That night, Dawn was sitting on the couch watching the test pattern on the television. She had no idea what time it was. She had no idea that she was watching a test pattern. The ashtray was filled with butts, bent in the center from having the fire squashed out of them. Behind her, pictures hung askew on the wall. In the pictures, people smiled. Dawn smiled. She held a dark-eyed girl — barely visible under a mass of red snow suit — in her arms. The girl laughed as she pushed both her mittened hands into Dawn's face. Behind them, a wooden toboggan lay on the brilliant white snow under a flawless blue sky.

Staring at the television, Dawn's eyes were as empty as the pattern on the screen.

In his dream, Dale stands at the riverbank. In his dream, the woman he loves casts her line into the water and hooks onto Dale and begins to reel him in. Dale swims away from the tug of the lure and feels pain. Then, in his dream, he stops fighting the tug toward the shore . and the woman, along with the pain, disappears.

He wrote a message to himself on the pad by his bed and went back to sleep, smiling and strangely calm for a man who'd just dreamed of being a fish hooked on a lure.