Uncrashable Dakota by Andy Marino Page A

claws because they dug in and roared and didn’t let go for days. She had always seemed terrified of passing along this affliction to Hollis and used to warn him of “auras” so often that every innocent action in his peripheral vision—the normal interplay of light and shadow—became a harbinger of doom. Fully aware that talk of a headache would result in being surrounded by doctors, Hollis explained his early bedtime simply by saying he was tired from launch day, the vaguest excuse he could think of that wouldn’t invite a concerned examination of his pupils.
    Willing himself to sleep so early proved impossible, but curling up to watch the sky darken outside his window soothed his aching head. Voices drifted through his bedroom door: his mother was holding court in the sitting room while Jefferson Castor, true to his word, was working late, and Rob was hatching plots with Delia.
    Hollis heard Elizabeth Quincy, the captain’s wife, steer the conversation toward rumored cargo. The Reynolds’ dead Shetland pony had been stuffed and mounted on a pedestal, and was traveling in a private storage hold along with two automobiles and a dozen gilt-framed portraits of itself. Several first-class ladies were happy to use this tidbit as a prompt.
    “You know our maid Francine?” one asked. “Darling girl. Not from Paris, from some provincial town—country girls simply know how to clean in a way that city girls will never master, they encounter more varieties of dirt—well, anyhow. Our Francine says that Heddie—that’s Juniper’s new governess, now that the old one’s been, how shall I say this, promoted —well, Heddie swears that Edmund just bought a prehistoric fossilized man from some Canadian explorers, some beastly thing that had been frozen solid in a cave for who knows how many thousands of years, which of course he’s taken aboard with him and stashed in a hold.”
    “Left it there to thaw? I should think it would smell after a while, don’t you?”
    “Well, of course he’s not letting it thaw.”
    “You’re saying they’ve got the man encased in ice? For the duration of the crossing?”
    Hollis imagined a leather-skinned specimen stashed away among the spoils of high-class life. What if the caveman woke up and found himself in Edmund Juniper’s private storage hold? What would it be like to track a mammoth through an ice field, fall into some crevasse, and open your eyes a few thousand years later aboard an airship high above the Atlantic?
    “Perhaps he’s lodging in the meat locker at Il Bambino’s. I thought the steak tasted a bit ancient. ”
    Peals of laughter barreled through Hollis’s bedroom door and reignited his headache, giving a queasy backdrop to his thoughts. Who was the armed porter? Why hadn’t his stepfather disciplined the man? Hollis couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that his failed christening had released some kind of slow-acting poison into the corridors and offices and engine rooms of the ship, changing the very nature of the voyage. It was a long time before he slipped into a shallow, disturbed sleep.
    In his dream, Hollis found himself alone on the main deck at night, surrounded by the high stone battlements of a castle. Terrible airship design , he thought. Above the castle-deck, a yellow moon dangled from two long cords like a stage prop. He climbed a narrow staircase up the side of the stone wall and studied the moon, which was only a few feet away. As he reached out to touch it—he’d always wondered what the moon felt like—he heard the unmistakable wet, raspy sound of his father clearing his throat. A gob of spit landed on the surface of the moon, and Hollis was suddenly afraid. His father had been dead for two years.
    The spit on the moon was flecked with blood. Hollis turned. His father fixed his spectacles and frowned.
    “Swear,” he said.
    Hollis backed against the stone wall. Dirt poured from his father’s ear and gathered in a pile at his feet. Hollis