The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

‘Many things have I seen many times over,’ said the old man, whose third hand was already beginning to look as natural to me as the birthmark on the side of my neck, ‘and I do not care to see many of them again. But there are three things I never grow tired of seeing.

‘One is the light in the eyes of a man or woman in love. The other is the setting of the sun.’

‘And the third?’ I asked.

He made a sound in his throat that might have passed for a hmm?

‘You said there were three things. But you’ve only mentioned two. What’s the third?’

The old man said simply, ‘Little children.’

I thought about what he said, and then I told the old man, ‘I have never been in love.’

He told me he had never been, either.

*

I did not go to see the old man for two days after that. My parents took me to see my grandmother, who lived many hours away. I’d been close to my grandmother when I was young, but the years and the cancer had distanced us. It’s not easy to get close to someone who might not be there tomorrow.

For the duration of the trip my parents tried to get me to spend as much time with my grandmother as possible. They told me things like how death was a natural part of life and how sooner or later we all had to go and that was how I realized my grandmother was growing tired of fighting. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. I tried to call Deidre, but she wouldn’t come.

My parents told me they were worried about me.

I told them I wanted to go home.

*

‘I thought you wouldn’t come again,’ the old man said as I walked down the beach.

‘Of course I’d come,’ I said, sitting down beside him in my usual spot. There was a beach towel neatly folded and placed on the sand. I sat on it. It was very comfortable.

I told the old man about my trip, and about my grandmother, and as I talked I cried, and did not feel ashamed.

The hours went by.

I asked the old man questions. He answered. He asked me questions. I answered.

We talked.

*

A few days later I returned home to find my parents waiting for me.

Home was a big house that looked out at other big houses along and across the street. There was nothing particularly unique or interesting about it; it was a rich house on a street where everybody was rich, and as such was unremarkable.

My parents stood side-by-side in our front room. They were holding each other as I walked in.

‘We need to talk,’ my father said.

No one ever says that unless something is wrong.

I noticed the other people in the room then. There was a woman in oversized glasses sitting by herself in the corner of the room, one long leg crossed over the other. She looked vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen her before. Maybe she just had one of those faces. Standing on either side of her were two men in matching jackets and boots. They stood with their hands behind their backs, avoiding my gaze. Something about them made my head hurt when I looked directly at them, so I turned back to my parents.

‘Talk about what?’ I asked my father. A funny thing happened when I spoke: my mother started to cry. She sounded on the verge of breaking down, like she was only just holding it together. I looked again at the strange-but-familiar woman in our house and wondered what she had done to my mother.

‘Dee, look at me, please,’ my father said.

Nobody had ever called me by that name before, but he was looking at me when he said it so I figured it must be me he was talking to. I looked back at him.

‘Where have you been all day?’ he asked me.

‘I’ve been at the beach,’ I answered truthfully.

‘And…’ my father began, then stopped, then tried again. ‘And what were you doing there?’

I paused for a while before answering, but I could see no way around the question without lying. I didn’t want to lie. ‘I was with my friend,’ I said, and of course the next question that came my way was:

‘What friend?’

I had kept my friendship with the old man secret up till now. This was partly because I suspected my parents would not approve and partly because my friendship with him was something precious to me and I felt like the more people that knew about it the less it would mean.

I saw no way to keep it a secret now. Something about the woman with the huge glasses and the two men flanking her like bodyguards and my parents standing together like they would crumble and turn to dust if they let each other go made me think the best thing I could do was tell the truth.

‘I was with the old man with the third hand,’ I said. ‘The one who sits down on the beach in his rocking chair. I lost my ball on the beach and went to get it and we got to talking and… well, now we’re friends.’

I kept my head down as I talked, but now I lifted it because a deathly silence had fallen in the room. Nobody moved – including myself. My parents looked like they’d been carved from rock, they were so still. So, too, were the three strangers. Although… was it my imagination, or had the two men moved ever so slightly in my direction?

The silence became too loud. I broke it.

‘What?’ I asked my parents. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

My mother made another sound in the back of her throat, and it took me a second to realize that she was crying again. ‘Oh Dee,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh Dee…’

There it was. That name again.

‘What