Half Sour, Half Sweet Read online

Elizabeth Parker. Something-or-other Parker had been his neighbor, years ago. They hadn't been friends, but they had talked sports and weather in the apartment building's laundry room once in a while. He had been over to Parker's place once for a beer, he remembered. Watching some fight on pay-per-view. Parker had moved out suddenly one winter.

  The winter when Elizabeth left him. Because they were together for seven years and he still couldn't decide when or how to ask her to marry him. Because he was afraid to take a big step that would change everything. Because even then when he was young he had been a cautious old man.

  And she had left him for the neighbor, whose face he couldn't remember now, forty years give or take later.

  He clicked on the screen again, minimizing the journal. There was Elizabeth's face, as an old woman. He stared. The blue eyes were right. The face had gained weight and changed shape. Forty years had happened to it. But it still looked right to him. The cheekbones? The chin? The blue eyes? He couldn't say. It looked right.

  It had looked right forty years ago, if he'd had the courage to admit it to himself.

  David Jr.'s Journal. He brought the text back up and double-checked.

  She had had a child, a boy. With Parker, or...

  ...or had she been pregnant when he had told her 'maybe after Christmas' that last time? He sat down in the little desk chair in front of the computer and it surprisingly held him without protest. No tears came, no feeling. Just a calm quiet. He studied at the words on the screen, just three of them. Reading them over and over. David Jr.'s Journal. Then the words blurred, and the memory came on sharp and heavy.

  They had been arguing, and they hardly ever argued. But they'd been arguing for a month. The first argument had been when he wanted to get his old car fixed after the transmission died, his old little two-door that got great mileage. Get a minivan or a station wagon, she had said. You know, in case.

  In case what? he had asked. In case, she said again. And he had said he'd think about it and then he'd gotten the transmission in his little car fixed and she had barely talked to him for a week.

  It was so obvious. Another argument had come after she had tried to take him into a kids' store in the mall, 'just to look around'. He'd told her to go ahead, and gone to the bookstore. Later, he couldn't understand why she was so angry.

  The day before he had told her maybe this Christmas, she had told him that she was so jealous of her friend who had gotten married the year before. They'd been watching a family comedy together on the couch.

  What had he said? The memory was sharp, but he still couldn't remember his words. He had mumbled something so bland that even he couldn't remember it.

  And she had left him, gone off with the guy next door. He looked at the journal again, blinking the words back into focus.

  No mention of grandpa. She had gone off with him, but maybe not for long. Raised her—and his, David's—boy. And named him David. And his son had a son and named him David Junior.

  He had a grandson. Suddenly the room was too much to bear. He left the chair spinning slowly behind him and walked out into the hall again, closing the door firmly behind him.

  It was too much to make sense of all at once. He reached up for the pullcord on the ceiling, pulled down the attic stairs, unfolded them. Climbed up carefully, knees popping, looking to the left only once for the thrill of vertigo, looking down those long stairs to the living room like he had when he was a boy.

  There wasn't much in the attic. It was still half-finished, fully floored but rafters standing out like ribs over his head. The dusty bulb was an LED instead of an incandescent, but it was as naked now as it had been sixty years ago. He pulled its string and it lit up a pile of boxes marked Christmas in the corner (maybe next Christmas, he'd said), a big rolled-up rug, a couple of plastic file boxes with Taxes magic-markered neatly on their faces. An old fashioned chair, dark wood with black leather upholstery over thin padding, held down with lines of big dome-topped brass upholstery tacks. A little bookcase, a bookcase from his childhood, still with faded green paint. It had more books on it than he remembered. He could see Tom Swift on the spines of some of them. Those he remembered, and a dictionary with thin yellow pages. The Harry Potters must be the new boy's. His grandson's. And there was the huge old travel trunk he remembered, on the opposite end of the attic from the chair and bookcase.

  It was a relic from two hundred years ago or more, from the age of long ocean travel instead of quick jet flights with cheap carry-on luggage.

  It looked like it hadn't moved since he saw it for the first time, when he was small. It probably hadn't. It would take two strong men to move it. Even the stand was heavy and formal, dark stain over ancient mahogany like the trunk itself. The corners and accents of the trunk were heavy brass. Not thin plate held down with tacks, but actual pieces of metal like something you might find in the guts of a car, thick, with heavy nails that fit flush to the surface. It looked as if it had been designed by a craftsman, by hand, lovingly, piece by piece.

  Alien to today's world, a visitor from a strange past filled with strange people who treasured the things they had and planned for their ancestors to have them far, far in the future. Only the future didn't care, and hid the things, the few that survived, away in attics.

  And it wasn't meant to leave, either. It wouldn't fit down the stairs. When he was small, very small, smaller than ten, he remembered his father measuring it from every angle with his folding wooden carpenters' ruler, cursing.

  No matter how he measured it, there was no way to get it down the stairs. And its weight would probably collapse them if you could get it out there.

  Perhaps it had been hoisted up onto the roof next to the attic windows, before the panes were installed, and wrestled in through there. It might fit. He didn't remember his father measuring those. The windows could open from the top or bottom, but not both at once. You'd need to pull the window assembly out of the wall to try.

  Maybe it had been brought up with rope and pulley, lifted to the roof rafters before the attic floor had been laid. And then suspended there as the joists were installed and the floorboards nailed down, and then lowered into its stand, there to stay for as long as the house stood.

  Either seemed unlikely. But the alternative was that it had simply appeared there on its own.

  It felt like it belonged to the attic, or, more properly, that the attic belonged to it. And the key was heavy in David's pocket. It was warm against his leg and he imagined he could feel it quivering slightly, anxious to get out, to get back to its lock after a whole lifetime waiting under the water with only the cold trout for company.

  He pulled the key out and looked at it, there in his hand. It was bright and alive. He looked up. The trunk, though ancient, was also bright and alive. As if they were the only things in the attic in color, and all the rest was in black and white. He stretched out his hand and slipped the key into the lock. It turned. He felt the click with his fingers, but did not hear it.

  He had never opened the trunk. His father had never opened the trunk—not that David knew of. Nobody had ever spoken of it, if they had opened it. He might be the first to see it unfold in a century or more. The right and the left halves of the trunk opened to the sides, tripling the width of the trunk on its stand. The parts that opened were half of the prodigious depth of the trunk, so that the wings rested flush with the body.

  In a trunk of this type, that should have revealed a chest of drawers, perhaps three ranks of four or five deep drawers designed to hold clothing, stationery, documents, cash, and the variety of odds and ends that a traveler might need.

  Instead, it was a wide rectangular door into a shallow cave mouth, the stone extending only a couple of feet to a grassy ledge of sorts, broad enough for a dozen people to stand on, the hole screened from the ledge by fragrant evergreen shrubs. The deep scent of rosemary flooded the attic. Very faintly, like the brea
th of a baby, he felt the warm air of summer on his face. Through the leaves, he could see a panorama spread out in front of the hill. A winding river, the green of the deep forest, wheeling hawks. Very far away, a silhouette against the far horizon, a narrow spire stood, topping the blocky shape of a castle. Above the hawks, a shape never seen on Earth flew on great wings, trailing a long tail.

  A dragon? He stuck his head through the portal. The rosemary scent was stronger, but there was also a hint of woodsmoke. He could hear the burble of a creek nearby and a wooden sound. A water wheel, turning and turning? Somebody lived nearby, in this world he had found sixty years later than he ought to have. He reached his arms through to grasp at the heavy gnarls of the strong rosemary, ready to pull himself through.

  And he hesitated. There was one more thing he needed to do downstairs, before he moved on.

  When he returned, he pulled the attic stairs up after him. He tossed the cold bag with the single trout in it ahead, then climbed through. The fish, and the apple in his pocket, were small things. But perhaps a small gift would do as an introduction to whoever owned that water wheel and tended the fire he smelled. Once he was in the hollow behind the rosemary, he reached through and pulled the arms of the trunk closed. They clicked shut, and an irresistible force gently pushed his hands away. The wooden features of the trunk as seen from the inside faded, leaving a blank face of rough granite, flecked with flakes of gold and veined with quartz, marred by a single flaw: a small hole that looked suspiciously like a keyhole.

  Down in the house, now unreachable to him, the key waited behind David Junior's computer monitor. At the top of the journal he had added a single line: “Do not fear what your heart wants.”

  His grandson was ten, the perfect age for an adventure. He had a feeling the boy would not fail as he had, so long ago.

  David crawled out from behind the rosemary bush, to see what he had been missing for so many years.

  See more from S. A. Barton on his blog at https://sabarton.com

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