Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

girl touched her stomach. “Do you have owls in your bowels? I do. I know I’m not supposed to, but I do.” She smiled and shrugged.
    “ Owls ? Listen, Josephine, I have to go now. It’s been nice talking to you.” Kaspar Benn walked back into his store. At the counter he turned around and the little girl was standing right behind him. It was very strange because he had no sense of her following him in, but there she was, inches away.
    The phone in his pocket rang. He let it ring once more before taking it out because he was trying to process what the girl had said. Between “Muba” and “owls in the bowels,” he was so distracted it never crossed his mind not to answer the phone because it might be—“Hello?”
    “Kaspar! Finally! Thank God. It’s Vanessa. Look, we’ve got to talk. I think Dean left me this morning.”
    The little girl next to him began shaking her head. “Don’t listen to her.”
    Frowning, Kaspar lowered the phone and asked exasperatedly, “Why not?”
    “You’ve got other things to do.”
    He made a sour face while lifting the phone back up to his ear. “Why don’t you come to the store, Vanessa? Dean’s sledding up on the hill all morning and I’m here alone. I talked to him before and he told me about you two.”
    Vanessa gave a surprised oh! and then asked, “You talked to him? What did he say?”
    “He said you two fought and things were dicey.”
    “Anything more? Did he say anything else?”
    “No, not really. Just he was sledding and wanted to think things over up there before he made any decisions. He always says sledding is his therapy.”
    Josephine stared at Kaspar while he spoke. Her expression was disconcerting. He averted his eyes.
    “I didn’t see this coming, Kaspar, not at all. We’ve been having some arguments, sure, but I had no idea he felt like this. Really, it’s the truth.”
    Before he could stop himself, the normally tactful Kaspar blurted out, “You can be a handful at times, Vanessa.”
    “I know, but still, he wants to leave ?” She paused to breathe a few times. “Out of the blue he throws this bomb at me? We’re supposed to talk about it first. You’re supposed to talk things like this out before you make such big decisions. Right?”
    “I don’t know, Vanessa. I’ve never been married. It obviously depends on the people involved. Dean’s a quiet guy. You never know what’s going on with some quiet people…”
    She expected him to continue but he didn’t. She waited for him to say something more but he didn’t. His silence held. “Kaspar?”
    Nothing.
    “Kaspar, are you still there? Did you get cut off?” Hearing nothing, she grimaced, ended the call, and tried his number again. But it just rang and rang unanswered on the other end.
    Sitting in her car in the mall parking lot, Vanessa put the useless phone on the seat next to her and closed her eyes. “ Now what? ” she asked the empty space around her. She decided to do as he had suggested—go to the store and meet him there. Even a short conversation with her lover might help her regain some perspective, some balance now that all the gravity had suddenly evaporated from her life.
    *   *   *
     
    At his feet, Kaspar’s cell phone burned brightly on a green throw rug under him. Speechless, he watched it crackle and hiss as the molten plastic bubbled and melted into a blob. Its parts twisted and fused together in the intense heat. One moment he’d been talking on that phone to Vanessa. The next, he was yelping against the fiery pain across his palm where he was holding it.
    The little girl stood with a hand extended over the small blaze on the floor. He didn’t realize until later that it did not burn the rug. When he eventually lifted the charred melted mess off the floor to throw it away, there was no mark—no blackened spot, no heat-scorched carpet pile.
    “You can’t be stupid today, Muba, not today. If you’re not going to be smart on your own, then I have to