Read The Big Front Yard and Other Stories for Free Online Page A

flickering in the brush and weeds and the street lamps had been lit and the stars were out.
    But a flood of sunlight was pouring through the windows of the living room and out beyond the windows lay a land that was not Willow Bend.
    â€œBeasly,” he gasped, “look out there in front!”
    Beasly looked.
    â€œWhat place is that?” he asked.
    â€œThat’s what I’d like to know.”
    Towser had found his dish and was pushing it around the kitchen floor with his nose, by way of telling Taine that it was time to eat.
    Taine went across the living room and opened the front door. The garage, he saw, was there. The pickup stood with its nose against the open garage door and the car was safe inside.
    There was nothing wrong with the front of the house at all.
    But if the front of the house was all right, that was all that was.
    For the driveway was chopped off just a few feet beyond the tail end of the pickup and there was no yard or woods or road. There was just a desert – a flat, far-reaching desert, level as a floor, with occasional boulder piles and haphazard clumps of vegetation and all of the ground covered with sand and pebbles. A big blinding sun hung just above a horizon that seemed much too far away and a funny thing about it was that the sun was in the north, where no proper sun should be. It had a peculiar whiteness, too.
    Beasly stepped out on the porch and Taine saw that he was shivering like a frightened dog.
    â€œMaybe,” Taine told him, kindly, “you’d better go back in and start making us some supper.”
    â€œBut, Hiram –”
    â€œIt’s all right,” said Taine. “It’s bound to be all right.”
    â€œIf you say so, Hiram.”
    He went in and the screen door banged behind him and in a minute Taine heard him in the kitchen.
    He didn’t blame Beasly for shivering, he admitted to himself. It was a sort of shock to step out of your front door into an unknown land. A man might eventually get used to it, of course, but it would take some doing.
    He stepped down off the porch and walked around the truck and around the garage corner and when he rounded the corner he was half prepared to walk back into familiar Willow Bend – for when he had gone in the back door the village had been there.
    There was no Willow Bend. There was more of the desert, a great deal more of it.
    He walked around the house and there was no back to the house. The back of the house now was just the same as the front had been before – the same smooth curve pulling the sides of the house together.
    He walked on around the house to the front again and there was desert all the way. And the front was still all right. It hadn’t changed at all. The truck was there on the chopped-off driveway and the garage was open and the car inside.
    Taine walked out a ways into the desert and hunkered down and scooped up a handful of the pebbles and the pebbles were just pebbles.
    He squatted there and let the pebbles trickle through his fingers.
    In Willow Bend there was a back door and there wasn’t any front. Here, wherever here might be, there was a front door, but there wasn’t any back.
    He stood up and tossed the rest of the pebbles away and wiped his dusty hands upon his britches.
    Out of the corner of his eye he caught a sense of movement on the porch and there they were.
    A line of tiny animals, if animals they were, came marching down the steps, one behind the other. They were four inches high or so and they went on all four feet, although it was plain to see that their front feet were really hands, not feet. They had ratlike faces that were vaguely human, with noses long and pointed. They looked like they might have scales instead of hide, for their bodies glistened with a rippling motion as they walked. And all of them had tails that looked very much like the coiled-wire tails one finds on certain toys and the tails stuck straight up above them,