Read Gryphon: New and Selected Stories for Free Online Page A

she whispered them.
    They went past a world of details. Sidewalks broke into spiderweb patterns. A green squirt gun was in a boy’s hand, but the bus was moving too quickly for her to see the rest of the boy. In a tree that she noticed by accident, a brown bird flew out of a nest. Something redbreast. Robin redbreast. The bus driver’s head, suddenly in the way of the sun, shone a fine gunmetal blue. On a jungle gym, a boy wearing a green sweatshirt, smaller than Horace’s, hung down from a steel bar with only his legs, his knees, holding him there. Margaret stared at him. How was it possible for a human being to hang by his knees from a bar? More important, why would anyone want to do it? Before an answer came, the boy faded out and was replaced by another detail, of a seagull standing proudly in someone’s alley, an arrogant look on its face. The seagull cheered Margaret. She admired its pluck. The other details she saw were less invigorating: an old man, very white in all respects, asleep in a doorway; two young people, across the street from the art institute, kissing underneath a tree (the tree and the kissing made her flesh crawl); and now, at last, a cumulating, bright pink, puffing cloud of smoke exploding out of someone’s backyard, someone’s shed, on fire or dynamited, even the smell reaching her. The bus drove on and Margaret forgot about it.
    She remembered her stop, however, and was halfway up the sidewalk when she remembered that she had forgotten to get out at the Safeway to buy groceries. She counted all her canned goods, in her mind’s eye. “I’ll be all right,” she said, “and besides, there are more buses going here and there. It’s their fate in life.” She trudged on into the building.
    Skinny Mr. Fletcher, employee of the United States Postal Service, had already come and gone with his Santa’s sack of bills and messages. Margaret unlocked her mailbox, hoping for a free sample of a new soap. Instead, there was a solitary postcard inside, showing on its picture side Buster Keaton walking squarely down the middle of a railroad track. On the other side was a message from Horace, written in his miserable script. Some letters had been crossed out, but he had not given up.
Dear Margaret,
  Happy birth aniversery
            today
    from love Horace
      ps remember lightbulbs
    Where had he mailed the message? Where, more important, had he found the stamp? How had he remembered the address? It was all very mysterious. The postcard was, of course, simply one of his monstrously large postcard collection, which he had taken with him to the First Christian Residence, over two hundred of them. He had traded a few for cigarettes. Margaret looked at Buster Keaton as she went up the stairs, the stairway extending and shortening, like a human-sized accordion.
    She opened her door and stepped into the living room. On the left was her pastel blue sofa, next to her radio and television set, and on the right was her mother’s harmonium, underneath a mirror. Behind the sofa were bookshelves, filled with books she and Horace had read to each other: Robert Benchley, Don Marquis, Brooks Atkinson. She could remember their names but not the character of their work. “Feels like I’m walking through gelatin,” she meant to say, but no sound could make its way out of her throat.
    She stood stranded inside the door, waiting for something to happen. At last the invisible steel wires holding her feet loosened for a moment, and she managed to get as far as the harmonium. Then the movie came to a halt again. She hadn’t taken her coat off, nor could she. She was forced to look at more details: the spiral pattern on her white rug; the legs of the harmonium; her own white surprised face in the mirror. “I know where I am,” she said. “I’m home.” But she didn’t remember the mirror. Who had brought it here? Had it been delivered by Mr. Fletcher, from his sack?
    “I should go to the