So Long Been Dreaming by Nalo Hopkinson Read Free Book Online

from my fingers, wings broke across my back, my mouth was in bloom, the kick of a machine gun bruised my ribs, I swallowed a harpoon, and sang with elephants on the stage of a great hall.
    “I want your best self,” I said and fell into him. Delicious images exploded across my body, yet I wasn’t overwhelmed. He didn’t mean to set me off. I was not who he expected at all, not his Renee. I was Axala, a griot from the stars, come for the story of life, now in the body of a dead terrorist. And who was he? What was his story? A new beard covered his coppery skin like morning frost. My fingers slid through the hard little hairs up to the lines that broke apart the edges of his eyes. I didn’t care if this moment was a lie.
    “Are you sure?” he murmured. “You’re hurt.” His fingers were tentative, careful. “There’s no time. . . .”
    “We’ll steal the time. This is what I want.”
    His lips nudged mine open. My body knew exactly what to do.

    We snatched long moments out of nowhere and then –
    “I’m not your Renee.” He was still inside me when I said this. I felt his shock and embraced it. “I only remember bits and pieces of your Renee.”
    I flashed on Renee and her man, his long hair pulled tight against the skull, his face smooth. They were flattened against a rough wall, waiting for a blast in the village beyond, then they ran along a broken walkway.
    “Blowing up shit . . . the only thing I ever got a chance to get good at,” Renee shouted.
    “Not the only thing,” he argued.
    “And I was gonna do something noble. . . .” Renee muttered as they dropped into dung and mud for a second explosion. She closed her eyes on a stream of blood.
    “Are you having one of your episodes?” He tried to pull away from me. I was stronger than he expected. “We don’t have time for you to snap out.”
    What did he mean? He had offered me his best self. I wanted him to know my story. Body historians didn’t usually reveal themselves or get involved, certainly not with pure natives. Just grab the dead miracles and run. Well, not any more.
    “My name is Axala.” I released him. “I’m from. . . .” I didn’t remember my specific griot life, before Earth. Damn serial amnesia. “Light-years from here. . . .”
    “Stop it!”
    We stuck together where I had started bleeding again. I winced as he moved out of my body and rolled against a tree root arching up at the entranceway.
    “You can’t snap on me, not now, not on this job.” He jerked his sweaty clothes back on his body. Clots of dirt clung to the hairs on his chest. “We could retire after this job.”
    “I’d like that.” I wanted to wipe my blood off his stomach, do something, anything, instead of waiting for him to curse me out for playing games, going insane, fucking with him.
    “You’d consider retiring, just living our lives, putting the shit behind us?” He sounded desperate.
    “Look, I don’t know how to be straight with you.” I pulled on clothes. Cool, slimy bugs crawled across my ribs. “Some of Renee is still in me. She loves you.” Stalling for time, I brushed away the bugs. They made Renee’s skin crawl. “Despite . . . whatever . . . has happened between you.”
    “What hasn’t happened? I don’t know how much more I can take.” He pressed himself further into the darkness of the tree, but I could still see his eyes, like the husky’s eyes watching the wounds on my neck heal. A freak-show glare, foam at the corners of his mouth. I turned away, before he started howling.
    “What I’m saying is . . . I know I can handle the memories. Everything I’ve been.”
    He shook his head. “But I can’t handle all that.”
    “What do you mean?” I dug my fingers into the dirt. The head of a whale breaching on a rocky beach, the hands of a samurai clutching a sword, the feet of a Maasai cow herd running from demons, the oxygen breath of an orange tree. . . . I was lost.
    “We don’t have time for this.” His voice