Murderkill River

To lay her head down on the pillow again felt like a sin. As an atheist, she didn’t literally feel like it was some crime against the unknown and unknowable, but it was close. Vivid, the dream dropped gems in her skull like so many pieces of artifacts. She could still hear the screams. She smelled the blood in the air. It hung like a metallic mist drifting on the wind. Though the pieces didn’t fit together into a cohesive whole, they came in fragments. Each of them reminded her of the battle that had been waged. Her alarm clock sounded on her phone at three am. She picked herself up from her bed, the nightmare still scaling the walls of her consciousness.

She walked into the room of her house in Wilmington, Delaware. As a single working woman, she had acquired her own town house right near the heart of the city. She had no pets and had been totally astonished at her track record with men. Zero dates in the last four years. This Saturday allowed her to rest from the Wilmington Stock Exchange (WiSE) where she worked as a day trader. In her mind, however, she was poised to be a senior vice president at her firm.

By keeping up with the rush of youngsters gunning for her spot, she had to be game tight. That’s why she woke up so early on a weekend. She wanted to position herself in a role of being the best at her company. Did the alarm wake her though? It was the dreary dream that commanded attention in her thoughts. In spooky fashion, Galain Mackington, 28, felt the chill of the nightmare slinking up her spine and pervading her wakefulness.

She sat down with a pen and pad and sketched the scenes out and tried to put them in order. She saw Dutchmen surveying the lands in Lower Slower Delaware (LSD). Like little puzzle pieces forming a greater image, Galain attempted to make sense of all the confusion. With every step she took, she realized this could be a dead end. Or was it? She had enough of the memory of the dream still glowing in her mind. She tapped the pen against the pad. She wrote out the scene. Bottles of beer rolled about in a ship. American Indians snorted and swallowed the staple brew. Her pen wrote furiously as if it had a motor in it. Her mind became an engine in itself. The scenes of the Dutch chortling with the men all painted a picture she attempted to compose.

The flashes of red oozing from wounds overtook her senses. She heard the incessant shrieks of the Dutchmen and their failures to fully capture their own lives and send the hordes of American Indians on their way. Instead, she jotted down the laughing and the smiles. But this came before…how could she place this all together?

Galain looked at her notes which looked as if she had marked down a recipe. But this was a map made to make her remember. The coolness of the house contributed to the iciness in her body. Outside baked even in the early morning. She kept writing. The amount of time she had spent in trying to figure out this whole conundrum made her mind speed even faster. Her hand blasted away at the paper and she peeled back pages of her yellow legal pad. She could’ve used her laptop or desktop or her phone, but she felt like this was the most advantageous way of scribbling down thoughts as they fell from her brain.

More debauchery came to her as scenes of American Indians butchering the Dutch with knives and spears. Then, the drinking again. In her mind, she could keep it all together, but didn’t want to spoil the mystery surrounding her horrific phantasm. With enough energy to keep going, she decided to stop. And just wait. A cup of coffee would stimulate her enough to remember the reality of the situation. Once she had made the coffee, she delved further into the recesses of her mind. Her distinction between being a businesswoman and someone severely disturbed by a dream meant she would be given ample space to explore this particular case. She kept going. Each sip brought her closer to her understanding. Then, she noticed the coffee not giving her the energy she craved. Galain yawned. She shuffled back to bed. As she stood up, she heard laughter. The house had been empty except for herself. All the screens and sound systems had remained off totally. There seemed to be a raucousness that she had not expected. By calling the police, she would have never been able to explain away a nightmare come true. But other beings dwelled in her walk-up at this moment. She passed them in the hallway. American Indians with blood in their teeth and hair shouting and yelling and streaked past her. Now, the horror felt real. The taste of wine and brandy poured into her mouth as the American Indians continued on their war path through her house. “YEE LEEA!” shouts issued from their mouths as they passed her. She crouched in the corner of her kitchen and looked at the clock. It read four o’three. Galain walked around the figures who had assembled in her living room. The feeling, the intense emotion almost overwhelmed her. The touch of the men storming past her had been an unwelcome sense. As they huddled in the living room, she felt her heart with the little man with a hammer thunder in her chest. Every breath was like a gasp of some succor to her being yelping out for aid.

The cries of the Dutchmen all rattled her. Deafening pleas and screams surrounded her, just about taking over her entire sense of herself. She pushed forward to keep from hearing the sounds, but they reverberated around her like phonics at a symphony hall offering nothing but concertos of agony. She thought about calling the cops and getting this home invasion put to rest. As she picked up her phone, she felt that twinge in her stomach as if there had been someone breathing on her neck. She slowly placed down the phone and looked at the man behind her with full dress feathers and and drinking from a bottle of beer.

He then ran off to be with the rest of his tribe while the Dutchmen all pleaded for their lives. She couldn’t understand anyone’s language but she could distinguish how the American Indians had more sway over the cries of the Dutch. Helplessness had never been a hallmark of Galain’s character, but it seeped into her bones right now. She witnessed the entire situation as clearly as ever and now the harrowing scenes she saw in the dream had become even more grotesque. The Dutchmen kneeled as the Indians hovered over them with sharp tools tracing their victims’ necks. In all of this, Galain just decided to see if she could talk them out of this blood sacrifice that was about to go down in her living room. They had already dispatched others, now they focused on shedding even more blood. If there had been a better time to go from this distressing chapter in her life, she would have taken it. But she remained stunned. What was this? She could not move her body but the reality of the moment presented itself before her eyes.

The debauchery that had once ran through the actions of the Dutch and the American Indians had evaporated. There came a time where Galain had become hell-bent charging forth in front of these characters and begging them to not spill any more blood. The clock read five fifteen. The sun started to poke through the windows as the marauders dug in and continued to swig great gulps of beer and brandy. The golden beer and the amber brandy all flowed like a river. This is what she wanted to piece together. The idea of the drunk, fighting men jumped onto the dashboard of her mind. She could hear the whimpers and the gnashing of teeth. She ran to her kitchen table and jotted down this whole display. She put more of the puzzle together with an uneasiness growing in her gut. All of the ugliness in her life right now…did it mean anything? What did she have to do to end this terror?

Speedily, she returned to her living room and everyone was gone. The smells of beer, brandy, and blood no longer floated up to her nostrils. Rather, she smelled the cleansing agents in her kitchen. No one was there. No Dutch. No American Indians. Her brow furrowed. For some reason, she had pangs of missing out on something. She wanted to capture this scene as it played out in front of her. Though, she still could recollect the feeling of skin on skin contact by the American Indians brushing past her. The hot feeling of the tribesmen and the settlers coursing away from her all painted a portrait of a woman seeking to once again be ensconced in her own domicile. Then, the alarm clock blared. It read three o’clock in the morning. This time it wasn’t on her dresser. She felt bewildered, befuddled, and somewhat afraid. That whole experience was another dream? What the hell? How could she live through each? She just sat up and breathed. The sound of water rushed into the spaces of her brain. The slight smell of brackish water entered through her nose. The sound of rushing water kept washing against her thoughts as she struggled to find her bearing. She squinted as she lay in her sleeping bag. Six more bags laid by the river. Some laughter from a short distance away rose up amongst the flow of the water body. Galain got up from where she was, stunned to find that she was not in Wilmington but standing on the banks of the Murderkill River.

“Good morning,” Hostin Beverly called. He was tallish and matched the black skin of Galain. “Here, let me help you up,” he mentioned. “You appeared to be wrestling with something in your sleep. Did you have a nightmare?"

“Sure, two. You’re you, right?” Galain asked with severity in her voice.

“Yes of course. We were all listening to the tour guide out here last night. You fell asleep after he started talking about how the river got its name. Imagine that...it has to do with both the Dutch words for "mother" and "creek" or river. Though, if you remember, a homicide had been reported as early as the seventeenth century. Anyway, we just tucked you in and thought nothing else of it. You must’ve had some dreams.”

Galain smiled a crooked smile. “I did. I’m just glad…is everyone from the office here?”

“Just about. Pallia left early but the rest of us are here. Whoa…are you okay?”

He noticed her uneven gait.

“I’m fine. I’m just trying to get my self-control.”

“There’s some coffee and bagels and cream cheese at the hooch.”

“Don’t mention hooch. I’ve had enough run-ins with alcohol already these past few moments.”

“Whatever suits you, Gal,’” Beverly reminded her. He started walking towards the hut to refresh and prepare for the day. Galain cleaned up her place at the riverside. Once she had properly secured her belongings to the vehicle, she journeyed to where the other financiers had started breakfast. Eggs and bacon frying brought a sense of familiarity and calmness to her. She made it so she had been connected to the others some other way other than her tumultuous sleep.

“Hey,” Spillane Ellin Hutchison called. “Do you want some bagel and lox or a steak and egg sandwich?” She asked.

“I think I’ll just have a coffee.”

“You were tossing and turning last night but you never woke up. We thought to just let you fight whatever bad dream you were having.”

“Yeah, it was––” Then, with quickness, three American Indians rolled down on the group of adventurers from up North. They sliced into Beverly and ran down on Spillane. Their spears and knives sliced away at the men and women of thought. Galain pulled up a hot pan and knocked one of them against the head with it, he went out cold. The other two she charged with a steak knife and plunged the knife into the chest of one of them and sliced at the other. One sliced back at her.

Galain awoke again. Rushing water surrounded her. The belligerent tide tugged at her, forcing her under the water. In her struggle, she thought of her friends and the ferocity of the river. Instead of just giving in, giving up, she fought against it with her might and sought refuge along a strip of land jutting out from the banks. She managed to pull herself onto dry land and just cough away and check to see if she was still alive. She patted her clothes and her face. Her hair, matted down, rested on her back and shoulders. The struggle to get up and pull away from the river led to her finding her friends.

Spillane and Beverly each aided Galain to her feet.

“You gave us quite a scare when you got swept out of here,” Beverly admitted.

“I don’t think I’ll visit this place again,” Galain announced. With the fullness of her lucid state, she declared these words with truth.

“You're hit,” Spillane observed. A small gash marked Galain’s face.

Once mentioned, she felt the sting of the entire scenario and not just her minor wound. They journeyed towards the camp aid station to have Galain looked at and give her fresh clothes and hot chocolate. They wrapped a blanket around her. Galain looked at her palm. Another wound, this time slightly deeper, appeared. It looked like a gash into the earth.

“That has to be a laceration from a spear,” Dr. Westbridge remarked. His cool demeanor and calm voice bolstered Galain’s resolve. She wondered how she could have sustained such an injury and then the smell of brandy and wine rose up in the tent next to the coffee and hot chocolate. Her colleagues imbibed and she remembered the warring factions and the blood spilt. In her dream state, she had discovered her sense of being alive, even under the threat of death.