The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time by Steven Sherrill Page A

coke, the crumbled rock, and looked up. Eight uniform walls of stacked stone rose high over his horned noggin. Skinks and beetles scurried in the cracks. Weeds rooted in the crevices. Up the Minotaur looked to a perfectly round disk of blue sky.
    “Unngh,” he said that day, and sat down.
    •  •  •
    “Unngh,” he says this day, and sits down. Presses his back against the mortared stone. Lets his horns touch there, too. A few generations ago, humans stoked the fires overhead; two thousand degrees stormed and raged, belching black smoke high into the sky, vomiting chalky white lime onto the earth. Men and animals labored and died in the process. Lifetimes. A drop in the bucket of what the Minotaur knows.
    The fire is gone. The stone was stone before chisel, before hammer, and after. Mortar is only wishful thinking. The stone walls keep all the secrets. The Minotaur cut his eyeteeth amid stone. He knows well its loyalty. The Minotaur comes to Joy Furnace when he wants to remember nothing. To foresee nothing.
    This day, his life in pending upheaval, Old Scald Village and all its people likely behind him, the Minotaur wants nothing. Nothingness. For the moment. The Minotaur sits, his bull head at rest in the ruinous kiln, this mouth of rock, and lets the torrential silence overtake him.
    Sits. And sits.
    The day does as days do. And in passing leaves the Minotaur alone.
    •  •  •
    Alone, that is, except for the stinkbug that lumbers over his pant leg as if it were a veritable mountain. Alone, that is, except for the hive of busy wasps coming and going from a hole in the far wall, perfect in their industry. Alone, except for the king snake and the copperhead staking out territories in the kiln’s nooks and crannies, waiting for the field mouse, waiting for the fledgling robin to topple out of its nest on an overhead ledge, not quite sure what flying means yet, is yet—could flight be the mouth of this reptile, its binding hold? Alone, but for the shadows that slice the blue circle of day overhead from time to time. Here a titmouse, there a hawk, a buzzard. Alone. Except for the beast that crawls up out of the noonhour.
    The Minotaur hears it first. A creature on approach, coming from the highway. What rough beast is this, slouching up the sloped path to Joy Furnace? A labored grunt, then a squeaking and creaking; the thud of something not quite foot; breath heavy, shallow, constricted; some dragged thing, then a pause.
    The Minotaur is not afraid. The grunt, the rattle, the thud, the wheeze—everything gets louder as the creature draws nigh. But drawing nigh takes its toll on the clock, in the universe of near-silence inside the abandoned kiln. The Minotaur listens long into the day. A small-scale clamor and clang. A manageable din. The Minotaur refuses to speculate. Clunk and scrape. Crank, wait. The Minotaur is not afraid. Really. The Minotaur is, however, human enough. Man enough. He looks, after all.
    It is hard to peek, what with those horns, that snout. But the Minotaur tries. He cocks his head along the arch of the kiln’s portal. The horn tips emerge first; there’s no other way. Whatever makes the sound, whatever comes, is close.
    Is close. Is closer. Is—can it be?—something of a man. The Minotaur sees him. The man (manlike) doesn’t see the Minotaur. The man is too busy struggling up onto the low slab of stone at the mouth of the far kiln. He struggles because of the prosthetic leg, a booted apparatus that telescopes from beneath his pant leg just below the knee. He struggles because of the absent arm, the uniform sleeve pinned at the shoulder. That arm, that missing arm, flails in its immense void. The man, the soldier, struggles. The fat cylinder of oxygen weighing down his backpack. And the face, the remnants of face. All this, though, merely glimpsed. The manlike creature enters the far kiln. The Minotaur hears him settle in against the stone wall. The Minotaur listens as the soldier’s