The Arcturus Man Read Free Page B

Diamonds.
He hummed the song in his
mind. The song was about LSD. That was chemistry that Jared liked immensely.
    She was short, perhaps 4 feet and five inches. She couldn't have weighed more
than 90 pounds.
Was less than 90 pounds possible?
She was so frail and light that she
almost seemed to float.
She was invisible.
She had no weight, no substance.
He
searched for her shadow.
Was she even there? As she moved she never touched anything. She barely touched the floor with tiny steps. She made no noise. She was as silent
as butterfly wings.
    She drifted to one table and a moment later to another. A small zephyr must have
caught her as she finally settled down in the midst of a group of young children that had
been exiled by their mothers, seated away, but in plain sight.
"S trange ," he thought.
    “ Don't old people hate young children? Kids make too much noise and do annoying things .”
But this little black women sat impalpably in their midst. The neatly folded waxed
brown paper bag that she held tightly seemed as heavily creased as her. It looked as if it
had been used many times. It almost was a part of her.
She slowly unfolded it and took
out a small plastic dish of something.
She also had a carton of milk, but she hadn't purchased anything from the restaurant.
Jared glanced at Ashley, but the waitress didn’t
seem to notice.
“ Who was she? ”
It was automatic, like his heart beat. He imagined her soft wispy thoughts.
The little old woman was alone. Her husband had many died years ago. Had she
outlived everyone, including her own children?
There had been many children. He
guessed that she was close to a hundred. Perhaps she was over a hundred.
Could she be
even older? He couldn’t make any sense of it.
“ Who was she?”
She was so quiet, so polite, and so transparent, that few people ever noticed her.
She lived alone in her fragile world.
“ What loneliness that must be ,” he thought.
Why did she come here from so far away? How far had she come? Did she want
to be close to children?
Her eyes were foggy with cataracts.
Even though they couldn't
see her and she couldn't see them that well, she could sense them and she could hear
them.
She could smell their youth much as she had the scent of old age.
She was alive
with the children.
Although she was between two worlds, not quite in one and almost
ready to leave the other, she looked forward to these moments in her silent, gentle purgatory.
She would wait for heaven every evening and be resolute every morning when it
hadn’t arrived, knowing that like the strong wind in the forest that you can hear at a great
distance, sooner or later it must come. It was a knowing!
She really had no expression.
She neither smiled nor frowned.
Nevertheless, he
could sense the joy she felt being close to children. That they were all white children was
unimportant. It wasn’t even a thought. She was alive in their animation. She breathed
their youth in.
She couldn't really see the children through that gray film that had invaded her eyes--probably long ago. Perhaps she heard them and smelled them and felt
them around her, and for an instant--a very, very brief instant--her own children were
back with her.
Her memories passed before his eyes.
There was a time that she could
remember her children well, but it wasn't so clear anymore.
She had grown as accustomed to her cataracts as she had to her clouded memory. Perhaps that was a grace, a gift
that life bestows on the very old. He longed for such a gift.
And now, she was young
again in a bright flowered dress.
long time ago, she was a child.
Knowledge is the enemy of faith.
She had been young and beautiful once, and a long,
She was loved.
She didn’t want to know too much.
    He left briskly without looking back.
She glanced up at him as he left.
She
smiled faintly. He didn’t see the smile, but he felt it.
“ Good-bye Mary Thomas ,” he thought to himself, “C ome another day ”.
Would she evaporate after he left? He didn’t