The Year's Best Fantasy: Volume 3 by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781645061038
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2024-08-19T21:00:00+00:00

She smiles as she imagines the street emptied of cars, slick with ice like a frozen pond. How she would love to skate home now, like she used to do as a girl, as Chilton had done as a boy. (After a long hiatus, she’s able to enjoy Chilton again, and for that she’s grateful. His words have given her so much joy in her life that being able to read him again feels like recovering a part of herself.) She’s a little sad that she’ll never know what story Chilton was trying to tell with the poem. If the poet is to be believed in that interview, he’d be okay with other people taking his poems and fitting them into their own stories, even if they were about mushrooms and eyeballs and storms of outrage that he knew nothing about. Maybe that’s a kind of transcendence too.

She notices that inside the plastic wrapping, the cardboard pieces sandwiching the painting to protect it are coming apart. She needs to retape them. She removes her gloves and carefully unwraps the plastic, takes off the cardboard pieces, and holds the painting up while searching for the roll of tape inside her purse. It’s not snowing and there’s a lull in the wind; not too bad.

She’s not sure how many people got to see the painting at the show that just closed. The gallery is small (it’s the back room of a coffee shop), and the theme—“Invisible”—isn’t very catchy. But Kay doesn’t mind. She picked it because she liked the people she met there. They were earnest and didn’t know her at all. (There are still a few people at ArtNow who call her the “Mushroom Lady;” she still struggles with tuning them out.) Nobody made any comments when she brought in The Passing of the Dragon. Maybe they never saw it, or maybe they didn’t care. (Solana is right that Kay overestimates the importance and power of the internet.) She hopes that at least a few people who saw the painting at the show found a positive and comforting way to make it part of their own pursuit of happiness.

She finds the roll of tape. She sits down, supporting the painting next to her on her purse so that it doesn’t get wet. She rips pieces of fresh tape and tacks them on the cardboard piece in the back.

She stops to take a break. She’s almost ready to add the front cardboard piece and secure it with the new pieces of tape. Then she’ll wrap it up and brave the slippery sidewalk home, joining the crowd of weary pedestrians, each absorbed in their own coat and story, all ready to be anywhere but here.

The fog of her exhalation clears, revealing a man stopped in front of her. He’s been walking for a long time, judging by the beard caked in flecks of ice. The red plaid trapper hat on his head is as ruddy as his cheeks. Annoyed pedestrians part around him like river water around a rock.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.