Yesterday's Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

the horses from the
wagon. “Come on, Ladies,” she said.
    Bella was amused. She’d been Girl but the horses evidently warranted a higher level
of respect.
    Once the horses were unhitched, Aunt Freida
grabbed their halters and led them past a wooden bin filled with
hay. It had wide slats, big enough for them to stick their heads
into. They opened their mouths and tore off chunks of hay with
their big yellowed teeth.
    Then Aunt Freida picked up a small tool that
was sitting on a shelf. She knelt down next to the horse closest to
her and picked up his leg. She used the tool to pick out the rocks
and dirt that had accumulated in the hoof. She repeated the action
until all eight hooves had been cleaned, pausing only once when
Rain or Sunshine, Bella wasn’t sure which, decided to poop.
    She made a mental note never to bitch about
having to put gas in her car again.
    Her aunt led the horses to separate stalls
and Bella heard the sounds of water getting slurped up by huge
tongues. Finally, her aunt hung the lantern back on the wall,
turned down the wick until the light was extinguished, and led
Bella out of the dark barn.
    “Let’s get inside,” her aunt said. “Daylight
is about gone.”
    When Aunt Freida reached the cabin, she
opened the unlocked door and motioned Bella to precede her. Now,
given the grip and stride she witnessed in Mantosa, and the
austere, no nonsense attitude of the barn, Bella expected the
inside of the cabin to have a similar look. It would be Spartan,
perhaps even a little masculine.
    One foot inside, she realized she couldn’t
have been more wrong. It was one big room. On the left side was the
kitchen. Well, sort of. It didn’t necessarily look like her and
Averil’s kitchen but there was a big black stove, some cupboards, a
sink, and a small rectangular table with six straight-back,
unpainted, wooden chairs.
    Towards the center of the room sat two
upholstered chairs in a gray fabric that was shiny from use. The
sofa next to the chairs was a pale blue. On the far right hand
side, there was a bed—with sheets and a thin blanket that looked
like they’d been hastily pulled up. It was not nearly as wide as
the full-sized bed she’d left behind, a full 130 years in the
future. There was a closed door on the far side of the cabin,
almost directly across from where they stood.
    She thought it was just short of amazing that
she could catalog all these things. It wasn’t amazing because there
were so many things—after all, it was just a table, a few chairs, a
couch, and a bed. What was amazing is that she could see past the
collection of hand-painted dolls, in various stages of dress and
condition, and china tea cups that seemed to take up every square
inch of available surface.
    Dolls and tea cups?
    There had to be more than a hundred of each.
“My,” she said, unable to think of any other word. Her aunt was
full of contradictions.
    “I started collecting them after my Herbert
died. I get them shipped from back East, all plain, and then I
paint them. I make clothes for the dolls, too.”
    “They’re beautiful,” Bella said, stepping
forward to finger the skirt of one of the porcelain beauties.
    Aunt Freida shrugged. “I just needed
something to keep my hands busy. I suppose you know about things
like that.”
    After her mother had died, her father had
dragged his teenage daughters from place to place. They’d had
dinner in a different part of the world every night for three
months while he grabbed on to one activity after another.
Bullfighting. Auto racing. Mountain climbing. It had stopped as
suddenly as it had started and the three of them had returned home.
And tried to pretend everything was okay. “Yes, I think I do,” she
said. She held up her small hard-sided case. “Where should I put
this?”
    Aunt Freida pointed to the closed door. “When
me and Herbert first built this cabin, we had our two children
still living with us. We had ourselves our own room,” she said
proudly.