The Eater of Dreams Read online

  ©Katherine Miller, 2019

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  410 2nd Avenue North

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The eater of dreams / Kat Cameron

  Names: Cameron, Kat 1964- author.

  Description: Short stories.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190137436 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190137444 | ISBN 9781771871846 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771871853 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771871860 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8605.A4818 E28 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada for its publishing program.

  For my family

  CONTENTS

  Spirit Houses

  Whyte Noise

  White-Out

  Dancing the Requiem

  How You Look at Things

  Searching for Spock

  The Apostles

  Cutting Edge

  Truth or Fiction

  The Heart Is a Red Apple

  Zoonis County

  Variations on a Theme

  Homesick

  Fractures

  The Eater of Dreams

  Spirit Houses

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, I meet an old friend at the Muttart Conservatory. It’s minus twenty-five outside, but inside the air sweetens with perfume from the table of pink and purple hyacinths for sale.

  At Maureen’s side, her three-year-old daughter, Emily, dances in perpetual motion. Her pink sweater with an appliquéd daisy shimmers with colour, as bright as the hyacinths, and her Hilary Duff jeans have pink and silver sequined butterflies at the cuffs. I feel drab and oversized beside this pint-sized fashion plate.

  Maureen has brought another woman with her, Jasmine’s mother, whose name I can never remember. While they are hanging up their heavy winter coats, I smile and nod, hoping that Maureen will introduce her name in conversation.

  The lobby branches into four corner ramps. Below four glass pyramids are different display areas: temperate, tropical, desert, and a feature show. As we walk up towards the desert pavilion, heavy doors swing open. Emily darts ahead.

  “Careful,” Maureen calls.

  The pavilion glows beneath the bright blue sky. Dry desert air. I inhale deeply and smell sage. Blooming prickly pear with red bumps of fruit fill the middle bed, limbs coiling like octopi. A massive saguaro stretches up to the glass. Emily reaches out to grab a fistful of cactus.

  “Sweetie, that’s sharp,” Maureen says, pulling back Emily’s hand. Emily pouts for a second, reaches out again. Maureen patiently pulls back the tiny hand. I’d let Emily touch it for herself. Once pricked, twice shy. Perhaps Sleeping Beauty was an overindulged child, unafraid of evil witches and spindles.

  Jasmine runs along the path ahead of her mother who is encumbered with the stroller, diaper bag, sweater, purse. Jumping up onto the concrete retaining wall, Jasmine begins throwing fistfuls of gravel on the path.

  Bending down, I say, “Don’t do that. The plants need the gravel to live.”

  Her mother glares at me. I feel like pointing out the signs. Stay on the path. Don’t pick the flowers. Why does everyone feel exempt from these rules? The mother is too passive to complain openly; instead, she stuffs Jasmine into the stroller. Jasmine begins a high-pitched whining, like a dentist’s drill.

  We walk down the ramp and over to the temperate area. The trees are dormant, brown leaves scattered in a creek below. Only the ivy covering the lone stone walls shows a hint of green. I sit on a bench under a bare oak tree, covering my mouth to hide the yawns.

  Jasmine’s mother turns to Maureen. “Someone was up late partying. Remember those days?” Her tone is mildly patronizing, as if speaking of a teenager rather than a woman her own age sitting right in front of her. “We were in bed last night by nine. We saw the early fireworks and that was it.”

  I smile, say nothing. I was up late doing lesson plans, but if she wishes to envy me, she can. It’s better than the mild contempt I so often feel from mothers my age. When did my life become a joke? I don’t know what Maureen has told her about me. Maybe I’m a cautionary tale, the kind told in whispers.

  We wander under the bare trees and then back down the ramp, park the strollers by the coffee counter, and buy coffee and date squares. Once the two little girls are settled at a small table, with paper and crayons, Maureen mentions the tsunami that hit Asia on Boxing Day.

  “I keep thinking about this one mother.” Maureen turns to Jasmine’s mom. “Andrea, have you seen her? The Australian mother and her two boys. She couldn’t swim with both children and had to choose to hold on to one. Imagine.”

  “Sophie’s choice,” I interject. They both stare at me blankly. “Remember, Sophie had to choose one of her children or the concentration camp guard threatened to take both.”

  “Oh, the movie,” Andrea says slowly. “But this is real life.”

  What does she think the book was based on? Andrea is the type of woman who proudly claims to read only non-fiction. I can’t understand why Maureen spends so much time with her.

  Maureen returns to the Australian woman from the news. “I don’t know how she could make that choice.”

  “Would it be better if she had left both to die?” I ask. Even though both children lived, thousands of nameless children died, both local and tourists. Do the media focus on this story to take our minds off the other mothers, the ones whose children didn’t survive? Discussing this topic makes me feels as if we’re trying to ward off disaster. Not here. Not us.

  “Remember our trip to Phuket?” I ask Maureen, changing the topic. “The Friendly Garden B&B? Remember the two fat German guys in their fifties who were sharing the Thai prostitute?” Every morning, over tea and toast, we’d see the Germans at the table next to ours, their thick voices rattling like gunshot. Two sunburned beefy faces glowing on either side of that sulky silent teenager.

  “I don’t remember them,” Maureen says. Wilful amnesia. Or maybe pregnancy does destroy brain cells.

  “Oh, come on. You were the one who started calling them the Tom Thumb Twins. The prostitute was a head taller than either of them.”

  “There are children present,” Andrea says in a prissy voice. It’s lucky I didn’t mention the Australian surfboarder Maureen picked up the second day there. I’d gone for a walk, came back to our tiny villa draped with pink bougainvillea, caught Maureen and the tanned beachboy doing it doggy style on the sagging double bed. I backed out the door fast. The secrets I could tell. The secrets she could tell. What old friendship consists of, secrets you could tell but won’t, not even when the friendship is dying, pulled apart by too many changes.

  I drink my coffee, listening to Maureen and Andrea discuss daycare options. Looking at Maureen, I can see traces of the bohemian backpacker who trekked through Thailand with me. In her twenties, Maureen wore her black hair in a pixie cut that feathered her high cheekbones. Since Emily’s birth, she’s been growing it out and there are streaks of grey at the temples. With the shoulder-length
bob, the black Gap sweater and tan pants, she looks like the mothers she used to mock, the ones who thought little Ashley was a genius even though she couldn’t spell genius in grade seven. She has achieved that adult look, that adult life: house, husband, child. One version of an adult life.

  The first year of our MA program, Maureen broke up with her boyfriend, a jerk who slept with another woman. The night after Maureen’s final crying phone call, we started drinking Cabernet Sauvignon in our apartment, and then hit the local pub when the wine ran out. By two, she was flashing her breasts at the guys in the bar. I dragged her out.

  On the way home, a frosty November night, she started screaming at the moon like a madwoman. “Fucking men. Assholes. No more fucking men for me.” She wouldn’t shut up. I walked her around the downtown area for an hour, afraid to take her home, worried that our neighbours would call the cops. Now she acts like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. It’s all worked out for her.

  In Thailand, we saw a woman carving flowers out of vegetables, daikon transformed into white leaves, turnips into tulips. I bought an elaborate red rose, carved from a beet, and placed it ceremoniously on the verandah of the next spirit house we saw, an elaborately carved, miniature teak dwelling, its swooped roof draped with garlands of marigolds. Every Thai house has a spirit house, a sarn phra phun, built on the northeast corner of the property to placate the spirits of the land, the chao tee, displaced by the building. Rules structure the placement: the shadows from the main house cannot fall on the spirit house or bad luck will follow. Each day the householder places offerings of tea, rice, and flowers at the door of the spirit house to propitiate the gods.

  Shut out of the conversation, I finish my coffee and announce, “I’m heading up into the show pavilion.”

  “Me go too,” Emily says.

  Maureen looks at me doubtfully.

  “Sure, come on,” I say, annoyed that Maureen questions my ability to watch her child for ten minutes.

  Emily dashes ahead, her shoes clattering on the tiles. The doors swing open to a garish display of red, a womb of poinsettias, with one giant Christmas cracker spilling papier-mâché candy over the central bed.

  I sit on a bench and watch as Emily runs round and round the central bed, a top spinning out of control. Look at me! Look at me! She takes after her mother. Fortunately, there’s no one else in the room with us, and I indulge her until she staggers, dizzy with motion, and plops down hard on the floor.

  “Let’s look at the flowers,” I say, before she can start to cry.

  We bend over the mass of potted plants. The poinsettias glow like hard candy. Their colour entices Emily, who reaches for the petals. I remember they’re poisonous.

  “No, we don’t pick the flowers. Leave them for other people to enjoy.” That lecturing tone. I’m withering into a pursed-mouth schoolteacher. A caricature. I despise this role, which is forced on me more and more often. In any case, it does no good, for Emily doesn’t listen. She grabs, pulling petals.

  “Emily, I said no.” Reaching over, I attempt to pry open her fingers, extract the treasure. She holds on, clenching chubby fingers tighter around the petals, which ooze like blood. But I’m stronger and I win, forcing her hand open, brushing the petals back onto the black dirt. Fighting down the temptation to give her a sharp smack on the hand, I say, “They’re poisonous. Don’t pick poinsettias.”

  Emily throws herself on the tiled floor, stretched full length in a display of grief. “No, no, no.” A word she knows well.

  “Emily, the floor is dirty. Get up.”

  She ignores me.

  “Fine.” I’m not about to reach down, haul her up by the arm, an action I’ve seen many exasperated parents perform, the grab and yank, the suppressed exclamations to stop crying, act your age. I walk over to the bench, sit down.

  Emily continues her prima donna act, fake sobs and all. I wonder if it works at home. Would it work if I were more emotionally attached?

  Last year, Emily fell off a slide at the playground and cut her chin.

  “When I saw her,” Maureen said, after the trip to Emergency, after the tears and comforting, when the only remaining evidence was two tiny stitches, barely visible, “when I saw Emily with blood pouring down her face, I realized that a piece of my heart is outside my body.”

  A ludicrous statement. I would never have expected Maureen to say something like that. It’s as if giving birth has destroyed her sense of humour. Yet I could also understand. The power of a metaphor — your heart outside your body. A piece of you, gone.

  Are there spirit houses for lost children, the ones who haunt your house? She was so small, my lost child. Born two months early. I’d been so sure, even after three miscarriages. Sure that everything would work out.

  We named her Spirit. The grief counsellor at the hospital told us to pick an unfamiliar name. Ryan wanted something else, but I insisted. I insisted on the picture too, her small form swaddled in blankets, her face blue, like the statues I saw in Bangkok. Every week I place flowers before my makeshift shrine.

  I look up and Emily is just disappearing, a blur of pink running down the broad ramp. The hydraulic doors swing wheezily closed and she’s gone. Jumping up, I run after her.

  Maureen and Andrea are at the table. Jasmine sits placidly in her stroller, clutching her panda with the ripped ear.

  “Where’s Emily?” I ask. “Did she run down here?”

  “She’s missing?” Maureen jumps up, grabbing her black sweater at her throat. The gesture is so histrionic that I want to laugh. But don’t.

  “Where is she? Why did you let her out of your sight?”

  “I told her not to pick the flowers and she took off. The doors open automatically.”

  Maureen is already gone, running towards the entrance. I hear her crying breathlessly, “Did a little girl in a pink sweater run by?” but I don’t hear the reply. I walk up the ramp to the Temperate Pavilion, calling “Emily.” I won’t run in a gesture of panic. Unless she managed to open the double glass doors leading outside, she’s still in the building, probably hiding in one of the other pavilions. I often play hide-and-seek at her house, counting to ten while she hides behind bathroom doors and under beds. “Where’s Emily,” I’ll call before she pops out of her hiding place, screaming, “Here I am.” For her, this is a game.

  I try to believe this. There’s no sign of her as the doors swing open. Images flash through my mind: Emily hit by a car in the parking lot, Emily kidnapped, Emily face down in the pool of water below the bare elm trees. All it takes is one instant of inattention. All my fault. Like the wicked fairy at the christening, I trail bad luck behind me.

  “Emily,” I yell. No answer. She’s hiding. I know she’s hiding. But my heart pounds in my ears so that I can barely hear. I can’t catch my breath. “Emily.”

  Beneath a bare magnolia tree, an elderly couple sits on a bench. Both white-haired, shrunk into themselves.

  “Is Emily about this high?” the man asks, holding the flat of his palm at the level of the bench’s back. I nod. “She ran up that way.”

  I hurry around the curving path, past the goldfish pond, the oak trees with a few clinging dead leaves, the rhododendron bushes. At the little bridge, Emily leans over the top log, staring down into the water.

  “Emily, why did you run away?” I grab her arm as she attempts to sprint by me. She pulls. I swing her up on my hip. “You scared me.” She hides her face in my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. How quickly we learn that word and its power. I hug her, feeling that fragile vulnerability of small limbs.

  I walk slowly down the ramp. “She’s here,” I call at the bottom. “She’s fine.”

  Maureen rushes over and grabs Emily from my arms. A sudden emptiness. I’m reminded once again of my insignificance to their lives. I should feel relief. Instead, thick anger surges through me, so strong I cannot speak.

  I walk away. Maureen calls my name, but I ignore her. Pulling on my coat, I push open the outsi
de door, which would have been too heavy for a small child to open. I know Maureen believes that somehow I broke the rules, didn’t placate the spirits, left some rite undone. She has backed away, afraid that my bad-luck shadow will fall upon her house.

  Whyte Noise

  COMING OUT OF A BAD relationship, Zoe retreated to Edmonton. Late July she found a place in the Strathcona district. A tiny apartment, it was up three flights of purple stairs with a bedroom under eaves so low she couldn’t stand up in the corners, a short hallway, and a kitchen/living room with large windows looking out into the branches of an elm tree. She liked the idea of living in a garret. There was a decayed charm in the sloping chipped walls, in the canopy of green elms lining the streets, in the university area with its coffee shops and bars.

  The house sat on a corner lot. Built as a single-family home in 1918, it had slipped down the social rung into a boarding house for unwed mothers in the twenties, bottomed out as a rooming house in the dirty thirties. Converted to a hospice for parents with terminally ill children, it had recently been bought by an older woman with crinkly grey hair.

  The first month Zoe melted. August heat collected under the eaves, pooled in the low corners. During the evening, she sat in a lawn chair on the fire escape, drinking strawberry daiquiris in blue-stemmed glasses with her new boyfriend. The sun set in orange strips behind the cardboard skyline. At night she left the windows open. Her boyfriend, Grant, radiated like a furnace. They kicked off the blanket and sheets and set a small rotating fan on the floor with a bucket of ice in front of it. The fan oscillated slowly, each pass of cool air soothing her prickly skin. One night she straddled Grant, rubbed ice cubes over his chest, goose bumps flaring under her fingertips.

  Each weekend as the bars on Whyte Avenue closed, crowds of students would stumble by, boisterously shouting “Fuckin’ A, man!” and other profanities punctuated by “Whooohoo” catcalls. A drunken nocturnal parade. One night a girl screamed. Primal screams. No words, just the sound of a jet engine taking off. A scream queen in a B-grade flick. They looked outside. A girl in a short green coat, a man in a leather bomber jacket. Standing five feet apart, they faced each other, a showdown without guns. The woman screamed again.