Reserved For (Part 1)
Year: 2,327 A.D.
Tag woke up from the same dream he’d had for the last month. The dreams were always a little different, but they ended the same way. Lately they ended more painfully. In last night’s Tag tore through the forest with Lily. They held hands and zigged and zagged in between and under trees, jumped over low brush, swung from long hanging branches, and never broke from each other. They went faster and faster until the trees were a blur and their movements stopped being conscious.
They were floating, weightless despite their increasing speed. They flew headlong towards the edge of one of the many tall limestone walls that framed the river below and Tag felt no urge to stop. He wasn't sure he would have been able to. He remembered seeing the bravest, dumbest juve in his clan jump off the same cliff when they were seven. He broke his leg and wasn't brave anymore. They went off the cliff with an unnaturally slow, arching descent and hit the water without a splash. They didn't breath or hold their breath, but they could feel the chill of the early summer water. He felt the end of the dream coming now. You can usually tell when you’re about to step out of a dream. There’s this creeping discomfort towards the end. In his normal dreams he found the discomfort in something that was just a little too strange, like a spongy rock or talking squirrel, but in these dreams he was always very aware that he was dreaming and that everything was very strange. No, the discomfort in these dreams was physical.
They traveled down river under water with the same speed that took them through the forest. As they careened from turn to turn with the winding river the discomfort hit. A small mouth bass caught his eye and he felt his body reel. He’d learned to force his eyes closed when the discomfort hit to keep it from taking him out of the dream too fast. With his eyelids closed tight the rest of his senses went on the attack. The taste of the river flashed thousands of images of names and faces and mud types. The cool water sent a barrage of maps and seasonal data and history. The touch of Lily’s hand brought him every inch of her body - her heartbeat, ailments, injuries, more images and feelings he couldn't make sense of. That’s where the dream always ended. With flashes of Lily hitting his body with a force he couldn't bear. It tore and slashed at his head, pounded his chest, pulled on his arms and legs, and only ended when he bolted awake on the musty cot. He took a deep breath, smelling the dry pine needles that littered the ground around him. He took a moment to appreciate how simple the smell was.
Clammy and exhausted Tag walked over to the coals his sister and mother were already nursing back to life for the morning meal. He bent over and stretched his long, tanned legs, exhausted from weeks of dreaming. At 19 years, 11 months, and 20 days old, he figured he was officially the second oldest juve on the Rez. Lily never let him forget she was older. He could hear her voice now, “As the elder of 9 long days, I..”. She was coming over for dinner later and he was sure he’d hear it over something stupid, like getting the last biscuit or who was the faster swimmer. He was faster.
“Taaaag. Oh, there there, Taggy. Take your time. It’s not like we've been slaving away all morning. No, no. You just go right back to your slumber, baby Tag”, his little sister teased with an armful of branches. Kimber was a small 14, all skinny appendages and dirty blonde hair. Her big blue eyes and pinched nose didn't help her look any older than her tiny body did. Mom always said she was a baby badger. Fearless and scrappy but easy to kick around.
Their mother stepped out from under the awning that covered the majority of the family’s worldly possessions. They found the blue plastic sheet floating down river years ago and it still stood out sorely surrounded by the earthy tones of the forest.
“Shut it, Kimber”, she said. She could still be a very intimidating woman. At 53 years old, Jenny Reed stood at a 5'2" but was as sinewy and hard as most active young men. Maybe that’s just a mom thing, being intimidating. Tag didn't think that was it, though. Grown men spoke to her with the same caution.
“Your brother needs it. Are you sure you don’t want to go back to bed, honey? I swear I slept 14 hours straight during my month. My mother hated it.”
“I’m fine, mom. I don’t think I could, anyway”, Tag said. It was true, if it wasn't the fear of waking up in a cold sweat again that would keep him awake, the upcoming smell of sizzling bacon would. He’d eaten more this month, too. He didn't mind that part so much.
Tag’s mother had gotten increasingly interested in the content of his dreams the last few days. She told him they were going to get more painful and to tell her if anything unusual happened and to always say thank you and to wear sunscreen even if it’s cloudy. He was used to that kind of thing. She would sometimes say she wasn't being a helicopter parent when they’d get into fights about where he could go or who he could go with or what cliffs he could dive from. She’d say she wasn't anything like her mother, but Tag was sure she was, even if he didn't know what a “helicopter” was.
“Tell me about it, Tag. Everything this time. Beginning to end”
He could never get it quite right when he retold his dreams. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember them - they were ingrained deeper than his favorite memories - but he couldn’t find the right words for the feelings. They’d tried different exercises to translate his memories, including painting, endless lists of adjectives, and one particularly embarrassing morning of interpretive dance, but none of them worked any better than immediately spilling out what he remembered.
“Well, we were flying thro-”, Tag got out before his mother jumped in.
“You and Lily again?” she asked. “Just you two the whole time?”
“Yes, mom. Again, it’s only the two of us. Nobody else. So we’re flying through the forest and we’re going faster but nothing is blurring like when you run fast, just going by faster. I start dodging around the trees and it feels amazing. But then I kind of lose control over the movement but my body is still avoiding trees and moving forward”
His mother always scowled during his re-telling. Not like she was angry or disapproving, but like she was trying to tear apart ever word individually to inspect its innards.
“Then we flew off Old Man’s cliff and into the water, but I could only feel the water itself. Not the impact or the momentum or anything like that. Just the water and the cold. So we’re flying through the water for a long while and then a fish sparked it so I closed my eyes tight like you told me and kept going”
“What was the fish like, Tag?”
“What?” Tag got tired of questions like this. Every morning was the same. What was the birch tree you ran past like, Tag. What was the water’s temperature, Tag? He’d lost his patience for it pretty fast.
“The fish you saw. Really describe it for me” his mother said, the crease in her brow growing more impatient. “Picture the fish in your mind and tell me about it”.
“Okay, alright. Give me a second”. He pictured the fish he’d passed with Lily at his side. He was back there for a second. And then another. To his right he could see Lily’s hair floating in the water, covering her green eyes for a moment, then revealing them in a little game of peak-a-boo that made his stomach tickle. He could see the fish forming at his left and managed to pull his attention from Lily to it. The colors came in first, then the shape. It was perfectly frozen in time. The scales shimmered a world of brown he didn’t know existed. As the details started to fill the fish’s shape, text slowly appeared in the surrounding water. He squinted to read it and was hit with a pain worse than the one that woke him that morning.
Tag forced his thoughts away from the of the image of his dream and the fish. It felt like the skin was being cut and pulled back from his forehead, but when he opened his eyes it fled as fast as it had come. His mother looked at him expectantly, her eyebrows now abandoning their usual scowl, raised in interest.
“So?” She asked, clearly unaware of any discomfort remembering the fish had caused. “What do you remember about the fish? Color? Size?”
He spoke before he could form an answer in his mind, “It was a 4.72 lb, 14.6 inch Micropterus dolomieu. Female. Healthy dark brown coloring, color code #5C4033. Endangered. Eating is not permissible”
Tag felt the tension before his mother and sister. He felt it before he heard the unfamiliar words poring from his mouth and felt it continue long after. Tears of confusion began to bead in his eyes and he felt the unfamiliar feeling of the first cool tear rolling down a warm cheek.
His mother stared at him, her eyebrows now at a neutral position. The rest of her face would have looked placid if not for her wide eyes.
“Tag. Tag, honey. It’s OK, we just need to go now. We can’t wait until next week, dear. We have to go now”, she said with the seasoned voice of a mother. He remembered the nightmares he’d had when his father left the Rez and how his mother had rocked him to sleep with the same tone.
“Mom. What’s goi-….what is this?”, Tag asked, now wiping away the tears. He was just 10 days away now, after all.
She took a deep breath and touched the top of his wet hand. “Tag, we use the metric system”, she said. “We need to hurry your ceremony. That’s all”.
A part of him wanted to laugh at that. He looked into her eyes and saw the shimmering start to tears. He remembered those from the night his dad left too.
“Then why are you so scared?”
(to be continued)
