The Messenger of Magnolia Street Read Online Free PDF

Brilliance is the word, but they don’t use that word in Shibboleth because they think it’s too close to crazy.) “Now, after I saw that, I thought of Billy and saw your face.” She gets up and leans her hands on the table, stares into Nehemiah’s eyes. “ Your face, Nehemiah. And I felt the three of us running. Together. I knew it was six legs, two to a pair, and that they all belonged to us. Now I may not know what we were running to, or from for that matter, but I knew we were together .” She sits back down in her chair. “And I called Billy because I knew that we were meant to come see you. To tell you that there is trouble.Serious trouble. That something is being stolen.” She points to the empty shell of the orange.
    â€œWhat is being stolen, Trice?” Nehemiah is taking shallow breaths, trying to ignore that little scent wafting over him from Trice’s hair. Try to ignore it as he may, I know what the man can smell. I know what he’s made of.
    â€œMy guess, Nehemiah, is everything worth keeping.” Trice runs her hands through the back of her hair, pulls it in a knot on the top of her head, and closes her eyes before she answers. “Something is trying to steal Shibboleth.”
    A quiet fills the room with a lot of unasked questions going unanswered. God begins whistling again, hands in pockets. He ambles over to the window and lifts the curtain, looking out. He looks as if he’s just waiting, just killing time, and believe me, nobody kills time like God.
    Nehemiah is considering all the things in his world worth keeping. But his world and the world of Shibboleth are light-years apart. “This all sounds important, Trice,” he waves his arms about, “and it is mysterious as all get-out, but what does it have to do with me?”
    â€œI’ve told you. Something bad is going to happen. See this?” She picks up the orange peel. “This is Shibboleth,” she slowly squeezes it in her fist, “and it is disappearing. I don’t have to know the part you play. I’m just the message bearer. What you do, Nehemiah, with the message, that’s up to you.”
    Billy picks up the other half of the orange and begins to eat. He has been very still, very silent, and very seriously listening. To him, if Shibboleth disappears, then there is no hope. Shibboleth is the heart of the planet, and all that is worth keeping is kept there. Only he doesn’t remember how. Or where.
    â€œWe’re trying to tell you you need to come home.” Billy surprises Trice by adding this. Shocks her, actually. “Trice is wired a little different. That’s her way of telling what she sees. But you know , Brother, it’s real.” He swallows the last bite of the orange. “And you know what I mean. We’ve had proof.”
    â€œLike the time Blister almost died except I dreamed” —Trice slams the word dreamed like a gas pedal to the floor—“about him standing in the middle of those flames screaming.”
    â€œThat was when he was still just John Robert.” Billy adds, “Blister came later.” Billy pushes his chair back on its hind legs. “After you got me and Nehemiah to go over there with you at three in the morning, and we pulled his body out of that house.”
    Nehemiah is remembering the smell of scorched flesh on a hot night. Is remembering staring at the blaze engulfing the house, pacing back and forth. Back and forth. Remembers wishing for, needing, rain. Then clouds, fast, white, powerful, rolling in from the east, a clap of thunder, a sudden downpour dousing the flames. Him crashing through the door and John Robert’s identity altered into something, someone else. Remembers looking at Trice with a new respect. A knowledge that her strange dreams were more than crazy hunches. Right then he made a silent vow that no matter how foolish they appeared, he would not deny her their