Opal (The Raven Cycle #4.5)(7)
Summer had animalness in it, though, just like a human, and so it too eventually had to die.
The end of the summer was good and bad. Good: Adam invented a ball game that used cricket wickets but that was better than cricket, and Ronan played it with her sometimes while smoke from the grill drifted past them and made Ronan’s clothing smell delicious. Bad: Ronan and Adam had more and more conversations about whether or not they’d find the cure for shitbox before Adam went away for the fall and whether or not Adam should just take Ronan’s car. Even though Opal went away herself plenty, she did not like the idea of Adam going someplace because he might get old and die without coming back. Good: Ronan spent less time in the long barn doing dreamstuff and instead spent time repairing other outbuildings and cleaning the house and typing away at the computer the lady had looked at, which meant Opal often got full days of him, only having to share with Chainsaw, who Opal resented hugely and sometimes daydreamed of eating. Bad: Twice Ronan got a phone call from his Ganseyfriend and both times he did not say anything to the phone, just listened to the ebullient patter on the other end and made grunting sounds in response. Both times after this Ronan went and lay down, once in his own room and once in Aurora’s room; the first time, he was very quiet for a long time, and the second time he held his parents’ photograph and cried a little without making any sound.
By the end of summer, Opal could not remember the last time Ronan had been to the long barn. The dreamstuff sound in him was becoming a different one, a scratchy one, one she had heard long ago, back when she was still in a dream. Once Adam asked, “Are you going to do it before I go?” and Ronan answered, “Not if I can’t get rain.” Adam started to say something then instead said only, “be that way,” and let it go. They went on more long drives and Adam stayed at the Barns more than ever, but Opal knew this was only because he was about to go away for a long, long time instead. She raged around and stole everything from the kitchen cabinets and buried all of it in the upper field where she had intended to put the dreamstuff lady’s body if it came to that. When Ronan and Adam returned and told her this was unacceptable, she bit Adam and ran away.
She was filled with so much bad feeling that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted to make Ronan and Adam feel as badly as she did. She wanted to break rules. She wanted to break anything.
The long barn came into view before her, dark and hulking in the evening. As she made to skirt it, she was, as always both attracted and repelled by what it contained. Every evening before this one, the repulsion had won out. Tonight, though, she thought about the rule of not entering the long barn and she thought about how it was a very large, old rule, and it would be very noisy and satisfying to break.
She had half a thought that she might smash everything she found inside, too.
The long barn’s door would not say yes to her, but a small window that wouldn’t have fit a human did, so she slid inside.
She had expected it to be dark in here, and humming with dream energy, but it dazzled with small surprises of light tucked into corners and hovering near the ceiling, and any hum of dream energy was drowned out by the bellows of her anxious lungs and the hoofbeats of her anxious heart.
The floor was dirt. Tables were crowded with papers and glasses and musical instruments. A piece of art that she didn’t like leaned against the wall. A door in the middle of the floor opened to reveal another door. A trap door hung open in midair, and on the other side of it was blue sky. Half a laptop was stacked on a phone the size of a cinder block. Opal touched nothing. Now that her heartbeat was a little quieter, the humming of the dreamthings rose to take its place. Fear wobbled inside her as she crept around and looked, her hands behind her back, her hooves scuffing dirt. This was too much like being in Ronan’s head again. Raw and formless and without rules. Walking through these dreamthings was like walking through a memory, remembering the troubled country where she had grown up.
She could tell that Ronan had not been dreaming for a long time. All of these objects were weeks and weeks old. Nothing had the persistent, loud humming of the newly dreamed. There was mostly just the dull silence of an old barn, and in the background, a watery pattering. It called her more than everything else, and so she silently wound her way through the things until she found its source.
It was a large plastic bin. She could tell that the bin itself was not dreamstuff. Its contents were. Even from the outside, the contents felt happy and sad, enormous and small, full and empty. It was like the feeling of happiness from the cloud lady on the bench, but multiplied many times over, and she knew that the feelings themselves were dreamthings. Opal had forgotten the intensity of dreamstuff. She had remembered they didn’t care about animal rules. But she had forgotten just how much.
She wasn’t sure why she lifted the lid. She would have thought she was too afraid. Afterward, she thought that she had maybe done it because she was too afraid. Sometimes bad ideas were so bad they looped right around until they became good ideas.
Her fingers trembled as she set the lid aside.
Inside the bin, it was raining.
The rustling she’d heard was the sound of the rain misting the interior over and over, collecting into big drops on the plastic sides of the bin. Occasionally thunder rumbled, low and far away. The happiness and sadness Ronan had dreamt into the rain rolled over her, and she began to cry despite herself. This was the rain for new Cabeswater, and it had been here long enough for the lid to have dust on it. He had possessed it all along and it was never the thing stopping him from dreaming his new Cabeswater. Something else must have been stopping him. This knowledge made her even happier and sadder. The feelings grew and grew in her, the sadness slowly ebbing to leave only happiness.