Turn by David Podlipny Read Free Book Online

you sit down.”
    The shadow of a phantasm cut across his mind. Sono leapt hungrily after the crumbling tail of its logic. “So, wait…you agree that this place looks horrible?”
    Edgar peered at him thoughtfully. “Hmm…”
    “You do. You don’t think it’s beautiful either, you just admitted that, indirectly...”
    Edgar bobbed his head from side to side as if tossing the possibility between his uncooperative brain halves.
    “Stop doing that.”
    Sono had seen a fellow prisoner doing the same motion for hours on end.
    Watching his grandpa’s still face in profile, his skin hanging from the protruding bones like a crumpled garment, he flung away another pebble along with his interest in it.
    “I could just bulldoze the whole place…flatten it all, like a bug pancake. Feed everyone. With dust!” He sliced through the air horizontally with his right hand.
    “There’s no need to turn horrible like that Sono. No…that would be irrevocable. Very, very damaging.” Edgar shook his head in fearful little tremors.
    “How would you like to have beachfront property, with two drops of water and dusty beaches?” Sono planted his palm flat onto the coarse ground, and looked at his grandpa, his face clutched by a burdensome wonder.
    “No…don’t worry; I was just messing with you. I won’t touch your sacred leprosy fields...”
    Together, in silence, they stared across the jagged gray landscape around them.
    With no considerable effort, his grandpa’s recent statements sprouted before him vividly, one quicker than the next, each shoot instantly developing into a sturdy branch on his tree of disbelief. In the very space Edgar had seen the invisible tree, his own burst into bloom with a fresh clarity.
    Sono gazed at his grandpa with taut eyes and brows guarding them fiercely. “Now I see…what you’re doing…” Sono nodded to himself, and produced a succession of clicks as his tongue repeatedly parted with the roof of his mouth. “I’ve caught the scent of the tree too, and I smell bullshit. Ripe as ever.” His slanted mouth hinted of an expression eager to put its teeth to use. “Since you’re a wise old man, a nail-licking, finger-sucking shaman, and a tree symbolizes knowledge, of course you see a tree. Of course, what else? As for me, I’m superficial, young and dumb, so I see a girl. You’re full of shit Grandpa. Full of it.”
    “That depends on how you see it. I don’t have the precise percentage now, but–”
    “No, you’re full of it. Like if that hole in the ground you call toilet was elbow deep; that’s you. It’s all over the place. You’re full of it.”
    Sono waited anxiously for him to retort to what he believed to be a very sound observation.
    “It merely takes on a form familiar to me,” his grandpa offered harmlessly. “I wouldn’t pick it up otherwise, in its natural form, its spiritual form. Its lack of what we’d call form. It’s beyond our comprehension. We’re very limited as a species...”
    “So if I saw, uh…a dancing shoe, then I’d be a genius? Waltz, waltz, backflip, tadaa!”
    “Who’s to say you aren’t already?”
    “Eeeh…thanks for that insincere compliment, but you won’t be able to sugarcoat this. I’m on to you for once…you sugarfiend.”
    Despite Sono’s ominous slits for eyes, his grandpa freed a cherubic little smile.
    “The best thing I can do is to just sit down. Sit down on my bony rump.”
    “That’s it?” Sono fired back unhappily.
    “The less the better. The more I try to reach it, or get more of it in any way, it becomes something else. It disappears. Sometimes I even close my eyes, and listen to the rustling leaves, the energy running through it…”
    The whole thing didn’t sit right will Sono, not at all.
    “What you’re saying is that my ant brain can’t comprehend anything else but the image of a girl? You’re the one living in a cave.”
    “Did we establish that she was an illusion?” Edgar slid in