You Must Fall In Love

Chapter Thirty-Five

The flyer was old and yellow and printed in multiple shades of grey. It looked like a takeaway menu from one of those cheap Chinese restaurants, or at least it would have, if it wasn't for the actual text.

Suitors Wanted For Prospective Bride

All Comers Considered

See Address Below, Or Call:

The number was below, as well as an address on Thirteenth Street.

Rob sighed, took a small bite of his soggy taco, and kept walking. Then he stopped walking, because there was absolutely no way he was going any further, not with a flyer like this in his hand. This was one of those stupid mysteries of life that he just had to solve.

Where had it come from, anyway? It had blown right into his jeans, but it still looked crisp and clean and the corners were sharp, like it had rolled straight off the printer.

Beside him loomed the spiked gate of Hemingway Park, ends fashioned into branching antlers that ended in happy little curlicues. It was an extremely twee gesture, for a park as terse and taciturn as its namesake. From what Terry had told him, the park was originally just Stagport City Park, but one of the higher-ups in the municipal morass had gotten really into modernism and quoting famous writers, and that had been it.

"Not that I know who Hemingway is," she'd said, scratching the back of her head. "Didn't he do something about a sound and a flurry, or whatever?"

Rob hadn't corrected her, because he didn't know who Hemingway was, either. His entire literary world consisted of his beloved children's books and his bad poetry, which he knew was bad but still harbored thoughts of publishing one day, for absolutely no reason other than the fact that Rudyard Kipling and Kenneth Grahame had, too.

Who was Kipling?

What did he do?

Did he write anything else apart from stuff

About a man-child and a mongoose

And seals who sang Lukannon before the sailors came

And all that other bunk?

Rob wasn't given to pretension, only pretense. He knew that those two books were the limits of his childhood; that they were, in a very real sense, his entire childhood. Sure, he had read other things, but nothing stuck with him as much.

He felt like Rudyard had written with a real Indian wolf beside him, and sought advice from the elephant under his desk, and that Kenneth really could talk to moles and badgers, and had conversations with water-rats on the daily.

They had animals inside them, just like he did. They were his friends.

But if he allowed himself to find out any more about the authors, whom he had always imagined as being just like him somehow, he had a feeling that they would turn out to be anything but.

"I see you have come across my flyer."

The voice was old, with an accent he couldn't quite place. Old people were one of the few kinds he didn't innately distrust, but that was solely due to his lack of contact with them. The sisters in Silverfawn were all middle-aged, the volunteers tended to be young idealistic types like Terry, and the less said about his foster-parents the better.

All of his foster-parents.

"Your flyer?" asked Rob. "You were the one who printed this?"

The old man folded his hands and bowed. He was wearing a dark blue Chinese shirt, the kind with the long frog buttons.