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Short Story

Gardens

Alexander Joy observes a clash of ways of cultivating the mind.

This bright cold April evening finds Dr Kenjamin on a barstool nursing a paper-cut. Fiddling with his airship ticket like a furtive ace of spades has put a thin, deep gash in his index finger, so he tries thinking of happier things: the Dutch confections he discovered during his farewell tour of the market square; the pending spring thaw; the time printed on his ticket, a mere half-hour away, and what this will mean for his business. Thirty minutes more, he tells himself. The worst is over. And a bar isn’t a bad place to wait: not overtly suspicious, and filled so densely with inebriated brain-waves that a telepath could lose himself forever scouring them for the slightest scintillation of clear unorthodox ambitions.

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