Jacqueline dreamed of the day to come. Since she was little, barely able to articulate, this quirk plagued her. She preferred a dreamless sleep. Living the probabilities of a day that had not occurred and would not in those proportions fatigued her. Observing these hypotheticals did not have the according charm of being informative or entertaining.
She spoke to a grief counselor after her mother's death. During it, Jacqueline had mentioned the dreams in case they might somehow have diagnostic value. She knew enough to be aware of Carl Jung, but not if his theories remained in vogue. The therapist, with practiced tact, decided that dreams were only subconscious noise and typical anxiety, thus perhaps not the most pressing issue.
Her dreams were rarely realistic, even when they followed a sequence predicated by the logic born of the subconscious. Tonight's did not vary, and only eerie fragments remained by the southwest morning sun. Light prismed to baffling rainbows, a snake-headed woman, a limestone heart, ivory ruins. Scarabs, but that was to be expected given the inflated role Houdini had been given in her life. Wick did not even have a walk-on role, which seemed curious on reflection, but had not within the realm of the dreams.
The guest room door was shut when Jacqueline peeked her head out to see if it was safe enough to scamper to the bathroom to shower. Any adventure -- especially one where she was bound to be in a car with a near stranger for nebulous hours -- had to be better if she had cleaned behind her ears.
The guest room door remained shut when she exited, russet hair drying to curls in a towel and the rest of her in what amounted to a terrycloth sweatsuit. She pressed her ear to it, rationalizing that it was not creepy when one owned the door in question. She heard not an errant breath.
Well, fine. She would make breakfast -- eggs and English muffins would have to satisfy Wick because she had both a hankering for these and disinterest in allowing him the opportunity to dissent.
Then, she would dress for comfort in deference to this uncertain journey and pack something more formal and funereal for when they reached her father, as well as a few items that she suspected might help in exigent circumstances. Only then would she care to try to wake Wick again.
While the eggs cooked, she did a nervous dance through her kitchen, tossing snacks from her cupboard into a reusable grocery bag. It paid to be overprepared when it came to road food. Even in upstate New York, one could not trust that there would be diners or gas stations enough.
She had not been on a proper road trip in a decade, since just after college, but had clothes enough that would suit the task: stretchy jeans, a hoodie over a t-shirt -- itself under a denim jacket (layers were essential) -- and woolen shoes that felt like slippers. For her backup clothes, she chose variations on the theme of black, but she did not extend herself to imagining if they together made a sensible outfit for mourning. God of the afterlife or not, her father's contribution had been ejaculating into her mom on a fertile day. He left behind no moral lesson or parental affection, not even having the decency of sending a few dollars their way or even a card on her birthday. Surely any god worth reverence could manage to swing by a Hallmark store for his only daughter's birthday.
Or was she the only one? Wasn't that optimistic? Did she have a gaggle of half-siblings wandering the world? She found that she did not particularly care either way. Sharing genes did not make one family.
It struck her funny, thinking of this as a road trip given its inevitable conclusion. Though she did not revel in the destination -- the last few years had brought her death enough -- the journey to it seemed the closest to excitement that she had experienced since her mother's wake. Why else had she been so willing to engage in monologues with bugs? What else would compel her to give in to Wick's grave edict so quickly?
She still heard nothing behind the guest room door, so she impatiently knocked.
"Are you decent?"
"To a fault," came the response, cool and smooth. Its evenness unsettled Jacqueline, as she had been expecting a clearing of throat befitting waking from sleep on an unfamiliar mattress in a stranger's home. She had made these sounds often enough to know them by rote.
Jacqueline creaked open the door. There Wick sat on the edge of the green down comforter, the sheets unrumpled, three books beside him and one in his hands.
She picked up the top of the pile. "On the Road? A little on the nose, no?"
He put down the book in his hands. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He seemed to be going for a theme.
"I enjoy it."
"You've read it before?"
"Around forty times, yes."
Jacqueline thought that she would rather read different books instead of the same dozens of times.
"Are you ready? I made breakfast." She was almost out of the room before the thought struck her. "Those are the same clothes you had on last night."
"Yes."
"I've taken the human courtesy of showering. Might you want to? I presume cleanliness is also next to child of godliness?"
"No," Wick answered. Jacqueline did not care to pursue this conversation longer than surreptitiously sniffing the air for the musk of body odor, thankfully absent. She did not wish to drive with the windows down in deference to disgust.
She watched Wick delicately nibble at the unpalatably cool eggs -- his fault for dawdling -- and a fresh-from-the-toaster English muffin then decided to check on the scarabs. Houdini was where she had left it atop her dresser, under the bandana, all but tucked in.
"Rise and shine," she whisper-sang at the insect. It did not move. The next breath turned to icicles as she envisioned his death. Had it been the dip he had taken the night before? Was it her fault that her guide on this trip had expired? That could not be a good omen, and she considered if it were not enough to cancel and send Wick on his way.
Houdini began its wiggle, crawling out of the box toward her. She put her relieved hand on the edge, into which it skittered. Finding it curious to carry it in her palms -- wanting still to wash her hands whenever she touched it in recollection both of its toilet excursions and nature as a shit-eater -- she placed with delicacy on her shoulder.
She wanted her connection to this bug to bother her or seem strange, but she had already settled into treating Houdini as one might a clever hamster, albeit one that could roughly communicate with her. Others would buck against the peculiarity, but she found it a welcomed novelty.
The beetles in the living room were equally keen to acknowledge her, though she had no song to wake them. Houdini clung to her jacket such that she might yank off its legs if she tried too quickly to remove it. She did not consider putting any of the others on her. They should come today, surely. She had played favorites -- there was no question of that -- but they all had traveled for her, and it would be at minimum an act of rudeness and ingratitude to neglect to return them to her father.
Jacqueline could not find a way to think of her father as Anubis, to insert that name into the slot. Anubis was not her father, no matter what Wick had said. Her father was her father, negligent and absent. That he was an Egyptian god was a distant second. She would visit her father in his waning hours, but she could not help but titter at the notion that she would stand at the foot of a god's deathbed.
When Jacqueline returned to the kitchen, Wick had washed the breakfast dishes and dried the last of them with a towel.
"Polite of you," she noted, though her meaning was that he should not have done that because it was not his business. She felt at once that this was all a matter of exchanging favors. She had no urge to keep a tally of who owed what.
His strokes on the plate were methodical. When Jacqueline washed her dishes, she left them in the slowly rusting rack beside to dry of their own accord. To see someone take such pains for the mundane annoyed her in a way she did not care to express aloud, as though he were implicitly calling her on having not done this every other day of her life.
"It is a second nature; I do not like to see dishes left in a sink, especially when I have dirtied some."
She stepped around him, lifting the bag. "I have snacks."
He peered into it. "How long do you expect this trip to be?"
She jostled the bag. "At least one bag on off-brand Oreos, I guess, however long that takes."
He retreated upstairs to bring what supplies he had, though she suspected and was correct that all he returned with was his books.
Houdini pulled the fabric on her shoulder, and Jacqueline fell into obeying the directional tugs until she crouched to retrieve a disposable cake pan.
"You certainly don't want to travel in style."
With a dulling steak knife, she stabbed the thin, translucent blue plastic of the lid to provide air holes to the scarabs, though she was still unsure what they needed since water and food (distasteful though it was) were not on the menu.
She gathered the other four, gently releasing them into the container, adding two handfuls of loam and decaying leaves from the aquarium for good measure.
She put her right hand on her left shoulder to provide Houdini passage to the pan, but it remained affixed to her shirt. So be it. She'd worn weirder accessories in college.
She was out the door, turning to ask Wick if he got carsick, then stutter-stepped. Even parked, this car before her house looked so sleek it was impossible to say it was not already moving. It was cherry red, four doors, a black canvas roof pulled up. She had a passing acquaintance with cars, enough that she could buy one without a panic attack and had taken her business elsewhere when dealing with crooked mechanics. This barely was the same type of machine as her sensible sedan, a few payments from being paid off.
She dropped her bag to the brick path, drawn toward the car as though compelled through mesmerism.
She would not at first lay a hand on its polished exterior. Though it had been a month since the last snow, most cars retained the salt grit of the storm, even if they had since been washed. This car appeared as though it had never met a speck of mud.
It looked driven straight off the lot, though a lot left in the rearview mirror before Jacqueline had been born. Looking closer, she couldn't identify what sort of car it was, aside from a roadster of some sort.
She gave in one and a quarter circuits, ending in front. "What kind of magic is your car?"
"It is as it needs to be."
He was not much for expansive answers. "If you could kindly explain to my car how to be all that it could be, I would be much appreciative."
The relaxing of Wick's face might have been a smile or as close as he was apt to give.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
