The Absent
by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

I had a dream last night of taxidermy. In some strange corner of my mother’s house; that is, my mother’s and my aunt’s house—the two of them absent. But Lucie Beale was with me in the dream. We were on the floor sitting talking like Indians, as though we were children playing, the way as a child I used to play on the floor beneath the dining room table. There was a wolf with us on the floor, or was it a fox, if a fox a large one, although remembering the dream it looked more like a wolf. Sprawled on its side like a dog sleeping, but it was a wolf that had been skinned and stuffed. I began petting it in the dream, though Lucie Beale refused to pet it, and as I was petting it,

    it came back to life and leapt up and ran away.