This is the 19th story in a series. Click here to read all parts from the beginning.
The mountain road climbed steeply again as my Chevy truck took a sharp curve. A forest rose up ahead, off to the right, marching into a hazy sky. On my left, a rocky, crumbling slope fell away.
(Creative Commons image via flickr)
Something about the road seemed familiar, but I didn’t know why I was on it. Another curve, even steeper, brought me up behind a black F-150 with a dragon in the driver’s seat. She had golden-green scales, shimmering in the sunlight, and I recognized her as the same dragon I’d captured in a Knoxville warehouse last summer.
The Ford had a bumper sticker with gold lettering, not quite close enough for me to read it. I felt that I needed to know what it said, so I gave my truck some gas. The tires vibrated on the rough pavement like a rocket blasting off. By now, there were sheer cliffs on both sides of the road. It slanted upward at an impossible angle, bridging earth and sky.
I gained on the Ford, gravity notwithstanding, and drew close enough to read the bumper sticker. A familiar row of symbols in place of letters came together to make a word I’d seen many times before.
Just as the meaning came clear, the entire scene started fading away into the haze, and I realized that it was all a dream and I was about to wake up.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” I muttered, flooring the Chevy and turning the wheel sharply to the right. I launched myself out the window, grabbing hold of the Ford’s bumper as my truck plunged off the cliff and, an instant later, dissolved into nothingness.
The bumper sticker tried to dissolve too, but I wrestled it back into form and meaning until every line of the symbols glowed brightly in my waking mind.
“Got you,” I declared in satisfaction, sitting up in the predawn light as the plain walls of the cabin took shape around me.
Across the room, in his bed, Ira chuckled. “What did you get?”
The golden symbols still gleamed in my thoughts, disrupting any words I tried to put together. Images flowed through my mind instead—spellbooks and shiny dragon hoards, earth and sky, a tiny ribbon of magical space connecting them—and I was that ribbon. I hadn’t yet formed a conscious intent to answer when I heard myself speaking, but the words felt solid and true.
“A gift in a dream.”