The Fire and the Rose: Part 4
Thousand-year-old boy, strange scribblings, temple
Part 3 is HERE
The story stars HERE
He paid his bill and rushed outside to read the mysterious book April had given him. He crossed the street to the park, found an empty park bench, sat, and studied the book’s cover.
It was a pocket-sized Tacoma tourism guide published 1964. The cover showed the Kress Building and Pantages Theater on Broadway downtown. The city looked much more colorful than it did nowadays, even in the faded, bent image of a nearly sixty-year-old publication. The people on the street looked optimistic, somehow. Energetic. Alive.
Unlike today.
He flipped through the book. He knew something had to be in there for him to find. The whole mad sequence of events that led him here couldn’t be accidental.
Was anything accidental? he wondered. This was a thought that had never seriously occurred to him before — the type of thing he’d laugh at stoned hippies and New Age dorks for. Yet, here he was, wondering himself.
A young boy startled him, seeming to appear out of nowhere at his right side. The kid was nine, maybe ten, black bowl-cut hair and hazel eyes. He smiled mischievously at Jeff, said, “I’m a thousand years old,”…
