Dolly asked.
“I went back to town,” Marcus explained. “It was the middle of the afternoon and I hadn't eaten since breakfast.”
Again Marcus went silent at the use of that word. He looked around the break room, just as he'd done before, and August imagined he could see, in the reflection of Marcus' eyes, Marcus' mother flipping flapjacks in the moments before her Sparkling. “No!”, she'd cried out. 'Not now! My babies!”, and August reflected on the unearthly cruelty of a blessing that would snatch a person away from the thing that they loved best, their own life, the way it was, the way it should have been, just like his own Sparkling had been, once upon a time. It was many years ago already, long before the Anti-Wish Brigade had come into being. August March had been the happiest of men. He had lived contentedly with his beloved wife, April, and their darling children, John and Mary in the city of his birth far to the East of Gaia. He had worked in the library of that city, curating the 'visible collection of the week' and recommending reading to all who asked, a wonderful job at which he excelled, and then, one miserable morning, to find himself on fire! Bright lights blinding his eyes, an awful noise roaring in his ears, drowning out the world, and the sensation in his mind, the vision, the seeing, the awful truth of his next infernal destiny, a lonely old man walking along a deserted highway with no hope or prospect of ever experiencing the beautiful growth and development of his darlings as they made their way into the wider world, and then, in an instant, that old good valuable world was gone and in its place there was nothing. A curse. A trap. A lie. The Sparkles, he knew then and still knew now, lead one only down, and out.
“As I walked down the main street,” Marcus was saying, “I looked at every shop along the way. I passed a small grocer's, then a postal office, then a barber shop, and then a copy shop. I remember thinking to myself, good Lord, what would such a tiny town in the middle of nowhere need with a copy shop, and I almost laughed, but something caught my eye, and I looked into that copy shop, and I saw my brother, sitting there behind the counter, daydreaming.”
“Oh my goodness!” Dolly declared.
“Could it be?” Suleia asked, astonished.
“I don't believe it!” Morris said.
“Morris?” Veronica said.
“Morris?” added Makima.
“What are you thinking, Morris?” asked August.
“I don't believe it,” he repeated.
“Believe it,” Marcus advised him. “Because it's true. I went in to the copy shop and I said 'Ben!' and he looked at me with the most embarrassed look on his face.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked me.
“What are YOU doing here?” I replied.
“You're not supposed to see me like this,” he said.
“You told me to find you,” I reminded him.
“Yes, but it's not the way,” he complained.
“Aren't you happy to see me?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“You won't understand,” he told me.
“What won't I understand?” I asked, but he didn't have to say another word, and I didn't have to say another word, because right then, she appeared. She must have been in the office in the back of the store but she she came out and glared at me like she always had before.
“Get out!” she hissed. “Get out of here right now and never come back!”
“It was Gloria?” Dolly nearly fell off her chair.
“Gloria,” Marcus nodded.
“But how?” Ham wondered.
“The Sparkles!” Snake snickered.
“They're supposed to give you what you want,” muttered George.
“Nonsense!”, Finika shouted, and she jumped out of her chair, knocking over her coffee cup in the process. “It's all nonsense!” she yelled again, as she stomped off to the restroom.
"I knew everything about him," Marcus said, "or at least I thought I did, but I didn't know that."
August sighed and shook his head sadly. The truth was cold, but like Morris, nobody wanted to see it.
“We're such poor beggars,” he softly said, “always being taken for a ride.”
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