Persephone (Into Shadow collection) by Lev Grossman

Author:Lev Grossman [Grossman, Lev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories
Published: 2022-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lexington is, as I may have mentioned, a very normal town, but as I’m sure you’re also aware, due to its copious informational signage, it is also the Birthplace of American Liberty because the Battle of Lexington happened there. It was the first battle of the American Revolution.

It wasn’t much of a battle. I’ve read about it. The British weren’t even interested in Lexington—they were just passing through, trying to get to Concord to see if we were storing any guns there (and we totally were). But a bunch of half-trained colonial soldiers were hanging out at a bar on Lexington Green, and they piled out the door to discourage them. The British had been marching all night and were in a lousy mood, and they completely lost it and shot some of the colonials and bayoneted a few more, who died and had elementary schools named after them.

I was thinking about all this because I was getting a great panoramic view of Lexington as the helicopter lifted off, so gently that it was as if somebody had carefully detached the world from underneath it and was quietly whisking it away.

The man in the suit sat by the window in a reverse-facing seat that folded niftily out from the wall. He smiled affably. Minutes ticked by, about fifteen of them.

You’d think I would have been just bursting with questions at this point, that I would have been grabbing everybody by their lapels and shaking them with my little fists till they told me what the fuck was going on around here. But I wasn’t in a mood to ask questions. I didn’t want to hear the answers.

Still shivering, I snuck a glance at Alonzo. He was staring straight ahead. Not so chatty now. But he saw me looking at him and that seemed to snap him out of it. He leaned across the empty seat.

“I’m Alonzo.”

“Persephone.”

“I know.”

I didn’t feel like I was in any condition to be spoken to at this moment, but there was no stopping him.

“Do you know where they’re taking us?”

I shook my head.

“You could ask . . . ?” I inclined my head toward the guy in the suit.

“You mean Guy Smiley over there.”

“I can hear what you’re saying,” Guy Smiley called out pleasantly.

“This is a private conversation.” You heard about people having green eyes, and they were never really all that green, but Alonzo’s eyes really were green. He lowered his voice.

“Can I ask you,” he said, “did something weird happen to you this morning?”

“Yes.”

“But I mean super weird.”

“I mean that too.”

Then Alonzo told me what had happened to him.

“I was in gym class. We were playing basketball. I was watching everybody warm up or whatever, and I was thinking about how great it would be if I could’ve come to school with a doctor’s note saying that nobody was allowed to give me any shit today. It would be like a medical thing: if anybody gave me shit—teachers, kids, dogs, whoever—I would just show them the note, and it would explain that if they did, they would have to fuck off.

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