Free Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams by Damian Huntley Page A

expected to accomplish in the course of a single
phone call? Beach was right … He just needed to get up off his ass,
and make the effort.

    It took David a while
to calm down. He paced the flagstones of the back yard, not walking
as far as the screen door to the den, because he didn’t want Hannah
or Stephanie to see him so worked up. Eventually, he stepped back
into the kitchen and made himself a coffee, sipping slowly,
breathing meditatively.
    Stephanie
pouted, and then growled when David explained that she hadn’t
really won a competition. She wasn’t convinced by his explanation
that there was no such thing as a ‘free lunch,’ even after he had
elaborated on this, offering up that the free lunch was a metaphor.
After some coaxing, she had eventually curled up beside Hannah on
the couch, and had started to read aloud from Les
Misérables , much to Hannah’s dismay. Hannah was impressed,
perhaps even a little jealous that Stephanie’s interest in the book
hadn’t waned, but as she was studying for her masters in history,
she struggled to contain her desire to complain about the lack of
historicity. She was surprised when she heard Stephanie read aloud
the singular thought that she herself repeated ad infinitum.
    “’She must be a
big girl now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I
call her Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie …’”
    Yes, Hannah
thought to herself, she is seven years old, don’t be such a
bitch.
    David stretched
out on the floor of the den and stared blankly at the screen of his
laptop. The sound of the air conditioner was enough to distract him
from the dulcet tones of his daughter’s reading, but there was
still too much noise in his head to really pay attention to any of
the websites he visited. After clicking idly through a few tech and
entertainment sites, David finally succumbed to the inevitable and
logged on to reddit. He read the most recent messages several times
over, and the noise seemed gradually to die away, till all he could
hear was his heart pounding in his chest.

    [–]ThaneOfTheVoid  1 point 2 hours ago
    I would like to
offer my assistance, and I can only hope that you are not too
stubborn to accept it. I’m well versed in the circumstances
surrounding your case.
Edit: By the way, your phone manner is dreadful.
     
    Charlene woke up
slumped over in her armchair, breathing in through her teeth
ruefully, anticipating the pain in her lower back, and across the
arch of her shoulders. The pain didn’t come. She felt relaxed and
refreshed, which was unusual. Hesitantly at first, she pressed her
hands into the arms of the chair, pushing her weight forward, then
she stood up and stretched, reaching her hands up over her head. No
discomfort. “Son of a bitch,” she whispered, licking her lips,
running her fingertips down the base of the spine as she arched her
back.
    She walked to
the bathroom and turned on both taps at the sink below the vanity
unit. She bent her head over the ceramic sink, and cupped both of
her hands under the pooling water, splashing a little on her face.
She blinked a couple of times, splashed again, then she stood up
and looked at herself in the mirrored door of the vanity.
    Her eyes were
still foggy with sleep, so she bent over again, repeating the
exercise of splashing her eyes, but this time she took care to rub
her eyes gently with the warm water, running the pads of her
fingers along her eyelids. She stood once more and looked at her
reflection. She squinted and leaned closer to the mirror. She
looked at the tube of toothpaste which lay next to the cold water
tap on the sink and she read the ingredients. “Son of a bitch!” she
declared, dropping the toothpaste tube into the sink.
    She lifted her
eyes to her reflection and smiled, but the corners of her mouth
fell, nose wrinkled in bemusement as she examined her face more
closely. There were lines there, sure enough, where there had been
lines for many years; creases at the