The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time Read Online Free Page A

always does), her fingertips graze his palm (they always do). The Minotaur occasionally sees the fully human in a face. Sometimes, though, he can detect the animal. Widow Fisk winks when she gives him the candy. Maybe. With her enormous glasses and his own struggles with seeing clearly, the Minotaur can’t be certain.
    “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, and is poking one of the bittersweet lozenges deep into his mouth when he opens the Gift Shoppe door.
    “Hey!”
    The Minotaur looks up.
    “Hey!”
    Up and into the eyes of the little unicorn girl, her beautiful hazel eyes. The same girl from the battlefield, from yesterday. She’s in the pillory. Her family has come back to see the dying two days in a row. It’s not uncommon. She’s in the pillory, the stocks, perched tiptoe on a stepstool. The girl cranes the scrawny neck and wiggles the birdlike arms jutting through the pillory’s three rough holes. A boy, probably a brother, chops at her feet with a rubber-bladed tomahawk from the Gift Shoppe. The lights in her magic shoes blink madly with each whack.
    “Hey!”
    She’s speaking to the Minotaur. A woman, probably her mother, sits—exhausted or bored—on a wooden bench between the Chickens and Roosters bathroom doors. The woman barely looks up from the cell-phone screen she’s tapping at. The unicorn girl’s father, struggling to focus his own cell phone on the squirming kids, looks fully at the Minotaur. His paternal hackles rise instantly.
    “Hey!” he says.
    The pillory. Medieval. Simple. Little more than planks and chains and humiliation. There are three, maybe four pillories in Old Scald Village, and always lines at every one. Always someone shrieking, “My turn!” or “You next!” And the ceaseless photographs. The Minotaur is perplexed by humans’ obsession with, love of, punishment. The Minotaur knows, too, that nothing in Old Scald Village could hold that tiny beast against her will. Not really.
    “Hey!” she says.
    And the whole gathered throng looks at the Minotaur.
    The Minotaur is stunned by her presence, by her reappearance. Not exactly spooked, but so surprised that he gasps. He gasps and sucks the horehound lozenge deep into his throat. There it plugs his windpipe tight, seals it, guards against any breath, out or in.
    A choking Minotaur is a sight to behold. Or maybe not. The Minotaur isn’t quite sure what to make of the airless moment. Thinking back over the millennia, he’s surely been in this situation before. But for the life of him the Minotaur can’t recall. He scuttles backward into the Gift Shoppe, mostly to get away from the scrutinizing eyes. In his haste, trying to dislodge the candy, the Minotaur dips his head low, and his horn tip plows through a bin of sock puppets. George Washington. Betsy Ross. Ulysses S. Grant. When the Minotaur rears his head Abe Lincoln dangles, impaled on the horn.
    Much about the Minotaur’s life is ridiculous. He accepted that fact a long time ago. He tries not to dwell on it, but sometimes . . .
    Widow Fisk, on the other hand, is a pragmatic no-nonsense creature. She doesn’t judge. She acts.
    Widow Fisk rounds the counter, steps up behind the breathless Minotaur, encircles him in her capable gingham-clad arms, snugs him tight against her ample and aproned bosom, and yanks her balled fists into his gut. One time. The Minotaur’s cavernous diaphragm is no match for Widow Fisk. Neither is the horehound lozenge. The hard candy fires from deep in the Minotaur’s throat. It flies across the room. It pings and plinks in a “Union States of the Civil War” shot glass display, coming to rest in Ohio.
    “Mmmnn, thanks,” the Minotaur’s says. His eyes water. Faces may be pressed to the glass door, looking in, but he can’t tell.
    “Sit yourself down, hon,” Widow Fisk says, leading the Minotaur into the tiny office behind the register. “Catch your breath.”
    The windowless room is warm and smells of running computers, smells of lanolin from