Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 Read Online Free PDF Page A

had to cross several major streets. But that night, I walked. My neighborhood is full of old split levels and even smaller houses, like mine, which only has two bedrooms and no basement. As I walked farther I went through a neighborhood full of newer, bigger, two-story homes. One of the houses, which was brick on the bottom half and siding on the top, now had a huge clock in the side of it. The clock was set in a huge wave of metal, shining pink in the setting sun. I went this way to the grocery and the house had never had a clock in it before. It was big, with an ornate hour and minute hand and no numbers, just an ivory face with a design like ivy down near where the seven would have been. But the siding around the clock had been changed into some substance like porcelain that rose and swirled organic. Suburbia has always struck me as a little strange, but before it had been a boring, overly sincere falseness, and it was as if that clock was about a different suburbia full of beautiful manmade things, full of artifice.
    I thought about my mother's house, walking through the darkness. When I got there it would be the end of the day and maybe I'd have a daiquiri or a Manhattan, and maybe my mother would have one with me. I didn't really know if I wanted a drink, but it would be a kind of punctuation on the day.
    I was at an intersection: traffic lights, four lanes wide plus turn lanes in all directions, waiting to cross, maybe only half a mile from my mother's house. A dry cleaner, a drug store, buildings all pressed close to the street without much space between them. A Ford pickup was stopped at the light in one direction. The sky was dark but still glowed purple and luminous the way it will some nights, especially before a tornado. A young unkempt guy with a beard sprinted across the light and an SUV coming around the corner fast lost it trying to avoid him and went up on two wheels as it started to roll over and everything froze in place. I could see the underside of the SUV, all that car stuff of struts and differentials and muffler and catalytic converter. I looked around. Time wasn't stopped. The DON'T WALK light was flashing and although things were frozen, it was imperfect, and after a moment, like the moment of a held breath, the truck floored it and went through the intersection past the frozen tumbling SUV. The guy running had only one foot on the ground, but his raised left foot wiggled back and forth on his ankle, as if he was finding his way to movement. A big orange sneaker, with a big white toe, waggling.
    I looked at it all and I knew it was all right. It was only just beginning.
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American Dreamers
    Caleb Wilson
    1. Ellzy Tarbutton loved the pulps. She spent her entire twelfth year (in what doctors assumed would soon be her deathbed) reading mysteries printed on the cheap, smeary paper. Her illness, which weakened and wasted her body but did not affect her mind, manifested in the form of marks and stains like a schematic that wriggled beneath her skin. She discovered them in the night, peeling back the sweat-stained bedclothes to poke at a swollen lymph node only to find herself covered in a living diagram.
    Ellzy's steady diet of crime and clues kindled in her the desire for answers. She opened her first case the day she woke up suddenly cured, the aching, the rash, and the painful sensitivity to light all having subsided overnight. She jumped out of bed and threw open the window to fresh air she hadn't tasted in nearly twelve months, eager to solve the mystery of where she'd contracted the illness.
    During convalescence Ellzy's hands had been too shaky to write, forcing her to invent methods of mental note-taking that would serve her well in the years to come. She had spent hours mentally recording in detail her life just prior to the fever's striking. Once recovered, she combed her mental files and the link appeared almost instantly—the night before she woke scratching and