The House of Discarded Dreams

She opened her eyes. It was dark at first, but as her pupils dilated and adjusted, she started to make out shapes at a distance—a mountain with a rounded top overgrown with what looked like trees bending in the wind and a faint white sickle (moon?) hanging above it.



Then the mountain shuddered, and two white round windows opened inside it. Vimbai jerked back as she realized that in the dusk she had misjudged the distance badly, and what she thought was a mountain in reality was a human head just inches away from her face, and the white circles were its dead eyes.



“Hello,” the head said. “You new?”



“I’m . . . temporary,” Vimbai said, and her heart—outside of here, distant—thumped like mad. “I’m just looking in.”



“Like all the legs,” the head said. “Funny, I see legs and hands and feet and only rarely—other heads.”



Vimbai nodded. “I have a body too, only it’s outside,” she said. “I’m Vimbai.”



“Balshazaar,” the head said.



Vimbai studied the head—it was quite old and quite dead, and very desiccated; Felix was not lying about that. The sparse hair covering its parchment-yellow scalp did resemble trees—each hair stood alone and separate and rather straight up. Long and deep furrows covered the face, and Vimbai thought that she noticed traces of faint green luminescence hiding inside them. Balshazaar was a landscape in his own right, and Vimbai could not think of a single thing to say to him. “It’s nice to meet you,” she finally managed. All the other questions rising in her mind were cut off by their overwhelming mundanity—what did it matter who Balshazaar was or where he came from or if he ever owned a body? Now he was just a desiccated head living in the hair of a really weird teenage malcontent. The rest seemed trivial.



“Going already?” Balshazaar said politely.



“Yes,” Vimbai answered. “I don’t belong here—see, there’s a whole other world outside, and—”



“I know,” Balshazaar interrupted. “I’ve seen it.”



“You used to live there?”



“No. Felix takes me out sometimes.”



“You don’t say.” Vimbai was angry at Felix now, for not telling her more and certainly for not letting them know that he had dragged a disembodied head out of whatever unknown dimension. It was one thing to amputate phantom limbs, and quite another to show Balshazaar the world. It was just like grandmother said, one did not screw around with things one did not understand.



Grandmother. The woman who used to be so ridiculous was starting to make sense; or at least she lacked Vimbai’s streak of rationality, which made her helpful in irrational circumstances. Grandmother lived—or used to, when she was truly alive—in the world where razor cuts protected from misfortune, and cunning muroyi, witches, could sic spirits on the living and make them ill. Grandmother would deal with a dead head like she dealt with all such problems—remember a remedy or go to a n’anga and have it fixed. Vimbai wished there were a healer nearby, someone who was versed in dealing with the supernatural rather than someone like her, who flailed and hyperventilated and tried to stay calm in the face of it—so far, that was all Vimbai could manage. Even her fear of the Harare healers had receded enough to think of them wistfully.



“I’ll be going now,” Vimbai said, and straightened. Balshazaar’s face diminished as it hurtled away from her, and Vimbai looked into Felix’s disturbing eye. She was not ready to tell him anything yet, and so she stalked away without saying a word. Felix was so disconnected from everything anyway that he probably didn’t even think her rude.



Vimbai padded to her room along the hallway that had grown a covering of soft, slightly wet moss, and lay down on her bed. A mattress and box spring, really—not a proper bed. She resented her grandmother’s arrival and the house’s ill-fated journey. Why did it have to happen to her, a perfectly rational person? Were those the superstitions of her ancestors that dragged her along, people long dead but unwilling to let go? It just wasn’t fair that someone she was related to by blood alone could do that, as if shared genetic background gave them some sort of power over Vimbai. She wondered if Maya too felt that same pull and resentment.



Maya. Maya who barely talked anymore and instead followed with her feral pack from one room to the next. They roamed like hunters, disappearing into the closets recently converted into thick suffocating forests, they swam in rivers that poured from the downstairs bathroom. Vimbai hated to admit that her worry about Maya was just a pretense designed to mask her envy and disappointment at not being invited. She too would enjoy a pack of furry familiars following her around, she too would like to be unconcerned about their future and the present circumstance.



Peb floated up through her pillow, its smooth skin and several feet and hands brushing cool against Vimbai’s cheek. “Don’t be sad,” Peb said, its former petulance forgotten. “Why are you sad?”



“I miss Maya,” Vimbai answered. “I wish I could go with her.”



“There are creatures under the porch,” Peb said cryptically. “The house found them.”



“They were on the porch,” Vimbai said. “And now they are gone.”



“No,” Peb argued. “Still under.”



“There are only horseshoe crabs there.” Vimbai sat up abruptly. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”



Peb bobbed over her pillow, floating up then down, until it jetted higher up and disappeared through the ceiling.



Vimbai rubbed her face. “Horseshoe crabs,” she murmured. Poor crabs, bled half to death by wazimamoto in medical trucks. Vimbai jumped off her bed, reenergized by the possibility of a new discovery. There would be time later for Maya and Felix and Balshazaar; now was the time for horseshoe crabs.



Vimbai had never anticipated that she would be sticking her face into strange and unfamiliar places so much, but there she was—on her hands and knees on the porch, by the very edge of the water. The house had mutated again, developing a coquettish hem of round pebbles and pieces of seaglass, polished and clear. The barnacles hung onto the edge, their quick ghostly feet kicking food in their mouths hidden somewhere inside their chalky shells. If it weren’t for horseshoe crabs, Vimbai would’ve studied barnacles for the sheer weirdness of their anatomy and lifestyle.



Vimbai kneeled on the edge of the porch that currently fancied itself a littoral zone and studied the surface of water—smooth and clear, and so cold. Her breath fogged the air and touched the waves; Vimbai tried to cloud them with her breath like one would a pane of glass, but to no avail. She took a deep breath and thrust her face into the ocean.



The salt and the cold burned her skin, a million needles threading her cheeks. Her teeth ached. She opened her eyes underwater and they burned too, tears not helping the matters at all. The water around her seemed stationary, like a block of green ice. She couldn’t see very far, and her breath tried to break out of her chest like a caged and panicked bird.



Vimbai came up for a breath of air, and gasped, still crying from the cold and the salt and the sadness of all this water, always separating her from something she wanted. How could one love something so cruel, something so terrible to her parents? As if answering, a withered ghostly hand lay on her shoulder.



“Sahwira,” her grandmother said. “Girlfriend, my girlfriend. You look for thing no mortal eyes can see. Let me guide your vision.”



Her grandmother’s hands lay flat on Vimbai’s temples and pushed her gently back toward the water’s surface. For a moment, blind fear boiled in Vimbai—what if she were to hold her head down and never let her come up for air, no matter how much her heart thundered and her legs kicked and thrashed? What if she wanted Vimbai to be a ghost, like her, to finally touch the souls of her ancestors?



But it was foolish. The hands on her head were so gentle even without warmth, so kind, that Vimbai succumbed and let them guide her. She opened her eyes, and for a moment there was just familiar transparency without images, the endless wall of thick glass. And then her grandmother’s eyes entered her own.



If she were asked to explain how it felt, Vimbai would’ve faltered for words, groping for images that best described what she was experiencing. Her grandmother’s sight entered her own like a hand enters an empty glove. Vimbai had been hollow and now she had a center, a depth, a density—she felt three-dimensional and alive and aware. She focused her eyes and she could see every grain of sand in the bottom, every rock, every shrimp hiding in the crevices. She saw kelp forests and the silvering of a school of anchovies, the rapid quirk of a shad. On the bottom, hagfishes braided themselves into an incestuous, slithering nest of Gorgon’s hair in the empty cavity of a dead shark’s head, its gill arches protecting them like the barred windows of a jailhouse.



And beneath and beyond all that, under the sand sifting over the skeleton of a sunken ship, there were horseshoe crabs, pale and unwell. There were hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands, all of their tiny legs moving in unison, burrowing in the sand. As Vimbai looked at them, they stared back with their pinprick eyes. And as if one, they shifted, their legs working in reverse now, digging themselves out rather than in.