The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 456

already claimed by the fame-seeking, mental defectives. Yet, every unexplainable thing in him told him that he should have known and that he was guilty and did not have to wait for the legalities of a sentencing hearing. The punishment was inflicted before charges were filed.

He again wondered if he were yet another person merely consigned to the wrong time and place. He had been so mistakenly sure of the decency of so many other locations that he found the question unanswerable. He had to try to forget the failure of all that was part of the past and hope and believe that he was about to enter something new; as well as something old. A successful life seemed to demand the contradiction. Without the belief in that one in a million, “miraculous,” and naïve long shot, he may as well have stayed up on the hill with the butchered, burned and unirrigated tree stumps. If the denizens of the valley city were averse to him, so be it. He could know that only after having tried to befriend them.

He again mounted Spotty and rode his companion of thirty years. The black, white and gray spotted mare now struggled with every step she took on the sloped and treacherous terrain. He held the reins slackly and made no effort to compel her to move with anything other than the speed and course with which she was most secure. As he experienced the careful slow steps she took, he