Free Idea in Stone by Hamish Macdonald Page A

reasoned, right up to the point his father died. Their transformation was incomplete, and she was left on her own to become something else entirely.
    I get it , he thought, the whole relationship thing . It was alchemical, a process where two things could become a third that was greater than its constituent elements. He felt sorry for his mother, having to carry on that work by herself, knowing that she didn’t have all the necessary ingredients. Her girlfriend Cerise was a science experiment.
    “Stefan, we need a hand moving the dining room table,” yelled the woman downstairs who no longer seemed quite so familiar, who had knowledge of a whole aspect of life he’d skipped. What about Ming? he asked himself. Nope , he answered, that wasn’t chemistry. Maybe home economics. Not chemistry .
    “Coming,” said Stefan, taking his father’s play and the binocular picture set, shoving everything else back in place.

    ~

    The house was brightly-lit and full of charm. It was a great home for parties, with its big rooms—the living room, dining room, and kitchen (where all the drinks were, naturally drawing a crowd), then the upstairs, where the bedrooms provided sanctuary for deep conversations, coat storage, and the odd indiscretion during the course of any given party. The guests were a who’s-who, but not from any attempt to assert it themselves. On the contrary: the famous had to go somewhere, and each other’s company was often more comfortable, as few of them felt the need to verbally genuflect over their various achievements. Of course there was a hierarchy, with the venerable actors, writers, and musicians at the top, being most culturally visible and—for whatever reason—appreciated. Stefan’s friends often told him how lucky he was, and he knew it, but not for the reasons they imagined. Fame was a vague cloud, and he’d grown up in it. It had its advantages, and definite disadvantages, too. For him the real luck of it was getting to be around people who were so good at what they did. They imagined things and brought them into being. For that—not their personalities or their elaborate possessions—Stefan regarded them as demi-gods. His mother laughed with the conductor of Cerise’s orchestra, who matched Delonia’s height and had a swept-back head of white hair. She was one of the demi-gods.
    Delonia caught Stefan’s eye, and pointed past the conductor to the young host of a television show. Stefan couldn’t deny that he found the young man attractive, with his dark hair and eyes, and that confident schoolboy smile. His friends and he had wondered if, perhaps, the host liked men. Allen heard of a party where he’d supposedly disappeared with a man for a while. But like so many rumours it turned out to be wish-projection: the host was here with his fiancée, who stood only ten feet from him, engaged in another conversation. She, of course, was lovely and utterly un-hateable. Stefan gave a strained smile to his mother and nodded. Demi-god or no, philosopher queen to his father’s king, his mother still drove him crazy.
    The doorbell rang. Stefan answered it, finding a female jazz singer there whose smoky sound he always loved. He was about to tell her how much he’d enjoyed her latest album, when she gestured behind her. “I think that woman needs help getting in,” she said, sliding past him into the party.
    Stefan looked down the tall, wide steps and nearly gasped. There in a wheelchair someone had plopped a tiny creature, vaguely feminine, with shiny black hair streaked with grey, glasses like twin television sets each projecting an eye. She held a cigarette up to her mouth, drew in, exhaled a cloud into the night air, and nodded to him. “Think I could get a hand here?” she asked, her voice a basso-helium-frog-croak. Stefan’s social graces did him the favour of intercepting a look of shock before it reached his face. He recovered himself, trying so hard to act nonchalant that he knew he was