Honeydew: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

him and he flirted right back, kept her as close to full awareness as possible. “Have you ever been in love, Blue Eyes?” she giggled.
    Afterward, a mute shower, his second of the day, while the chatter that had clung to him drained into the hospital’s sewer.
      
    One day, shortly after a rain, something unfortunate happened. While sliding on her backside down the bank toward the stream, Acelle was stabbed by what felt like a dagger. It was in fact only a bit of narrow branch. It would have done little damage had she been wearing jeans, but today she’d worn last year’s party dress. Below the striped mini her legs were bare and her upper thigh and even part of her buttock were vulnerable to the miniature weapon; worse yet, the thing had its own pointed twiglet, which had entered the flesh easily enough but, Joe saw, would be a bitch to dislodge.
    “It’s like a fishhook, pointing backward,” Joe explained to Acelle. “They make fishhooks that way on purpose…so they can’t be pulled out the way they came in, and the fish can’t get loose.”
    She was lying on her stomach. “Pull it out anyway.”
    He bent and looked closely at the little bit of tree that seemed to be feeding on her tenderness. “No, the fishhook will rip you. It went in slanted, like a splinter. It’s very near the…skin, the surface. Maybe I could cut your skin and lift it out.”
    “Maybe you could stop talking and do it.”
    He took out his imitation Swiss Army knife. The two of them had been enjoying it all summer. It was his birthday present. Even this knockoff was so expensive that all his relatives had to chip in. “I should sterilize the blade.”
    “Spit on it.”
    Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded-up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He stretched the affected area between his forefinger and middle finger, and made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came out too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.
    “It hurts a lot but not as much as before,” Acelle said. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
      
    Near the main entrance—the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm—was the gift shop that had recently become Victoria Tarnapol’s to manage. Victoria had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades earlier. Returning now, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.
    The gift shop was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a glass candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, as were the games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria’s ascendancy, two round café tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and slices of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-café became popular—many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you’d prefer not to know existed.
    Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the glass-walled gift shop. In those first days he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter—she had a face like a goddess, she had a spinal deformity—had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one, who usually helped out, was late for school, and so he had to make all three bologna sandwiches: his, Camilla’s, Acelle’s. On his midmorning break, when he would normally be walking in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria instead. But he stopped to look at a ship in a bottle in the gift-shop window—he’d like to try making one of those