Free Kingfisher by Patricia A. McKillip Page A

stood up, still holding her eyes. “Then I’ll come back,” he said, and turned away from her. As he closed the door behind him, he looked back at her, saw her staring down at the plate, still covered on the bar.
    He wandered the streets a while, aimlessly, while the sky over Chimera Bay grew black. Traffic thinned, shopsclosed, a couple of restaurants turned out their lights before he finally bought some take-out sushi and a six-pack to carry back to the motel. When he was nearly there, something furry and four-legged darted in front of him and hissed furiously, every hair on its body standing on end.
    He blinked down at it, then rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I’m sorry. Just let me get in out of the dark.”
    The cat wailed at him, stalked away, hair still erect. After a few feet, it shook itself, then sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and looked around a moment. It gave up trying to figure out what it was doing there, and began to lick a paw.
    I know just how you feel, Pierce told it as he passed.
    He ate sushi and drank beer on his bed in the quiet motel, staring mindlessly at the news. Sometime in the middle of the night, he remembered his mother and the phone he had never turned back on. He pulled the pillow over his head and went back to sleep, dreamed of cooking strange and wonderful dishes, none of which seemed to be made of anything he would have recognized as food.
    The Metro was fixed by noon the next day, but Pierce couldn’t persuade himself to get into it and go. That day passed. Another. A third. He watched TV; he wandered out for food when he had to, trying to look inconspicuous and dodging growling dogs, spitting cats, a crow that fluttered into his face and yelled at him. He picked up his drained phone at one point, hunted around for the charger, then stood looking blankly at it, unable to find the energy or the interest in connecting one to the other. At noon and again at twilight, he wove a labyrinthine path through the streets that led him surreptitiously closer and closer to the heart of the matter: Stillwater’s.
    No matter what time he reached it, no matter how elaborately he stalked it, winding his way through side streets and alleyways, trying deliberately not to think about it until he finally permitted himself to pass it, the restaurant was always closed. He would wait, skulking across the street. It would stay closed. Finally, he would walk down to the waterfront to gaze at the quiet bay, where a neatly painted tugboat or a sailboat or a barge full of logs might be following the shipping channel out to sea. If he was lucky, and wasn’t accosted by his mother’s familiar of the day, he would turn finally and walk the complex labyrinth again.
    The restaurant would be closed.
    Incredulous, he wondered if the restaurant was closed only to him. Other people entered when his back was turned, ate and drank, were spoken to and served by the long-limbed, rippling-haired beauty with her eyes full of secrets, her air of one moving imperturbably through her tasks while listening for a distant voice. Somehow the chef had seen Pierce’s heart among her possessions; somehow, through the power of his arts, he denied only Pierce entry to his enchantments.
    Or maybe, Pierce thought in saner moments, they were just taking a vacation.
    He could wait.
    He wandered into a scruffy bar along the waterfront one twilight, a place where faces grew blurred on entry since nobody came there to be seen. He would sit and have one beer, he decided, then take the shortest route to the restaurant, just like any other diner expecting to be fed, expecting Stillwater’s to behave like any other restaurant. Maybe if hechanged his attitude, stopped slinking through the streets, sending an aura of guilt and confusion ahead of him, the sadistic chef wouldn’t recognize him. He would just step in, sit down as easily as he had taken a stool in this shabby cave where nobody expected him