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

urgent, as if there was real danger nearby, or they were right on the brink of something. Ettrich looked again toward where the dog was pointing but saw nothing. Still, Hietzl’s agitated tone made him uneasy. For some reason—who knows why?—he turned quickly and glanced back to the place on the ground where his model airplane had crashed a few minutes before. It was gone.

Ettrich did not appear surprised. His eyes flicked here and there around the area to make sure this was true. It was—the model had disappeared. Only then did a kind of alarm show on his face. The dog was right—real trouble had just arrived.

“Hietzl.”

The dog stopped a moment, and then continued barking.

“Stop it! Come on, we’ve got to go right now.” Ettrich touched the dog on top of its head. Then he began walking back toward his car as fast as he could manage. He had not healed completely so he couldn’t run. But he would have.

Two hundred yards behind them among the thick stand of trees stood another man and his dog. This man’s name was John Flannery. He was portly and rather short. He wore a trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. People sometimes remarked on the resemblance between him and photos of the older Ernest Hemingway. Flannery always liked hearing that. He’d never read Hemingway but liked who he was.

Today he wore a brand-new blue T-shirt that wasn’t tucked into a pair of brand-new beige shorts covered with lots of pockets. Oddly, he was barefoot although he stood on a forest floor covered with a variety of sharp stabby things.

The dog, a Great Dane with black spots scattered across its white body like ink spilled on a blotter, was named Luba. It had blue eyes and stood unmoving by Flannery’s side. The presence of these two had caused Ettrich’s dog to start barking. Interestingly, Hietzl had sensed them but gotten their direction wrong. Ettrich saw nothing when he looked toward where Hietzl was yapping because nothing was there. Flannery and Luba stood far behind them, watching impassively, as the other two walked away and finally out of sight. Flannery held Ettrich’s model plane in both of his hands. It was whole again and looked like it had just come new out of a box.

When the others were gone, Flannery turned toward the woods and lifted his arm high above his head. With a quick flick of the wrist, he threw the plane into the trees.

Defying all laws of logic and gravity, it stayed aloft for the next twenty minutes. Even when the wind around them died completely, the small plane continued flying through the forest—around trees, beneath and above and round and round long crooked grasping branches that normally never would have let it pass. The plane flew right by those branches. It taunted them with loop de loops and sudden swerves to avoid all kinds of collisions that should have happened but didn’t.

After a while Flannery and Luba sat down on the forest floor to watch this performance. Now and then the man spoke to the dog in a relaxed companionable voice. It looked at him as if it understood every word.

At one point Flannery raised his left hand. The wooden plane instantly stopped and hung in the air fifteen feet up, next to a towering chestnut tree covered with flickering yellow-green leaves. A mile and a half away, Ettrich had started his car and was driving off. Flannery nodded and smiled for the first time, having waited for the sound of those tires crunching across the gravel of the parking lot. His hand dropped and the plane started flying again.

“Things look good, but we can’t get excited yet. ‘Thunder is not yet rain,’” John Flannery said out loud. He loved proverbs. He memorized whole books of them and always had one for any occasion. Suddenly another popped into his head. “Too large a morsel chokes the child.” As he thought about it for a few moments, his face lit up in delight. He could use that. Damn right! He could use it this minute to make Vincent Ettrich’s life a very, very uncomfortable place to be.

He raised his chin a bit toward where the plane was flying. It did a 180-degree turn toward him. As if waiting for instructions, it paused a second or two and then flew away. Out of the forest, away from the trees and Flannery and Luba the dog, the plane flew toward Ettrich and his dog and Isabelle Neukor and their child and the misery these people would soon know. Today was the first day of the end of their lives. Even John Flannery felt sort of sorry for these poor fuckers, if you can believe that.

“So how did Haden die?”

Sitting back in the chair, Flora Vaughn crossed her arms over her chest. “How come I don’t hear a lot of regret in your question, Leni?”

Leni rolled her eyes and proceeded to answer for all of them. “Because Simon told the women he wanted to fuck that he was dying so they’d feel sorry for him and go to bed with him. I did, and so did you. I don’t care if he’s dead.”

Flora nodded and smiled. “Don’t you love the way Leni phrases things so diplomatically? She should be an ambassador to some dangerous country—she’d start World War Three in half an hour. ‘Mr. President, your foreign policy sucks. It’s obvious you’re either completely incompetent, or you’ve got a small cock and are compensating.’”

“We’re not talking about me. How did Simon die?”

Flora took a drink of water and then pointed at the glass. “In a car wash.”

Her answer was so unexpected that spontaneously the three of them broke out laughing again.

“No, really—how?”

“That’s the truth. Sabine Baar-Baarenfels told me. He died in a car wash in Los Angeles. He had a heart attack while his car was being washed.” Some answers in life are so weird yet satisfying that on hearing them, all that the mind can