Spirits in the Wires Read Online Free Page B

It’s ancient. And it doesn’t help that I’m a little too familiar with the bottle.”
    I paused for a moment, then asked, “Do you have someplace to stay?”
    He smiled. “Come on now, Saskia. Don’t go all caseworker on me. Let’s just be friends.”
    â€œI wasn’t trying to …”
    â€œI know. It’s just that your heart’s too big. I already got that out of those pieces you wrote. But you don’t want to be bringing home strays— not unless you’ve got a mansion on a hill and more money than you know what to do with. If you’re not careful, you could end up with a mob of street people taking advantage of your goodwill and …” He gave me a toothy grin. “They wouldn’t all be as pretty as me.”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œIt’s okay. I’m sharing a room with a guy in a boardinghouse off Palm. I make do. And who knows, one of these days I might actually get it together and try to rebuild my life. Next time I see you, maybe we’ll go for a coffee and I’ll share all these great plans I’ve got for fixing the world— starting with yours truly.”
    â€œAll right,” I said. “I’ll hold you to that.”
    â€œThanks for stopping by,” he said.
    I smiled and stood up. “No, thank you for helping me figure out my problems. Maybe you should consider becoming a counselor.”
    He laughed. “Yeah, I’m just chock-full of good advice, even if I don’t put it into practice for myself.”
    â€œSee you, Marc,” I said.
    â€œYou know something?” he said as I started to walk away.
    I paused to look back at him.
    â€œIf it was me, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get rid of that shine of yours.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œWell,” he said. “It seems to me that everything’s got a spirit, a mystery that most of us can’t see. But invisible or not, that doesn’t stop these secret spirits from being the heart of the world—sort of what keeps it beating. Are you with me so far?”
    I nodded.
    â€œThen tell me this: Why would you want to hang around people that get uncomfortable, or even scared, about that kind of thing?”
    â€œMaybe just to feel normal,” I said.
    He laughed. “Normal’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
    â€œYou think?”
    â€œHell, I know.”
    I don’t know if I could have taken Marc’s advice even if I’d wanted to. So far as I could see, whatever was different about me came from inside. How do you avoid yourself?
    But he made a good point about normalcy. Except I don’t think it was so much that I wanted to be normal. It was more how nobody likes to be the brunt of other people’s ill will—especially when you’ve done nothing to earn it.
    I think the bigger question for me was that I needed to know
what
I was, and not even the voice in the back of my head seemed to have an answer to that.
    In the weeks that followed I made a point of getting out and seeing people. It was hard. Most of the time I got the same kind of reaction as I had from my neighbour across the hall, or the woman with her dog outside the Chinese grocery store. I’d go to music shows, art openings, poetry readings— any place that a person could go by herself to meet other people. Invariably some guy would start to hit on me—especially in a club—only to back off as though he’d suddenly realized that I had a third eye, or a forked tongue, or who knows what? I’d stay for awhile, but eventually the general level of barbed comments and ill will directed toward me would get to be too much and I’d have to go.
    Later, when I got to know Jilly and her crowd, I discovered that I’d been going to the wrong sorts of events—or the right events, only attended by the wrong sorts of people. But at the time, I didn’t know and there were a lot of