Free Slices by Michael Montoure Page A

warm in his arms. Watching her
take her first steps, feeling tiny hands wrap around his fingers.
Taking her out to a park, around the lake in a stroller, sunlight
streaming down in ribbons between the branches as she tried to catch
falling leaves.
    She
always looked the same. He wondered about this, by day, about why his
mind had latched on to one particular image of the child he’d
never had.
    Sammy
was almost never in these dreams. But he never wondered why.
    He
would lay half-awake in bed some weekend mornings after these dreams,
sometimes for nearly an hour, not quite willing to leave the warm
haze of sleep and rejoin the world, missing his daughter already.
    He
tried talking to Sammy. Not about the dreams; never about the dreams.
Instead, he talked to her about having changed his mind, about
realizing how important to him children really were. They could work
things out, he told her, reprioritize their lives and tighten their
spending habits and make room for a baby, if she was still willing —
    She
wasn’t. She didn’t talk much about why not, just turned
some of his own words back at him evasively, a reasonable, calm
Giaconda smile on her face the entire time. It was like seeing his
own resistance from before reflected back at him, a mirror image
glimpsed through smoke. No baby. It wasn’t time for one.
    Nathan’s
life inverted, crystal-clear and brightly colored visions at night,
and a dream-like fog of wavering waking hours, drifting his way
through hours at work and silent evenings at home. He felt like his
home was haunted, but watching his wife, seeing her as if from a
distance, he couldn’t be sure which one of them was the ghost.
    And
watching his wife, an idea began to grow in his mind.

    He
first saw it one day when she stood in the morning, naked and
unselfconscious, by the side of the bed. She’d just woken up to
the morning light and was facing the window, stretching.
    And
under her skin, something moved.
    He
was sure for a moment that he was dreaming, and he stirred a little
in his half-sleep, and then she looked down and smiled. Put a hand on
her stomach where the movement had been, then cradled her arms around
it, lips moving in unspoken lullaby.
    He
did go back to sleep after that, and woke convinced he’d
imagined it. Then he put it out of his mind all together.
    But
the awareness was there, restless in his deeper mind, and with it,
the suspicion.

    Dreams
went on, as some dreams will. Not long after he’d talked to
Sammy about his wish for children, his dreams brought him another; a
baby sister for his first dream daughter, who was herself a toddler
now, pretty and precocious, hair in impossibly thick dark curls,
already starting to be able to pick out and read a few phrases from
the books he read her — Dr. Suess, Goodnight
Moon, others. He had, in dreams, other books already bought and set aside
for them both when they were older — The
Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Prince, the Narnia stories. Sometimes, in his waking life, he would wander
through bookstores after work, reluctant to come home, and find
copies of these books, run his fingers over their spines.
    As
time wore on and his younger dream daughter had started walking and
his first dream daughter was nearly starting Kindergarten, he dreamed
one night that they were back in the park again, the older girl
skimming stones across the lake and the little one in the stroller, a
little fussy, wanting to be free.
    The
sun was low and huge in the sky and the light was coming down at a
warm summer evening angle, their shadows huge and unreal giants along
the ground. People would smile at Nathan as they passed, admire his
beautiful girls, say “Hello” like old friends. It was
just that kind of evening.
    His
eldest sat at the lake’s edge now, dangling feet just above the
water, tapping the surface of the lake gently with her shoes.
    She
looked up at him, the wide smile she’d had just moments before
suddenly gone. The shadow of a cloud