I heard the wicker again, slow, the front part, the back part.

“Oh, Lutch-” I heard the wicker, sharp and crisp, as she came up out of it. Then he said, “You been hearing rumors about you and me?” There was a pause about long enough to do this. Lutch had a little habit of catching his lower lip with his teeth and letting go when he was thinking was hard. “Fawn, about the other night, with all that moon. “Lutch Crawford always talked straight to the point. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.” She did.įor a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. “She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume X: The Man Who Lost the Sea “And all that you can put in your pocket.” Or if he said something you like, you could get him to say it over a hundred times, and he’d never mind.” And even more, you could shut him up if you didn’t feel like listening. He’d give you all he’s got or any part of it, whenever you wanted it. Suppose you had a friend there waiting for you anytime you wanted him, anyplace.

He kicked a pebble into the water and watched the sunlight break and break, and heal. He could tell you things that make your hair curl, lose you sleep, or things that make you laugh.” He looked up at her swiftly, and away. And what folks were like a hundred years ago or even a thousand. He could tell you things about what people are like all over the world, the way they live, everything. “Tell you what, suppose you had a friend, he knew a whole lot more than you do. He looked at the still water for a moment, thinking. It’s just that nobody ever asked me that before.” Now he laughed, and she flared up at him, “You laughing at me?” She seemed to be having a great deal of trouble getting used to the idea of a man reading a book. She looked at the volume where it lay by the boulder, at Scott, at the book again. “I never read a book in my life,” she said again.

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon