There is a particular time, near midnight on Christmas Eve, when all people, at least those who are not accustomed to seeing hallucinatory visions, go inside and spend time with their loved ones, or ones they pretend to love.
A small number of those familiar with things that can’t happen, but do, and things others consider monsters and frightening remain. A still smaller number find themselves outside a marble building in Manhattan, and two of that small number are friendly monsters themselves.
“Pat, you awake?” grumbles one.
“How many times do I have to tell you I hate being called Pat?”
“What kind of name is ‘Patience,’ anyway? For a guy, for a lion.”
“Do I call you Fort? No, I respectfully call you Fortitude. Fortitude the Asshole.”
Fortitude growled quietly as he stretched out in a most feline way. “Let’s not fight. We get one night a year, where we can smell the... hey, does the air smell funny to you?”
Patience stuck his leonine nose into the air and inhaled deeply. “Yeah, a little less exhaust fumey, I think.”
Fortitude looked down from his pedestal at an inebriated passerby. Strictly speaking, not passing by, as he was lying flat on his back, looking up at where there ought to be stars if the city lights weren’t so bright.
“Hey, you there! What’s up with the air?”
“Mmmmmm hmmm rona.”
Patience, exhibiting a lack of the quality for which he was named, shouted, “Speak up, you besotted vulgarian!”
“‘S the virus. People are s’posed to be staying home more.”
Fortitude turned his head toward Patience. “Just like the flu, back in 1918. Remember that? We were young then.”
Patience flicked his tail. “Huh, you’d think they’d learn.”
“Hey, you guys are the lions!” The drunkard’s eyes were wide open.
Fortitude yawned. “Think we ought give the guy an A in biology, Pat?”
Patience snickered, and then winked at the man.
“Bbbb-but you’re alive!”
Now Patience yawned. “Yep, for one night only. All sorts of magical things happen on Christmas Eve.”
“Magic, huh? Can you make rabbits come out of hats? Make the Statue of Liberty disappear?”
“Kid stuff. We do serious magic.” Fortitude rolled on his back, nearly falling off his pedestal.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like taking you to mysterious lands. Like time travel. Like letting you talk to dead people and people who never even lived.”
The man sneered. “Yeah, right. I may be drunk but I’m not a fool.”
“Waddya think, Pat? Should we show him?”
“I dunno, Fort. Pearls before swine and all of that. And anyway, we’re wasting time. There’s a lioness in the Bronx zoo I heard about.”
“Aw, this’ll only take a minute. Touch my paw, human. Go on.”
“You promise not to kill me?”
“Naw, I’m a friendly lion. Like in the Chronicles of Narnia.”
“What’s that?”
Fort sighed. “You’ve never heard of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?”
“Speak English, I tell ya. Whoever heard of a foreign lion anyway.”
“You gonna touch my paw or not?”
Patience and Fortitude watched the grubby man struggle to stand, then stretch to touch his dirty hand to Fortitude’s paw.
There was a flash of light and both lions and the human were somewhere deep in the stacks of the New York Public Library.
The man fell back against shelves of books behind him. Not out of fear, for alcohol had dissolved any fear he ought to have felt, but because Patience was licking his face with a very rough tongue.
“There. Your face is a little cleaner now.”
“What is this place?”
“Go on, you’ve never been in the library?”
The man looked down and whispered, “I can’t read.”
Patience and Fortitude stared at the man and then at each other.
“Should we?” they asked in unison.
“We should,” they answered together.
“I guess the zoo can wait till next year.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“Relax,” said Patience. “You’re too skinny to eat.”
Patience and Fortitude lifted their right front paws and placed them on the man’s shoulders.
“Close your eyes. Powerful magic is not good for the eyes,” Fortitude warned.
“Okay, you can open them,” said Patience a second later.
The man looked around. “Magic, huh? It’s all the same. No strange places, no dead people, it’s...”
“Look at the spines of the books,” said Patience.
The man’s eyes grew wide.
“They’re words. You understand them now.”
“C. S. Lewis. Lion. Witch. Wardrobe. Chronicles. What did you do to me?”
“Gave you a little of the magic you should have had all along.”
The man lovingly touched the books on the shelves, and took one down. He opened it. And he began reading aloud to himself.
Through a window, the two lions saw the sky grow light.
“Damn, another year gone by. We’d better get back in place,” whispered Fortitude.
“Next year, no good deeds. They take too much time,” grumbled Patience.
And as the sun rose, the shiny tan coats of two lions turned to pink Tennessee marble, and a gentle snow fell, and the morning was a little brighter as a man entered the realm of Narnia, through the magic of reading.
© 2020 Leland Dirks. Find more of my short stories in my collection Stories of December, available through your favorite bookseller or at www.amazon.com/dp/1656572710/?tag=augiedocom-20
By the way, the lions outside the New York Public Library have been there since 1911, and they have borne the names Patience and Fortitude since the 1930s. And they really do guard a most magical place.
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