Dreams Underfoot: A Newford Collection Read Online Free PDF

it’s there.”
    “So was it always there and we’re just aware of it now? Or does it exist because we believe in it? Is it something that came out of us—out of me?”
    “Like Uncle Dobbin’s birds, you mean?”
    Reece nodded, unaware of the flutter of dark wings that Ellen felt stir inside her.
    “I don’t know,” she said softly.
    “Uncle Dobbin’s Parrot Fair” was the last story in Christy Riddell’s book, the title coming from the name of the pet shop that Timothy James Dobbin owned in Santa Ana. It was a gathering place for every kind of bird, tame as well as wild. There were finches in cages and parrots with the run of the shop, not to mention everything from sparrows to crows and gulls crowding around outside.
    In the story, T. J. Dobbin was a retired sailor with an interest in nineteenth-century poets, an old bearded tar with grizzled red hair and beetling brows who wore baggy blue cotton trousers and a white T-shirt as he worked in his store, cleaning the bird cages, feeding the parakeets, teaching the parrots words. Everybody called him Uncle Dobbin.

    He had a sixteen-year-old assistant named Nori Wert who helped out on weekends. She had short blonde hair and a deep tan that she started working on as soon as school was out. To set it off she invariably wore white shorts and a tanktop. The only thing she liked better than the beach was the birds in Uncle Dobbin’s shop, and that was because she knew their secret.
    She didn’t find out about them right away. It took a year or so of coming in and hanging around the shop and then another three weekends of working there before she finally approached Uncle Dobbin with what had been bothering her.
    “I’ve been wondering,” she said as she sat down on the edge of his cluttered desk at the back of the store. She fingered the world globe beside the blotter and gave it a desultory spin.
    Uncle Dobbin raised his brow questioningly and continued to fill his pipe.
    “It’s the birds,” she said. “We never sell any—at least not since I’ve started working here. People come in and they look around, but no one asks the price of anything, no one ever buys anything. I guess you could do most of your business during the week, but then why did you hire me?”
    Uncle Dobbin looked down into the bowl of his pipe to make sure the tobacco was tamped properly. “Because you like birds,” he said before he lit a match. Smoke wreathed up towards the ceiling. A bright green parrot gave a squawk from where it was roosting nearby and turned its back on them.
    “But you don’t sell any of them, do you?” Being curious, she’d poked through his file cabinet to look at invoices and sales receipts to find that all he ever bought was birdfood and cages and the like, and he never sold a thing. At least no sales were recorded.
    “Can’t sell them.”
    “Why not?”
    “They’re not mine to sell.”
    Nori sighed. “Then whose are they?”
    “Better you should ask what are they.”
    “Okay,” Nori said, giving him an odd look. “I’ll bite. What are they?”
    “Magic.”
    Nori studied him for a moment and he returned her gaze steadily, giving no indication that he was teasing her. He puffed on his pipe, a serious look in his eyes, then took the pipe stem from his mouth.
    Setting the pipe carefully on the desk so that it wouldn’t tip over, he leaned forward in his chair.
    “People have magic,” he said, “but most of them don’t want it, or don’t believe in it, or did once, but then forgot. So I take that magic and make it into birds until they want it back, or someone else can use it.”
    “Magic.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Not birds.”
    Uncle Dobbin nodded.
    “That’s crazy,” Nori said.
    “Is it?”
    He got up stiffly from his chair and stood in front of her with his hands outstretched towards her chest. Nori shrank back from him, figuring he’d flaked out and was going to cop a quick feel, but his hands paused just a few inches from her