Photo courtesy of Daniel Lincoln
During their Friday afternoon catch-up over tea in her office, Amanda tells Isaac about the dream that snapped her awake last night, sweaty and shaking. She’d said something that a client had found offensive—Transphobic or anti-Semitic or racist, she can’t remember. The client posted her remark on Twitter, and it went viral. There were thousands of retweets, thousands of comments about how awful she was. Amanda read these comments in horror, watched the number of retweets climb, and knew there was absolutely nothing she could do.
“I lay there, my heart racing, trying to figure out if it had really happened or was just a dream,” she tells Isaac. “Even after I decided it was a dream, I was still freaked out, because I thought my subconscious was trying to warn me about something. But what?”
“But what?” Isaac repeats. His light blue eyes widen, as if to assimilate more data. “I had a similar experience, years ago. In my dream, I killed a woman. I had to bury her body.”
Isaac describes his dream, which recurred half a dozen times, each iteration the same, over a span of a decade. He killed a woman, and then he buried her body in the crawl space under a house. He couldn’t remember how he had killed her, or why, but other details he remembered perfectly, such as the metal handle of the shovel he used to bury her body. It was striped like a barber pole, silver and red. Peeling duct tape wrapped around the handle chafed the palm of his right hand.
Amanda’s mouth has inadvertently opened, so she closes it. “Weird that you can’t remember how you killed her,” she says.
“You couldn’t remember if you were Transphobic or racist in your dream. Dreams are peculiar, the incidental details they include, the crucial ones they eliminate. But I had the same experience as you: every time I woke up from this dream, I was confused about whether it was in fact a dream, or whether I had really killed her. Even today, talking about this with you, part of me wonders: wait, did I really kill Cathy?” He laughs and sips his tea.
“You knew this woman?” Amanda asks. She twists the string of her teabag around and around her finger.
“Yes.” Isaac tells her about Cathy, some woman he met at a copyright conference in St. Louis, sixteen years ago. He has never seen her since, but he hears from her once or twice a year. “We’re pen pals,” he says.
“You write her?”
“Maybe once a year, about some book I’ve read or film I’ve seen. She likes military history too. And I always send her the Christmas newsletter.”
Amanda grimaces: that awful Christmas newsletter, a joint composition on the part of Isaac and his wife Lynette, featuring, always, their two children, their volleyball championships, proms, and whatnot. There are always pictures of their fat, yellow Labrador, and of the family on annual vacations. Isaac put Amanda on the Christmas newsletter email list seven years ago, when they were in the thick of their affair. Then, for a year or two afterwards, when they were keeping their distance from each other, she was off the list; when things thawed between her and Isaac, she was re-added. Amanda remembers feeling relieved when she saw the “Happy Holidays from the Springs!” email once again in her Inbox. It signified an official return to normality. Every year, Amanda makes herself open the attachment, read it through, and look at the photos of the children, the Lab, and Lynette’s pompom hat or wetsuit or dirndl or bikini, whatever outfit accompanies the current year’s vacation. Amanda looks at these pictures, she regards this as her penance, and then she deletes the email.
“So why did you kill Cathy?”
“You mean in the dream?” Isaac laughs. “The way you articulated that was very peculiar! I have no idea why, just as I have no idea how—what the murder weapon was, what my motive was. Certainly in real life, I feel no antagonism towards Cathy. I haven’t seen her in sixteen years. We just write to each other about biographies of Napoleon and Peter the Great and so forth. But my dreams are so clear and vivid—I can feel the shovel, the duct tape stuck to the handle scratching my palm. The awful urgency to bury the body under the crawl space before someone sees me. And it’s not my house, even, though the crawl space looks similar. This house is made of some kind of pinkish brick.”
“Do you have feelings for Cathy?”
Isaac’s eyes widen. After he ended things with her, Amanda once tried to paint a picture of him, a way of summoning Isaac in his absence. She mixed the color for his eyes, that very light blue, by adding one drop of Ultramarine to a fat dollop of Titanium White.
“Other than a friendly feeling, you mean? Nope. Certainly nothing that would motivate me to kill her.” He laughs. “It is strange, though, how clearly I recall the muscle burn from digging, the loamy, sharp smell of the dirt, and that pinkish brick. I remember the dream more vividly than so many things that have actually happened to me, in real life.”
Such as me, Amanda thinks.
Sometimes, looking at Isaac’s composed, affable expression while they drink their Earl Gray tea in her office on Friday afternoons and take nibbles of the dusty-tasting biscotti Isaac’s daughter Lucy bakes, she wonders if they were ever more to each other than friendly colleagues, first-year associates many years ago, and now both firm partners (Isaac a year before her, the senior partners have always been more enthusiastic about him). If she imagined their affair. It began when they were in Louisville doing document review for the class action case about talcum powder—the plaintiffs argued the baby powder caused ovarian cancer. Document review was the worst of all lawyer chores: boring as hell, yet demanding one’s full concentration. The Kentucky hotel with the boxes and boxes of documents felt like being trapped in a bunker or a desert island, the real world fully receded. Instead of regular meals, she and Isaac ate vending machine potato chips and bar snacks: peanuts still in their oily shells and sticky Buffalo wings that stained Amanda’s best gray skirt. A week into this trench life, they ended up in each other’s arms. Their affair consumed a couple of months and a Christmas newsletter before Isaac called it off. “Too hazardous,” he’d said, meaning for his marriage. Then Amanda had felt like the talcum powder they’d spent months trying to exonerate, prove harmless: something carcinogenic, after all.
Was their past relationship just some deceptively vivid dream?
“Why did your subconscious select Cathy, of all people, do you think?” Amanda says.
Isaac looks amused, as if he can read perfectly the question she wants to ask, that she refrains from asking. “I have no clue. But isn’t burying a body always about repression? Really, your viral tweet dream is a perfect companion to it: I’m no shrink, but don’t you think that one must be about fear of exposure?”
“True.” Amanda takes a bite of her biscotti. It’s dry and almost tasteless, except for the white spheres of some mysterious nut. “Lucy is such a fan of The Great British Baking Show!” their most recent Christmas newsletter had exclaimed. Well, too bad, Lucy can’t bake. This thought cheers Amanda.
“What are you reading these days?” Isaac says. This is what he always says on Friday afternoons, just before he says “Well, see you later,” and returns to his corner office, nicer than hers, with more light, better views, and an orchid with obscene, meaty blooms. His question has a ritual, predictable quality, like the inevitable vacation pictures (snorkeling, skiing, sailing) in his Christmas newsletter. In the past, it’s felt almost soothing. Though now Amanda wonders. Is this how Isaac manages all his women, asking them about books? For Cathy, biographies of kings and generals; for her, novels? Is there a science fiction woman out there, or a mystery woman who reads (obviously) mysteries?
Amanda holds up the book she is reading for her book club—the most efficient way to have a social life, given her demanding job, is to see her friends once a month, in one fell swoop. The book is about the women of the Trojan War. One thing Amanda has learned from it is that, if there is no way to bury a body, the bereaved can throw a handful of dirt on a corpse. That’s enough to get the soul passage across the River Styx. In a pinch, Amanda learned, a handful of dirt will do.
Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com
JMWW 