We’re so excited for this May release: The Rock Eaters by Brenda Peynado!
Courtesy of Penguin Random House: The stories in THE ROCK EATERS take place in different worlds and dimensions: many are centered on Latinx communities in Florida, while others take place in a world comprised of virtual reality pods, or on an island where children eat rocks to avoid flying away from their home country.
The Dreamers: In a world where humans still sleep for a third of their lives, but instead do it all in one go and sleep for years as opposed to every night, a young girl prepares for prom while everyone around her drifts to sleep.
Scroll on for the chance to read “The Dreamers,” an excerpt from this brilliant Latinx read!
The Dreamers
In my ten p.m. class, I keep my eyes on the streetlamps outside, their buzzing lights over Bayview. I’ll never sleep, not for years, not for decades if I can help it. When I’m at my worst, eyes bloodshot, thoughts racing, I’ll excuse myself to the bathroom, slap my face, and pinch the insides of my arms. Sometimes when I’m studying I even tape my eyelids open. At the beach, I let the salt burn my eyes.
Prom is tonight, all of us soon to be twerking on the dance floor in dresses and tuxes. I’m running over the plan in my head: how I’m going to break my boyfriend, Joaquin, out of his glass sleeper coffin so he can come with me to prom.
At the desk in front of me, a girl from the track team bobs her head—not those small twitches all of us do, but a really slow descent, and then she jerks herself up. It looks like a dance move. Beside me another girl rolls a quarter between her fingers too fast to see, a blur of silver. A boy pulls his hair in frustration. My ex–best friend, Karina, sitting at the front of the classroom, is the only one relaxed, leaning back with her arm over her chair; she’s also the only one of us who’s ever slept. Sister Olivera drones on about quadratic equations at the blackboard. I look back to the streetlamps, the dark of the bay just beyond the basketball court. My heart pulses so fast I could dance to it.
But then my eyes skip back to the track girl, nodding her head lower. Right in front of me, BAM! Her head hits the desk and doesn’t rise again. She is facedown in her own drool.
“Peynado is a writer willing to cross literary borders: magical realism, fable, parable, fiction, nonfiction—she erases those limiting storytelling parameters and her stories soar.”
I don’t know what to do. What just happened? Sister Olivera doesn’t even notice. It’s Karina who sends the nun into hysterics and signs of the cross by raising her hand and saying, “Sister, she’s fallen asleep.”
The nuns are followers of Santa Acostara the Sleepless, the first person able to stay awake for her whole life. After forty-four years of wakefulness, she fell into a coma for twenty-two years. There was a vigil for every day of those sleeping years, everyone thinking she would wake up again, but in the end she just died in her sleep. They sainted her, celebrated her four decades of wakefulness, taught the importance of her example: sleep is weakness, and weakness is sin. Her following grew. But then other nuns and people outside the convent, people godless and unbelieving, started being able to stay awake for decades, live their whole lives before their final sleeps. Now, almost all of us do it, desperate to live every second of our youth. Still, the nuns—they cling to wakefulness like it’s a sacrament. Guard against the heavy eyelids, they say. It’s a sin to choose sleep before your time. You teens are especially vulnerable. We must pray for the sleepers’ souls.
And yet, some people—heretics, sinners, people from other religions or godless—still choose to go to sleep before their time.
Sister Olivera phones the office, and an announcement shudders over the speaker system. Grief counseling, by which they mean sin shaming, will be held in the chapel during next period.
We crowd into the chapel, and by some ill luck, I’m pushed into line behind Karina. When our elbows touch, my eyelids droop and I feel tired, so tired. I pinch the inside of my upper arm as I walk behind her. We’re told sleep is something we naturally resist in this day and age (except for teens, who, during puberty, start to feel both manic and drowsy). But if I’ve never fallen asleep, how do I know when I’m doing it until it’s already too late? Of course, the nuns can’t tell us anything, because they’ve never done it either, and they think keeping us in the dark is the best way to make sure we don’t try it. Which is why Karina, the traitor, is so popular now; she’s one of the only people our age who went to sleep early by choice and woke up in time to tell us about it.
Humans sleep about a third of their lives, but since Santa Acostara it’s almost always at the end, all in one go before we die. We live our youth and sleep away our old age. If we try, we can fall asleep early, but that sleep is still a third of our life span, and then we wake up and live out the time we have left. Like Karina. She fell asleep when she was ten and woke up when she was sixteen. The doctors say she has until she’s eighteen before her body craps out on her—not that they know what’s wrong yet; they’ve just done the math. It gives her an air of the doomed. But her sleep also made her popular. When she woke up, everyone flocked around her and wanted to know what dreaming was like. They crowded her in the halls and showed up at her house. They left invitations in her locker and candy on her desk. Never mind that I was the one who had defended her, and she’d closed her eyes because of them.
Before she slept, these same girls had teased Karina because of her hair, which poofed out in a half-mast afro. Girls in our class kept pulling it straight, asking, “How long is it really?” or getting their fists caught in it, yanking her head around. Boys called her Puffhead. One day in gym class, girls held her down on the basketball courts while boys patted her hair and stepped on it. I threw basketballs at them until they let her go, but the damage was done. She sobbed and wouldn’t come out of the locker room until everyone but me had left. We missed the bell.
She had asked her father if she could switch schools, to move farther from the beach and the mean kids, but he just kept telling her to tough it out. He’s the town’s dreamcatcher, and he’d leave newspaper clippings on the table for her, sob stories about kids he’d picked up in his dreamcatcher van who’d let themselves fall asleep young. “When things get hard, you face them. You don’t run away,” he said, when she told him about the basketball court. He was white, and Karina often told me how he didn’t understand her. Her mother, afro–Puerto Rican, tried to console her: “Things may get better in a few years. Just wait until high school.” But then she got quiet and said, “I don’t know. Sometimes things get worse.”
I found Karina the day after, asleep. Tripped over her, actually, when I was running down the beach looking for her. The dunes rose up around her, and the cattails and grasses waved over her head. She had tucked herself into an old turtle’s nest. She was swaddled in sand, her halo of curly hair glittered with grit. Her smooth cheeks puffed in and out. She was dreaming, gasping and letting out whispering little breaths.
We were used to coming upon people sleeping in the dunes, a sleeper or the dreaming dead. Sometimes a bum curled up in a meadow, usually naked, their clothing and shoes stolen by the wakeful. They were rounded up by dreamcatchers, then claimed by loved ones or unclaimed and sent to a state facility. This was back when my parents were still together, and I made my dad call Karina’s to tell him where to find her. I never imagined it was her I’d have to give up.
Six years later, Karina walked into our two a.m. biology class like she hadn’t been gone a minute. I barely recognized her: her hair heavy and wavy, boobs bigger than mine, taller than anyone in our class. When I did realize who it was, I was so angry. She had abandoned me, and I thought she wouldn’t wake up until after I’d graduated college and gotten married and my kids were the age she’d been when she went down. I had already mourned her. And if she was awake now, it meant she was dying soon and I would have to mourn her again.
It was Joaquin who said, “Easy. The last thing she remembers is fourth grade.” He knew how much we’d meant to each other. He was the one who patted the desk next to mine. He was always going against what everyone expected of him, surprising me in the hallway with shells when he should have been in class, finding weird kitsch on eBay that I loved, laughing when I thought he was going to shout in frustration, saying the most random things that had us cracking up for days.
Soon Karina and I were having sleepovers again, Joaquin climbing in through the window after basketball practice. We showed her high school algebra, the bands and TV shows she’d missed, how to smoke, told her what things were expected of us now that we were older. I taught her how to flake on plans and how to ghost and how to drift away from someone without causing a fight. She still had the sad innocence of a child, hadn’t yet learned the defense mechanisms that we high schoolers had for dealing with grief and hurt. She was so earnest. Every time we showed her something new, she’d jump up and down and laugh. She squealed when we ordered our usual combination of coffee and fries at the diner. Joaquin and I took turns teaching her how to kiss, and she’d gasp every time, dig her fingers into our arms. I’d lie down on the floor holding her, with my fingers tangled in her hair, the ceiling spinning until it was time to go to school. It was like we were kids again, had gotten a do-over to promise everything, even better than before. We swore we would never believe in a god who would condemn us for how we loved or when we slept.
The three of us were inseparable. I wasn’t angry anymore that she’d left me; I was just happy she was back. I was as in love with her as with Joaquin. Out of the three of us, I was the protector, the one who would pull someone by the shirt if they cut in line, who would glare anyone down who made a crack about our threesome, who would keep her old bullies away. “It ended up true,” she said, “that sometimes you give things time and they get even better.” But there was the shadow of her short life. She told me she was afraid. Not of death, which she thought would be like dreaming, being pulled apart and into a new form; but of pain. The doctors couldn’t say what would kill her, not yet anyway. It could be a tumor or a lightning strike or a murder.
Then, Joaquin fell asleep a few months later, leaving us to figure out anew what we meant to each other. At first, Karina and I spent all our days and nights in the Denny’s that his parents owned, just to be near him where he slept in his glass coffin. When his mother brought in a prayer group to chant novenas for his great sin, surrounding him behind the hostess station on their knees, Karina and I talked loudly to drown them out in case their words would infect his dreams. Karina held my hand under the table, and just before daybreak we lay on the beach where she’d first gone to sleep, watching the turtles shamble out to the sea. I wept and I railed. Karina was quiet, but she opened her arms for me to curl against her in the sand. When we made each other come then, we were tender and quiet.
At first, I recounted memories about him like it was his funeral, things even Karina didn’t know. But the whispers at school about his sin were getting to me. Joaquin would have shrugged, or danced in front of them and given them a bow. But without him, it was up to me to make them treat him like a person.
“Peynado probes the limits of reckoning with such dilemmas as otherness, loss, and love in her glorious debut”
When I told Karina my plan to break him out for prom, wheel him in, and let everyone remember him, she lost it. She slammed down her coffee mug. She was sitting next to me because Joaquin always used to sit across from us. Coffee sloshed onto my lap. “You’re as bad as his parents, making him into a doll against his will. Parading him around. He’s sleeping.”
“What?” I said, grabbing napkins. “I’m defending him.”
“Don’t defend him,” she said. “Love him.” She pressed the napkins into my shorts, soaking up the coffee.
I wrung my hands. “He wanted us to come with him.”
“You know I can’t anymore. I’ve done all my sleep.”
I knew. How to choose between the two of them? One awake, one asleep. Joaquin got to have dream-versions of the two of us until he would come back and find Karina gone. “Well, he might wake up early, like you.”
“Oh, so you’re wishing him an early death?” She had learned to be whip-quick at pulling out truth from where it was hidden away.
“That’s not what I said.” I scooted away from her down the booth, but she caught my belt loops and pulled me back.
“You’re going to change so much in the decades it takes for him to wake up. You’ll go to college, have a career, go to my funeral. You won’t know what each other has been through. You don’t know what either of you are going to want.” She tucked my hair behind my ear, moved my chin with her fingertips so I would face her. “You were so different when I saw you again.”
I shrugged her off. Then it occurred to me. “He was always asking you about what it was like. Did you tell him it was a good idea?”
She shrugged. “He made his choice, and you have to let him lie. Don’t be selfish.”
“I’m selfish?” I couldn’t believe her. I had thought we were a team. “Maybe I should join him.”
I could feel her studying me from the side, like when she was learning something new about the world. “Maybe you should,” she said. “Maybe then you’d understand.”
I waited in silence while she piled all the brown-wet napkins on our plate of fries.
She put a five on the table and walked out, brushing her fingertips against Joaquin’s glass on the way.
I stayed in that booth for hours, but she didn’t come back. At school, she sat in a new desk on the other side of the classroom, joined a cafeteria table full of the girls who’d bullied her and gave them her earnest smile, ignored me even when I blocked her path in the hallway. She stepped around me. She stopped returning my phone calls, started fucking other boys and girls from the basketball teams, ghosted me. The very things I had taught her how to do. I felt ten years old again. She was so good at it—betrayal.
Brenda Peynado’s stories have won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Award, selection for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Small Fictions, a Dana Award, a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic, and other awards. Her fiction appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun (London), The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and more than forty other journals. She received her MFA at Florida State University and her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. This will be her first collection.
