A Dirge for the Temporal by Darren Speegle Read Free Book Online Page A

that there be no mistake as to their naturalness.
      Lane said, “Those may be the eyes you were born with, but what do they see ?”
      The Prism keeper sucked his teeth. “I’ll tell you what they see. They see a fella who’d best be on his way. I have lost my patience.”
      Lane was swift in his assault, driving the keeper against the glass wall, where he jolted the man’s head to erase the present. The old man was stout and stood there on powerful legs, dazed, while Lane searched his pockets for the key. Lane found it in short order, clutching the means in his fist as he scanned his surroundings. Some ghosts and some mirrors hovered on the fringes of the park. The language of the former spoke more to amusement than concern, while the latter related in the only way they could, by reflecting. Satisfied, Lane turned to the task at hand.
      The door in the Prism’s base proved small and plain, the monolith having never been a place for tours. The narrowest of passages wound upward through its glass composition. It might have been sculpted out of an iceberg, but for the absence of ice. As he reached the lower miasmal strata, the colors clothed him. The vertical edges of the triangular body, otherwise undetectable, expressed themselves by splitting those colors so that the pigments seemed to flood the visitor’s senses from all sides. The glass trapped heat, which spread through Lane’s own material, writing out a definition of integration. The claustrophobia was less kind, pressing him within a house of mirrors, depriving him of oxygen. His mind, of its own accord, turned to the question of what he had to offer New Geneva. He wasn’t a citizen, but he was a thief, as solid a fixture on the urban set.
  Nevertheless, he rode the stairless spiral up through the invisible roofs of surrounding buildings, imagining melting ice and released oxygen even as the drops of sweat fell from his brow. Perception overtook this retreat, however, as the whole tower turned upside down and he was sliding along its spiral tunnel towards cool water in which to plunge. The colors began to dissolve as speed and altitude and depth became one thing. An effulgence of fire encompassed him. He looked outward and saw a fan of color dispersing from his own person. The fire dissipated into clarity, and clarity reigned. The nimbus roiled below his position as he realized he could breathe again, he could taste with his senses again. He was above the city. He was above the prophets.
      Hands of clear liquid glass, clearer than the substance of the incorporeal âme , took his hands and led him to a terrace. Motion and color disturbed the clarity. As he stepped out into the air, he realized that the disturbance came from beneath his feet. There, in the transparent floor, lay Leah. Her arms moved wildly, her mouth formed infinitudes of expression, her eyes shone ice-clear as she stared up at him through her prison. The noise of air, hot and rushed, sounded above him. He looked up to see the bottom of the wicker basket. The boa dangled from its rim like a temptation out of the Garden of Eden, the serpent in its ultimate allure, with promises of a wonderful something just beyond the mortal grasp.

    ~

      In her silence, Leah’s tears fell from her eyes to become drops of glass on her cheeks. Her arms waved the gift away, she didn’t want it after all, the city could have it if only she could be allowed to go where her sister had gone. The air smelled like smog. The sky looked like nuclear winter. Lane expressed like some prophet out of the dumpster. His hands were smeared with dirt and blood, his eyes had grown the color of girders. Words came out of his mouth, but she couldn’t understand them through the silence. The gift lolled over his back, like a teasing tongue. It didn’t mean anything, the dime store thing. Voices, things…nothing was intrinsic except the fascination. No one belonged within.
      Which was why the tears did not continue