Gossamer Read Free

watched while she found a teabag in the canister, took a thick brown mug from a cupboard, and dangled the teabag in it. He watched while she dropped a slice of bread into the toaster and turned the toaster on.

    Finally she filled his bowl and set it on the floor beside the stove. Then, when the kettle whistled, she poured the steaming water into the mug.
    "Another day," the woman said, as she took her plate of buttered toast and her cup of tea to the table. She unfolded a flowered cloth napkin and placed it in her lap after she had sat down. Toby, finished now with his gulped breakfast, curled by her feet in a spot where sun, finding its way through the small-paned window of the old house, had outlined a square on the floor.
    "We'll take a walk after I get dressed," she told him. "How about that? It looks like a lovely morning."
    Toby drummed the floor with his tail. They took a walk every morning unless the weather made it impossible. They always walked to the corner, turned left, walked past the Methodist church—many squirrels there, on that large lawn, but Toby no longer bothered about them—past the house of the young couple with the new baby, and across the street to the small park with the diagonal path where sometimes they stopped beside a fountain.

    Resting on the park bench, the woman would listen to the birds and watch young parents push small children on the nearby swings as Toby sat attentively at her feet. Then they would continue on, around the next corner, and then the next, making a complete square and returning home. It was a short walk, but all that she could manage.
    He dozed while she ate. She continued to talk to him though she knew he was asleep. She had no one else to talk to, no one but Toby. She had outlived many of her friends, as well as several earlier dogs.
    Life had become very lonely for the woman, but she was accustomed to her solitude. She sipped her tea, sighed, and fingered a folded letter and its envelope that lay on the table. With a worried look she thought about the way her existence was about to change.

6
    "Whatever became of Rotund? He used to curl near you in the daytime Heap." Littlest was chattering as she set out for the evening's work with her new supervisor. "I remember that you and Rotund used to tell jokes to each other. He always told one that started, 'A horse went into a bar.' W hat's a bar, by the way? I never understood that joke."

    Thin Elderly shook his head and chuckled. He did like little ones, it was true, but he could see that this curious chatterbox was going to be a handful. "Shhh," he said. "Remember that we always move quietly."
    "I am," Littlest whispered. "Look! Tiptoes!" She pointed to her own transparent, delicate feet. She skipped along beside Thin Elderly.
    "I was just wondering about Rotund," she added. "I liked him. And I know he was a friend of yours."
    Thin Elderly frowned. The thought of it was painful to him. "He turned menacing," he told the little one. "We'll say no more about it. He is gone."

    Turned menacing. Littlest did not know exactly what it meant, but she knew it was very, very bad. Those who turned menacing disappeared. Well, not disappeared. They still existed. But they were no longer part of the community of dream-givers. They had gone someplace else. Someplace frightening. Maybe even evil.
    "Why do some of us turn menacing?" she whispered.
    They were at the entrance to their assigned house, the little house with geranium-filled window boxes and the rocker on the porch, the place where the woman lived. In a minute they would enter, compressing themselves and sliding in through the space under the front door. Thin Elderly reached over and took Littlest's hand. The timing of her question was unfortunate, he thought, because they were about to start their night's work. But he was responsible now for her teaching.
    "It just happens," he told her in a low voice. "We are not certain why. Some think it is because they have touched things