How I Came to Haunt My Parents

by Natalee Caple

  “Well, this is awkward,” said the lion. “You are still here.”

  “Yes,” sighed the sheep. “But I’m poisonous,” she tried.

  “You are not poisonous, but I had a wonderful dream and I think we can make it together.”

  “I had a wonderful dream too!” said the sheep.

  They told each other their dreams, repeating them over and over until the previous reality seemed unthinkable.

  You choose who you are.

  The Sailor and the Fish

  A SAILOR WHO HAD ALL the best intentions went fishing one day in a little boat let down from her ship in the center of the ocean. The day was very hot and the waves were very slow and before long the sailor fell asleep with her hat shielding her face and her fishing rod gone slack in her hand over the side of the boat. Hours passed and she floated far from her ship. The rod slipped from her hand and sank. Her arms and legs burned deep red. At last she woke and realized that she was lost. She sat in the bottom of the boat and cried for herself until she heard another voice crying and the sound of gnawing below her.

  “Who is there?” she called. “Am I not alone?”

  But the source of the tears and the gnawing did not identify itself. After a little while the sailor saw a large gray body move under the water near her boat. The mysterious figure swam just beneath the surface, circling the boat slowly. Then it seemed as if the creature doubled upon itself and the sailor heard the gnawing again.

  “Who are you?” she called. “What are you doing?”

  But the creature did not answer. A swirl of blood rose on the seafoam over the spot from where the sound emanated. The sailor became frightened and began to lament her fate out loud. After a minute the gnawing went silent and the creature beneath the boat was still. But the sailor continued to ululate over her foolishness and the end of her life in sheer loneliness. At last she heard a voice.

  “I’m a fish, just a fish. I have eaten all my children and now I am eating myself.”

  “Why did you eat your children?” the sailor asked.

  “Out of hunger.”

  “And why are you eating yourself?”

  “Out of grief.”

  The sailor lay back in the boat and looked at the sky. She wiped her tears with her hat and gathered her breaths until she felt calm again. It would be days until she died of dehydration, but more if it rained and she had to starve. In those days she might be rescued or she might not.

  “Well, I suppose you must not have had a choice,” she said to the fish. “At any rate, I am glad for some company.”

  “I had no choice. And I am glad to tell that to someone,” said the fish, and they stayed together for as long as possible.

  Things are never so simple as when you are sad.

  The Snake and the Woodsman

  A SNAKE, HAVING MAD HIS hole near the porch of a cottage, inflicted a bite upon the ankle of the woodsman who lived there. The woodsman grabbed the snake and shook it. He screamed at the snake and lifted him up and threw him in a barrel. The woodsman rolled the barrel down a hill and across a field and all the while he chided the snake for its nature. The woodsman and the snake crossed two more fields and then, still not satisfied that the snake had been punished, nor that the snake had been moved far enough from his porch, the woodsman tied the barrel to the back of a rowboat and floated it behind him as he rowed and rowed and rowed across a great channel.

  At the shore of a foreign land, the woodsman took the barrel to a local market to sell the snake as a slave to a snake charmer. But the woodsman could not speak the language and so he had to take the snake with him for many, many lessons — until he could return with the snake to the market. By this time the woodsman had become accustomed to the snake in the barrel who, he assumed, had long since repented the bite. At night he often sat upon the barrel and thought how lucky he was not to have died from that bite, which had gone untreated. He wondered about his wife and infant son and if they would ever accept the snake if he were to return home with it as a pet. He wondered if it might be best if he stayed in this new land, speaking his new language. He wondered if he should take on a trade where he might become richer than a woodsman, able to build a house with special snake doors and furniture for the snake so that they might live in peace as equals. He spoke of all these things to the snake and he sang lonesome songs deep into the night as he drank wine and slept with his head propped against the barrel.

  At last he decided that he must free the snake and they should decide together to make a life or to go their separate ways. By this time he was quite old and gray and had forgotten the route back to his cottage, had forgotten even the name of his wife. And so he lifted the lid from the barrel and saw that it was empty. How can this be, he wondered. I have spent fifty years with this snake and at the last minute he vanishes!

  Back at the man’s cottage the nest of snakes left behind had grown so huge that the grass and trees were hissing with them. The woodsman’s wife had left long ago with their child and, assuming that he had died from the bite, she had remarried and been happy. Their child had grown and developed talents in archery and music. He had married a girl he loved, who was funny and warm, and who his father would have liked. Together they raised sweet children. Those children, the woodsman’s grandchildren, learned songs and these they sang to the stars every night. All this, the woodsman never heard nor saw for he spent the rest of his days gazing into the empty barrel.

  Invest appropriately in your relationships. Also, look in the barrel.

  Mousetrap

  A FARMER TRAPPED A GROUP of mice that he feared were responsible for eating the seeds in his field. Inside the cage the mice introduced themselves to each other. Some were family, some were friends, but many were strangers. One mouse suggested that they could escape by cooperating to open the cage.

  “The ceiling of the cage is the weakest point,” he noted.

  The ceiling was high, but made of mesh and the little door there was held shut by a piece of twine that would be easy to chew apart. The walls, however, were smooth, oiled metal and no purchase could be made by their little feet.

  “What we need to do is stand upon each other’s shoulders and make a tower. The mouse that reaches the ceiling can jump onto the mesh, chew open the door and go and find something to lower to the other mice through the opening,” their clever new leader said.

  Even a long stick would do for mice are very good at climbing and at balancing as long as they have the least friction or grip on a surface. And so the mice agreed on this plan and began to climb upon each other’s shoulders. They swayed back and forth as the tower grew. The mouse who had invented the plan waited to be the last to climb to the mesh and release his brother and sister mice.

  “Hurry,” he urged. “Hold still. Don’t sway like that.”

  At last he climbed the frame of bodies and reached the ceiling and destroyed the fragile twine that held the door closed. He disappeared, slamming shut the exit behind him and yelling, “Goodbye!”

  The other mice tumbled to the floor.

  “Sedition! Sedition!” they screamed, stomping and jumping and weeping with betrayal.

  Miserable hours followed in which they made peace with their inevitable drowning. At last the farmer returned and grabbed the cage. He tied the cage in a burlap bag used to hold potatoes and took the cage with him to the river. At the river he flung the cage onto the water and left the mice to die. Water filled the bag quickly. The baby mice cried and clamped themselves onto their mothers’ bodies. Older mice began quoting stories about the afterlife barely recalled from their childhoods. Married couples declared their devotion or confessed their infidelities. It was a sight to equal the greatest human disaster. The mice scrambled to swim in the water, rising as the surface rose until at last they were pressed against the mesh of the ceiling.

  “Wait, we can escape now,” cried one mouse. “Le
t us escape through the door and then through the mouth of the bag and swim to shore.”

  “I can’t swim!” cried one mouse in despair.

  “Then I will carry you,” said another.

  Quickly, quickly they swam through the mesh and through the mouth of the burlap bag and they found themselves in the current of a great body of water. On the horizon a strange vision emerged: the mouse who had abandoned them riding in the open mouth of a pelican. The bird flew down and scooped all the mice into his ballooning jaw and flew them to safety on the shore. As they were deposited into the sweet dry grasses some of the mice began to clamor for revenge against the one who they believed had betrayed them. Others insisted that he was the hero of the day and should be rewarded. At last the mouse himself spoke up.

  “Friends,” he said, “when I yelled goodbye I was speaking to the farmer. If it seemed as if I slammed the door it was because I moved so hastily. I went to find a rope and when I returned you were gone. I bribed the pelican with a ring I stole at great danger to myself from the farmer’s wife. He traded the ring with a magpie for information to find you. We came at once and saved you. I never betrayed you, but the task was more difficult and took almost too long to complete. If you had all perished I would have taken my life for the guilt.”

  When the other mice realized what the first mouse had gone through to rescue them they felt ashamed.

  “Forgive us,” they cried. “And thank the pelican and the magpie for us. Thank you for returning.”

  After that day the mice knew to trust each other even in moments of great anxiety.

  There is always more than one hero. At the end of a story it is only the ending that matters.

  The Caribou and the Leopard Frog

  IT WAS CLOSE TO CHRISTMAS when a caribou was surrounded by hunters in an Arctic glen. The hunters, dressed in white, silently circled the animal who raised her head high and looked out over the watercourse and cried.

  “No,” said the caribou. “I love to travel, but I suspect that you are lousy companions.”

  A red dart sank into her neck and she saw the ground before her knees as she crumpled.

  The caribou woke in a concrete room. A shallow moat of dirty water separated her from a glass wall behind which stood a row of children in thick trousers and jackets with mittens like massacred hands dangling from strings out their sleeves, looking for all the world as if the living creature waking before them was of less interest than stale bread.

  Twice a day the caribou was dressed in bells and led outside to pretend (with other deerish peers) that they had some vested interest in a fat man. Music played too loudly hurt her ears and the smells of perfume, gasoline and cigarette butts almost obscured the scent of water, weeds, trees and feathers warm on the bodies of free-flying birds. The caribou sniffed again and sighed. The zoo was in a valley that meandered for miles in every direction. But the caribou was tethered to a sled.

  On the evening before Christmas hailstones began to pelt the buildings. The bunker where the caribou slept resisted the balls of ice, but the glass ceilings of the greenhouses shattered and cold rushed in to kill the flowers, butterflies, moths and gentle ferns. The caribou woke to see cages of birds and frogs lining her prison. Bright eyes looked back at her and for the first time in weeks soft voices called all around her.

  “I’ve been so lonely,” she said.

  “This is a fine opportunity,” said one voice.

  The caribou looked down to see a meadowfrog freely hopping back and forth across the room.

  “Yes, yes, this is fine!” called the bright green beast.

  “Yes, yes?” said the caribou.

  “Look at the door!”

  True enough, the door at the back of the enclosure, which was usually bolted shut, lay slightly ajar, the corridor behind it lit and empty. The caribou looked down at the excited frog. Her eyes were large and dark, glittering with some plan. The frog’s pale little throat bulged. The dark spots on her back seemed suddenly cheetah-like, less innocent.

  “Lie down,” the frog said.

  The caribou lay down in the pointy straw one last time and the frog jumped up on her shoulder.

  “You’ll be too cold,” the caribou said.

  “Your coat is thick around your neck. I’ll hide in here. Go into the corridor. Go out into the night. Follow the paved road to the entrance. The parking lot will be empty. There is a field beside an orchard and beyond the orchard there is a valley. Let’s go.”

  The caribou and the frog exited the zoo. It was a very starry night and the hail had broken branches, which lay across their path. The ground beneath the caribou’s hooves was lovely and uneven. She watched her own breath crystallize as she stepped and stepped and stepped away from the sled, from the bells, from the burned candy apples and the smoky oil smell of the cafeteria. She let the cold blow out her senses and she found the river and followed it. On her shoulder the little frog sang.

  (Readers, I ask you for the moral of the story.)

  The Caribou and the Lynx

  A CARIBOU WOKE IN THE land of dreams beside her friend, the lynx. They walked together beside an ocean, at the base of mountains and then over the sharp apex of peaks, through a deep wood, around a carnival. They rode on a carousel with children on their backs. They danced on the bow of a ship. They walked together around the Earth’s waist and as they walked they spoke.

  “That is a line from Strindberg,” said the lynx.

  “No, it isn’t. Isn’t it strange that we should meet here when we could have met anywhere?” said the caribou.

  “Do you mean on Earth? I like to think we met because we could be friends. I am your friend.”

  “You are my friend because we both know that the Greek for lynx is lunx, which means light, brightness, and it refers to your eyes.”

  “I think I am your friend because I don’t eat red meat.”

  “And I am your friend because I do not judge you.”

  “I am your friend because you love to walk.”

  They wondered as they wandered about the circumstances of their lives and if the tundra would melt and if the mice would all be eaten and if the sorrows of humans could ever be forgotten even by the frozen grass. At Liding Bridge they paused and said at once, “We’ve been here before, but then we were married.” They looked at the bridge, at its brown arc under snow, and wondered in silence, how could that be? Perhaps we were other people. Were we ever other people?

  Night rolled out and the lynx hummed to hide the sound of her stomach rumbling.

  “It’s all right,” the caribou said softly. “I will always be your friend.”

  The Lark Burying Her Father

  IF TIME HAS A DISCRETE shape and that shape echoes the shape of this Earth in that it is circular, and if the lark in her organic loveliness does predate this shape, time and the Earth itself, as one fable suggests, then what was she to do when called upon to bury her dead except to bury them in her own mind? Not only her father, as the story goes, but the history of larks inasmuch as it had begun. And so, as that legend says, the lark’s crest is her father, every moment of him that she knew, but the crest becomes the symbol of her larkness, written in her genes. The legend was meant to describe biology as the way time buries each of us in the bodies of our others. If the peak of each feather is a quality of him that she retains then, so too, the peak of hair on my mother’s brow is her mother, settled there.

  And the lines of my hand, which are so similar to the lines of my father’s, are so because one day he will lie in my hand as I will lie in the hands of my children: a simian crease to be worried over, smoothed and pressed. Someone will give the greenness of my eyes to someone I will never meet. In this way we exist in the past and the future. We paint upon each other all day long, knowing and unknowing, growing into one relative and growing out of another, reading and unreading where we came from, what we mi
ght become.

  We never disappear.

  Acknowledgments

  “Liars in the Land of Crows” is for Jonathan Ball.

  “Pinhole” is for Dianne Bos.

  “The Traveler Is Lost” is for Patricia Caple.

  “The Lark Burying Her Father” is for Russell Caple.

  “The Caribou and the Leopard Frog” is for Jowita Bydlowska.

  “The Caribou and the Lynx” is for Nikki Sheppy.

  “This Is the Story of a Good Mother. This is Her Picture” is for Suzanne Caple Hicks and Marc Hicks.

  "How I Came to Haunt My Parents" is for Andrew, Heidi, Maude and Ford Pyper.

  I would like to thank Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis for their talent and enthusiasm as writers and publishers and especially for bringing this book into being. I would like to thank the members of my short story club Jonathan Ball, Cathy Ostlere, Chris Blaise, and W. Mark Giles for writing stories with me except for Jonathan who was a (oops) fine competitor. I would like to thank my family (the one I was born into and the one I married into) as always for their love and support and for providing me with material. I would like to thank my beloved husband Jeremy who is perfectly fantastic. I would like to thank my children Imogen and Cassius for making me laugh all day long.

  I owe thanks to Michelle Berry, Jonathan Bennett, Stu Baird, Wendy Morgan, Nikki Sheppy, Natalie Zina-Walschots, Susan Swan, Patrick Crean, Hilary McMahon, Nick Kazamia, Ann Shin, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, Priscila Uppal, Julia Creet, Ailsa Kay, and Derek Beaulieu for kindnesses and assistance in difficult times.