked under him. I breathe through the odor of his sweat and desperation, my back curled, his final card hidden, face down on the table.
When he finally left, I stood on the fire escape, listened to the waves of bachata and kompa music floating up at a sky littered with stars. Night-time. I could still hear the children laugh and leap, shrieking through the darkness below, their shouts mingling with the sharp-edged call of car horns and crows. The ever present crows.
They knew.
The truth I would not admit to myself.
I had told him a sweet lie, a story pieced together of all the women I had ever known. Enough of the truth to make his spirit woman real, enough of a lie to make him release the cards and turn away. A lie stitched together with the threads of past lives, crossed stars, ill-timed fates, the worst kind of luck. Now the crows have come to pick it all apart.
“I’m not going to do it!” I cry. I run out to the terrace, kicking over my poor, struggle herbs. “I don’t believe in you.” The black circle slows. The sound comes not from outside, but within my ear. I scream. Regret every foolish word I’ve uttered. How stupid could I be? The circle of sound reverses itself. The murder of crows dives from the sky, but instead of cutting through the night, they circle inside my head. I back away, knocking over my thyme, and climb back inside. Slam down the window so I cannot hear. They shriek and call, wings clawing at the air. A cloud of them circled overhead, counterclockwise, haranguing me. Their beaks are sharp as needles, sharp enough to pierce the skin.
Bleeding or not, that night I refused to sleep, let alone to dream.
I snatch the cards off the table, hands shaking, I drop one. The Hanged Man, reversed. I stare at the figure entwined in lush green vines, surrounded by blood red flowers and gourd-like fruit, then stuff all the cards into the velvet bag. I double tie it, almost wishing it was a hangman’s knot. If only it was that easy. I take the crystals and the bowl of dust and dump them into the trash. A red cloud rises into the air. I am done. D. O. N. E. Done.
I dig in my bra and pull out a couple of the crumpled bills he’d given me and grab my keys. Though I had never been up there before except to get late rent, it was time to see the sock puppets.
I stomp up the rickety stairs so they could hear me coming. The music, propulsive beats that make the whole floor shake, turns down before I even make it to the door.
“What’s good?” a sleepy-eyed man asks. He has grown his hair out since last month, and his hair is half-braided. His girl lounges on a couch, frowning in the background. Piles of folded up laundry cover the floor.
“I need to stay awake.”
He shakes his head. “Naw, sis, you sure? Look like you need to be sleep.”
I hold my money out to him. He won’t take it. I dig in my bra and pull out some more. “I don’t want to dream.”
He turns back to his girl, as if asking permission. She grabs a dress out of the basket and lays it flat across the couch. After she smoothes it out with the palms of her hand, she shrugs. Her purple twists dangle over her shoulders.
“I got you,” he says, and disappears into a back room.
At first there was nothing. I slept the sleep of the ages. So much nothing I could dive into it. Hours and hours of nothingness. I had been resting, better than I had in a good, long while but then, just before dawn, the dreams—if I did not speak them, they would bleed into my waking thoughts. If I did not speak them, they would tear the veil away from their world into my own, rip and tear at reality, starting with my skin. Soon, nothing gave way to the Sight, the Sight becoming all I could see. The crows came to screech a warning. I had to tell him something. Enough of the truth to keep both him and the spirits away, or I would never have another day or night’s peace.
Real hoodoos, sho’nuffconjurewomen can’t be bothered with black cat bones in pockets or meetings at crossroads. Meetings take place in the mind, in the space where your soul sleeps, where all the signs are newborn, hidden from view. The night after I spent his money, the night after the crows shrieked my name, I hear the house split and crack. I open my eyes and see a zig zag scar across the ceiling above my bed. I watch it grow deeper, longer until I fall asleep. The crack grows while I dream. Then I see him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I ask.
“What are you doing here?”
We avoid each other’s eyes and shift on our sides. He is lying next to me, clutching my pillow as if it’s his own. He is dressed in a T-shirt and some tighty-whities. I had pegged him for a boxer man. I’m not looking all that great myself. I am dressed in a jersey tank top that is so tattered, I should have been using it as a dust rag. I clutch myself self-consciously. My best bra is wet, hanging on the shower curtain pole, dripping by the sink. Neither of us admits that we’ve been keeping our own separate vigils in our sleep. We are so close, almost touching. I assume that this dream is another way for the Dissys to mess with my head, to tease me about latent lust, so I snatch the pillow back from under him.
“Hold up, that’s mine,” he says when his head bangs against the headboard.
“You’re in my dream. My rules.”
He looks confused. “Last night, I saw this crack in my wall and I…”
“Put your finger in it and it brought you here. Great. Jacking up my sleep.” I snatch the quilt I sleep under year round and cover my boobs like a death shroud. “Go on back where you come from.”
“I don’t understand…”
He repeats syllables that make no sense to