A Bridge of Years (48 page)

Nathan
and Maria took him home. Their touch pulled memory out of him like a
throbbing tooth until there was only the fact of the sky, the water,
the heat.

"Saw
an Infantry patrol this morning," Nathan remarked, "but it
passed well to the south."

"That's
good," Billy's mother said.

Billy
took her hand and tugged her toward home.

"I'm
tired," he said. The sun was hot and made him tired and he felt
like he'd walked a very long way.

Robert
Charles Wilson is a native of California who now resides in Nanaimo,
British Columbia, with his wife and son. His short fiction has
appeared in
The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
and
Isaac
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
His
novels include
A
Hidden Place, Memory Wire, Gypsies,
and
The
Divide.
He
is currendy at work on his next novel, tentatively titled
The
Harvest.