LITMIR.BIZ

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back in her chair. As always, a kind of nausea washed over her like seasickness. She didn’t have to conjure the flashes of her dreams, since they came to her of their own accord. But each dream had different details. And now she was too exhausted to say anything but the basic elements, since the one dream worrying her took up most of the space in her mind. She tilted her head and began:

      1. Police raid. Green house with the big philodendron on the porch. Body in the closet.

      2. Pink pacifier and bottle. Box buried in the yard. Frederick Douglass house. Study cottage in the back.

      3. Red, white, and blue beads on the ends of braided hair. Train tracks. Washington Bullets T-shirt. Kingman Lake.

      4. Wires on fire. Apartment on Dotson Street. No numbers on the doors. Windows nailed shut. Woman can’t breathe.

      5. A mother. Five children. A man named Wilson holds his arm and loses his heart.

      Amber stopped and twirled a lock of hair around her finger and let out a long sigh.

      Mr. Johnson was writing furiously on his notepad, recording every word she said, and he put his pen down when she stopped. As always, her death dreams were ghastly, more so because he knew they came true. Young women killing themselves when they’d fallen on hard times. Houses burning down with families in them. Shootings and stabbings and poisonings. Boys hung in jail cells and that sort of thing. Despite the fortitude inherited from his grandmother, the death dreams bothered him long after he wrote them down and had them printed. He had stopped confirming the gory details of Amber’s foretelling in the television reports and obituaries, for this interfered with his ability to sleep at night. He stared into the green lines of the table. “Is that all?”

      The floorboards of the house creaked as if buckling from some unseen pressure.

      There’s more, Amber thought, staring at her guest’s empty glass. There was so much more in the five visions than what she’d described. And there was the dream about Dash. But speaking of that meant acknowledging what she couldn’t bear to accept. “Yes, that’s all of it.”

      * * *

      Amber stood topside on the wood-warped porch like the deck of a ship, watching Mr. Johnson drift into the mist until he was out of sight. Her legs grew tired and she sat on the step, weary from the doldrums of precognition. Once more she thought about that first death dream when she was twelve, a bizarre and horrible vision about her father. And once more she tried to understand the reason why she’d seen him eaten by a talking shark but was unable to do so. It’s just a dream, she’d told herself back then.

      And she’d believed it for a while too, until her father’s body was found. When Nephthys came back from the morgue with the news, Amber ran around the garden, screaming. Later on, she told her aunt the dream she’d had about the shark. She remembered Nephthys telling her that it didn’t mean anything and should be forgotten. “Real be worse than any dream,” she’d said. But from that moment on, there was something about the way Nephthys looked at her: an accusatory gaze, a silent rebuke. The dreams were more frequent after that, and they got worse as she grew older. Different people with different deaths. More chilling in clarity, more terrifying in accuracy.

      Amber stared into the thickening cloudcap. Neither she nor Nephthys had ever found out the particulars of her father’s undoing from the autopsy or the police; how he ended up in the river or who put him there. But the facts of the chewed-off leg and ravaged body followed them wherever they went, floating about the rooms of the house, festering and poisoning everything between the two of them, until her father’s death drowned them both.

      Amber got up and went back to the kitchen and cleared the table. At the sink she looked into the small stand of trees. Again, they seemed to stare back at her, full of the enigma that places like Anacostia create. And once more she asked the silent wood what she’d asked a thousand times before: What happened?

      PARABLE OF THE DREAMER

      The great white moved through the water like a submarine on watch for the enemy, his icy glare matched only by his cold will. His bleached underbelly was as massive as that of a whale, and his serrated teeth jetted from mammoth jowls that sucked in water like some wild sinkhole. The beast powered through the currents he’d marked as his territory, magnetic north guiding his dorsal fin from one point of the horizon to another. He swam on, an unrelenting patroller, until he spotted a man in a boat and rocketed toward him.

       The great white circled the craft and said to the man, “You’re in my waters.”

       The man sat calmly in his boat. His dark and bare legs spanned almost to the bow, and he braced them as he adjusted the line of his sail, anchoring it around the half finger of his hand like a hook. He looked at the shark. “Waters can’t be yours.”

       The shark surveyed the miles of briny deep he had already cleared and turned a glacial eye to the man. “These waters are mine and I’m going to kill you.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I can. Because I am.”

      “I am too.”

      “You exist only because I am looking at you.”

      “You really believe that?”

      “I do.”

       The man peered over the water at the peopled land and back at the shark. “You can’t kill us all.”

      “Makes more to hunt.”

      “But more to come.”

      “True,” said the shark. And he opened wide his great orifice and bit into the side of the boat with the force of a bomb, dragging the man under.

      ISLE OF BLOOD AND DESIRE

      Anacostia, that isle of blood and desire, was its own kind of cay. For those who dwelled there sometimes forgot where the southeast quadrant ended and the other quadrants began, and the happenings of their small spaces was the world entire. And because of the spells of fortune and misfortune cast down on that wafer of earth through the eras, each year compounded the consequences of the next, so that one Anacostian scrutinized another as if looking at the last of his kind.

      Amy Riley had this feeling of obsolescence each morning when she stared across the kitchen table at her husband, Brandon, in their childless, brick-faced home on Alabama Avenue. She hailed from a bleak floodplain in the Kingdom of Delaware, where roads appeared and disappeared on maps, and struggling farmers prayed for rain to stop, each vying for the crop of another or none at all. When she could no longer bear to look her husband in the eye, she stared instead at the shark tooth dangling from the chain around his neck, a reminder of her malice and loathing, for it seemed that the possession of his trinkets—she among them—was the only thing he cared about.

      Well into middle age, Amy adorned herself in the young party dresses of the day, her bluish varicose veins peeking through her nylon stockings. She felt her long blond hair was still her best feature, and she spent hours brushing it with their three dogs at her feet. But there were times in the boredom or fright that filled her days when she drifted into thoughts of the man who worked at her husband’s furniture shop. Osiris Kinwell. For reasons she found difficult to explain, she was intrigued by him, filled with primeval feelings that went beyond the limits of her sensibilities, for when she heard the dollop of some exotic nameless place in the lilt of his voice, she thought of swamps and cotillions and whips.

      But even now, the way he reacted when she first introduced herself to him was puzzling. Because she expected him to be nervous in her presence since she was making a point to address him directly. But he wasn’t. Weren’t her eyes blue like the skies? Didn’t her hair stream down her back like the ladies in the Sears catalog, and wasn’t it golden like the dolls in the store windows? Despite her unfortunate circumstances and the disappointments that life had brought her, she believed (knew?) that she represented the ideal woman in the kingdoms of the land. For the

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