Among the Dead and Dreaming
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"A masterful exhibition in storytelling; a breathless page-turner. Ligon drives his narrative like a formula one racer. Buckle your seat belts and get ready for a thrilling ride."—Jonathan Evison, [i]West of Here"Part meditation on modern love's dark and often unexamined underbelly; part can't-put-it-down-even-for-a-dinner-break-thriller, this novel contains one of the most convincingly and complicatedly terrifying fictional characters I have run into."—Pam Houston, [i]Contents May Have Shifted"A wildly original love story, a ghost story, a tense and suspenseful story in which the wickedly talented Ligon channels voices—of the lost, the longing, and the damned."—Jess Walter, [i]We Live in WaterPraise for [i]Safe in Heaven Dead:"A superbly convincing first novel….An expertly motivated debut."—[i]Kirkus, starred review"This debut novel instantly seizes and holds the imagination."—[i]Publishers Weekly, starred review"Ligon is firmly in control, laying out the elements of the story like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle."—[i]New York Times Book ReviewNikki has spent her life running from her abusive mother and the violent boyfriend she killed years ago, and now from his brother, Burke, just released from prison. Burke doesn't know yet how his brother died, but he's obsessed with finding Nikki and claiming her—and her daughter—as his own. Now she's run out of room to run. [b]Samuel Ligon is the author of [i]Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins, 2003) and [i]Drift and Swerve. His stories have appeared in more than twenty literary journals. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of [i]Willow Springs.
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AMONG THE DEAD AND DREAMING
Drift and Swerve
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When I finally got off the phone, I had to leave work and settle myself out on the boardwalk, walking, wanting to throw up every time I looked right at it, so not looking right at it, and nowhere to go, just walking, moving. Alina was probably home, packing for school, and Kyle was probably in his studio, preparing paintings for his upcoming show. I just wanted to go, to run. But where? I wasn’t a kid like when I ran from Austin, from Providence, from Manchester. And I wasn’t going to run from Kyle.
There was a guy I met when I was pregnant in Portland, Bobby, who I became close to before and after Alina was born, who loved me and loved Alina until she was almost two. He was thirty years older than me. That’s when I realized how fucked up I was. Not the rape. It wasn’t that. I wasn’t even calling it that then. But just everything. My mother and how I’d run from her. Cash dead and Alina. My cousin Melanie in love with Daryl down in Austin, and how much I’d wanted him, how wrong that was, and how I wanted to be better than I was. Just all of it. And this guy, Bobby, in Portland, he loved me, I knew that. He loved Alina. And he was a good man—I liked him—but he wanted to be more than friends, which was perfectly natural, even though I didn’t feel that way. And even though I didn’t feel that way, I wanted to feel that way and made the mistake of trying. We slept together a couple times—twice—how I realized my feelings were never going to develop. I wanted them to, but there was nothing there. We lived together awhile as roommates, until I understood it was a kind of torture for him, that as long as I was around he’d hold out hope that we’d wind up together. I knew I was holding him back, that my presence in the house was hurting him. I’d never be able to give him what he deserved. I knew how much he wanted me to love him and I tried. But I couldn’t do it, and he’d never find someone if I was around.
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