|
Excerpt
Polly!
by
Stephen Goldin
At first he thought the object ahead might be a mirage. But it
didn’t shimmer, and it grew in appearance as his car approached.
A two-story mansion of shiny white stone, with rows of windows on
each level, reflected the early afternoon sun. The front porch,
shaded by an overhang, boasted a row of gleaming white marble
pillars. In front of the house a rectangular patch of green lawn
sharply delineated from the barren desert around it.
He’d driven the road before and didn’t remember seeing anything like
this. But that was a few years ago, and anything could have happened
in the meantime. He ignored the mansion and drove straight ahead.
Or tried to. Without warning his engine suddenly coughed and died,
and the old Corolla coasted slowly to a stop almost directly in
front of the mansion’s driveway. He at least managed to steer it off
to the side of the road so it wouldn’t get hit by any other car
passing this way. Not that there was much likelihood of that.
The gas gauge showed the tank was half full. He tried the ignition a
couple of times, but only got a dismal whirring noise. “Damn!” he
screamed at the unheeding machine, pounding the steering wheel with
both fists. “Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! Why me? Why now? I knew I
shouldn’t have trusted this piece of junk for a trip like this.”
He looked at the stack of insurance forms on the passenger’s seat
under the bag of his clothes he’d managed to salvage after the fire,
then got out and slammed the door angrily behind him. He raised the
hood to stare at the engine. It was an exercise in futility—he had
no idea what to look for, let alone how to fix it.
He looked impatiently at his watch. Twelve thirty-five. The
temperature was easily a hundred already and would only get worse as
the afternoon wore on. There wasn’t a breath of wind. He’d have to
do something if he wanted to make it to his brother’s ranch before
nightfall.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. That was
no help, either—the display showed no signal here. After all, who
would put a cell phone tower out here for the jackrabbits and
coyotes? He threw the cell phone as far as he could into the desert.
“Good riddance!” he shouted after it. “What good are you? What good
is anything?” He kicked the car in frustration and shook with a
barely suppressed sob. “What good is anything?”
What he wanted to do was get back in the car again. In the back
seat. And curl up in a fetal ball, whimpering. Maybe even sucking
his thumb. The whole universe could just pass him by. That would
probably be better than what it had been doing lately.
He looked up and saw the house again. Well, at least he could ask to
use their phone to call Triple-A. Of course, with his luck there
wouldn’t be anyone home.
He looked down at himself. Despite his sweating, his clothes were
dry in this desert heat. He ran his fingers through his hair a
couple of times in lieu of a comb. Then he started stomping up the
asphalt driveway, glad it wasn’t a dark, stormy night; because then
he might be heading into the lair of Dracula or Frank-N-Furter or
someone ominous like that.
He was so wrapped up in his black cloud of thoughts that he’d gotten
more than halfway up the driveway before he saw the snowman out on
the lawn near the porch. It had to be one of those plastic Christmas
ornaments, he mused. Someone had a weird sense of humor, leaving it
out in July. Either that or they were really lazy about putting it
away.
As he approached it, though, it looked more and more real. It was a
standard three-snowball snowman with the base three feet in
diameter, the middle two feet and the head one foot. Its eyes were
black plums, its nose a sweet gherkin pickle and its mouth a dotted
line of cherries curving in a smile. It wore a cheerful yellow and
red scarf around where its neck would be. On its head, instead of
the traditional top hat, it had an Oakland A’s baseball cap. Its
arms were disproportionately skinny, just a couple of bare twigs
sticking out of its shoulders.
He came up beside it and touched it experimentally. It was cold. It
was made of snow. And it was standing out on this lawn in
hundred-degree heat under the blazing desert sun in July.
He backed away from it slowly, not completely willing to take his
eyes off it. The snowman just stood there and showed no intention of
melting.
PDF Ebook
: 
HTML Ebook
PRINT
|
