Turn Read Free

It was the reason both he and his home, in actuality the entire area around his home often stank with a smell he had never before encountered. There was nothing chemical about it, but rather something detestably human.
    With dejection he turned to the concrete pieces before them, spreading his gaze flat across it all, diluting his focus.
    “Maybe it’s…I’ve just spent too much time around you and your furious baby. A hallucination, and nothing else…”
    “Yours or mine?” his grandpa asked and raised his pipe, about to take a puff.
    “I saw her, so I guess it’s mine. Or did you see her too?”
    “I see a lot of stuff. Like your wrinkly face. Why so serious? You’re too young to frown like that.”
    Edgar took two puffs from his pipe and smiled enthusiastically. His evident good spirits took Sono by surprise.
    “How high are you right now?”
    “How low are you right now?”
    “Have you been smoking that pipe all day? It’s not good for you, and you know it Grandpa. You’re getting skinnier and skinnier.”
    Edgar glanced askance at him. “Have you been thinking about me smoking this pipe?”
    The words thinking about conjured her before him, adrift in a nebulous sea of intermingling colors. One hop, two hops, and her disproportionately large feet disappeared, leaving a whirlpool of colors dissipating into thin air, as if pulling the stopper from a neighboring universe. “You’re exhausting…”
    Edgar grinned mischievously at Sono, his cheekbones salient, exposing the numerous gaps between his teeth. “You said she didn’t have any hair…”
    “No, she did have hair, but short.”
    “Hmm…” Edgar put his entire hand around his chin in strenuous contemplation, while his two electrocuted caterpillars for eyebrows dropped down slightly.
    “Hmm what? Indigestion?”
    “No.”
    “Then what? You’re leaving me hanging every chance you get. You’re a sadist…does the short hair mean anything?”
    “No.”
    “It doesn’t? Then why’d you ask?”
    “I was curious. Maybe I should cut my hair too. Do I look unapproachable like this?”
    Sono peered doubtfully at his grandpa’s hair, a stiff, dried out mop that seemed to not once have encountered either a comb or soap.
    “Your hair is the least of your concerns...”
    “How so?”
    “Do you want me to make a list?”
    Edgar narrowed his eyes, but the sentiment behind it didn’t make it to Sono in one piece.
    “Or maybe a long beard?”
    “A beard? Oh yeah, go for it, that’ll make you look less like a deranged cannibal. How old do you think she is?”
    Edgar stroked the cropped whiskers on his chin tenderly. “Why does her age matter?”
    Sono shrugged his shoulders, surrendering his inquisitiveness openhandedly, partly because of the creeping shame he felt for not willingly answering his grandpa’s question. After all, her age was impossible for Edgar to know, unless he knew her, which, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be the case.
    “The shadow must ripen before its fruit can cast a shadow.”
    Sono glanced surreptitiously to his left and right, before glancing up as well. He even looked over his shoulder, very carefully. “What? Who are you talking to?”
    “You.”
    “Me? I didn’t ask you anything. Not about, uh...whatever weird shit you just said. Shadows and fruit.”
    “It wasn’t an answer.”
    Alarm tried to pierce his flesh, but apathy had already blanketed it. “What…what are you doing? What are you talking about Grandpa?” He turned his upper body toward his grandpa.
    “A way, possibly.”
    “Really? I didn’t know that…” Sono, stiff with bewilderment, watched him closely. “You’re fucking delirious. Have you been toying with the circuitry up here?”
    Being about a head taller than his grandpa, Sono tapped the top of his head with his knuckles. He didn’t even flinch, persisting to peek out probingly from under his loose-fitting eyelids.
    “No. That would be brainless,” his grandpa said and stuffed