The Time Fetch Read Free

Feenix would take the bus on a day like this, so he figured he was safer staying on foot. The school was an entire seven blocks away, but in this case, it was worth the tremendous effort.
    The street was busy as always at this time of morning, people emerging from the coffee shop, gingerly holding their steamy four-dollar caramel macchiatos out in front of themselves like little bombs that might go off at any second. They hurried along to the subway, trying not to blow themselves up. Little whiny kids got pushed in strollers to their daycares or wherever. Here and there, among the crowd were other prisoners of the state like him, heading toward their six-hour dates with unrelenting boredom. You could recognize them easily from the way they tried to keep their faces really blank and unreadable. He supposed he probably looked the same.
    There were actually little patches of ice here and there on the ground. In spite of himself, he was glad his aunt had made him wear the jacket.
    The sky was gray and low, and the wind blew in little bursts.
    Red and green plastic holiday decorations hung from wires strung over the street. They swung wildly. The store windows, still mostly locked behind steel gates at this time of the morning, were fully loaded with Christmas trees and electric menorahs and smiling snowmen.
    Edward paid very little attention to the holiday stuff. As a kid, he’d gone along with all of his aunt’s crazy winter solstice celebrations—the baking, the decorating, the singing, the big party, but now he no longer believed in it.
    As a general rule, Edward didn’t believe in anything. That is, he’d come to understand that reality was largely a hoax. One of the many useful things that Mr. Ross had taught them was that everything was made of atoms, and atoms were mostly empty space. Everything might appear solid. But it wasn’t. It was 99 percent empty space.
    When you took for granted that the floor you were standing on was solid, you were making a big mistake. When you put your butt down on a chair and didn’t go through the chair and the chair didn’t go through you, it was because of the magnetic repulsion of electrons against each other. You were really floating a minuscule fraction of an inch over the surface of the chair. If it weren’t for that force of repulsion, everything would just pass right through everything else.
    Other people looked like they were solid whole things. But they were really mostly full of emptiness. Most of what they had to say was just hot air, too. All this stuff they filled the store windows at this time of year with was worthless junk.
    The things that people believed in, the things they kept themselves so busy with, were just ways of convincing themselves that their lives weren’t completely random and unimportant.
    Although he liked the smells. He breathed deeply and caught a whiff of the pfeffernusse that was traveling in his pocket and then that particular scent the air has when it’s about to hit freezing. At the corner he nearly lost his way for a moment as he passed through the rows of pine trees for sale, but he was pulled out the other side by the smells of cinnamon and coffee that floated through the door of the donut shop.
    He stopped there and gazed inside. It was always nice to check this window out, even if it was illusion. There was a row of donuts in the front decorated with bright wreaths of red and green icing. He felt someone’s eyes upon him. Looking up, he saw a policeman with a donut halfway to his mouth, staring at him oddly. Edward preferred not to have policemen looking at him. He made his face as blank as possible and kept on moving.
    Overhead a cloud of pigeons went scouting by, keeping their eyes open for any sort of edible garbage to make a miraculous appearance. At the corner, Edward waited for the light to change. He could see his breath in the air and stood there for a while, watching it. He got so busy looking at the little puffs of steam he