ferus rex

The boy continued to roll in the torment of sleep. Though the rays of his vision arced across the vast Serengeti, his body was in a prison. He lay fitfully dreaming in a small, dingy bedroom where the brightest color was gray.

A certain sound was audible in the room between the blare and thump of passing car radios, and when the distant wailing of police sirens briefly lapsed. The sound was the humming of frustrated electricity. In the lower half of the single window was a lazy fan, its propeller, spinning, slowly and noisily dying a dust-choked-motor death. A black, greasy soot had settled with time on the motor’s copper coil, so that the fan made an agonized moan when called upon to move the hot, still air of Willie’s room. Between the slow rotation of the rusted fan blades, dawn’s first light struggled in, but for the boy, the desert sun was already high and in full assault.

Although Friday was already dawning over Corona, surging up in places, stirring alive here and there in the start of a car or in the jingling keys and shuffling feet of some early riser, Willie Rivera was still lost in the riotous swirl of dreaming that traced its origin to Thursday night.

Two nights before that, Willie had begun to dream differently. The dreams were different, and they were also new. That much at least was certain. They were new and different for a single reason, but Willie had not been quite able to cup his understanding around it. There was a way in which the newness and the difference were relative. Which is to say that the new dreams made themselves prominent against a recollected group of old, familiar dreams, but still not in a way that was completely clear. There was no specific quality to either the newness or the difference, so as to enable one to say for example: “Well I’ve never dreamed in color before!” or “That was the strangest dream I’ve ever had!” No, nothing so conclusive nor so easily described. For if Willie could have made any such declaration, or even formed any such thought, then all his brooding on the dreams could have ended, could have been knotted-off like a balloon and surrendered to the wind. Instead, the dreams, or rather the thoughts of the dreams, pervaded his waking life. Miserably. The dreams could not be ignored, nor could the overwhelming sense that there was a reason to fear them.

The bed was still poised impossibly atop the monstrous fang of rock, teetering menacingly when the touch of the wind lifted up or pushed down from above. Willie was a fluff of misery in the heat. The sweat ran from his every pore and his throat was a dry river bed. He felt like a sacrificial offering under that unflinching yellow scrutiny, as it incinerated all things with equal indifference. The desert sun had arced past its apex, and had begun a long decline to the Western horizon. After his understanding of place and predicament was thoroughly absorbed, the necessity of winged flight began to well up inside him. The need to fly became perceptible at first as a dull aching in the arms, as from an involuntary tension, that the stout upward gusts of wind seemed to relieve. He became aware of the distant strips of green growth as appealing in the most elemental way. But only when the chastising of the sun, the sheerness of the spire, and the teetering of the bed produced a form of madness in him, was he able to crawl himself to the edge and leap toward the tumbled rocks a thousand feet below.

But he did not fall. And as if there had never been any question of his ability, Willie found himself aloft in air, flying by his own power. It was sky, open and limitless, and all the consuming sensations of flight roared in his mind. For a delirious moment there was no up or down, only a uniform brightness without boundary. Then out of the dazzle, darker patches coalesced and became the vast stretch of land below, a tone of reddish-brown already familiar and agreeable to him. And not far away at all now, were the trees, and that glorious carpet of grass with a sparser border that braved into the desert for several miles. The green areas seemed to reach a thinned and weakened hand out to him specifically, beckoning him into the impenetrably lush and living center of wildness.