Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

When he woke, there was a man on the seat next to him. A hatchet-faced man, reading a paperback book. He closed the book when he saw that Shadow was awake. Shadow looked down at the cover: Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being.

“Good book?” asked Shadow.

“Yeah, all right,” said Smith. “It’s all essays. They’re meant to be personal, but you feel that every time he looks up innocently and says ‘This is me,’ it’s some kind of double-bluff. I liked Belle et la Bete, though. I felt closer to him watching that than through any of these essays.”

“It’s all on the cover,” said Shadow.

“How d’you mean?”

“The difficulty of being Jean Cocteau.”

Smith scratched his nose.

“Here,” he said. He passed Shadow a copy of the Scotsman. “Page nine.”

At the bottom of page nine was a small story: retired doctor kills himself. Gaskell’s body had been found in his car, parked in a picnic spot on the coast road. He had swallowed quite a cocktail of painkillers, washed down with most of a bottle of Lagavulin.

“Mr. Alice hates being lied to,” said Smith. “Especially by the hired help.”

“Is there anything in there about the fire?” asked Shadow.

“What fire?”

“Oh. Right.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t a terrible run of luck for the great and the good over the next couple of months, though. Car crashes. Train crash. Maybe a plane’ll go down. Grieving widows and orphans and boyfriends. Very sad.”

Shadow nodded.

“You know,” said Smith, “Mr. Alice is very concerned about your health. He worries. I worry, too.”

“Yeah?” said Shadow.

“Absolutely. I mean, if something happens to you while you’re in the country. Maybe you look the wrong way crossing the road. Flash a wad of cash in the wrong pub. I dunno. The point is, if you got hurt, then whatsername, Grendel’s mum, might take it the wrong way.”

“So?”

“So we think you should leave the U.K. Be safer for everyone, wouldn’t it?”

Shadow said nothing for a while. The train began to slow.

“Okay,” said Shadow.

“This is my stop,” said Smith. “I’m getting out here. We’ll arrange the ticket, first class of course, to anywhere you’re heading. One-way ticket. You just have to tell me where you want to go.”

Shadow rubbed the bruise on his cheek. There was something about the pain that was almost comforting.

The train came to a complete stop. It was a small station, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There was a large black car parked by the station building, in the thin sunshine. The windows were tinted, and Shadow could not see inside.

Mr. Smith pushed down the train window, reached outside to open the carriage door, and he stepped out onto the platform. He looked back in at Shadow through the open window. “Well?”

“I think,” said Shadow, “that I’ll spend a couple of weeks looking around the U.K. And you’ll just have to pray that I look the right way when I cross your roads.”

“And then?”

Shadow knew it, then. Perhaps he had known it all along.

“Chicago,” he said to Smith, as the train gave a jerk, and began to move away from the station. He felt older, as he said it. But he could not put it off forever.

And then he said, so quietly that only he could have heard it, “I guess I’m going home.”

Soon afterward it began to rain: huge, pelting drops that rattled against the windows and blurred the world into grays and greens. Deep rumbles of thunder accompanied Shadow on his journey south: the storm grumbled, the wind howled, and the lightning made huge shadows across the sky, and in their company Shadow slowly began to feel less alone.

About the Author

NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, and Neverwhere, the short-fiction collection Smoke and Mirrors, and the bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illustrated by Dave McKean). Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

www.neilgaiman.com

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Also by Neil Gaiman

FOR ADULTS

Anansi Boys

American Gods

Stardust

Smoke and Mirrors

Neverwhere

MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script

FOR YOUNG READERS

(illustrated by Dave McKean)

MirrorMask

The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish

The Wolves in the Walls

Coraline

Credits

Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan

Jacket images: butterfly by Jan Cobb; eggshell © by Paul

Lindamarie Ambrose/Getty Images; snowflake by Floyd Dean/Getty Images;

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Some of the pieces appearing in this collection were first published elsewhere; permissions and copyright information as follows:

“Introduction” © 2006 by Neil Gaiman.