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

the open tin of Bag Balm by the keyboard, smells of cinnamon mouthwash, smells like her. Like full-grown fully human woman. The office is cramped. The Minotaur moves his head slightly and almost knocks a framed poster from the wall. The poster reads, One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show .
    The computer screen flickers on the desk. Widow Fisk is working on the flier for The Encampment, Old Scald Village’s biggest reenactment event of the year, two weeks away.
    Widow Fisk goes out to make a sale. The Minotaur thinks about what just happened, about the unicorn girl. Can’t help thinking her reappearance is somehow linked with the electric shock from yesterday, the sudden blackening of the Judy-Lou, the stopping of all the clocks. Change is coming. Change. Change threatens to overtake the plodding old bull. The Minotaur knows it. For better or worse is in the eye of the beholder.
    Without really planning to the Minotaur snaps the lid on the Bag Balm and slips the tin into his jacket pocket.
    “Catch your breath,” Widow Fisk said.
    Sometimes it really is just that simple.

CHAPTER FIVE
    THEY SAY THAT, IN THE OLD DAYS, bridges were covered, were built to resemble barns, so that farm animals would feel more at home and not stampede as they were driven across streams and rivers. They say that bridges were covered to keep snow off, to keep the oiled planks of the roadbed from becoming dangerously slippery in the rain, to cover up unsightly trusses, to provide shelter to travelers caught in storms. Shelter. They say—some of them, the hopeful—that bridges were covered to secret away one’s love. To kiss there unseen. Shelter. They say.
    The Minotaur comes and goes. He has for centuries. And there have been many bridges.
    The Minotaur pauses, as he walks, midway through the covered bridge that serves, in more ways than one, as the entrance to Old Scald Village. He rests his heavy snout against one of the wooden trusses. The Minotaur likes this portal, both ingress and egress, a breach in the terribly human construct of time.
    “Mmmnn,” he says. The Minotaur likes this bridge.
    Music—or something like music, anyway—drifts into earshot from somewhere in the village. The Minotaur considers going back to see, to listen. Ponders it. But his history with music, that very human endeavor, is itself ponderous. He is drawn in. He is kept away. After the day he’s had, the portentous little unicorn girl, the lozenge in his throat, the Minotaur cannot fathom navigating his big horned head back through the village and the people. No matter how much he’d like to track the song to its source, to be in the presence of sound shaped by human intent.
    “Mmmnn,” he says.
    He likes this bridge. He liked it the first time he ventured through. Though the timing has to be right. He tries to wait until Biddle and the rest have left, or are occupied somewhere deep in the village. The Minotaur doesn’t want either the generosity of an offered ride or whatever comes with a passing stare.
    The single-lane bridge spans the weed-choked banks of Mill Run (when the upstream paper mill is in high production, Widow Fisk calls it Stink Creek). No lights are inside the bridge, and though there are gaps at the roof gable, there is, at nearly a hundred and twenty feet, a very real into-and-out-of-the-shadows experience for all who pass through.
    “Mmmnn,” the Minotaur says, and with his horn resting against the plank wall feels the ghosts of the old traffic, hoofed and otherwise, in the wood grain.
    To get anything from Old Scald Village, you have to cross this bridge, to move through, to let go of something behind and be willing to accept what’s ahead, no matter your direction of travel.
    Timing. It’s often all about timing. The day has been strange. Portentous. There in the bridge, shadowed, sheltered, the Minotaur feels time careen. Past, present, and future roil. He can feel it in the planks at his feet. They vibrate. They rumble. No. It’s a