“Deener!” Mrs. Barlow said. “Where’s your manners?”
“In fact it is,” said their mother. “I just put it on the counter to cool. We’d be happy if you’d join us for a piece. We’ve got ice cream too.”
“Tip top,” said Mr. Deener. “Someone fed me a pie a short time back that was apparently full of pits. Gave me the most awful indigestion.” He looked at Mrs. Barlow. “Tasted burnt, too.”
“Where’s Polly?” Danny asked, looking out the window.
John looked past him. What he saw was the front porch, the lawn, the street. Mr. Skink was raking leaves again. Penny the cat climbed the porch steps and jumped up onto the swing. “Aren’t they coming?” John asked.
Mr. Deener shook his head. “Not through the window.”
Danny took the doughnut monocle out of his back pocket. The doughnut fell off the end of the stick. John picked it up and handed it to him, and Danny peered through it, out the window. “Wait,” he shouted, but then was silent, as if there was no point in yelling. After a moment he waved. He handed the monocle to John.
Through it, John could see Aunt Flo and Polly, very far away now. The full moon was like a tiny white marble in the sky. In the hazy distance the hills were green, and the river flowed down onto the meadow, not dry white anymore, but like a blue ribbon. Far away rose what looked like chimney smoke, maybe from unseen farmhouses that had just awakened out of an autumn sleep. As John watched, the whole world beyond the window rushed away from him. Polly waved, and John waved back.
“Who is it?” asked their mother, stepping over to the window.
“Just some friends of ours,” Danny said.
She looked out. “Why that’s Kimberly and Florence Owlswick,” their mother said, and she shut the window and turned the latch.
“We’ll give them a piece of pie, too. There’s enough for everyone.”
“I’ll just let them in, if you don’t mind,” Mr. Deener said, looking past her out the window. John looked too. It was Kimberly and her aunt, heading up the walk. What a coincidence. Mr. Deener hurried from the room followed by everyone except John and his mother.
John slipped the doughnut monocle into his jacket pocket. There, lying inside, was the holly berry Christmas pin. He handed it to her.
“Wherever did you find it?” she asked, pinning it on her blouse. “I looked high and low for it.”
John blinked at her, wondering whether to tell her the truth – that he had snatched it off a goblin’s shirt when he was about to be boiled in a kettle full of bones and fog and glass jewelry. Maybe later he’d tell her.
“I found it outside,” he said.
“Outside?” She turned toward the door. A big hubbub was just then starting up in the living room over the return of Mr. Deener. “Outside. Isn’t that the strangest thing?”
“I guess it’s one of them,” John said.
Chapter 21: What Happened After That
Autumn passed away. Christmas came and went. In January Mr. Deener and Mrs. Barlow got married on a rainy Saturday afternoon and moved into a white wooden house near the library, on Center Street. That spring Mrs. Barlow opened a doughnut shop where the curiosity shop had been. There had been nothing left in the empty shop but the one dusty green copy of the Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. She gave the book to John and Danny to keep.
Mr. Deener went into the business of making marbles in his garage. He set up complicated magnifying apparatus in order to heat his glass kiln with moonlight. The sleeping cat from Dr. Stone’s office lived in the garage among the jars of colored glass chips. Only it wasn’t asleep anymore; it had awakened on the afternoon of their return from the magic land, and Mr. Deener adopted it and was teaching it not to eat sparrows. On that same afternoon the fountain in the plaza had gurgled suddenly to life, as if, like the cat, it too had simply been asleep.
As an experiment one Saturday morning, John, Danny, and Kimberly gave Harvey Chickel some of Mrs. Barlow’s doughnuts. At first he pretended he thought they were poisoned, and he wouldn’t eat them. Then he forced himself to eat one and said that it “tasted like dirt.” Then he ate two more and asked if that was all and got mad when they said it was. He didn’t push anybody, though, and he didn’t spit.
Instead he went over to the Deeners’ house with everyone else, and all of them ate more doughnuts and listened to Mr. Deener explain his theory of tin cans and moon travel. Harvey made the pinwheel sign around his ear a couple of times, but he hung around all afternoon while Mr. Deener showed them how to make the rainbow spiral in a glass marble.
And he showed them how, if you had a clear eye and the right tools, you could learn to make the marbles round every time, as round as a soap bubble or the moon or the hole in a perfect doughnut.
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.
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