A Dirge for the Temporal Read Online Free

around the room. “It is OK?”
      “Yes, very much. Before you go, can you recommend a place for dinner?”
      She smiled. “Our own restaurant perhaps? A table has been waiting, I think, for a long time.”
  “What do you mean?”
      “We don’t get many visitors here, Mr. Sept. We are honored to have you.”
      Leaving the key, she closed the door, and he was alone.
      Room 11 was on the back side of the building, with a balcony and a view that swallowed him into its oblivions upon the moment of first contact. The slope behind the Gasthaus was rocky and steep, one section boasting a waterfall draping in quivering iridescence from the lip of a high cliff. A scent not especially pleasant, but raw, real, came off the pool formed by the falls. On the brink of the sheer face stood trees whose twisted roots dug into the stone, forming the knitted, contemplative brow of a sage old man. Down by the pool stood another chestnut tree, and another, and grass as green as May.

        But May is September, September is May,
         The fields that we play in, we always will play

      He could not recall where the verse came from, and chose not to go searching among the relics. The past was not to be visited; so it had been decreed. Then why could he not avoid his images as he gazed out across the rich grass? Delete the waterfall and wasn’t this the park where he had lain with his poet Ginger and understood the secrets of the universe? Hadn’t he made love to her only there, beneath the tree, while she spoke to him in whispers of September, that whispering time of year? Ah, the verse was hers, of course. Where did she go, with stars in her brown eyes, poet of his?
      She had been his inspiration for dabbling in the arts himself. He had taken up painting, then photography, then, in college, writing. After a year of submitting his fiction to the same responses—mainly that he spent too much time on exposition and not enough on narration—he gave it up. The psychiatrist his mother was seeing at the time—a probing, dis cerning man—had expounded on the theory for him. Galen’s approach to literature was Galen’s approach to life. If he spent as much time actually living his life as he did setting it up, he would live as living was meant to be. The aside was that almost all people took the approach Galen did. This gratis observation no doubt encouraged Galen’s falling into the European setting with such love. With only one year separating his degree from its application, he had leapt into the world offered to him, perhaps at Laura’s expense. While she screamed permanence, he belted about the rare opportunity they had. They’d best seize it while it was in their grasp because one day it would be back to Iowa and they would have missed their chance to live.
  The fields that we play in, we always will play.
      “Excuse me, Mr. Sept…”
      Her voice came from below. He leaned over the balcony rail to find her smiling up at him. Something belonging to the moment, something about the unassuming expression on her oval face, or the last of the afternoon sun dancing in her hair, made her look especially youthful. He wondered how old she was, but there was no answer to be found in gazing upon her rather wistful, though lovely, features. Her eyes belied her visage, and vice versa.
      “Please call me Galen…Verena.”
      “Of course. If you would like, I will have dinner ready for you, Galen.”
      “You prepare it yourself?” he asked.
      “There is no one else. Not for a very long time.”
      He confessed, “I’m confused. Earlier you referred to it as our restaurant. You said, ‘ We don’t get many visitors.’”
      “It is…how do you say…a figure of speech?”
      He looked at her a moment before asking, “Did you come back here expecting to find me on the balcony?”
      “I was going to the waterfall to wash my hands.” She held up the right one, palm to him. “I must know if it will