Time's Mistress by Steven Savile Read Free Book Online Page B

his knees acting out some sort of passion play with puppets of a cloven-hooved George W. and a wild-haired Saddam with a uni-brow fit to launch a thousand nightmarish ships. Who said political satire had to be cutting edge?
    The first thing that caught my eye was the terrible restoration job. They’d obviously tried to purge two hundred years worth of soot from parts of the old bridge, and left some of the gold on the statues looking like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Tourists climbed up onto the wall to have their photographs taken with the various saints and patron saints that lined the bridge. I walked toward the middle and St. Christopher; after all, I was a traveler. I didn’t realize I had been clutching Isla’s medallion until I was standing on the wall, eye-to-eye with the statue. I hung her St. Christopher from the fingertips of the baby Jesus on the saint’s shoulder. I recited a couple of lines from Mácha as a sort of prayer, and clambered back down before anyone could complain about the crazy tourist hanging off their national treasure.
    As I turned, I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was of a couple standing outside of a shop window, meeting for the first time. The hope in their eyes was agonizing. I know, because it was the hope in my eyes the painter had captured. I couldn’t see if the same look of love was in Isla’s eyes because her head was tilted just slightly away as she looked into the window. All I could think was “be brave” as I walked up to the artist. He sat beside his easel, eating a meat pie with his hands.
    “This painting, how did you see this?” I asked, pointing an accusing finger at the shop on the Westgate Road.
    He looked up at me like I was mad.
    I was beginning to think I was.
    “I mean, this picture, that very minute, that’s the most important minute of my life, what’s it doing in one of your paintings?”
    He continued to look at me, and then a slow smile spread across his lips as he recognized me. “It’s you,” he said.
    I nodded.
    “Oh, my God, it’s you.” He jumped up, dropping his meat pie and grabbing my hand to pump it. “I’m so pleased to meet you! You have no idea!”
    I really didn’t.
    I felt like a character in some surreal black and white art house movie.
    Once was coincidence, but twice, what was that? It certainly wasn’t coincidence.
    “I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
    “It’s a funny story,” he promised, but I doubted it. “I was away from home, living in this shitty bedsit, when my girlfriend phoned me to tell me she was pregnant … it was the happiest moment of my life,” he said, still grinning. I have to admit it, his grin was infectious. I wanted to share his happiness. “I just went to the window and took a photograph of the world outside. I wanted to remember that exact moment, all of it, exactly how it happened. I always wondered what was happening down there.”
    “It was the happiest moment of my life, too,” I said, thinking about it all over again. Thinking about how it felt to swallow my fear and walk across the street and say: hi, I’m Steve, I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with me. “I was finally being brave. I saw this woman, and I just knew I had to walk over there and tell her she was going to be the love of my life.”
    “That’s wonderful! What happened? Did she fall in love with you? Tell me she fell in love with you! That would be perfect; two happily ever afters entwined in a single painting. I could call it four hearts. That’s a great name for a painting. Four hearts.”
    I nodded. “She did.” I didn’t realize I was crying until he asked me what was wrong. “This was supposed to be our honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I let him read between the lines.
    There was a moment in which the silence between our heartbeats was deafening, and then the painter understood the implications of the word supposed, and said, “Oh, shit, I’m