Free The Care and Feeding of Griffins by R. Lee Smith

couldn’t stop herself from crying out.
    “ I won’t take that!” she said helplessly.  “I won’t!  I’ll lose it!”
    Birgit ’s laughter rang out like a bell, light and free of care.  She caught Taryn’s hand and dropped the ring into her palm, then backed away, waving her own empty hands mischievously.  “No backsies!” she said merrily.  “It’s yours now, aisling.”
    “ But—”
    “ I hate long goodbyes.  May the Good Lord keep you in the hollow of His hand and never close His fist too tight,” Birgit said, and she turned around.
    Taryn looked down at the hand that held her grandmother ’s wedding ring.  It was still outthrust and white-knuckled, with the ring itself dangling and glittering in the filtered greenhouse light.  She looked like she was trying to ward off an attack of plant-people.  With a sigh, she slipped the chain over her head and let the ring fall to join her father’s St. Christopher medallion.  Then she picked up her cauldron full of tiny green potatoes and headed outside.  Her car was waiting and she still had one more bad goodbye.
    Taryn drove to John’s apartment complex.  She sat outside the mud-brown building where her boyfriend lived, staring at his door and listening to Aisling treble his sleeping chirps under his blanket in the backseat.  She supposed she should feel worse than she did.  Which wasn’t to say that she didn’t feel bad at all, but most of what sat cold in her heart was just the dread of doing this in the first place.  John was a nice enough guy. 
    She needed to get this done.  Time was passing her by and it was never going to get easier.
    Taryn got out of the car and went to John’s door.  She started to reach for her keys, but then left them where they were.  Walking in like nothing was changed and then breaking up with him…how could she do that?  She lifted her hand to knock and then lowered it again.  Knocking felt so formal, so unkind.  All of a sudden, she found herself wishing strongly that she’d chatted with him at least a little the night the egg had hatched, instead of shutting him down and then driving off without another word.  Now she was turning up at his door just to say goodbye.  She supposed the break-up itself was inevitable—they’d been dating three months now, and each day it seemed to take a little more work to make everything okay between them—but it was still depressing to have to admit defeat like this.
    Maybe it would be easier to do this over the phone.  She felt wrung out enough already from the scene with her family, with Rhiannon.  She didn ’t want to do this anymore tonight.  Aisling was waiting in the car.  He’d need to be fed again pretty soon and she still had some rabbit in a plastic container waiting in the car.  She’d rather be wrist deep in that than have to deal with this.  What did that say about her?
    No.  The break-up may have been inevitable, but John still deserved to hear it face to face.  She ’d make it as painless as possible and she’d let him get mad if he had to, and then she’d get out as soon as she could and get on the road.  On the steps of the Redmond library, Romany may already be waiting for her.  All this would probably hurt a lot more tomorrow, but by then, she’d have plenty of other distractions.  Raising a griffin out in the wilderness of Washington state probably wouldn’t leave her with a lot of spare time.  She just had to get through this first.
    Taryn fished out her keys, found the one for John ’s apartment, and unlocked his door.  She was struck first by the dinner-smells, good ones, garlic and wine.  Not a bad cook, her Johnny-boy, especially when it came to Italian.  Lunch was still an unhappy lump in her stomach, but the thought of curling up on John’s shoulder with a plate of his lasagna was very appealing to her.  He was—
    He was …
    He was in the bedroom, she realized, as the sounds she had been hearing for some time