Free The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia Page A

shad. On the bottom, hagfishes braided themselves into an incestuous, slithering nest of Gorgon’s hair in the empty cavity of a dead shark’s head, its gill arches protecting them like the barred windows of a jailhouse.
    And beneath and beyond all that, under the sand sifting over the skeleton of a sunken ship, there were horseshoe crabs, pale and unwell. There were hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands, all of their tiny legs moving in unison, burrowing in the sand. As Vimbai looked at them, they stared back with their pinprick eyes. And as if one, they shifted, their legs working in reverse now, digging themselves out rather than in.
    Among all the strange occurrences of the past weeks, the fact that the cold-blooded crabs were able to react with such speed and determination bothered Vimbai most of all. She wanted to pull away, to break the surface and to not have to see this, but her grandmother’s quiet attention held her, their eyes—Vimbai’s and vadzimu ’s—riveted to the creatures. They varied in size, from the tiny ones as small as a quarter to the adults as big as a dinner plate, and yet all of them moved together, the living carpet of them swarming onto the surface of the sand, their mouth parts open in plea or hunger. As Vimbai pulled away, the wave of crabs heaved after her; as she moved closer to them, they retreated but never far away.
    “Why are they doing it?” Vimbai whispered.
    “It’s like that story I told you,” the vadzimu answered. “Weren’t you listening?” Her tone was impatient now, stern—just like she used to be in life, the kind of woman who would take her own daughter to be carved up by razorblades—but always for her own good.
    Vimbai frowned. “What does the story have to do with horseshoe crabs?”
    Grandmother heaved a sigh. “The tortoise,” she explained slowly, patiently, as one would to a dim a child, “did not want the moon. But the oceans followed him nonetheless, as they always follow the moon.”
    “I dreamt about it,” Vimbai interjected. “Seas following the tortoise.”
    “He did not want it, did not ask for it—and yet. He drank the moon, and the moon in his belly was bigger than he, and it commanded the ocean whether the tortoise liked it or not.”
    Vimbai considered she might have drunk that was so compelling to the crabs, and gave up. It wasn’t her first beer in the house and it wasn’t the tears she cried in secret, letting them soak into her pillow, her hair, her eyelashes. But there was something inside of her that made her find the house and bring her dead grandmother along, something that made her want to study horseshoe crabs—and now, apparently gave her a power of command over them. They were not as cute as Maya’s half-foxes, but they were Vimbai’s—at least, they seemed to think so.
    When she opened her mouth, the salt water flooded it, numbing her tongue and pounding her teeth with its frozen hammer. Her face did not feel a thing, and she wondered idly how was she able to hold her breath for so long. Nonetheless, she managed to ask, “What do you want with me?”
    The crabs answered in a quiet rustling of their legs and mouth parts, in the sad stares of their tiny eyes, We want you to take care of us, and let us take care of you . And this is how Vimbai found herself in possession of a horseshoe crab army.
    Vimbai remembered the time when she was little, before the horseshoe crabs and her anxiety about Africana Studies. Back then, she considered New Jersey prosaic and hardly the place where one could hope to grow up while having important experiences. She listened to her parents as they spoke after dinner; when they talked to each other they did it in Shona. Back then, Vimbai did not concern herself with questions why it was so, but now she understood—even though both were taught English from an early age, Shona was a way to set themselves apart, to reaffirm that they were of the same cloth as each other, set against the rest