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Re Gizzards - Now you know...

Now that's the best one I've seen in a while.

648. CATFIGHT! Marnie roared up out of bed, left hand driving up to seize the overhanging windpipe: her other hand, hard-gripped around a wire-wound knife's handle, drove up, hard, with full intent to start between the soft ribs and come out just behind the collarbone. Marnie's hand closed about the throat under that face, that damned face! -- Marnie's convulsed leap took her over the foot of her bed and most of the covers with her -- she came to full wakefulness in mid-air, landed on all fours, then came up on the balls of her feet -- turning -- snarling, hands bladed, fingers curved a little, circling, looking for that hated enemy -- Dr. John Greenlees mumbled something, rolled up on his side, curled up a little. Marnie took a quick breath, blew it out: she seized the blanket, still settling to the floor: a snap, a spin, the flannel sheet and then the quilt settled down on her somnolent husband. Marnie went to the baby's crib, reached in, felt drowsy warmth and peaceful life: satisfied her child was safe, that the electronic guardians at the foot of the bed were awake and functioning -- in the event of a decompression, a force field would snap into existence around the baby's bed, automated measures would tend the child for however long was necessary -- Marnie turned, quickly, a dancer's turn, on the balls of her feet: she was still ready to rip someone's throat out, and someone provoked her -- She stopped, pale eyes busy. It was night. She was in her own bedroom, she was still on Mars, she was still Sheriff, there were no alarms, there were no enemies present ... What the hell just happened? She went to the sink, splashed cold, fresh-tasting, one-hundred-percent recycled water on her face, breathed one-hundred-percent recycled air: thanks to technologies gifted them by the Confederacy, their water was chemically indistinguishable from the healthy, mineralized springwater she remembered from home, the air smelled as it did in the high mountains: nothing was different, nothing was changed -- Then it came from within, she thought. Within me. Marnie raised her dripping face, glared at the reflection in the unbreakable mirror, then dried herself and paced silently back to bed. "Marnie," her Daddy told her when she was a little girl, "your dreams belong to you." Marnie looked at her Daddy with all the innocent faith of the little girl she'd been. "Your nightmares like to laugh at you." Marnie's eyes dropped and she drew her legs up, hugged her arms around her shins, under her white flannel nightgown. "Nightmares are mean," Linn continued quietly. "You have to grab them and shake them hard and tell them it's your dream, you are in charge, and they WILL obey YOU!" Marnie looked up at her pale eyed Daddy, uncertainty in her expression. Linn leaned down, just a little, brushed the back of his Daddy-finger along her warm pink cheek. "Marnie," he said, "a nightmare tried to scare me last night." Marnie blinked, her eyes opening a little wider: she nodded, just a little, as if she was afraid of what he might say next. "Marnie, that mean ol' nightmare tried to scare me and make me believe I'd done something very bad." Marnie blinked, rapidly, hugged her shin bones harder. Linn winked, looked left, looked right, leaned closer and whispered, "Do y'know what I did?" Marnie shook her head, tried to hide her face behind her flannel covered knees. "I put ears on that nightmare." Marnie blinked rapidly again, this time with surprise, and Linn nodded. "Yep. Ears. Long floppy donkey ears that didn't match. One had red pokey dots and one had green and purple stripes and then I grabbed a mirror and held it up so the nightmare could see how silly it looked." Marnie lifted her face a little, regarded her Daddy with big and hopeful eyes. "And then I laughed at it, and it turned around and stomped off 'cause it couldn't scare me no more," Linn whispered, managing to sound like a little child himself. "Every time a nightmare comes around, I laugh at it and I make it look silly, and anymore my dreams are written by a commodion." Marnie tilted her head a little this time, the way she did when she was thinking, and Linn saw her brows pull together a little. "Daddy?" "Yes, Princess?" "Daddy, are you so full of it you need flushed?" It was Sheriff Linn Keller's turn to blink. Then his ears turned a little red, and then his face turned kind of red, and Marnie shrank back a little, because she'd seen men get red faced and bad things happened, and she squeezed her eyes shut and pushed her face down into her knees, shivering, waiting for the slap, the voice, the words-- She felt her bed shake a little and she heard kind of a funny snorting sound and she lifted her head just a little and opened one eye, and then she lifted her head and looked at her Daddy with honest surprise, right before he fell backwards across her bed, laughing -- a good, honest, from the bottom of his soul big healthy Daddy-laugh, and when he ran down a little, he hauled in a breath, looked at Marnie and wheezed "Commodion," and then he was off laughing again, and that was the night Marnie first put spotty and stripey ears on her nightmares and laughed at them and made them go sulk somewhere else 'cause she run 'em off like her Daddy told her to do, hmph! Sheriff Marnie Keller lay back down in her own bed, closed her eyes, relaxed: her disciplined mind went back to where she'd been when the face came over her, when she drove a knife up and seized a living throat -- Wait a minute. The throat was real. The knife was real. I felt it -- She sat up again, and she was in the Firelands cemetery. The back-home-in-Colorado Firelands cemetery, not the one with the first of their dead buried in Martian dust Firelands cemetery. Marnie stood -- she wore her red cowboy boots and blue denim skirt, a flannel shirt -- Her hand closed around the checkered walnut handle of her .357 -- "You have a question," a familiar voice said. Marnie turned, looked at what might have been a reflection of herself, had she been wearing a fine McKenna gown with a matching little hat and parasol. "I have a question," she confirmed. "You want to know something." "I want to know why I didn't cry when my children were killed." "You grieved." "Damned right I did." "But you shed no tears." "Not one." "And you think I can tell you why." "Yes." Sarah Lynne McKenna sighed, shook her head: she furled her parasol, collapsed it between gloved palms until it was the size of a bottlecap, dropped it in a cleverly disguised pocket. "I didn't cry either." "You lost your husband." "And my son, and my nephew, I lost my father --" she looked sharply at Marnie -- "not that miserable beast that married Mama and tried to sell us," she snarled. "The Sheriff, or the Rosenthal?" "Levi Rosenthal. An honorable man." She looked down the row of tombstones. "He loved Mama and he loved my sisters and I, and I grieved his death, but no. I shed no tears either." "Did my Gammaw?" "Why don't you ask her?" Marnie turned. Willamina stood beside her red Cannonball-mare, an engraved Winchester rifle balanced in her gloved hand. "I shed mine a long time ago," Willamina said. "But you grieved." "I grieved." "Just not --" "Not with womanly tears, no." Marnie looked from one ancestress to the other, her mouth open, her palms up as she frowned, trying to make some sense of all this. "What's wrong with us?" she asked. "Our children -- people I knew, people I --" "Loved," Sarah and Willamina chorused. "You honestly loved every one of the colonists that were killed." Marnie nodded. Willamina turned, thrust her '73 rifle into its carved, background-dyed scabbard, turned: she paced slowly toward Marnie, took her granddaughter's hands in her own, and Marnie felt Sarah's gloved hands on her shoulders as she, too, came near. "There's nothing wrong with any of us," Willamina whispered. "We've all been through hell itself. Our tears are long since shed. Grief enough and yes, we can weep, but for better or for worse, we're ..." Marnie saw her Gammaw bite her bottom lip, frown, consider for several moments. "Maybe we're too strong for our own good." Sarah came around from behind her: now Marnie's hands were held by her Gammaw's, and her more ancient ancestress, both. "I was the face you saw in your sleep, Marnie. You went to bed wondering why you couldn't cry when you lost your children. You knew I had the answer, and it wasn't coming out, so you saw me as the enemy." Sarah smiled gently, tilting her head the way Marnie remembered her Gammaw doing in a tender moment. "By the way, sister, you're hell with a knife and I don't want to make you mad!" Three pale eyed women giggled, and Dr. John Greenlees, physician, surgeon, and husband to the pale eyed Sheriff Marnie Keller, woke up just enough to realize his wife was laughing in her sleep: Marnie felt her husband's warm, reassuring arm come across her belly, and she laid her hand on his, and then she relaxed and went back to sleep.

Sorry, I guess I should have looked back to see it anyone else had posted it - oh well maybe we can check out all the others for repeats...