Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 by Kelly Link Gavin J. Grant Read Free Book Online Page B

energy to say anything.
    "We got in touch with your ex-wife,” Michael said.
    The surprise barely penetrated. “How did you know how to reach her?"
    "We've had her number for a while."
    "And you didn't tell me?"
    "She didn't want you to know."
    Scott rubbed his own matted hair and felt dull-witted. “Is she coming?"
    "She's already here. She's with the hospital administrator."
    "The hospital administrator? Why?"
    "To make sure that Caitlin is kept alive. To make sure you don't abort her this time either."
    Scott heard echoes from the future: injunctions, hearings, his guilt and Caitlin's half-life on the cover of magazines.
    He ordered them to leave, but before they could move the door opened and Dawn came in. Jennifer took her hand and the two of them looked defiantly at Scott.
    Dawn's face was radiant. If she hadn't been much of a mother during Caitlin's waking life, she'd make up for it now.
    * * * *
    He drove home and took a shower and made himself a meal. He considered calling Bruce and asking to borrow a gun.
    But he called Cary instead.
    "I'll be right over,” Cary said. He brought a black bag. “Let me teach you,” he said.
    He set the bag on Scott's dining room table and drew out objects: a doll, a worm, a fishing weight. He explained what he had in mind. Later that evening, they walked down to Cary's house and performed the surgery.
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Westness Walk
    Neile Graham—Rousay, Orkney—
    When a mile-long walk can take you five thousand years
    (from a farm to a grave, a miracle of geography, of transdimensional space)
    how can you believe this is simply a beach? On a small island? In the far north, north of Scotland, north of the civilized world?
    It is. Low waves shadow your steps, echo them, count you as one of the passing fray. They don't mind you one bit. So you start at the beginning, at Midhowe, where the humble rusting hangar shelters the stalled, empty graves of
    Neolithic farmers.
    You're on a walkway above them. What do you look down on?
    All of those five thousand years, or more? Each stall marks where the bones now aren't. How can you imagine the hands that made these?
    You can't. Step out into the salt wind. On the promontory now you trace
    Midhowe broch. It's new: first century B.C.E., the Iron Age, is almost like home now, isn't it? Isn't it? Okay, try
    Brough Farm which flourished between 1200 and 1600, surely that's easier and you've already come a few steps down the beach.
    Another broch here.
    You try to imagine the towers so close, how the people might have huddled there against raiders, then spilled out in safety across the fields. Still no easier. Damn. How about the Wirk?
    What? Not enough left to imagine at all. So St. Mary's Church.
    Surely that's easier.
    The small shape buttressed to keep it from sliding down the slope to those waves, or better yet here's Skaill farm, empty since
    The Clearances.
    The Norseness of its name brings you to Viking times. Does that make you uneasy? The dragon prows? The funny hats?
    Walk on.
    Here's another stalled chambered tomb. Knowe of Roweigar, safely buried in turf. The cow by the notice board eyes you with something like disdain.
    You pass now the Knowe of Swandro (a broch, again kindly buried, visible only to the knowledgeable eye), the Norse Hall
    (Vikings again).
    So here an uneventful walk to Moa Ness, where Picts and Vikings buried their dead. You are pleased to hear the Picts had no grave-goods, were simply laid in their graves. That seems simple and clean.
    Not so the Viking grave there, revealing a woman and her newborn, she, covered with many grave-gifts, two oval brooches, a silvergilt ringed pin with gold filigree and amber inlaid. Now it strikes you.
    Now you can imagine the grief of one who would lay her there, them there, picture him and the shovels of shore dirt, picture that grief. See one death
    (one life)
    amongst all of these. You're safe now. Pass the Noust, a simple boat house. That's nothing much. Come now