His Sweet Read online

  HIS SWEET

  Antonov Publishing, Iceland 2018

  © Hildur Sif Thorarensen

  Layout and Cover Design: Barnaldo Black

  Printed in The United States of America

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  To Dmitri

  102

  I’ve always believed in magic. When I was young, I met a man who played the slots. He claimed he could make the spinning stop at just the right time to hit a jackpot. I was skeptical, the realist in me not ready to believe in such a talent without any evidence. Not batting an eyelid at the disbelieving youth, he went ahead and proved it, winning himself ten dollars, which was a small fortune to a kid. The man turned me into a believer, and after that I spent weeks telling everybody I had met a magician so amazing that he could even control the slot machines.

  As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned how magic really works. Behind every act of magic lies a hidden trick, and none of it is ever real, no matter how much you may think it is. I didn’t like finding that out. A part of me wanted to hang onto the mystical for dear life, dig my claws into it, and drag it down to my existence in order to keep it there, and with some grueling effort, I did. I kept the magic. I stuck to my beliefs even though, with time, they changed.

  It was never about bunnies, large hats, or magic wands for me. I always wanted the upfront, close-up magic, not the kind that happens behind a curtain or inside a box. Card tricks were such a wonder. How could they find my card after shuffling the deck? And how did those magic rings just clink together when they didn’t have any openings? I never knew, and honestly, I never wanted to know. That way I could keep believing that the magic was real.

  I went to a magic show once. I had to nag my parents for months on end and do all sorts of chores, but it worked—I got my way. Dad drove me to the next town over and sat with me as we watched the mediocre magician perform his routine. I was impressed; my dad was not. He said the whole thing was a waste of time and not something a young girl should be interested in. I disagreed. Every fiber of my being disagreed. When I was tucked in bed, my thoughts gleefully drifted back to the show, and to this day they still do.

  Mister Whiskers shows me magic sometimes. It’s been a while since he did so, but I always enjoy it when he does. He’s very good with his hands; his masterful manipulation of the deck never fails to leave me in awe. I often ask for the one where he makes my card disappear from it, so I can sit in wonderment while scrambling through the rest of them, trying to find the one I picked. On his good days, he’ll do it. On his bad days, he won’t.

  Although he sometimes shows me some tricks, Mister Whiskers does not believe in magic. He believes in the concrete. The real. He says that there’s no magic in this world, only facts. I never object to what he says anymore; I’ve learned from that mistake. He builds houses for a living. Says that creating something useful is the only way to go. He might be right, but if I ever got to choose, I would probably become a magician’s assistant. Wear those small dresses and wobbly high heels while saying “ta-dah!” after every trick. Just like my dad, he doesn’t like that idea. So I don’t tell him. Instead I say that I want to become a teacher. He approves. Says women make good teachers.

  Every night before I go to bed, I look at the glowing stars Mister Whiskers got me. They shine so brightly in my ceiling, though a few of them have fallen down with time. He says that’s because their glue has dried up and that I’m too old to keep them anyway, so I should go ahead and take them down. I refuse, and for some reason he lets me. Maybe it’s because he knows I like to look at them when he crawls into bed with me. I look at them and imagine that they’re a magician’s cape flowing as he walks onto a great big stage. Now I can even hold on to that thought while he hurts me, disappear into my stars and imagine I’m somewhere else. That’s my power. That’s my magic. That’s my everything.

  Yolanda was feeling tired. She hadn’t been sleeping too well since being appointed sheriff, but she didn’t know if it was due to the pressure to perform, as she was the first mixed-race woman to serve as sheriff of any county in Alabama, or because of the warm summer nights. The heat had hit hard early that year, and she didn’t want to turn on the air conditioner yet for environmental reasons. If the summer continued like this, however, she’d have to give in and do it soon.

  Thankfully, the day had been slow. Solomon, her deputy, had stopped a drunk driver, but nothing else had happened to prevent Yolanda from being able to sit back at the station, answer emails, and take care of some overdue paperwork. Upholding the law in the small county wasn’t really a job for two, but the incident that had led to Yolanda becoming sheriff had gotten them a rubber stamp from the governor himself, letting them run the sheriff’s office with two full-time employees, along with a dispatcher by the name of June—a lovely girl in her late twenties whose bright smile somehow managed to travel through the phone lines and put nervous callers at ease.

  June was the one who had sent the boys to Yolanda’s desk, where they now stood staring at her with looks of incomprehension, waiting for her to examine the notebook they had brought along with them. There wasn’t much to it—a black cover and looking a bit dog-eared, as it seemed to have been not only written in but also read several times over.

  “So, where did you say you found this?” Yolanda asked, flipping through the pages of the worn-out book. The text was written in neat cursive handwriting, as if the author had taken great care with every word.

  “Like I said, Chief, me and my buddies were just poppin’ ollies by the old barn, and there they were. A whole pile of them notebooks,” the tallest one said before taking off his baseball cap and fiddling with his greasy hair. “I didn’t know anybody went up there, seeing it’s all abandoned and shit.”

  “Popping ollies? Do you mean skating?” Yolanda asked, her deep brown eyes displaying befuddlement while looking the three young men over.

  “Yeah. That’s what I said.” He stared absent-mindedly out into space and didn’t seem to give his words much thought.

  “What Tiny means is that we built our own ramp up there,” the smallest of the lot interrupted. “No one was using the plot anyway, and Pandy here lives right next to it.” He pointed at the third member of the group, who was wearing an oversized hoodie with a skating panda embossed on the front.

  “Yeeee-aahh!” the panda-man exclaimed, shaking his head up and down in agreement like a giant bobble-head doll.

  “And there was more than this one?” Yolanda wasn’t sure whether these teenagers were making this up or if it was real. For all she knew, they might have decided to use an old school notebook to pull a stunt on the new sheriff. Have a nice laugh and high-fives all around. Then again, none of them seemed like they had a promising career in calligraphy.

  “Yeah. They were like in a box, just sitting in the back. We’ve got the rest of ’em in the trunk,” the first one continued. “It was like somebody just dumped them there. Like they didn’t want them no more.”

  “And why did you decide to bring them to the sheriff’s office?” she continued, her eyes following their every move, waiting to catch a hint of mischief.

  “’Cause of all the stuff, man. There’s like creepy stuff in there, you dig?” he answered with a frown.

  “So you read them?”

  “Nahhh, Chief. Just that one.” He pointed to the book she had in her hands. “Couldn’t take any more of that
shit. It’s like she’s locked in or something. Nasty.” He shook his head in a gesture of disapproval. “Giant suggested we bring the box here, so we did. Just came straight on in from the ramp.”

  “And you’re Giant?” she directed her words at the shortest one among them.

  “Yo.” He smiled, revealing a part of the grill adorning his upper teeth.

  “All right.” She made some quick notes on her pad. “Have you seen anybody around the old barn lately?”

  “No, never,” Giant answered, and the rest concurred. “Nobody ever goes up there except for us three. It’s no-man’s-land, man.”

  He was right about that. The old barn had been abandoned for years, the owners having passed away. Without any children of their own, they left the lot to the local church as well as the few animals pastured there. The animals had been sold off right away, but the church kept the plot. There were plans to build an even bigger chapel with a community hall and offices, to which the church could eventually relocate. The congregation had been saving up for the construction, and last she’d heard, they were two hundred thousand dollars away from their goal.

  Yolanda remembered passing the area the boys mentioned, but she had no recollection of ever seeing a skate ramp, which meant it was a fairly recent addition. She was almost positive the church had not given them permission—or that permission had even been sought. She still decided to let things lie until somebody filed a complaint, especially since she was a keen believer that youths were better off having wholesome hobbies rather than hanging around the center of town, bothering everyday folk.

  “It might be a bit secluded, but what about other skaters? Maybe somebody using your ramp? Is it possible one of them put the books there?” She squinted her eyes and chewed the tip of her pen, deep in thought.

  “No way, Chief. Nobody knows about it, and we’d like to keep it that way, if you know what I mean.” Giant winked at her.

  “Right.” She exhaled. “Is there anything else you boys would like to add?”

  “Nahh,” they all replied in unison, leaning their heads every which way, adding a few ‘too cool for school’ gestures while they were at it.

  ”Well, then, I’m not going to keep you any longer. You’ve probably got a busy schedule.” Her face portrayed utter seriousness as her undertone flirted with sarcasm. “If you could just fill out this form with your contact information and show me some identification, you can be on your way.”

  “Cool,” Giant replied, smiling wide enough to show the full extent of his shiny grill as he accepted the pen and pad.

  “Solomon here will help you with the box.” She nudged Solomon, who had just returned from booking his errant DUI and was taking his first sip of a fresh cup of coffee, at last finding a moment of solace only the hot beverage could provide.

  The panda gentleman and the deputy trotted outside to get the box while she helped the remaining pair fill out their forms. The one with the baseball cap smelled like marijuana, and Yolanda wondered for a second whether to follow up on that but thought better of it. These young men had brought forth evidence of their own volition, and that was a big step for a crowd such as this. Underneath all that gnarliness, they might not be such a sidetracked group after all.

  “Yoly,” Solomon said, jolting her back from her thoughts.

  “Is your name really Yolo?” Pandy interrupted, a grin spreading across his big face.

  “Not quite,” she replied, looking at the two of them. Each of them was carrying a big box filled to the brim with notebooks. There had to be at least twenty books in each box. Yolanda grabbed the topmost one from the nearest box and flipped through it. She then went through a few more, giving them all cursory glances, knitting her brows further as she realized that every one of them was filled out, front to back. A feeling of foreboding washed over her—those entries had all been written by the same person.

  181

  I once had a cat named Mister Whiskers. He was a mean cat. Mean and big and likely to scratch you if he was in a mood. My mom wanted to have him put down, but my brother refused. He kept guard over that cat, and it grew up to be the biggest, fattest cat I’d ever seen. Mister Whiskers was white with a black spot just above his tail. I always imagined that the spot was the source of his evil, and that without it, he would have been just a normal, boring cat. My Mister Whiskers has a spot like that too. It’s on his right shoulder. I’ve thought about biting it off to see if that will make the evil disappear, but I don’t dare. He’s so big and strong, and deep down I know his evil comes from a different place.

  My Mister Whiskers doesn’t have any pets. He says he doesn’t like animals. The cat was the same way—he always avoided our guinea pig. But while the cat didn’t like anybody (not even my brother), my Mister Whiskers seems to like me and some other people too. I hear them walking around, talking and laughing upstairs. He sounds like he has a lot of friends, and he says that someday he might let me join his parties. But it’s too early now. He says I’ll have to wait.

  Sometimes, after one of his parties, he’ll bring me leftovers. I like it when he does that. Then I can close my eyes and imagine I’m there with them, chatting, laughing, and even dancing. There’s not enough space in my room to dance, unless I just step in place and move my arms around. I do that sometimes but only when he’s not home. Just stand there in the middle of the floor and dance my heart out.

  I’m not allowed to make too much noise. If he hears me singing, he eventually looks in on me and yells. I get scared when he yells. He reminds me of an orc when he does that. An orc from one of those movies with the elves, the wizard, and the hobbits. The second one of that series was the last movie I ever saw. I’m still a little sad at not knowing how it ends. Whether they managed to get rid of that horrible ring, or if the evil eye and orc armies ended up winning in the end.

  Mister Whiskers doesn’t like movies. He says they contaminate the soul. That’s why he doesn’t let me have a TV. He sometimes brings me books, but they’re seldom ones I like. It’s either some autobiographies about old men, famous literary fiction, or stuffy books by a Russian author whose name I can’t pronounce. There is no magic in them, only facts and information about people. I asked for the third book about the ring story once, and he got mad. He got so mad that I didn’t get any food for two whole days. I’ve never asked for any book since, just accepted the ones he brings.

  After I first came to Mister Whiskers, he gave me a book called Alice in Wonderland. I had been crying for days, and he said he wanted to cheer me up, to make me smile again. The book is my favorite out of everything he has ever given me. I love the Mad Hatter and the tea party and always imagine I’m there, talking to Alice and playing around with the potions. I didn’t understand why he gave me this book since it speaks of magical potions and strange worlds and Mister Whiskers doesn’t like that. I later learned that it’s written by a famous mathematician; he called himself Lewis Carroll, but his real name was something completely different.

  Like the Carroll man, Mister Whiskers wants me to have a new name. He says he’s always liked Bonnie. He wants me to forget my real one and become someone else, and I pretend to do that. Pretend I have forgotten. Pretend that I’m different. That now I am enjoying our conversations about the big books he forces me to read. I even pretend to be his friend, greeting him with a smile and making him think I like his company. In reality, I’m just like Alice. I also followed a rabbit into a hole. But my hole is dark and cold, and there are no magic beings to guide me. All I have is him and these notebooks, and no matter how hard I cry and plead, this orc is never going to let me get away.

  Yolanda finished her paperwork, having included information in her daily report about the notebooks found by the old barn as well as details of the morning’s events. The drunk driver Solomon had stopped earlier was sleeping it off in one of the three cells in the basement, and before heading out the door, she notified the night watch to give her a call once he came to.

  The
boxes had contained a total of sixty-five conventional notebooks, fully written out on both sides. According to her Google search, each notebook contained hundred pages, which meant they’d have to read through thirteen thousand pages if they wanted to read them all. The written entries were numbered, and the handwriting appeared to be the same for all of them.

  After dusting them for prints, a skill she had gotten certified in at a detective’s course some years back, she and Solomon grabbed a couple of books to read at home before meeting up again the next morning. Placing them in the passenger seat, she felt somewhat uneasy, as if she had gotten herself into a mess, one that would not let her come out unscathed.

  The day passed quickly and it was nice to have been able to finish up before six and drive straight over to KFC to pick up some dinner for herself and her mom. They had been living together since Joshua, Yolanda’s high school sweetheart, moved out. Seeing as her father had left when she was only a child, there was plenty of space for the two of them in her three-bedroom house.

  “What a delightful smell,” her mom exclaimed as Yolanda burst through the front door, holding a large KFC bucket under one arm and clutching the notebooks in an evidence bag to her chest with the other.

  “Yeah. I got us a tub and figured we could just eat the leftovers tomorrow,” Yolanda responded, slamming the books and bucket on the kitchen counter before making her way into the living room to greet her mother.

  The older woman was a full-figured lady with curly hair and a smile that could melt away all the worries of the world. She was dressed in a wide red shirt and black culottes, her olive skin and pitch-black hair giving her the appearance of a Mediterranean fortune-teller. “Oh, that’s just wonderful, darling,” she said, having stood up to welcome her daughter home. “I’ve made tzatziki and rice that we can use as sides. You’ve got to eat something, Yolandoula—you’re all skin and bones! No decent man wants to bite into a starved leg of lamb.” She shook her head in a disapproving fashion while looking her daughter over.