Hehaka Luta - The Red Elk (Private)

He used to like sleeping, liked it a whole hell-of-a-lot back in the days when he used to be able to get some. Now though, it wasn’t as easy to get through. Now it was more of a fight to just stay out of those strange lands called ‘Dreams’ for the engineer. He guessed if John the Shaman were around he’d say something about old spirits calling out to him wantin’ to visit and tell him something. Roland wasn’t all that sure about religious things. His whole aspect on life was if you can’t touch it then it ain’t real and if it ain’t real then can’t hurt you.

Of course that wasn’t true now and he knew it…knew it twice over.

It was a tossup between what dreams were worse, those with his son or his wife. Both were just replays of days Roland had tried to forget. He’d done it too with the help of a bottle until that frame landed in his lap. Now every night had been more like hell reliving two days over and over for some infernal reason he didn’t want to understand

If you can’t touch it then it ain’t real.

His wife Alma, she was damn smart and not afraid to get her hands dirty. She knew more about the molecular structure of metal than any man but him and she wasn’t afraid to prove it by creating some new damn near indestructible sample. Her long black hair tied back in a pony tail and a smudge of soot streaked across one cheek, it was sheer beauty to him. He never saw the broken chain link in the pull they used in the shop. He had told himself to inspect the damn thing but it just slipped his mind with all the work they were doing and all the time they were spending together afterwards. He wasn’t in the shop thank mercy when the chain broke as she was lifting a large block of newly fused metals out of the acid bath. The chain broke…the block fell back into the bath…the acid splashed on her. Alma died in his arms as he screamed her name crying like a baby, the soot smudge gone forever.

And If it ain’t real then it can’t hurt you

There was nothing to do get his boy back. Mikkel had chosen to be a man too early, just like his father had done and his father before him. He struck out into the worlds looking to make his own way and his own legacy in this world choosing not to trade on his father’s name. Roland had told him he was damn fool. Mikkel didn’t have the skill to be a metallurgist and he didn’t have the mind to be an engineer. He asked his son just what he was going to do to get by and all Mikkel answered with was silence. So he watched his son leave, the word ‘fool’ the last thing he said to him. Yet it wasn’t really the last was it. There was the day he put Mikkel in the ground, when he had cried a second time as a single flute played a lonesome tune.

“I love you my son…my precious boy.”

No, these nights had been hell for whatever reason. Roland laid back in his cot and closed his eyes. If the spirits were trying to tell him something then he the sure as hell best get to it. He didn’t want to wake up with tears rolling down his face anymore.