Storm Glass Read Online Free Page A

really knew her quite well; all about her window sashes and bedside tables, all about her music box and stuffed toys and sleeping brothers. He knew her well enough to demand that she sew his shadow back on immediately. Which she did, making everything more or less as it should be. John knew nothing of the interior of my rooms and didn’t care to know as far as I could tell. So, as a result, I gained full possession of his shadow. He just never knew me well enough to ask for it back. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that I had it.
    Once the shadow was back in place, back where it should be, Wendy and Peter began to have adventures. John and I shared no adventures. We met in neutral rooms in the neutral suburbs of what could have been any city in the world. It was all poured concrete and mirrors and plate-glass windows thatlooked out on more poured concrete. You couldn’t take much home with you from spaces such as these. It would be unlikely that you would even remember the pattern on the spread or the pictures on the walls. Nobody stayed for long in these rooms and we knew it. They passed right through them on their way back to the unique furniture of their real lives. This was just the way John wanted it. The memory of me or anything to do with me was something he could do without. Because I was in love with him this angered and hurt me even though I knew that things could be no other way. Perhaps it was this hurt, this anger that made me unconsciously steal his shadow.
    I was always running away from John one way or another: planes to here, planes to there, trains to places where there were no phones. Phones that ring, phones that remain silent, phones that are full of awkward sentences and tense silences. I was always running away to anonymous addresses in foreign countries. Sometimes I was annoyed to find John’s shadow in my suitcase when I arrived; sometimes, however, I was relieved. A bit of familiarity in a strange place. And without the possibility of having to deal with the neutrality of the real John this could be comforting. The shadow, I felt, had the ability to care.
    And it was portable—unlike John who stayed, stayed, stayed where he was. Stayed with his wife, stayed with his kids, stayed in the city. He wouldn’t have followed me anywhere, not that John, not that real John. He made me come to him in those grey neutral rooms he rented. He locked me into them and pushed me out of them. He covered himself with me and then he showered me off. But I had his shadow with me later for some company.
    More than anything, though, I missed knowing some other kinds of rooms; rooms where something, anything, belonged to him, belonged to me, belonged to us.
    This time when I arrived at the airport in northern England I was full of John, full of him. On the plane I had read books that I knew he liked, expressed to the stranger beside me opinions that I knew were his. I was even wearing a pair of jeans that were similar to his. Oh, I was full of him all right, more than I usually was when I was running away, and why? Because he had utterly rejected me before I had left. It was always like that: the greater the hurt, the more the compulsion to run away, the more he pumped through my blood stream and nervous system like some kind of bad drug leaving me weak with longing and self-loathing. His indifference was a stimulus to my obsession, it was as simple as that. And so, by the time I stepped off the plane in northern England I was so stunned, so absorbed that I wasn’t sure that his shadow wasn’t my own, that I hadn’t sewn it onto the toes of the wrong body by mistake.
    John in my bloodstream, John in my nervous system and John’s shadow attached to every other part of my body as I walked up the flagstone path towards the stone cottage I had rented. Beside me, oblivious to all but my material luggage, my new landlady, Mrs. Southam, who was discussing, at some length, the hardships of the present winter, hardships which