Free Dreams That Burn In The Night by Craig Strete

women of earth offer these returning heroes? Candy Boxes agreed with that sentiment entirely.
She agreed with it everywhere and with every­one. She agreed to it in a variety of positions.
That was why San-derman retired from chiropodist work and signed up for space duty.
    Did Candy Boxes
know her legs were on the wall? Sanderman the master used to beat the little alien girl called
Dunchfito be­cause she didn't have Candy Boxes' legs. Dunchfito had her name tattooed on each of
her legs, hoping it would help him figure out that he was certainly right about little
Dunchfito's legs not being Candy Boxes' legs. It did not seem to help in any way or clear up the
confusion. Dunchfito always got her revenge, though.
    She always waited
till he fell asleep, then cracked him over the head with a rubber-headed mallet. He always woke
up the next morning with a blinding headache and a fuzzy spot on his head that was beginning to
soften after several months of nightly poundings. He never woke up when she hit him but he did
have reoccurring dreams. Sometimes he dreamed he was a tennis ball, sometimes he dreamed the
entire chorus line of a musical variety show was kicking his head in.
    His dreams did not
terrify him but he did wake up a lot of times in the morning with the feeling that the entire
population of Mintfrappe had walked across his tongue in their socks.
    As blood dripped
from his thorn-damaged knuckles, waves of gray matter fluttered like clouds in his brain. He just had to man­gle something, to bash
its stupid breathing face in. Tear its legs off, get hair between his teeth, see pulp, pulp. The
more he thought of it, the more he felt like going berserk.
    He cursed like a
madman and went boiling off into the jungle again. He smashed through a particularly thick clump
of bushes and fell like an old stuffed duck with loose wings into the river. The river was dry,
choked with dust and boulders. He missed the dust.
    He sat there, numb
from the bruised hip up, numb down to the toes too. There he was, a once reasonably intelligent
chiropodist, living a comfortable life among the feet of other people, maybe a guy a little too
hung up on ... Who the hell was doing all that screaming?
    He looked up on the
bank and saw a dimpo bird shrieking like a five-alarm fire. Oh Christ, if he only had a gun! He
used to have a gun but one of the damn aliens ate it. He'd found the pearl han­dles with teeth
marks in them. That was all that was left.
    He picked up a rock
and heaved it with all his might at the bird but he missed it completely and it flew off
screaming even louder. Sanderman gave it up.
     
    Every day Sanderman
went a little bit berserk in the jungle. All it had to do was rain. Just once. Just one little,
insignificant day of rain and he could get out of there. The river was the only way out and the
only way out was dry. The time when the rains should have come was already gone. Long since gone.
The only way into the village of Mintfrappe was down the river after the rains came. He had been
assigned there until the rains came and his replacement could boat in as he, Sanderman, rode the
river out.
    The village he was
stranded in was surrounded by impenetrable jungle. A hundred times he had set out to beat his way
back to civilization only to find himself back at the village of Mintfrappe. He had tortured
dreams of being stuck there forever. What if it never rained ever? What if Candy Boxes ran off
and married a lunar-module salesman? His life was a nightmare of just those sorts of hideous
possibilities, all the more hideous because he was, so to speak, up the river without a
river.
    His anger spent,
his hip bruised, he limped back into the village compound with his hands over his ears. He was unable to shut out the inevitable
sound of the nutcracker birds the natives kept as pets. There was a continuous cracking sound.
Crack. Crack. It continued unabated twenty-four hours a day. Crack. Crack.