Illusions by Richard Bach Read Free Book Online

believing what you believe and it's sort of like . . . a fire . . . after a flood . . . in a flour mill, don't you think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess."
                 "Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don't you think the basic bread itself --not the grass or the little charred part, there-the basic pan-bread, don't you think . . . ?"
                 "Terrible," he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had handed to him. "I'd rather starve. Still have the peaches?"
                 "In the box."
                 How had he found me, in this field? A twenty-eight-foot wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he would tell me.
                 "How did you find me?" I said. "I could have landed anywhere."
                 He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a knife . . . not an easy trick.
                 "Like attracts like," he muttered, missing a peach slice.   
                 "Oh-"
                 "Cosmic law. "
                 "Oh "
                 I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from the stream. That sure is good bread.
                 "Do you mind explaining? How is it that I am like your esteemed self? Or did by 'like' you mean the airplanes are alike, sort of?"
                 "We miracle-workers got to stick together," he said. The sentence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it.
                 "Ah . . . Don: Referring to your last comment? Perhaps you'd like to tell me what you had in mind: we miracle workers?"
                 "From the position of the nine-sixteenths on the toolbag, I'd say you were running the old levitate-the-end-wrench trick this morning. Tell me if I'm wrong."
                 "Wasn't running anything! I woke up . . . the thing woke me up, by itself!"
                 "Oh. By itself." He was laughing at me.
                 "YES BY ITSELF!"
                 "Your understanding of your miracle working, Richard, is as thorough as your understanding of bread-baking."
                   I didn't reply to that, just eased myself down on my bedroll and was quiet as could be If he had something to say, he could say it in his own good time.
                   "Some of us start learning these things subconsciously. Our waking mind won't accept it, so we do our miracles in our sleep." He watched the sky, and the first clouds of the day. "Don't be impatient, Richard. We're all on our way to learning more. It will come to you a little faster now, and you'll be a wise old spiritual maestro before you know it."
                 "What do you mean, before I know it? I don't want to know it! I don't want to know anything!"
                 "You don't want to know anything."
                 "Well, I want to know why the world is and what it is and why I live here and where I'm going next . . . I want to know that. How to fly without an airplane, if I had a wish."
                 "Sorry."
                 "Sorry what:"
                 "Doesn't work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore." He looked away from the sky. "You're like everybody else. You already know this stuff, you're just not aware that you know it, yet."
                 "I don't recall," I said, "I don't recall your asking me whether I want to learn this thing, whatever it is that has brought you crowds and misery all your life. Seems to have slipped my mind." Soon as I said the words I knew that he was going to say I'd remember later,