Cat's Eye - Margaret Atwood [65]
Walking in the forest I find a dead raven. It’s bigger than they look alive. I poke it with a stick, turning it over, and see the maggots. It smells like rot, like rust, and, more strangely, like some sort of food I’ve eaten once but can’t remember. It’s black, but not like a color; more like a hole. Its beak is dingy, horn-colored, like old toenails. Its eyes are shriveled up.
I’ve seen dead animals before, dead frogs, dead rabbits, but this raven is deader. It looks at me with its shriveled-up eye. I could poke this stick right through it. No matter what I do to it, it won’t feel a thing. No one can get at it.
It’s hard to fish from the shore of this lake. There’s nowhere to stand, no dock. We aren’t allowed out in a boat by ourselves because of the currents; anyway we have no boat. Stephen is doing other things. He makes a collection of the boat funnels from the lake freighters, checking them through binoculars. He sets up chess problems and works them out, or splits kindling, or goes for long walks by himself with a butterfly book. He isn’t interested in catching the butterflies and mounting them on a board with pins; he just wants to see them, identify them, count them. He writes them down in a list at the back of the book.
I like looking at the pictures of butterflies in his book. My favorite is the luna moth, huge and pale green, with crescents on the wings. My brother finds one of these, and shows it to me. “Don’t touch it,” he says. “Or the dust will come off its wings, and then it can’t fly.”
But I don’t play chess with him. I don’t start my own list of boat funnels or butterflies. I’m ceasing to be interested in games I can’t win.
Along the edges of the forest, where there’s open sunlight, there are chokecherry trees. The red chokecherries ripen and turn translucent. They’re so sour they dry up the inside of your mouth. I pick them into a lard pail, then sort out the dead twigs and leaves, and my mother makes jelly from them, boiling them up, straining the pits out through a cloth jelly bag, adding sugar. She pours the jelly into hot jars, capping them with paraffin wax. I count the beautiful red jars. I helped make them. They look poisonous.
As if I’ve been given permission I begin to dream. My dreams are brightly colored and without sound.
I dream that the dead raven is alive, only it looks the same, it still looks dead. It hops around and flaps its decaying wings and I wake up, my heart beating fast.
I dream I’m putting on my winter clothes, in Toronto, but my dress doesn’t fit. I pull it on over my head and struggle to get my arms into the sleeves. I’m walking along the street and parts of my body are sticking out through the dress, parts of my bare skin. I am ashamed.
I dream that my blue cat’s eye is shining in the sky like the sun, or like the pictures of planets in our book on the solar system. But instead of being warm, it’s cold. It starts to move nearer, but it doesn’t get any bigger. It’s falling down out of the sky, straight toward my head, brilliant and glassy. It hits me, passes right into me, but without hurting, except that it’s cold. The cold wakes me up. My blankets are on the floor.
I dream that the wooden bridge over the ravine is falling apart. I’m standing on it, the boards crack and separate, the bridge sways. I walk along what’s left, clinging to the railing, but I can’t get onto the hill where the other people are standing because the bridge isn’t attached to anything. My mother is on the hill, but she’s talking to the other people.
I dream I’m picking the chokecherries off the chokecherry tree and putting them into the lard pail. Only they aren’t chokecherries. They’re deadly nightshade berries, translucent, brilliantly red. They’re filled with blood, like the bodies of