The Dig by Audrey Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

you, in colonial English, what a television set was.

    It was a really fun field trip and I was impressed by the way the actors held their ground. A couple of the sarcastic boys tried to break them. They asked them what they were really having for dinner over and over again, but the actors didn‘t break character. Thinking about the field trip helps me to stay calm. All I need to do is find a gift shop. That‘s the one question that anyone employed by a living history museum will answer honestly.

    I hear laughing. Three young boys are roughhousing in a nearby alley.

    The boy with shaggy brown hair never seems to get a chance to kick the rock. I decide that Shaggy will be my tour guide. I smile at him with my best American-tourist grin and wait for him to notice me. He catches my eye and quickly turns his head, as if I could only have been looking at someone behind him. We laugh. He‘s a good kid. He will surely direct me to the gift shop.
    Everything is finally going to be all right.

    I start toward the alley and am just about to introduce myself when a blaring alarm erupts.
    I clap my hands over my ears and wince. Ouch. I realize that alarms are necessary, but do they have to be that loud? I whip my head around to make sure I‘m not in the way of an ambulance.

    Instead of an ambulance, I see a crowd, all eyes on some sort of event.

    I look back to the boy in the alley to gauge his reaction, but he and his friends have taken off. The dust is still settling and the toy rock skids across the dirt. That obnoxious alarm sounds again and I cover my ears. Nobody else seems that bowled over by it. Are my ears playing tricks on me now too? Because I‘ve never heard a sound like this. And it‘s becoming clear to me that the unbearably high-pitched wail isn‘t coming from a machine.

    No, this noise is coming from…a person.

    I maneuver my way into the crowd, following the sound of the scream.

    Two big guys stand in the center, brandishing weapons. Frankly, they look like your standard bad guys in a school play: grizzly beards, heavy clubs, gladiator sandals and gnarly grimaces. They‘re the kind of guys I expect to gang up on someone. But what I don‘t expect is their victim.

    It‘s a little girl.

    She is darting to and fro, dodging every swing of their clubs at the last second, fighting for her life. She moves with the finesse of a ballerina. It‘s incredible—and horrible—to watch. How long until she makes a mistake and those goons catch her?

    With an earsplitting scream, she spirals up into the air in a somersault and easily lands on her feet. Okay, that‘s not a little girl, I realize. That‘s a woman. But she‘s no bigger than a little girl, barely three feet tall, with shimmering bendy arms and quick tiny heels. That elfin grin, those larger-than-life disproportionately round eyes—I‘ve read enough Greek mythology in my day to know what she is.

    A nymph.

Chapter 9
    Like any well-adjusted person who knows the difference between real life and fantasy, I realize that nymphs are the stuff of legend. They don‘t actually exist.

    Maybe somebody should tell her that. Because she looks very real right now as the men keep swinging their clubs at her.

    I glance around the crowd, looking for an explanation, or at least some confirmation that I‘m not hallucinating, but all I see are distressed expressions. Those boys from the alley are jumping up and down as if they want to interfere but can‘t. If this is all for viewing pleasure, why doesn‘t anyone look happy?

    ―Why doesn‘t anyone do anything?‖ I say to the man beside me. He shrugs. At this point I don‘t know if it‘s because my Greek is so bad or because this kind of thing happens every day. I think of the playground in sixth grade, the way everyone would stand around and watch a kid get ganged up on, afraid to compromise the natural order of the schoolyard. It may be because of the concussion or the heat or both, but something clicks in