Spires of Spirit by Gael Baudino

Author:Gael Baudino [Baudino, Gael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Collections & Anthologies
ISBN: 9780451455680
Google: xeweAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0451455681
Publisher: Roc
Published: 1996-12-01T18:30:00+00:00

Now . . .

Elvenhome

Joan knew it was going to be one of her odd days when she drove to work that morning. The sun was too bright, the sky too blue, the fields on either side of the road too green for her to feel at all normal. Traffic about her and landscape unreeling past her windows, she struggled to keep her eyes on the road, to shut the warm, sweet air of midsummer out of her mind.

She could never say exactly what caused these days. If she tried very hard, she could push the whole question away . . . for a while. The air was clearer maybe, the polluted Denver skies swept clean by mountain breezes; or perhaps some flower was in bloom, causing an obscure allergy to flare up. But such excuses smacked to her of dishonesty, and though she was quite willing to forget to mention a thing or two when dealing with a difficult applicant or a reluctant employer, she was quite unwilling to apply the same procedure to herself. And so, when (the Mercedes idling at a light) she found that on her right beckoned a small park, a carefully landscaped and mowed and manicured city park with an artfully sculpted pond in the middle and nothing natural about it save for the water and the grass and the earth, she nonetheless found herself staring at it hungrily . . . and admitting that she was staring at it. Hungrily.

Green. And blue. And the fertile brown of good dirt, warm and gritty and all ready to push the tender shoots of plants toward the sunlight. Joan wanted to do nothing so much as pull over, take off her shoes, roll up her Yves St. Laurent pants, and (admitting it again) go wading. And she wanted to reach down and touch the water and the earth, because . . . because water and earth were what mattered, not things like managing employment agencies and clients who—

A horn blast startled her out of her thoughts. The light had changed. Flushed and cursing under her breath, she dropped into gear and pulled out quickly; and if her eyes were moist, she only clenched her jaw tighter, kept a more careful grip on the wheel, fought more grimly against the sunlight and the sweet air.

It was one of her odd days.

Excruciatingly conscious of her every thought, she managed, as usual, to fight down the urgings, and she was only a few minutes late when she hurried past the receptionist and entered her office. But even here, in a room full of synthetic carpeting and the subliminal flicker of fluorescent lights, her ordeal was not over, for her window looked out upon the fields as yet untouched by the burgeoning construction of the suburbs, the tall grasses speckled with yellow daisies and the gully just to the south supporting, even in the summer heart, a stalwart bunch of cattails.

Eyes averted, she closed the blinds on the scene, and then

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