Fiction | December 01, 1999
Tad Lincoln’s Ladder of Dreams
Emily Pease
Winner of 1998 Editors’ Prize in Fiction.
This story is available via the PDF link below.
If she held séances, then you can understand it, there were so many deaths. How she watched her little boy die. How her eyes turned to the small shallow spot in the bed — his ghost — when they finally lifted him away from the sheets. Feverish boy, with wet brown hair, glassy-eyed. She had wiped his brow. Had held his small hand and caressed each small finger, lifting them at the knuckles. Laid her head on his chest, his tender ribs, to hear his dying heart. In the upstairs room a window had been opened. Rain puddled on the sill. The boy’s cat stepped its quiet paws over the floor, rubbed its back against the bed, crouched to jump — its back legs tight, ready to spring — while the boy lay in his dark fever. But she lunged at the cat, kicking her stiff black shoe at its head, so terrified had she become that her boy would be robbed of his last tiny breath.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT

Fiction
May 17 2022
Gone
Gone Linda Wastila The late May morning I drove east from Chapel Hill, I didn’t pay much mind to the tracts of yellowed corn and soy or the tobacco-curing… read more

Fiction
May 17 2022
The Cadence of Waves
The Cadence of Waves Trent Hudley Leon showed up the day of the blackout in December of 1998, toward the end of some extreme El Niño weather we’d been having… read more

Fiction
May 17 2022
Palace Rock
Palace Rock by Mason Kiser On Mondays, we ruled the sea. Lightning lashed the whitecaps, and thunder shook the hull, and rain fell so slantwise that it ripped to shreds… read more