BY Joel hans
In my dream, thousands of years have passed. Someone traces through two feet of new-fallen snow
in a city called Morioka in a country called Japan to find the museum where my bones have migrated.
They nest a piece of paper in their palms the way the humans kill me carry the embers to a fire that’s
nearly gone but could still be revived. I dream of you.
I ask you about the Indiana dirt. You tasted it for ten thousand years, so who better to ask—this is
absurd, I should leave, but the woman in the white mask, who unlocked the museum’s doors for me
a few minutes before opening time, backs out of the mastodon exhibit, giving space to a communion,
something sacred and sweet.
In my dream, you get ahead of yourself and lead with the wrong question, but I forgive you. I know
how it feels to be so cold you want to close your eyes and, when you open them again, find you’ve
been made to disappear.
I ask you whether you know anything larger than yourself. On the last night I saw him, my brother
was twenty-eight to my fourteen. In the backyard, polished off two beers as quickly as I did one. When
moonlight struck our shadows on the lawn, his was twice as large as mine, sizing the holes we thought
we would—much, much later—gouge into the land.
In my dream, the humans outpace me. I can’t stop their progress. I run, but not fast enough to keep
their spears from tucking into skin. My blood decorates miles and miles of till plain. My shoulders
ache. I lie down for the last time and bleed, slow, the way the lake in the north comes and goes as the
moon kneads it back and forth. Dying isn’t pleasant, but it’s not hateful, either. I take in a breath. The
last thing I do, when I exhale into the cold, is seed the clouds that crown us.
I ask you how you got the scratches in your bones. The woman in the white mask is playing defense,
keeping the just-arrived museumgoers away from your exhibit, the frantic squeaking of her sneakers
my signal to stay. Did they hurt to be committed even after you were dead?
In my dream, the humans unzip my meat from my bones and leave a few scratches behind. I forgive
them. They scatter their fires and depart, carrying my most precious pieces—my heart, my tongue, my
tenderloins, the lobes of my liver—into different corners of what will someday be called the state of
Indiana. The dying of a lunar eclipse bathes the swamp in blameless purple.
I ask you about all the time you passed beneath the Indiana earth. Whether the earthworms were
welcoming. Whether you felt like something loving and much larger was dragging you into embrace.
The woman in the white mask brings me a single tissue, looks me in the eye, and retreats. Whether
you could taste the glaciers as you were embraced by the land, your joints crumbling until your skeleton
was loosely drawn as constellations. She returns with a flock of tissues fluttering atop her palms.
In my dream, a business magnate develops the Buckeye Traction Ditcher, which lays drainage tiles far
faster than by hand, allowing the farmers and settlers and invaders to drain the swamp I died in. They
unsheathe fertile land for crops and newborn cities and golf courses, which is where I sleep beneath
their drives and chips, the balls dropping into one of eighteen holes, kind little knocks at the door on
the life I’ll live beyond this life. I know it’s absurd, these words, these places, but I see it, clearly,
through the rose window that is this dream.
I ask you whether you wanted to be found. To be sold for six hundred thousand dollars and named
the state fossil of Indiana and strung up on display so far from the land where you were born and
died. Despite the efforts of the woman in the white mask, the exhibit is rich with people now. Children
delight over your bones, so that might be my answer.
In my dream, a dragline excavator tugs me into the light. The machines go quiet and the humans
huddle over me for days, in the bitter cold—their sniffling noses, their soft gloved hands—to welcome
me, at a glacial pace, back into the land of the living. Their applause is like ice forming on the lake in
the north come winter. It crackles and hangs in the air around us.
I ask you if you’re okay. I ask you if he’s okay. I ask you if I’m okay. But the communion we shared
in the museum’s golden quiet has faded the way I wake from a dream.
In my dream, the woman in a white mask takes you by the arm, escorts you from the exhibit and into
a bench, where the museumgoers can forget you. With a flat hand she asks you to stay, leaves, and
returns with two mugs of tea, which steam the way my bones steam as they’re unsheathed from the
soil and carried across a bucket brigade of loving hands, like there is still life within them, because
there is. In my dream, the woman in the white mask pries apart your hands and finds your notes to
the interrogation you’d planned before we went off-script. She asks you to read them aloud, one by
one—not to answer them, not because she understands them, but because outside the window, the
light is changing—the rising sun, a flexing tree—to souse them in the purple light of the living.
Joel Hans was once called a saguaro cactus in disguise. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, Puerto del Sol, Booth, and others. He edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe, and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson, Arizona with his family, and can be found online on Twitter @joelhans or at joelhans.com.