GLASS SOUP by Jonathan Carroll (funny books to read .txt) 📕

“Tell me.”

His eyes shifted to her hand still resting on top of the coffee cup. “I’ll show you instead.”

Isabelle didn’t know where to look then because Vincent avoided her eyes. Instead he continued staring at her coffee cup, so eventually she looked at it too.

Over the top of the cup now was a small hand, a child’s hand. On the fourth finger was a cheap plastic ring shaped like a sunflower. Isabelle had owned an identical ring when she was eight years old. She’d found it on the ground in the Stadtpark when she went walking there with her family one Sunday morning. Because sunflowers were her favorite flower, she’d assumed finding the ring was a magical sign; it would bring her luck. So she wore it religiously for two years, rarely taking it off.

An eight-year-old’s hand wearing that ring was at the end of her wrist on top of the cup now. The hand was small, the fingernails short to the nub, bitten away by a nervous mouth. Isabelle’s mouth when she was a girl and edgy about everything. Those nails, that hand, that very ring.

She was almost as surprised by her calm acceptance of knowing for certain that she was looking at her own eight-year-old hand as she was by the fact that that’s what it was.

And then it changed.

The hand got bigger while the fingernails grew longer and sprouted color—glaring green. A horrible, funny color she remembered well from a day when she was twenty. Flora had bought a bottle of psychedelic-green fingernail polish as a joke gift for Leni. Then the three friends ended up painting their nails and toenails with it that afternoon because they were completely bored and looking for anything to do. Flora’s mother took a picture of them showing off their green hands and toes. Isabelle had the photograph framed and still kept it on her desk.

“What are you doing, Vincent? Why is this happening?” She did not take her eyes off her hand.

“I talked to time. I asked it to do something. It understands what you say if you ask it correctly.”

“What did you ask it to do?”

“To show you your hand past, present, and future. Do you recognize them? Are they you?”

She looked at him blankly.

Ettrich said, “When a person’s alive they think time’s only what’s on a clock—hours, minutes, and days. But they’re wrong; I learned that when I was dead. Time’s also—” While he spoke her hand started to change again. In a moment what it became silenced him.

The green nail polish disappeared, replaced by a delicate silver and jasper-stone ring that Vincent had given her the week before. A thick small scar, the result of scraping her hand against a wall just after they returned from America, blossomed across the back of her thumb. At a glance it was clear this was Isabelle’s hand today. Except that one of her fingers was now missing.

Knee-Deep in Sunday Suits

“This is where I leave you.”

“What?” Haden barely heard Bob the polar bear because the animal was so far in front of him. It had been that way for miles. They had walked and walked across the city, Haden’s dream city, for most of the morning. But because the bear did not respond to his questions, the man had no idea where they were going except toward his nightmares.

“I said this is where I leave you, Simon.”

“What does that mean? Will you stop walking for a minute, please? Just stop for one fucking minute.”

Bob stopped but did not turn around. Haden looked at that huge white back in front of him and waited. Nothing happened so he used this stop time to catch his breath. When he had but the bear still hadn’t turned to face him, Haden looked around. He had never been in this part of the city. Or if he had, none of it was familiar. He knew that this place and everything in it came from his own memory and imagination. But one of the things he had learned here was that most of what a person does, thinks, and creates in a lifetime is forgotten. What remains in our memory, or in others’ hearts, or on the earth after we are gone is often a surprise.

A woman wearing a radiant blue “spinning Bobo” funeral mask from Burkina Faso walked by and said jovially, “Hi Simon!” Haden was used to this sort of loony event here by now and only acknowledged her greeting with a half wave.

“Follow her, Simon.”

Thinking about something else, Haden didn’t really register what Bob had said. “What?”

“Follow her—the one in the mask.”

“No Bob, I won’t follow her.” The bear still hadn’t turned around and frankly at that point Haden didn’t give a shit if it ever turned around again. The goddamned bear—who did it think it was, bossing him around like that? “What’s going on here anyway, huh? Where are we? What is this?”

The masked woman disappeared into a doorway down the block. For a moment Haden wondered who she was and where she was going.

Then something dawned on him—something big. Without another word, he dashed off down the street toward the woman who had disappeared.

Bob crossed its giant paws and tsked its tongue like a disapproving auntie. It was about time! From having lived with Simon Haden all through those little-boy years, Bob knew that he was dumb. But to have grown up and remained as dumb was both disheartening and impressive. Instead of his life experiences soaking down into him like water into porous stone, thereby making him weightier and more substantial, Haden seemed like glass when water is poured over it—nothing stays. Well maybe a little, but only in the remote corners and definitely not much.

The woman in the blue mask had been just about the last rabbit Bob had left to pull out of its hat. If Simon had not reacted after seeing her, the bear really would have