This is an edited extract from Little Plum by Laura McPhee-Browne, author of the award-winning Cherry Beach.
Little Plum is available now through Text Publishing. Scan the QR code for more frankie favourites.
This story is about Coral.
Coral is 29 years old, and she doesn’t know what she wants. She has been doing an online dream course in her spare time, curated by Jungian analysts in America. The dream course suggests that she keep a dream diary, and because she wants the course to show her something, she writes down her dreams every morning, in a notebook lined with blue.
It has become apparent that she often dreams about her mother.
When Coral was a toddler, her mother let her eat anything she wanted: sand, sticks, playdough, puffs of dust from the corners of their tired old terrace house. Once, her mother tells her annually, they were at the park and Coral wandered off and came back to show her mother a ladybird she had placed on the tip of her little pink tongue, which she promptly swallowed. It makes Coral’s mother laugh with delight to relay this, and confuses Coral. She believes ladybirds to be special, and can’t imagine wanting to eat one – to vanish it into her tummy. She will never understand why her mother didn’t try to get her to spit the poor beetle out. Sometimes she believes it has resurfaced and she can feel it in her
