Shorter Days Read Online Free Page A

up a bit,” Bernd, one of the teachers, explained.
    Simon won’t take part in the festivities. He stands apart from the swarm of dressed-up children like a professional ghostbuster, a Man-in-Black in a suit and overcoat—perhaps he even has a laser gun in his briefcase that turns other-worldly beings into puddles of green slime. The fact that he can be here on a regular Tuesday to admire his daughter’s costume is pure luck; he had a business meeting on the glass-covered veranda at Sole e Luna, a temple for seafood-lovers on nearby Neue Weinsteig. In a moment he’ll get in his car and drive back to the office.
    Simon is actually the one who discovered this place for the girls. In the middle of the move, carrying a bag of rolls for the movers under his arm, he opened the wrought-iron gate: the faded inscription CHILDREN'S FARM 'WREN HOUSE' MON-SAT 10AM—6PM awakened the explorer in him. Simon is much more curious than Leonie, who managed to pass by the church with thirteenth-century frescoes in Heumaden, her old neighborhood, hundreds of times without succumbing to the allure of a sign that advertised “the only known representation of a female demon in Würtemburg.” It was only in the week before the move that she, already feeling a bit nostalgic, finally entered the bright room, which smelled curiously of apple pie. She knelt at the entrance automatically and searched along the wall for the basin of holy water—naturally, in this Protestant church it was nowhere to be found. Finally she traced the protective path from forehead over breastbone and shoulders with dry fingers. She lowered her head under the mild gaze of the Jesus who seemed to dangle effortlessly above her. Fascinated, she contemplated the black nails that passed through palms and feet and the wound that discreetly bled from Christ’s side and quietly murmured, “Please protect Simon and my girls, keep them healthy, Amen.” The whispered words were almost a sacrifice—not like the inscrutable transformation of the pale wafers, more like an incantation that belonged to another era: Give me this and I will give you that, I will scatter grains of frankincense in the altar flames, I will burn a fatted calf. This crude metaphysics came from a time when people prayed every night before bed; it had traveled down through the years unchanged, along with fragments of the rosary, whose “fruit of thy womb” was for Leonie always a Granny Smith, and images from a children’s bible—Adam and Eve clothed in furs, cowering under the angel’s flaming sword. Leonie’s mother had Sudeten German roots, and nurturing Catholic traditions in the Swabian diaspora was important to her; Leonie served as an acolyte for years.
    Only after the ritual of crossing herself did Leonie allow herself to take a brochure from the foyer and follow its guidance, head tilted back, in search of the demoness. She quickly discovered a blackish-brown figure amid the throng of faded shapes. Leonie was disappointed by the sexless body of the demon, dumpy and inchoate. A barely visible bulge was the only hint of a breast; the clumsy figure, without bosom or buttocks, looked like a silhouette pasted on the wall. “What were you expecting, a pin-up?” Simon teased her when she gave him her indignant report. She wasn’t able to put what disturbed her so much into words. Simon saw right through her, of course: for breaking her usual routine, departing from the regular path between office, kindergarten, playground, and supermarket to do something unusual, something pointless that had nothing to do with her job or family, she felt she deserved to be rewarded. With a full-breasted devil with a big butt, for example, one she could tell Simon about that night in bed as they drifted off together side by side, face to face, while she held his soft penis, disappointed that it didn’t budge, and then almost equally