AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Aye, this one won’t come bashing through the front door like Orcus. This one’s sneaky. Elegant.”
“Elegant? So you’re not part of the dark rising, you’re just here to warn me, I mean, us?”
“Appears so. Unsettled souls attract a bad lot. This city of yours is a whirlwind of ’em.”
“Like here, in this house?” Rivera was hoping. Maybe she could help.
“No, love, no human souls here ’cept yours and old Smokey’s there.”
Rivera looked down at Mr. Atherton—his shirt collar was smoking from where the stun gun had arced. He patted the ember out.
“So that’s why he could see me . . .” He looked to the banshee, but she was gone, leaving behind the smell of damp moss and burning peat. Somehow she’d managed to grab his stun gun as she left.
“Fuck!” said Rivera, to no one in particular.
7
Shy Dookie and Death
A study in sadness: Sophie Asher—sitting at the picnic table by the edge of the playground, away from the other kids, denied access
to friends, laughter, and fun, condemned to watch from afar like some exile—was in a time-out.
He walked across the playground with something between a limp and a soft-shoe, as if there were brushes playing rhythm on a snare drum under his steps. He was tall, but not too tall, thin, but not too, dressed in different shades of soft yellow from shoe to hat, the latter a butter-colored homburg with a tiny red feather in the lemon-hued band. He sat down across from Sophie and swung his long legs in under the table.
Sophie saw him, but didn’t look up from coloring her ponies. He was wearing sunglasses on an overcast day, which Aunt Cassie would explain as him protecting his retinas from UV radiation and which Aunt Jane would explain as him being a douche.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to be here,” Sophie said. There was no gate into the playground, and he hadn’t come through the building, past the nuns.
“It’ll be all right,” said the yellow man. His voice was friendly and he sounded Southern. “Why so sad, peanut?” He smiled, just his lower teeth showed, one of them was gold, then he matched her pout to share her sadness.
“I’m in a T.O.,” said Sophie. She glared over her shoulder at Sister Maria la Madonna con el Corpo de Cristo encima una Tortilla, the Irish nun, who had stripped her of her recess and exiled her to this cold limbo by the fence. The nun returned her gaze with a stern, tight-lipped resolve—mime anger. The nun didn’t seem to see the man in yellow at all, which likely was something else she would be stern about.
“How’d you do to get yourself in such a fix, peanut?”
“I told them I had to go home to go to the bathroom and they said no.”
“You have bathrooms in the school, don’t you?” He said bathrooms with an f instead of a th, which she liked and decided that’s the way she would say it, too, from now on.
“It was number two,” she said, putting down her crayon and really looking up at him for the first time. “I don’t do number two away from home.”
“So you got shy dookie. That’s okay, I had that, too, when I was little. Shoot, bitches need to respect a person’s habits.”
“That’s what I said. But they’re all anti-Semites.”
“Y’all lost me, peanut. This a Catholic school, right?”
“Yeah, I go here because it’s by our house, but I’m a Jewess.”
“You don’t say?”
“And an orphan,” Sophie added gravely.
“Aw, that’s sad.”
“And my dogs ran away.”
He’d been shaking his head to the rhythm of the sadness of her story, but he stopped and looked up when she mentioned the goggies. She missed them. She didn’t feel safe without them, so she was acting out, that’s what Auntie Cassie would say.
