When we started out, Benjamin made me walk at least three paces behind the wheelbarrow. A safety precaution, I guess. After a while, he got bored with being safe, forgot to be afraid, and let me walk right up beside him, not more than six or seven inches from his heart.
A nice distance for talking.
"I can't believe that you've been back and forth along this road hundreds of times and you've never noticed the mountains. That's extremely weird."
He shook his head.
"Not weird. Just practical. I have no need for mountains. They're awkward, uncomfortable, inaccessible and dangerous. I've never noticed them because they have no bearing on my life. They're completely irrelevant."
"Irrelevant!" I gasped.
"Irrelevant," he repeated.
He continued, his voice pedantic and his face about as expressive as a dinner plate. "When the safest and fastest distance between any two points is the asphalted surface that connects them, what possible purpose is served by deviating off into the mountains?"
My face, on the other hand, had turned bright red.
"What possible purpose is served by only being safe and fast?"
"Well..."
"Or by commuting back and forth between two tediously predictable points?" I pouted for a few seconds. "And how in the world do you have the nerve to call my mountains irrelevant? A road may be irrelevant. A person may be irrelevant. A philosophy or expediency or a controversy might conceivably be irrelevant. But a mountain? A mountain is never irrelevant!"
I huffed. I puffed. I tried to blow down Benjamin Pencil's obstinacy.
But any hopes I had that I might have succeeded evaporated when I saw the indifferent expression on his face. He was looking eastward where, in a few hours, we would get our first glimpse of a mountain peak, and he still wasn't smiling.
How could anyone even anticipate a mountain and not smile?
Clearly, the man was defective.
"Don't you ever laugh?" I ask suddenly.
"Laugh?" he repeated and turned to me. His eyes were wide and, I suspect, privately amused.
But he said somberly, "Whatever for?"
YOU ARE READING
The Man With The Glass Heart
FantasyPanache, an exuberant road gypsy, is on her way to the mountains. Benjamin Pencil, The Man With The Glass Heart, has no use for mountains. But their paths cross and their lives intertwine. As they travel, they encounter a predatory Woman, a Laugh...
