Read Online The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky - Free Book Online

a matter of minutes the impending company would make real what still to me remained dreamlike.
    I drew myself toward the door until my breath became an explosion of white misty cloud upon the surface of the glass. It was as though I’d exhaled any hidden complacencies into a breath-frost which dissolved like water beads heated upon a kettle into ripples of steam. I grappled with my confidence until I willed it to rise. I stared for a moment through the glass at the wispy torrents of life as I knew it, and in my blurred reflection I beheld the fossilizing remnants of a Max Polito that once was. Silent and sentimental, I bade it a final farewell.
    I hadn’t expected anything short of a casual entry after this. I gripped the door’s handle, but several futile tugs revealed it was somehow locked into place. Feeling a bit foolish, I would have abandoned my efforts as I had not come all this way to contend with an unruly door. But as soon as I released my grip the door creaked disastrously ajar, christening my entry with a confounding loss of balance; I found myself slipping impossibly backwards, my frozen ass plummeting to a painful collision with the hard entranceway flooring. In striving to retain my grip upon the door’s handle I clumsily lurched forward, further complicating the embarrassing episode as my armful of journalistic accessories slipped from their brown-and-beige-sweatered hammock, splashing across my feet and the encircling tile floor in a bedlam of clamorous grief. Inadvertently, as if to polish off the performance, my restored grip upon the handle issued a faceful of glass which could have shattered had I not at least some small degree of luck and the door locked firmly in place, pitting my nose no more than an inch away from a blue and white endorsement for Diner’s Club.
    Time appeared to stop amidst the following silence, and I dared not turn to the presence I felt behind me. I leaned over to retrieve the clutter about me, fighting against the weight of attention which tried to paralyze me, ashamed and distressed of the notion that the unknown itself could come running to my aid at any given moment.
    It was not supposed to happen this way.
    My organizer notebook lay unscathed amidst a dispersion of microcassettes. My microrecorder had fallen face-down, and I cursed as I raised its rectangular body to find the plastic window severely cracked. Then two AA batteries spilled out from their ruptured compartment.
    I failed to notice, at first, the reflected image of the woman before me in the closed entry door’s glass.
    I was distracted by the movement of light from her flickering image....I shot my gaze to the glass pane, my full attention seized but for the awareness of my quickening heartbeat.
    The woman was approaching me in determined but politely cautious strides, disproportioned into a seemingly impossible distance behind me, beyond me and dwarfish enough to present the illusion of being perched upon my reflected shoulder like a voluptuous human parrot. I spied the front register counter following up in stunted visage upon the view’s horizon. The counter truly could not have been more than several yards away from my crouching back, which logically placed the woman’s actual position a mere few feet from me.
    I feared a hand upon my shoulder at any given moment. I could almost feel her breath there. I could almost catch the drifting fragrance of Channel mingled with the sweet scent of familiar hair spray. I could see the shroud of lampblack luster limply draped and shoulder-length, hair framed about flawless Venezuelan features, caressing waves sweeping against tan brown skin and the shoulder straps of an azure autumn house dress.
    I sat trembling. Any strength I thought I had in facing my wife suddenly crumbled into chalk dust set adrift from a denuded slate. I was a thunderstruck corpse of petrified flesh and blood beneath the fear of what actually might be there, that if I was to turn I would find