The Rainy Season
Page 32
After thinking things through, he told Betsy about her passing, but he kept silent about her having moved into the house. How the news affected her, he couldn’t quite tell, but he had the impression that the same thing was true for Betsy as was true for him: Mrs. Darwin had already receded, her memory diminishing with each passing season.
AT THE TURN of the century, well water flowed between the willows, out of the culvert and down across the bank of the creek, washing the bank clean, exposing polished stones and sand that glittered with fool’s gold.
Phil and Jen walked out through the grove to the creek one quiet afternoon in April, where they found Betsy and her grandfather picking through sand-polished stones in shallow creek water. Betsy had gathered a jar full of them, topped off with water to keep them shiny.
“Treasures?” Phil asked her
“No,” she said. “Mostly just rocks.”
Colin held out his hand, which was covered with a folded, water-soaked handkerchief. Atop it lay what appeared to be a flattened glass marble, the glass cloudy, tinged with a faint orange swirl. Phil looked closely at it, and it seemed to him that the cloudy center suggested a misty human figure, like a genie captive in a bottle, or a ghost seeping from a crack in the earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in Unearth magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include Knights of the Cornerstone, The Ebb Tide, and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled The Aylesford Skull, to be published by Titan Books.