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

her message, he didn’t know that what those people saw were the English words Glass Soup and nothing more. Leni had spoken to the living in the language of the dead. But it did not translate. As a result, the living saw two words they understood but which made no sense other than as a surreal image signifying nothing.

That’s why there was no noticeable reaction in that crowd to the vision at the time it happened. The majority of them thought it was only creepy nonsense, as meaningless as Leni’s message. A dead woman held up a sign that read GLASS SOUP. So what? Were they supposed to turn to their husband or neighbor in the middle of this funeral and exclaim I just had a vision of dead Leni! She showed me a sign that made no sense. That would have been a big hit with the other mourners; it would have added a lot to the solemnity of the occasion. Even her best friends Isabelle and Flora remained silent about it, although both were immediately convinced that their visions meant something significant.

In fact Isabelle was so caught up thinking about what she’d just seen that she didn’t realize for quite a while that her Vincent was no longer standing nearby. On discovering his absence though she wasn’t particularly surprised. It was just his way—Mr. Fidgety. Vincent could never stand in one place too long. He called himself KADD—the King of Attention Deficit Disorder. She assumed he was somewhere nearby.

He wasn’t. Because like John Flannery, Vincent Ettrich also knew what Glass Soup meant. When Leni held up her handwritten sign, he read the two words on it and his eyes widened slightly. Ettrich felt neither panic nor joy. He did not feel like running off in all directions at once. In the language of the dead, Glass Soup described and explained the mosaic, and the mosaic was God. One of the first lessons a person learned after dying—what it was and what it meant.

Walking away from the funeral, his mind was in the afterlife, looking slowly around at all that it held. Passing through the cemetery gates, Ettrich realized he knew how to do so much now; so much more than before.

“Shit.”

Both Simon Haden and Leni Salomon looked at Bob the Bear.

“What’s the matter?”

“It didn’t work.”

“What do you mean?”

“How do you know?”

The bear rubbed its head and said angrily, “Shit shit shit. It didn’t work, do you understand? It’s my job to know these things. It didn’t work.”

Haden and Leni glanced at each other at the same moment with the same question in their eyes—how can it be sure?

Haden looked away, muttering his own curses. It had been so difficult to reach Leni in the first place. Find Leni and her dreamworld in the limitless regions of death. And if you do that, then you must figure out how to enter that world and find her in it.

But Haden had done all of that. What’s more, he did it alone. No help from Bob or any others. His search for Leni Salomon had been tedious, then frightening and grueling. Full of wrong turns and false hopes, eventually he had done it. He had no idea how long it took in lifetime—a thousand years or ten minutes? This was death and the clocks here were different. Haden was so proud of himself, prouder of this than anything he had ever done. Prouder even than the bravery he had displayed toward Mrs. Dugdale and later against Sunday Suits back in the school gymnasium.

He would not forget the expression on Leni’s face when he walked up to her on the bench while she was feeding the dinosaur. He didn’t know that as a girl, Leni had dreamt of dinosaurs night after night after night. Maybe it was because of the contrast—she was a small child with a bad leg and dinosaurs were so very huge and powerful. Or maybe she just liked them. Even with a little girl’s tongue she could perfectly pronounce their polysyllabic names as if they were the players on her favorite team, or the words of a much loved children’s prayer.

When Haden finally located her in death, adult Leni was sitting on a green park bench near the banks of the Danube River, about four miles away from where she had been buried. It had been one of her favorite places to sit when she was alive, so naturally she carried it with her into death.

At her feet was a large brown wicker basket filled with cooked hamburgers. Sitting obsequiously on its hind legs nearby was a nine-foot-long Troodon, once known as the Stenonychosaurus. The smallish dinosaur took each burger it was offered with the most careful, delicate gesture and then put them into its mouth with a paw and claws that looked like they could have torn a hole in concrete if this monster got pissed off.

“Hey there,” Haden said from a reasonable distance, not sure if he wanted to get any closer to this burger-vore, dream creature or not.

Dead Leni turned to him and recognizing her onetime lover, smiled at Haden but not very warmly. “Hello Simon.” Her voice was flat. She appeared neither happy nor surprised to see him here.

He crossed his arms and tried to find a comfortable standing position. But every time he looked at Leni’s friend the dinosaur, Haden went up on his toes, ready to run at its slightest suspicious twitch or flick.

She reached into the basket, brought out another burger, and handed it to the creature. It gently hooked the meat with one huge claw and brought it to its mouth. “I’ll give you one of these hamburgers, Simon, if you can tell me what its name is.”

Haden only smiled and shrugged. He didn’t know anything about it and didn’t want to know. “Donald?”

“It’s called a Troodon. The name means ‘wounding tooth.’ This used to be my favorite dinosaur when I was a girl because it’s relatively small. My