Every night, Walter dreams the same dream.

A lady with sun-bright hair, who smells of fine spun sugar.

She whirls him around and combs through his hair with cool, dry, hands, but he can never quite see her face. It can’t be any of the Sisters around Saint Ursula’s; their hands are calloused and are most often found wrapped around the forearms of children like the boa constrictors he reads about in picture books at the library.

The lady in his dreams is the golden warmth of late summer, when the annual town festival bursts across the weed-choked empty lot behind the city hall in an array of rainbow banners and billowing tents. Walter has only ever passed through once, with two other saucer-eyed children and a flustered Sister who hurried them across the sticky concrete, while they turned their necks every which way to drink in the sights and sounds through the roiling sea of fair-goers.

In his dream, she spins him around and around like the carousel he glimpsed between the mass of bodies that day, lacquered horses and gleaming lights swirling in time with the distant notes of a calliope. Walter has never known his parents, though he’s sure he must have had some once. Some of the other children can remember theirs, but he can never picture a face no matter how hard he tries. Maybe it’s for the better, he thinks. What if his parents turned out to be people he didn’t like? If he could pick and choose, Walter thinks, he would like the lady from his dreams to be his mother.

He’s tried to ask her before, but trying to speak in his dreams feels like wading through molasses. The smell of burnt sugar sticks the words to the roof of his mouth--are you my mother?

But he startles awake each time, the sound of her laughter giving way to faraway chime of morning bells.