Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

autumn leaves. It had been an unusually brilliant fall, early frosts setting the leaves ablaze more emphatically than usual: but that same seasonal precocity meant that there was little left of the splendor now, only a few trees in sheltered spots having managed to hang onto their leaves this long. As they headed downhill toward the center of the Park, some of the stubbornest trees were flanking their path—beeches and oaks that seemed to be practically clutching the leaves to keep from letting them go, as if to spite the nearby maples, which had by and large given up and now stood dark and bare against the slowly falling dusk.
    Matiyas had fallen silent for the last couple of minutes, looking up and around him as they walked. “Do you get color like this back home?” she said.
    “Not so much. It was mostly conifers, Douglas fir and so on. Some of them go gold at the end of the year, but otherwise, everything just stays green…”
    “That’s a shame,” Caroline said. “I love this time of year: everything suddenly looks so different. Sometimes I wish it could last a lot longer.”
    “I don’t know,” said Matiyas. “I kind of like it when everything comes off the trees, at last. You can see all the shapes: what the trees are really like underneath…”
    “Aha. A winter fan.”
    “Spring is best,” Matiyas said. There was something surprisingly wistful and sad about the voice. “But until it comes, you handle winter the best you can.”
    He smiled at her again: once again, Caroline had to suppress a shiver. And then that smile went off, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown.
    It was odd: but who knew what workday thought might have interrupted the moment. “Yeah,” Caroline said as the path bottomed out, and they paused in front of the cream and russet-striped brick of the carousel building, now closed for the autumn weekdays. It looked abandoned and sad—shut iron gates grim under the building’s arches, dimly seen carousel horses barred inside, wet brown blown-in leaves scattered across the floor. She remembered the last time she had ridden that carousel, when she’d been going out with Colin before he dumped her: she hadn’t been on it since—or out with anyone. A year and a half? Two? And I hardly care…. Caroline huddled into her coat a little, shivered again. “Snow would be nice, too. Anything’s better than this damp gray.”
    They walked on through the tunnel on the east side of the carousel plaza, out again into the cloudy afternoon, and up the slight hill toward the tree-occluded vista of the apartment buildings east of the Park, on the other side of Fifth. The way out led past the old steep-roofed Dairy: as they passed it, Mike stopped for a moment to look at the old wooden sign with the park’s bylaws carved into it. “’No one shall be permitted to drive swine into the park?’” He looked at her with a peculiar expression. “There were pigs here?”
    “Whole herds of them, apparently,” Caroline said as they headed toward Fifth. “And cows, but they were here on purpose. Seems that there was a shortage of commercially available milk that hadn’t been watered down to make a profit…”
    Mike gave her a look. “How very New York.”
    Caroline snickered. “Yeah,” she said. “So the City started doing their own. You could come down here and have a cow milked for your kids, my dad told me.”
    “You have any of those?” Mike said.
    Caroline put her eyebrows up. “Kids? Why?”
    He shrugged inside his coat, a chilly gesture, as they came around the corner of the old Armory building and headed up the path toward the eastern wall and Fifth Avenue. “Everybody at work seems to be either about to get married and have kids, or getting over being married and having had them,” Mike said. “Just curious to see if you fell into either category.”
    Caroline shook her head. “No plans that way,” she said. “Other people may have some kind of clock ticking, but I can’t