Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Science-Fiction,
Romance,
Fantasy fiction,
Fantasy,
Family,
Magic,
Love Stories,
Fairies,
Masterwork,
Families
or . . . other things."
"He's a doctor."
"Not really. Not any more. He's a writer." She was smiling, and Sophie beside her was giggling again, and Daily Alice went on with the conversation as though the object were to see how long she could keep a straight face. "He writes animal stories, for children."
"Oh."
"He writes one a day."
He looked up into her laughing eyes clear and brown as bottle glass. He had begun to feel very odd. "They must not be very long," he said, swallowing.
What was happening? He was in love, of course, at first sight, but he had been in love before and it had always been at first sight and he had never felt like this—as though something were growing, inexorably, within him.
"He writes under the name of Saunders," Daily Alice said.
He pretended to search his memory for this name, but in fact he was searching within for what it was that made him feel so funny. It had extended now outward to his hands; he examined them where they lay in his houndstooth lap, looking very weighty. He interlaced the ponderous fingers.
"Remarkable," he said, and the two girls laughed, and Smoky laughed too. The feeling made him want to laugh. It couldn't be the smoke; that always made him feel weightless and transparent. This was the opposite. The more he looked at her the stronger it grew, the more she looked at him the more he felt . . . what? In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened: not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circumstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.
The Young Santa Claus
He had gone down the narrow back stairs to the only john in the house that still worked, and stood looking into the wide, black-flecked mirror of that stone place.
Well. Who would have thought it. From the mirror a face looked out at him, not unfamiliar really, but still as though seen for the first time. A round and open face, a face that looked like the young Santa Claus as we might see him in early photographs: a little grave, dark-moustached, with a round nose and lines by the eyes already where little laughing birds had walked though he wasn't yet twenty-three. All in all, a face of sunny disposition, with something in the eyes still blank and unresolved, pale and missing, that would, he supposed, never fill in. It was enough. In fact it was miraculous. He nodded, smiling, at his new acquaintance, and glanced at him again over his shoulder as he left.
As he was going up the back stairs, he met Daily Alice coming down, suddenly, at a turning. Now there was no idiot grin on his face; now she wasn't giggling. They slowed as they approached each other; when she had squeezed past him she didn't go on but turned to look back at him; Smoky was a step higher than she, so that their heads were in the relation dictated by movie kisses. His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.
There was a noise then on the stair above them and they started. It was Sophie, and she stood above them eyes wide, biting her lip. "I have to pee-pee," she said, and danced by them lightly.
"You'll be leaving soon," Smoky said.
"Tonight."
"When will you come back?"
"I don't know."
He held her again; the second embrace was calm and sure. "I was frightened," she said. "I know," he said, exulting. God she was big. How was he to handle her when there was no stair to stand on?
A Sea Island
As a man