(eng) Karen Myers - The Hounds of Annwn 04 by Bound into the Blood (retail)

Author:Bound into the Blood (retail) [Blood, Bound into the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

George was young again, and his mother was making him breakfast. He remembered what it was to be child-sized, looking up at his tall mother who always seemed to have a smile for him.

She told him stories every night. He’d been so surprised once he was old enough to realize that other mothers didn’t make up stories for their children. Hers went on and on, and they never repeated. The same characters would appear, but the stories about them changed every time. She’d told him that he used to object to that when he was smaller, but he had no memory of it. Instead, he found it exciting trying to anticipate what new situation his familiar friends would encounter each night and how they would handle it.

If his father was home, he would listen, too, sometimes, in silence.

He wasn’t there now, just his mother, in the morning light of the cottage’s little kitchen. She took his plate away and put it in the sink and stood looking out the kitchen window, her right hand over her stomach.

Then she turned her head and looked back at him. “Be careful, dear,” she said.

The colorful, sunlit scene dissolved before him like melting wax, and he woke with tears on his cheeks and his heart pounding.

Why did it feel like a nightmare, there at the end, he wondered, as he wiped the moisture off his face and tried to slow his breathing.

I haven’t dreamt about my mother like that since my first couple of years in Virginia, after she died. How much of that was real, and how much imagination?

He thought her posture at the window was a real memory. He recognized it now, though he hadn’t as a boy. That was the protective stance of a woman carrying a child. His never-to-be-born brother. Gil the Ghost.

He’d forgotten her wonderful stories. How could he not have remembered? Did she ever write them down, or did she just make them up and forget them the next day? Were they in those boxes of her writing that he hadn’t finished going through yet?

And there was something else. She reminded him of someone.

Of course. She reminds me of Angharad. Not physically, he’d have noticed that, but the way her creative mind worked. I seem to have imprinted on artistic women who are older than me, he thought, amused. And me without a drop of creative juice in me.

He pursed his lips. And maybe that’s why, he thought. He was used to competent women who spent hours every day making something from nothing. He just hadn’t realized that was a key part of the feel of “home” to him.

He smiled, in the dark. He’d have to tell Angharad, when he saw her again.

Seething Magma had painted a clear image of the scene in his mind when she returned from her delivery this evening. She’d been sitting on the veranda with Bedo, Maelgwn, and Alun. And the animals, of course. Mag had relayed the messages and Angharad’s amusement at all the roses.

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