White Horse by Alex Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

stitched edge, white marbles beneath paper-thin skin. They barely support the nest of rings stacked on top of them. “I love Rome,” she echoes. “It’s romantic.”
    We don’t speak after that. She retreats to her world, the one where she wears a haute couture dress with one ring, one necklace, where her husbands are still alive, where someone else carries her luggage. I attend to my stomach, which is launching a protest, and rip into the flimsy plastic wrapping the fortune cookie. It has snapped into pieces from the tension in my hand, which saves me the trouble of breaking it in two. The slivers dissolve on my tongue until they’re little more than the memory of sugar.
    The fortune is stiff between my fingers. I unfurl it and read.
    Welcome change .
    I read my fortune until I laugh. I laugh until I cry. I cry until I sleep.

FOUR
DATE: NOW
    I wake in a panic, drenched in tepid sweat. It’s not rain, because it smells sour, metallic, with an underlying sweetness like fruit just as it turns. My plane ride to Rome swirls down the drain, dormant until the next time I close my eyes. I shove myself up from the tree roots and look for Lisa. She’s asleep.
    When I rouse her, she barely recognizes my voice through the sleep fog.
    “What?”
    “You fell asleep.”
    “I was tired.”
    “I have to be able to rely on you.”
    She leans over, vomits, heaves until I worry she’ll turn inside out. Between bouts, she manages to speak.
    “I’m sorry. It just happened.”
    “Come on. We should go.”
    We push off from our resting place and I glance behind us, scan the land. Nothing but trees and grass. But something follows. Branchescrack when they shouldn’t. Every so often I hear a step that doesn’t come from me or Lisa.
    We are not alone out here.
DATE: THEN
    “Have you ever turned it over?” Dr. Rose asks. “Looked at the bottom?”
    I look at him, my mouth sagging softly because that never occurred to me.
    It’s Friday evening. In my head I call this “date night,” because I’m not like the other people who come here. I’m not crazy. I’m not even a little off balance. At least I don’t think so. But that jar bothers me. The mystery of it curls cold fingers around my heart and squeezes until I ache.
    “No. Never.”
    “Maybe you should. Maybe it’s time to take action in your dream. Take control.”
    “What do you think I’ll find?”
    “A message. A clue perhaps. Or maybe a Made in China sticker.”
    Laughter spills from my throat. “Wouldn’t that be a trip? My dream the product of mass manufacturing in China.”
    We leave together. I’m his last appointment. He locks the office door while I wait, then we stroll toward the elevators like he didn’t just print me an invoice while I wrote him a check.
    “Do it,” he says as the steel cables hoist the oversized dumbwaiter to our floor. “Push that thing over and inspect the bottom. Look, you’ve seen every other part of it. It’s a dream. If it breaks, I don’t think they’re going to hold you to the ‘You broke it, you bought it’ policy.”
    He has a point, but not the full picture.
    My voice wobbles out on unsteady legs. “I haven’t seen all of it. I haven’t seen the inside.”
    A sharp ding echoes in the hall. Metal scrapes as the elevator locks into place. When the doors slide open, Dr. Rose’s hand goes to my waist and gently urges me ahead of him. His warmth seeps through my shirt.There’s a familiar smell about him that I can’t quite grasp. Trying to pin it with a label is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.
    “Dreams are funny things,” he says. “All this technology, all these specialists and their experiments, and we still don’t have a grip on what they are or what they mean.” The elevator shakes and hums. “You asked about my dreams. Since we’re just two people making conversation, I’ll tell you.” He hits the Stop button and we jerk to a halt. “I’m standing on a beach in Greece, where my family are from.