Aquasynthesis by Grace Bridges

Author:Grace Bridges [Bridges, Grace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, fantasy, short stories, science fiction, dark, metafiction, splashdown books, splashdown
Publisher: Grace Bridges
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

~}~~~{~

So, against my better judgment, I watched Penelope Williams a little more carefully. Her behavior was extraordinary only in its consistency. Miss Williams was always well-behaved, always studious, and always cooperative with her classmates. Her diet was unremarkable. She ate the cafeteria food without complaint, even if she never seemed to find enough time to finish her lima beans or Brussels sprouts. It would have been suspicious if she had. On the playground, she favored jump rope and tetherball, though she was content to simply stroll about the yard, smiling a quiet little Mona Lisa smile, waving here and there at her friends, laughing at some shouted joke or whispered confidence.

If there was anything magical about Penny Williams, I wasn’t seeing it. She was a nice little girl, and perhaps that was magic enough. I felt like some backwater cop on a stakeout, waiting through endless hours of stale donuts and cold cups of coffee for something, anything, to happen. Dull, dogged flatfoot that I was, I kept watching.

Nothing interesting transpired until Penny’s family took a trip over two school days in the middle of October. Was it just my imagination, or was the class a little harder to handle, a little more fractious than usual, a little less focused on their lessons?

Maybe it was the heat. The cooler wasn’t working, and opening the windows didn’t generate enough flow to clear the stuffy air from my classroom. I couldn’t blame the confluence of Indian summer and a seized compressor on the absent mystical aura of a nine-year-old pixie from south Alabama, could I? My colleagues passed me in the hallway with Cheshire Cat grins, sage nods, or amusedly tolerant shakes of the head and the ever-inscrutable “Mmm-hmm.”

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