# Read the first page of The Mythic Dream by John Chu

Read the opening of The Mythic Dream by John Chu free, no signup. Eighteen writers retell myths from Hades to Kali to Loki.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-mythic-dream-john-chu
- Genre: Fantasy
- Year: 2019
- ISBN: 9781481462402
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781481462402&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781481462402
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781481462402

## The opening

The sky over Indiana was Dorothy Gale blue, that shade of sun-bleached denim that spoke of faded dreams and dying youth and all the wasted days of summer. Aracely squinted up at the sky and wondered what they'd called that color before Baum came along with his silver slippers and his golden roads and his green, green fantasies of a better world. Probably nothing. Some things were so much a part of the way the world was that they never stood out until someone pointed out that it wasn't always, hadn't always, couldn't always be that way.

People in Indiana lived and died under this sky, and they thought it was exactly right, and she thought that was exactly wrong. She lowered her eyes and walked on, cutting a path across the boneyard as around her, the carnival bloomed like some incredible flower. Tents for petals, people for pollen, and the straight metal spine of the Ferris wheel for a stem, rising from the dry-baked ground one piece at a time. It was a miracle of modern engineering, the way the whole thing broke down and came back together, and she didn't understand it and would only be in the way if she tried to help, so she kept walking, waving to people who weren't too busy to wave back, smiling at the rest, so they wouldn't have to worry she'd feel slighted when they didn't drop everything to say hello to the boss's daughter. The carousel sang as it was tested, calliope music drifting sweet as a dream over the field. A speaker buzzed with static louder than a beehive, sweeter than any honey. The garden Aracely had been cultivated for took shape, light and color and glorious, controlled chaos, and she breathed it in with a grateful heart, filling her lungs from tip to top with home, home, home.

She did all right in motel rooms and trailers, but there was nothing like the honest, open air of the carnival. Her mama's tent was already up, walls fluttering gently in the breeze, neon sign above the door flickering to draw the midway moths inside. The buzz of the needle cut through the carpet, and Aracely relaxed that tiny bit more. Everything was normal. She swept the hanging door aside with one hand and stepped through, into the surprising brightness of the tent. Her mother's lighting array had been refined over more seasons than Aracely had been alive, until it would have taken a grand search to find a place—any place—with better visibility. The racks of inks and books of flash were in their places, and her mother sat, regal, next to Charlie, who drove the main wagon, his face pressed into the table, her needle pressed against his skin. A river unspooled behind it, waters dark and deep and beautiful, filled with mystery. "Hi, Mama," said Aracely. "Hello, sweetheart. You have a good nap?" Her mother didn't look away from her work, and that, too, was normal; that was the way things were supposed to go.

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