Horrors and Dreams: A Short Novel

Horrors and Dreams

Grant Palmquist

Horrors and Dreams

Copyright © 2016 by Grant Palmquist All rights reserved.

First Smashwords Edition: March 2016

Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer—both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.

– Bram Stoker, Dracula

1

Chase’s oft-repeated question about why I never dated, I figured, had to do with his own coming-of-age. Chase was fifteen now and undoubtedly had some interest in girls. Typically a son learns from his father, but in this area I was devoid of answers. I had only been on a handful of dates since Nancy died in the car crash in downtown Houston—where we still lived to this day—and each one of the dates had been an utter disaster.

After a while I gave up and accepted the single life. It gave me more time to watch movies, read, exercise, and spend time with Chase anyway, which diluted some of the lonesomeness that coincided with perpetual bachelordom. Of course, there was always the desire for sex within me, but that was cured through such prosaic means as masturbation. What wasn’t cured was my roaming eye. It seemed the more I tried to accept the single life, the more attractive each woman became, as if I had perpetual beer goggles on. Women I would have never been attracted to before suddenly took on an air of magic, no matter how fat and ugly they were, as if to touch them would have somehow relieved me of all my anxieties and worries. I could smell them from a distance, could imagine the way they’d feel if only I had the courage to hold them.

Well, son, I once said to Chase as we played chess, I just like hanging around you more than women.

Chase gave me a one-cornered smile and eyed me suspiciously, then returned his focus to the chessboard with a laugh. Yeah, right.

He was right.

I loved hanging out with him, but it didn’t fully cure the hole inside me that only a woman could fill, and the more I tried to find ways to fill it, the more I collided with the reality that there was no way to truly find happiness without a lover in my life. It had been so long since I’d known what it felt like to give affection to or receive it from a woman, I’d almost completely forgotten.

It was about time I remembered.

I began by creating a profile on a dating website called FINDURLOVER.

Chase took a picture of me in our backyard with his iPhone. The sun was setting behind me, the smell of must and grass swimming through the air. I didn’t want too much light, afraid it would accentuate the wrinkles and crow’s-feet in my forty-three-year-old face. I’d never been good at faking smiles, so it took a few tries to get it right.

What’s this for anyway? Chase asked.

Just a little project I’m working on.

He tilted his head to the side. You’re signing up for a dating site, huh?

Maybe, I said.

It’s about time.

About time for what?

For you to get a girlfriend.

What about you? I laughed.

I’m working on it, Chase said.

Later, after I’d uploaded the picture and filled out my profile, I messaged a few women on the site. First there was Kathy, a thirty-five-year-old teacher with reddish hair and blue eyes, who described herself as Looking for Mr. Right. Whether I was Mr. Right or not I was unsure—my gut told me I wasn’t—but on the off chance I was, I gave it a shot. Then there was Jennifer, a blondish-brown-haired girl with olive skin and a charming smile. Jennifer was Seeking That Special Someone, whom I could glean from her description was your typical tall, dark, and handsome fellow, which obviously I was not, but I messaged her nevertheless. Lastly, I messaged Lisa, a woman who was Just Looking for a Good Guy, which I at least felt like I was, although some might have disagreed.

I sent all three of them essentially the same message: Hi, I noticed your profile and was interested in talking with you. I sat around and tried to think of something more to say, but there was really nothing to add, so I copied the text and sent it to all three of them… and, quite literally, waited in front of the computer for them to respond, my fingers trembling on the mouse.

When it got to around ten o’clock and none of them had bothered to answer my message, I went to bed and lay there, eyes wide open, thoughts running like a train through my mind, heart pounding in my throat. Through the window to my right, the full moon hung in the sky like a mocking face.

I was tempted to get up and delete my profile because, for whatever reason, I began to think I’d go somewhere, say Barnes & Noble, and somehow women would recognize me as the fool who’d been reduced to searching for women on a dating website. Of course the thought was absurd, but it repeated like a loop in my mind, and I finally got up, went to the computer, and checked one last time to see whether anyone had responded.

They hadn’t.

Instead of going back to bed, I surfed the Internet, chin in hand, that old habit of clicking around out of pure boredom. Anything was better than tossing and turning with my heart pounding rapidly in my skull, so I figured I’d stay here, maybe pour a cup of coffee and waste the night away, and that was what I did. I searched for ways to meet women, for if online dating wasn’t going to work—and granted, it hadn’t even been a full night yet, but I was getting the overwhelming feeling it would not work—then it seemed like it was nearly impossible to meet someone in this digital age where nobody really communicated anymore.

There was varying advice: go to a wine bar and look intriguing, which was a bit puzzling, at least to me; wander through a bookstore and find a woman who’s reading a book and claim that you’ve read it too and hope to God she doesn’t ask questions about it; and go to a coffee shop and start up random conversations with strangers. None of these seemed like realistic scenarios when I pictured them in my head. It was as if someone had listed different ways he’d seen people meet in a movie and thought they would work in real life. I was almost certain none of them would work for me. When I tried to picture each scenario, they all ended in disaster. For example, I imagined myself striking up a conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop and every person in the place stared at me, their mouths agape, while the girl in question, her face an indistinguishable blur, went about rejecting me loudly enough that everyone could hear, and the observing crowd broke into the type of laugh track you’d hear on old comedy shows like Seinfeld, while I felt as though I were shrinking before them. And me trying to look intriguing at a wine bar? By what, wearing sunglasses indoors?

It was all elusive to me, a foreign world.

I’d been lucky enough to meet my wife, Nancy, the way I had at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, where I was studying accounting and she was majoring in English. We’d happened to take a speech class together and had to work on a project about someone who’d changed the course of history. We settled on Winston Churchill, whom she admired for his speeches, which was fitting.

We met on the weekend at Mary and John Gray Library and worked on the project. We were both shy, so in the beginning we focused on the work, but there was a detectable air of sexual tension underlying everything. The way she glanced at me, then looked down with a slight smile, her cheeks flushing. The way I couldn’t help but softly touch her when making a point, an electric charge sprinting up my skin, her sugary scent dilating my nostrils. It was something I could hardly believe I’d tried today, touching her, taking that chance. It was as if I were a different person then, but I knew it was only the momentary courage of youth, the idea that there was always tomorrow if something went wrong, another chance just around the corner.

Nancy wasn’t what everyone would have considered beautiful, but to me there was something about her, a glow to her that drew me in, an otherworldliness within the green of her eyes. I wanted to know everything about her, and that first day together we talked long into the night, revealing our inner selves and finally revealing our outer selves.

I really like you, she’d said as we lay together in the darkness.

I really like you too.

2

It got to where I was thinking of Nancy all the time, remembering what it felt like to have her lying next to me, to touch her soft skin, to inhale her scent.

Back then just the sense that someone else was beside me, moving through this life with me, was enough to keep me going. Twelve years and I still couldn’t let Nancy go.

She was gone, never to come back again, and it was time I fully accepted it and moved on.

But each morning it began to feel as if there was a hollowness on the side of the bed where Nancy used to sleep. Sometimes I’d wake in the night and see her there, and her hologram-like image would change from fresh and full of life to a corpse-like shell and then disappear altogether, the dust from her hollow body floating around the room.

I could barely focus at work, my mind firing on all cylinders all the time, thinking of ways