"Reliquary" by David Ryan

Reliquary

David Ryan I. The stray dogs were sleeping, tied to the stall post beside three cloaked bird cages. The barn was dark and hot, and splintered sky bore through the old joists and broken roof where below one of the dog’s sleeping body scattered in a dream. His slim, black legs danced and darted: inside this dream his lips were swollen and black too, and his teeth tore at the sinew of a mule’s muscular leg, and the parted bloody meat danced and darted, as if in imitation of the dog, mirroring it. A woman’s soft enthusiastic voice came from the leg, praising such a strong, good dog. He was untied, free. Now he ran with the mule, kicking, leaping in the air, flying.

One of the caged birds beside the tied-up dogs, an owl, had been standing asleep on some dirty newspapers on the floor of her cage. The owl’s cage was covered with a canvas sack and the absolute black disoriented the native darkness the owl had memories of. Once used to the natural cycle of the sun and the moon, she now found a brilliant light jarring her at times her body could not predict, and the dark of the cloaked cage, a thick dark even her golden eyes could not penetrate, summoning her, at other times. She no longer slept naturally, and so there seemed to be no more nature left in the atmosphere, no more sky or wind in the dampness or dryness of the air. All the sounds around her now composed a keening plaint, as if inside her head alone. The mule in the dream was singing now through the dog, into all of the other

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animals’ sleeping minds. The owl heard a small rat penetrate a thatch of straw. She heard an ax hammering a stump far off, pock, pock, pock. She heard the sky’s ghosts gather and knock together and pass. A tribe of bats, asleep, snored in the rafters of the barn and she heard this too.

Ghuu Ghuu, the owl sang back to the dark. The dog’s dreaming in the absolute black was the only answer. Ghuu, the owl sang to the dream. The dog’s dream turned into an owl and the dog’s kicking paused, then turned back into the mule, and the dog sneezed once and only then did the other dogs beside it stir.

The owl had been dreaming of a brook full of fat silver-blue fish. The owl had been dreaming of four rats scuttling into the shore brush. The owl had been dreaming of its footing, its full set of talons gripping a wet bough. The owl had been dreaming of fish blood and scales and the salt and of a chilled body twisting in its mouth, the crush of its beak, and of the moon. The owl’s dream had a cold pleasure in its body and then the fish dream stopped twisting and the moon was extinguished by the sound of the dog kicking and whimpering. The brook vanished into the mule. And then the mule vanished and the owl stood there in the dark. The dark, much hotter than the brook in the dream. The owl awake, framed within an abyss: an owl within an owl within an owl.

The owl heard the darkness whine and then screech, and in her newly-awoken confusion thought another owl had come to warn her and for another moment believed she was free. Then footsteps crushed the straw and stones and came nearer. The ax in the distance paused, then started up again. And then a familiar rupture of light opened up before her.

Ghuu ghuu ghuu ghuu, she said. She blinked three times. §

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A boy pulled open the barn door. He entered the room where the dogs slept. He saw the dream whimpering and baring its teeth inside the black dog’s body on the ground. That one he called Shadow. The boy approached the birds and lifted the sack from the owl’s cage. The owl turned her head in several rapid, small oscillations, then blinked. She blinked again, adjusted to the faint red sun coming from the late afternoon outside the pried-open barn door. Ghuu ghuu ghuu ghuu, she said.

The boy opened the cage. This owl was his favorite. It was gentle and it would let you do what you wanted with it. A long, pale ribbon that had once been a dark blue was tied around its leg.

At the market they let the owl stand on a perch, tied down like the stray dogs for sale. Three of the nails on its left talon had been cut off and ground for a poultice the boy’s parents claimed would clot blood or bring luck or allow the dead to return to one’s dreams kinder than they’d been in life. The more desperate the owners were to sell their animals, the more magic the animals were capable of producing. Several of this owl’s plumes had been used for other medicines, for a number of contagious and sympathetic manipulations, too.

Today, at the market, the boy’s parents had sold nothing and the family hadn’t eaten dinner. He worried what they were going to do to the animals.

The owl opened her mouth and held it open. Then she closed it.

The boy reached his hand in and the owl hopped onto it. The boy pulled his hand out of the cage. The bright light from the dark doorway varnished the barn’s wall. Now something like an owl memory bit inside the owl, which had inside it the memory of a barn, and another barn inside this barn, and another barn and another. The owl was hungry, had memorized this feeling which in its mind looked like a star.

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The boy took the owl out through the opened door. The owl swiveled her head nervously in the open air and adjusted to this one reality as the other barns continued to nest as if rippling inward in the confusion inside her.

Above in the sky, a thicket of starlings swelled from a comma scattering like buckshot and the panic in the pattern boded another storm coming. A boom came and spread. The owl’s talon gripped the boy’s hand. The ribbon then fell away, draped over a dirty finger. Far away, the ax stopped.

The boy threw her into the sky and she lifted, then landed back down on him, with an embarrassing squawk like a swan’s, finding the brief lift strange, mistrusting the ceiling of it. Expecting the constraint of the ribbon. The boy threw her again, and this time she saw that the ribbon wasn’t tied down to the piece of wood or gripped in a fist, and she lifted higher. Inside her body a star burst.

She descended again and landed on the boy’s shoulder, and the boy pulled her away and lifted her into the air above him. Go, he said.

Go go go.

The owl misunderstood one more moment: Ghuu Ghuu, she said.

She launched and flew off into the clear sky where the star had retreated far away now.

II. Mom and I hold our bodies so still the air is breathing around me instead of inside. We are standing deep in the kitchen in the dark where the bank man outside cannot see us. It is too bright out in the wind and, here inside, our shadows only join other shadows into a tissue of dark shapes. A small bead of sweat is drawing a dirty line down my temple past my ear, now the low arc of my jaw, and even this I don’t touch, worried my shadow might move, too.

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Not while the bank man is out there. My blouse is damp and it is the time of day where the heat is at the edge of sleep, and sends chills into you like a bitter goodnight kiss. I’ve begun to imagine the heat wishing us dead.

The man’s knocking stops and we listen to his silence for as long as it lasts until the silence seems to walk away with the bank man’s footsteps. I watch his figure from the hinged split in the doorway. His blue silhouette through the sheer drapes in the window hold a little clipboard, a briefcase. I imagine for just a splinter of time kicking him on the ground. I would like to see his body, perfectly still there on the ground, swelling up, splitting open in the heat.

The sharp, dead hollies hold him back from our window. A patch of swarming bluebottles, gathered like a mindless sentry, bat at the air there.

I would like to see the flies tending his body like shepherds.

Mom’s eyes aren’t watching the door or the window. She’s watching the past. A gray-blue cord in her neck pulses, descending her pale skin with a shower of bruised capillaries streaking beneath the collar of her T-shirt that says Coca-Cola over her breasts. Her forgotten hand is cupping the rosebud in the bucket of water on the table. More gray-blue veins the color of a heron among the constellations of red dots are there too, like the larger blooming suns rising on her arm, the crisp white circle around these bruises like a cresting eclipse. Like a new sun absorbing the existing sun.

Her breath can sometimes be as thin as the separation between now and then. The now that erases the future, like a comet erasing itself in the sky.

The bank man’s figure falls away, grows smaller in the window, vanishes beyond the shrubs. But then we hear his steps rising the front stoop again. There is a pounding from the derricks on the ocean far off that has fallen into step with the pulse in my head.

Then, the door heaves and groans, then it booms. It booms again,

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but doesn’t give to his body. And then the quiet that follows is absorbed by the wind. The bank man walks away, drawn from the house, a splinter easing from its wound. I watch him pass between the dried hedge at the front of the property. I hear the door of his car close. I hear his car cough and then it rubs away and then there is just the elegy of wind singing.

There, Mom says. There. She had not taken her hand away from the top of the rose the whole time the man had come and gone. As if protecting it, too, from him.

We return to our flowers. We are in season, Mom would say.

It is important to get it right. Do not let them enter you, to prick so that you bleed, she says. We don’t want blood all over the place.

Here, strip like this. Her hand cupping the rosehead like she’s cupping a small bird from above its body.

Her bruised fingernails glow in reverse, her pinch turning them white. The thorns peel slowly under the care of her blade.

My own broken roses are cast aside, failed work: that rose, no the one over there I mean, the one where my knife had cut too deep into the shaft. The season lasts only a week or two now. But there is something more desperate in Mom today. As if she’s trying to get me to get it right for a future without her. As if it scares her, what I am, my skills, my misunderstanding of the world.

She says, Honey. Try to get this. Get this right. Here. Now, see? I can move my hand down and pinch. Pinch the stem. There, a little, beneath the flower. I can hold it here now with these top thorns stripped.

The pinch in her nails presses white again against the bruises.

The skin over her arms is pale vellum over flat blue branches, thin fine hairs, an early cluster of age spots at the back of her hand.

She’s much younger than she looks. She draws the razor down along the stem and thorns drop onto the kitchen table like little black teeth.

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When we finish, she sweeps the little thorn heads from the table into a glass jar, another jar to add to the shelf in the pantry.

Night, now. The garden beds out back are staggered in growth.

Blackened crests and cups of roseheads outline the night haze; though with the shortening season we must move quickly and sell as many as we can before they dry and wither, black. We pick away the bruised petals—these, for Bible pages, or the oils and medicines. Mom hums, wrapping the cut and stripped roses in bunches of six, setting them in water. She opens the pages of one of the Bibles to the Psalms. Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame, stained with pressed petals.

The glass jars for the thorns we gather from the sea, washed up, containers of memory seared by the salt and the dead kelp and acids in the fish. That night we eat kelp and an animal she won’t tell me about.

Later, in bed, the wind outside taps the window by my head and sings in a long low moan. Mother coughing in her room. Out back the garden’s roses have gathered dark, shivering beyond my window. The night bees join the flies, dart sluggish from flower to flower in the cooling indigo sky. My chills have passed. I put my book down, about Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Cortés and the Mayans. I turn out the light and close my eyes and soon a priest dressed in thousands of feathers presses a hot blade against the stomach of a baby girl.

Our station wagon passes the shelled out, dead cars, tires fused to the baked mud road like the carapaces of hard insects, soul and substance just rust and bubbled paint. Miles of windmills on either side. And beyond, in the ocean the derricks and mounts, the water fires. Wind swats at our drive. In the back the aluminum poles, the canvas. A box of Bibles, pages filled with pressed petals, and then the roses, stripped and sitting in water, knocking gently. The flowers have begun to open, just enough. A perfect day, Mom says to

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herself as much as to me. We drive over the broken concrete road.

She coughs again, deeply, and I wince. We pass the bank-owned houses. What ours will likely soon be, the windows boarded over for the haboobs, the hail. We continue toward the fields, the sod dwellings buried in the earth with little swells, doorways trenched just above the topsoil like pillbox fortresses, covered with a scalp of tall grasses. We pass the seashore for a time, the pumping derricks. Roll up your window, honey, Mom says, and I smell the sewage and something I imagine could be death. We continue past a sandy bank formed from the mid-tide; two beautiful swans sit in a silver puddle as if stunned. The sea winds have brought large mesmerizing fires on the water closer to shore.

We set up our small stall. There is Becky and John. There is their son, Ellston. Hi! They’re selling dogs, caged birds for spells, medicines, good and bad luck. There is an osprey with sockets in place of his eyes, the barn owl, and several caged, nervous horned larks. Owls missing talons, certain crucial feathers. On the table, glass jars and vials with powders, colorful fluids in ampules and syringes. To their side is the corn stall and the sun-dried vegetables, there is the butcher with his marrow bones and dried cuts, another vegetable stall, the younger dried kelp the sea hasn’t yet cooked, the ice man who keeps the sideshow of ghosts under glass. I lay out our poles, connect them. I stab them into the earth, then drape the tarp over them. The bridge table, the two folding chairs. I take the flowers out of the boxes and set them on the table. I take the stack of Bibles and put them right over there. Bees and bluebottles break through opening buds. A man pretends interest in the roses, the Bibles. But it’s Mom, his interest. I know from how he looks at her, opens the Bibles, thumbing a leaf or two, that he is another liar.

A patch of her voice, for a moment, carries in the breeze. The dried petals concentrate the sugars, Mom is saying: a source of

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vitamin C. But the man is trying not to look at her arms. Is that right, he says. Liar by omission, a banker, another adjuster. What’s left of her, they want, what is us—this is, at least, true.

At the blue tent with the dogs and birds Ellston is chewing on something like cud. He waves, again. Mom continues with the man, smiling at him. I can’t hear the words now. I pull out a dagger and stab him repeatedly in the leg. His easy smile. I stab him in the sides and the back and I float up with my dagger and stab his bloodless smile over and over. Ellston shouts something and my imagination instantly erases the dagger and all his blue wounds. What? I say too quietly. Then the man walks away and he is smiling because my mom’s smile is contagious magic, and so, quietly, he has left fearing us, too. Mom goes into coughing, and sits. The man is now talking about the weather with the ice guy and his ghosts under the lid of glass.

And I look at the owl looking back at me and feel that the owl has been watching me this whole time.

Later, when we pack up, most of the roses have been sold. It’s a good day. The drive back is calmer; the winds are calmer. My mom hums a song that reminds me of childhood, that reminds me of a song about a family.

III. Pock pock pock, the ax stings the wood. Outside our window I see the owl rising over the sky with that ribbon tied to its leg. It flies gracelessly, like a fat, baffled bat, and I recall the important feathers missing from the plumage at the market. I had to carry Mom from the car, up the porch stairs, inside.

That night I dream that I am my mother dreaming about my father. I’m witnessing this but I am inside the dream, too. In it, he’s died and we’re watching him on the pallet pulled from the

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mudslide. It’s a vague memory, really. A bright red thread weaving through space between the real moment and the dream of the moment, which is itself no less real. Then we three are on the beach though I hadn’t been born yet. She is pregnant and I am inside her and inside her I dream about color, mostly, and little oscillations of shapes and shadows turning and blinking: reds and blues depending on mom-to-be’s breath. She breathes in and inside her body I dream red, the red washing around, purpling to blue as oxygen evacuates. I am attuned to every interior sound of her body. I hear washing and bubbles; I hear the peristalsis of her throat, the slight ringing in her ears. The colors cycle, oscillating with the beating of her smooth pulsing breath, as she and Dad sit on a beach. Now in this dream I begin to dream she is dreaming, and in our shared dreams Dad still loves her because he is alive, the flash hasn’t taken him and churned him under the rushing mud of a mile-long grave. She is dreaming they are there on the beach, now, as if it had all happened backwards, his death, his living: but in the dream it is the right time; his death reasonably less important than this earlier time. That’s the logic. As if the dream were giving merit to a state of being, rather than the ordering of time; the dream, correcting time. Now they are on the beach, they’d made love earlier and my father was concerned about this, because Mom was pregnant with me; he worried that the penetration could be dangerous, but she said, of course it was okay; there’s absolutely no harm in it. Hurry, she said: now. And now they sit on a large rainbow towel on the dirty beach and watch a tanker moving along the horizon so slowly it is still. An electrical thunderstorm has begun to scatter synapses across the surface of a great brain.

There is a longer lightning flash. And inside her womb she dreams I am counting one-one hundred, two-one hundred, mapping the time it takes from the light to shapeshift into the booming sound as they pull my father from the mud, as my father sits there beside

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her watching the oncoming storm. She can count already! she says. Proud of me. A few pellets of rain fall, and my father says, it’s okay. There’s no harm. We’re just a dream. I’m alive and I love you, and we’re together. You’ll have a baby soon. And in her dream I dream I am in her womb weeping. I am mourning us all.

There is an explosion and I dream my mother dreams of her own father and mother standing in an old photograph on a mantle.

They look exactly like Mom and Dad. And on the mantle, there is a photograph of me in a dress, but from generations ago.

It is too much. This dream forces anxious light inside me to pulse rapidly and I startle from the bed as if I’d woken from my mother’s dream and successfully pulled myself out of the dream within her dream, and am now kicking and darting it away from me, yet leaving her to continue dreaming. Like I was just born from her dream.

I walk into her room and see her asleep there on the bed.

It is raining now outside, a heavy rain. The rain storms have become nearly indistinguishable in the distance from the haboobs produced by the failed thunderstorms, which come nearly as often and produce the same lightning, though without thunder. The haboobs are like a thunderstorm miscarrying. Sometimes the rain even gets confused with the dust and mud comes down believing it is rain.

Mom sleeps there on her bed and I watch her maybe dreaming.

Still waking, I feel a lingering ache of love and terror from when I was asleep just a moment ago, as if inside her. In the dark you can never see how sick she is. She lies perfectly still there. The dark makes her much smaller. I see myself holding her like a baby. Her bedroom is so hot. Outside the rain drills down, and I step quietly to the window and open it. The rain song rushes in, the pressure in the room shifts like your ears after swimming. I worry this will wake her. But she doesn’t stir. The rest of the night, I will stand

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watching her. I will stand remembering my dad. I recall that owl I’d seen at the market, how it watched me. And I wonder (still) if the dead have dreams, or if death was just a dream you moved into after this life. Moved into like a second life. Would you also still love and ache as you do in dreams? And I look at my mom and circulate images—owl, Mom, Dad, beach, and I know that my dad would have loved me, and maybe does, if my theory is correct. I know he had loved Mom. She has never said anything to make me believe he wouldn’t love me if he’d been there. I watch her sleep for a long time; only later do I understand that she isn’t asleep. And only then do I see that my dream of her dreaming was simply the last time we would be together in this house, alive. But I watch her. The rain comes down. I watch and try to step back into that dream as if I were dreaming the sound of the rain now falling over her, me, and my father there on the beach while the thunderhead continues. I can feel the dream already forgetting me as hard as I try to remember. I whisper one-one hundred, two-one hundred, three-one hundred.

IV. The owl flies over the village. A thunderhead is coming in. Fires burn over the mounds of earthen homes. The owl sees shapes on the water; she hears them chugging and pumping and the black smoke hisses. The owl sees schools of fish gather and swell like smoke below the brown sea and a vast red bloom, the rotted sea kelp in the shallows. The owl rises against the hot wind until she finds a proper flow and lift for her wings, rides this for a time.

Below, black and white boxes on the ground, large lumps in grass and the dunes. New fires cluster and the older ones smolder. The owl continues, then drops into the twilight, landing in the ruins of the contagious hospital where nearer the ground in a thatch

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of weeds in broken concrete her talons dart and scrape free a small rat. The owl flaps into the air rising a little with the rat, and passes through the broken opening of a roofed room with an open window and strangely clean linens pulled over the bed. The owl lands in the bed’s shadow cut from the dim band of light cast from the window. A breeze trembles. The small rat in the owl’s talon is dead, its heart having failed before the owl had even lifted it into the air. The owl hears a boom and atoms shift and scatter, ions agitating around the tawny feathers that surround her eyes and ears; and the sky darkens. She hears a huntsman spider plumb the finished funnel of its web over by a closet. She hobbles with the rat to the darkest corner of the room—away from the one long window, away from the closet. She opens her wings halfway and holds them like this to allow the breeze to pass through her.

The sky begins to cloak the room. But it feels different now, the darkness freer. It seems to refer to some other time and place. She begins to eat: her beak darts down at the rat, and she swallows it, nearly whole, just as the sky closes completely over the room and the first big drops of rain drill down.