The Green Man by Michael Bedard Read Free Book Online Page A

them. “Of course, there is another possibility.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “We live in the midst of mysteries, my dear. They surround us on all sides, and, for the most part, we take no notice of them. Take Time, for instance. What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go?”
    She leaned forward and took a book from one of the piles on the table. “Imagine that this book is that very small piece of reality we call the present – you and I, here, now.” She stood it between two tall piles. “This moment stands between a future that is not yet real and a past that is no longer real.” She placed her hands on top of the piles to either side. “Before we know it, it too has slid into the past, and another moment has come to take its place.
    “But what if it is not as simple as that? What if all those past moments still exist, as real as the books on this pile, but hidden from the present moment by a thin fabric, like the painted backdrop in a play? Say that in certain places that fabric were to wear thin and tear, and what lay on the other side were to spill out? Perhaps they would be places where the pressure of the past had grown so great that it could no longer be contained.
    “Maybe the Charles I saw at the window spilled over from the past. Maybe he
did
once stand at that window,walk down that street, sit on that wall as he did today. And if a boy with a buggy could slip through, perhaps other things could cross over in the same way.”
    It was clear she was no longer talking to O, but to herself. The words hung in the air, like the smoke in the closed car.
    Aunt Emily stood up. “I think I’ll go heat up this tea.”
    Nothing more was said of the matter, but for the rest of the evening O found her eye drifting repeatedly to the book propped between the two piles on the cluttered coffee table.
    Time was hard to keep track of at the Green Man. One day flowed seamlessly into the next. Before she knew it, they had turned the calendars to June, and the weather was heating up. Their lives had fallen swiftly into a pattern. They ate breakfast together, then went down and opened the shop a little after ten.
    Since her “incident,” Aunt Emily had taken to closing the shop for an hour at noon to eat and rest a little before reopening. But after O had been there two weeks and had begun to learn her way around the shop a little, she abandoned the practice. She started leaving O alone while she went upstairs, assuring her that, if anything came up, she was just a shout away.
    Most days, they closed a little before six. After dinner,they read and listened to Aunt Emily’s jazz collection and chatted the evening away.
    O noticed things about her aunt that reminded her of her father: the way she held her head to one side when she listened to you, the infectious laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her when something struck her funny.
    Despite their difference in age, she found she was quite comfortable with her aunt. But, then, Aunt Emily was not your normal adult. There was still a lot of the child about her. Maybe that was what made her a poet.
    One evening as they sat together, O took a book from the top of one of the piles – a collection of Chinese poetry translated into English. She started reading and was quickly captivated by the simplicity of the words, the clarity of the images, the deep emotion that pulsed below the tranquil surface of the poems.
    When she glanced up, Aunt Emily was snoring in her chair. Her glasses had slid to the end of her nose, and her book lay slack in her hands. As O sat looking at her, the words of a poem came into her mind. She grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper and quickly wrote them down:
    Sleep steals quietly into the room
.
Eyes grow leaden and close like flowers
.
Books grow drowsy on the shelves
.
If you listen, you can hear

The murmur of dreams in the still air
.
    As she crept quietly from the room, she heard her aunt moan softly in her sleep.

10
    T he