Specimen & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been torn off in the process. To
his relief, it was still intact, and responded to his touch by
raising its head, like an extreme fighter after a severe beating,
but still game for more.
    Beside the bed was a bookshelf fashioned
from bricks and wooden planks. Stanley rolled on his side and
examined the titles. The SAS Survival Guide . An Idiot’s
Guide to Astrology . The Female Body: An Owner’s Manual . Sexual Palmistry . Fodor’s Guide to India . The rest
were novels: a mix of mysteries, thrillers and erotica.
    Stanley got dressed and looked at his watch.
It was 9:30. He had no meetings on the agenda today, and had in
fact planned to simply hunker down in his office to read a thick
report from the provincial government on the sustainability of
social assistance programs for the homeless, whose numbers were
considered suspect by his boss.
    In fact, their department of Social
Statistics was one of the last way-stations in the vetting process
for large budget programs. “Vee are from zee SS,” his boss Joan
liked to joked with her non-Jewish departmental colleagues, “and
vee are here to count you.”
    She was vacationing this week in Muskoka,
with no expectation of her calling in for any reason. If he’d had
his cell phone with him, he could’ve called his assistant Gary to
say he’d stayed home to read the report undisturbed. But in the
absence of such a call, his staff would simply assume he’d taken a
vacation day. Let’s face it, you could bring a carton of doughnuts
into a government office during the summer, and scarcely anyone
would surface for a nibble.
    Stanley crawled out of the shelter. Callie
sat cross-legged, still naked, on a square of folded blanket with
eyes closed and hands folded in her lap. She appeared to be
meditating and he didn’t want to break her concentration, so he sat
there quietly, just watching her. In repose, her face had a
timeless quality to it, reminding him of statues from Indian
temples, of goddesses whose inner bliss was reflected in their
outer beauty.
    An hour passed. Stanley got antsy. He wanted
to go home, take a shower, have a coffee, give Isabel a call. If
Callie didn’t wake up in the next minute, he’d leave. It was
starting to get a little creepy, this deep meditation. She was off
in a world of her own, and didn’t appear to be coming back any time
soon.
    He stood up, taking a last look around. It’d
been wonderful in a strange sort of way, but it was time to go.
Maybe it was just the fish, or the wine, or the ecstatic sex, but
he was starting to feel queasy. He felt like he’d been teleported
away and back, returning slightly out of sync, like Jeff Goldblum
in The Fly , needing coffee to wash down his sugar. He needed
to return to familiar surroundings – home, office, head space –
before she woke up and mesmerized him again.
    He felt a sudden frisson of panic,
and the hair stood up on the back of his head. It’d been fun, but
now he had to run. He crept quickly through the undergrowth,
heading for the safety of the trail back to Pottery Road. He
berated himself for having been such an idiot, having sex with an
unwashed wood nymph. What had possessed him? He’d better see his
doctor right away, get a morning-after shot of antibiotics or
something.
    He paused to relieve himself beside a small
bush that bore clusters of tiny red berries. No sooner had he done
so, he felt a wave of relief. His panic attack had passed. So had
his desire to return to Pottery Road, Riverdale or life as he had
known it on Browning Avenue.
    He looked back toward the Don. The path
though the bushes was a tunnel into the trees, and at the far end
of it a warm light glowed and pulse. Probably it was just some
trick of the eye – sunlight reflected from the river onto the
underside of the leaves, the breeze in the foliage, clouds
shape-shifting...
    She was reading a book when he returned to
her. She looked up at him and smiled. “Feeling okay?”
    “I had