On the most distant outskirts of Pine Deep, near Songbird Bridge, a homeless man huddled into the doorless husk of an old refrigerator, an old rug pulled over him and newspapers lining the insides of his clothes. His name was left behind on a dusty road down south. The path from where he’d been when life turned on him to where he was now that life was nearly over was on some map that had long ago been thrown away.
The other homeless wanderers called him Aqualung, after an old song from when they were young. Sometimes they’d mock him by singing the first few lines of the song, but they mostly got the lyrics wrong.
Aqualung shivered, partly from the cold, and in his dreams he spoke names he did not know. They were not his dreams, and that was his problem. Ever since he was a boy his sleeping thoughts were filled with other people’s dreams, and other people’s nightmares. Unwanted, unbidden, unbearable. Tonight it was worse, because he knew the things that haunted him were stolen and it was like he was strapped to a chair and forced to watch the ugliest and most graphic pornography. Not sex, but naked emotions, stripped raw and laid bare, and all of it set to a music score of buzzing insect wings. Ugly and unnatural in every sense of those words.
Aqualung tried to wake up, but he could not. The darkness pressed down on his chest like a nightmare hag, and he was too far away from any house for anyone to hear his screams.
The wind carried those cries with them, and if ears could not hear them, hearts could.