- The Worm Turns
- by Rich Logsdon
I. For seven nights in early
December, before her alarm sounded at 5:30 am, Dara dreamed the
same dream: she sat in a blue canoe, floating atop dirty water,
singing gospel hymns in a sweet angelic voice. Paddling, peering
through murky water, she saw the lettering of submerged street signs;
the lettering seemed to be in an occult alphabet. In the dream,
she sought her own street corner, called out to her father, in whose
presence she'd be safe At the dream's end, Dara found herself staring
into ghastly wide-open eyes of a dead woman, her bluish gray corpse
two feet under. As Dara slowly awoke, she felt smothered in mud
and fought to free herself from sticky sludge.
On the seventh morning, a Monday, she
sat buttering sourdough toast at the kitchen table and drinking
black bitter coffee;utterly exhausted, she thought of the dream,
the dead girl's image fading from memory In silence, the grandfather
clock ticking loudly from another room, she looked out the window
at the shriveled plum tree that had died in her back yard last winter.
She noticed the rising sun sitting on the horizon, its light pushing
away darkness
Tall, slender, and beautiful at twenty-five,
Dara had long dark brown hair cascading down her back. Her perfect
face was childlike, and her brown eyes generally danced with a joy
that the dreams had stolen. Raised Pentecostal in Wyoming, Dara
and her mother had fled her father's Biblical wrath three years
ago and moved to Las Vegas, where Dara now worked as a waitress
at Denny's and attended community college in North Las Vegas. While
she missed him, Dara was glad that her father, the darkly stooping
preacher at Streams of Living Water Church back home, no longer
looked over her shoulder, breathing fires of judgment down her neck
when she did something contrary to the will of God.
Slowly, wiping butter from her mouth,
she arose from the table and turned.
Coffee cup in hand, she walked into the
small living room to pick up her books piled on the TV. It was finals
week, and indifferently she realized she would miss her Philosophy
final if she didn't hurry. Taking one last sip of coffee, she set
her cup on top of the television, and attempting to shake images
of the dream from her mind, walked to the front door, opened it,
shut and locked it gently behind her so as not to wake her mother,
and headed across the dead-grass front yard to her primer-gray Chevrolet
parked along the street in front of her house.
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