Whispered Dreams

Ever since she could remember Evangeline had been in love with the comatose boy her father kept in the laboratory beneath their home. They had grown together over the years in the same otherwise lonely house; he ever-asleep, she thinking of him even in her dreams; she under her father’s benign neglect, the boy’s brain and biochemistry the main focus of the man’s attention and creativity.

Her father had long been the acknowledged master of the art of sweet-talking biology into doing subtle and profitable new things. His skill had given him riches and reputation until it had grown so bold that it became fearsome. He had been forced to retire to the house many envied, the daughter some people pitied, and the laboratory only the two of them knew of. Evangeline never thought of asking her father where the boy came from, just as she never wondered why the boy’s skin sometimes changed its color to deep blue or a white gold it was almost painfully beautiful to look at. Such things were common in her life, and her father had never barred her from witnessing them, trusting less her discretion than a love of hoarding secrets and wonders that echoed and rivaled his own.

She even got to spend time alone with the boy. During those hours she would tell him of her day or read to him. That he never stirred from his sleep did not worry her at the beginning, yet as they both grew older and his naked form became an inarticulate strangeness his presence alone became insufficient.

For a while she stopped visiting him and when she returned it was for short periods when she did not know what to say.

For the first time in her life there was something she wanted she knew her father would not give her. She resented him for this and decided she would wake up on her own the boy she loved.

From then her visits were careful and planned. Her intelligence was too an echo and rival of her father’s; she knew his mastery of flesh was beyond everybody else in the world, but she had been sharing her dreams with the boy during most of their lives. She began to whisper to him dreams born not of sleep but of sleeplessness.

With her words she would bring him to her: on this she had the certainty of the young. One day he would wake up, strong and fast as her father had made him, and she would smile and kiss him and then put a knife on his hand. And neither of them would ever need to sleep again.

Every day Evangeline told the boy this story in the hushed tones of a secret promise, and every night she dreamed of it with the vibrant urgency of prophecy while her father watched intently the ghostly shiftings of her brain and whispered things in her ear.