I mentioned here the occasion that birthed this story, a trip to the art museum where, while perusing sculpture, the title came to me. Only, for the first 24 hours, that title was Fragments of a Story Saved from the Fire. The details of the story having nothing to do with what I saw that day, but it gave me a title and everything grew from there.

At a little over 3800 words, this is the longest of my stories written since my return.

I’ve called these stories horror-adjacent, which is silly. Horror is many things and embraces any number of uncomfortable emotions.

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Fragments of My Father Saved from the Fire

My father died at the proverbial stake, consumed by a non-proverbial fire. His home became his pyre. The ruined foundation resembled a grave marker, but in a cemetery, the grass would be trimmed. Flowers would be placed. Nothing awaited me but the solace of memories, and I stood at the end of the stoop, at the threshold of a door that no longer existed, and waited for something more.

Into that emptiness, I spoke his last known words, most certainly written for me:

My son, you are a composite of those who came before…

The shrill blast of the truck’s horn shook me. My truck. My father’s truck. Parked on the street, it had escaped the flames, becoming part of my inheritance. I glanced back to see my mother’s averted face, her eyes focused on the worn seats, unable to look upon the place we once called home and unwilling to look for peace in memories of my father. She wouldn’t have come if she’d known where I was going.

A minute, nothing more, I’d said. I never pass this way.

There’s no reason why you would.

She laid into the horn again. I didn’t move. Birds burst from tall patches of grass and filled the sky by the dozen. Dark in their groupings, they resembled demons fingerpainting with smoke the sigils of death. Mother’s voice cried out my name, attaching it to their sorcery. They trailed away, and I alone remained with my mother’s pleas.

She stopped when the neighbor’s screen door opened. Mrs. Winterbourne stepped out into that silence and beckoned for us to join her, a shawl of purple lace following every movement, flowing like a psychedelic after-image, her plump, perfect body illusory in its burst of color and grace.

“Y’all come see me a spell,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “I have something for you.”

Mother shrunk out of sight.

Mutely, I waved, transmuted to that teen-aged self that had come of age enjoying the widow Winterbourne as she enjoyed her garden. Half-naked, Mother had said, and I, prone to a most literal exegesis, had spent hours watching and casting mental chicken bones, foretelling which half Mrs. Winterbourne might remove. In the end, she never presented those mysterious places to the light, but I had become a man in the waiting. I felt that manhood waiting for her now.

She was my mother’s age.

Mother glared at me as if she knew, but she knew nothing but that she would die and this moment was murdering her. “We’re going,” she hissed. “We’re going right now.”

I approached the truck.

I’d been sixteen when I last saw Mrs. Winterbourne, and in the years since, that scrawny, awkward boy had become a man: muscular, rugged, and easy on the eyes, if the word of a woman still meant anything in this man’s world. A grin bent cockeyed across my grief. I couldn’t help it. With a little effort, I could seduce Mrs. Winterbourne. Not that I would. But I could, and that pleased me. It pleased all the parts of me. I had my father’s good looks.

“Right now,” Mother hissed, spitting each word through a snarl that bared what should have been her fangs but were a hedgerow-perfect set of teeth.

“Mother,” I said.

The hiss became a growl.

“Mother,” I said.

She’d left my father and I when I was fourteen, two days before Christmas, and came back for me on New Year’s. This was always the way. Thoughtful, eventually. Afterthoughtful. Mother first. Sammy second. Whenever she complained about my own supposed selfishness, I confessed not to copying her greatest skill but to perfecting it.

“We’re going to say hello,” I said.

“You know what they must think of me?”

“I know what Mrs. Winterbourne will think of you if you don’t get out of that truck.”

Pouting, she opened the door. Dainty white shoes touched the ground. She looked at me from under lashes, hesitant and hoping for reprieve. I started across the yard. She followed. Mother was a slender socialite with little use for social niceties. She wore her little white dress high and tight, and in the right company, it never mattered what she said, not until the next morning, and by then she was ready to move on. Fuck the world, she’d always said, and the world obliged.

From the road, the house resembled many in town, a blend of Cape Cod and Craftsman with dormers peering fore and aft above tapered columns. Lawn occupied little of the yard, but Mrs. Winterbourne kept the various islands and pebble paths well maintained, and if the herb garden grew a bit wild and eccentric, it was secluded in the back. Few saw. None complained. As we drew near the porch, I heard music drifting through the screen door and the sound of footsteps as Mrs. Winterbourne prepared. Behind me, mother grunted and clutched my shirt to keep her balance. The grunt became a whine, the mewling of a shamed dog, but not for anything she had done. No, Mother’s shame was having been my father’s wife. After the fire, after the news, people assumed we’d known. We had to know. How could we not?

The bastard was a witch.

“What can we possibly say?” Mother said. “She’ll think we have answers. We don’t have answers. I don’t even understand the question.”

We didn’t need answers. We’d come to visit, to revel in old times and share our mutual confusion and amazement over relics found among the ashes. Our heads would shake at the scandals linked to my father by gossip and innuendo, like unsolved cases of animal sacrifice in the woods. No one had ever heard of these cases before, but we knew about them now. We’d share our grief and wonder, and we’d leave. Let the world observe our ignorance and wash us clean.

I held Mother’s hand, and we climbed the stairs. I knocked, Mrs. Winterbourne beckoned us inside, and Mother crossed the threshold. An involuntary gasp escaped her lips. I wondered how many had seen inside the house with its crystals and candles and whether they’d understood, before the fire, before the news. Mother tried to take a step back. I pushed her forward and closed the door behind us.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house was everything the news had painted my father’s to be. Bundles of dried herbs hung above every window and door. Bone and feather crossed each other above the fireplace, held together by a dash of purple ribbon, seemingly as harmless as my grandmother’s potpourri.

Mrs. Winterbourne placed a silver tea set on a doily’d table, her smile wide and easy. “Make yourself at home. I honestly swear; it’s been a month of Sundays.”

Mother muttered, “Longer.”

She meant not long enough, and Mrs. Winterbourne certainly heard it that way.

“If I’d my druthers,” said Mrs. Winterbourne, “this moment would’ve come long ago, but come it has. Come it has.”

A raven hopped in from the kitchen and flew to its perch by the window. It roosted there, watching, appearing to think, seeming to judge. I thought of things to say, but said none of them. Mrs. Winterbourne poured the tea, not proper sweet tea but the English kind, with twigs swirling like detritus from a storm. It seemed fitting, considering our surroundings, and we each took the proffered cups.

“Samuel,” she said, “I want to tell you about your father.”

I took a sip of tea, a reflexive desire for normality, and stared blankly into the truth.

“Does this mean you’re a witch?” The word tasted funny on my tongue. Not the word. Not as a word. What tasted funny wasn’t the role but Mrs. Winterbourne in it. She was the mother-next-door, the one who shaped my taste in women. One taste threatened to sour another.

I had a girl waiting for me at home, and to see Mrs. Winterbourne was to see Emma’s future. If Winterbourne was a witch, it’d ruin me. The big brunette could no longer be my type, and what else was there? The slender socialite? Heaven and hell forbid.

“She’s not a witch,” Mother said.

I knew she wanted to add there’s no such thing, but there were such things. We knew that now. I waited for Mrs. Winterbourne to pounce, to pronounce the word Wiccan and denounce our denials and become judge and jury in her reverse witch trial. Instead, she ignored my mother, and in addressing me, ignored me as well, pushing forward on the path planned. I knew then she didn’t speak out of any love for Mother or me. She’d summoned us out of loyalty to my father.

“I loved him very much,” she said.

The cuckoo marked the hour’s passing.

“And he loved you,” she said.

I tried to make a crone of her beauty and failed. Grief and groin fought, grasping for the greater footing in this new world, but I remained beguiled by Mrs. Winterbourne, bewitching as ever.

“He wanted to tell you about us, but it never felt right,” she said.

Well won, old man. Well won. Even in death mastering and wrecking me.

“I learned to stay away when you were visiting. That was your time.”

She learned. She’d stayed away because she learned better than to be around when I came home. I understood that now, remembering the last time I’d seen her. My parents had been fighting again. All Mother had to do was drop me off for the weekend, but she was inside, yelling, threatening to take me home, to never let him see me again. I ran out back, and Mrs. Winterbourne was in her garden. Despite the fence between us, she knew I was there.

That you, Samuel? Come sit with me a spell.

At sixteen, I held no nostalgia for those days at my window, watching, only shame covered in a feigned forgetfulness. No desire drove me to her, only a greater need to get away. It was cold out, one of those early days of Autumn, but she didn’t invite me inside. We sat on the patio as a fire burned.

Never gets any better, does it? she said.

I didn’t answer, and it was good that anger held shut my mouth. I’d have told her to go to hell. She was right, though. They couldn’t be in the same room together. Couldn’t stay apart.

Nine years later, Mother put down her empty tea cup. “How long were you two seeing each other?”

“It was after you left,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “About seventeen months after.”

“You recruited him?” Mother said. “Like a Jehovah’s Witness?”

Mrs. Winterbourne leveled all her attention on me. “Your father made that decision on his own. He saw my peace and wanted it for himself.”

I glanced at Mother, hearing the crude remark I knew she wanted to make: all the neighbors saw your piece. She didn’t say it though. With the burden of a great and painful weight, she didn’t say it, and the silence threatened to give her an aneurysm. I saw it in the twitching of her eye.

“Makes no matter,” Mother said. “You should tell the neighbors, though. Get them off our backs.”

“They’ve spoken to you?” Mrs Winterbourne said.

“No.”

“You’ll speak to them.”

“No.”

“In your years away,” Mrs. Winterbourne said, “perhaps your fire has cooled.”

In awkward silence, Mother stared at her tea.

“Forgive the expression,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Awkward or not, the point had merit. Time away from my father had done Mother good, mended some wounded aspect of her soul, and now I knew how that came to be, beginning with that cold afternoon on Mrs. Winterbourne’s patio.

She’d looked into my twitching eye, and with the whispered tone of a Sunday’s sermon highlight-reel, spoke truths I knew but never wanted to hear.

Your mother can’t be honest with herself, neither about what she wants nor who she is. Do you know what that does to a person?

No.

The light of reason stops guiding your actions, she said and tapped me on the chest. That’s when choice springs from here, from those canyons of your heart you can neither hear nor see. It’s where all the truth resides that your mind can’t handle.

So? I said, that and nothing more. It seemed enough. It seemed like nothing I said could ever be enough.

We’ll make your mother a gift, Mrs. Winterbourne said. But it would be best if she didn’t know it came from me.

I nodded and scooted a little closer to the fire. Mrs. Winterbourne excused herself, and when she returned from the kitchen, she carried a tiny burlap sack with a loose purple ribbon sewn into its neck. She picked a few herbs from the garden, added them to the sack, cinched it tight, and secured it with a bow.

Drop this inside your mother’s purse, she said. It’ll help calm her nerves.

The gift worked. My parents fought over the phone, but after that, whenever Mother drove to the house, she never went inside.

Now, I understood why.

Mrs. Winterbourne encouraged us to finish our tea. In unison, Mother and I raised our cups.

“Your father wanted to help you,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “He was making you a present when he died. I retrieved what I could and rebuilt the rest. It’s ready for you, if you’re interested.”

“Is that what killed him?” I imagined dark sorcery over a burning pentagram.

“He smoked in bed. I’d warned him more times than I can count, but it didn’t do any good.”

I would have preferred sorcery.

“You weren’t with him?” Mother said.

“We were dating, not living together.”

“I’m interested,” I said.

Mother looked at me.

“It’s from Dad,” I said.

Mrs. Winterbourne stood, but I held out my hand to stop her.

“Why weren’t you living together?” I said. “Why didn’t you marry?”

Mrs. Winterbourne flashed sadness in the shape of a smile and gathered our empty cups. “Come with me. You’ll understand.”

The room felt suddenly crowded. The raven tilted its head with a personality I thought I recognized, and for a moment I thought it was my father, but it wasn’t my father.

Mrs. Winterbourne led us into the kitchen.

When I was twenty-three I’d noticed something odd about my father’s home. Beneath the obvious strangeness of Mrs. Winterbourne’s house, I saw it here, too. No, that’s not fair. It’s not true. Emma noticed it first, and I noticed it after she’d pointed it out.

I’d never brought many girls home, but I’d thought Emma was the one, the girl to keep until her looks gave out. I’d still thought so until just that moment, until I learned my father had fucked Mrs. Winterbourne, which was too much like him fucking my girl, and that wasn’t something I knew how to handle.

Mr. Fisher, Emma had said, you have the most extraordinary kitchen.

Call me Ishy, Father said.

Ishy. Emma grinned bigger than I’d ever seen, the first instance of Father provoking my jealousy, something I should have taken as an omen.

Emma pointed to the copper-finished, Bertazzoni proofing oven, and Father explained the delicate needs of yeast. She gushed over the high-end dehydrator, and he lectured on extractions and preservation. I’d never given any thought to the changes in my father’s kitchen. Lonely men liked lonely things. Emma saw something miraculous and wild.

I’m glad to see you take an interest, Father said. Sammy’s always been a little lost in the kitchen.

Most men are, she said.

Once upon a time. These days, it’s a pretense.

He’d said it in good humor, but the dig angered me. Real men didn’t care about kitchens and neither would he, if he’d been able to keep my mother, but now I understood the source of his interest. He’d copied every aspect from Mrs. Winterbourne’s kitchen, lacking only the overtly pagan aesthetic. Maybe he imitated that, too, on days I didn’t visit.

“The wrongs of one life inhibit the next,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother rolled her eyes.

“Your father couldn’t begin a new marriage until he’d settled the sins of the old,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

Mother’s eyes stopped rolling.

“And then came the cancer,” Mrs. Winterbourne said.

We ceased to breathe, and I remembered how thin he’d been the last time we were together. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. Mostly, I bitched about wanting to go out, but he was tired. I told him he was too young to be this old.

Tell me about Emma, he’d said.

I stared out the back window as if something wonderful might spring up from the grass and deliver me.

We’ve got a few years left in us.

Sammy.

No more lectures, I said.

She deserves better.

She’s free to do as she pleases. So am I.

He sat in the gloom, away from the light that streamed through the windows, and faced a dark television. I saw nothing more to his life than that, a dog lingering for crumbs when life’s meal was gone.

Life’s short, he said. Fill it with something good.

Good’s all there is.

Pleasure and good aren’t the same thing.

At least, that’s what I think he meant to say. His voice trailed off. I might have asked then if there was something wrong, but the boredom had grown thick and oppressive. The whole world beckoned, and he’d trapped me in that stuffy house, a prisoner to his early old age. I told him I had to go and didn’t wait for an answer.

I could have done so much more.

Mrs. Winterbourn set a bowl on the kitchen island. “That’s when he began work on this.”

I recognized it from the paper, or one very much like it. The news had made a fuss about a ceremonial dagger and melted glass fused with a tiny bird carcass, but none of it would have meant much if they hadn’t found what they called an incantation bowl, the words of its spell carved along the interior, spiraling from rim to well.

“I see the recognition in your eyes,” she said. “You know the bowl. You’ve read the transcript of its spell.”

I had. The entire town had.

With a glass stirring rod, Mrs. Winterbourne scraped the twigs from my cup into the bowl.

“As part of your father’s gift, you’ll need to recite it now.” From a cabinet, she pulled a glass orb with the remains of a cardinal trapped inside, as if resting.

“Dear God,” Mother muttered.

“I didn’t kill the bird.” Mrs. Winterbourne placed the orb inside the bowl, a perfect fit. “Do you remember the words of the spell?”

I shook my head, every movement a lie.

From the refrigerator, Mrs. Winterbourne removed an amber glass bottle and poured a black-red liquid that covered the orb and pooled along the rim.

“Dragon’s blood,” she said. “Tree resin mixed with alcohol. When the alcohol dries, it leaves a hard, red finish, sealing together the orb and bowl. You have until then to speak your father’s spell.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“I believe you do.”

Mother grabbed my arm. “I don’t trust her. Not a word of it. Not about your father. Not about him having cancer. Not about that bird.”

“I didn’t kill the bird,” Mrs. Winterbourne said. “Neither did Ishy when he made his. We wait. It’s part of the ritual. We wait until we find one felled naturally.”

“We know what you really do,” Mother said. “Everybody knows.”

“Everybody? You mean those people who judge you by what they’ve read? Are they the everybody who knows?”

Mother didn’t answer.

“It’s the way of the world to blame the powerless. If a child goes missing or a critter dies, blame those who can’t defend themselves. Anything done that needs hiding, blame it on the elderly; blame it on the woman; blame it on the witch. That’s a memory born into every girl’s blood.”

Mother’s voice softened. “I still don’t trust you.”

“Those old ways keep a man from facing the culprit at home.” Mrs. Winterbourne looked at me. “You’re a master of those old ways, aren’t you, Samuel? A vein of cruelty runs through your ore, but it can be made gold. You’ll have to choose, but make it quick. Alcohol don’t take long to dry.”

She hadn’t explained my father’s gift, but from the words of the spell, I understood well enough. Everyone should have but hadn’t. That was clear from the rage. The town had welcomed his message about family as if it were the end of everything good and godly.

My son, you are a composite of those who came before, a present that retains the past, a vessel that holds the blood once spilled, now emptied for blood’s trespass.

#

The journey back felt strange, and once, I lost my way. Mother complained and didn’t stop complaining until I parked outside her house, and then she didn’t speak and didn’t move. She breathed and shuddered with the effort of breathing.

“We shouldn’t have gone back,” she said when I refused to fill the silence. “I don’t belong there.”

“I know.”

She managed a smile and patted my leg. “You gonna be okay?”

I shrugged, which was the most honest answer I could manage, and she climbed out of the truck and shut her front door, and I was alone. Only, I didn’t feel alone. I felt like I’d been gone, not for a few hours but gone far away for very long.

My apartment had a keypad. I knocked. Emma let me in.

I confessed to a forgotten code, but in truth the whole system caught me by surprise, as if my own home were something distant and crudely remembered, like fragments from a dream. The more I fought to center myself, the more I felt like a wrong that couldn’t be made right.

I told Emma she deserved something more and left, taking little with me. None of it belonged to me. I belonged to none of it. Except the truck. I took the truck, and the road passed beneath me without purpose or direction. My phone rang. The screen read Emma. I didn’t answer.

Mrs. Winterbourne’s house stood silhouetted against the awakening day. A murmuration of starlings rose into the dawn, painting sigils of life, and I wept. When the sky again hung empty and blue, I dried my eyes and left the truck, and Mrs. Winterbourne opened her door like she’d been waiting all this time, my angel at the threshold.

“You’re home now,” she said and held me and cried.

Some part of me thought this strange, too, but such a thought was built on lies. For weeks, I’d sat with the spell, those words, and their meaning. Given my proclivity for a literal exegesis, I knew. I had to have known. How could I not?

— Thaddeus Thomas

About the author: Now politically progressive but once an evangelical pastor, I lost my tribe for speaking out against Donald Trump. Lately, my stories have turned apocalyptic. Surely, one thing has nothing to do with the other.

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Old Truths for a Best Day

You’re not in trouble, but I need you to listen. Remember my words. Treat them like your potassium pills, and they’ll ward off the sickness to come. Can you do that?

Sarah said she’d remember everything. She promised.

Randall ruffled her hair and lost himself in innocence that radiated like a nuclear blast, but the half-life of a child’s trust could be measured in months. The teaching had to be done while her core still burned.

“You’re at an age,” he said, “where you understand the difference between who you are and who you pretend to be. You’ll lose that as you grow older.”

The Geiger counter waved a red finger. Chittering softly. Silencing him.

Sarah’s brow knitted, but her only worries would be whether she could go out to run and dance or if this was another indoor day. With the winds building in the east, indoor days could become basement days–could become bunker days–and he felt a blistering of guilt. Let her play while she still could.

But he didn’t want this to be a tomorrow talk, turning it into a lecture to be associated with cinder-block walls and second-rate beds. Best-day talks came with bright skies and bird song, and that’s where the truths of the old world belonged. Old truths for a best day.

“As you become a teenager–”

The counter hushed, and a new chittering rose in its place, the shuffling of shoes on snow-sheeted paving stones.

Sarah’s face double brightened. She knew the signature of that sound as well as he. Better. Her lips mouthed the word: Tommy.

Randall nodded, and Sarah sprung from the white sofa, sprinted past the grand piano they would never hear properly played, and skidded to a stop between the staircase and the windowed door where glass sparkled like jewels, cascading rainbows across her ill-fitted white dress. Beneath Tommy’s twisted shadow, those sparkles died like the memory of stars.

She opened the door and squealed as Tommy stepped into the foyer, slouched and hidden beneath a frayed hoodie. She spun in circles and talked about all the fun they would have in the snow. Dizzy and joy-drunk, she wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes closed and her smile widened, but Tommy shrugged her away.

Randall stood without thinking to stand; no one came into his house and disrespected his daughter. No one.

Tommy’s hands never left his pockets. He stood without purpose, a creature of resentment, indifference, and ego, and when he raised his head, when Randall could see his eyes beneath that raggedy hood, he spoke with all the eloquence of a paralyzed dog, two mumbled thoughts dropping from his mouth like rotten teeth: “Mom’s dead.”

Caitlyn. Tommy’s mother. Their neighbor. Dead.

Shit.

Tommy’s resentment became grief; Sarah’s pain became compassion; and bluster fizzled away, a great litany of damnable curses transformed into softly spoken words.

And Randall said, “I’m sorry.”

Caitlyn had embraced Sarah. She’d insisted the kids have “play dates” and, in this time of distrust and isolation, had become a true neighbor. Randall never wanted the intrusion, but he knew they’d been made richer by it.

Her death was the end of a future that no longer existed, a future that ended months before they met. Before Sarah found the manor. Before Randall found Sarah.

In truth, they’d all died with the world. There could be no tomorrow, and every today was the death spasm of a lost humanity. Caitlyn had dreamed of more, but like everything else, dreams die.

“I can’t bury her on my own,” Tommy said.

Sarah reached her hand for his. “I remember when my momma died.”

Tommy didn’t reach back, and Randall’s heart ached. Like so many others, Sarah had lost everything and pieced back together a life from what she could find. She’d adopted Randall as her stand-in father. Given the chance, she’d adopt Tommy as her best and only friend. Did she imagine more? At her age, Randall thought it possible, but his heart told him no.

Natural ringlets bobbed before Sarah’s eyes as her hand remained outstretched and unmet. Randall expected her to cry, to run back to him and bury her face in his side. Instead, she looked at Tommy with disapproving curiosity and said, “You’ve got no gun.”

Tommy shrugged.

“You don’t never leave the house without a gun,” she said.

“Didn’t much think about it,” Tommy said. “Didn’t much care.”

“You’d care if they found you.”

“Not really.”

Sarah’s mouth made a scandalized circle.

Randall put an end to the quarrel with a hand on Sarah’s shoulder. Tommy wouldn’t have welcomed his touch.

“We’ll help with the burial,” Randall said.

“Do you mind if we don’t go back right away?” Tommy said.

“We’ll take it in your time. There’s no rush and no needs to serve but our own. If you’re tired, it’s a good day. You can sleep in a good bed.”

“It’s a best day,” Sarah said, but nobody answered, no one at all, even when death was an old truth, and old truths were best shared on a best day.

“But even on a best day, you need a gun,” Sarah said.

Randall hushed her, but her comment caught in the recesses of his imagination. Taking up arms had become instinctual. Tommy would no sooner forget his weapon than walk out in the snow without shoes.

“I had to wait until it was safe to go outside,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but danger grew in layers. Some came and went with the winds. Others hardened into the foundation of the world.

“She’s been in there a week,” Tommy said.

Randall said he understood, but what he understood was dark and dangerous. He’d seen women and children, exposed and unarmed, and had feared them more than any militia. Vulnerability only risked itself under a protective eye and only exposed itself to draw in the unwary.

Tommy wanted to appear harmless and knew he was protected. Caitlyn wasn’t dead. She was coming for Randall’s girl.

Clearly, they didn’t know Sarah as well as they thought. She didn’t need a father’s protection. She’d pointed a Glock 9mm at Randall’s head on the day they met. It’s why he’d believed her when she said she was alone but that he could eat something as long as he behaved. She’d kill him if he didn’t. It’s why he’d felt safe and slept like a child.

He’d eaten very little that first day. He’d been so emaciated, giving in to hunger would have killed him, but day by day, Sarah had strengthened him. He grew muscles again. Even a little fat.

Together, they felt like a family, but he’d always known this day would come. Kill the man. Take the girl. That’s how the new world worked.

But not Tommy. Not Caitlyn. They’d been different, at least Caitlyn had, full of hope and clinging to dreams.

Maybe that was who she pretended to be. Maybe, underneath, she was like everyone else. Maybe. His heart said no, but no one listened to their heart at the end of days. Hunger and lust spoke too loudly.

But Tommy didn’t want to go back, not right away.

If this were a ruse, right away was exactly what he’d need. Move quickly under the confusion of emotion. Rush Randall outside and into the sights of Caitlyn’s gun. Spring the trap before the quarry gets wise.

Kill the man. Take the girl.

Randall put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt him flinch. “I was just telling Sarah that she’s at an age where she understands the difference between who she is and who she pretends to be. When you’re a teenager, that goes away. We get this idea that the life we imagine can be the life we make real. The people who love us most can look like obstacles, good for nothing but holding us back. We resent what we have because of what we imagine.”

Tommy looked up at him.

“What matters is life as it is,” Randall said, “not life as we wish it to be.”

“I wish it were anything but this,” Tommy said.

Randall had rebuffed Caitlyn’s intrusion into their lives. Sarah, he could keep safe, but Caitlyn came and went as she pleased. He’d told her she was risking all their lives, that when they came for her they’d kill her son.

To sweep up Sarah in her fantasies would be selfish and cruel.

“Tell me about your mother.”

Tommy stared at his own feet.

“Tell me what she wished for,” Randall said.

But it was Sarah who answered.

“My momma used to tell me that some dreams never go away, no matter what happens.”

Randall hadn’t believed in dreams and certainly not in family, not before Sarah. What she’d given, he wouldn’t easily surrender to another, especially not this whisper of a boy.

Sarah would understand. She’d have to.

“What did your mother tell you, Tommy?” Randall said, and he heard anger in the cutting edge of his voice. “Did she have dreams for you and Sarah?”

Beneath his touch, Tommy’s shoulders hunched forward, as if he would curl into a ball.

“Tell me.”

“It was stupid.”

Randall softened his tone. “Tell me.”

Again, Sarah answered. “My momma said that some dreams are built into us. Countries fight, but we all still need to be human. It can’t be helped.”

Tommy’s voice barely raised beyond his lips. “Mine was kind of the same way.”

Sarah looked up into Randall’s face, her eyes wide with fresh understanding. “Tommy will live with us now, right?”

Randall wanted that Glock pressed to the side of his head. He wanted to feel safe again. He wanted to sleep and know nothing would hurt him in the night. It’s what he should have given Sarah but what she had given him. Peace. Security. Belonging.

Now this scarecrow of a child had come to take it all away.

Randall’s grip tightened. “How’d your mother die?”

Tommy didn’t answer.

“My momma got stabbed over a bucket of drinking water,” Sarah said.

Tommy didn’t answer.

Randall lifted Tommy’s chin until they could see each other. Tommy cried, but men cried over killing other men. Tears never meant safety.

“She told me the future belongs to the young,” Tommy said, “and then she put a pistol in her mouth.”

Randall let go, and Tommy’s face disappeared beneath his hood.

“Shot herself,” Sarah said.

Randall looked through the jewel-like glass to a splintered view of the front lawn. No one waited, but he felt the presence of the gun. He felt the pressure of it in his mouth, the taste of metal on his tongue.

Sarah wrapped her arms around Tommy’s waist. He didn’t push her away.

“Damn fool,” Randall muttered, but as he watched the kids hold each other, he knew Caitlyn had been half right. The kind of future she wanted couldn’t be stolen. All she could do was offer it as a gift, and with all their walls and all their division, perhaps this seemed the only way through.

Tommy looked up, and in his eyes, Randall saw the boy’s pain and need for answers.

“The future belongs to the young,” Randall said, “but today belongs to us all.”

Outside, the wind howled, and the counter chittered its warning.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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The Gosling

They came like your naked grandmother, bald and four-footed, hunched upon stilt-like legs. That’s what the newsies heard. It’s what they repeated. It’s what Daryl believed. No one ever said anything different.

With the calcium ammonium nitrate in the coffee grinder, Daryl pulled a fifty-pound bag of icing sugar from the pantry. Beth and the girls watched from beyond the bakery’s shattered glass. Behind them, dawn broke over red-brick buildings, and the little strip they called downtown changed, becoming what it was when Daryl was a boy, probably what it was when the first stores opened in ‘46. For a few, sun-glorious seconds, he saw the memory of a world, young and healthy.

He looked to the boy with the backpack and the mouth full of news.

“As a child, I’d ride my bike through downtown on the way to school,” he said. “I’d leave too early and arrive too early so that when I passed by, that fresh-baked aroma was still strong and clung to me like hope. No better smell on that pre-forsaken earth.”

“They’ve passed as far south as Grover, but that was three days ago,” said the boy. “They eat what they take, so that’ll slow them down some, but a town the size of Grover won’t last no three days.”

Death worked like a hive, snagging its victims and keeping them in a communal feeding area where hundreds of naked grandmothers ate and shat until the food ran out and the shit ran high. Then death moved on.

Daryl dragged another bag of icing sugar from the pantry and then a third. He looked to the boy with some faint notion of finding help, but the boy had come with news and nothing more. Daryl went back to the pallet. The bags wouldn’t be going far. He could handle it on his own. There’d be plenty of rest when he was done.

Beth called out to him from the sidewalk, saying she was strong enough to help.

They’d talked about this. For at least a month, they’d discussed how today should go, and together, they’d decided that he’d do the work. The girls wouldn’t be alone.

“There may be a doll left in the store,” Daryl said.

Beth stood her ground, and the girls didn’t even glance in the direction of possible toys. Such promises had lost their meaning.

“Okay then,” he said.

“You wait here,” Beth said to the girls, and she stepped through the glass.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“We haven’t had a newsie pass through in weeks,” Beth said. Then she took hold of a bag by its corners and dragged it out through the opening and into the road, and when she was done, she sat on the bag and made a whooping sound full of dignity and the pride of effort.

Daryl looked up at the sound and smiled.

“We used to think they wanted their meat fresh,” the boy said.

Beth pushed herself up from the road, ruffled the hair of her youngest, passed through the glass, and took hold of another bag.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“What do we think now?” she asked.

“Ma’am?”

“What do we think now that we didn’t think before?”

“They’ve been seen eating carcasses off the road, roadkill, bloated, and reeking of rot,” said the boy.

“Roadkill,” she said.

“People. Those killed in the riots.”

“They eat carrion. That sounds adaptable to me. That sound adaptable to you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They were never said to adapt.”

“We didn’t think them capable, no.”

“But now we know better.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dragged away another bag.

Daryl returned to the grinder, covered his mouth, and worked by hand what was intended to run by motor, cranking a handle he doubted had ever been connected before today. It moved easier this time, the grains being finer now and putting up less resistance.

“I’ve reports of how they digest their food,” said the boy.

Daryl glanced at the girls. Four, six, and eight. His first memories were of being four, most of his first memories, anyway. The world was full of discovery then, and every new thought felt profound.

It was strange how, on that journey from gosling to gander, the ignorant wisdom of new eyes became the foolish knowledge of youth.

Beth returned for more sugar. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Eye witnesses out of Boston and Tullahoma,” said the boy.

“It’s the eye-witness part I don’t understand.”

“Boston was still heavily populated. A few made it out. At Tullahoma, the witnesses were hunters, camouflaged, with scopes at a distance.”

Daryl wanted to say they’d hit plenty of populated areas and plenty heavy with hunters, instead he asked the boy what any of that had to do with how the creatures’ digestion worked.

“They don’t digest their food internally,” said the boy. “They vomit fluids while the catch is still living.”

Daryl grabbed a bag of sugar, pulled it to his shoulder, and walked out, passing Beth along the way. Her voice drifted back to him.

“They do the same with a carcass?” she asked.

Down the fall of the road and up the rise, thin crowds gathered, moving Daryl’s way. He couldn’t hear the boy’s answer.

He raised a hand in greeting. A dozen hands raised in return. The world went quiet. He could almost hear his own wind chimes play their strange song from the wraparound porch of their two-story, clapboard house, white as bone among well-tended flowerbeds, spotless and pure but for the occasional flurries of ash.

He pondered that ash and remembered its taste. Other towns. Other families anointing their homes one last time, transforming themselves into the soil which had supported their generations.

Bits of ash had lodged themselves in his daughters’ lungs, flavored their breath, and punished them with coughing fits. One more click of the clock. Time was running out. Death would come by fire or cloaked in baggy flesh and perched on lanky limbs. It’s what the stories said, each echoing the same inescapable horror.

Their meager farms failed. The food stores wouldn’t last. Months ago, they’d worked in teams to search root cellars and inventory what provisions remained, but—

—A tiny hand grabbed his trouser leg and tugged.

Even before he turned, before he understood the trouble, his hand whipped to the pistol tucked in his waistband. Before he could pull it free, he saw Beth holding hers and pointing it in the boy’s drained-white face. Her own flushed red.

Beth’s words broke clean and clear in all that silence. “You’re no witness.”

Daryl motioned for the girls to stay behind and then stepped through the glass. “If he’d seen, he wouldn’t have survived to spread the news.”

Her voice became something feral. “Not even those piles of manure left behind? Shouldn’t somebody somewhere have seen something?”

“Apparently, they have,” Daryl said.

“Boston and Tullahoma. Where the hell is Tullahoma?”

The boy said nothing.

Daryl answered for him. “Tennessee, I believe.”

“Well, it ain’t here,” Beth said. “Neither are they.”

“You rather we leave?”

“I don’t rather nothing.” Her grip on the pistol loosened.

Daryl walked past her and checked the grinder. The fertilizer looked like sand. He funneled the powder into a paper sleeve.

Beth’s voice settled. “I’d like to have heard something, anything, from someone who’s seen.”

Daryl dropped the last chunks of the ammonium nitrate through the grinder’s top. “I can’t fathom what difference that would make.”

“It’d make a difference.”

He pulled on the handle, and for a long second it barely budged. “How so?”

“It’d make a difference to me.”

The handle turned, and the room filled with the noise of gears turning and teeth gnashing.

“We chose to keep living our lives in this place and with these people,” he said. “I can’t imagine having done it any other way. Does that change now?”

“Did you hear what they do with the rotted ones?”

Daryl stopped grinding. Beth looked away from the boy. Looked right into him. Daryl saw a familiar emotion in those eyes, strength buckling beneath an inescapable weight. He pulled his own pistol and aimed it at the boy. As if released, Beth came to him. He took her in his arms, and she tensed against his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him like a climber clings to the mountain.

“It never mattered before,” he whispered. “It doesn’t change anything now.”

But it did matter. Whether it changed anything or not, every detail mattered.

“I don’t regret a single day,” she said.

“Until now.”

“Not even now,” she said.

Now had come the time of second guesses, as clear as any mark on the clock. Click. The news. Click. The doubt. Click. Peace with that which could not be appeased.

Click. The news. Always the same and always believed. Click. And now? If they proved it all lies, the clock still clicked. If they proved it all dreams, the ash still fell. If it be nothing but ghost stories, even stories had an end.

“They don’t vomit on the dead and bloated,” Daryl said. “They suck up the rot.”

“You were listening.”

“That’s just what it has to be.”

She drew her mouth close to his ear. “When they come, they’ll suck us up, too, whatever’s left. We were meant to be escaping that.”

Outside, the first of the others gathered behind the girls, each couple carrying their own heavy load.

“From some things, there is no escape,” Daryl said.

She took one long breath, pulled herself out of his embrace, and with a touch of her fingers, lowered his pistol arm.

“I still wish you’d seen them with your own eyes,” she said to the boy. “It’s the one thing today needed.”

Daryl walked the boy out through the glass and the gathering crowd. He pointed to the valley, to the white farmhouse where sunlight reflected off wind chimes. “Some provisions. Even now. You’re welcome to what you can carry.”

The boy shook his hand.

“Where you off to?” Daryl asked.

“Heading south until I run out of road.”

“Just as likely to meet them there.”

“I know.”

Daryl put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for men like you, we’d have no notion of what’s going on in the world. I don’t have much news to offer in return, but you can say that Gosser’s Gap was a place where generations were born and raised. A good many of us decided a change in the world needn’t mean a change in us.”

Beth stood with the girls. The youngest buried her face into the back of Beth’s thigh.

The boy walked on.

The crowd grew thicker and, one-by-one, set their explosives in the street. Children glanced at one another without smiling. Adults spoke of the quality of the sky and the lingering scent of rain.

Daryl held Beth’s hand, and the girls pressed in close. They’d gathered in these same streets for the town’s bicentennial, the same couples, the same friends, but there’d been babies that day. No babies now. His four-year-old and those few her age were the last to experience the depth of first-discovered thoughts. He wondered what she’d tell him if he asked her about today, but he knew he’d never ask, not even if seconds stretched into eternity.

Down the road, the boy stopped and watched. Perhaps he felt it necessary, and Daryl supposed they’d goaded him into bearing witness. The boy. The gosling. The fool. Mouth full of news. Mouth full of lies. No idea which was which. No notion whether he spread life or death and not enough sense to ask.

Daryl had been such a boy on mornings when the air carried bread like ash and the chatter of fools carried no more consequence than the passing of time.

-end-

Thaddeus Thomas

She bounds out of the gully into brown fields stretched long and low to a blue horizon. She pauses to hear the soft pad of their paws and then sprints on, for they must not see her face. The deep rasp of their breath presses close as they run. The sound of it, rumbling out of their broad chests, excites her; and she must lengthen the distance between them lest they hear her purr, something lions cannot do.

She has journeyed miles to find them; she must lead them back just as far, to wound them close to the den and teach her children to finish the job. She thinks of those pink, cherubic faces buried deep in blood and flesh, and she smiles.

As night approaches with amber skies, the kopje that hides her den is lit with speckled reflections of the setting sun. A cry aches in her breast, but she dares not release it—a cougar’s call, a woman’s scream. She has heard that scream herself, echoed from a woman’s lips, but what the human sounds in terror, she mimics in joy. Tears bead and then stream back along her face and into her hair, a deep well of emotion springing out from her eyes.

She alights atop the first rock cropping and then the second. She pauses, flicks her tail, and then drops gently into the stone valley and waits. She looks once between the stones to her den, hidden in shadow. Like shadow upon shadow, she imagines she sees faces stir in the blackness, and then light reflects like red bursts of flame, the bloody glow of the capillaries at the back of her children’s eyes.

She turns away from her children and leaps back atop the kopje. She settles her belly against its cold surface and faces the approaching lions at last. The shadows of the evening will cloak her for a few seconds more, but soon her would-be lovers will see her smooth, pink, hairless face, the intelligent eyes, and playful smile, and they will know that she is more than they expected and more than they can handle. In the moment before she strikes, she will let them hear her scream.

She breathes deep, and a familiar smell tickles her nose. It is as faint as her own scent must be to the approaching lions, for she has positioned herself downwind. She feels the taut pull of panic. She’s been careless and arrogant, too often the hunter, too rarely the prey. The scent is male and human. He’s downwind, where he can wait unnoticed until the moment comes to strike.

She prepares for a desperate spring to safety. Muscles compress and then propel her forward, but as she moves, human thunder echoes across the plain. The bullet pierces her hide and then expands, punching a large hole through her intestines and spleen. It enters like a pinprick and exits like a volcano. The earth tumbles up to meet her.

Pain blinds her at first, and her senses are slow to find their way through her confused thoughts. She smells the fear of the lions. If it were not for the sound of her own blood pulsing through her veins, she would hear their soft retreat. The human male will approach soon to finish her. He will not be alone. They hunt in packs, these humans. She thinks of her children.

She tries to stand, but the pain in her gut is too great. She drags herself through the grass. A few feet away, a rock overhang hides another cave. In summer, she enjoys its shade, but it’s too exposed to den her children. She turns to face her hunters and then backs inside.

Night has come to the Serengeti, and the last of the evening’s purple light fades away in blackness. Footsteps foretell the coming of men. Light flickers across the grass, and in it, she sees her own trail of blood. The light drifts away, but she knows her hunter is not leaving. He can kill at a distance. Several seconds pass, and she cringes, waiting for the kill. One of the lights falls to the ground. It rolls in the grass to within a foot of the cave, this light, like the fire within her children’s eyes, shines without burning. She wonders if she will hear the thunder before she dies, the way her own prey would hear her scream, but neither death nor thunder comes.

A shadow falls across the mouth of the cave. Then more than a shadow, it is a man, staring in at her. His weapon, still in his hand, rests on the grass. He is broad-faced and white, with a mustache, thick and dark.

He asks, “Are you hurt?”

She wants to laugh and to cry. What kind of question is this? She is dying. It seems foolish to admit her weakness and foolish to deny it. At last, she says only, “I am hurt.”

In Swahili he tells the others to watch for the lion. There’s a woman here, injured. She not only understands him, but she manages to smile. Her Swahili is better than his.

In English, he tells her, “We’ll get you to a doctor.” Then he wipes his face with his hand and asks, “Was it the lion?”

She understands the words, but not the question.

When she does not answer, he changes the question. “Did I shoot you?”

She stares at him, bewildered. She nods.

He bows his head and closes his eyes. If she had the strength, she could kill him now. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what happened. I was shooting at a lioness. There was just the one shot. She must have been right on top of you.”

It takes a moment, but at last she understands. He thought he was shooting a lioness, because he could only see her flanks. Now, he can only see her face, and he thinks she is human. Again, she manages to smile, but she is careful to hide her teeth.

“Give me your hand,” he says. “We need to get you out of there.”

“No, I will stay here.”

“It’s perfectly safe. I promise.”

“I will stay here.”

“But you’re hurt.”

“I am dying,” she says, “and I will die here.”

He looks angry now. “Don’t say that.”

She looks at the walls of her cave, pleased with herself. Perhaps, there is a chance to save her children, if the hunter never knows what she is. “This,” she says, “will be my grave.”

“I can’t allow that.”

“You have killed me. Will you deny me this, as well?”

He has no answer for this. She can see the confusion and frustration in his eyes, and she wonders if she could find the strength for one last lunge. She could kill him or wound him enough for her children to finish, but he’s not alone. The pack would kill her, and once they saw what she was, they would hunt down and kill her children.

He asks, “What would you have me do?”

“Leave me to die,” she says. “Cover the entrance with rocks and dirt. Bury me here and go.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Will you bury me when I die? Bury me here, where I am?” She sees his hesitation. She thinks quickly, paws at the riddle of human nature, and finds her answer. “I came here to die. Illness has consumed my flesh, left me in pain and grotesque to other humans.” She catches herself. “Other people. I came here to die, unseen and forgotten. You must not pull me out. I beg you. When I die, bury me where I am.”

Her words connect, and he nods. “I wish I had known you before,” he says. “I would like to have known this woman who came to Africa to die.”

He asks, “What is your name?”

Name. She has no name and cannot invent one now. “I want to die unseen and unknown,” she says. “What is yours?”

“Ernest Hemingway,” he says, and he says it with the expectation that it will mean something. It does.

“I have read you,” she says, and it is true. Sometimes, in the midst of destroying a human camp, she finds books. Hemingway seems to be a favorite among white men in Africa. She has read his short stories and novels and a biography of sorts, A Field Guide to Ernest Hemingway. She remembers it for its riddles:

Hemingway is to Hadley as Herod is to Mariamne.

“Call me Mariamne.” She laughs gently at her joke, and fresh waves of pain rip through her gut.

“Mariamne,” he repeats, without catching the allusion. “What a beautiful name.”

“She was the first wife of King Herod the Great,” she explains. “He had her murdered and then mourned her the rest of his life. Will you mourn me when I’m gone?”

“I will mourn you.”

“For all your life?”

“For all my life.”

She closes her eyes and tries to imagine its true. She knows his relationships with women are murder—the butchering of their memories in conversation, in letters, and in fiction. The one exception is his first wife, Hadley. He divorced her for a wealthier woman but has regretted losing her ever since. Hemingway is to Hadley as Herod is to Mariamne.

“You will never forget me,” she says. “That much I believe.”

“How could I?”

“I don’t believe you could.”

He turns and gives more orders, but in English this time. He has spent his Swahili. Soon he reaches into the cave with a canteen of water. The walls of the cave make it awkward for him to maneuver the canteen. She drinks the water from his hand.

“You’re dehydrated,” he says. “Your tongue is like sandpaper.”

She wonders if he noticed, too, that she pulls back with her tongue, like a cat. He says nothing of it. She likes the taste of salt on his palm.

Another white man kneels at the cave’s opening. His leathered flesh and hard features, and the massive rifle in his grip, mark him as the pack’s Alpha Male. “Let the men pull her out,” he says. “We have to get back to camp.”

#

One of Mariamne’s children ventures out of the den. She is a little beige cub with large, puffy, pink cheeks and starburst hazel eyes. The muffled sound of her mother’s voice draws her, and she scampers across the earthen floor of the rock valley and leaps for one of the walls.

The eldest of the children darts after her, catches the back of her neck in her teeth, and hurls her to the ground. She’s double the size of the runt and used to unquestioned dominance. She has never experienced the mad desperation that pumps through her sister’s veins, the certainty that their mother is hurt.

The runt’s eyes see only the danger that hunts her mother. She hits the ground on all four feet and springs upward, slashing at the throat. The eldest is hardly aware she has been hit before her throat is gone. In embarrassment and spite, she smashes the runt’s skull against the stone wall, and they both tumble to the ground. The sounds of their dying differ, one from the other, as their wounds differ. The eldest sucks in a final reflexive breath, full of blood. The runt’s eyes roll back as seizures ripple through her body. Finally, they lie still, their bodies only inches apart.

#

The hunters argue at the mouth of the cave, but at last the Alpha Male capitulates. Mariamne will not be moved. Her blood-choked cough ends the argument. They look into her eyes, and she knows what they see. Death.

The Alpha Male retreats into the darkness. Hemingway wants to hold her hand, but she will not reach out to him. He strokes her cheek instead and tells her of his home in the Keys. He will take her there, and they will fish off the coast of Cuba. They will go to Paris, to the Little Bar. They will see the world and take in all it has to offer and will come again to Africa, where they will hunt side by side.

“What about your wife?” Mariamne asks, her voice so weak, she doubts he can hear.

“You will be my wife.”

His hand is still on her cheek, and it is the last good thing she feels. She tries to imagine a life with this man, to imagine being human. She wants it, and perhaps she wants it enough to send him away, to tell him to bury her now, to tell him that she will be all right but bury her now. She will be his again, tomorrow. Perhaps. She smiles at this, the final irony of her life, that she is Schrödinger’s cat, Stockton’s Lady or the Tiger. But she will not tell him to go. He will be there when she dies. He will not come back for her.

“If I should find you again, after I die, will we still do these things?” she asks.

Her eyes are closed now, so she cannot see the look on his face as he hesitates with his answer. At last, he says, “Again and again and again.”

She is silent, and he is silent. Her awareness of him comes and goes, and when it comes, she wants to crawl out to him. She lacks now the cunning to stay hidden. She also lacks the strength to emerge. Only once does she reveal herself to him, when she asks, “What should I be for you? A woman or a lion? How would you love me best?”

She cannot hear if he answers her. He still cups her cheek in his palm, and she wants to taste the salt of his sweat. She wants to flick her tail and rub the scent of her hindquarters against him, to stir the animal in him and have him as her mate. In the final throes of delirium, the wall between want and have are shattered, and she believes they’re together, frolicking in the dry savanna grass. With one last burst of strength, she screams.

He hears a scream of terror, but it is not terror she feels. Her last act before dying is this scream of joy.

#

Mary regrets her decision to stay behind. The hunt went long. The sun set, and when the men returned, their arrival failed to lighten the gloom. Instead, they seem to draw it in around them, like a mourner’s veil. They have no right. The veil is hers.

She sits for dinner beside Hemingway. Through each of the courses, he broods, and she can feel that something has happened that no one will talk about. She is tempted to believe that he, like his fictional Macomber, has proven himself a coward, but she knows it is not so simple.

Earlier, he had been hungry for a kill, but the Serengeti refused him. The photographer from Look demanded the worst of him and photographed him claiming another man’s kill, a leopard. He saved what dignity he could, insisting it not be published until he had killed a leopard of his own.

Then, while she had been away, Christmas shopping in Narobi, he had shaved his head, dressed in native garb, and hunted down his reluctant leopard with a spear; a spear and six shotgun blasts. He celebrated the victory without her. He continues now to see one of the women from that night. If she is supposed to ignore or condone it, she can do neither.

They eat in silence, and no photographs are taken. He will not write about this night for the magazine. It, like so many nights, doesn’t fit the romance of his image, the romance of the hunter and the kill. She looks for something to say, but tonight, between the two of them, there is nothing to be said.

She wants to be wanted the way he wanted the leopard. She wants to be chased and overcome and to be the victory celebration that lasts all night and breaks the cot. Yes, she knows her cot has been replaced, and she knows what broke it. She wants him to herself in a way she has never known. Before her there was Martha, Pauline, and Hadley, and others besides. There have been others since. Perhaps, there will be others after, when she is another Martha, Pauline, or Hadley.

When she found Hemingway, she thought she was saving him from Martha, a woman who had grown to despise him. She wonders if, instead, she saved Martha from Hemingway, and there are good reasons he should be despised.

She sleeps on her new cot and tries not to dream about what broke the old one. It brings to her lips a taste for the kill. She has told Hemingway she wants to shoot a lion of her own. It is, she supposes, a half-truth. In her dreams she is Margot, and he is Macomber.

#

Dawn stretches across the savanna and dips its finger into the rock valley where lay the bodies of Mariamne’s cubs. They lay at the bottom of this cup of shadow slowly sipped by the morning’s light, and there their bodies writhe. Flesh boils and squirms, and their chests expand with great gasps of air.

One emerges from death as a human child, and, possessing the fearful memory of her mother’s need, she scrambles back to the rock wall but now lacks the strength and claws to scale it. The other emerges as a lion cub, and, possessing an instinct and a nature that overcomes and undermines her old memories and self, she pounces on the child. Then, proud and ready to feed, she drags the carcass toward the den.

Deep, throaty growls warn her off. The den is full of now-strangers, and the lion cub drops her prize and clambers out of the rock valley. The sphinx cubs drag the carcass back inside and begin to feed.

#

In Mariamne’s grave, her body, too, begins to writhe. Flesh boils and squirms, and her chest expands with great gasps of air. She is Schrödinger’s cat. She is both lion and woman and the uncertainty between two states, until Hemingway comes to unearth her grave. He has not slept and comes now, alone or thinking he is alone, to uncover her grave. He must see her one last time. She is Stockton’s Lady or The Tiger, waiting for him with either love or death, and maybe neither choice is so different than the other, for Mary follows after him with the Alpha Male’s gun.

With the last of the rock and soil dug free, Hemingway steps back, pushed away by the stench, a stench as strong as death, but it is not death he smells. He drops to one knee, several yards from the mouth of the cave, and peers inside.

Mary appears to his right, the great mass of the rifle weighing down her arms as she aims. He is still looking at her when Mariamne charges out of the cave and thunder explodes across the grasslands. The body drops to the ground and slides three feet across the dew.

Hemingway jumps to his feet, looks at the body, and looks at Mary. Mary smiles; it is a smile that says her shot was more than perfect. It has castrated without touching, without wounding, by simply killing that which he most desired. She wanted a kill of her own, and she has found it. She will not ignore. She will not condone.

Hemingway stays after Mary has left. The cave is empty. Mariamne’s perfect body lies sprawled in the grass. The morning sun rises higher in the east and will soon choke the savanna with its heat.

—Thaddeus Thomas

About the Story

In December of 2003, I became active in a forum, an adjunct of a site with other things on its minds, and happily critiqued stories and offered my own for the same. It’s possible that I wrote the first draft of the story during this time, certainly not before.

Over New Years, they shut the forum down, and finding myself without my newfound community, I founded Better Fiction, a critique forum that played a strong role in the indie community for a few years, struggled on a few more, and closed at the end of the decade.

The Better Fiction community helped me polish this and all my stories published during that time. This one was a favorite and found a home in the second edition of Fantasy Magazine (during that short span when it was a physical publication) and was an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

If you were a reader of the first iteration of ThaddeusThomas.com, I reprinted it twice there. The first time, I’d been on Substack for 5 days, which means this is the anniversary of that posting.

When I immigrated my comment here, it got left behind.

Now, rescued, I present it once again.

Flash Fiction

Not long ago, I started a new effort of offering a weekly work of flash fiction for paid subscribers. (Mostly paid. Some are free.) Now, I want to amp up that challenge with a new piece of flash fiction with every post.

He stood his ground before the damned and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and before he could understand why nothing happened, a uniform tackled him to the ground and held him there until the police arrived. Handcuffed in the backseat of a cruiser, he watched them laugh among themselves, wiping tears from the corner of their eyes and glancing furtively in his direction, dedicating to memory all the details they’d tell at home and to their friends at parties for years to come, until their children rolled their eyes as well-rehearsed words tumbled out with premature laughter, asking, did I tell you about the gunman who couldn’t…

Couldn’t what? He couldn’t even say, still not understanding what went wrong, not with his moment nor with his gun, but he could say what went wrong with his life and count off the steps, one-by-one, not knowing that even in that, he was wrong. He wouldn’t see he was wrong until his twelfth group session with skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the prison’s once-a-week counselor, and then Theodore would see it all, all at once, and break down weeping with tears and snot and trembling, which the others would see and tell—and for which he’d be beaten in the prison laundry and sent to the prison infirmary and from there to the hospital and the ICU, where for several days he’d hope he’d die.

Such was the epiphany of Theodore Beasley.

#

Theodore Beasley bought a gun. No, Elizabeth didn’t want to hold it. No, it wouldn’t solve her inability to sleep at night—nor the lingering certainty that safety was an illusion. Instead, it meant death had a place in their home, in the drawer of Theodore’s nightstand, beside the bed they shared and where she lay awake at night, staring into the ceiling and thinking not of this ceiling which was smooth and still but of her childhood bedroom and the popcorn ceiling that came alive in the interplay of shadows and the lights of cars passing with the hiss of freshly-fallen rain as dragons, knights, and princesses danced across her midnight canvas. Sometimes she was the princess, sometimes the knight, but often the dragon, and she wished she could be the dragon now: fierce, eternal, and unafraid.

But she did hold the gun. It spoke to her in the sleepless dark, over the whisper of Theodore’s machine as it breathed against his apnea, in and out, like an old man dying of emphysema or an infant struggling to know a second day. She took the holster from the drawer and the gun from the holster and stood by the bed at Theodore’s side, not pointing the gun but feeling its weight and staring at the face hidden beneath straps and hose.

She wondered if he’d snored in that woman’s bed.

Once, long ago, dragons distracted from voices raised and doors slammed. Elizabeth had never been a shouter, was afraid to shout, afraid to scream, even when there were reasons to scream, so many reasons held under so much silence. Her whole life was a series of moments, each echoing the last like footsteps down a hall, footsteps in a prison hall, and she from her cell saw neither those to come nor those gone, but only the present prison guard, wearing a different face but the same clothes, the unchanging uniformity of life.

No one could be trusted, and she found herself alone, awake but dreaming of Theodore dead, air sucking through a mask splattered and intermingled with bone and meat, a few teeth dangling at the edges of his jaw.

No one had ever loved her, and every moment was like the last, guards on parade.

#

Skinny Mr. Rimsdale, the second-most-frightened man in prison, minced his way into their lives once a week. Theodore Beasley recognized his own kind. Neither man belonged here nor understood this world, but Mr. Rimsdale tried. In his best and most official capacity, he tried, and every session, about halfway through, something somebody said would distract him from his fears, connect him with his own thoughts; and he’d transform before them, the child becoming the man.

Theodore envied him that, and in his tenth group session, he told him so.

In the eleventh session, Mr. Rimsdale answered, begging Theodore not to take it wrong, that he would never say this to another living soul in any other situation, but in this case he thought it proper, if Theodore could accept the present his wounded face presented.

“You lived, and the strength it took to overcome, you’ve got no choice but to let the whole world see. The men look at you, and they know. What you’ve been through commands respect.”

Theodore slept on those words for a week, a pillow lighter than air and softer than down. He ate his meals without fear and walked the yard without flinching, such was the culmination of his life’s journey, bringing him to this moment—fierce, immortal, and unafraid.

#

Elizabeth waited. Their therapist waited.

“He said he’d be here,” Elizabeth said. “He said he was buying a gun, but he said he’d be here.”

“Theodore’s buying a gun?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Is this something the two of you discussed?”

“It’s the first I’ve heard him say.”

“So you don’t know why he wants a gun?”

“Well, I don’t know. Last night, he was saying he’d protect me.”

“Do you need protecting?”

“It doesn’t matter. I said that to him. I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“Because he’s all talk and always has been. He said he’d be here.”

Alone, Elizabeth exited into the waiting room where the damned lingered before the gates of hell. The uniform lifted his eyes. Spurred by an unthinking reflex, Elizabeth looked away.

On the street, Theodore texted his apologies, and a light dusting of pristine snow met with sullied mounds, remnants of the season’s final storm. The sun was shining, and earlier, temperatures had peaked above freezing. Elizabeth considered taking the bus, even though Theodore was on his way. Across the street, spring’s first green trolley jollied along the tracks in no great rush and going nowhere important. She watched it pass, full of nostalgia for a time no one remembered, but the trolley couldn’t take you anywhere useful, only from shopping to shopping, commerce to commerce. The bus could take her home, but she’d had enough of the bus and slipped into the little cafe where she and Theodore always treated themselves and decompressed after a couple’s session, a routine their therapist recommended.

Elizabeth chose the cafe because the tables and chairs were delicate and petite, declaring this a space that didn’t make you feel protected but where protection wasn’t necessary. Dangerous men wouldn’t rob a place so girly, the very act being a threat to their manhood and contaminating their gain.

Here, the frills of girlhood never died, and each visit became a rebirth. She ordered a cup of vanilla chai and a tiny cake dusted with sugar and sat in her favorite spot in the back of the cafe, far away from the windows, her back against the wall, the cafe becoming a delicate barrier between her and the outside world. Theodore was part of that world now, she thought, that outside world, and the interior retained its integrity without him, like snow untarnished by the smut of the street.

She remembered when Theodore seemed little more than a boy—cute, delicate, and untarnished by smut—or so she’d assumed. Maybe she’d been naive. The Washington Post ran that piece about the pervasiveness of perversion. The Internet had claimed the childhood of nearly every adult her age, but she refused to believe it. The fallen always held that the world was in their hole. It wasn’t, or Elizabeth didn’t want it to be. Her cake tasted lonely.

The phone buzzed. Theodore wasn’t coming.

#

Embrace your emotions, Mr. Rimsdale said. They're valid. Name them. Understand them, but never forget that emotions possess a will to live. They’ll lie to you and, through their lies, linger, feeding off you like a parasite. Embrace your emotions, but let them die their natural death.

#

Green-and-jolly trolleyed down the track.

Elizabeth waited at a serious-minded bus stop while shoppers waited at their little green stop, cheering their trolley’s approach. Elizabeth had places to be. She waited for her serious-minded bus which would deliver her to her serious-minded business, and today that business was—

—what? Preparing dinner for Theodore? Fuck Theodore. Fuck his dinner.

She waited and searched for a reason to wait, a reason to need to go where she needed to be, and the trolley drew closer, and its bells clanged a happy hello, but her bus turned the corner, full of ugly certainty and approaching at speeds the jolly trolley would never require.

It would be nice just to go and have nowhere to be.

The bus hissed like a cat and sighed like an old man. The doors folded open. She stared up at the disinterested driver. The driver stared back. She smiled apologetically, sorry to be a bother, an inconvenience, and a taker of space, and she bowed ever so slightly, hurried away, and joined the little green line as the jolly trolleyed to a stop.

Can a trolley trolley? she wondered. In London, one could get trollied on a Friday night, could get so drunk they needed to push you home in a shopping cart—a buggy—a caddie—a trolley.

She felt drunk on the possibilities.

Push me anywhere you wish me to go, she thought. I have nowhere to be.

“No charge,” said the trolley man.

The bench seats formed conversation groups, one side facing the other, and Elizabeth sat facing backwards, giddy in her participation with even the tiniest rebellion. A woman sat opposite her, colorfully clothed and middle-aged, fifteen years Elizabeth’s elder, if Elizabeth had to guess.

The woman smiled the widest of smiles and introduced herself. “I’m Theodora.”

Elizabeth’s smile broke across her chin.

“You wanted to be alone,” said Theodora, rising from her seat.

Elizabeth held up guilty hands of protest. “It’s not that. Please. Really.”

“If you’re sure.”

“Your name. I know someone... It took me by surprise. That’s all.”

Theodora settled back into her seat, her smile a bit smaller now, but gentle and kind.

“I’ve never ridden the trolley,” Elizabeth guilted, shaming the biggest shame she could shame.

“It’s a pleasant get-about for a day shopping,” Theodora said. “When I was a child, the original trolley still ran to the river, down Old Brewster’s Camp Mill Ferry Road. Of course, it wasn’t called that back then.”

“It wasn’t?”

“You must not be from around here.”

“Transplanted from Virginia.” Elizabeth’s voice caught in her throat, choked by all she’d left behind.

“Well, Brewster’s Camp was a settlement across the river with eyes on becoming a town,” said Theodora. “The mill came in, but they situated the mill where it wouldn’t bother the camp, and the town grew there, around the mill, not the camp. When the ferry started, that’s where it crossed, to Brewster’s Camp Mill. For a good fifty years, the Brewster’s Camp Mill Ferry Road Trolley took you from the city to the ferry and back. The mill’s gone now, and Brewster’s Camp became Brewsterton, and the old road is nothing but a deserted set of tracks on the way to the water. There’s a New Brewster’s Camp Mill Ferry Road, but it’s just a name, not connected with anything it signifies, and being such a mouthful, the locals call it Memory Lane.”

“I’ve heard people mention Memory but had no idea what it referred to.”

The trolley jiggled and swayed as pedestrians passed them by.

“The road takes you nowhere it claims, and the trolley has nothing to do with the road. Every few years, someone petitions to make Memory Lane official, but the officials don’t cotton to our reasoning, I suppose.”

“Does this trolley have a name?”

“I never asked. Wouldn’t matter none. The old road told a history and took you through it, but when history’s history, all you have left are names. They get strung along like something of significance, yet have no meaning.”

“Like Elizabeth Beasley.”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Nothing significant,” Elizabeth said. “Nothing of any meaning, whatsoever.”

#

Mr. Rimsdale looked quietly at the group. It was Theodore’s twelfth meeting, and the moment had come when inspiration filled skinny Mr. Rimsdale, leaving no room for fear or trepidation. Theodore sat a little taller and felt a charge sweep through the room, prickling at the hairs at the back of his neck as Mr. Rimsdale looked into his soul like the prophet of God calling out sin from among the people, his wisdom falling from a place mortal men could never touch, a vaulted wisdom of birth and ruin which ruled the paths that carried man from each to each, which set him upon his way, which took him down again, and which wiped from all minds the remembrance of his habitation within the glories of a blind creation.

“Never forget that emotions possess a will to live,” said Mr. Rimsdale. “They’ll lie to you and, through their lies, linger, feeding off you like a parasite.”

Theodore closed his eyes and let the truth wash over him like a man in a river reborn. His thoughts whispered to themselves in praise of all he’d heard. It’s true, all true. Emotions lie, and the father of lies is the devil, sinful and vile. The holy man feels nothing, and nothing touches him. It was by emotion that I fell into this pit and by emotions all men are made undone. Cauterize the heart and steel the mind. Set ice upon thy veins, for the casting off of all emotion is the key to acceptance before God, His angels, and the parole board.

“Embrace your emotions,” said Mr. Rimsdale, “but let them die their natural death.”

Theodore’s thoughts fell silent, but from the fullness of his heart, his mouth spoke. “I don’t need that shit.”

“Your emotions are valid, Theodore.”

“You said emotions are lies. They can’t also be valid. They can’t be both.”

“Emotions are good and valid for their time and their purpose. The emotion itself isn’t the lie, but rather the vision it presents of your life. Memories link one to another by the emotions associated with them, and a strong emotional experience triggers a foreshortened timeline, made up of only its kindred moments, creating a vision of your life that’s only that one thing.”

Only that one thing, echoed Theodore’s thoughts.

“Only that one thing,” echoed Mr. Rimsdale. “When things are bad, they’ve always been bad, and if they’ve always been bad, they’ll always be bad, forever.”

They’ll always be bad, forever, echoed Theodore’s thoughts.

“Life is more than your darkest moments,” said Mr. Rimsdale, “but in the dark, the dark is all you see.”

The choirs of heaven fell silent. Fluorescent lights flickered and dimmed, and the faces of the men turned pallid, like old paper, their eyes a faded ink in which time had written all their darkness, tattooed forever upon the iris of their eyes.

Rimsdale talked, but the words washed over Theodore, almost without sound, a distant whisper about life beyond the negative moments. No such life lived within these walls. The punishment of prison was the cessation of time, frozen in that instant when Theodore had seen nothing beyond the dark.

“Embrace your own damn emotions,” Theodore whispered, his voice rising to more than a whisper, breaking, catching, and returning as a shrieking roar. “Hold them as they die. Bury them if you need to. Another day awaits you, but no new day awaits us. There’s no awakening from this darkness. No uncurling of a foreshortened timeline. There’s no escape but death.”

Tattooed eyes watched him and watched themselves, having become aware for the first time of the judgment scratched into their surface, and as they saw him through that judgement and despair, some distant part of his mind recognized their hatred and knew what was to come.

After the beating, as he lay in the temporary respite of the ICU, he prayed to the bright, white darkness. He prayed, and he waited.

For death.

And on the third day, the bright, white darkness answered—speaking without words but as clearly as any Sunday sermon, for what were heaven and hell but another moment in a foreshortened timeline: See, I have created new heavens and a new earth; the former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.

Death is no escape but only another lie, said the darkness. One last, eternal, kindred moment.

“If things are bad,” Theodore whispered, “they’ve always been bad, and if they’ve always been bad, they’ll always be bad, forever.”

He saw her again. Elizabeth. The phantom dream of Elizabeth. The gun and the blood on the day everything went dark, and he wished he could speak to her, to tell her he was sorry, to say he wished he could undo all the things which can never be undone, to ask for forgiveness, but that forgiveness would never come.

#

Maybe on a day like this, a little shopping could be excused. If Theodore could buy a gun, Elizabeth could make an impetuous purchase to bolster whatever perceived impotence belittled her that day. Only, she didn’t see herself as impotent or castrated or whatever phallus-centered thinking drove men’s actions.

No, that wasn’t enough. That was a coward’s complaint.

On the face of it, the thought was true, but it didn’t answer the underlying question. Was she compensating, and if she took the answer for granted, whether or not she could present testimony or proof, then how was she compensating and how would she know? Maybe no one knew such things about themselves, no matter how obvious it appeared in others.

“You’re awfully quiet.”

Elizabeth stirred to soft music playing within the alley-like store—a boutique, they called it—nothing like when she was a kid and the grand department stores still clung to the remnants of a former glory, like the old southern matron who couldn’t let go of the debutante she’d once been. Did such women still exist or had her grandmother been the last? Times changed but never willingly.

“Everything seems so impractical,” Elizabeth said. “My grandmother raised me to be enamored with Edith Wharton. Every extravagance had its purpose. One would fly to Paris to buy clothes but not wear them until they were out of fashion.”

Theodora wrinkled her brow. “You bought your clothes in Paris?”

“Not me. Not us. Those who came before. Maybe I’m not making any sense.”

'“They had fewer possessions,” Theodora said, “but what they had was beautiful and soundly built.”

“You do understand.”

“And everything today feels disposable.”

“Exactly.”

Theodora touched her hand. “You can’t buy back the past so pick the slacks.”

Neither bus nor trolley jolleyed down the tracks, and in every car sat a lonesome driver beside an empty seat. The cold planted itself into the earth of Elizabeth’s coat and germinated, blossoming into snowberries and frostweed. She could call Theodore and demand a pick up, but he’d want to know why she wasn’t home already. It wasn’t worth the call.

“Where are you parked?” asked Theodora.

Elizabeth said she’d take the bus.

“Not on a day like today. I’ll drive you.”

Elizabeth said she couldn’t.

“You can and you must. After such a perfect day, I couldn’t possibly settle for anything less.”

Elizabeth hadn’t settled. She’d named and claimed her future, but what was in a name but the prickly thorns of a wilted rose?

Theodora drove an electric hearse
that sang an aria in reverse.

“I thought for us, it’d be different,” Elizabeth said. “I thought we’d have the relationship my parents lacked, a return to the old ways and the values society forfeited in trade for plastic.”

“What values are those?”

“Our therapist asked the same thing.”

“How did you answer?”

“I didn’t. We moved on.”

“Can you answer now?” Theodora asked.

Elizabeth stared out the window as they rode the on-ramp to an elevated interstate, as if they would fly out of the city and into the cold gray heavens.

Theodora answered for her. “You think your troubles come from failure, but I suspect they come from your success.”

“I don’t feel successful.”

“Most people don’t.” Instead of merging, Theodora took the off-ramp back into the city. “Let’s not go home just yet. I want to show you the old trolley road.”

“Theodore will worry.”

Theodora laughed, and Elizabeth realized it was the first time she’d said his name out loud, as if it were a summoning spell and he were her familiar.

“Oh, we’re definitely going to the river,” Theodora said. “It’s where I used to go when I had the world to solve.”

“Don’t you go anymore?”

“The world’s lighter than it used to be.”

“Doesn’t feel that way.”

“You’re carrying it for me, darling. You’re carrying a weight once carried by others before you, generations of women gone and buried, and it’s far too much for your tiny shoulders.”

From the gray heavens they descended into a city of cities, low and high, sprawling and spotted green, aging its way to the river. They drove through the city to the preserves, and through the preserve ran a forgotten road. They stopped short of the slope down to the river. Theodora said they’d come back in better weather and stand by the ruins of the pier and watch the gray waters and snowy egrets. Nothing else in all the world calmed the soul like a river.

They stood at the bluff’s edge and watched those waters through the tops of winter-bare trees.

“You know why you don’t feel successful?” Theodora asked. “We’re taught to pursue the desires of another people and another time, and then we’re surprised that what we have isn’t what we wanted.”

An eagle circled and swooped out of sight. Elizabeth could talk in a place like this, away from people, away from men, free to simply exist and say whatever truth had for too long been denied—and that truth was that she barely existed at all.

“I’d say I feel empty, but there isn’t even a form to be empty or full. There’s just nothing.”

She saw all her life as it trailed behind her, moment to moment, nothing to nothing. She was as she had always been, an absence where the universe had opened a person-shaped hole. No one else had this problem, just her, a catastrophe too undefined even to call broken, a momentary witness to the lives of others, a sadness for all that would never be.

“What you are,” said Theodora, “is a new page ready to be written.”

Tires struggled against the ice. An old Studebaker skidded into the dirt and a dozen boys piled out of double rows of bench seats like clowns at a circus, howling and hooting, some pulling rifles from the trunk, and some circling like hyenas laughing at the kill, their eyes wide with a mocking lust.

The boys circled, and the circle tightened. Hands brushed at Elizabeth’s coat and tugged at her hair, and then one of the boys with the rifles whistled. The circle fell apart and fell away, and their howls and their laughter vanished into the woods, taking with them something Elizabeth couldn’t define. It felt like silence.

#

When Elizabeth was home and dry, Theodore comforted her with the gun, pushing it into her hands with promises that here she’d find her safety. Here she’d find her strength. She let it roll off her fingers and drop to the floor. Theodore screamed. His limbs coiled like ribbons around a maypole, becoming his own caduceus. He stared at her, open-mouthed, pale, and breathless.

Safety, she whispered, is an illusion.

She’d half hoped to see the gunshot her ears would never hear, but the gun did nothing at all. It offered nothing and could save her from nothing, not the boys by the river and not a life spent with Theodore.

Violence was no substitute for voice. Her silence was gone, lost in the depths of the woods, and her voice was rising from those depths. Surging. Inevitable.

And she knew that when her voice found her, the sound of it would shape her world.

And it did.

Theodore’s machine breathed.

She stood over him as air sucked through a mask splattered and intermingled with bone and meat. Teeth dangled at the edges of Theodore’s jaw, and his eyes opened. He looked at her, his face undamaged, the gun unfired, and she felt the weight of the gun in her hand. His eyes followed her, and she replaced the gun in the holster and the holster in the drawer. He said nothing.

She thought she’d said enough.

In the morning, Elizabeth awoke to find the bed empty and the house quiet, like an omen of days to come. Healing and measured progress no longer mattered. The finality had come of its own accord, with no way back and no way forward. The fantasy of Theodore’s death assured her their shared life had come to an end, and for the first time in months, the anger passed and she felt only sadness and mourning for something beyond resurrection.

Theodore’s tube hung loose instead of terminating in the cleaning machine. The mask lay, unprotected, on the wooden floor. Above it, the drawer hung open, holster and gun gone. A smile twitched at her lips.

Scared him, I guess.

She stared out the back window at the abbreviated lawn, as if looking for him. Something fell in another room.

“Theodore?”

Nobody answered, and the sound of the impact played in her mind. She didn’t know what a body falling would have sounded like, but it sounded like a body falling, and now there was only that same still silence.

“Theodore?”

She eased through the double doors into the living room where everything seemed in place and undisturbed. The spare bedroom door swung open on silent hinges. Theodore sat on the end of the bed, his head bowed as if in prayer to the gun he cradled.

“Theodore?”

He didn’t look up. He didn’t move. “Therapy is a waste of time. You can see that right? We can do this without her interference.”

“Do what?”

“Save our marriage.” He still wouldn’t look at her, but the gun muzzle pointed vaguely in her direction.

A feeling like a voice, external to her own, told her to be afraid. Negotiate for peace, it said, even if peace is an illusion. Stay silent. Stay kind.

She listened as best she could, knowing every warning and every word like an old friend, but she had no negotiation left. No silence and little kindness. All she had was an unspoken rage, ready—even now—to find its voice.

Theodore turned his face to hers, his eyes bloodshot and darkly hollowed, and he tapped the gun to his chin. “Promise me we’ll try. Promise me, or I’ll end it.”

And the rage within her boiled.

“There is nothing left to try,” she said. “There’s no trying left. Gather your things and go. I don’t want you to die. Just go and discover who you are without me. For both of us, there’s something out there that we’ll want more.”

“I want this,” he said. “I know you want it, too.”

She answered and the gun fired. The bullet ripped through Theodore’s chin, teeth, and nose, unzipping his face like God undoing his creation. He fell to the floor, ruined but alive, the insistence of life to live striking harder than cowardice.

Elizabeth picked up the phone.

-End-

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Ship and Sighting

The original pages are splattered with the author’s blood, the journal having fallen from his grasp, arterial spray bright-blood-bleeding between the letters and the fibers of each page, obscuring his sickly-sweet certainty that their love would never die, but death came for Preston Hughes, long-time producer and stalwart friend. Left for me to find. First the journal. Then the man. A man whose secrets those pages can no longer keep.

Masculine and leather-bound, the journal is fit for a sea captain’s great, white wanting, when but for the breadth of one whale’s fluke, all the sea’s a wasteland: but he who chases is lost.

At our lunches, the food abandoned and the conversation forgotten whenever the muse moved him, Preston kept the journal by his plate. Lights glared off his bald spot as he bent low enough to smell each page’s must, his pen etching neatly printed letters with uniform spacing. Obsessively neat.

“You’ll have to introduce me.”

That introduction never came.

Preston’s pursuit was a woman. A woman he called her, a girl of nineteen by one telling. By another, she’d been nineteen for the decade he’d fought for (and ferried through development hell) his dream project, film as both ship and sighting: Dracula’s sequel, The Bloofer Lady; the title’s lady, that poor, dead Lucy Westenra.

Ship and sighting. Those were his words, often repeated, and though unexplained, I understood them well enough; sighting because the young object of his affection became the Lucy Westenra of his imagination, one born less of Stoker’s book than Coppola’s movie; ship because it would bring man and muse together in some never articulated fashion.

They shot little of the film before his death, and the footage is disappointing. I visited the set in those hopeful, expectant days, a location doubling for the interior of Hillingham where Lord Godalming keeps his vampiric Lucy. Preston guided me through Lucy's bedroom, which Godalming modifies into a cell, and as Preston talked he gestured, his hand still grasping the journal as if it were the wand from which movie magic sprung.

“He believes he’s keeping her satisfied on transfusions of his own blood.” Preston pointed to the crucifixes and garlic hung outside the windows. “He stays with her each night, but each day she escapes to the streets of London, joining the growing number of prostitutes who meet the needs of servicemen on leave.”

Outside that window, the Great War rages. Over twenty years have passed since Arthur and Lucy’s engagement, and Arthur, Lord Godalming is in his fifties while Lucy’s remains remain forever nineteen.

#

LUCY (wanton in white lace)
Come to me, that I may taste your longing and know all that God forbids honorable, onanistic men.

#

I’d read little of Preston’s script before that day. I knew less of his muse or the strange desires his neat, little letters spelled. By week’s end, that would change with the bloodied journal at my door, face up in the courtyard, bordered by bloodied footprints that came out of the grass, up the brick steps and through the front door, ending on the white tile of my foyer.

Men’s shoes–or a man’s size–with a tread that struck familiar. I called and received no answer. The police say I should have phoned them, but I drove to the Hillingham house and found Preston in Lucy’s bed, his throat slit open.

To all the gossipy theorists and conspiracy mongers: if it were as you proclaim, the vampire wasted its meal on white linen.

I called the police and sat with the journal to read what could be read. Fingerprints! they’d cry. Restoration has revealed more of the text but not all, leaving far too much a mystery.

#

She calls to me, raising paths of desire like a labyrinth, but he who chases is lost.

#

Today, I meet her, Preston’s muse. She joins me for lunch at the Burbank bistro where Preston and I once ate–her choice, unprompted. I haven’t been back since the killing and still see him neatly lettering, his bald spot shining, forever in his forties while I continue, age to age. His muse looks nearly forty, and a quick mental math says she could have been nineteen when they met. A tanned brunette and strikingly familiar, she calls herself Abigail Thorne.

“You're publishing the journal?”

“How can I be sure you are who you say?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Should I?”

She pulls out stationary, written in that same meticulous hand:

#

As both ship and sighting, the film shall deliver us together if my navigator holds. Speak on my chattering muse. Let loose your horrid needs and speak.

#

“He sent you these?”

“And more.”

“What do you want?”

“A little conversation for old time’s sake.”

I won’t begrudge a visit from a beautiful woman, and should she truly be the story’s muse, she may have answers to all that remains a mystery.

“Have you truly forgotten?”

“The doctors blame it on the trauma. The purpose of the book is to piece together the pieces I’ve lost.”

“The only purpose?”

“The main purpose. You’re asking about the money.”

“I’m asking about you.”

Bloodstained pages turn crimson in memory.

#

The navigator speaks: she makes me feel heard when no one else will listen. My friend, the world condemns what is good and meaningful, declaring it wicked and gross, but you have always heard me out.

#

“You could have come by these pages some other way.”

“All things could have come about some other way, and it’s only the narratives we hold that tell us otherwise, these fragile things we call memories.”

“That’s no argument.”

“I’m not arguing, just stating facts. You remember facts, don’t you? The hypocrisy of prostitution laws during the Great War?”

“They forever marked the women, even those whose only crime was to birth a child out of wedlock, forced to register as a prostitute.”

“You do remember.”

“I haven’t forgotten everything.”

“Do you remember who taught you?”

“Preston, probably at this very table, as he wrote each word in that damned and damnable journal.”

#

Anonymity for men. Infamy for women.

#

“There are those who say I killed him.”

“No one knows who you are.”

“They know I exist. They think I was Preston’s muse and that perhaps I drank his blood before he could say too much.”

“Did you? No. Of course you’d say no, and then the shoes, men’s shoes.”

“Small feet can wear a larger size.”

“Do you want to be a suspect? Is that the fame you’re after, to be remembered, no matter the cost?”

“It’s your remembrance I’m after. No one else’s.”

“There’s nothing to remember. Preston never introduced us.”

“All he had of me was an address.”

“An address?”

“And ten years ago, all my letters stopped, like I’d been forgotten.”

#

I was thirty-two when we met. She was running from her family.

#

“Then you can’t be his muse.”

“The narratives are breaking down.”

“If those are his letters, they could be worth something, but you should’ve been honest with me.”

“I’ve always been honest with you and see no reason for that to change.”

My head hurts, and I fight to string thoughts together.

“This was a mistake.”

“Your mistakes were made long ago, and if you’re going to publish the journal, it’s better to confront them now.”

“I’m trying to remember a friend, to make sense of what he did.”

“And I’m trying to help a friend remember, so you can come to terms with what you did.”

I stutter over my response, half demanding clarity to her accusation, half hiding in my own silence and by that silence made blind. “You–you seem to know more than anyone.”

#

LUCY (wanton in white lace)
Come to me, that I may taste your longing and know all that God forbids honorable, onanistic men.

GODALMING
Don’t talk like that my love.

LUCY
And how would you have me? In the pretense of a church’s blessing? Would you paint a corpse in incorruption? Have at me, Lord. I’m yours, here, in this mausoleum of your making, where there’s nothing left of me but lust.

#

I remember the page and shudder at its vulgarity, a vulgarity pointed and personal, aimed at the heart of all that’s decent.

“What happened can only truly be known by you, but I know you and much that you’ve forgotten.”

“You don’t know me.”

She doesn’t answer, but lets the air grow heavy with my denial.

“You don’t know me.”

#

I see her then, twenty years younger, dancing atop the hill in a Victorian wedding dress, dancing outside the observatory in a stolen wedding dress—pale skin burned. Her face blushed red against white collar and black eyes, her smile suggesting a pleasure with the world and with herself and with the role she’d chosen for me to play. Somewhere, music played. She danced, and I swayed like a tree in the wind if she were the wind, the stars, and the sea.

#

“You don’t know me. I’m remembering his life, a life told on neatly-lettered pages.”

Her hand reaches across the table to hold mine, and her flesh is sharp and cold. My blood’s heat rises in cheeks and throat.

#

“You’ll have to introduce me.”

He looked up from the journal, his eyes eager and wide. I see the emotion buried there, in the blackness of his pupils, the assumption that quickens the pulse.

“She makes me feel heard when no one else will listen.”

“I bet she’s a real good listener. Has big ears, does she?”

“My friend, the world condemns what is good and meaningful, declaring it wicked and gross, but you have always heard me out. Hear me now when I say you’ve got it wrong.”

He smiles at me, his teeth white and straight, as perfect as his lettering, but his eyes are wild; they were wild and desperate all the time I knew him, and I’d known him since the beginning. He came to Hollywood to be an actor, but his face was neither leading man nor character. It was just a man’s face, a mediocre face, and mediocrity has no place upon the screen. Every bus home overflows with mediocre men gazing blindly into the unseen space between dreams-breaking and homecoming. Only, Preston stayed, weaseling into jobs that didn’t pay, writing scripts that didn’t sell, sleeping with women who didn’t know the difference.

His lettering got him his first real break, a job as a producer’s assistant, taking dictation from a man who thought his every thought a goldmine. Preston’s work earned him a reputation, one strong enough to find more work when the producer found him with his wife.

Preston texted me that night, the old kind of text you had to work for with your thumbs, rat-a-tat on a key until the right letter appeared. I remember the text still, when I’ve forgotten the thousand scripts I read that season: Beautiful quickly rabid skulking. He was stoned, I thought but no, sober and purposeful in his prose, only allowing himself four words to capture the moment while he caught his breath.

Beautiful quickly rabid skulking.

Why did that strike me as the only writing worth writing in a town full of scribes, printing their hopes at Kinko’s? I expected brilliance and nuance from a man who could give the middle finger to Strunk and White while he captured what he gave the boss’s wife. They’d said: write with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs. He wrote truth that broke the rules, and that’s what I’d expected–truth not trash.

#

LUCY
Have at me, Lord. I’m yours, here, in this mausoleum of your making, where there’s nothing left of me but lust.

#

“I assumed my affections would be the price for your assistance. The life I’d known always came with a price.”

She sits across from me at the table and in the grass outside the observatory on a Friday night in a stolen wedding dress, still high off the joint she smoked before the laser show; Pink Floyd still echoed within our skulls.

Lights flash outside the bistro’s window. A siren chirps and falls silent.

“They came to me. I want you to know that.”

I ignore the activity outside and focus on the feel of her hand. It’s a teenaged hand, a runaway hand, a hand with no idea what dangers await her, only the danger she’s left behind. I feel the offer in her flirtation, the promise of payment for her rescue, and for a moment, I consider the possibility of letting her pay, that self that I was for a moment being the only self Preston could believe.

The bistro door opens, and a bell jingles.

#

She calls to me, raising paths of desire like a labyrinth, but he who chases is lost. I have to let her go—to be her deliverance and salvation, but to let her go, unbothered—to become for her both ship and sighting, that forever she might know that the vessel of her departure is proof her safe harbor awaits.

#

Preston dragged a box cutter’s blade through the drapes, shredding them to ribbons, which would break union rules were this a union job, but he’d taken it upon himself to prepare the scene where Lucy lures Godalming inside her cage, where the drapes, torn by her nails, suggest the danger mortals face in her embrace, lust overwhelming reason, propelling her action, a starved beast provoked by the scent of blood. Godalming’s death would seem ordained had Preston not started the script with a scene in this very room, darkened with dust and neglect and entered by an aged Godalming, the first to enter in many years. A second man stands at the door.

#

GODALMING
I don’t want to be here.

JOHN SEWARD
No one, blissful in his misremembered past, welcomes correction.

GODALMING
I remember well enough to end all sleep and bring to ruin what might have been days of rest.

SEWARD
What prompts you to pick at the scab of forgetfulness, when these fitful memories only convince you of your innocence?

GODALMING
I desired only to be her salvation and, though you will not hear it, am guilty of nothing but an impotence which failed to redeem the dead.

SEWARD
In memory, you’re innocent in both act and desire?

GODALMING
Purity is polished in the struggle against temptation.

#

Newly rewritten pages rested newly on Lucy’s bed, printed black on red paper to distinguish them from prior rewrites. Preston nestled his chin upon my shoulder, a momentary Thunderdell, birthing a second head to mock and muck out the first.

“What prompts you to pick at the scab of forgetfulness?”

I glanced at him and back at the pages, written for the day, revising the action between Godalming and Lucy, each stalking the other, each armed to overwhelm, to plunder treasures from the flesh.

“He wouldn’t do this.”

“To say he doesn’t remember, isn’t to say it wasn’t done.”

Preston set the box cutter on Lucy’s dresser, where it glinted in the light as if touched by God, like the holy relics Godalming wielded that he might have his unholy way, Lucy dressed in her once-intended wedding gown, a Victorian wedding gown, her face red from a day in the sun, hunting men among the prostitutes. She flinches before the crucifix, and by these symbols of salvation, his damnable desire is done.

Preston plopped on satin sheets, man and journal.

“For a decade, you’ve held a devotion that would make romantics shudder. Only one thing takes a girl, hardly known, and makes of her an idol—guilt, my innocent, guilt. All these years of sending cash was money spent to buy your own redemption, now well and double paid. What you make from our movie, don’t ply upon the past. It’s as good as never happened.”

“Only because it never did.”

Preston opened the journal at random, smiling gleefully as his eyes skimmed my words, his smile tight in the bliss of the secret he believed he’d uncovered.

“On the press tour, this will have to be addressed. The inspiration alone will distinguish us from every other would-be sequel. You’ll be famous, my friend, the both of you. No, now, don’t look at me that way. You broke no laws, and the audience will eat this up. We’ll publish the journal as supplementary material, and I promise you, our names will live forever.”

He found a passage, the delight clear—if condescending—in his eyes, and the words I hear him speak in memory, I’ve never read upon the page, the geyser of his life’s blood rendering them beyond retrieval.

#

She danced, and I danced with her, caught in the movements of the world which swayed to keep her rhythm, all creation committed to her worship and her worship alone, betraying to her beauty all former gods and their paltry promises of paradise. Eden is the fruit offered by nimble fingers stained and dripping with its juice, and there is no garden but the taste, swallowed—flesh, seed, and all—until we are nourished in the offering of that which we’ve desired.

#

Her fingers slip away as the tinkling tinkle of the bell dwindles, dims, and dies, but as my reproachable future approaches, I hold her in my gaze.

“Preston was wrong about what makes an idol, and that’s why he could never understand the Lucy he tried to write nor the girl I danced with on the grass.”

“I never wished to be worshiped.”

“Gods are molded from the hope you can’t hold, the desire met only in passing. Godalming lost his to a demon, but I lost you to my better nature, both that we might dream forever of a future that can only be deserved in its denial.”

#

The blade cut cleanly halfway through and snagged, the metallic point made hesitant by the gore’s grim finality, my hand trapped within its wellspring, and for endless seconds I could neither complete my cut nor flee, my mind incapable of reasoning to release the knife, incapable of reasoning at all, intending only to release his life and, in its gushing end, wash clean the night his mouth had sullied. His eyes, wide, stared until the mausoleum that had been a man, doors now shut, lay still. My mind filled with its own screaming, the tortured cries of a sanity rent by that same blade, sliced and tattered like the drapes, and like the drapes, that sanity fell full and dark, blocking the window to the war beyond.

– Thaddeus Thomas

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Daddy’s Will

With little running steps in Robert’s shadow, Becky de Jong struggled to match her fiance’s pace. Her feet went tap, tap, tap at the sidewalk, like fingers at a typewriter, but Robert’s legs moved like scissors—swift and cutting. She always wondered that he never winded himself. She could barely speak.

"I’ll do the talking," he said. 

Robert always did the talking, as had all the men in Becky's life. She supposed it was meant to be that way.

Still, it left her with little say for herself, and now that Daddy had died, she was alone, with only Robert to speak on her behalf. The idea left her a little nauseated. She stopped, startled by what the feeling might mean.

Robert reached the solicitor's door before looking back. "Don't worry. I can handle your brother. You deserve that money, every penny and pound."

She put her hand over her stomach and took a deep breath. Daddy never liked Robert, but as long as Daddy lived, Robert had been manageable. Daddy's death would change that; so would the money.

Though her father's estate came to a little under a million, she had never thought much about it. The idea of money sullied things so. Still, it would be hers now, or half of it, at least. That did provide for certain options. A woman of means, in London—in 1965—the opportunities were enough to make her dizzy.

The color flushed in Robert's face, the way it always did when she aggravated him. She hurried. Obediently she hurried, and Robert led her into the waiting room. 

Gregory glanced up as they entered but didn’t bother to stand. She wanted to run to him, but he was uncomfortable with the mushy, family stuff, and Robert didn't want her anywhere near him.

Gregory nodded at her from behind his magazine. She waved with the flapping of four fingers, like a toddler. That’s how Robert described it: she waved like a toddler.

"You've got nerve coming here," Robert growled—and it was a growl, like a dog. She didn’t like dogs, not the big, scary kind. She liked a lap dog that peed itself with excitement when you got home.

Robert was peeing himself with excitement now.

"I'll have more than nerve." Gregory smiled, as if it were all a joke, and maybe it was. Gregory had always been a cute child. Even now, as a grown man, he seemed little more than a child. She hoped he would stay. He’d been gone for years, and there was so much she wanted to know.

Gregory needed to stay for his own good, too. He needed to know what had happened while he was away. Daddy had moved out of the house and into a little apartment in the city. All the trappings of wealth had disappeared. Certainly, Gregory would approve. He’d denounced such things when he left.

Maybe Gregory would stay after she dealt with Robert, and she would have to deal with Robert. The nausea on the sidewalk told her that much. She deserved a life full of everything she loved, museums and galleries and little clubs where people recited poetry on stage. Oh Eden, sweet Eden. How much time had passed since she strolled through her bounty?

Robert thought it a waste of time.

Robert loathed the idea of Gregory receiving a sixpence of their inheritance. He often said (more often as the day of the reading approached) that Gregory had abandoned the family and in doing so had surrendered its spoils. Spoils. What an ugly word, and it was ugly to say Gregory had abandoned her. She liked to think of it as being abroad and forgetting to write.

A tall, pious man, like an undertaker—Mr. Bliss—stepping out of his inner sanctum, pinching his glasses upon his nose, and coughing once for their attention, welcomed them with solemn tones, each word a distant bell, tolling, deep and resonant. "Mr. and Miss De Jong, if you'll step inside, we'll discuss the details of your father's will." 

Robert tried to lead the way.

Mr. Bliss stopped him. "I'm sorry, sir. The will is specific."

"Becky needs me."

Mr. Bliss gave a practiced grin of supreme humility. "Miss De Jong must attend the reading on her own, or everything goes to her brother."

Robert paled. Becky squeezed his hand and hoped it communicated all she wanted to say: she didn’t need him to speak for her. Daddy would have it all in hand. Daddy always did. 

Robert glared as if this were her doing, as if she had conspired to keep him our of her private and personal matters, which she had never done. Perhaps she should have. Perhaps, from now on, she would. She’d carve out what little space society allowed her and not so willingly surrender all.

“Don’t fuck this up,” Robert said.

Mr. Bliss closed the door. He offered Becky and her brother the leather chairs that faced his oversized mahogany desk. 

Gregory ignored him. "Look, Sis. If the old man wrote me out, let's not put ourselves through years of legal battles. Neither of us want that. Split the money, and I'll be off."

Becky opened her mouth and found herself at a loss for words. She stared at Gregory and pictured herself in his eyes. He’d think she looked like Vermeer paining, Girl with a Pearl Earring. She felt like Girl with a Pearl Earring, enigmatic and mute, frozen in time.

Mr. Bliss came to the rescue.

"In fact, Mr. De Jong, your father left it up to the two of you how you should divide his estate. What's left of it, that is."

Those last few words arrested all life within the room. Becky scarcely dared to breath, and Gregory's eyes narrowed into thin slits of suspicion.

"‘What’s left?’ The old man was loaded!"

From atop the file cabinet, Mr. Bliss pulled out a series of papers and laid them out for the De Jongs to see. "Almost everything is gone. Real estate. Stocks. Bonds. Furniture. Even his clothing. It's all gone. Take as long as you want to study the papers. You'll need to be fully satisfied that what I'm telling you is the truth before we can address the particulars of the will."

The numbers told a simple story.

Gregory wiped his face. "That's not possible. I need that money."

"If you’d like to take the papers home..."

Gregory thumbed the stack and handed it off to Becky. "Did you know about this?"

Becky shrugged. Daddy had moved into the apartment, but she never suspected money trouble. She thought it had to do with his legs.

"It’s impossible," he protested. "The house in the country. The cars. The art. There's nothing left?"

Mr. Bliss held up a hand. "Your father has taken care of all his expenses and leaves no debts behind."

Though Becky assumed this was meant to be good news, Gregory lowered his head and mumbled. "I've debts enough of my own. Thank you."

Becky placed her hands in her lap and cleared her throat. "Is there nothing at all?"

She saw a twinkle in Mr. Bliss's eyes, and hope kindled a fresh fire. She knew Daddy had taken care of everything. He always did.

Mr. Bliss again reached atop the file cabinet and, this time, placed two framed paintings upon the desk—one, the famous and long-venerated painting of Christ with Mary and Martha. If genuine, it deserved the dignity of a museum, not the indignity of a solicitor’s file cabinet. The other painting was an interior of a church. The Christ bore the signature of Johannes Vermeer, the church, Han van Meegeren.

Becky smiled in delight that some part of her father's passion for Van Meegeren had survived. Her brother only groaned, but before he could protest, Mr. Bliss held up his hands in a grand gesture for silence.

"As I said, your father has left it up to you how you will divide his estate, and that means these two paintings. There is nothing more. The will stipulates that I am to cover the story of Van Meegeren, in case either of you failed to listen in your youth. When I am done, I will leave you with the paintings, and you will be decide between you."

He took a deep, preparatory breath.

"As an artist, Han van Meegeren found himself out of step with the art critics of the thirties. In the age of cubism, his classical leanings threatened to make him irrelevant and sink his career. Either as revenge against the critics, for money, or both, he turned to a career of forgery and specialized in creating new works in the style of the great master of the Dutch Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer. In this he proved incredibly talented and became a very rich man.

"When the Nazis rose to power, they had an insatiable appetite for art. They stole everything they could and what they could not steal, they bought. Perhaps to save national treasures from Hitler, or, perhaps, simply to increase his personal wealth, Van Meegeren traded one of his forged Vermeers to the Nazi, Goering, in exchange for two hundred paintings, most of which were genuine.

"After the war, the forged Vermeer was found among the Nazi stash and traced back to Van Meegeren. The authorities arrested him on charges of collaborating with the enemy. He could only save himself by revealing himself as a forger.

"Van Meegeren became a national hero. He had humiliated the art critics, a feat the press loved, but more importantly, he had swindled Hermann Goering, the second in command of the Third Reich. Original Van Meegeren art, the paintings he did in his own name, skyrocketed in popularity at the same time that museums hurriedly took down their fake Vermeers. Van Meegeren became such a major commodity, that his original work became a popular target of forgers. 

"Your father loved the stories, both true and mythical, that rose up around the man. He loved the art and the craft of the forgeries. The fakes, of course, are worthless to anyone, but your father loved them all, original and forgery alike. Of what was an impressive collection, all that remains are these two paintings. What you do with them is up to you. We can have them sold and split the money evenly between you, if that is what you choose."

Mr. Bliss stepped to the door. "I'll wait outside while you think it over."

With Mr. Bliss gone, the hopelessness in Gregory's eyes vanished. "Selling both paintings would be such a shame. Don't you think?"

Becky nodded in quick agreement. How could anyone expect her to sell the paintings? Still, she supposed she’d have no choice, and she wondered if she’d been too hasty in her praise of Daddy. He was supposed to have seen to everything.

Whatever happened, she had to deal with Robert. Not that she knew how to leave. She couldn’t stand that thought of hurting him. She did so hate to see people hurt.

"You hold on to yours, old girl, for Dad's sake." Gregory stood and leaned over the paintings.

Becky wrapped her arm around his. He looked at her with surprise, but she needed family.

"You've got Robert," he said. "Besides, sometimes sentimental value outweighs everything else, especially for a woman."

Becky lowered her gaze, and staring at her feet and into herself, she saw hidden things—Gregory painted and signed by Van Meegeren’s hand. She shuddered at its meaning. Was he hero or hoax? Master or manipulator? Family or fraud?

Family, Becky decided. Gregory would always be family, and she couldn’t stand to see him hurt. Daddy would have known as much.

Daddy, dear darling Daddy. His hand moved even death.

Gregory would have his way. He’d always have his way, and Daddy had known. He’d arranged his will with this truth in mind, and the voice of the dead spoke clearly to her to let it be.

She hugged Gregory, clinging to him for as long as she dared. "Go ahead. You can have whichever painting you wish."

Gregory hugged her back, before backing away. She held on still, bending towards the door.

Gregory chided her with a kind, laughing tone. "I don't have much time."

The door opened. Robert stared in desperation. Mr. Bliss stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Gregory glanced at Becky and asked Mr. Bliss. "The Van Meegeren is authentic?"

Becky covered her mouth, hiding the smile she couldn’t suppress. Gregory was so predictable. He wouldn’t ask about the Vermeer. She chose to believe that he was sparing her feelings, but she knew the truth. He feared she’d change her mind if she heard the Vermeer's beggarly price.

Mr. Bliss gave an abbreviated bow. "It is."

"Fine then," Gregory said. "Let's sign the papers. I'll take the Van Meegeren."

Mr. Bliss turned to Becky. "Is that your wish as well?"

She hesitated. "I'm not sure this is fair."

Gregory put a hand on her shoulder. "You've never been one to go back on your word. For your own sake, I must hold you to our agreement."

Becky forced a brave smile.

They signed the papers, and Gregory snatched up his painting. "It's not much, but it should cover my debts." He ruffled Becky's hair as if she were a little child. "I wish I could stay, but I do need to settle some nasty business. Besides, I don't think I want to be here when Robert finds out."

"Don't worry,” she said. “I can handle Robert."

Gregory threw open the door and called back to her as he ran. "I'm sure you will!"

Robert took the chance and barged in. "Well, then? What happened? How much did we get?"

The desperation in Robert's eyes touched Becky's heart. She hoped she wouldn't have to hurt him too badly. "All Daddy left was a painting. Everything else is gone." She paused but only long enough to make up her mind. "I think you and I need to talk about our future."

Robert's face blushed an angry red. "Future? All you got was a painting, and you want to talk about our future?" He stomped away, and Becky smiled, pleased that she hadn't needed to hurt him after all.

She turned to Mr. Bliss. "I am sorry about Robert. Like Van Meegeren, he's revealed himself a bit of a fraud."

Unlike Gregory, Becky had listened growing up. She knew almost as much about Van Meegeren as her father had, and in the years to come, she’d put that knowledge to work as a consultant in the art world. The work would come as steady as she could hope for, especially since she wouldn't need the money.

Because Becky had listened, she knew that Van Meegeren never copied existing Vermeer paintings but created new ones in his style, passing them off as lost treasures. She had tried to tell Gregory. The Van Meegeren was authentic, but so was the Vermeer. Daddy must have sold everything to buy that one painting.

Poor Gregory. It seemed so unfair, but what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.

And she did so hate to see people hurt.

— Thaddeus Thomas

Sometimes, even an android’s back is turned, and among the dead there lies a child, half devoured. A flesh-picked hand holds a stuffed bear, and though the sight of the child frightens her, she’s never owned a toy. She glances at the android. It’s busy shepherding the lines, marching children across grass-busted asphalt and away from crumbled buildings. She scoops up the bear and names him Dietrich. The name speaks to her of home and love, even if she can’t remember why.

Carnival tents rise like crayon-colored mountains at the edge of town. Androids herd the line of children through the entrance where human workers adorn them with ribbons. A man kneels down beside her and pins a ribbon to her dress, a pink ribbon with letters. He says the letters spell “DEAR.” Missing teeth mar the worker's smile, like the frays at the edge of his denim jacket.

He holds one of her fingers between his, a quick gesture unnoticed by the androids, momentarily clutching her the way she clutches Dietrich.

2.

The calliope overwhelms the sounds of the kitchen. Honey sits at the table, Dad sneaks a peek at her over his paper, and Mom stands in the glow of the window. Beyond the window, Honey imagines a bluebird perched on a clothesline and thinks she could hear its song if the carousel would ever fall silent, which it never will.

Dad folds his paper and sets it on the table. He flashes Honey a smile of ancient wisdom. She loves his smile and dreams about it every night. It’s just as she remembers it from last year and the years before that.

The other children gather beneath the dancing lights, awaiting their time on the carousel. Honey’s turn comes to an end. The chair is empty. 

Mom returns to the stove, and Dad raises his paper. Champ takes the empty seat, and Mom smiles, her hands clasped at her waist where the flowers on her apron make the accidental shape of a garish, little bear.

3.

Every time the carousel stops, the line moves forward, but Dear can't see over the children in front of her. She's never been to the carnival before, but she knows everything about the carousel and can picture every detail. Pressed tightly to her chest, Dietrich squirms.

When at last she stands at the front of the line, she sees yellow wallpaper dotted with little blue flowers and a counter checkered in white and blue tiles. Dad sits at the table. Mom fries eggs, and the kitchen spins round and round.

The worker has left his spot at the entrance and followed along beside her. He gestures to a cardboard box beside sheet-metal stairs. Inside, a doll's tea party has an empty chair. He points to a red sign with white letters which Dear can’t read.

She places Dietrich in the cardboard box. 

Dietrich stares at the marten with a teapot. He stares at the elephant. The room above the cardboard box spins, and Dietrich wobbles in his chair.

Inside Dietrich's head, buried within the wheat-grain stuffing, creatures have laid their eggs. Their young pupate within the grain.

Mom sets a plate before the empty chair. Dear stands, immobile; little hands bunch into little balls. Tears dot the collar of her dress. She wants Dad to hold her in his lap and Mom to kiss her cheeks. She wants them to tuck her in at night and remind her she’s safe, loved, and where she’s meant to be. The calliope overwhelms her, consuming Mom's words with its melody.

In Dear’s imagination, she’s seen it all, exactly as it should be, and that’s all she wants. She can’t understand why it’s too much to ask, nor why all the wishing in the world won’t keep her turn from ending.

At the sheet-metal stairs, the man holds up Dietrich as an offering. Like a good mother, Dear pushes aside her sorrow and steps out of the kitchen and into the dirt, arms outstretched. The man glances at the inattentive android and walks away, bear in hand.

Dear follows.

Inside Dietrich’s stuffing, the creatures sense movement and warmth. They swarm, finding pleasure in his scent.

Dietrich’s fur presses against the worker’s hand. He ducks behind a tent. Dear follows.

She finds him on the ground, screaming. Dietrich squirms, as does the flesh of the worker’s hand.

An android steers her away. Over her shoulder, she watches Dietrich writhe.

4.

The other children cling to their ribbons and insist on being called by the random names assigned. Dear wonders if she’ll understand better next season when the carnival returns. Maybe a parent’s love is something you have to be older to understand. Champ draws pictures of Mom and keeps them by his bed. Honey has made her own wallpaper to match the kitchen.

Dear wads up a yellowed sock, dots it with eyes, and calls it Dietrich. When she settles into bed, her fingers wiggle beneath the cloth, making Dietrich writhe. His face wiggles close to hers, and she smiles, filled with all those unremembered feelings of home.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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—Thaddeus Thomas

As I lay murdered and dying, I swore my revenge, never reckoning on what it would cost me.

Afterwards, I stood on the side of the road in my bare feet and overalls. The blacktop curved as it fell away, and just out of sight, beyond the bend, was the land where I died. Just a moment gone by and now I was here, feeling the cold of death but not chilled by it, staring down the way to the land I'd known for all my time living.

Age didn't have much meaning no more. I was a boy, and I was a man. I reckon I was everything I’d ever been.

Behind me, wind chimes tinkled on the porch of a ramshackle store. They played a melody filled with sorrow, like the creek before it comes a flood.

The store looked as if it belonged there, and though I knew otherwise, no fear or dread gripped me. The shopkeeper stood on the porch, staring. He had the lean, hard face of a farmer, full of half-gray whiskers.

“Take a look at where it happened.” He spat on the grass and hitched his pants. “That's why you're here.”

I squinted to see if maybe he'd disappear. “I'm surprised to be so kindly welcomed, all things considering.”

“Come see me when you're done.” 

“Do I know you?”

“We've never had the pleasure and never will again.” He coddled the screen door to keep it from slapping the frame as he went inside.

I walked down the road and out onto the dirt and the grass. Our two-story house needed paint, and the chicken coop looked better kept. Between me and the coop were the barn and hog waller, and fields ran to the woods where the land dropped to a creek and rose again to old-growth hills.

The wind bayed like it'd treed its quarry.

I headed for the woods and water and hills. They pulled at me with a longing that could have been mine but might have come from the land itself. It had me so focused I almost missed what was missing.

No chickens scurried about the coop. No pigs wallowed in the mud. No cows lowed. No dogs barked.

I stopped and listened and cried out a loud hello that echoed off the hills. 

Nothing. No birds. No insects. In all the world, there was only me and the stranger at the roadside store.

The tug of the land pulled me into the woods. It left me at the turn of the stream in a sandy clearing below the dry banks where floods had cut the rock and exposed the roots of crippled trees. 

I felt the beating of a dying heart and could almost hear my oath. Trouble was, that's all I remembered. I had the place and the feeling, nothing more. I'd grown up hunting here and been murdered on this spot. It went no further. I couldn't even tell if either of us were born to this land, a Chester by blood. Might have been, I’d been a farm hand or master of the house. Weren’t no telling. Could be I had parents, a wife, children, but there existed nothing certain but me and the land.

Aside from the wind and the leaves, nothing changed. The creek neither receded nor swelled. The earth hadn't eroded from around exposed roots. This was both the space and the moment where I’d died, and yet it was something different and removed, between spaces and alone.

When the woods had nothing more to offer, I strode across the fields. A smokeless fire covered a broken crib and a pile of rubbish. It felt wrong, that crib. I couldn't say why.

Through the back door, I entered the kitchen where a pot rested on a black stove. Three cane chairs sat around a wooden table. Framed photographs decorated the hall, but the images were blurry and overexposed, clouding their faces. 

At the top of the stairs, I found two bedrooms and a third that was nearly empty. It held no furniture. A framed, nursery-rhyme illustration hung catawampus on a sky-blue wall. A picture book lay open on a crumpled rug that showed dimples where furniture had mashed it flat. The placement and distance of those indentations brought the fire to mind and the crib.

Though outside, the house had weathered and chipped, the paint in this room was fresh. I stared longer than seemed reasonable, knowing that paint meant an expected child and wondering if it’d been born and died or just passed away in the womb. It hadn’t lived. The empty room told me so, that and the grief that leaves a crib to burn.

I followed the road to the store, and as had the stranger, so I coddled the screen as it closed. The shopkeeper stood at the counter beside the little black register. The air tasted of sweet tobacco and pine.

“You get what you come for?” The shopkeeper's voice rose out of gravel roads and rooting hogs.

I shook my head.

“I reckon you will, but be quick about it. It's getting late.”

He gestured to ticky-tack bookcases and side tables full of trinkets, the collected debris of a man's life.

I felt lost. “What am I meant to be looking for?”

“What draws upon you most?”

As if the motion weren't my own, I snatched up a rifle and butted it against my shoulder. The stock brushed the hairs of my cheek as I tested the sight and aimed square below the shoulders of a hand-carved, wooden dog.

In the rifle, as in the earth, I felt an unremembered rage. 

#

Green leaves surrounded me, and the creek below gurgled past a young man with a rifle abutted to his shoulder. He held the muzzle high from recoil, and the echo of his shot ripped through mountains. I clung to the branches and to my pain and breathed out a low hiss as hate festered. That hatred gave me weight. It drew me into his world, and soon, I would feed.

I breathed in the man's scent and waited for him to turn so I could see his face.

#

The shopkeeper took the rifle. “This ain't where you're meant to begin. It's not allowed, not till you've made your first purchase.”

“I don't need no rifle.” I shook off the anger and felt each breath fill and calm me. The carved eye of the dog stared blindly in my direction. “What I need is to remember.”

“The items ain't on offer,” he said. “All that is are the memories.”

“What's that mean?”

“Pick something what draws you.”

The dog tugged, as did a locket that held a photograph of a wedded couple, standing hand-in-hand at the church. Nearby, a bronze medal hung from a multicolored ribbon. On the medal's face, a winged angel held a sword and shield.

The shopkeeper came alongside, tall and paler than before. “That there is a Victory Medal, awarded for military service from 1917 to 1920.”

I took the medal and studied it. “This mine?”

He shrugged. “Ain't my memories.”

“What then?”

“Make a purchase.”

I moved to a folded, hand-stitched quilt. “I want nothing here.”

“What you want is what I sell, and all it'll cost you is your forgetting.”

“My what?”

He opened his mouth wide as if to bite the air instead of breathe it. The color in his cheeks grew weaker. “You can remember, or you can forget. You can't do both.”

“I'd like to remember.”

His smile showed no kindness. “Then pick something.”

I returned to the medal.

#

My grandpa and I sat on the porch steps. He's quiet now, although an hour before I'd been lectured to and whipped. “Do a thing or don't,” he'd told me when I'd quit crying. “You can't kill an animal halfway. I'd sooner respect those boys who left for the city than a man who works in half measures.”

He'd gone in to take a phone call and returned with his old medal. For a long time, he stared at where it lay draped in his large hands. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he pulled down the tip of his straw hat, covering his face in shadow.

“I ever tell you about haints, boy?”

I waited, eager for one of his stories.

“In the war, we'd hear enemies in the trees, even when there weren't none there. Buddy of mine called them haints, the ghosts of men we'd killed, following after us.”

My legs shivered. “Haints.”

“Cause they haint there.”

I choked out a soft laugh, suppressed by fear. 

Grandpa stared off into the woods. “Got word this morning he's passed on.”

I told him I was sorry.

“They say it was his boy what killed him, but part of me wonders if them's what did it.”

“The haints?” I asked.

“The past always catches up.”

#

The outside world rumbled. Floorboards shook beneath my feet.

“Time's a wasting,” the shopkeeper said.

I stirred from the scent of Grandpa's pipe. “So, I can remember any of this?”

He nodded, and I turned back to the rifle.

“You'll have to pick what you care to recollect.” His skin faded to a deathly white. “Some memories you can carry with you.” He turned his eyes heavenward. “Others hold you down in pain and sorrow. If you want revenge, it's the weight of sorrow and the fire-fueling pain that matter.”

“I swore I'd make him pay.”

He closed his eyes, as if moved by some remembered joy. “I know it. Now, don't take too long making up your mind. I'll be closing soon.”

“I need time.”

His face grew thinner, and his eyes sunk into obscured shadow. “Some things can't be delayed.”

I touched the rifle and felt the grain of the stock and the iron of its bolt. The quilt, the toy, and the locket laid before me on the shelf, untouched, their moments unremembered, but in this weapon rested all the memories of my passing.

With an unspoken question in my heart, I plucked up the quilt and held its cloth to my chest.

#

Grandma held my hand as we stood at the grave. She wore the quilt over her shoulders like a shawl, shielding her against the cold.

“It's a good place to be,” she said, “when you're no longer here.”

The family drew around us, and my wife hugged me, her sandy blonde hair pulled back in a braid. A silver locket rested against the bosom of her black dress. Our son clung to her side.

My wife, her name was Ruby; she said, “Grandpa had his share of sorrow, but he taught me you choose your inheritance. The hurting lands may be plenty, but you can live in your few acres of joy.”

I kissed her. “That don't sound like him.”

Ruby blushed. “When a man don't say much, a woman learns to listen.”

“What were his words?” I asked. “His own words?”

Ruby's gaze turned to the woods. “A man can't spend his life watching the trees.”

Grandma patted Ruby's cheek, and as she drifted off in thought, her hand lingered. “Still don't understand what happened. I never seen nothing so horrible.”

My boy whispered, “Some animals store their kill in trees.”

I shot him a look, but he had too hard a head for any thought to enter.

Instead of hushing up, he just got louder. “That's what the sheriff said. It's so they can come back and eat later.”

Each word tore through me like buckshot, but it wasn't me I worried about. Grandma covered her face. She'd lost a son before, but, the way grandpa went, it made a death by hanging seem gentle.

#

The smell of sweet tobacco drifted back over me. I let go of the quilt and reached for the locket. The shopkeeper grabbed me. The thin flesh of his fingers traced each curve of his knuckles and bones. “You got time for one. Nothing more.” He shoved the rifle into my chest. “Murder needs answering. If you ain't angry enough, you're left to fester. This here's where the anger burns hottest. Take the fire to your bosom and burn.”

I hesitated and looked at the locket and our wedding photograph inside.

“Feel the draw.” The shopkeeper's eyes dissolved into black, hollow pits. “That's where the need remains.”

In the rifle, I felt the clear-watered stream and gentle curve of the land. In the fallen foliage, pain and anger rotted into the earth, feeding worms.

“Some moments you take with you, but some moments take you.” The shopkeeper ran his tongue across his lip-less maw as if the smells of supper were drifting in. “Their pull gives you weight and draws you back into that old world. They'll give feed to your hunger.”

No matter my dying oath, I wanted something more than revenge. If I could take the memories of my loved ones with me, that’d be enough. The mystery of who killed me I could leave to the living. 

I lowered the rifle and reached for the locket.

“Don't be a fool.” His mouth pulled wide, revealing narrow teeth. “Ain't nobody knows what memories you got trapped in that. Feed your vengeance.”

I could think of no greater damnation.

“Make the wrong choice now,” he said, “and all that hate don't do none of us no good.”

“I don't want this.”

He leaned in until his teeth touched my ear. “Do a thing or don't. Maybe you ain't got no vengeance in you, after all.”

I pulled away. The walls shook. Glass rattled. The Victory Medal fell. The shopkeeper turned his eyeless face toward the windows where dead leaves obscured the view.

From the locket, I felt an uneasy joy. The rifle pulsed with hatred.

The wooden dog rocked on its shelf. It felt vulnerable, like it needed protection and there weren't nobody coming.

I reached for the shelf and, as the shopkeeper clawed to hold me back, grasped the wooden dog.

#

A deluge of dead leaves beat against me as I stepped into the road. The world breathed a deep-throated roar; the little shop splintered out of existence, and I was alone beneath the midday sun and a quilt-work canopy of autumn leaves. The ever-present, ever-approaching wind pushed me forward. If I wanted to go anywhere but back to the land, I'd have had no choice.

As I stepped onto the first patch of grass, chickens clucked in their coop. Hogs slopped in the mud. A cow lowed beyond the barn.

Ruby threw open the back door and called out to the woods. My son's answer echoed back. Their voices played a melody filled with memories, like the creek when it comes a flood.

I planted my feet against the wind and stared into my wife's face. We’d grown up in the same church. When my father hanged himself, it was only her what never backed away.

My grandparents loved her as their own, and when we had our boy, she insisted on calling him William Floyd, after my grandpa and me.

Farming is hard on small families, and thoughts of easier lives prey upon the mind. That'd been especially true of late with a private offer made to buy the land and everything on it, but this land was my blood.

Grandpa's only son left him only me, and for years it seemed fated I'd have one child, too. Then all that changed. Ruby carried our second child low. If I remembered grandma's lore a’right, that meant it was a boy.

Ruby stood in the doorway with her belly as big as the day I died. Her cheeks were rosy and full. 

Beyond the coop, the fire crackled, and the burn pile shifted, revealing the charred frame of a crib. Ruby drew closer, her hand clutched to her chest. A wooden dog smoldered among the ash. I'd carved that dog for our unborn son. Ruby looked back to the house, where the crib and the toy should have been, in a room freshly painted.

With a wind-fueled cry, leaves of skin and blood flowed around me. They lifted me off the ground and over the house and into the woods to the bend in the creek where I slipped into a cluster of green-leafed branches.

My son worked the bolt of his rifle and lowered it again to aim. I lay in a pool of blood, wheezing for air and bubbling curses.

His eyes narrowed. His knuckles whitened, but Ruby's voice echoed through the treetops, calling us home.

He answered her back, and, when the sounds had rippled into silence, he faced me. “Don't you worry. I've got plenty left for her. One last hunt on Chester land.”

He squeezed the trigger.

High above, I clung to my anger and pain.

He walked to the house, reloading as he went, but at the edge of the fields he stopped and looked back, like he'd heard me in the trees. I reached out an arm the color of autumn but couldn't break through to touch him. The film between his world and mine stretched. It grew thin in places, and I clawed, breaking off filaments of space beneath my fingernails. The scent of his world filled my nostrils.

But I lacked the rage needed for breaking through. All the sorrow and pain that welled within me meant nothing against that veil. I looked past my boy, to the house and the fire where Ruby stood, and my son turned toward his mother.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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—Thaddeus Thomas

It makes a good counterpoint to last week’s story where the science was soft, and I hope you enjoy my little tale.

And Saturn Below

I circled the tubular vessel with its dragonfly array and checked the hull for damage, but she appeared in good shape. Her name rotated into view, looking almost as crisp as when she arrived: Kronos III: Polar Explorer. Underneath, the crystalline plastic tether pointed needle-like at the gaseous planet below. Nothing I saw told me why the ship was dropping orbit. I reported my all clear and prepared to dock.

From halfway around the planet, Roberta cautioned, "She's a second-hand piece of junk, Miguel. If she's not worth saving, write her off and get out."

"Don't let the company hear you talk like that."

I slid in the coupler, and the docking clamps grabbed hold. Before I unhooked myself from the seat, I took another look out past the ship to the planet. From my usual station, the rings always stretched overhead, drawing their lines across heaven's dome. Here, beneath Saturn's southern pole, I could see a large stretch of the rings all at once, laid out flat before me in broad sweeps of purples, grays, and beige.

At last, the airlock opened. I unbuckled the harness, grabbed hold of the walls, and gently propelled myself from one ship to the other. The Expert Program's interface greeted me. I asked for a status report, but it had nothing more to offer than was already known: three hours earlier the electrodynamic tether's internal current had experienced an uncontrolled fluctuation.

In my ear, Roberta said, "What can't be done to that ship in the next hour won't be done at all. We've got five hours before all hell breaks loose. Five hours, Miguel."

"I'll be back before then."

I floated planet-ward, climbing upside down by means of a centrally located ladder. Roberta would’ve spat fire had she known I was enjoying myself despite the time pressure. Our main vessel, The Tolkien, simulated a one-G pull. Weightlessness had become a novelty again. The joy ride ended when I reached the bottom of Kronos and unscrewed the faceplate that covered the anchored end of the tether.

"Can you fix it from there?" Roberta asked.

"I hope so. This isn't a good day for a space walk."

"Miguel…"

"I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding. Now give me a moment."

Nothing seemed obviously wrong, which was a disappointment. I ran the meter checks, one by one, hoping to find something that failed to match the specs, but everything checked out. In frustration, I muttered, "What's the damn problem?"

Though I had been talking to myself, the Expert Program, the E.P., took my question literally. "Variations in the electromagnetic field create vibrations in the tether, resulting in mechanical stress-induced failure. A fluctuating current compensates for this, and as long as that fluctuation is maintained the tether is safe. For unknown reasons, three hours and fifteen minutes ago, that fluctuation temporarily failed."

"I know that, but what caused the failure?"

The E.P. paused before answering. "It is impossible to explain the unknown."

Hmm, I thought, how philosophical.

Roberta chimed in with the obvious. "If it's not onboard, it's got to be in the tether. Send out the drone."

"In a moment," I said. "I need time to think. I did a flyby. The tether's sheathe was unscathed. If I attempt an exploratory repair, I'm likely to do more harm than good. I want to know what I'm looking for." Of the E.P., I asked, "We're still running the tether at full current?"

The E.P. confirmed that we were.

The tether acted as a simple sail, allowing the vessel to move from one orbit to another. If the ship needed a lower orbit, then it lowered the tether's internal current. The plasma in the surrounding magnetosphere would act against the tether, thereby reducing the ship's velocity and dropping it to a lower orbit. On the other hand, when a direct current was pumped through the tether, the force created against the magnetic field would accelerate the craft, allowing it to rise to higher orbits. The speeds and complexities of Saturn's magnetosphere allowed all this to happen off the current generated by the tether's interaction with the field. No additional power from the ship was ever required.

That was, at least, the way it was supposed to work, the way it always did work, until now. As I pondered the problem, Kronos was steadily dropping orbit, despite the current pumping through its tether.

Again Roberta griped in my ear. "If it's a problem with the ship, I don't understand why the E.P. didn't find it."

That got my attention. It was an Expert Program, designed to handle all human knowledge within its limited area: electrodynamic sailing vessels. Roberta was right. If there was a problem with the way the ship was operating, the E.P. would have known, but this tether was an open system. The end of it was unsheathed, open to its environment. This created a phantom loop, using the ionosphere as part of the circuit. 

I let out a long pent-up sigh of frustration. "I knew that would come back to bite us."

"What?" Roberta demanded. "What is it?"

"I told you when the company sent us E.P.'s designed for Earth-orbit vessels that there would be problems. I think we've run into one right here."

"And that is?"

"The cause of the fluctuation isn't the ship, at least not directly. It's something in the magnetosphere, and our E.P. doesn't know enough to see it. Bring up the intraplanetary system readings for the exact time of and just before the anomaly. Tell me what you find."

There was a pause, and then Roberta said, "I'm working on it. You want to tell me what I'm looking for?"

"I'm not sure. It will have something to do with the difference between the E.P.'s Earth-orbit reference and our Saturn-orbit reality."

"Keep talking."

I let myself float freely in the darkness, the light from my headgear offering the only illumination. It fell on metal walls and girders, the ladder, the open faceplate, and other consoles. I ignored them all as best I could without cracking my head into a sharp corner.

Roberta wanted a quick review of the differences between the Earth's magnetosphere and Saturn's. I supposed she thought my ramblings would help her spot a detail she would otherwise have missed. Unsure what a logical starting point would be, I began reciting basic astronomy. "Saturn's magnetosphere isn't as simple as the one on Earth. Plasma trapped in Earth's electromagnetic fields is a fairly straightforward blend taken from the Earth's own atmosphere and the solar winds. Here, the icy moons, the rings, and Titan's atmosphere work together to form a very complex, very active magnetosphere."

As I talked, I could imagine the photons from the sun and the electrons and ions from the plasma all smashing into the rings and the icy moons. The impact ionized water and nitrogen molecules and tore them off, casting them into the sphere's electromagnetic soup. I smiled, wondering if the E.P. could grasp the reach of Saturn's power. On Earth, the influence of the planet's rotation was limited to plasma within 15,000 miles of its surface. Saturn's influence stretched nearly a million miles, encompassing Titan, the rings, and most of the icy moons. It was almost more than an Earth-bound intelligence could fathom. On Earth, the moon played almost no role in the magnetosphere. Here, nearly everything was touched, and the ionized molecules took on the plasma's ambient velocity and repeated the process, smashing again and again into moon and ring, constantly regenerating the plasma. 

"You're getting awfully quiet."

The sound of her voice stirred me. "How much time do I have?"

"Fifty minutes."

"Did you find anything?"

"Maybe," she said. I recognized the strain in her voice and knew that she was well out of her comfort zone. She was a fleet manager, not a scientist. She could have had a perfectly healthy career, safe and sound on Earth where she belonged, but I’d talked her into following my dream.

I could imagine her lovely face hovering over the main screen, its monochromatic light reflecting sporadically against the sharp line of her face. She kept her hair pulled back, but long, black strands would have fallen loose. When I left, she’d been wearing the standard issue sweatpants and a ribbed, sleeveless tee. Since then, she would have donned the bulky sweatshirt as well, to warm herself against The Tolkien's chill. I chose to ignore that fact. In my mind I kept her in that little, form-hugging tee, and I was again reminded that I’d married a beautiful woman.

But relationships needed more.

On Earth, our attraction for one another and the time we spent apart easily compensated for our differences. Out here, with no distractions other than our work, our differences had grown large, all encompassing. We’d drifted apart, isolated in our close proximity.

What she said next chilled me. "At the time of the anomaly, there was a drop in the equatorial magnetic field."

I might have cursed. I don't know. It had never occurred to me that a decrease in the equatorial magnetic field would have affected the ship. In fact, I still couldn’t say it had. What I did know was that the fluctuation and drop were co-incidental. I also knew that a much more massive drop was only hours away.

In my ear, Roberta mumbled a quiet, "That sounds significant."

The biggest problem with electrodynamic tethers was keeping them operational through the endless vibration caused by the high velocity of and extreme variations in the magnetosphere. The variations were countered by a carefully controlled pattern set in the tether's current. If that pattern failed, the tether would soon fail with it. 

"Miguel, talk to me!"

Forty-five days earlier the sun had unleashed a series of X-class solar flares, the largest of which had been aimed directly at Saturn's path. We’d been monitoring the approaching interplanetary shock ever since, its effect on Kronos being our chief concern. If the shock created a magnetic storm, it would be situated over one of the poles, placing Kronos at ground zero. The systems had checked out, and we’d left the vessel in polar-synchronous orbit, eagerly anticipating the wealth of data we’d soon collect.

"Miguel!"

"That magnetic storm we’re expecting, one of its effects is an injection of ions from the magnetotail into the ring current. The strengthened ring current causes a planet-wide drop in the equatorial magnetic field." On Earth, there were recorded drops that lasted as long as twelve hours, and it took twice as long before standard levels returned. 

To the E.P., I said, "Jettison the tether. Engage thrusters. Bring us into a synchronous orbit below The Tolkein." They were only maneuvering thrusters, but they would last long enough to get the ship away from the pole. Without the tether, the ship would be crippled and stand little chance of survival in a Saturn-sized magnetic storm.

Roberta was screaming in my ear, something about the difficulty of getting a replacement tether and other options needing to be considered. Whatever it was, it kept me from hearing the E.P. I asked it to repeat itself. Its words were cold and simple: "Jettison failed."

Roberta breathed a sigh of relief. "Good. Now when this is over, we'll repair the existing tether and stay on budget."

"Maybe you should remember what you said earlier about this being a second-hand piece of junk."

When she asked me why, her tone suggested I was being argumentative. Unfortunately, I was preparing her for a hard truth. "Kronos is a dead ship."

It took her a moment to take that in. Her voice was quiet, almost penitent, as she asked, "Why?"

"The electromagnetic drag on the tether is still pulling the ship out of orbit, despite the current. Maybe the reading is wrong or the strength of the surrounding field has spiked, either way, if we can't jettison the tether, we've lost the ship." Of the E.P., I asked, "Did you fire the thrusters?"

"Thrusters engaged."

"What's our heading?"

"Kronos is plotted to reach synchronous orbit below The Tolkien in twelve hours, forty-two minutes. With the current rate of orbital loss, however, the ship will begin terminal descent in eight hours, thirty-six minutes."

And the interplanetary shock would hit in four hours, forty-five minutes.

I took one last look at the anchored end of the tether, hoping to find a way to jettison it manually, but I knew no such option existed. It was time to write off the ship and get out.

I instructed the E.P. to upload its records to The Tolkien. Then I grabbed hold of the ladder and propelled myself upward to the airlock. As I floated into the shuttle and strapped in, I realized how quiet Roberta had become. She was worrying over the budget. That was her job. The loss was the company's fault, really, allowing themselves to be conned by the lowest bidder into using a maladapted E.P. A Saturn-orbit model might have understood the problem and reacted in time. On the other hand, maybe there was nothing that could’ve been done, and this was simply the price of doing business. Either way, it didn't matter. The company would shift the blame onto our shoulders, Roberta's mainly. The health of the fleet was her responsibility. I was just a scientist. What do scientists know about business?

Roberta's voice came back. "Miguel, hold on. We've got some serious Kilometric Radiation spikes."

The airlock hushed closed. "Now? It's too early."

Saturn Kilometric Radiation, SKR, is the planet's principal radio emission and is related to the way the solar wind interacts with the magnetic field at the poles. The SKR would go nuts when the shock hit, but spikes now didn't make sense, not unless there was something moving ahead of the main shock.

Then I saw the dancing lights of the aurora below me, and I knew I was in trouble. I heard the locking clamps disengage, and I had just begun the careful retreat when Kronos went mad. It rocketed upward and clipped the airlock, which spun the shuttle around until my thrusters collided with the passing vessel. It all happened in less than a second, and then I was tumbling through space. 

The damaged thrusters failed to react to my command. I tried to calm Roberta, telling her I was okay, but in reality I was near panic. When my efforts to correct the situation failed, I steadied myself by trying to understand what had happened. That proved easy enough. The SKR spikes indicated another, more significant drop in the equatorial magnetic field, weakening the forces that had been working against the tether. Without these forces holding Kronos back, the tether and the thrusters, working together at full capacity, had rocketed the vessel skyward.

I felt a little better now. At least I knew what was happening. I thought it strange, that though I might die, it calmed me to know the cause. It was my constant need to know, the very need that drove us to Saturn.

Roberta's voice, now kind and reassuring, said, "I'm coming after you."

I thought of Kronos then, and told its E.P. to cut the thrusters. There was no need to waste the energy. At least for now, the ship was fully operational. 

Roberta had heard me. "Miguel?"

"Yes, Roberta?" I felt guilty for dragging her halfway across the solar system. We should’ve stayed on Earth. We could’ve had a family. It would’ve made my mother happy. The last time she’d called, what had she said? When she was our age, she already had six children. Six! And we had none. At the time I’d laughed it off as a mother's twisted sense of priorities, but now I thought maybe I had things backwards.

"Can you use Kronos?"

I blinked, not sure what I’d heard or what it meant. Outside, Saturn spun in and out of view three times. It took that long to see the obvious: Kronos could be my savior. 

My enthusiasm, my certainty I could make this work, got me through the next two hours. It kept at bay the possibility that I was sealed in my own coffin, doomed to spin lifelessly in orbit around the planet I had presumed to love. I forgot for a time the power of the magnetosphere around me: the surging, swirling plasma feeding off the solar ultraviolet energy and the ionized molecules constantly torn from everything in its grip. That now included me, and with that realization, my enthusiasm faded. Given enough time, the magnetosphere would ionize my molecules and assimilate me unto itself. I would literally become part of the planet as it had figuratively become part of me.

 Through the E.P., I had Kronos calculate my position and come to my rescue. Uncertain how fast I was going, I was concerned about how long it would take the ship to reach me. My velocity, however, was relatively low, and Kronos made rendezvous inside of twenty minutes. That was encouraging, as the slower my shuttle's speed, the easier the rescue.

I felt good.

In that time I ran a diagnostic on my airlock, and surprisingly, it checked out. When Kronos arrived, I talked the E.P. through the necessary steps to bring the two ships along side each other and then had Kronos duplicate my shuttle's spin, like dance partners. I’d anticipated the time it’d take to complete the maneuver, so the passing minutes did little to discourage me. I could see, inch by inch, minute by minute, the progress we were making, until, at last, Kronos orbited the shuttle, our airlock doors in alignment.

The thrusters held through it all, and continued to hold as I guided her in. The coupler screeched angrily but the ships connected. I used Kronos then to counteract the shuttle's roll. The ship, after two hours in a spin, stabilized. 

I toggled the airlock controls and started unhooking my harness. The silence, though, was unmistakable. I’d been expecting the gentle hush of the opening doors. The silence told me the doors remained closed.

I yanked at the manual override. The doors refused to budge. I closed my eyes and focused on the problem, trying to let the solution come to me, but nothing came. My enthusiasm failed. I looked at the walls of the shuttle and saw the walls of my coffin. I was going to die.

Melodrama runs in my family. I get it from my mother. 

Always a faithful believer, she’d sent a cross and Bible with us as going-away presents. I thought of them then and realized I had no idea where we’d put them. It was a good time to pray, but I knew nothing of prayer and no one to pray to. That symbolized for me, more than anything, the depths of my loneliness. No children. No God. I had, instead, everything I ever thought I wanted: the realization of a dream. I held Saturn in my hand. I knew her, almost possessed her. But I would die, and she would not mourn my passing. How typical.

Roberta's ever-present voice promised that she was only an hour away. One hour. An hour and a half after that, the interplanetary shock would hit. The melodramatic heart of my mother, beating at full strength within me, whispered, "Turn around. You still have time to make it back."

"I'm not going without you!"

She gets it from her mother, too. But her mother is scary, not a weeping Madonna like mine. If Roberta spits fire, her mother breathes it. I knew, when her mother learned what had happened here, I'd be glad I was dead.

I needed to do something to make it easier on Roberta and figured the least I could do was meet her half way. I checked with the E.P. on my current trajectory. In my despair, I had overlooked that fact that we would no longer be on our original course.

Our entire livable space amounted to five orbital vessels. That's five pinpoints in space around a rather large planet. Wherever we were headed, I figured it would be the middle of nowhere, and I was right. I told the E.P. that our renewed destination was The Tolkien, but this time I set us on a fairly direct route, plotting to give only enough distance between us so that Kronos and The Tolkien could pass each other by, should Kronos be dead weight by then. 

Of course, the stated objective was to meet Roberta en route, and I began to hope again that there was something we could do to get me out of my ship and into hers. I plotted and planned, but the only viable solution I could come up with was totally unverifiable. I figured that I could disengage from Kronos, and assuming that the airlock would open once the two ships were no longer attached, I could space walk from one ship to the other. Easy. The diagnostics, as before, checked out for the airlock systems. The malfunction could be in the coupling system. When it engaged, it might have interfered with the airlock. It seemed logical. Unfortunately, the only way to test it was to disengage from Kronos, and the time for that had not quite come. 

Still, having a plan felt good.

By then I’d forgotten about my earlier concern with Kronos. The equatorial magnetic field had dropped briefly, resulting in two problems: the first had been an uncontrolled fluctuation in the tether; the second had been a surge in the magnetic field that followed the drop, and it was that surge that had caused Kronos to systematically lose its orbit. I should have remembered that surge, and considering the second, larger drop that had caused the collision in the first place, I should have known another surge was coming.

It hit about an hour before the interplanetary shock's scheduled arrival, and it felt like a giant had grabbed me by the tail. I nearly panicked, but caught myself in the last moment before I disconnected the shuttle from Kronos. As long as we shared the same downward velocity, breaking free would do me little good.

As before, I told the E.P. to engage the thrusters and give the tether its full current. The cluster of ships slowed, stopped, and actually began a slow crawl heavenward, but Saturn's pull quickly gained strength. I felt our progress die. In a matter of seconds, Kronos would give in to the downward pull.

I disengaged the locking clamps, and instructed the E.P. to maneuver Kronos clear. The worn-out thrusters sputtered and died, but it was enough. Kronos banked away, and, I watched as Kronos III: Polar Explorer lost the fight and sank, its dragonfly array stretched out like the arms of a drowning man.

Its receding form remained in view for the next half hour, and I kept watching, hoping to see it rocket skyward again as the magnetic surge lost its strength. It never happened, and finally the speck in the distance disappeared entirely. Kronos was gone.

Roberta's voice screamed with delight. "Miguel, I've got you in visual! I've got you in visual!"

Snapped out of my thoughts, I pulled on my helmet, checked my harness, and then toggled the airlock. It let out a long, extended hush as it released the interior atmosphere, equalizing the pressure before exposing me to the void beyond. It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

I floated from one shuttle to the other, and for an instant there was nothing below me but Saturn herself. Far enough removed from the pole, I saw the flattened polar horizon, an effect of the planet's rapid rotation, and then I left Saturn behind and slipped into the shuttle's embrace.

Roberta and I slipped off our helmets and held each other as best we could. I heard my own breath, and that breath nearly became a whisper, a promise we could go home again, to Earth where she belonged. I said nothing, and when the interplanetary shock hit, we watched the lights play like ribbons in space, filling the void where Kronos had been.

-End-

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Aleskei Volchenkcov, the CEO of Concupi Science, Inc., felt giddy, almost weightless, as he passed by the final Trespassers Will Be Shot sign. Two armed soldiers stood outside Research and Development. Neither moved as he entered, humming to himself.

The night before, his wife had grunted at him and turned from his touch, but her ritual of neglect had bothered him very little. Instead, he had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking of this moment; or, rather, thinking of long-ago days spent in the arms of Lilya Datsyuka. The thought of her now made his heart race, and he calmed himself, not wanting to aggravate his condition.

The waiting crew of scientists and engineers greeted him professionally, though in their eyes he saw a hint of discomfort, as if they did not trust him with their new machine. Normally, he would have pulled himself upright and met them eye-to-eye until the condescension gave way to fear and trepidation. They would have seen that age and diabetes-induced obesity had not softened the will of this corporate dictator. With eyes as cold as his deeply graying hair, he would have made them quiver to their toes, but, today, he couldn’t be bothered. Lilya Datsyuka, still young and perfect, awaited him.

The time machine looked a little like the old-fashioned salon-style hairdryers, being comprised mainly of a bell-shaped contraption they would lower over his head. As he slid into the accompanying chair, several voices talked at once, either highlighting the capabilities of the machine or reminding him of the transmittal procedures. He listened to none of it. He had only one thing in mind: his destination.

Then the cacophony died away, and one clear voice spoke in his ear. “Though you do not physically travel back, what you cause your younger self to do will alter time. Don’t make significant changes of any kind. Your entire life could be turned on its ear, and you’d never know it. When you returned, you would remember only that new life, nothing of the old. Be careful. This is real.”

Aleskei smiled broadly. “This had better be real,” he said. “I’m counting on it.”

After a moment’s hesitation, the man spoke again. Aleskei now became aware of the nervous, little twig of a man addressing him, Ichansky, the Chief Science Officer. Ichansky wiped away the perspiration that beaded on his weasel-like face. Anxiety amplified his every movement, and his voice cracked when he spoke. “Sir, I don’t think you appreciate the severity of what we’re saying.”

Aleskei flashed his practiced, don’t-cross-that-line smile and met Ichansky’s gaze until Ichansky turned his head like a scolded dog. Aleskei hissed, “I know what I’m doing,” and motioned for the others to proceed.

The Chief Science Officer had the power to shut down the project. Had Ichansky the backbone, he could have thrown Aleskei out on his rear, but Ichansky had been Aleskei’s choice for the position. He had chosen a man he knew he could control. True to form, Ichansky skulked away, and the others jumped to follow Aleskei’s commands.

They lowered the helmet. For a moment, as the metallic jar cut off air and light, he felt a wave of claustrophobia surge within him. He fought it off, more than willing to go through torture, let alone discomfort, for the experience that lay before him. Then a fresh breeze of air brushed against his nostrils and a soothing light pulsed before his eyes. Everything was going to be just fine.

As they had trained him to do, he thought back to the time in his life he wanted to revisit. He could go back, they said, to observe and experience. They had warned against the urge to right past wrongs and ease old regrets. Minor changes in time could have far-reaching, unanticipated results. Aleskei pondered what he could possibly want to change. He had hurt people along the way, and perhaps that was unfortunate, but it had also been a necessary part of the man he had become. All of it was a delicate balance, and he cared to change none of it. There were, however, a few particular moments he wanted to relive.

He focused on the convention in Brussels when he first met Lilya Datsyuka, and he chose the timing of his reentry very carefully. The evening had been a long, delicate negotiation with a potentially vital client. He had outdone himself that night, impressing Lilya, the company’s representative, and wooing her all at once. He dared not mess with that performance, but instead waited until uncertainty gave way to inevitability. Then he entered the conscious mind of his younger self as he and Lilya stumbled into her hotel room, locked in a passionate embrace.

After his brief trip in time, the chauffeured ride home seemed more pleasant than usual. Even his aches and pains troubled him less. No longer were they something he would never again escape this side of the grave. Now, he could elude the rot of aging any time he chose. He could be that young sales representative again, full of life and immortality and embraced by Lilya’s perfect touch.

His home, a great stone structure with high, gothic arches, overlooked the sixteenth tee. The driver brought him to the front door, and Aleskei stood in front of his house, studying it in the dwindling light. As with every spring, the wasps had returned to build their nests. A great, two-story arch loomed over the main entrance, and at its peak several dozen of the creatures danced in agitated loops. They would soon die by the gardener’s hand, and in some way that was a shame. Their swarming presence gave the home a menacing presence, a touch of character that he enjoyed. 

The wealth and power he now accepted as his right had once seemed forever beyond his grasp. He had married the daughter of a powerful man, but as Lilya had once told him, that would only take him so far. He wondered what Lilya thought of him now. He wondered if she still lived. It was a sign of her character that she had never popped up again, wanting to make things difficult for him. Still, even if she had, what could she have done? His wife had discovered the affair. The company would have frowned on his committing infidelity with a client, had things gone badly, but that had not happened. In the end, morality was measured in profit and loss, and by that standard he was a saint.

He stepped into the great hall, and for the first time in years he paused to appreciate the beauty of the staircase as it swept upward in its gentle arc. It would have been a welcome sight to see a young wife poised at the top of the stairs dressed in a skimpy negligee. As it was, neither he nor his wife was in any shape to climb those stairs or to wear sexy nightclothes. Those delights were left to the young. 

He found his wife, Natasha, in the atrium, trimming flowers. She wore a colorful pants suit and her favorite, floppy hat. She caught his eye and returned his beaming smile. “Well, I can see you had a good day.”

They kissed and the first pang of guilt pulled at his heart. “We’re almost ready to introduce a new product to the cabinet of ministers.”

“Oh? Which product is that?”

“Top secret. National defense and all. Let’s just say that it will assure our superiority in the region, perhaps indefinitely.”

“Daddy would have been proud.”

Though he politely refrained from saying so, this last innovation would put her father deeply in Aleskei’s shadow. Still, he had to admit that he had always admired the man, even now, after he had surpassed his achievements in almost every way. In only one area had her father outdone him, and that was with the women. Up until his death at the age of eighty-seven, his “little flings” had been a constant, ingrained part of who he was. It had also been the one part he would not let Aleskei imitate. 

When Natasha told him about Aleskei’s affair, her father had sat him down for a talk. The old man had leaned back in his favorite chair and sipped at a gin and tonic as he spoke. “I understand what’s happened, believe me, and I’ll make things right with Natasha.” Aleskei’s heart had soared, and in that instant he had imagined that he could keep it all. “If it were just you and me, I’d find a way to make this work. I understand that’s a fine looking woman you’ve got on the side, and I hate to make a man forgo the pleasures of life.” Slowly, Aleskei’s euphoria slipped away. “The trouble is, I’ve got Natasha to consider, and she means more to me than anything in this world. You are going to break off the relationship. I’ll see to it that there are no business ramifications from all of this, so you just take care of it as quickly and neatly as you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Her father then finished his drink, set down his glass, and looked him in the eye. “I want you to understand how bad you’ve hurt my Natasha. If you had died, she would have suffered less.”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

He had held his gaze for several seconds more. “Good, because I’ve taken steps to see that she never suffers like this again.”

That had been harder to fathom, but soon the meaning had become clear. His next act of infidelity would cost him his life. Aleskei had a price on his head.

Natasha gathered her pruning sheers and pulled off her hat. “Dinner should be ready soon. Why don’t we both wash up?”

One thought sickened him as he followed Natasha to the mudroom. It was possible, he supposed, that her father had been the reason Lilya had never surfaced again. He might have paid her off. He might have even had her killed. Having enjoyed the afternoon in Lilya’s exuberant company, it filled him with a fresh sense of loss to think of her being dead these many years. What a waste. Oh well, all was not lost. Tomorrow, they would be together again.

That night, Aleskei made a list of all the dates he and Lilya had shared and eagerly looked forward to reliving each and every one. In the following weeks, as his visits to Research and Development began raising eyebrows, he started going after hours, with no one but the guards to witness his comings and goings. His aged body showed no ill effects from the rigorous activity of his youthful self. They remained separate, while his consciousness made the journey.

He returned home, late again one evening, sat at the dinner table and smiled at Natasha. She passed the vegetables, and he thanked her. Not long before, he had dined on the Riviera with Lilya at his side. He had ordered a thick, rare steak and for desert, cheesecake. He had eaten with abandon all the things that had long since been restricted from his diet. It made the bland, healthy meal before him now seem an impossible drudgery, but his body was hungry. He forced himself to chew and swallow.

His every evening was filled with food, dancing, and sex, in any combination he chose. He relived and rewrote his youthful vigor, enjoying it more now, he thought, than he had the first time around. No longer, as they say, would youth be wasted on the young.

Still, every night he was obliged to go home. Every night he stared into the settled, quiet face of his wife and muddled through his doctor-prescribed diet. The forced smiles grew more difficult, and eventually stopped entirely, and he found himself sitting across the table from a woman he loathed.

Then, one day she looked at him with pain in her eyes. “Work has certainly been keeping you away these couple of months.” He saw her loneliness, but the guilt it stirred only made him resent her more. 

“Someone has to pay for all this.” His voice was abrupt and harsh. The very sound of it startled him.

“I don’t like you staying out so late.”

“It’s the only time I can really get things done. Maybe I can arrange to be here more during the day. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

She nodded noncommittally and stared down at her plate. “I thought it would be nice to get away for a while. We could take a vacation, go to Rome. I’d like to see Rome again.”

Aleskei exploded. Before he knew what was happening, he was on his feet, screaming, and his chair capsized behind him. Blood pounded in his temples. His heart raced so hard it hurt. He heard himself yelling something about Natasha never being satisfied; he had just told her he would arrange to be home more, but that was not enough. It was never enough. 

He saw the shock and fear in her face, and felt his own legs begin to tremble. He turned and stumbled away from the table. She was screaming now, but he could not focus on what she was saying. The pounding in his ears was too loud, and the room was spinning. He pressed his face against the china cabinet. The cold glass felt good. A wet washcloth. He needed a washcloth and a pill. Then he would be all right, but he couldn’t let her take him away from Lilya, not now, not again. 

He tried to move towards the kitchen. He took a step, but somehow his foot couldn’t find the floor. He felt nothing but space, cool, black space that rushed up to take him in its arms.

He woke in a hospital room with tubes in his nose and arm. It came as no surprise that he was alone. The bedside chair where a worried wife might have sat was empty. Though unsure what that meant, the possibilities troubled him little. He had Lilya again, and Natasha was only getting in the way. Besides, she would be happier without him. It was the best for both of them. Her father’s threat had kept this from happening before, but certainly, it had been inevitable from the beginning. Though he had never been able to admit it until now, they were never meant for each other.

Doctors and nurses came and went, and then, as the day drew on into evening, the door opened and Natasha walked in. She stood by the foot of his bed and looked down at him. For a long time, neither of them spoke. For Aleskei, all that was left was for her to say the words. She was leaving him. He had become impossible to live with in his old age, and she was leaving.

Though it took longer than he had anticipated, she did at last speak. “How are you feeling?”

The question caught him off guard, and he had to think about it a moment. “Like a puppet whose strings were cut.”

She nodded. “I’m not surprised. You’re too old to carry on like this.”

He shrugged. “People lose their tempers. Mine was bound to boil over eventually.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “You’re going to have to stop seeing her. It’ll kill you otherwise.”

Several silent seconds passed before he realized his mouth was hanging open. “What are you talking about?”

She clasped her hands and took a deep, shaky breath. She sounded like she was on the verge of crying. He noticed now that the flesh around her eyes was red and puffy. Apparently, she had been crying for a long time. “I didn’t want to believe it,” she said at last. “At your age and in your condition, I just couldn’t see it happening, but you haven’t acted like this since you carried on with that Lilya person.”

Memories of her father’s threat came flooding in. “Natasha, you’re crazy. How could I possibly be having another affair? I swear to you, Lilya was the only other woman I’ve ever been with, and that ended over thirty years ago.” He almost smiled at the irony of the truth in what he said.

“I know you, Aleskei.”

“Check with the office. I spend my evenings in Research and Development. The soldiers on guard see me going in and out every day. Ask them.”

“You’re cheating on me again. You are, and it’s going to kill you. I’m not ready for that, Aleskei. Heaven knows why, but I want you around.”

Again his mouth fell open. She wasn’t leaving him.

“You need help. I’ve contacted a psychiatrist, and we’re going to meet with him and work through this.” Her words were sharp, crisp, and clear, and he marveled at how well she handled something that had to be incredibly painful. Then, at last, having said what she meant to say, she turned and left him alone in his room.

Aleskei tried not to panic as he considered the ramifications of what had just been said. If there were a contract on his head, the passing of thirty years might not mean anything. The money, he imagined, could still be out there, waiting to be claimed, and once word got out that he had been unfaithful, his life would be over. By contacting the psychiatrist, Natasha might have sealed his fate. Something had to be done.

There was, he thought, one possibility. He had to get back to the time machine.

Over the next few days, Natasha returned faithfully to visit him. He behaved perfectly for her, and her stays gradually increased. After a week, he was allowed to go home. “We’ll see the psychiatrist tomorrow,” he promised as he left the obligatory wheel chair and slid into the limousine. “Everything will be just fine.”

As the limousine entered traffic, however, a black sedan pulled in a few cars behind. Aleskei watched as the sedan matched them turn for turn. Time, he knew, was short.

He turned to Natasha. “There’s something that needs attending.” He told the driver to make a brief stop at the office.

“You’re not well enough for that,” Natasha protested.

“Just this one thing,” he promised, “and then I’m all yours.” She tried to give him a look of disapproval, but he knew he had already won. She turned from him, her face darkening, and he felt a fresh surge of guilt. He had never been the husband she deserved. Perhaps, had he realized that years ago, had he cared, he could have changed things. Now, the time for that had passed. She needed to come to her senses and leave him. She could grow old in peace, and he would have his Lilya.

Without another word between them, Aleskei left Natasha in the car and marched straight to Research and Development. The soldiers saluted his return, and the engineers and scientists cheered. He thanked them all and explained that he needed one short trip in the time machine, that was all.

He glanced at Ichansky, the Chief Science Officer, wondering if he would object, but even he seemed happy to have Aleskei back. He figured Ichansky would feel differently, if he knew what he intended. He would have said that the ramifications of such a plan are inherently unpredictable. Change the path of a mosquito, and, at least in theory, you could doom humanity.

Aleskei tried to smile and look full of anticipation, as if this were just another joyride. The project team could afford to ponder theories. Aleskei could not. If he walked out that door with nothing changed, he was a dead man, but if he could arrange it so Natasha never knew about the affair, then there would be no contract. In fact, she wouldn’t even think to suspect an affair now. All he had to do was make that one small change. In the grand scheme of things, it would be almost meaningless. The only possible ramification, as he saw it, was that when he took that helmet back off, he would be a free man.

Suspecting nothing, the project team willingly obliged him and had soon fitted the helmet over his head. The fresh puff of air blew against his nostrils, and the soothing lights flashed before his eyes. He focused his thoughts on the last date with Lilya before Natasha discovered the affair. He could have gone back to the beginning and stopped the affair before it ever happened, but then it would have been truly erased. It would cease to exist in his memory. He could never go back and recapture it again. This way, he could end the affair and yet keep it going forever.

Be quick, he told himself. Don’t give Natasha time to wonder what you’re up to.

The date he chose was a quiet evening at her apartment. When the door opened, revealing Lilya in a little, black teddy, Aleskei was tempted to linger. Given time he could have enjoyed the evening and then broken it off, but there was no time to give.

He hesitated a moment as doubt nagged at his soul. This was a change like nothing they had ever tried before. For the briefest of moments, he considered a different series of choices: spend the evening in Lilya’s embrace; don’t risk making the change; accept death. 

Change the path of a mosquito, and you could doom humanity. Possibly, but what else mattered, if it cost him his own life? The answer came clear and certain. Nothing else, no one else, was more important than his own survival. Hoping to make it quick and simple, he looked Lilya in the eye and told her it was over. “I can’t see you anymore. I’m sorry. Don’t try to call me. We’re through.”

Then he turned and walked away. He gave himself enough time to actually leave the apartment building and only after the street door locked behind him did he return to the present. As he became aware of the flashing lights, his remembered universe turned in on itself and emerged as something new.

Part Two: Rebel

Aleskei Volchenkcov stood outside his lover’s apartment building and marveled at what he had done. He yanked at the door, but it had locked shut behind him. He buzzed her apartment, but she would not answer.

He stood back at the edge of the sidewalk, teetering on the edge of the street and looked up at her window where white curtains of lace hung slightly parted. He started to yell, but thought better of it and held his tongue. Even this was too much. He had the look of position and wealth about him. People would notice. Someone would connect him with Concupi Science, Inc., his employer. 

He was leaving himself open, especially now as Lilya Datsyuka came to the window. She had covered herself in a silken robe, one hand holding it together at her throat. Even from here he could see that her face was puffy with tears. Anyone on the street could easily see the same. He hesitated, unable to risk calling out to her, and then she turned away from the window and was gone.

Aleskei slapped his hand over his mouth as if to stifle a scream, but he made no sound. Instead, he closed his eyes, sucked in deliberately through his nose, and then walked away down the sidewalk, looking he hoped very little like a man who just ended an affair.

He was young, trim and good looking. Lilya had been a surprise, but now that he had found himself able, certainly he could manage it again. Still, he fought the urge to look back over his shoulder, and instead pulled his woolen coat tight to him. Another block and he would be in his car. There he could find the time to think, to ponder this out.

Pondering, though, would not solve this mystery. He had come to her door, anticipating an evening of bliss, and had, instead, told her they could not see each other again. There was something else, something that had been at the back of his mind. His wife, Natasha. He had needed to hurry because his wife was waiting. She was in the car, waiting for him just outside the doors of Concupi Science. Again, that was nonsense. His wife was at home, blissfully unaware of his little fling.

Haunted with a sense of unease, he drove home to their townhouse with the view of the river. Leafless trees stood like sentries guarding the approach. An orange moon hung low on the horizon, showing itself briefly between the buildings and over the water. The house was dark but for the light that burned in their bedroom, on the second story, overlooking the water. He saw its glow as he slowed to make the turn. He imagined Natasha pacing before the great picture window, sobbing as she held the phone to her ear. She was on the phone. Somehow he had not doubt of that.

He also knew his world was about to end.

He pondered the strangeness of it as he trudged the last few steps to his door. If Natasha was on the phone, if Lilya had called her, then his sins would have, at last, come to haunt him. Yet, had he not ended the affair, he could have spent the evening in Lilya’s arms and no one would have ever known. He paused at the door and wished he could go back in time and change this horrible day, but, that being impossible, he worked the lock and pushed open the door. The sound of Natasha’s stifled sobs drifted down to greet him.

Lilya Datsyuka was the representative for an important client. He had met her at a convention in Brussels and had won both her business and her bed. In losing Lilya he lost the client, but with her phone call he lost much more. He had married a powerful man’s daughter, but as Lilya had once said, that would only take him so far, and it had not taken him so far that she could not tear him down again. He lost everything: wife, job, and home. He lost his very future.

As autumn chill gave way to a snow-covered winter, Aleskei drank himself to death, or, rather, he drank himself as close to death as he could afford and then settled into a shadowed alley and waited for the cold to do the rest. At first, despite being drunk, he could feel the chill air as it nibbled at his fingers and nose. Then he felt the frosty night embrace him with a hold so strong he found it difficult to breathe. At last, though, the pain and discomfort subsided, like when the sheets at first are cold and then warmth comes rolling in on the tide of a good night’s sleep. He could feel the tide now, tugging him out of consciousness. He was almost under when footsteps echoed in the alley. He thought a street gang had found him and it was apt. Even the end could not come painlessly.

Instead of beating him, the hands that reached down to him lifted him up and gently placed in the backseat of a car. Confused, but still too sick to care, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Eventually, he awoke to a stern but beautiful face staring down at him. She was a petite woman with hair that was either a light brown or a dark blonde. She had small hands and strong shoulders and a smile they conveyed the best of man’s emotions. Staring into her face he saw not a shallow beauty but the deep promise of things to come.

"Don't try to move," she said, her voice like the lilt of angels. He would never stop loving the sound of that voice, not as they grew old, not after the throat operation to remove her cancer, not ever.

Her name was Tanya. When he recovered from his alcohol poisoning she was the one to introduce him to his new world. The resistance–working against the government and, by extension, Concupi Science, Inc.–had taken notice of Aleskei’s fall from grace. 

At first he played along out of bitterness toward the company. Slowly, though, Tanya taught him to let go of his hatred, and to see, instead, that their work was not against an institution but for a people who needed their freedom. 

His own needs, his own life, dwindled away to something insignificant. This new vision of himself made it particularly difficult to ask for Tanya’s hand in marriage, but he bowed down on one knee and told her that he wanted only the chance to make her happy. To his delight, she accepted.

A new life, a new future, opened for Aleskei as he and Tanya raised their children and grew old together. They never had much, but with faith, family, and their work, they always had what they needed. When he looked back, he saw a life he could truly call blessed.

Then word came that Concupi Science had invented an unimaginable weapon, a time machine, and the resistance leaders urged Aleskei out of semi-retirement. The mission required that the ultimate price be paid, a price beyond even death itself. The thought of it tore his heart, and he expected, maybe even hoped, that Tanya would refuse and cling selfishly to the memories of a life they both dearly loved. Instead, she blinked back her tears and faced what lay before them with her characteristic and unwavering sense of duty.

"We've had our lives," she told him. "Even if all memory of our existence is wiped from this planet, we have had a wonderful life together. What matters now, is keeping that opportunity alive for the next generation and for the generation after that."

He noticed that she did not say for their children, and their children after that. If their plan worked, their lives together and the children they loved would all be sacrificed. In an instant, they would cease to have ever been.

Sensors made it impossible to sneak weapons into the Concupi Science building, but with a little inside help they could slip Aleskei in, unarmed and alone. Given a few a minutes with the time machine, he could change his history and from there change the world. He would go back and stop the affair that had ruined his marriage and career, but that would not be enough. This new self needed to know the dangers of the time machine. It needed to be ready to stop the threat. Their plan called for him to write his younger self a note, explaining as much as he could about the time machine, his mission, the affair, and the man he would need to become were he to change things. It would be the last artifact remaining of the life he had once known. 

To Tanya, he protested, "There's no guarantee that I'll take my note seriously. If I'm part of Concupi Science, I might not see the threat the time machine represents, and if I don't see that, then no amount of power will matter."

She smiled and gripped his face in her hands. "You will do what is right. You are good and selfless, and you would be so without me. It is who you are and who you were meant to become. You'll see. It is simply the nature of Aleskei Volchenkcov."

Believing that with all his heart, Aleskei broke into the Concupi Science Research and Development department. He intended to follow the plan, to go back to Brussels and stop the affair. Then he could claim a place of power within the company, and, when the time came, he could undermine the time machine project. Yet, once he started the machine and sent himself back in time, everything went wrong.

He found himself back at Lilya’s apartment. The door swung open, and, posed before him in black lingerie, she beckoned him to come to her. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “I can’t see you anymore. I’m sorry. Don’t try to call me. We’re through.”

He waited until he was on the sidewalk outside her building, and the door had locked behind him, before he re returned to the present. 

Aleaskei’s memories confused him, as if they were not his memories at all. Instead of going to Brussels, he had returned to the last date with Lilya before Natasha discovered he had been cheating. He broke off the affair as he had before, illogically and without reason but with great determination as if his whole life depended on it, as if changing nothing would change everything. 

Maybe there was something wrong with the machine. Maybe he had lost his mind.

Nothing changed. He still lost Natasha and his job, joined the resistance and fell in love with Tanya, just as before. Now, back in his own time and confused by the failure, he slipped the helmet off and looked into the faces of several screaming strangers. Two armed soldiers burst into the room, and Aleskei raised his arms in surrender.

Part Three: Revolution

The soldier’s ushered Aleskei Volchenkcov to a small, gray room and filled his veins with drugs. When the interrogators came, he told them everything. Under the influence of the drugs he could not refuse. The resistance had foreseen this possibility, however, and the base and even Aleskei's home would both be empty.

As they grilled him, he could think of no reason for why he had been unable to change time, but he could not make himself regret the failure. Had it worked, he would have removed the helmet not as a stranger but as a power broker within Concupi Science. The life he loved would have been wiped away, and in its place he would have the memory of a life lived with his first wife, Natasha. The men who now held him captive would have welcomed him as their superior. He would have lived on in wealth and power, but he wanted none of it. If he were to die, he welcomed the honor of dying as the man Tanya had taught him to be. 

He heard one of the interrogators say, "It sounds like we got lucky. He couldn't get the time machine to work."

A door slammed shut and a high-heeled staccato echoed off the walls of the small room. The interrogators made respectful murmurings, and Aleskei looked up to see Natasha, looking severe in an exquisite business suit. 

She studied his face for several seconds, and then, without smiling, said, "You look good Aleskei."

"We both look old."

She ignored him and verified with the guards that he had been drugged. Then she peppered Aleskei with questions. What had he planned to do on his time trip? What actually happened? As he talked, he could see excitement grow in her face. Eventually, she even smiled.

Without addressing anyone in particular, she said simply, "I do believe Aleskei's trip was a success.” She glanced at the interrogators. "He does not understand his trip and considers it a failure because that is the only moment of his old life left remaining.”

She leaned forward and stared him in the face. "We owe you a great deal, Aleskei.    You've cleared the way. With that machine, we will dominate the region. Perhaps, used well enough, we will learn to rule the world."    

She turned to leave, but something brought her to a halt in mid-step. When she turned back to him, the smile on her face had turned sinister. "I wonder about that old life of yours Aleskei. Does it eat at you to know you've changed everything but can't remember how?" 

She grabbed a chair from a nearby table and sat down facing him. "I suggest we do a little exploring. I want you to concentrate on your trip in time. Return to it. Relive it."    

Aleskei nodded.    

"You have told us what you did then, but I want you to look deeper now. You were in your old mind then, full of old memories and old thoughts that no longer make sense to you. Tell me, Aleskei, what were you thinking, what was in the back of your mind as you broke off the affair with that girl?" 

Aleskei tried to fight the impulse to obey. That segment of his memory was so disjointed, so out of place, that he felt an instinctive desire to avoid it, to deny the problem entirely. The drugs, however, won over instinct. He remembered the trip and the ever-present nagging thoughts that had moved him along his course.

"Change the course of a mosquito, and you can doom humanity."    

Natasha waved the notion aside. "Yes, yes. What else? Other than your concerns about the trip itself, what was on your mind?"

"I had to hurry."    

"Why?" 

The answer to her question shocked him. It came first as a memory of Natasha, aged as she was now, but different, softer. She had been crying. Aleskei understood none of this, but still the drugs pumping through his system compelled him to answer: "You were waiting."    

Natasha paused. The smile faded. "Was I? Where was I waiting?" 

"In the car, outside this building." Slowly, he saw his own discomfort written in Natasha's face. "You didn't know I was using the time machine," he explained. "I had to hurry."    

Natasha spoke as if reading from a text. “The trip was the catalyst that changed time, but the catalyst itself remains unchanged."

Then she turned abruptly and barked at everyone else in the room, "Leave us alone!"    They bowed in obedience and filed out. As the door closed, her façade of strength cracked, revealing traces of emotion. Aleskei watched as she struggled with the revelation that he had changed both their lives. After a moment the look of strength returned. "You went back to end the affair. Why?"

He started to give her the same answer he had before, but she cut him off. "Stay focused on the trip. What was on your mind then? What was your purpose?"

Aleskei struggled to answer, but the reasons conflicted in his mind, confusing him.    

To calm him, she gently touched his hand. "Let go of what you meant to do. When you were on the mission, something changed. You had a new reason for breaking off the affair. What was it?"

It took a moment to focus, but she waited. At last, Aleskei said, "I had to keep you from finding out. That knowledge was complicating things."

"Complicating what?"

"I don't know. I can't remember. You were crying. Your eyes, they were red and puffy. You were waiting for me. We were going home."

Familiar lines creased the flesh between her eyes, and she breathed out a melancholy sigh. "We were still married." She sniffed and briefly dabbed at one eye with her finger. "I can believe it. Even after that woman called me, I didn't want to leave you. It was Daddy. He insisted. It wasn't my feelings he was concerned about so much as the company. You made the company look bad."    

She squared her shoulders, drew her mouth taut and spat the words at him. "Aleskei, you were a horrible excuse for a human being."    

"I know," he said, "and I'm sorry."    

She thought that over a while and then settled back in her chair, letting go of the stiff, formal posture.    "So, this time you meant to go back and stop the affair from ever happening?    That would have been nice.    Nothing's ever hurt me that much."    

A mocking light glittered in her eyes. "I suppose I could let you try again, but then what? You and I would still be married. You'd be running the company by now, and I would be the housewife I thought I always wanted to be. It's funny, though, the way things change. I'm the Chief Science Officer, now. Did you know that?" 

He nodded.    

"Of course you did. You've been spying. Well, the truth is that as painful and difficult as my life has been, I'm rather fond of it. I like who I've become, and I don't want to give that up."    

He let that thought linger a moment before saying, "If the time machine were to be passed into full service, it would be out of your hands. The government would use it as they see fit, and who knows where their changes would bring us?"

She looked ready to disagree with him, but a moment's consideration changed that.    Instead, she said, "Look at what you did with it. You must have been one of the most powerful men in the country and now what are you? You're nothing. Nobody."

"I am," he said, "who I want to be."    

"So am I," she whispered.    

"We could keep it that way. The time machine doesn't have to work. My trip could prove that it’s flawed. The whole project could be scrubbed."    

Natasha looked up at the ceiling and sniffed again. Then she drew close to him and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Had Daddy been the one to find you, he would have had you shot."

"And you, what will you do with me?"

She put a finger on his wedding band. "Do you love your wife?"

"With all my heart."

"Are you good to her?"

"I am what I should have been to you."

She touched the ring finger on her own left hand, and though it was now naked, he saw a tan line encircling it where a ring had been not very long before. "What changes a man that much?"

He had asked himself that same question many times over the years and so answered without pause. "For me, it was being helped to stand again, after the fall."

"Purified in the fires of life." She sighed deeply, and rose to her feet. "If that's the case then Tanya ought to thank me. Tell her that, when you find her again." She hurried to the door, but instead of opening it, she placed her palm flat against it, holding it shut.    

Without turning to face him, she said, "There are so many different directions our lives could have gone. There must be better, happier alternatives, but if we go back and remove the pain, perhaps we become something less, not something more."

"Perhaps," he said.

"I guess we'll never know, since the time machine clearly doesn't work."

She turned again to leave, but he called out to her one last time. "Natasha, I am truly sorry I hurt you."    

"I know,” she said.  “We gave you serum." She put her hand to the knob but let it pause there a moment longer. "And I forgive you, Aleskei."    

The door shut behind her, and he was left alone in the room, listening to the echo of her retreat.

-End-

—Thaddeus Thomas.

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Twenty-two by seven inches, sepia-toned silver gelatin print, 1992

Cindy poses in Lan Kwai Fong, the cobble-stoned street narrow, sloped, and crowded with the bars and nightclubs that have made the area so popular with expatriates. I shot this early in the morning, so the street is empty. In her palm, Cindy holds a butterfly; it loo…

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Bill ignores the center racks, where the books change weekly and make him dizzy, and heads to the classics section. He picks up a book and begins to read. He reads the same book every day, almost the same three pages, moving forward a word or two each day. The book looks used now. The clerks frown at him, though he does not notice, and they want him to stop. They say nothing, however, because—as far as they can tell—he has never been in this store before, has never picked up that book before, has never read those three pages. It’s not his fault that every day someone enters—a man, a woman, a child, someone—and that someone picks up that copy of that book and reads it from three seventeen until three twenty-four. The book is Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. He is not yet halfway through.

Bill has ignored or adapted to the changes of three hundred years. He walked these wooded shores with the natives, with the French, and finally with the Americans. He has seen woodlands fade away and become, now, this quaint southern village. He accepts these changes as best he can, camouflaging himself under a daily shift of form, and comforting himself in whatever consistency he can find. For more than thirty years, the bookstore has been part of that consistency.

This town to him is made up of the things that resist change: buildings, roads, light poles, and trees. Over the years he has forged a routine and a path from which he never wavers. Page and Palette, a rambling bookstore made up of interconnecting rooms, fits in one small niche of that routine. It is not a destination; he has no destinations, but rather the constant present moment that is moved forward by strict routine. The routine is the rain; each moment a single raindrop.

Another day passes, and as the appointed time approaches, so does he, walking easily down Section Street to the corner bookstore with its long bank of windows in front. He walks beside two-story buildings with the stores at ground level and apartments above, and as he passes Fairhope Pharmacy on his right, across the street a woman takes a jogging step around a waste receptacle between The Book Inn and The Cat's Meow, and Bill feels a rightness in his soul.

Memory finds no hold upon the quicksand of people and cars and seasons and trends. The rightness comes when the sameness holds, and at times like these, he becomes a man with a past.

The receptacle is wood, painted white, with flowers planted at its top. A split-brick sidewalk runs between the stores and the street, and, just past The Cat's Meow, a balcony hangs over the sidewalk, looking down at the corner of Section and Fairhope Ave.

Blind to the details about the woman, he notices only her movement around the receptacle. He ignores the scattered people along the sidewalk. They mean nothing to him. He would ignore this woman, too, except for that simple movement which triggers a memory. He has seen that movement before, not once or twice, but everyday. Everyday, at this moment, a woman—a man, a child, someone—takes that same little jogging step.

Perceived memory triggers emotion, and that emotion produces in him a physical reaction: he smiles. The smile, though, is new. He does not smile at this time of day, has never smiled at this point in his walk. Anxiety swells up, erasing any thought of things being right.

A day passes, he sees her again, jogging her step around the receptacle. The sameness again thrills his soul. The emotion again brings the smile. By the third day, the smile becomes part of his routine. It ceases to be something new, ceases to be something scary, and without the anxiety, it lingers a little longer on his face.

By the end of the week, the smile comes with him as he enters Page and Palette. As he reads The Old Man and The Sea, he has an idea. He wants to talk to her, this creature that has entered herself into his routine.

The thought pleases him. Two weeks later, he is used enough to the idea to act upon it. Talking to her must come in steps, slow, glacial steps, to control the chaos such changes could bring.

First, he decides to wave to her. At three fifteen he hesitates slightly at the moment he sees her between The Cat's Meow and The Book Inn. The boldness of that hesitation thrills him. Pushing on, he lengthens the hesitation day by day. After only two weeks he comes to a full stop before continuing on to the bookstore.

Not wanting to rush things, he leaves it at that for another week before pursuing the actual wave. At last, though, he is ready, and at the right moment he twitches his forearm. Within days, the arm is actually moving. By the end of a month, he has raised the arm with his palm pointed to her as if warning her to stop. Day by day, movement is added to the upraised arm. The day the act is finally achieved, he fails to notice it. After three days, however, he understands that he has reached that moment when at three fifteen he stops, looks at the woman across the street, raises his arm, and waves.

This adventure becomes part of his routine for several weeks, and then something unthinkable happens. She looks his way and makes eye contact. Actually, this has been going on for days by the time he notices. 

At three seventeen he can barely concentrate on The Old Man and The Sea. The image of her blocks out the words. He has never looked anyone straight in the eye, soul to soul, being to being. After a few days of this he cannot remember what page he should be reading. A few days more and he cannot remember what book. Certainly, this must be love.

II

People seem suddenly thick around him. He cannot be sure of the change. He only knows he notices them more, is bothered by them more. At three fifteen he waves but can barely see her through the crowds and the cars. In the bookstore, he stands before the classics section, upset and confused. He no longer remembers what book he was reading, and the changes bother him. He wants to lose himself in the familiar, but he stands frozen by indecision and fear.

The next day is worse. Every-day life has always surrounded him with things he chose to ignore, but they were there: the people, the cars, these things that changed and followed no routine. Now they are gone, and he feels their absence. He walks alone down the sidewalk. At the appointed time, he stops and waves. 

She jogs round the receptacle between The Cat's Meow and The Book Inn. She is there. He knows the time is right, but he feels he must be late. The sky is too dark. He pushes on and reaches the bookstore on schedule. The doors are locked. The windows are boarded up. He stands at the doors, helpless, and confused.

By three fifteen the next day, the rain has been pounding for hours. The wind whips through the streets, wailing as if lost. He has not yet reached the corner. The wind and rain have held him up. Finally, a minute late, he stops outside Fairhope Pharmacy, raises his arm, and waves, but there is no one between The Cat's Meow and The Book Inn. The streets are deserted except for a lone woman at the corner, and her thin dress is whipped around her legs by the wind. He recognizes no one. The pain he feels at her absence confuses him, as if the rhythm of his life has skipped a beat, bruising the muscles of his soul.

The next day, the rain has stopped, but the streets are flooded. Debris fills the sidewalk ahead, and a woman fumbles her way around the mess. A few cars drive through the streets, and torrents of water spray up from their wheels. Many of the lights are broken. Some of the trees are down. He tries to notice none of this. He stops and waves, but across the street, no one is there. He feels a sting of regret, but already the memory of her is fading.

At three sixteen, he stands in front of the store. The locked doors and boarded windows bother him only a little.

The trees are still down the next day, and he acknowledges them now. He notices the broken streetlights, too. The people are back, but he tries to ignore them. At three fifteen, he stops and waves across the street. Between The Cat's Meow and The Book Inn a woman takes a jogging step around the waste receptacle. He fails to notice. He waves now out of routine alone.

When he stops in front of the bookstore, he finds the boards are down, but the lights are off inside. He stands and looks at the reflections in the glass until three twenty-four and then leaves.

At three sixteen the next day, the lights are on inside the bookstore. People come and go, but he stands on the sidewalk and watches the reflections. Over the next few weeks, the clerks notice that no one comes in anymore to read The Old Man and The Sea. The battered copy is given away. No one notices that from three sixteen until three twenty-four someone—a man, a woman, a child, someone—stands outside the store and stares, every day.

In the glass he sees the reflection of the street behind him. He sees The Cat's Meow and The Book Inn. He sees someone standing on the sidewalk, her back to him. He remembers seeing her in the glass before. He remembers seeing her as he waves. Each day--this woman, man, or child—whoever it is, it is the same person. She takes a jogging step around the receptacle and then stops. 

In the window, he notices something different in her reflection. For a few days that difference bothers him, but then he understands that she is turning. Soon, after only a few weeks, she makes enough of a turn to face him.

Then the day comes when, as she turns to look at him, past him, at his reflection—their eyes meet. She looks into his eyes, soul to soul, being to being. He remembers having looked into someone's eyes before. Out of the deepest recesses of his past, these new emotions stir old memories. He remembers the woman. He remembers the look. He remembers the love that burned in his heart. He looks at the reflection of the woman across the street. He looks away. He has been in love before and been hurt for it. At three twenty-four, he leaves.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Thank you for reading,

—Thaddeus Thomas

The nurse called…

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