Dancing in Dreamtime Read Free Page B

Veronica often came here with her parents to picnic or camp. At first she had been frightened by the flying specters, with their talons and fangs, their metal hooks for hands and barbed tails and tentacles. When she pointed them out with a shudder, her parents dismissed her worries. “Monsters in the trees!” her mother echoed teasingly. “Let’s have a look,” her father said, shining his flashlight into the branches. The beam swept over a white-bearded gnome, a scarlet devil, and a burly gorilla, all clear as day to Veronica. But her father merely said, “See there, kiddo, just empty trees. Nothing to worry your pretty head about.”
    She soon lost her fear of the creatures, and never again mentioned them to her parents. From the first she knew perfectly well what they were, these goblins and ghouls, these shaggy wolves, these hunchbacks and witches and mad scientists. Some she recognized from her own dreams, especially the nightmarish beasts, while others—the hunter, wizard, or drowned sailor—appearedin dreams recounted by her friends. It seemed reasonable to her as a child that these nighttime visitors would spend the daylight hours roosting in trees, like owls.
    Back in those years before puberty, when girls still looked at her without jealousy and boys without lust, she would hike up to the forested ridge with friends at dawn or dusk to see if they noticed the specters swirling overhead. Only one of those friends—a languid boy with sunken cheeks and forehead pasted with sweaty hair—ever seemed aware of the chattering flocks. “Do you hear that?” he said to her one night. “Hear what?” she asked hopefully. “That whispery sound,” he said, “like river rapids far away.” Another evening he squinted up into the bustling air and observed, “The sky is full of colored patches.” “What shape are they?” she asked. “I can’t make them out,” he said, “they keep shifting, like jewels in a kaleidoscope.” Soon afterward, the boy took to his bed and died of leukemia, leaving Veronica alone with her visions.

    And so when the bearded stranger sat down next to her on the bench one April morning and said with a secretive air, “Have you noticed there aren’t nearly so many dreams these days?” Veronica neither glared at him nor fled. Instead, she gripped the edge of the bench to still her trembling and waited to hear what he would say next.
    He recalled the hardwood forest that once covered this ridge where the hospital now sprawled amid parking lots and landscaped grounds, and then she recalled how as a girl she would climb the fire tower and gaze with wonder over a sea of trees. Of course the tower had long since been taken down, together withall but a scattering of trees that were spared to provide islands of shade on the groomed lawns.
    â€œThe city keeps on expanding,” the man said, waving a bony hand at the horizon. “Any day you can hear chainsaws and bulldozers leveling another woods.”
    â€œIt’s worrisome,” said Veronica. She stole a glance at the man, so pale and thin, his hair and sparse beard as blond as corn silk. His blue eyes, glinting behind the spectacles like pebbles at the bottom of a creek, shyly avoided looking at her.
    â€œThe fewer the trees, the fewer the dreams,” the man went on. “Some people get only half a sleep’s worth, others don’t get any. That’s why the hospital is so busy. That’s why the city is boiling with anger and fear. People are going nuts from dream deprivation.”
    Veronica had been disturbed by the same thought, and was about to tell him so. But before she could speak, she burst out laughing, overjoyed to meet someone who shared her vision.
    Abruptly the man stood up. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”
    â€œOh, you’re not bothering me.”
    â€œYou’re laughing. You probably