 
Sfumato

By Kat Thomas

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Kat Thomas

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### Book One

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But, those that it will not break, it kills. It kills the very good, and the very gentle, and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry." --Hemingway

### Chapter One

**Outsider Art – noun - (aut-'si-d** ə **r** ə **rt) 1. A termed coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for Art Brut (which literally translates as "Raw Art" or "Rough Art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; focusing particularly on art by insane asylum inmates.**

"Daisy..." I exhaled.

I knelt down next to my life, softly stroking her chestnut locks.

"Come on let's get her head up Mr. Glass," Augie pragmatically said. Gingerly I cradled her head upright.

And then I saw it. The spot that was turning Daisy's dress from white to pink.

Oh god, the blood. The blood. _The blood._

### Chapter Two

Pieta – noun - (pee-ey-tah) 1. A representation of the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of the dead Christ, usually shown held on her lap.

The dirty solitary tile bathed in sunlight. The tinkling laugh that contains the sucker promise, for most, of fornication. The smile of Daisy. You, human that you are, may think later that I focus on details too much. But when my only long term standing relationship is with my memories, details are all I have.

But that is not now. That is the end. This is the beginning.

### Chapter Three

**Negative Space – noun - (ne-g** ə **-tiv sp** ā **s) 1. Empty space in an artwork, a void.**

In 1610, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died. At the point of death he was thirty-nine, and a complete failure. A brilliant artist, something that your nitwit of a century has only just rediscovered, he was also a convicted murderer.

In Rome Caravaggio had mortally stabbed a man in a duel, all over a measly bet on a tennis game. A seasoned veteran of the underbelly of life, this was not Caravaggio's first entanglement with the law. He had the reputation to be associated with quarrels, brawls, and assaults. He had been prosecuted for tossing a plate of artichokes at a most unlucky waiter. This had all resulted in being jailed, frequently. It had gotten so bad, that he always slept fully clothed with a dagger by his side for necessary protection.

Caravaggio had been one of the most renowned, and heftily paid, Roman painters. But one disaster after another had caused his genius to be eclipsed by his catastrophe of a life. He fled his sentence conviction for the southern climate of Naples and Sicily. After four years in exile he had created a series of paintings, bribery for the patrons of Rome who had vainly attempted to gain a pardon for this train wreck of an artist.

Caravaggio had hope. He had finally received word he could return to his homeland and set sail for Rome. But in a Tuscan port of Palo his small ship was detained. There he was, ironically, mistaken for another low life degenerate and was seized for questioning. While in jail the tide turned, for the worse. Caravaggio's ship sailed with his collection of paintings, and not him. Two days later he was released from prison, an innocent man who was now infected with a deadly case of malaria.

Desperate, Caravaggio decided to chase after his precious paintings, canvases he needed for the men on high who wielded the power. Delirious in the blistering heat of summer, Caravaggio treaded the scalding beaches of Italy fervently trying to catch something that was physically impossible. The farthest he got was the Port'Ercole where he collapsed and died a lonely miserable death in an infirmary run by the clergy of San Sebastino.

Caravaggio's life was a series of bad timing, bad judgment, and straight up bad luck, but he did create turbulent paintings full of contrasting brightness and darkness. Personally, I am more of a fan of the subtly of Da Vinci, give me his sfumato over Caravaggio's chiaroscuro any day of the week, but regardless the man was a genius. Despite Caravaggio's pathetic life story the man created works of art that were revered throughout the world during his lifetime, and once again in this century after being completely forgotten for four hundred years. He created truly great art, a perfect window into the pure emotion of humanity.

So what have you, sitting in your cubicle coma, done?

That is right: diddly squat.

But you are not alone. Everyone hits a point in their life where potential becomes an ugly word. When the person you could have been shrinks into a mirage of evaporating ambition and fading prophecy.

It does not matter your professional aspirations. You could wish to be a movie star, an astronaut, or the president of whatever puffed up country you reside in. And then one day you wake up and you are a real estate agent, a chemistry teacher, or just a loser that ran for the school board and lost.

It is the sickness to which everyone feigns immunity. I am invincible, you think. All of _my_ dreams will come true. And then one day you wake up and discover you are ordinary. Hacking your lungs up with the black plague of mediocrity.

But this is not the story of your pathetic life; it is the story of mine. Or lack thereof.

I too believed I was inoculated, that I was to be _known_. I was to live my existence with a ferocity whose only response would be cowering before my very might. I was to be an ubermench; and not the Man of Tomorrow comic, you witless clam of a reader. But unlike your meager moments of self-examination, it took me a millennium of toiling to get to this realization.

Let us breeze by that last statement, as you probably do me every day. Nothing unordinary about me. You walk right by. Nicely dressed, but indistinguishable. Tall, but not too tall. If you took a second glance, which you never have a reason to do, you might note a head that is too large for its thin torso, the receding hairline helps in aiding this realization. But if you were to stare harder, which we all know is not polite, you might note that I do not smile.

But what if I were to smile? It has been awhile, quite awhile, but stranger things have happened. Chances are it would be of the cocktail party variety smile, polite yet comfortable, always in control. Never would it be one of those Perma smiles, one of those grins that starts at your mouth and invades your whole face until your eyes are shining like the once visible Milky Way. But for sake of argument let us say I did smile this of utter happiness.

If perchance my lips were to part into a real smile of actual joy you might note my Left Canine tooth. Now this Left Canine is a perfectly average humanoid tooth, but after a moment more your eyes would be compelled to trail across to my Left Lateral Incisor. Said optics would then continue across the veneer of my mouth, skipping past my two Central Incisors, over the Right Lateral Incisor, before landing on my Right Canine.

Funny, you would think, I have never found beauty in a tooth before, but there is something intoxicating about that Right Canine. There is something primal about that tooth, you would think, sharp to the point of almost being fanglike. With no regards of those social cocktail niceties you would lean over trying to get a closer look at that tooth, at its savagery.

But I do not smile. The mouth remains closed for business. You see nothing.

Pay attention because, since I am not a fan of Supernatural labels, I really I am only going to say this once: Vrykolakes. Katakhanoso. Upiry. Blutsauger. Damned. Bogeyman. Blooksucker. Undead. Nosfereteu. Vampire.

I can hear your mind right now. I can hear it whispering through your little peepers as they hover above theses riptide like words. A monster, you think, but monsters do not exist. That is right, you are sensible. You are a grown up who has cast aside childlike beliefs for the cold predictability of rational reality. It is a good story that you believe most of the time; but I bet you, Doubting Thomas that you are, are asserting this statement with a tad less certainty than you care to admit. And perhaps, if you were alone, and did not have to worry about losing said rational face, you glanced over your shoulder, just once to make sure.

Yes, Virginia, there are monsters. Although we prefer the title non-Fatal, monster with its negative connotations is just so anti-PC. Not that there is a huge constituency these days, we are nothing if not candidates for the endangered species list. It is simple: nobody else believes in us. It is not only Tinkerbell who fades out of being without faith.

Think about that for a moment. It is as if a rock stood in the middle of a town. The square was established around it. Everyone knew the rock: they named it, drove their cars around it, maybe high school students graffiti-ed it the day before they were to matriculate. The rock's existence was unquestionable.

And then it was not. Over time people stopped noticing the rock. They were too busy to trifle with such matters. It became something only mentioned to the very young and the very gullible. And then one day there was no rock, because the people could drive right through it. It simply ceased to exist.

I am the rock, or rather the lost potential of the Stonehenge that rock could have been.

It is a sad existence, one that has a complete lack of recognition.

But, I do not seek your puny pity. You should still fear me. Sure my Right Canine does not drain to dry, but the result is always an "untimely end." Not enough for most to notice, but enough to satiate the hunger, and do its job.

Sadly the only person other than yours truly that sees my craftsmanship is the morgue attendant, and even then it is anonymous. Usually my official classification is "unexplained illness." My credit is stolen away by a sniveling weak-chinned pudgy man who spends his nights with stiffs wondering why smoking hot Cathi, note the "i "not the "y", down the hall, you know the one with big tits, will not even smile at him. But, even if he were to recognize my handiwork, could you imagine the audacity of a medical examiner claiming that the deceased was killed by a parasitical Supernatural? There is no little box to check on the sheet for that one.

Sometimes they try to be creative with an investigation, usually not; there is never for a budget for that sort of thing except on television shows. Instead I am mostly labeled as heart disease, of the ambiguous kind. Elusive. Indefinite. Undefined. Inexplicable. Uncertain. Unexplained. Usually but I recently received my most patronizing insult to date: West Nile, a bug bite.

If there was ever a moment in existence where I wished for my Left Canine to match my Right Canine, this is it. A bug bite! As if I was an insect, a vermin that you dismissively wave away with your hand as it buzzes around anonymously. An infestation lacking any moment of contemplative thought. An insect has no flair for the creative; it has no flair for anything because it does not think. It just lives its short useless life and then dies. And nothing mourns it. Not even other insects.

Okay, I am sure by now you have so many questions. You might want to know if all the stories and legends are true? You might want to know where my other tooth is? You might want to know of my life before? Or how my cherry was popped, how I happened into my profession? So do I.

Pardon me, now I feel I should correct myself. I do believe that I misspoke before. To say people do not believe in me is slightly erroneous. They do not believe in me until the moment of contact. But even then there is the slightest suggestion of disbelief. As if maybe I am a dream, a hallucination that is not to be accepted. Should they trust their primal fear, or rationalize me away like Santa Claus? But those questions drain away as the moment of contact is replaced with an even more important moment: the moment when they realize that they are going to die.

Then they can most definitely be made to believe. A moment I completely savor. It is a sweetest of revenges against my marginalization. And this would have been my existence. Tiny bubbles of fury followed by painfully endless epochs of being on the periphery.

But what had always been was to change. And by chance or fate, the catalyst for change is not some huge moment, as it always is not, but a series of minute moments that somehow always seem to break that proverbial camel's back.

There was a straw and his name was Steve.

I usually do not talk to my prey. I am not self pornographic. Do not call me a cat; frankly, I do not pleasure myself with taunting.

I am direct. It is a job, for better or worse, my job.

As always, I do it quick and clean. Gore is so unbecoming. God, how I hate blood. Sanguinity is a byproduct of my livelihood, but not one that I embrace. I do not believe in chaotic venesection. I hate how humans they become so messy when injured, oozing about. It is also so untidy.

I can be savage, but it is always cleanly savagery. No reason to soil the clothes, dry cleaning being so expensive these days. What is it they say: cleanliness is next to God?

If I am impulsively trolling for a late night nosh, something I rarely attempt nowadays, I am patient. I wait for my moment. You know the mise-en-scene: dark alleyway, unlit hallway, or a moonless sky. Here is where your beloved cinema got it right.

I enter the scene and I execute. Most of the time my mind is on something else. A book I just read, a Ken Burns documentary I recently watched, or did I leave lights on at my suburban home? That is the thing: if you have done the same job for almost eleven hundred years you can do it with your eyes closed.

Once upon a time people did realize, and accepted. Curving into my body like a lover who had resisted long enough. Oh yes, I know how this story ends. Accepting their fate like sheep treading towards the slaughterhouse, embracing the hopeless surrender.

But there was none of that in the eyes of Steve as he diddled his pornographic phone while waiting the last train of the night at one T station. He pushed away at his toy as I approached his left flank. As my mouth reached for his luscious neck, nestled between a navy colored Peacoat and a Crimson colored collegiate scarf, I hesitated a moment.

By this time Steve actually felt the need to engage himself in his life. He tore his optics away from the text message he had just written declaring that the party he had just left was nothing but "a sausage fest and two girls he had already hit," and into my line of sight.

I have to admit, there was something about Steve: a void in his eyes. A dullness that could not comprehend even the most basic functions of humanity. They gleamed back with the fogginess of someone who had gotten laid early in life and never looked back.

Intellectuals will always argue that their generation is the decline of civilization. That everything in the past was peachy academic keen in a utopic world where everyone was a smarty-pants.

And I, social archeologist that I am, am here to proclaim that is not the case. The majority of the world is made up of dumb people who have snippets of enlightenment, if they are lucky, but who pass them aside for moments of happiness. Because, as hopefully you with your attempted stabs at elucidation will know, the two are as different as darkness and illumination. And though I have seen many a blank stare in my time there was something about Steve's opacity.

I will never be completely sure why I did it. Perhaps I wanted some validation, someone to recognize me. Perhaps I was just bored with the status quo. Whatever the reason I did something that I had not done since my amateur days when I still had a flair for the dramatic. "Do you know who I am?" I asked him.

And he raised his eyes for a split second, scoffed with dismissive stagnation, and returned to thumbing his phone before absently committing to a reply, "You're nobody, just another loser."

Steven missed it, as he had many things in his life, but I replied. Silently I gave a rebuttal to this statement as the corners of my mouth slowly rose up blooming into an angry smile. I made my move.

His death was nothing exciting. And neither was the few hours afterwards.

But some words creep. They do not hit upon impact, but hover above your head in a halo of dirty delayed sickness. And then one day these floating atomic bombs, orbiting around you like one of the many moons of Pluto, is inhaled. Radioactive particles that with unconscious invisible breaths kill you, and everyone you love. If you, simple human that you are, can actually fathom what love is. These said words methodically tunnel deep into your lungs, taking on a weight that was never experienced upon detonation. They burrow and metastasize, until finally they find their emotional crypt, lying in your heart like a piece of lead at the bottom of a lake.

You are nobody, just another loser.

### Chapter Four

**Crepuscular – adjective - (kri-p** ə **s-ky** ə **-l** ə **r) 1. Of, relating to, or like twilight. Or, dim; indistinct; glimmering; imperfectly luminous; obscure.**

And so I came to bring this up at the meeting.

I am a social hermit save one night a week. The meeting is nothing formal, just some underworld beings getting together in a rented basement apartment to hang out on a weekend night. Unofficially we call it the Friday Night Killer Club, a misnomer if there ever was one. Mainly we commiserate on the forgotten crack of hell we seem to have fallen into. Call it AA for monstrosities.

There is a Larry. Not his real name, Larry is a hater. Self-loathing looks terrible on humans, worse on a 3,000 year-old Mesopotamian mummy. He has given up on it all. Figures it is better just to hide. All he is on this planet is a joke. More so than any other non-Fatal he is unable to drum up a shred of fear. But Larry does not want to be scary. He just wants to have a 9 to 5, a mortgage and a wife. It is pathetic, but who Larry really wants to be is Steve.

And Lobo: he is partial to full moons, hates silver bullets, and ladies he is an animal in the sack. So what if his reputation is more of a lecherous hand than casting a long dark shadow of fear. With his shaggy long hair and requiring the services of a good orthodontist, people see him as more aging rocker than the devil's minion. He is the guy at the bar hitting on girls that he could only get in his glory days, a point that he purposely overlooks in a mist of self-medicating cannabis.

And then there is Jerry. Yeah, that is his real name. Blessed with intelligence to the point of being a hubristic curse and totally tactless. Jerry is a lawyer.

Hey, every team has to have a mascot.

We are the ghosts of monster middle management. Once upon a time we hoped for better; now we just want to be allowed to settle into the dust of whatever. An effigy to the gravitational pull of downward mobility.

And what happens at these meetings of the past rulers of the realms of fear? We usually play pinball or air hockey, and talk about the good old days; not that they were even that great for this lot. For a while we had a ping-pong table but Jerry was always arguing that we were cheating when he was losing a game. It got to be such an annoyance that Larry secretly called the Salvation Army and donated the table to avoid further altercations. Someday, we delude ourselves, we will wrestle up the enthusiasm to go out for a slay. And yet, it never happens.

It was there on an idle Friday night, that Steve's last words were strategically mentioned.

"He called me a loser," I kvetched to my fellow geldings. I had to wait the proper time before interjecting in my malmots. In my premeditation I hoped to conceal the cancer that had nestled inside of me.

"You're not a loser," Larry automatically affirmed, as much for my benefit as for his own. If I am a loser what does that make Larry?

"But to this shilly-shally of human I was. A smelly silly Fatal. He referred to me as a loser. If only he could comprehend what a petulance his entire race is to me. Dog, if only I did not have to feast on them. Why cannot they just appear on my doorstep, like milk in the 1950s?"

"Now don't get your panties in a bunch," said Jerry, staring me down with his green eyes, fitting, green the color of greed. "It's all in the way you interpret it Chomper." He could spin anything except the ability to fit in with his own species.

"Well he 'interpreted' me as a loser right before I lapidated him," I countered. Whatever slight mood elevation I might have had, let us call it mild contentment from my act of viscosity, had been completely squelched into a bad mood.

"Why did it affect you so much?" Lobo asked with a moment of lucidity flashing into his foggy Husky eyes, one blue, one brown.

Because: It is true.

And that is always the worse thing to hear: the truth. But I was not going to address that to my band of over the hill Supernatural butchers, and one lawyer groupie.

"Because I should not be mistaken for such a thing," I lied. I then added, for myself more than my compatriots, "you know there was a time when my name caused fear."

"Yeah..." said Larry, probably thinking of a time when he was still using his real name.

And then Jerry smiled the slightest of smiles. I had seen that smirk before on him, it was the smirk of someone who believes he keeps the company of lower status entities to bolster his own self-esteem. "I think it's all in your mind Chomper," he said with that dog-damn annoying smirk. Note the lack of "S" on my atrocious nickname; God Jerry is such an asshole. "That you're choking on fear."

"I have killed every walk of person on this earth. I am not afraid of anything," I protested. Yet, another bold-faced lie.

But, I rushed to continue my thought, to not let the silence, that all knowing silence, be heard. "It is not my fault really: I am totally bound. I have restrictions. Do you know how many ways I can get killed? There are crucifixes, holy water, and most well trained priests. Luckily at least the latter was diminishing; I had not encountered one of those for a least two hundred years. Oh yes, and there is a little thing called the sun. Just another three billion years before that one burns out. It is a regular minefield out there for me."

"So don't just disarm the bomb, but the entire battlefield."

Irked I yipped back, "Stop quoting sound bites at me. You sound like a presidential candidate."

"The truth: man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is the sea, in him your great contempt can go under." Jerry has a photographic memory, an attribute which makes his criminal defense batting average astronomical.

Lobo huffed out the ever so deep response of, "huh?"

"Nietzsche," Jerry said, revealing the author like an eighteenth century sideshow magician.

"What are you droning on about?" I whined, wanting so much in that moment to rescind on our oath to never eat him.

"Will you just listen for a moment: ever take a philosophy class?"

"This is coming from the lawyer?"

"I had to take ethics to graduate law school," he retorted tugging at his socks. Jerry is the kind of man who wears cheap white tube socks and constantly spends all his time pulling them up.

I rolled my eyes, "Jerry, I lived through the Middle Ages. All people prattled on for those centuries was philosophy and theology."

"Well Chomps, do you remember the 19th century German philosopher Nietzsche saying, 'God is dead'"?

"Yeah." I had ingested him the day before yesterday, but I could still hear the apathetic attitude of Steve in every reverberation of my voice.

"Well, that's your argument," he said like a feline satiated on yellowbird. "Kill God and you'll be fine."

It was now my turn to rebuff with a hyper intelligent "Huh"?

Jerry sighed a sigh of patronization, "Look, you're scared of all the symbols of Christianity that bind and block you from the killer you could be. Right? Crosses, churches, holy water, etc. But if you were really serious about becoming successful you would dispose of these roadblocks."

"Jerry, I know that Christianity is on the decline. That the only time most people make it to church is for a wedding or a funeral. But I think I would get staked quicker than a heartbeat if I started destroying religious icons left and right."

"No, not physically," he said with a chuckle. "Mentally, mentally destroy them."

Lobo barked, "Jerry just explain it instead of dancing around like the canary who ate the cat." He then turned back to the addictive blinking circuit board of the pinball machine. The only thing Lobo could decimate was his own high score.

"It's the law of attraction," Jerry announced triumphantly. "That's the loophole: just conceive your own reality."

"Jerry will you stop with the legalese."

"Give it up."

"Give what up?"

Three Supernaturals with blank stares looked back. Myself and Larry towards Jerry, Lobo at the pinball machine. A true lawyer he grinned at his bright and shiny new technicality, "if you're can't get hurt then you can do whatever you want Chomper." Did I mention how I loathed that infernal nickname? Don't play by their rules, create your own." He added, "It works for a lot of politicians I defend."

Off our perplexed gazes he continued, "Quantum physics believes that the universe emerges from thought and everything we encounter is just precipitated thought. This is Rene Descartes, 'I think, therefore I am.' You're not only creating your existence, but universal destiny. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, 'the world is my idea.' Haven't any of you read The Secret? It was a New York Times bestseller. You guys are fucking immortal, what the hell do you all your time?"

Larry's mouth would have dropped further but those pesky bandages were in the way.

"Blah blah blah, blah blah," I retorted. Fatals eat asparagus and your pee smells funny; I eat and my entire persona modifies.

Giving me the death stare of a grade school nun Jerry continued, "You're probably ahead of the curve, being an underworld being. You have infinitely more power than any human on Earth. With some focus you could manifest power that would only be bound by your mind's conception. You've just been destroying your possibilities with negation. If you give anything enough attention it will become a truth. You my friend could be God."

Illumination had finally found a landing spot. I could be my own big Labrador in the sky.

"So what you are saying is that if I do not believe they will hurt me then they will not?"

"A double negative sentence, but you're correct. It's just like walking across of bed of hot coals."

Was it really that simple?

"But what about holy water?"

"It burns because you enable it."

"And crosses?"

"Just the most popular trademark of all time."

"And priests?"

"Dinner."

My mind was rushing with potential. Absolute power lay ahead of me like the horizon through a telescope focusing from blurriness into a hard line.

And then, I hesitated. "I do not know if it is possible."

"Why not?"

"Jerry, how can I give up God?"

"Just like a child gives up Santa Claus. You outgrow it."

I am sure by now the judgment has crept into your mind. How can a creature of the night truly fight for his belief of God... but hey let us examine the logic: I am, what is known as, a minion of the Devil. Does that mean I have ever met the big man down below? No. But supposedly he still manages it all from underneath. He is the wizard behind the curtain; at the end of the day, he is the one who writes my check of existence. Hopefully you can wrap your brain around this kindergarten syllogism.

Major premise: Mr. Glass exists.

Minor premise: Mr. Glass is a factotum of the devil.

Conclusion: Therefore, if Mr. Glass exists than the devil must exist.

And, what is the devil but middle management to the man upstairs.

Major premise: The devil exists

Minor premise: The devil is a minion (albeit a begrudging one) of God.

Conclusion: Therefore, if the devil exists than God must exist.

Throwing this inductive reasoning out the window would be bigger than discovering there was a landmass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Let me make it easier for you, tinsel brain that you have: you in your middle-American lifestyle have never met the President of the United States, but still there is something warm and fuzzy about thinking that he is running it all from his elliptical office with the big red emergency telephone.

"Chomper it's not like you converse with God all that often anyway," Jerry pointed out.

True. I was not as if I had been avoiding the Infinite. Really we just do not run in the same circles; that would necessitate me knowing my boss first. I would first have to start going to the White House before I could meet the President of France.

"It can't be that easy," snorted Lobo as he attempted to beat every high score he has established from the whirling dinging distraction machine occupying the corner. Leave it to him be a critical spectator in the Battle Royale of morality.

"It is. Chomper here has just been thinking of himself as imperfect," responded Jerry. "It's easier to believe you can't do it alone, because it's more comforting to have an imaginary best friend. We've fashioned a postulation of bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content because without these articles of faith nobody could make it through the day. It's our social contract with the world. But this doesn't mean that they are something real. Life is not the argument against opportunity. One of the conditions of life could be error."

Life is just an easier pill to swallow with the feeling that there is someone with culpability exceeding you.

"And how would this work for the sun?" Lobo asked with more lucidity than was deserved.

"I do believe one of the first things I learned in Hebrew school Lassie was that God created it on the first day. You ever heard of a little statement called 'Let there be light?' Believe me, drop the deity and you'll never have to worry about getting a sunburn again." Lobo growled lowly to the pinball machine he had just renamed Jerry.

"But, can you prove it?" queried Larry. Larry always looked for the safe bet. You should see him at poker; it is more than dismal.

"No, I can't. But remember you can never truly prove anything, at best the supposition can be seen to have no evidence to the contrary," countered Jerry.

"Now, it sounds like you're dictating a college term paper," I cracked. Whenever I feel uncomfortable bad jokes flow like wine.

"So it's a sure bet?" asked Larry, with the hopefulness of a doomed Tennessee Williams heroine.

Silence. "Well," confessed Jerry, "there is a catch."

Larry wheezed. He pulled out his sand colored plastic inhaler, a modern day rosary for the neurotic. He never uses it, but holding it in his hands placates him all the same.

"Ah, yes the proverbial catch," I sneered, dashing my hidden attempt at hope.

"You must fully commit. If there is even a single grain of you that still believes in God then you're destroyed, burned with every piercing ray of the ultra-violets. You must have unwavering faith in your disbelief."

Even the belief in nothing has rules. Remember in quantum physics the baby and the bathwater are the same thing. When you are an anarchist, you do not disregard only the laws you dislike; like the ones about smoking in public, not making a right on red in the city of New York, or having to always wear a seatbelt. No, anarchy stipulates that you have to destroy the entire textbook; including the really big ones like not killing other people. Not that I had been following that one very well for the last millennium.

The stark simplicity of this statement was beguiling. Very little of our choices are black and white. Slippery slopes are exactly what they are: chutes and ladders that either elevate or debase us. Most everyone can get talked into, or talk themselves into, anything under the right circumstances.

But this, destroying God, was not an area of vanishing smoke. It was most definitely a hard line.

"It's getting late," suggested Larry. "We should get going." One morning he had run into a businessman on the way to work who had mistaken him for a late night costume party participant. It had haunted him for months afterwards.

"Yeah," agreed Lobo. "I gotta get some sleep, so much to do tomorrow."

Liar, I thought. There was nothing to do tomorrow but murder time.

As we traipsed out of the clubhouse Larry offered some half-hearted words of encouragement. "Don't worry about what he said. It's just idle talk."

I was not quite sure if he was referencing Steve or Jerry. Probably, neither did he.

### Chapter Five

Frottage – noun - (fro-täzh) 1. The technique of rubbing with crayon or graphite on a piece of paper which has been placed over an object, or an image achieved in this way. Such impressions are usually made from such highly textured subjects as leaves, wood, and gravestones.

It is not like my existence was that great up to this point anyway. Even in my heyday I was a speck of dust to the burning comets that trail blazed ahead. But every star, no matter how small, must fall to earth eventually.

History has torn away at the ones who burned bright until there was nothing left. There may still remain a few sparklers, nestled deep in secluded bunkers. Sequestered princes in private kingdoms the size of petri dishes, imprisoned by their need to live life to the fullest. They fan the flames of their delusional glory days in the privacy of their own homes. Unlike them I keep with the times. Pathetic I am not, just a realist. A realist who lives in one of the larger mid-sized metropolitan cities in this country.

I may not be celebrated, but I am comfortable. Although my body comes sans the sagging skin folds, the signs of middle age are written all over me. I have mellowed to the point of tedious grayness, settling for security. How is that for a consolation prize for not perishing, girls and boys?

You digest the paper to discover what is being stirred by the hand of history: I read the newspaper like a homeless man would a grocery store circular. But I am forever staring at the pastries in the display window. I look, but do not touch. I may be tempted to become more aggressive, but I know my place. I stay in the shallow end of the pool, happily drowning in inches of water.

It is funny how the least daring of each tribe are the ones that last the longest. Others may be revered, remembered for what they could have done, but they did not go the distance I have. Joie de vivre impaled them, but I persisted. They went out on top, in a brilliant burst of flames. James Dean and his beloved Porsche Spyder while I am Orson Wells touting boxed wine, Citizen Kane just a foggy recollection for those dim witted television commercial viewers.

Someday I will just be a myth. Or maybe I already am and nobody informed me.

But how does an immortal being pass his time, when all he has is infinity? A typical mundane night begins with me arising an hour after sunset, do not want to risk it. I suppose you are envisioning a Spartan castle with nothing but that one velvet lined coffin. It is fantastical how you will buy into the flickering images of the silver screen but not that the world is bigger than your measly little philosophies of life and death.

My abode, just outside the city of Boston in the glorious suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a well maintained haven that includes cozy wood burning fireplaces, custom ceiling fans, plasma televisions, granite countertops, a fully equipped kitchen with Viking and Bosch appliances, and a wine refrigerator, not that the last two items were even plugged in. A mere half-hour by the MBTA's Commuter Rail line, Wellesley is the paradigm for every neo-classical small town in the America: not one but two botanical gardens at the local college, dogmatically well manicured lawns, sidewalks that are conscientious of tree roots, obscenely overeducated residents, and neighborhoods that are full of romantic moods without veering overboard.

Now try real hard for a moment to concentrate and focus your agate marble sized brain. Would you sleep in a coffin if it were not necessary? Once upon a time, it was a diversionary tactic used to confound demon hunters. No use for that one anymore. My bed has become a work of art fashioned over eons. Masselini designed the hand carved headboard in the sixteenth century. It is constructed out of wood that succumbed to extinction two hundred years ago. My sheets are five hundred count Egyptian cotton. I have thirteen decorative pillows in a variety of harmonizing color tones. I am the ultimate creature of comfort.

Perhaps if your brain enlarged to the size of an amoeba you might marvel: how do I finance my never-ending loser lifestyle? The thing about wealth is it breeds, like rabbits. It is delightful how if you have money, no matter how shady its original origins, it will just accrue and accrue. Bet that statement makes you hate me: good.

See it all revolves around the money; it is always about the money. Have enough, and nobody asks too many questions. The pattern of my lifespan is so standard now that my daydreams consist of someone actually catching me. From start to finish the average lifespan of my financial advisors is about thirty years. Up until this century it was less, but with today's wonders of cosmetic surgery I am able to maintain my ageless appearance for much longer without stirring up suspicion. I initially come in playing the role of the young wiz kid just a few years out of college full of smart and nifty ideas. I am just startling to settle into the mundanity of a working life, with a thinning temple to prove it.

Oh the joyous blessing of an eternally receding hairline! You see, garden snails that you are, we do not all get the movie star pleasure of looking like Robert _Pattinson_ , or Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise; luckily I am not doppelganger for Max Schreck either.

It is one of God's sick jokes that for the last thousand years of my existence I have been in the constant state of male pattern baldness. In the deep of my fog of a past, when I was of the living, humans had a life expectancy that was somewhere around the ripe old age of twenty-four years. This was of the era when starvation was a way of life and yearly baths were considered really pushing the hygienic line. Life was hard in those Dark Ages, thus there was little time for follicle scrutiny. But in today's era, where survival is replaced by utter boredom, there is nothing but mane judgment in the optics of my surrounding Fatals. Sometimes it is blessing not to be able to look at your reflection in the mirror.

Five years later I am back to chumming it up with my money managers, now impersonating an expectant Dad. At the ten-year mark, I am into my wife and son, Junior, looking for sound investments, but still willingly to take a guaranteed risk or two. Fifteen and twenty bring more groundwork on "my boy's future." The last decade has me "traveling" extensively. I conduct most my business by third parties during these years allowing the memory of me to fade into shadows and fog. Besides who really remembers a boring infrequent businessman? Sure, you would identify me when I am upon your immediate vision, but when asked to describe me the adjective of choice would be average.

And then I die.

This is the part that I revel in. Oh the delight and fun! Being a non-Fatal robs me of the distractions that idles the minds of humans in their golden years. You see, I never have the pleasure of wondering how I am going to go. You would be surprised how much time in a Fatal's life this morbid fantasy takes up, whether it be daydreaming about the Big C or getting hit by a bus. Thus, when I get the treat of "dying" every seventy years or so I am quite titillated by it.

Death is a time consuming project. I write obituaries for the local papers. I go and take pictures of myself in my "youth." Until twenty years ago, I went through the dog and pony show of burying a coffin of rocks in the ground, but humans do not fact check like they used to, why bother when there are an endless series of distractions to keep you focused on your own ego. Pity, I really did love the theatrics of that part. A few times I have put my toe in the water by having a wake. These did not go well.

They never received a great turnout. When you do not work, have kids, or go to church, you are not bound by any of the institutions that bind humans together. It always ended up being attended mainly by those odd people who go to funeral services without knowing the person in the casket, Eleanor Rigby style.

After my untimely demise I wait five years and show up as the heir apparent son. The amount of times that my "my boy" has heard that he looks exactly like his father by his aging banker with budding cataracts is astounding. But the momentary resemblance is a drop in the sea of ego. People are always thinking of themselves. If you realize how much they only want to go back to doing this you can manipulate them in any number of ways.

Longevity is a game of persuasion. Searching for that slight edge in the shameless attempts at your life. Margins are tight and corner cutting is necessary when you are a non-Fatal. Survival, like football, is a game of inches. Be it living further away from the equator to have less rays of daylight to ransacking a nursing home because nobody thinks twice about its nightly body count. Inches, for better or worse.

### Chapter Six

**Stendhal Syndrome – noun - (sten-däl sin-dr** ō **m) 1. Dizziness, panic, paranoia, amnesia, or other nervous conditions caused by viewing certain art objects or by trying to see too many works of art in too short a time.**

In a line of work where the bulk of all activity revolves around scouting for new outlets of energy I have broken down my possibilities into easily comprehensible odds.

For me the most worthwhile venture for my capital investment is a female over the age of forty. Logically, they are easiest to seduce. Living their lives of quiet desperation, they are the ones that hide their loneliness in plain sight. Embarrassed that they are forced to start dating again or, even more desperate, still dating.

Now I know all the feminists out there will bitch and moan, but frigid man haters hear me out. It is not that females are weak and stupid and males are not. Believe me on most occasions I would have to say the opposite is true.

The deviation instead is that they just want to believe more. Most prostitutes will tell you their job is more about listening than it is about fornication. All you need to do is acknowledge your Fatal power source and your energy supply is all but guaranteed.

And because of this I am a whore. Forever smiling, plastically marveling at how unique each wretched lady is. Before they are euthanized I give them everything they ever wanted: a perfect moment with someone who truly appreciates them for who they are. I make their little hearts beat just a little faster. I give them what they wanted more than anything else: hope. If they were to live past that night, I would be the person they would spend the rest of their life quietly masturbating to. Hope that all their dreams are still possible.

Ah heartbeats, the soundtrack for my endless life. I have to say it is the poltergeist pallor trick that I am most proud of. Forget the preteen romance novels, I do not have supersonic hearing; I cannot hear people from miles away. But I can hear the deluge of blood underneath your skin. And in the center, the Archimedes screw powering the impulse of life. It can be spellbinding. Strolling though a subway after a symphony concert, bodies pressed up close, is more a cacophony than any orchestra ever could be. In these moments of stalking though a crowd I feel the true hunger, animalistic almost. I must vanquish these ever beating tell tale hearts and find peace in satiation. And so I have become an inadvertent seducer of over the hill females, tackling the harder trial of manipulating the heart.

I have constructed the perfect date. Or let me correct myself, I have constructed the perfect semblance of a date. A date connotes involvement, but really I am just marinating my meat before my repast. Like a comedian I have constructed pinpoint timing to perfect lines to result in expected squeals of delight. Lines that never get old because my target will never be around to repeat it the next day to her girlfriends.

But to become truly corporate I had to study from the masters. I read every piece of material out there from Machivelli to Sun Tzu, from serial killers and Starbucks. I employ all their classic techniques, naturally throwing in my own personal flare. Timeless tricks such as relocation; move them to another location and psychologically they are tricked into thinking that emotionally we have progressed into a closer more intimate bond. This company move is also vital for pouncing at yet to be determined undisclosed site.

Charm. Relocation. Enjoy.

I know what you are thinking. What a cad I am. An absolute dandy of disregard. A hypocrite, you say; only two chapters earlier I spoke of not playing with my food. Yes but sometimes I chose to be entertained by my prey. And considering your race is nothing but a congregation of raging hypocrites, I do believe I deserve _une petite_ amount of leeway.

And, mindless floating jellyfish, you are missing my point: I am not taunting them. I am doing them a service. I am putting them out of their misery. They flit about inattentive to their sad little lives, wounded birds searching for one moment of joy. I allow their ending to be quick. Their lives have been riddled with nothing but disappointment; they deserve at least that. I seek the old and weak. Everyone else is just too much work.

Old maids. The people who keep kidding themselves that there might be someone out there who will love them for who they are. That is a line that might be swallowed when everything is perky and antigravitational; of course it is easy to get someone to love you then, just like old men that reek of money. How many twenty year olds do you see with a penniless octogenarian?

These are women who have lost the hope of anything. Sometimes they are on a date with some creep but most of the time I find them in simple daily life. They are everywhere. Stealing people away requires way too much energy, and leaves the pesky residue of witnesses. At the library, the video mart, or even at my most favorite fishing hole: the art museum. Miserable lonely people are ubiquitous to life.

God, I adore the art museum! Art has always been a passion of mine, but those obnoxious rays of ultra violet barred me from these houses of worship for the religion of art. For the longest time I was restricted to picture books. And then the glory came. It came in ninth decade of the twentieth century, in the societal want to make everything, including the once viewed stuffy museum, into a requisite commercial opportunity to exchange fluids with a member of the opposite sex.

In layman's terms: sex sells.

These hallowed treasure troves became subjected to mediocre jazz music and people with desperation ranging from a hint to a bath. But for someone who has only been able to reach art through the pages of picture books it was an illumination.

Please note, in the beginning it was not about the strawberry fields of food that awaited me, it was strictly for the art. The Museum of Fine Arts, my personal temple, houses some of the most prestigious artwork of the world: the sincere seascapes of Winslow Homer, the French classical masterpiece of Nicholas Poussin's Mars and Venus, Claude Monet's attempt at finally getting that grainstack right, this time at (Sunset), and Katsushika Hokusa's heartbreaking catastrophe The Great Wave. It is an art lover's wet dream.

Sure, inchworms that you are, there is the luxury of the information superhighway. Luxury my ass, a tiny condom sized image on a screen does nothing to compare with real art in living color; pardon the pun, but considering my audience I could not help myself on this one.

Unfortunately, the building that houses the art is never perfect. The walls are always the most pallid of whitewashed colors. Highly polished floors of wood; always of a cool Alfred Hitchcock blonde coloring. God, and the illumination, do not get me started. Take a moment to really use your walnut sized brain to think about it, electricity was not around for most of the existence of art, yet the people in charge of their final resting places always insist on overhead light bulbs that do nothing but glare accusingly. But these are trifles of the inferior when compared to the masterpieces housed in this cathedral, this Museum of Fine Arts.

Everyone's first time is awkward and unsure. It was six months before I mustered up the courage to make a move. But regardless of whether I was acting like a high schooler on prom night, once I walked through the museum I was enveloped by the holiness of creation. The word museum denotes an institution filled with a muse's presence, and there staring at masterpiece after masterpiece I can feel their inspiration pulse through every painting.

As the night continued on I lurked on the edges, breathing in the perfection of human creativity; the only part of your race that does not reek. Your race is like silkworms, terrible to interact with, but the aggravation is dismissed for the gloriousness of its byproduct. But I was not oblivious, I had seen the fervent eyes tracing the outline of my figure; it was hard to miss me in a sea of women. Typical of any "singles event" there was a ratio of ten women to every one male. I had been ignoring their optokinetic demands to conversate. I did not want to disrupt my commune with the aesthetic masterpieces.

Like meal sharks they circled, not wanting to destroy their chances by threatening my masculinity and taking the initiative. Women are losers; in spite of themselves they are beggars. They are forced to lead very tragic lives of necessary hesitancy.

But one woman finally clasped at enough nerve to approach me as I stood in front of my favorite painting, the most absolute perfect piece in the entire museum, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit by John Singer Sargent.

Edward D. Boit, Ned to his friends, was an American ex-patriot and artist living in Paris in the late 1800s, it was probably through these similarities that he befriended John Singer, America's greatest portraitist. Sargent's imposing painting of Boit's four female progeny stands tall and proud protected by two oversized Japanese vases featured on its canvas. It gives us a moment of mystery, of four daughters, all frocked in white pinafores, hidden in the enchanted dark spaces of the foyer of the family's apartment.

Like all great art, when it first premiered in 1882 at the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit was looked upon with complete puzzlement. But only a little over a hundred years later Sargent's portrait is considered a psychological masterpiece. One critic, whose origins remains unknown although his quip is most often repeated when discussing the painting, referred to it as "four corners and a void."

The painting was initially entitled Portraits d'enfants, Portraits of Children for the non-Francophile among you. Note the use of S on the end of that title. As Sargent's father astutely noted it is a not a painting, but "a portrait, or rather four portraits of children in one picture." And just like me the girls in the painting never grow up, never age, never die. Peter Pan times four.

There is no documented history of the painting, something I can commiserate with, somewhat fondly, my girls. There are no early sketches, no diaries noting its inception, no bill of sale. What is known is that it was painted in autumn of 1882 and that it took about six weeks from start to finish. Everything else about its creation is a mystery.

I stood in front of my girls like a proud parent. Throughout the years, wherever they went, I had found them. As they passed from Boit sister to Boit sister I would always wiggle my way into a dinner party or a charity event to get one more look at my foursome. I had first laid eyes of them was in 1888 when Singer Sargent had had his first solo exhibition. It was my girls' American debut in my newly minted hometown, of eighty plus years, of Boston. They had been showcased already twice in Paris, at an independent exhibition arranged by Georges Petit in 1882 and the Salon in 1883, but I missed both since I was already situated on the other side of the Pond. Wandering ex-patriots, another trait that both my girls and I shared in common; although technically my country of origin was a little bit more nebulous in nature. But really what was not nebulous during the Middle Ages?

When the painting was loaned in 1912 to the Museum of Fine Arts, and then donated in 1919, by the dried up old maids the Boit sisters had become I feared that I would forever be banished to the sorriest of poor man's proxies, art museum postcards. But here I was, less than a century later, able to return to them. Every third Friday of the month I stepped away from the monsters and towards my girls. My girls, my delight: my Tulip, my Ivy, my Iris, and my Daisy. The ultimate family homecoming.

The girls were once real people with shabby real names like Mary Louisa, Florence, Jane and Julia, but over the years I had bestowed each with pet names for my delicate flower petals. The obedient one dressed in red, saving the world with perfect posture, is Tulip. The two girls hidden in the shadows are more timid in nature. The shy one veiled in darkened profile is Ivy. The one posed to answer the question put before her is Iris. And the youngest, the cherub, the one with the Mona Lisa smile, is sweet little Daisy.

I stepped in front of my girls, taking in their vastness as one would the Grand Canyon, and breathed slightest auditory sigh of pleasure.

Naturally this did not stop one of the nervous Nellies from taking a crack at the only fresh blood present. Smartly she initiated obligatory small talk about the artist looming in front of us. "You know," she said, "once while painting outdoors together at Normandy John Singer Sargent asked Claude Monet for some black pigment. He didn't have it; Monet never used the color black."

I was shocked, this pigeon was not a complete nitwit. I turned and our visions locking; she looked tired around the eyes.

"'Then I cannot paint,' said Sargent," I stated, finishing her story. "Seems he was always looking for the darkness in humanity."

She smiled. "I'm Maureen," she said, jumping the gun before I could even bother not to ask.

"Harris," I countered with a quick alias. "Jim Harris." She smiled again.

"It is my favorite painting, ever," I continued.

"It's definitely the best in the museum," she answered. Right answer. "But if we're going for favorite of all time, I would have to say that mine is the Mona Lisa. My ex-husband took me to Paris for our ten year anniversary. It was really a magical experience. Most people don't realize how small it is. Thirty inches, that's less than a yard stick."

"Most people do not realize many things. I hear most people do not even have the decency to look at her without the barrier of a viewfinder. And poll those picture taking patrons after their viewing and nine times out of ten they could not even tell you that La Giocond lacks eyebrows."

A look of astonishment glimmered over her face. "Now that you mention it, I don't think I have ever noticed that."

"Shaved eyebrows were in vogue at the time of its creation."

She, naturally, smiled, "Tell me Mr. Harris, what other fun tidbits do you know about art?"

And with that sentence she had spoken the great secret password; whatever loathing and hatred I housed for her race I was willing to overlook for the chance to impart my wisdom. From my girls we strolled over to John Singleton Copleys' Watson and the Shark, another gleeful painting. We discussed this pompous frothy painting, noting that it was the second of three versions of the painting, the two others located at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Art, Motor City of all places.

"A great painting, but look at that shark," she said scrunching her nose. "It's so bad it's positively gooey."

"Do not be so callow," I said with supercilious sanctimony. "This painting was painted in 1782, when Shark Week was not even a glimmer in human consciousness. At that time most of mankind would not recognize a shark if it came up and bit off a chunk of flesh from their right leg."

Maureen's body became erect as a finishing school debutante. I thought for a moment, that she would turn and abandon me for my wanton ways. But in the end her desperation for a man canceled out any self-respect and she instead shuffled me towards hopefully happier times in the dappled light of Renoir's Dance at Bougival.

Like a set of sparrows intuitively we floated from piece to piece absorbing everything from Passarotti to Gauguin. The night flourished and withered on the framed work in front of us, directing the conversation like a good chaperone. Whenever awkward moments arose, when she asked silly questions on my private life, I instead chose to conversationally waltz through the adorned hallways. One, I expertly avoided these chatty interpersonal traps by intercepting each query. Two, I reflected the question back to her; Remember people adore conversating about themselves. And three, when I could not stand her maddening prying any longer, I would seek haven in my beloved artwork which she observed to be "so deep."

One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.

This was the pattern all night long until we were interrupted by a dowdy voice on the public address system announcing that the museum would be closing in fifteen minutes.

"Wow, I can't believe it's already ten," Maureen said, uttering a loaded statement.

I winced, realizing that Maureen was commencing an aggressive fishing for a telephone number exchange. My mind raced to tragic cancers I could give myself for our follow up telephone conversation.

Surprisingly enough she did no such thing. Instead she worked up the coyest face a forty something could make and whispered, "What do you think Jim, should we move to a more secluded location?"

Speechless for apparently centuries I finally inhaled a breath of disbelief: Could it be that she was inviting me into my favorite alleyway? We vanished quicker than morality during the Black Plague.

My eyes were peeled for the perfect nook or cranny to take advantage of as we ambled to a nearby dive bar. It was a dinky Irish pub, found on every street corner of the city, part blue-collar lounge, part hovel.

We ordered nightcaps and nested into a corner, ready for a quiet moment together. Alas, I was then barraged with the life history of her ex-husband and two overweight rat children. With a lack of art to direct her unbridled passion, save a tacky picture of dogs playing poker, I became her magnet. I quickly realized I was trapped.

It was all so nakedly maudlin. "I don't get it," she whimpered. "I'm a smart woman. I teach at one of the best prep schools in the country. I have an MFA in English literature. I own my own house." Five hundred years ago she would have been considered a witch for this and burned at the stake, but I do not think she would have found that tidbit useful.

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know," I plagiarized.

A section of me could find sympathy with her. It is not fun to age. At some point you transition from active participant to living bystander. Something I had been doing for longer than she could even fathom. Yes, I was spared the desecration of having the life sucked out of my body slowly day by day; of coming to the realization that your skin is not smooth enough to sustain companionship anymore, but I still knew the malaise of a not so fresh an existence.

Slowly she started to cry into her scotch. Not the repugnant tears of an attention seeking whore but, oppositely, the lamentations of meekness. These big fat droplets of misery deluged the makeup she had used to attempt to shave five years off her age.

I was flabbergasted. I needed to pacify her. But how? I was at a complete loss of what to do. My hand hovered above her back, wanting to pet her like I had seen some parents do to their spawns.

But I was offered no opportunity as suddenly I was blindsided by her tongue being shoved down my throat. I was hit by a wave of white shock. I had not brushed anyone's lips in over a century. My rustiness had no impact on her as she melted towards my body in an awkward embrace. And there it was: she had presented to me. She was mine, if only for her weakness.

I could feel this body movement energize me as her heartbeat started to echo louder. Her blood rushed down the corridor of my eardrums. And finally then I knew what to do.

I bit hard and I ended her pain the best way I knew how.

As I slipped out of the bar and walked home with the bitter bite of October stinging my Dorian Gray face, I began to giggle. I could not believe my luck. What a wonderful shiny new Schadenfreudian toy I had discovered, my psychological inferior.

Waking in my bed the next night, my experience burst forth like the water thwarting that Dutch boy's finger. I had found my small pond. It was everything I wanted: intelligent art conversation, someone who was more dismal than me, and at the end of the night some good late night food. Sure I had made multiple mistakes in my initial attempt, but I had found power, no matter how small. I scoured the paper for days to see if there was any mention. Four days later her obituary was in there: heart disease.

My mind raced with excitement. I would have to be more careful. I needed to rotate myself between the Boston's plethora of museums. But, if I was inconspicuous, if I blended among the desperati, I could definitely do it. Technology had given me some advantages; I did not have to worry about photographic evidence, the cameras only see what your little human minds tell them to see and that did not include me. My only nemesis was memory and luckily that was something mankind was trusting less and less with each passing application to their smart phone.

The future was looking bright; at over a millennium old it was about time to finally make a name for myself. In the land of low self-esteem I was the one eyed king. And that was something worthy of the slightest millimeter of an upward turn to the corner of my mouth.

### Chapter Seven

**Entartete Kunst – noun - (entatete koonst) 1. German for degenerate art, a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all Modern Art. In 1937, German museums were purged of modern art by the government, a total of some 15,550 works being removed. A selection of these was then put on show in Munich in an exhibition titled** _Entartete Kunst_ **. This was carefully staged so as to encourage the public to mock the work.**

I am a collector. I collect wisps of life. My lonely gravestone is not found in a gray desolate cemetery, but in the compilation of my copious possessions. Markers of the chronology of my time on this planet. And that is enough to house some form of satisfaction inside of me.

I have no specific context sans one: it must be exceptional. A first editions children's novel is the same as the first issue of Action Comics. Exotic orchids, pocket watches, Eighteenth Century French firing arms, portraits of the Russian czar's children, the wedding rings of a Scottish clan, coins from country that I had visited hundreds of years ago that no longer exist. The more intricate and obscure the better.

When I first became Conscious I imagined that I was collecting souls. I fancied myself a metaphysical Grim Reaper where every indulgence of my appetite would allow me to capture a tiny sliver of humanity, a ray of moonlight to be hidden away in a wooden cigar box. You see in the beginning it was not so simple; death still happened, but it was not so precise. There was an unclear cloudiness swirling about that with time would eventually burn away leaving only the cut and bone dry. In the newness of being the Angel of Death there lay a passion in ending each Fatal's future, and discovering their past. In those nascent days it was common for me, post feasting, to infiltrate their family like fog in the night. Investigating their posthumous right to existence.

But slowly this curiosity dissipated, burning like fog at daybreak. Wonder faded into the night and amazement evolved into mundanity. As my fascination with humanity left, I began to collect objects to replace this missing passion. At first I hoped vainly, and pathetically, that having a tangible object rest in my palm would restore what I had lost. In the beginning my objects needed to be a component of the individual, something that was once part of their being, of the life force that now flowed through me. A sliver of hair was my emotional photograph; a fingernail would retain wisps of compassion.

Nevertheless with time my grasps at these items became aimlessly weak. One day I glanced about and comprehended that all I had acquired was tiny objects of decay, items that the lowly barber disposes of every night. Nothing was attached to their presence. I burned them in effigy, failing to mourn my last shavings of charity.

From then on I realigned myself to people. They had lost their specifics, transformed instead into interchangeable parts. Sure there were slightly different makes and models; but I would not go as far as to call them individuals. They were just cogs in my wheel, rolling and rolling but going nowhere.

So I started collecting things. My first inorganic collection was a series of refracting mirrors. In the beginning, I was fascinated with my lack of reflection. An anti-Narcissus I would gaze into them for hours searching for a phantom in the polished looking glass.

It took me decades to acquire these looking glasses, a sublime rarity at that time. Time endlessly passed, and as it did the glass menagerie grew. I spent minutes, hours, days, years staring, but no one ever appeared.

When I had collected enough to fill a wall in a room, I began to place the mirrors on the opposite side. Parallel to each other they reflected my personal hell of eternity. Their images bounced like a tennis ball between the mirrors, lobbing deeper into yet another court with each reflection. Finally when my Hall of Mirrors was complete, I took my position in the middle. The infinite echoed back and forth, never stopping to consider my presence. A spectrum of reflections and I am invisible.

But all heartache dulls in time and even this became trite. I yearned for pain to prove my existence. I searched for another way to torture myself. A cowardly immortal with a death wish is never a pretty sight. I then began to place the mirrors like wicks on a croquet lawn. The plan: for the refractions to bounce from one polished glass to another like dominoes in a murder-suicide pact. In the dead of night after a month of setting my personal Rube Goldberg mousetrap from the entranceway through an endless series of hallways to the furthest room in the house, I broke a windowpane. Its shattering was as deafening as that of an eggshell. What a sanctimonious attempt at self-destruction.

At sunrise the light bounced about in a laser beam of moribund. Here and there, to and fro, and at the end of this rainbow of illumination was a single tile. A grimy tile that was, in all certain forms, no more or less better than any other tile in the room. And yet it was the one, bestowed with powers beyond every other tile in the room, whether it wanted them or not.

For days I would lie in the corner sleeping through my work shift of starlight and moon. As daylight thundered in I would cower to furthest regions of the corner; and from the safety of my darkness I would fixate on that tile. Transfixed by its beauty and my personal hatred. This tile was my rape and I would never forget it.

Eventually the mirrors were shattered, no worry of the consequences of bad luck, along with the one tile. I picked myself up from my crypt of light, dusted the dirt off my shoulders, and stepped fully half-hearted into my new existence. The glaring sunlit hole was boarded up.

It was from that my appreciation for the arts was born. I could not look at myself, but I could find distractions in peoples' pretty pictures. I could not feel, but I could appreciate humanity's shabby attempts at a legacy of their emotions. It was not God, but the distraction from the end of existence that was found in the details. I found humanity not in humans, but in the things they created.

But no matter how many collections are started and finished, how many paintings are gazed upon, that phantom tile hovers with every blink of my undying eyes. Taunting me to find that reflection in the mirror, till nothing remained but bitter fear of everything.

### Chapter Eight

**Glisk – noun - (gl** ī **sk) 1. A slight touch of pleasure or twinge of pain that penetrates the soul and passes quickly away.**

And so it was for hundreds, a life of isolation. Of avoidance and distraction. Of not remembering what it was like to feel; emotions, the ultimate phantom limb. A life of nothing but survival.

But I could not see any of this. But do not you dare, velvet coffin dweller that you are, to think you are superior to myself. Think about it, if people were truly objective in their own lives, if they were truly able to see the BIG PICTURE, they would not need shrinks.

And as the sentence of eternity dragged on, and on, and on, I only began to suffocate only more and more. Apathy had become the only air that I breathed, and it was starting to affect my work. My batting average had been dismal before the Steve event, but now I was not even bothering to get up to swing.

I had had quite a run with the museums. It had worked, longer than it should have, but despite a systematic rotating pattern of the art houses throughout town, followed by long hiatuses for damage control, attendance was starting to dwindle. Seems there had been too many people dying of West Nile and/or heart disease, the papers were starting to call it "broken heart art." In the beginning most of the desperati did not put two and two together, but as my stock continued to rise whispered talk in hushed tones of the random art museum deaths became more audible. Even more than the fear of a witch-hunt was my ever-growing agitation with my miserable existence. All I could hear was the cacophony of Steve.

My mind came back to his words, "You're nothing. Just another loser." It had been a few months, a space of nothing on my temporal dance card, but I still could not get his words out of my skull.

And with a nasty habit of disposing of everyone I ever placed even the slightest of interests in, there was nobody to deflect my anxieties. No one to help exorcise this coasting dread. Yes, I had the Friday Night Killer Club, but we are not into daily dialing heart to hearts. Larry does not even answer his phone half the time, scared that it is someone who is going to destroy him, whether it be an archeologist or the IRS.

So in what had become a standard practice on these uninspired nights, I flopped on my couch starring at the ceiling thinking about time. It had morphed from an amazing clause to a sentence of eternity. My calendar had become a prop in a Sartre play of one. And when these concentrated synaptic thoughts overwhelming me, I sedated them the only way I knew how. I reached for the television remote control.

As much as I despise the invention of television at the same time I find it to be absolutely reassuring. On those many nights when I could not even get to first base, and there are many of them, I will partake in junk food for the mind. Television is my comfort food. The substitute friend who guides me when it does not work out. All hail the radiation box!

But even with this habit I am discerning. There are only two channels that I ever watch: the "old time" cable channel VCM, which serves up commercial free classic movies morning, noon, and night, and PBS. You laugh, but I am an avid subscriber with a cheerful tote bag to prove it. The VCM Channel allows me to revisit old "pals" from my recent past: the golden age of the cinema. A time full of picture houses, ushers who wore silly hats, and hundreds and hundreds of captivated people. An era when everyone went to the movies four times a week, something I heartily took advantage of. I watch the Public Broadcasting Station for documentaries allowing moi to see how idiotic, although quite bemusing, your race can be when it comes to reconstructing the past.

Like everything else in my existence, my relationship with the idiot box is both love and hate. I remember a time when that maddening contraption did not even exist. To be entertained the masses had to be brought together with living breathing theatre. There it was visceral drama, you were in the earthy thick of it with the other groundlings. It was primitive. It was instantaneous. It was life.

Now a screen detaches you, separates you from the drama like eggs in a carton. Television as a global campfire my ass; you are forever alone. Where is the shared experience in that? Say what you want about a mob mentality, but it was a delightful distraction at its core. And free too. You definitely cannot say the same for cable.

Give me a good execution any day of the week: the Salem Witch Trials, the Spanish Inquisition, Vlad the Impaler. Horror yes, but drama as compelling as anything on HBO.

So on that mundane night, I flipped mindlessly from my one channel to the next killing time like there was nothing but tomorrows. I had just finished watching a Ken Burns documentary the History of boot making, the perfect way to destroy eight hours of eternity. Around three in the morning, with a couple of more hours before my bedtime, I came across a dusty black and white VCM movie starring Cary Grant entitled Arsenic and Old Lace.

Perhaps you have heard of Cary Grant or is your concept of history so concentrated on your candy cane existence that you do not bother to embrace anything that was created before the moment you were expelled from your mother's dirty womb? No? Perhaps you are different. Maybe, just maybe, you use the five percent of the brain that your humanoid kind is hypothetically supposed to use? Did not think so. Sadly America is a republic with majority ruling so for you, and them. But I digress.

Here, I will enlighten you: Cary Grant: (January 18, 1904 to November 29, 1986) A British actor known for mostly American films. He was noted as perhaps the foremost example of the debonair leading man, handsome, virile, charismatic and charming. Everything I am not. He was named the second Greatest Male Star of All Time of American cinema, after Humphrey Bogart, by the American Film Institute. He was known for starring in classic films such as The Philadelphia Story, North By Northwest, To Catch A Thief, Bringing Up Baby, and The Bishop's Wife.

Now that we have had our history lesson for the imbecile, allow me to return to my moment of ennui. The plot of my three o'clock diversion was this: a comedic romp about two kind, thoughtful, sweet old ladies who have developed the very bad habit of murdering lonely old men.

Let me digress, yes again. I am often amused by the human sense of the macabre. I find it entertaining that beings other than my kind would be amused by black comedies of death. It is funny to me because you all die and I never will. Why is it funny to you? But this movie was hysterical to it generation. It was a quite a success in its day breaking box office records, blah blah blah, blah blah. Here is another stupid fact to reiterate at cocktail parties: this mediocre black comedy about death was made by the same guy who directed the most saccharine movie of all time: It's a Wonderful Life. Is it a Wonderful Life? Not in for all of you since in the end you all turn to dust, jut like Little Zuzu's flower petals.

This idle entertainment choice was not the greatest of movies. Cary Grant overacts with the bravado of a circus ringmaster, there was definitely a reason he never won an Academy Award. But the man is just so charming that I did not care. I was transfixed by his smile, his confidence, and his precise choices in life.

He was everything I was not.

I wanted to invade his body, not just to ingest him, but to be him. My mouth salivated for his charisma. A goal that apparently even he aspired to since he was infamously quoted as saying "everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." His energy only oiled me deeper into this farce.

As I continued to watch a smile slowly crept along my face. I understood these twisted old ladies. Slipping lonely old gentlemen elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide gave them a feeling a peace. They were doing their little part to better the world. They were not performing murder, but charity work.

My heart lifted for a moment: just like me and my little art outings.

It was a feeling of satisfaction, of being a pencil pusher for the greater good. I was not famous or even infamous, but I was doing my little part to help a society that I dually was drawn to and despised.

But as I continued to the watch the film an itch slowly rose from inside. My initial viewing was through glasses that were just slightly too rosy. Something was off, something did not fit. At first, I could not recognize it, but even so I felt its presence enrobing me like a shroud. I turned the transmitter off. I did not need to see the end of the movie. Everyone dies, that is how every story ends. But my mind continued sinking through layers of realization, like Alice falling into the darkness of the rabbit hole.

I decided to amuse myself with a book, something more intellectual to pass the rest of my time. As I entered the library and began to peruse the shelves for the perfect choice of erudite entertainment finally it slammed down on me, like the executioner's utensil. An axe that had been hovering above my head ever since the incident with Steve.

No, I quivered, running from the truth. I fruitless tried to grab at the last strains of ignorance, but failed as illumination burned through my misguided vision of self-concept.

The truth was brutal. I was not Cary Grant. I was not one of these old ladies. Hell, I was not even the creepy Peter Lorre character. I was one of the nameless old pathetic men. I was the faceless guy who you do not invest enough feelings in to care whether he lives or dies. At least Rosecrans and Guilderstern had names.

Steve was right. I was a nobody, just another loser.

### Chapter Nine

**Fauvism – noun - (f** ō **-vi-z** ə **m) 1. An early twentieth century art movement and style of painting in France. The name Fauves, French for "Wild Beasts," was given to artists adhering to this style because it was felt that they used intense colors in a violent, uncontrolled way. The leader of the Fauves was Henri Matisse.**

And at that moment self-hatred took hold. Not the kind of musing in the back of your base mind that might destroy every attempt at a happy relationship. Nor the kind that would perhaps devolve you from a perky smiling bride into a Zoloft popping housewife with cellulite. I had the kind of hate that has only one monstrous name. And this name was revulsion.

All Hail, Oedipus the King!

I wanted to scream but my mouth was swamped with the bile of disgust, abscesses boiled from every taste bud. All attempted noise was negated into deafening silence. But that howl had to escape. That howl needed to find an exit. It erupted through the only possible escape route. In my eyes that howl burned with the acidity of denigration.

I had become agoraphobic of my own body. I wanted to rip off my skin because it nauseated me. I was finished tolerating its imposing size. I scratched away at layer after layer of myself till I was not visible.

But it was not only in my skin. I could feel it in my sinewy tendons, my throbbing veins, and the black hole of my mind. All I could hear was that howl, the echoing din of abhorrence. I needed to destroy something. Anything! If there were any mirrors in the apartment I would have shattered them all. Letting the shards lacerate my skin into a thousand pieces.

I am Envy. I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

If it were not the dead of night I probably would have just walked into the blaring sunshine. Do myself, not the world, a favor. My personal auto de Fé, and I would bring the marshmallows.

I had lost whatever slight sliver of altruistic intentions I had up until then delusionally possessed. Why did I want to give this world anything? The Fatals, they deserved nothing. They were ants that were scattered about and nothing more. I would ask for a magnify glass and laugh in delight at the burning of their cut-rate flesh. Give me a fast car and a lead foot, I would drive straight into a brick wall. I was going down and I was taking everyone with me.

I was done with meetings; I was done with groups. There would be no support. I did not want to share the credit with anyone on this utter destruction.

This would be mine, and mine alone.

My cuspate teeth ached with the longing to detach themselves from my body as I walked out of my preposterous cookie cutter house. I was blind to compassion. I walked the streets evoking the wrath of God with my destruction. I was non-gender bias. Sexual orientation had imprinted me not. My eyes were the colorblind of newspaper print. Age mattered as much to me as it did to death. I would have still inhaled you.

My first strike was an over-yuppified couple walking home from a whatever fusion restaurant. She with the gait of someone who had come from money, he with the swagger of one who had forced his way in. They would be martyrs to the altar of upward mobility. Next was a late-night shopper returning from the mall by way of the local bar. I looked at the strewn colorful shopping bags and wondered if they harbored early Christmas gifts. A female walking her chocolate Lab. Did she not know that it was dangerous for a woman to be out on the street so late at night? So sad the papers would say, "A modern day tragedy." A cop with a cup of coffee still in hand that had come running towards my acts of aggression. The man who sold him that cup of liquid crack.

The scarlet colors of rage were all encompassing. Fire consumed me. Everything was coarse and brutal. An inferno pumped from my heart, boiling my blood, searing my skin. Like rockets, the darts of arrogance pierced my body. I was the Phoenix of Icarus rising from the sea. My body of tallow and feathers reconstructing itself with every massacre I made. I was climbing towards the scorching sun of deathly fire. With pride Icarus was a man masquerading as an angel. With pleasure I was a demon finally being a man.

And where was it to end? Who knows the eternity that it might have been. But then an act from the heavens.

God sought me.

God sought me.

God sought me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the icy gray glint. A sacrificial offering of redemption: the twinkle of a snowflake. It fell slowly like a butterfly bouncing lazily upon the breeze. It finally rested with frozen stillness on my shoulder blade.

Clarity burst forth from my mind. Dark illumination had hit again. Fury metamorphosed, flipping from an inferno to absolute zero, from arson to premeditated murder.

Another flake glittered in front of my face as I smiled with the chill of malice. My eye turned towards the heavens. A ravel of frozen water butterflies slowly found solace on my tranquilized face.

Somewhere nearby I heard the cries of an old man as my feet made imprints in the artic powder covering the pavement. "Beware. Beware. God sees all."

But my thirst was unrelenting. I wanted to rip the skyscrapers from their concrete roots. Detonate a nuclear bomb, and leave nothing but a black hole. I had grasped that none of these ants would satisfy it. My need for destruction was infinite.

I knew what I needed to do.

It is a dog eat dog world, and I would destroy the biggest thing I could.

### Chapter Ten

**Postmodernism – noun - (p** ō **st-mä-d** ə **rn-ism) 1. A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to art, philosophy, and cultural criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually.**

Dear God,

I am sorry to do this but I am going to have to let you go.

I know this is tough, but it really should not come as a shock. I hope, being the omnipotent being that you are, you will understand my position.

And really, considering your recent work performance, I am surprised that we have made it this far. Let us examine the facts.

I could site all of the global issues in the world, war, famine, etc., etc., etc. but this is about your performance for the corporation of me.

Let us start first with your lack of dialogue. I understand that you have been known to be a quiet one, but come on. Apathy gets you nowhere in life. If you want to be believed in at least make an effort. Marks must be made. As always, it is better to be envied than pitied.

Sure there are certain third parties that will say that you speak to people through the miracle of ordinary life. They are fond of rattling on that there are "signs from Dog all around you, you just have to look." Many of these Neanderthals believe that the beauty of the sun rising every day proves your existence.

Well I cannot watch the sunrise. That civil liberty was taken away from me.

Do not forget about allowing the rape of my soul to happen. I did not want it and yet you, hapless Collie that you are with the attention span of a two-year old child, allowed it to happen to me. It is who I am now; I have embraced it, somewhat fully. But you chose it, not I.

So you can see why I might be a little bitter.

If you were doing a proper job than, really, would I even exist? Would you really allow monstrosities that constantly destroy your creations made in your image?

Besides, it is not like we have been on the best of terms anyway. I am sure you will find someone else out there. I understand that you are a little over the hill and not everyone comes to your Sunday parties anymore, but do not worry you still have the Bible Belt and the entire country of Italy.

You did do some huge feats in your nascent days. I am sure with a resume of creation and resurrection you will be able to take meetings with Fatals and non-Fatals alike. I know with a good marketing strategy, perhaps a first-rate catastrophe, you could drum up business.

I understand that there is a need for you to be sore. It is hard to hear that I prefer to be alone than to be in your presence. It may look dire at the moment but soon you will look back and realize that it was better for the both of us.

Anyway, we had a good run. Look on the bright side, with mortality being what it is, most of your relationships do not even last a tenth as long as this one.

Someday, sooner than you will care to admit, you will reflect and see that there were good times. Remember how, before my reassignment to the vice squad, we once were good to each other. But company relocation can wreck havoc on anyone's relationship.

Do not look at this as a termination, just an early retirement. There will be no severance package or exit interview.

Thank you for not making a big scene. It is better to keep the whole thing quite dignified.

I would say that I hope to work with you in the future, but since upon your termination you will not exist to me, I will not bother with this idiomatic politeness.

You are now a deity non grata.

Best of Luck!

Mr. G

### Chapter Eleven

**Sfumato – noun - (sfü-mä-t** ō **) 1. The Italian term for a painting technique which overlays translucent layers of color to create perceptions of depth, volume and form. In Italian Sfumato means "smoky" and is derived from the Italian word** _fumo_ **meaning smoke. Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane."**

It is done. Done in a moment. My so called existence had disappeared.

And then it hit me: I was alone. All alone.

The theological coup d'etat had been a succès.

The tiny snowflakes had mutated into bullets of hail, projectiles with machine gun speed. The wind blew with a power that it defied your precious physics. It tossed light particles from the grownup nightlights hovering above the pavement in whirling cyclones of illumination. I saw nothing but white, blind in a sea of frost. I looked downward. I could barely make out my ebony shoes contrasting with the snow stained cosmopolitan red.

I shut my eyes to utter blackness, opening one and then the other. Open or closed it did not matter. I was still there, alone in absolute solitude.

And in the silence I could only hear one screaming, deafening question: Now what?

So I did what any sensible modern being would do when destroying its maker, and thus shifting the entire existence of the universe: I kept moving.

I took one step forward, and then another. Walking away from the illumination towards total blinding darkness.

### Book Two

"We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd." --Gnosis.

### Chapter Twelve

**Chiaroscuro – noun - (kee-ahr-uh—skur roh) 1. A pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color. 2 a** : **the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art b** : **the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities, as in mood or character.**

I needed daylight. I had become a weed yearning for it.

I wanted to burn. I demanded to be blinded by the sun to the point of memory loss. The big yellow ball would incinerate my past and turn my future into a mirage. From this point forward only the present would exist.

I vowed then and there I would never wear sunglasses. No Aviator blinders for me. I have since voyaged to the hottest places in the world and nary a squint has happened. I inhale light into every ounce of my eyeballs. Scorching every bit of surface area to my corneas.

The sunshine would come, just not yet. My mind was clear, but not yet my own; the shock was stunning. I was like a virgin most definitely deflowered, but in the buffer of darkness not yet comprehending the consequences of her actions.

Primal determination moved through me. Pushing on as I continued to plow through the already tarnished snow banks. I glided through my past like bulldozer in at the Lego museum.

And then with a jolt I was jogged back into my placement in the world. Emerging from the dark tunnels of overpasses and alleyways I was an infant moving towards the birth canal.

All of a sudden out of nowhere a feral cat darted unexpectedly in front of my path. I tripped and fell. "Bitch!" I yelled knowing sure well that I was mixing my species.

My corpse hands buried themselves into the grayness of frozen water. How humiliating! Only minutes after fulfilling Nietzsche's prophecy I was back in the gutter. I pushed my hands deeper searching for the frozen ground beneath and slipped even further flipping onto my back like a turtle. I self-consciously gnashed at the air with my angry fang. But it was in this moment that my eyes trailed to the dissipating gray snow clouds above. There the optics of yours truly caught the full spectrum of a ceiling that had been obscured by a cumulous foreground. My eyes cast upwardly the shiny silver answer.

My dilemma had found its solution. I would deal with my problems in the most modern way possible: I would go on vacation.

Un voyage par l'avion.

How delightful I, like a born again christian, was to be deflowered twice in one night! My hymen would shatter with the sweet succulence of flying. I know, squawking mindless seagulls that you are, you are unable to comprehend a time when this modern marvel did not prevail, but for most of my existence it did not.

You, with the intelligence of a digger snail, have never considered the multitude of issues that transportation arises for a being like me. I will not humor your attempts at guesses, instead note that the majority of airline voyages commence or cease in daylight.

I entered through electronic doors that opened with just a tad too much effort. I strolled over to the dingy counter fueled by florescent lights, a test study in what defines the word pathetic. My transactional process commenced.

"Hi, welcome to Avian Airlines, how can I help you today?"

"Hello," I said, glancing at the inane's nametag, "Tammy, on a lark I decided to take a trip. When is your next available flight?"

Wristwatch sized gears clicked away in her miniature brain. I got it; in her head spontaneous actions were more likely to be an act of terrorism than whimsy. Trying to traverse my motivations she chose a subtle diversion, "Well sir, do you have any luggage?" By the reverberations I knew I was one push of a concealed button away from being flagged by security.

And in a moment I decided to own it, all of it. It was a moment of clarity in which lighting strikes in a vacuum. I could try to explain it, but it would be like explaining colors to a dog.

I was not alone at all. I was by myself, myself and only myself.

Hopefully, pollywog that you are, you can see the subtle difference.

It was mine. The world was mine! The world had become as trivial and promising as an oyster.

I looked directly into her eyes penetrating like seasoned lover, "No. Recently I decided to get rid of all my baggage." She smiled, not because the joke was good, it was not, but because I had dominated her. Her eyes averted my penetration.

So this is what it feels like to have confidence.

With a glance, I had transformed her into a tittering teenager. "Where would you like to go?" She faintly oscillated her body, unconsciously rustling her cotton panties with every slight sway.

"I have no judgment about my final destination. Why do you not pick?"

She giggled in a tone infused with bubblegum telephone conversations. "Really?"

"Why not? I am sure you are certainly experienced enough. I just want a place with boundless sunshine."

"Well," her mouth blossomed like a petunia, "the next available flight is leaving for Rio in twenty minutes. We're a couple days away from Lent. I always thought it would be fun to go to Carnival."

"That is exquisite," I said as I slid her my metallic tinted plastic over the counter. "Tammy, you are an angel." I could not believe it: yes that these trite words coming from my mouth, but more so that she was actually buying it.

"Oh no," she realized making the petunia wilt, "security is obscene today. I don't think you would be able to make it through in time."

"Tammy, is not there another way?"

Her timepiece sized mind concentrated hard, and the pink petals began to refresh themselves. She picked up a phone and tilted it towards her like it was her confessor. She murmured softly into it, but her eyes were always fixated on me.

I smiled a closed mouth grin. This was going to be fun.

She placed the male receiver back on its welcoming female counterpoint, "You're good!" She asserted, "Caesar will be here in a second to take you to the front of the line."

I smiled Cheshire like, "Oh Tammy, I could eat you up."

She leaned in closer, perhaps hoping either I would kiss her or do what I had promised. We waited in silence while I let my lascivious eyes do all the work. Finally the anticipation was too much, "You know," she said trying to break away from the bewitchment, clearing her throat of the frog that blocked her life from what it could truly be. "I could...."

But, her unbridled hope was foiled with the appearance of Caesar, a six-foot giant with forty extra pounds displayed proudly by his belt overhang. "Hey Tam, Tam," he alphally asserted. From the spell-breaking look on her face I knew they were lovers. "This my VIP?" He sized me up. I reciprocated in silent violence. He finally jerked away. "Doesn't look like much," he quipped free of the phoniness of guest first airline imperatives. "But they never do."

Caesar deposited me at the front of long line grunting his farewell. I slithered into line removing my shoes to allow for my surrounding homo sapiens their false sense of safety. The zombies running the machines asked if anyone had given me a bomb in Trojan gift-wrap.

I took all of my concentration to stifle my glee. Could they not see it? I was the bomb.

As I settled into the leather bound interior of first class I delighted in thoughts, supersonic speed hurling thoughts. Power and destruction that was now what I was.

"Sir would you care for anything to drink?" the stewardess, a walking cherry in a crimson skirt and shirt set, inquired. She was one the classic beauties found on intercontinental flights, Grace Kelly with a hint of cheapness that gave tedious businessman hope.

"No. I am fine at the moment," I assured her. "But maybe later on." She started to move on, but I snatched her forearm stopping her short. "You know," I said softening my tone so she had to lean in closer to the Big Bad Wolf. "You have an exquisite clavicle." She smiled and I heard the slightest rustle come from under her skirt. This treasury bond would definitely have a guarantee.

Two hours later, after the trivialities of bad earphones and miniature bottles of absolute that note was completed. She walked past me pushing her silver pushcart like a woman in a James Bond film. After centuries of going through the motions, after endless rounds of forty something losers, I was carnal.

Moments later, I was pushing her through the bathroom door. I lobbed her so hard into the mirror her heart stopped for a moment. I knew it would return so I busied myself by tearing apart her blouse. I felt the cheap rayon, shifting it between my talon fingers. I tossed it aside, dismissed for immediacy. There was no time to lag. I tore at the panties that she had flaunted at me. My passion raged through my body. Premeditation was no longer in my vocabulary. It was red and savage and mean.

When it was done she lay there panting. I got up, rising from the dead. She was still gasping for air to feed both her lungs and heart. I bent myself down to her recovering body and grazed her neck. My mouth bloomed into a smile of deep libertine rose. I hovered there staring into her endless almond eyes. Mere centimeters from a jugular that was just begging to be torn.

"Hello Bambi," I whispered revealing my teeth. And then, I turned and left.

I expect you thought I was going to eat her.

Well if I wanted to I would have. But I was satiated from my earlier hometown bloodbath. There would be plenty of time for that later. At the moment more important matters pressed, hard.

Sex is power, or in a rare two percent of the time, love. And, I was on the ultimate power trip, centuries in the making. I slid back to my seat and waited for time to drift all the mortals into REM moments. The cusp was upon me.

Slowly everyone's breathing slowed to a humdrum pace of in and out. The awful din of their useless lives faded leaving only rapture. I sat there was my eyes wide open listening intently to my own private symphony of sleeping heartbeats. I had become their master: conducting their pulsation according to my whims.

This is how I greeted the sun for the first time in a millennium. In mutual appreciation we mirrored each other. Inside I was conducting a symphony of 213 humanoid heartbeats, outside Chroma's sunrise swelled. A thousand years of blanched colorblindness contrasted with the brilliance of the world. Iridescence glory assailed me. If I had not just renounced the flopsy eared labrador I would have cited this as proof of his existence. If I could have cried, I would have.

Pity.

My eyes breathed in this moment. I knew very soon this instant would become trite. My temporary heart would dissolve. And the sun, like everything else, would become a tarnished ugly whore.

### Chapter Thirteen

Aesthete – noun - ('es-,thet) 1. Somebody who claims to be particularly sensitive to beauty and who thinks as a result that he or she is superior to others. One having or affecting sensitivity to the beautiful, especially towards art.

I stepped off the plane and into my coming out party. With the flush of sexuality adding a rosé to my cheeks I was struck by the humid air of Rio de Janeiro that perpetually gives the residents the same pinkish hue, that and also their rampant sex lives. Rio is two cities, both with lots of tail.

"Anything to declare?" asked the mind-numbed customs agent as I greedily eyed the tunnel to the sunlit outside world. "Only my genius," I answered and marched to my playground of sunshine.

Cariocas, the pet name for the locals, swarmed around me like rainbow multicolored bees around hive. Inhabited by native Tupi and Guarani Indians tribes, Brazil was then _discovered_ and colonized by the Portuguese, who were aided by an array of slaves from Africa. Later this country was flocked by fleeing Nazi Germans. And later yet by fleeing Japanese. Sired by country-approved concubines this wuzzling of genes has made Brazilians the ultimate half-breed. Not that they are a totally free loving colorblind nation, in the recent centuries Brazil banned immigration by the chocolate Africans and the yellow Asians, but openly encouraged the lilywhite Europeans. These restrictions were called the bleaching of Brazil, a eugenically approved way of making sure the dark colors don't ruin the entire watercolor palette.

Rio is a playground of the rich and carefree, in that sequential order. The affluent of Rio live in high-rise beachfront condominiums or behind the fortified walls of a few _choice_ suburbs.

People pretending to be false idols.

Their only job in life is to be entertained, and it does not matter what the distraction is, just as long as it happens. Restaurants, plastic surgery, nightclubs, beauty parlors, the ever burgeoning sex trade, whatever gets the job down.

The rich, in pursuit of eternal youth, have made Brazil the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. In Brazil, plastic surgery is not a dirty little secret, but is instead a status symbol. Conspicuous consumption at its best, getting work done shows that you have money to spend. Siliconadas proudly display their enhancements on magazine covers. Models, actresses, and Carnival queens expound the virtues of a new set of breasts or injecting fat into their face. In the weeks leading up to Carnival there is flesh flesh everywhere but nary a silicone implant to be inserted.

Here beauty is not something natural, it is something you have to work at. Packaged travel companies have multiplied grabbing imperfect Western European and American tourists and depositing in the land of nips and tucks for good dose of economic commerce. Their obligation towards perfection is such a necessity that once a year the good doctors of plastique open up their clinics to the poor and destitute offering up charity in the form of Botox and Restylane.

And while Prospero and his friends party into the night, the poor make their way up a hill of perdition to their hovel homes. Favelas, named for a stubborn thorny plant with that is native to Brazil, are the local tenements of choice. Populated by stubborn poor people who reside in homes made of plywood, scrap metal, and other pieces of trash. To partygoers these impoverished people are nothing more than weeds, irregardless that their personage constitutes a quarter to a half of their city's population, depending on whose propaganda you believe.

In these shantytowns the so-called vermin of humanity reside: the ones disfigured by malnutrition, the ones who are initiated into gangs by the age of eight, the ones who are frequently nibbled on by rats in their sleep. If they do have electricity for their compulsory nightlights, then it is tapped illegally from the public grid. An unlike those living in fortresses on high, there is no privacy in these irregularly shaped dwellings. Claustrophobia is inevitable in this world of cramped living with little breeze and no sunlight. These favela's residents are rats sneaking behind the walls of the castles of the rich. They are the workers of the town, the ones who polish, both literally and in innuendo, the brass of Rio's glittery society.

But, even among the poor and the thieves there is a hierarchy of economic and social standing. Only two hundred years ago the favelas were founded by former soldiers involved in some silly civil war. They chose to settle on unclaimed public land on a hill in Rio because the government failed to provide housing for their services. Typical. If there is one thing I know from generations upon generations of existence, in the end governments will always stiff you. And through the generations these non-pretty residents continued to populate and the shacks kept rising higher and higher on the hillside. The poorer the resident, the further they have to trudge up the hill to reach their abode. It is brutal, at the highest elevations the sewage simply runs in the streets. The stench of human and animal waste mixed with rotting garbage is so overpowering that it interrupts thought patterns. Thus is Rio: a superficial curtain hiding the persuasive ugliness of human misery.

With a network of stairways and sidewalks that makes M.C. Escher's Relativity look like it exploded into a million subdivisions the favelas are inaccessible by vehicle. In these shanties there is no main artery, no one road to salvation, only a variety of unusual, and often conflicting, points of view. As a standard rule the government of Rio de Janeiro chooses not to recognize the favelas existence as a legal entity. Sometimes it is easier to stick your head in the sand. Not that I blame them, before last night I had done exactly that for half a millennia.

And looming above all of the destitute high on the mountain are the arms of god. _O cristo redentor:_ christ the redeemer. What a joke.

The art deco statue of jesus christ with his hands spread wide above the city is the ultimate tourism icon of Brazil. Ninety percent of Brazil's people are roman catholic, giving it one of the largest catholic populations in the world. This factoid would have caused me trepidation in the past, but not with the dawning of this first day. Christ the redeemer is one of those things that the cosmetic surgery hungry tourists will grab a postcard of, slap a stamp on, and mail away to the folks back home.

The statue, an ugly effigy of reinforced concrete standing thirty-eight meters tall is located at the peak of the Corcovado mountaintop in the Tijuca Forest National Park. It is to Rio what the Mona Lisa is to Paris.

Never one for statues, too hard and cold, I dismissed it. Unlike paintings, there are very few statues out there that are able to evoke emotions in a viewer; only the Pieta comes to mind. Think about it, all those soulless modern cubes in front of corporate office buildings and frosty Greek gods in the well to do peoples' solariums. I would bet your life that if offered you would decline to snuggle up with any of them.

Glazing towards the eyesore all I wanted was an elephant's weight worth of dynamite. "The dog is dead and I killed him," I chuckled underneath my breath.

How funny, I thought, even here there were gods who looked down from above, judging people but never doing anything about it. Here he sits on his mountain, never coming down to help. And so the people got bored of waiting and put their faith in the gods of superficiality, choosing to lift their faces up instead the poor's economic status.

But none of this was a bother to me, I was my own god; and this was my own personal gold rush. A frenzy of sensuality. It was a kaleidoscope of human wantonness.

Brazil is the promise of the better life. "The land of the future, and always will be," the locals cleverly joke. A joke that eternally dangles with no punch line ever in sight.

But I had digressed; it was time to focus on necessary details. I checked in at the best hotel the city had to offer. My Portuguese was two hundred years rusty, but I was able to get the gist of my host's questions, "Did I need a tour guide?"

I smiled, "No I would love to walk about the town."

"Are you sure, Senhor these streets can be dangerous."

"Oh, I think I can handle myself," I said with a smirk.

Rio was Brazil's first wife. Up until 1960 it was the capital, but in a great boisterous gesture it was cast aside, the country's seat picked up and moved somewhere newer, brighter, and shinier. The country was looking for something younger, a fresher model that did not have all the hang-ups that its former first city had. But, Rio took it in stride. It did not become the housewife who has endless pity parties for her past, it chose instead to become the life of the party. And for a city that is four hundred years old it does a pretty good job with the upkeep. But do not look to too close or you might see the surgery scars. A pretty city, but only if you keep to the pretty places.

And I would, at least for the next couple of hours. I would peruse the tourist's façade before I went behind the brightly painted plywood flats.

I strolled leisurely to the Jardim Botanico the botanical gardens full of children and sun burnt Western Europeans. Passing the central fountain with its cherubs reaching down towards the court of royal palms. I strolled to the orchid greenhouse and entered. I walked among the hundreds varieties of O'Keeffe's not so subtle homage to the female vagina and thought of my days as a botanist. Since orchids take seven years from germination to blossom they were an ideal obsession for someone with all the time in the world. It was one of my many collections during the eighteenth century, gentleman gardening as it was often called then.

My eyes cast upon school children on a field trip, a glorious box of mild to dark chocolate. With the rainbow of skin tones found from four hundred years of mix breeding, it turns out that their lives really are a box of confections for me. But I was not going to waste my prize on a meager child. I was looking for choice Grade A Meat. I was looking of my white whale. I was to quest for nothing but utter perfection.

Besides, I needed to work up an appetite.

I wandered though the tropical foliage, until I came across a tiny greenhouse nestled under a canopy of oversized ferns that appeared right outside of the Museum of Natural history. I wandered in glancing at the signage outside framing the structure. Why is it that humans must always identify everything down to the most infinitesimal level? Always putting things in cases with a brass plaque next to it. It does not matter if nobody ever reads it, it is identified and that is all that matters.

My mind trailed to midnight visit I had had to the motionless butterflies at the Museum of Comparative Zoology back in my hometown of Boston. It is funny how the brilliant sunshine had burned away the layers of gauze exposing hidden memories in my snow filled past.

On a lark I had bribed the night watchman to see what was housed inside. I scouted these brightly colored delicate creatures; my eyes surveying over their rainbow corpses, freakishly preserved by humanity. Many of which had been placed in their glass mausoleums by Lolita famed cult novelist Vladmir Nabokov. Feel free to insert any joke you find deserving here.

Free of field trips full of unruly rugrats, there was nothing but perfect stillness. I strolled here and there, up and down the aisles mimicking the sacrosanctity of the nave of a church. If there was moment where I hoped that some great big dopey labrador would appear, it was there among those vibrant winged carcasses.

Please, I whispered, as I inhaled the quiet air of the saints of fields and meadows that had long been plowed to make way for planned housing developments. Please come, and tell me why this happened? But there was no answer, so I left, sampling the guard on my way out.

The Botanico's greenhouse recalled the narrow rows of my makeshift church. The walkway was the perfect amount of narrowness, and the plants it housed the perfect height. But instead of butterflies surrounding me, I was now encircled my botanical brethren: tropical carnivores. Pitcher plants, Venus flytraps, Snap traps, bladder traps, and lobster pot traps.

But enough about boring memories of the past, there was more of everything to kill.

I continued to stroll around the city passing the elaborate graveyards of dead people: the art museum, the symphony, and the churches, a multitude churches. Like any good catholic nation, besides a bar on every corner in Rio, there is also a house of worship.

I walked the streets heading north towards the hills of Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil. If where I was before was heaven then the next stop on my sightseeing tour was to be the depths of hell. Tourists are not supposed to enter the favelas minus a few tour buses that have paid hefty bribes to the local drug lords.

Electricity was humming in the air; waiting for the surge of Carnival. The alleyways were flooded with children and whores working on their Samba costumes for the upcoming parade. Waiting for their moment to look pretty in a life of ugliness.

The children ran around in packs like undomesticated dogs that had only known a life of being feral. They surged, flowing towards a beat that pulsated stronger with every thump of the drum.

I was a current drawn to the sound, trailing after the children like a reverse Pied Piper. Ensconced in the beat my eyes drifted to the saddened, to the ones remaining in the doorways, the old and the lame. Bodies who had lost their dreams of leaving this land of unpaved roads. I gazed at the harelips, the thinning hair, and the cataract glazed gray eyes.

And then there is a girl, more shy than her gaudy vêtements would lead one to believe. Yet unexpectedly my hand is grabbed. "Hey Gringo you want to have a go?" she said pushing her torso forward to make her teeny breasts more voluminous in the sparkly mermaid outfit.

She was lighter in skin and would have been a perfect specimen for this brothel petri dish save a harelip that ran unilaterally complete up from the right side of her mouth to her nose. With a simple operation she would be "perfect enough" to enter the sparklings, but the possibility of that happening was as good as Larry actually making it to the end of block.

"Not today pet," I said gently.

Her alabaster body trembled searching for a second defense in this debate, but there was no time to dwell because the echoing beats of the Maracatua finally arrived on the unpaved street. Hundreds of drummers, singers, and a coterie of dancers decked in sparkles and desperation surrounded me like a tidal wave.

Brazilians love to celebrate, even the poor ones.

Bedecked in traditional Portuguese royal garments these peasants were enjoyably reminding me how much I had elevated myself in the course of twenty-four hours. Colorful yes, but the favelas were not where I was going to dwell, my place now belonged in the sun.

In Brazil they have a word for it, the quick fix. Jeito. Literally described as the way, there is no true English word for its meaning.

The Cariocas will always find a way to get it done, even if that way is not technically legal. A traffic light does not mean Stop, only Stop if you see traffic. When it is late night and the streets are empty there is no reason not to keep your foot down like a lead weight.

The clever always find a way.

Thus, I headed back to the leisurely side of the distribution of wealth, to my hotel du bourgeoisie.

Along with the sun, I was to enjoy the nightlife of Rio. I was an inhaler of the darkness, enjoying all the huffing that the spraying of my money allowed. The rate of return was high, with not one but two wet dream orgies occurring before daylight. Sex yes, but dinner no.

Walking in to hotel at five in the morning the next day I knew that I had not arrived yet. This would happen only with my first feast as a self appointed deity. Like a modern day Virgil I needed to climb higher through echelons of Rio society to find my blood conquest. My next Fatal would be the queen of beauty, and I would murder her and it. This was something I knew I could not do alone in the immediacy I required.

Money opens all doors, but right social partner is the ultimate skeleton key.

I needed someone who would give my cold hard cash street cred. In a moment of pure happenstance, my keystone was to appear a twinkling instant later in the form of a living skeleton.

Drunk on aggression my footsteps echoed on the cold lobby floor. Not wanting to slide into the humdrum schedule of you pesky humans I refused to sleep with nightlife still a possibility. Inside the elevator of ice I hit the penthouse button for the posh trendy rooftop sushi lounge that, according to the hotel directory, rivaled the twilight stars with its neon lighting and posh people.

The doors opened onto an empty room of commerce with a sole bartender polishing cobalt blue glasses next to a rooftop bar.

I sat at the clear glass bar and ordered a dirty martini to keep the bartender appeased. "Slow night?" I queried letting my drink sit in front of me.

"Only for those who haven't found a friend yet," he curtly replied and returned to his glasses. I rolled my eyes at the insolence of the useless worker bee. I swiveled my chair and stared at the fading city, brilliant colorful lights dimming in favor of the emerging duller buildings. I searched the east waiting to see the first glimpses of daylight.

Needing to get closer I sauntered over to the edge of the building placing my hand on the transparent railing. Casting my personal windows to the right I was able to see all of Rio before me with its burning pink and green neon, antlike people, and billboards proclaiming beauty in the form of a violet-eyed supermodel with eye glasses that cost more than my favela friends make in three years. Below me the Copacabana beaches were pristine white framed by a striking sea transforming from black to blue with the arrival of the sun. The water is toxic. Those of a certain socio-economic IQ knew to only slum there at nights, choosing instead to dip their toes in the safety of chlorinated water.

I heard a faint murmur of rushing blood. I turned my eyes across the salt and pepper tiled floor to find the unexpected site of an inebriated man ravishing a book.

Compared to my nubile shining surroundings he was positively out of place having had to have been eighty of so. His pallid skin with all its crevices and crags looked like high-priced drapery, but his eyes were bright as his pupils flipped from word to word with his finger. He was someone from the past with a past. His bloodshot eyes, possibly green at one time if you had to take a guess, had the demanding burn of someone who had always forced his opinions to be right, a captain of industry who had devoted himself solely to the pleasures of money and power. Next to his information-seeking appendage sat a .45 caliber Remington Rand pistol.

I would have paid no attention the sloshed octogenarian or the gun, but I did take notice of his book: the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. This aroused me with curiosity. Who reads an eight hundred book year old book about a trip from Hell to Heaven at five in the morning at one of Rios most exclusive's club, and in Italian no less.

Then it hit me: maybe I was being tailed by the labrador.

Perhaps this man was a secret member of the army of the dog, sent to recover his AWOL being? Perhaps, or perhaps some of the paranoia from my past life had leaked through into my new world order.

I needed to be careful, I was beginning to sound like Larry.

My eyes glazed from his withered hands up his corpse-like body before traveling to his newly centralized red eyes. Their drunken focus had lost target of the page they were formerly reading and were now staring directly at me.

"If you're looking for a good time then you've come to the wrong place," he said peering over his spectacles as if he was scolding a child. "You should head back to the beaches I'm sure you can find something suitable there. I am only down for tight with tits."

I could have torn his throat out right there, but considering the novel in his hand I decided to play along, to see if he was only a feeble old man or St. Michael haunting me for my choices like a jacked up theological bounty hunter.

I was not going down without a fight.

I would probably kill him either way. Whether the reasoning was probable cause or just for the fun the result would still be the same. But not yet, I was only big game hunting right now and this fossil of a Fatal was the weakest gazelle in the herd.

"Old man," I replied, something I always found a shiver of pleasure stating, "You are no where near tight, but if you are looking for tits all you need to do is check your coffin dodging self naked in the mirror." His nose lowered allowing him to focus without his obstructive reading glasses blocking his view. He starred with a willfulness of someone who had spent his entire life living a pornographic tale, getting everything he wanted out of everything he ever did.

Slowly his mouth spread upwards towards the right corner of his mouth allowing me to see his teeth bared. After a moment I decided to bare my teeth also, whether it was a smile was open to interpretation. Either way it looked like we could play nice, for now.

"Humphries, Huguenot Humphries is the name." He did not ask my name. Other people's names were not important to a man like Humphries. "You know there was a time where you would be dead for a statement like that."

"Maybe back in the states, but Brazil is another world. One where the rules from back home do not apply," I countered. "You are now in the land of the jeito."

"True, but even in lawless societies there are rules otherwise we'd all be sociopaths."

"Maybe we are. ' _Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate._ '"

"Impressive, for a man who looks like he does not know Dante Alighieri from his asshole."

"Careful old man I could take those to be fighting words and you are quite mature to go after a spry guy like me."

"You're not twenty yourself anymore," he countered pointing to my diminishing hairline.

"I think we both know that I am far from twenty old man," I countered, our eyes locking tight for one moment more. And then another shared smiled.

Humphries began to stir the ice cubes around in his empty glass, "It doesn't matter," he said. "'At any age, our lives are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.'"

"Impressively depressing for five in the morning. I can see I was right to take you as bona fide patron of the arts."

"I am a patron of life, in all of its forms."

"Funny," I noted wryly, "so am I. Macbeth, such a superlative play; everyone gets what they deserve in the end."

"You know Junior you're not supposed to refer to it by its proper name."

"Well, there are a glut of things that it is better you do not refer to by their proper names. Take you: I could call you insignificant, but I am sure you do not want me to use that title," I said with a killing smile.

"Are you calling me little?" Humphries demanded, either his nature or the alcohol within him made him quick to boil on this definition.

"Well old man you are definitely not Superman."

"I am not little," he retorted. "I am far from it! I have been called many things: a son of a Bitch, a captain of industry, a master of the universe, a robber baron, some women have even called me god when I'm giving it to them, but I am not going to have some punk call me little...."

Infuriated to the point of violence it found its manifestation in a ferocious cough that consumed his feeble body. The bartender filled a glass with brown liquid and nonchalantly placed next to the Huguenot's convulsing body doing nothing to help, like an orderly with a DNR mandate.

Humphries inhaled his medicine. After a few moments the attack subsisted. A crackle sounded out from somewhere nearby, fireworks or gunshots I am not sure.

Humphries finally started, "You don't know who I am."

"And you do not know who I am," I countered, taking a seat down with him. "All I know is that you have intriguing taste in books for someone alone at a bar in five in the morning."

"A good book should be a blow to the head," Humphries said. He then scanned his eyes east towards the rising sun and then west to Corcovado's mountaintop. "Have you seen christ the Redeemer yet?"

"Not yet," I replied.

"Well they say you should check it out before you depart. Not that I have gotten around to seeing it yet."

"I do not know if I will get around to it since I do not think I will ever depart."

"Understandable," he replied, not understanding at all. "I might never leave too, this place is paradise. Well, if it wasn't the tourist traps that intrigued you then why are you here in Rio? Business? Hair plugs? Or just the good old fashion sex trade industry?"

"I am looking for the most perfect female," I replied. "I have heard that the skirts of this town work hard fighting for this title."

"My boy, there are thousands perfect females in this town. Don't short sight yourself. No one holds the title of the fairest of them all."

"But there is one valued among all others. I will find her and she will be mine."

"For a price?" he interjected.

"No. Paying for the perfect woman stops her from being the perfect woman."

"Boy you have a limited viewpoint. But, I like men with missions. Tell you what, let me join you on your quest. I'll take you out for a night see how the truly beautiful people live."

And there was my rabbit hole. But I played my cards smoothly, I could not be too eager.

"I do not know... I usually choose to be on my own." I trailed.

"So do I," counter Humphries, "but fuck it. Don't make me have to persuade you," offered Humphries with a Machiavellian smile. I waited, pausing a moment more for the payoff to be sublime.

"Okay, let us do it. But now I need to go to bed. It is already past sunrise," I said pushing my clear chair away from the table. I was not tired at all, but I knew once a deal is closed it is best to leave the negotiating table.

"Aren't you going to drink your beverage? Humphries asked."

I slid into standard response when it came to the question of imbibing. "Recovering alcoholic. Whenever I care for a drink I order it, but that is as far as I go."

"Well if you're going to waste all this ethanol than let me do cleanup for you." Humphries took the triangular drink and raised the glass. "I could make a witty toast about fucking and dying, but I hate people who are witty. Here's to hoping for lots of the first and never the second." He drank it in one gulp as if it was a goldfish and returned slightly more glassy eyes to his book.

### Chapter Fourteen

**Pop Art – noun - (päp** ə **rt) 1. A modern art movement that originated in the 1950s and 1960s. Pop artists drew their inspiration from the most ephemeral aspects of consumer society: billboards, magazine advertisements, comic books, and supermarket products. Some critics view these artworks as comments on the throwaway culture of consumerism; others view them as a reaction against the pretensions of the art world.**

Huguenot Humphries definitely did a good amount of the first. My Virgil had lost his looks long ago, the man looked like an unshelled turtle, but with his bank account being what it was women did not know the difference.

Humphries had made his money in the airline industry designing the planes that took both the beautiful people to their exotic parties and armies to their deathbeds. He had started as test pilot many years ago finding salvation in the rush that comes from being faster than anyone else on earth. He had held the air speed record for only two days before it was broken again, but for those two days he was a god and had never forgotten it.

I quickly manipulated the octogenarian into believing that we had become friends. A pill Humphries easily swallowed since he had been actively seeking a new buddy to whore with. Humphries rambled, for hours, trying to bestow all words of wisdom that those of a certain age believe they hold. "Falling towards Hell is as easy as falling from the curb." That was a Humphriesism. "All neurotics are either Oedipus or Hamlet." That was another golden nugget. "Even a liar wants those around him to tell the truth." The last one was my personal favorite.

Fickle by nature, there had been many before myself that he casually cast aside when he felt even the slightest inkling of boredom. But there was something different about me. I was an umami to him, something he was unable to put his finger on, but was exactly right for the moment. I said whatever I wanted to him and he kept me around because he found the truth so amusing.

In the week leading up to Carnival we attended a series of clandestine parties involving the crème de la crème of Cariocas society. Upwardly mobile heads of state, high class pornographers, and global sports superstars all forcing their way up through society like air through water. His pace was frenetic as he tried to chisel a permanent gravestone through my tutelage fighting against the inevitability of the end. It was a voluptuous scene. Their world sparkled as they danced and masqueraded from the poverty that lived at their feet. There were numerous appliances of pleasure: there were gogo dancers, there were Samba dancers, there were fire dancers, there were ravers, there was Beauty, and there was alcohol.

These Marvelous City parties were feverish and delirious. Numerous times makeshift scotch fountains found their lowest point of gravity nestled between the breasts of a fifteen year old Samba dancer, a convenient place for Humphries to imbibe from Jeito, that was the philosophy. Velvet, sparkles, and shimmering all had their place within the night whether it be in entertainment found in the clubs or later in the bedroom.

Yes I had found pleasure of the lascivious nature, but always I reported to Humphries that I had not found the perfect specimen. And for that reason I had not feasted since my slaughter; something that needed to happen soon as I was starting to get hungry.

Humphries true to his word never found his pleasure in the same woman, even in the same night. He was happy and dauntless with his money holding illimitable dominion over all. For him it was folly to grieve or to think, choosing instead to enjoy.

"Tonight will be the night to end all," Humphries stated. "Tonight you will find your queen and I will find a Cherry," he continued.

"What makes you so sure of that?" I inquired.

"Let's just say I have faith," he replied. I rolled my eyes. "But also it is the Carnival Eve party. All that anticipation in the air the sex could be able to cut with at spoon."

"A spoon?" I replied.

"As if sliding through a sweet cherry pie," he countered.

"Old man, are you looking for the Fountain of Youth yet again?" I queried.

"Always," he countered.

"Well I have faith," I countered back, "that you are not going to find it between a teenager's legs."

"I know I'm not young, but I can be young momentarily with every Cherry I meet."

"You know old man, everybody has got to die sometime," I noted, titillated inside by this last statement.

"Yeah," he pondered taking another sip of his scotch, "I sometimes wonder about what it's like afterwards."

"I am sure it was will all end up fine," I rebuffed, pretending to preen in the mirror. My nights had been spent with Humphries, but my days had been on the white beaches of Ipanema. A living Apollo, I sunbathed from the first beams of light through the summer's aggressive noon rays to the light's last dying moments. In the course of these few days my pigment had transformed from snowman white to the orangeness of the latter decades of Cary Grant's life.

"Really, that's what you believe?"

"No. I do not. I am an atheist. I do not believe there is anything after this so why bother worrying. Just enjoy the moment."

"Boy, I would toast with you to that if you weren't a goddamn raging alcoholic," Humphries said with a wry smile.

"Come on, let's find that perfect specimen for you. A non sterile wet sample."

There was nothing sterile about Humphries world for as at the moment the words parted his lips the doorbell to his honeymoon suite, the suite Humphries always chose because, as he explained it, he was always on his honeymoon, rang. A seraph like whore walked through the door with the grace and length of a princess, something easily insinuated as she was dressed in a fuschia and lime corset and tiara.

"Hello Cherry," Humphries, "you're late; I called your service almost an hour ago."

"Sorry Daddy, but the traffic _seu louco_ down there. Rio on Carnival Eve is like Vegas on acid."

"Cherry I've done Vegas on acid, twice in the eighties and once in the nineties. Rio has got it tits times ten thousand over that sandbag of a town."

He looked her over once more, and then giving an exasperated sigh spoke, "Come on you'll just have to service me in the car downstairs."

Cherry, they were all named Cherry to Humphries, performed her duties letter perfect in the limousine on the way to the party. Afterwards Humphries promptly dropped her off at the nearest corner, which was only seven blocks from the hotel; she was not kidding about the sanity of the traffic situation. Humphries insisted on opening a bottle, but the only thing available was champagne, which he blatantly noted he despised because it made him morose, yet consumed anyway.

"Stuck in traffic. Stuck in traffic. Stuck," he snarked in a sing-songy voice. With no one to help imbibe Humphries was a malaise son of a bitch in less than twenty minutes. "Stuck in this box. Stuck in this box. Stuck in a box..." At this point he had stopped the zippity do da tempo.

"You know I'm dying," he mumbled quietly. He protested this statement by lighting a cigarette.

I feigned surprise, but my downcast revealed all. Cary Grant I was not. Humphries stunk of death.

He sighed, "Well, like you said 'everyone has got to go sometime.' Perhaps, I'll finally be able to see my Beatrice again."

"I believe your senility has finally rotted your brain old man," I said, half heartedly trying to lighten the mood as I peered out the window staring at the eighty-foot billboard of two underfed models, one brown eyed, one violet eyed, groping each other. "Now you are getting your life story mixed up with Dante's fictitious one."

"No, I mean _my_ Beatrice. We were sweethearts in college. She's been dead almost sixty years. She's the reason I read that book in the first place."

"Ah yes Dante Alighieri, the Great Poet of the disgusting, the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Humphries did nothing but ignore this last statement. "She worked at the library and I checked it out trying to score points with her. She got Polio back when it was a deadly disease. Kept trying to marry her, but she said she didn't want to get married if she couldn't dance at the wedding. Salk cured the disease two years later."

I could hear the flutter of his palpitating heart as he talked about a corpse that had been moldering in a grave for over half a century. With every cardiac murmur his breathing became more laborious. The wheezing began to ooze from every inch of his body.

Not buying his tragic attempt at a pity party, I leaned over to grab his frail body. I spoke softly, but firmly, "You can die right here. If that's what you want. Do you want that? It would be really easy."

There was that moment of silence again. A little longer than before, he was trying to weed through the fog determining whether or not it was folly. Our eyes locked, I saw in that moment he was beginning to fear me. Finally he ordered his mouth into a smile and forced out a silence-breaking laugh.

"Look at us," chuckled Humphries, "we are going to get so much tail tonight it's ridiculous. A couple of lady killers." He was more right than he knew.

And, as if on cue, we arrived at the black silhouette of a building with no markings save a sculpture of a three headed canine. Of course it was a dog, and the suitcase of symbolism that comes with it. I really do hate sculptures. Even plaster ones gilded with faux marble spray paint.

We walked through the door and entered a miniscule room covered with black and white tiles. The walls were draped with velvet black as the night sea. In front of us was a brass elevator door. The only illumination in the room came from the brilliant glare of a red glowing elevator button. En face the illumination, somehow sensing our presence, the button began to be enveloped by brass leaves like a flower closing for a night. When finished the leaves were incomplete leaving a glowing keyhole.

Humphries removed the reciprocal male from his pocket and placed it into its female counterpart. "Insert Slot A into Tab B," he said, attempting a joke. The doors opened revealing an elevator room completely enveloped by red. There was only one button sparkling with scarlet light.

"Really," Humphries said, "It's a little too gay for me, especially for only one night, but nobody wants to hear the opinions of an old man."

"You are right there," I countered, but my agreeance was muffled by the roaring sound thrusting through the opening doors.

I scanned the great hall we had opened into. There in front of me was a masquerade world of sex, drugs, and dancing. It was if we had been dropped into the middle of an aquarium. Mosaics of colorful fish darted about in all directions, bodies twirling in fervent dance. Everywhere I looked was a grotesque bacchanalian experiment gone awry.

This was not the first time in Rios history that the mighty had fallen. Once upon a time Brazil was Portugal's underling, just another cash cow across the Atlantic. But in 1807 a short dwarf named Bonaparte marched his army into Portugal. The Prince Regent, ruling in place of his insane mother, as if there was any other type of mother, knew that if the court remained it would be overthrown. So with battle cannons booming outside the city of Lisbon the royal family and approximately fifteen thousand of their closest noble friends and family ran to the Lisbon docks and hastily boarded thirty-six ships that were to take them to Brazil. They were fleeing for their lives with Rio to be the new capital of the Portuguese empire.

But just as soon as safety was found on the Atlantic it was realized that there was nowhere near enough food and water, especially for people not used to any form of lack. It was also discovered that all the clothes for most of the court had been left on the docks, thus for the whole trip, these great nobles were unable to change clothes. The stench, a mixture of seasickness, indigestion, body odor, was apparently atrocious. Queen Maria contracted head lice and had to have her head shaved bald. When the ship finally arrived at the Brazilian shoreline most of the court refused to disembark their ships until the necessary supplies were obtained allow them to reinstate themselves to a dignified appearance.

My eyes looked upwards where a series of grated staircases and walkways leading to rooms full of potential chances to create secrets. It was a Carnival funhouse full of ups and downs rising for an indefinite amount of stories.

All at once the world slowed to the point of absolute stillness. I was now alone, the only movement in a sea of statues. A picture perfect portrait of this moment, my eyes drifted about: peacocks preening, glasses raising, flesh pressing. And then from the tranquility came Beauty.

Draped in a black corseted couture tulle dress, a black tiara, and sparkling ruby sandals she glided through the mannequins like a black swan. Her physique was pristine with ballerina legs, a tennis player's ass, and thickly tangled sun streaked Loira hair that fell right to the top of it.

I grabbed Humphries, reanimating the world around us, and urgently pressed, "Who is that?"

She writhed about to the music's persistent beat. The sexual authority, for a moment I thought I was in Versailles looking at Marie Antoinette. I moaned silently.

Humphries gazed, approved, and replied. "Odette. You know, the supermodel?" Off my bewildered eyes he elaborated, "She's the biggest thing to come out of Brazil since the Landing Strip. Only twenty-two, but she's done more covers than a hotel maid. She is known as 'the future of advertising.'"

Not if I had anything to do with it.

I pried Humphries for every shred of information found in his rotting brain. After years of training with Ballet Nacional Do Brasil, the national ballet company of Brasil Odette was discovered at sixteen at the airport while waiting on a plane delay. Within six months she had signed to two million dollar contract with a mega makeup conglomerate Gloss. She had active endorsements with Illusion Teeth the whiting product, Belie luxury goods, Pretense perfume, Postiche eyeglasses, and Huguenot Air.

During her three years as the face of Pixie Lingerie she had evolved the brand from a tasteless private corporation into a tasteless megacorporation with a record IPO offering. Odette sashaying down the runway in her signature red fairy wings and devil ears were plastered on the front window of every mall store from Maine to Madagascar. Front Numbers magazine had reported that she was the world's best-paid supermodel with an annual income of over thirty million dollars.

After walking the lonely runways of Milan, Tokyo, and Paris for three years she found amour in the arms of an up and coming Hollywood leading man, some said he resembled a young Cary Grant. During their five year duration Odette's Latin penchant for ugly public fights became constant tabloid kindling. After a breakup that resulted in ubiquitous rag covers for nearly half a year our Odette dallied in soccer superstars, wealthy financiers from Tangiers, and one rock star so ugly that people shuddered to think of the blending of their genes. At the moment she was rumored to be dating a Saudi prince who in the glossies was said to fancy polo ponies and in the tabloids was said to fancy the philosophies of the Marquis de Sade.

I gazed back locking eyes with her. They were striking violet, the rarest of all colors. But you, My Odette, I thought, are no shrinking violet are you? I mused. She was to be my big game, my perfect target, my chance to destroy Beauty.

They all stared at her. They stared, and she enjoyed it. She was that type. Always enjoying the attention, whether it was looks of approval or of hatred. It was disinterest that she despised. She needed the devotion, and one way or the other she was to get it.

I suppressed from ravishing her right then and there. I had waited over a thousand years for this; I could spend a few more hours getting each of us hot and bothered. Artful stalking is a marathon event, never a sprint.

I spent the next three hours involved only in the chase. She embraced my demanding nature, acknowledging the mutual appreciation of herself. The sexual heat from the pursuit was intoxicating. As she flitted from room to room like a fairy, her eyes constantly gravitated towards my presence.

Odette had the skills of a trained courtesan. Brazilian women are experts at manipulating male egos and she was the Queen bee. The tinkling laughter, the brief tactile brushes that felt like Midas touching the ordinary, and the eyes that cast sunlight onto a world dark before the blessing of her gaze.

Her only job in life was to flirt with the world; and she did it perfectly.

But being a true harlot, another john would quickly steal her attention leaving the last's planet to shrivel in a frozen death as it lost the illumination of her sun.

I patiently followed her up and down each staircase, as slowly throughout the night the space between us became a diminishing property.

Humphries tried to pry me from my pursuit, towards other Cherries, but I only had eyes for the girl in the red shoes. I inhaled her splendor as she danced on tabletops with playboys, air kissed with moguls, and took pharmaceutical gifts from eager to dole millionaires. Diet pills were just not enough for her. Happy drugs had took possession of her mind, allowing only the colors and the music to function as her reason for being. Why think when there is no need too?

She was mine, mine for the taking. I remained her shadow. Humphries had offered an introduction, but there was more rapture in pursuit. Convergence was finally obtained at the party's rooftop garden. A modern day flora labyrinth with twists and turns around every well-manicured corner. The blackened night sky loomed overhead so ebony in hue it had began to look blue again making it almost cerulean in color. Amazing, I thought, somehow the rich were able to cover up even the inescapable tarnishment of light pollution if they wanted to.

I was closing in on satisfaction with every inch. Yards in front of me Odette promenaded through the waterfall tube, sheltered from above by the umbrella of a glass ceiling. With water cascaded on both sides of her perfect body, her hand sliced through the stream in a move that Esther Williams would have envied.

A hand evolved into a foot, and then a body as she began to splash at the ever-tumbling sheets of water. She gracefully sliced at it recalling ballet movements embedded into her brain from her days as a waif who danced to express joy versus the waif who now stood still to sell panties.

Droplets of her own personal rainstorm fell down her radioactively glowing skin from her tousled hair to her pristine toes now encased in a ruined pair of six hundred dollar Milano shoes. Her face glimmered in the ceiling's reflective light as she glanced back with beckoning eyes.

With the grace of a swan she exited herself from the cascade. With only the tunnel distance separating us there was nothing but anticipation holding me back. The water dripping off her body was now deafening. Odette looked at me in her complete wetness, tinkled her bewitching siren laugh, and ran through adjacent door.

I hopped like a greyhound to the gun tearing at the knob on the Solarium, which I was able to recognize by the brass plate identifying it. As I blindly plunged through the frame the weighted door slammed behind me. I was enveloped by what I thought at first was complete blackness, but as my eyes adjusted I noticed the faint uneven twinkling of infinitesimal miniature lights.

But electricity they were not. Upon closer inspection the swarming erratic flashing was revealed to be thousands of fireflies trapped in the greenhouse. A color wheel of tints, the insects flashed a pale reddish, yellowish or green in color. For the drug induced party participant this would have been a silent heaven.

Odette kicked of her soiled shoes and began to twirl around these living baubles.

After a sufficient amount of pirouettes she turned to me eyes blazing with dizziness and drugs. "Who I am?" she demanded.

"Who are you?" I countered rhetorically?

Not willing to wait for the response she continued, "I'm an artist."

That is what I love about women: everything, as long as they keep their mouths shut.

"Honey, you are not an artist, you are a billboard."

"Well, I'm an angel then," she countered with a pout that had made her a multi-millionaire for the last five consecutive years.

"If you are an angel, then where are your wings?" I asked stepping slowly closer with the authority of a poacher capturing a unicorn.

She looked over her shoulder with the expectation of someone who received everything she demanded. She shrugged upon noticing their lack of materialization. "I must have lost them Yankee," she said, with the coquettishness of a seventh century French whore. Humbert Humbert eat your heart out.

"So you are a fallen angel?" I pressed, decreasing the distance between our bodies until I was inches from her face.

"Yes." She leaned in closer yet, her mouth millimeters from mine. Her smell recalled the gardens of Versailles.

"Look how they twinkle," she said impishly pulling away from the inevitable and spinning once more.

"They're dying," I said. "Over population, global warming, nobody knows why, but in the next twenty years most scientists think lighting bugs will disappear completely."

Ignoring my last statement, she got us right back on the course she wanted. "Maybe it is your job to save me?" she said, protruding out her million dollar lower lip.

"Oh Honey, not in the slightest." Her pout blossomed larger.

I paused and smiled before asking, "Do you not know who I am?"

She mischievously smiled back, "my toy."

"Nope, try again."

"Hmmmm," she pondered looking at me, not one for hard questions she tacking into another conversational topic.

"I don't know who you are, but I do know that you are wasting precious time talking to me right now when we could be having more fun."

And with this invitation I thrust myself upon her. Kissing her, hard. I tore away at her mouth with passion and anger. I was going to enjoy this, and I knew it.

I vanquished her long enough and then let her know. "You know who I am?" I said a little overdramatically, but I was enjoying the moment.

"I'm the Big Bad Wolf."

And that is when the fun began.

I ravished her, once her way and then once my way.

In a pas de deux of violence I swept her backwards towards the wall. I tore at her unnecessary corset slashing it to tatters. Her exquisite form trembled from the impact. Quickly I was thrusting both her exterior and interior. She moaned loudly; for me, and the ink she expected in the press tomorrow for our dalliance. As we came closer her violet eyes rolled to the back of her head, pushed by pleasure.

Wanting her full attention I pulled my hand back and slapped her across her face.

Her eyes instantly spun back, a hybrid of shock and now boiling passion.

Eavesdropping on her heartbeat I knew we were close to the finale of our paso-doble.

Almost there.

Almost there.

And then it hit.

She peaked, I bit.

The absolute darkness was enveloped by carnal redness.

In the silence that followed the ceasing of her heartbeat all of the fireflies' lights blinked on and off together, as if flipped by a switch.

She was mine, forever. Now, I was on high looking down at the universe.

I had found Beauty and had murdered it.

Refreshed and revitalized I descended the staircases into the circus of revelry, no longer the animal wrangler, but the ringmaster. I strode to the elevator and forceful demanded my vertical carriage to arrive.

From the right Humphries approached me. Our eyes locked for moment, but there was no smile to share. It shook him. "Where have you been?" he quietly questioned.

There were no more over-the-hill divorcees for me. No more hiding in rooms. No more associating with castaways and viles of society.

"You will find out soon enough" I retorted.

Entering the box I continued, "And now it is time for me to go."

There was no more being a loser.

He smiled unsurely, "But, the night is still young," he said waving his hand showing off the chaotic room of wayward painted faces.

No fear of anything.

"I am done now," I replied as the doors began to shut.

No fear of anything.

But before the doors closed completely Humphries slid in the elevator continuing his plea, "But Carnival hasn't even started yet," he said with the desperation of a lawyer's closing arguments on a losing case. "There's so much fun to be had."

"Old man," I countered. "This town is dying just like you."

No fear of anything.

Silence.

His words flew from his mouth with the strength of a man decades his junior. "Take me with you," he pleaded.

Silence.

"Please don't leave me."

Silence.

The bell chimed and the doors opened. I advanced towards a street packed with rain soaked Carnival revealers frenzied from dancing, drinking, and the kitchen sink. The droplets were sad and fat. Rio's skies knew to mourn its queen, before its citizens even knew what had happened.

"I don't want to die alone," Humphries begged clawing at me as we stepped into a street.

I turned around staring hard in his bloodshot eyes for the last time. "Everyone dies alone, including you" I replied. I easily brushed his paper body off, as if swatting a pest away. He fell into the flooded gutter beneath.

"Now go and find a girl to fuck to forget that I ever told you that," I finished, and crooked my body around.

You might say that I left before the party started. But I did not need to stay in this crime laden chaotic city of dog any longer. The revolution had begun, and Independence Day would follow me wherever I went.

### Chapter Fifteen

Cubism – noun -

**(kyü-bi-z** ə **m) 1. A style of art that stresses abstract structure at the expense of other pictorial elements, especially by displaying several aspects of the same object. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth.**

Rio was only the beginning. After a thousand years of dreariness it was time for some fun. I had left civilization in favor of the Tiers Monde, the worlds of the Third Level. I wanted off the radar.

I found it apropos to commence my new existence in nations of development, as I too was in a process of redevelopment. These were places where most of the population drove cars that were twenty years old. They were worlds that had nothing, but with passionate desperation were trying to be something.

Morocco, the Canary Islands, the Bahamas, The Dominican Republic, Haiti, French Polynesia, Belize, Cape Verde, Costa Rica, Guam, and Cape Verde. French Polynesia, Nicaragua, Maldives, Tierra del Fuego, El Salvador, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago. India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Places that you will only see in dreams, if your dreams are even that great.

There was no itinerary. I flitted from nation to nation with the mindset of an uncaged firefly.

Only one requirement: sunshine. There was to be no snows of Greenland, no eighteen hours of Alaskan night, none of the aching loneliness of Siberia. I was the Grim Reaper on holiday, footloose and fancy-free.

Daylight and death: the perfect combination.

These were nations where nobody asked questions. I was could personally shine without dealing with the red tape. In the more advanced countries they might label and track of me, but where I was holidaying that was never a problem. And the press? There were no anxieties in regards to them either. Nothing is easier to avoid than publicity, if motivated; besides the rogue reporter is something of an urban legend these days. These were countries where people disappeared all the time; a highlight that is not usually advertised to developed white people who are willing to spend money on their beautiful gated beaches.

I did not sample the natives. There were no preference for dark skinned political deviants, underworld beings, or ladies of the night. As in the favelas I would walk among them, but they were never my ultimate goal.

I was always in search of the generations of Lost. The bourgeoisie, elite ex-pats who chose only to love life, and themselves. The artists, the musicians, and the poets: all well supported by familial endowments. But this was no Club Med experience. There were no buffers of fruity drinks and tour guides who fornicated with clients searching for weak thrills. These were ones who blood flowed strong and hard. They moved through life with authority taking what they wanted. I, in kind, took them.

One of the benefits of these ever shifting nations of third world nature; any real problems could be solved with cold hard cash. Money opens all doors, especially the back one.

They were not chosen for fear of consequence. I was once a coward, but never again. I had entered countries that had their violence shining unabashedly in the daylight. These were places where I could get more bang for my buck. They were locations where at any moment anyone could be killed. Thus, no one noticed when a mass murderer entered their midst.

I was welcomed like anyone else with an endless line of credit: absolutely eagerly.

This was one of the things that entertained me most about humans: they were all smoke and mirrors. Socrates may have talked a great game, but that is all it was. There may be moments of enlightenment, but all of this is covered by the blinders of life. Humans love to make it pretty and always assume everything. Keep moving forward like a Chicago cattle drive.

But unlike the pathetic interactions that I had fallen into with humans in the past, they would now have their proper place. They were the ultimate feast. I was the vegetarian who finally realizes the pleasure in destroying things, walks to the nearest Chop House, plops him self down, and orders a Porterhouse bloody.

There would be no further need for the infernal radiation box. Remember those automobile stickers, "Kill your television." Well I had done that and upgraded with something better, humanity itself.

That is right, homo sapiens had became my ultimate interactive entertainment. For me conversating with people was like a human talking to a Muppet. The oldest amuse bouché for the immortal. I could see why the one who no longer exists, that dopey labrador of the past, had created all this to begin with.

The jeu had begun. I just needed to hone the art of manipulation. The end result was always the same, but the permutations were endless. I ingested psychology books absorbing Freud, avoiding Jung. I developed the ability to read your basic minds.

Before there had been no joy in my work, but now there was nothing but sport. Man is the most tantalizing of animals to hunt because one can learn so much about him before you destroy him. I felt like Kipling on Safari.

I have to admit, you were slightly more complicated than a computation machine, just slightly. I saw the world measured in transactions. Ask the right questions, give the right answers, and the game advances on. Once you learned what buttons to push you could add, subtract, divide and conquer. I was a modern day computer programmer. My toys were not fiber optics and wires, but organic fleshbots.

Other living things were not as easily duped.

Right away I noticed the birds. Before the change, these so-called messengers of the labrador would plague me. In the looming minutes prior to daylight, running for the safety of my castle of comfort, I would be pestered by cardinals and bluebirds singing siren songs so disgustingly cheerful. As I dashed through the park they would create a perfectly treacherous trap. In these moments of tardiness I would be drawn towards the trills and warbles recalling glimpses of foggy memories of sunlight. It was only with shreds of sanity that I realized how vile and putrid their songs truly were. I would force my palms to my head to muffle their melodies of deadly merriment.

Ducks would squawk at me in the park demanding that I throw toast at them. They followed me around like some tainted version of Make Way for Ducklings when I was running towards safety lost by a missed train. And the pigeons, the rats of the sky, how they would taunt me. Forever circling from above as I darted for a safe house like field mouse.

Must be nice to have such a strong existential dogma, even if it was completely misguided.

I am going to enlighten you about the spectrum of the blessed and the damned: every creature has both darkness and light. But unlike the Eastern bravado of ying and yang, the karmatic catch is that they are not equal parts.

Unlike American politics everyone is not either a Democrat or a Republican. Which is not to say that I actually care about that ridiculous circus, with my undead status there is not much need to be a registered voter.

Every living being has a place on the spectrum: cats are touched more by the devil, dogs more by you know who.

Naturally, humans are dead in the middle, which is why you people have the supernatural instincts of a magic eight ball.

Neutrality creates an utter lack perspective. Birds are one of the only animals that can go either way. Geese: bad. Doves: good. Crows: bad. Pigeons: believe it or not good. And ducks, those toast seeking bastards, were good.

Did they actually talk to the dog, to the great labrador in the sky?

I do not know.

Maybe they were just better programmed on a biological spiritual level. In the same way that white people innately feared every other race these bluebirds, cardinals, and ducks sneered at me because I worked for the bad guy. Taunting me the way a second grade bully does, not yet willing to start a fight, yet wanting to discover the weight of their social swing.

But it was different now. I had them on the run. They did not want to confront the existential concentration camp of my presence.

They would hover in trees terrified of me. They avoided me like an Upper East Side social plague. They would no longer cross my path, choosing instead to fly around me.

On my afternoon food shopping strolls I was Moses parting a Red Sea of beaks and feathers.

I was not playing for either side, a walking Switzerland of amorality ambiguity. And for this reason to every other living thing on this planet I was completely terrifying.

But of course this, like everything else important, was lost on humans.

Humans always distracted by frivolous detail, for example the concept of the importance of the passage of time. You invented the numbers, hands, and gears of a chronometer and now you are now ruled by the. New Year's only makes you a year older if you let it. You define people by their age, happiness by the length of a good and long life, and moments by their time signature. You eat dinner because your watch tells you, you wake up because your alarm demands it, you nip and tuck because the calendar tell you that you are forty. No other being on the planet lives by Father Time's ticks; your prison is one of solitude.

Do you not see my future appetizers and entrées? It is all a joke, a joke on you.

### Chapter Sixteen

**Fin De Siecle – noun - (fan d** ə **-s** ē **-e-k** ' **l; fa'-d** ə **-syekl** ') **1. The end of the century. 2. A period at the end of the 19** th **century and just before World War I in which art and literature languished in a kind of malaise compounded of despondency, boredom, morbidity, and hypersensitivity to the esthetic.**

I enjoyed my traveling. In the course of a few years, I had lived in dozens of countries circumnavigating the globe like a modern day knight errant. Some starting, some ending, but I woke up one day and the honeymoon was over. The luster had been lost; even fun becomes boring after awhile.

I wanted to go home. I missed my pillow shams. I missed my routines. I missed my lovely girls housed in my hermetically sealed museum.

Third World nations were great for unbridled swagger, for voracious appetites, but not the comforts of home. Not a lot of decent climate controlled art galleries in the Dominican Republic. I may be a monster, but at the end of the day I am a civilized monster. Now that I was a day dweller, I knew could rediscover my hometown of a couple of centuries all over again, truly seeing the city of Boston for the first time.

I arrived back in town at midnight declaring nothing to the customs official, who with a pursed smile sized-up whether I had smuggled Camembert into my carry on. A forty-five minute cab ride later, the soiled people of my city always beget traffic even at midnight, I had arrived home.

I was back at the ranch. The white picket fence gleaming, the gas-burning fireplace blazing within minutes, and my bed covers harmonizing like a four piece string quartet. I had returned to my portion-controlled environment.

After a good night's sleep, I rose with the dawn. Fresh and ready to meet my hometown like a bridegroom after returning from the honeymoon of a shotgun wedding. The insecurities of being an outcast for hundreds of years had evolved into poise and confidence; I strutted down the block like a high school senior.

Before neighborhood relations were best not dabbled in. I artfully chose to ignore the block since that whole do not shit where you eat theory was quite sound. They, in true New England fashion, had obliged me the same courtesy. But now, I figured I should give gestures of good faith and greetings. Nothing brazen, I may be king of the block, but it would do nothing for me to declare it.

Yards ahead Mrs. Dahl, who had recently mutated into a Ms., was working her bitterness into her garden. She weeded like a pro, not someone who had just taken it up upon retiring two years ago. I do find it funny how well-to-do people avoid manual labor at all costs, paying any unsavory ethnicity to do the job, but during the golden years of their lives it becomes their salvation. When Mrs. Dahl worked hundred hour weeks for the mortgage company she did not give a flying fig about the differences between the rouge hues of an American Beauty and Rachmaninov rose, but now you could not shut her up.

She was one of the perennials of the block, living in the community over seven years since divorcing her upgrading bastard of a husband. Our encounters had been nothing but brief. Always involving moonlight and Sparky the Chow, her happy go lucky replacement for ex.

"Good day, Mrs. Dahl."

"It's Ms.," she barked back mutilating the earth with a murder weapon of a spade. She raised her head at me, sparing a moment from her inner dialogue of all the ways she could destroy her ex-husband if she chose to finally to go out and do it. Her jaw tumbled down to her recently turned soil at the sight of me.

With the faint rustle of panties, I lanced her with a seductive nod. A deer in headlights she sat gaping at the impending doom a barreling sports car.

I dithered for a moment, should I jump her right now? Imagine the scandalé of the block I would be for that one. I suppose I could guarantee that none of those bratty girl scouts would be knocking on my door trying to sell cookies ever again. But as much as I would enjoy that moment could the neighborhood association really look the other way? So no; one must not be uncouth. Besides I could do better than Ms. Dahl. I did not want to slide into bad habits now that I was back home.

I sauntered by her and Sparky the Chow. It was not until I had almost completely passed by that with murine timidness she mustered speech. "Hello to you Mr. Gray." Oh Yes, Mr. Gray, my alias for the last nine years.

Turning my head I nodded with a placating smile and glided away with the ease of Sonja Henning.

The moment had passed; and she in typical human form was too late. I skated onward to betterness.

I walked through the streets of the Puritan City looking for the perfect fish to take aim in my barrel of a city. This was not a time of rash decisions. My hometown comeback would be something of style, not as flashy as Rio, but still a classic calling card. I would spend weeks tracking my prey.

Would it be an heiress? Or an economically over supported college student? A drug inspired stockbroker? Or a suffocating bank manager? I trolled through the affluent stores with the predatory tactics of a female stalking a Louis Vuitton bag. I was choosing not only their body; but also the acquisition of their mind. The perfect lifestyle with the perfect Ivy League memories could only leave a smooth aftertaste of money and dull contentment in my mouth.

I was walking black hole. It had evolved into nothing but perfect emptiness. Like a Warring blender I churned space, time, energy, and mass into a lovely fruity daiquiri.

My evolution had taken me beyond the event horizon. I had felt it abroad, but my homecoming to the old stomping grounds had focused it. Gravity had become another one of my playthings.

Everything in the universes had some gravitational pull.

Humans themselves are no exception; beings of sway swaying into each other. But, I was no longer a participant of such twaddle. There was no other gravity but my own.

If you have perhaps taken at least eighth grade science you will recall that inside a black hole time does not exist, instead it is replaced by individuality.

Something the ignorant Nobel scientists called imaginary. These science simpletons had supposed that as everything in a black hole flows towards singularity.

The solution of Schwarzschild had time and space bend towards inwardness. Everything spirals and disappears into nothingness.

I am a private black hole walking among collective beings of mass. Bathed in golden sunlight of a setting sun, I defy all your puny laws of physics.

Forever a frozen star.

"Hey! Look who it is!"

My death star of a head swerved around, as the people unknowingly tethered scattered around me like cockroaches from the illumination of a single light bulb.

Son of a Bitch, it was Jerry.

He, as if in a Cary Grant movie, performed an over the top double take starring up at the sun and then back at me.

Finally I spoke up, "Jerry you look like you are catching the two of us in an illicit affair."

"I think I am Chomper."

"Careful Jerry, you will make me blush."

"You could have told me."

"Told you what?" I said playing melodramatically coy. I loathed Jerry enough that I wanted him to work for any satisfaction.

"That I was _right_ ," he said grinning like a thirteen year old boy who had just learned how to spank the monkey. Not an ounce of refinement. With statements like this I did not just mildly dislike Jerry, I abhorred him.

"Well this calls for a celebration. I'm supposed to go over to the courthouse to do some pro bono stuff, part of my community service agreement for my entanglement with the law, but I don't think anyone will really care if another Mexican gets lousy legal counsel."

"That sounds wonderful to me," I said with a falsely plastic smile painted on so hard I looked like the late beauty Odette on a cover shoot.

Quickly we found ourselves at a restaurant that is trendy only for the sake of being trendy. Jerry, the glutton, ordered a Prime Rib steak full of blood and fat, and plate of Spaghetti Bolagnese whose portion size was comparable to the state of Alaska. He tore away at his food like he had my pointy tooth, while I sat there with an untouched dirty martini.

"You look good," he said with a smear of red sauce on the corner of his mouth. "We didn't know what had happened to you. All of a sudden you were gone. Abracadabra and all that shit! Larry was hit hard. Didn't know what to do." Of course he was, Larry was always the hardest hit.

"He kept insisting we should still come and hang out," continued Jerry, that dot of red screaming from his lips' crevice. "After two weeks I just figured you were gone. Hit by the higher power, or maybe just some Shrimp Scampi," he joked, badly.

"Jerry I do not eat. Why do you think I would I be afraid of garlic?"

Jerry gave me a look of simple confusion. I was not playing the role that I had previously been dealt. He had always had the best hand in social poker. This was wrong to him.

Jerry babbled on to me the way people talk at college reunions; running a gamut of conversation, but never really focusing on anything of particularity. After going through every person we mutually knew, which was two, one which we had already covered, he shifted the conversation to what he was best versed in: himself.

I heard about the females he fucked, the trials he had won, and the company he was embezzling from.

I sat back and enjoyed the show.

It had been hard to see before, but Jerry really had been just as pathetic as the rest of us.

I saw his hair plugs as he leaned back laughing too hard at a joke he told. I saw ever-growing coral reef of alcohol induce capillaries in his cheekbones. I saw the hesitancy in his mouth before he painted on a smile. Every so often he would tear another piece of flesh off the bone from the plate in front of him.

"You know Jerry," I said in, "in Brazil the largest export they have is beef. Now, contrary to popular belief, cows are actually some of the smartest of animals on the planet, but they are easily distracted. Sounds like any other species we know Jerry? In case you haven't heard it's hot in South America. So these cows, with their toddler like intelligence, have been known to wander into shallow waters of the Amazon to refresh themselves in its cooling waters. Most of the time they're safe and sound, but sometimes, quite unexpectedly, they attacked by a school of piranha. And within minutes, these large animals are reduced to skeletons by a few fish that each weighs only a few ounces."

"And why should I care of your story of poor Bessie? As long as she's bloody and tasty that's fine with me," he finished. But thinking better he added another a bon mot to his statement, "same as I like my women." Tastelessness fell every time his mouth opened.

"Do you not think your homo sapien superiority is nothing more than a figment of your little mind, Jerry?" I said.

"There are six billion human beings on the planet that I offer towards the contrary," he grunted. And yet that violent drop of blood persisting. "We are the point of the food chain triangle."

"Perhaps," I said, staring hard at that red stain. "Do you know what the mirror test is Jerry?"

"Well it's definitely something you can't participate in Chomper," he chirped slamming my back hard enough for me to want to tear into his jugular right there. Instead I chose to smile, and Jerry, getting drunker by the moment, took no notice that my smile now was at the thought of his impending immolation.

I continued, "The mirror test, is an experiment in which an animal is placed in front of a mirror, and is watched to see if it recognizes its own reflection."

"Wait a minute, so you're telling me if there were mirrors in the milking stalls Bessie would be checking herself out? Maybe the sun really did go to your head..." Jerry took his sleeve to his mouth finally decimating that screaming stain.

"Actually no, not cows. But not only humans. Did you know that elephants at the Bronx zoo recognize themselves? And that is not all: chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins, and pigeons. Did you know scientists have discovered that rats giggle and laugh? So who is to say that they are not higher on the food chain that your delicious species. Who is to say that out of all the beings in the world that you humans are a superior species? Maybe the superior species does not even look in the mirror at all. And all this time you have been fooled into blindly into thinking you were special."

"Just like the Democrats."

Jerry loved to hold court in the hall of insolence. But remember, every king can become a jester overnight.

"If you follow the inanity of human politics, than yes."

"As if there were any others."

"You are looking at walking proof that there are not."

Having completed his gorging Jerry's wandering eyes focused on the untouched alcohol in front of my being, "Chomper you're not drinking."

I looked up and smiled, "Ha ha."

"Well since I'm finished. Let's move on to the next location, since there's nothing of interest here. We'll need some female distraction if we're going to make it to sunrise."

"Good god why would we do that?"

"I think we should watch the sun come up together. I want to see my handwork in use."

Jerry would have taken credit for creating heaven and earth if some other hack of a dog had not already done so.

"You're going to get the check right?" he directed while sliding into his green overcoat. "It's the least you can do considering what I did for you."

Jerry did not wait for an answer. As he grabbed his coat his eyes focused to the other side of the room. "God," he said. "I wish they'd fire that bartender. She's bringing the whole gene pool down."

Steady, I thought, patience will be my revenge.

By four in the morning we were on our third strip club. Jerry, in an unsteadily alcoholic fuzz, was starring at a girl listless of life, a ghost of a rainbow. She swayed offbeat like a perpetually seasick sailor. Her skin clung to her coked riddled body begging for salvation, but the only thing Jerry was bestowing was five and tens.

The song cut abruptly; only in movies do strippers really get to finish a number. Another Barbie zombie walked on dressed in only a red hooded cape. She dropped to the floor, and proceeded to show us her gateway to ecstasy.

He disregarding the girl, he peered hard at his conspicuous consumption designed wristwatch focusing his two filmy orbs distilled by the glaze of intoxication. "Just one more hour," he announced with glee. He turned his attention back to the dead peacock in front of us.

"I love costumes," he said, bestowing her with a sawbuck. "Can't get enough of that shit. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... If you can meet her on the streets of Disneyland than I'm pinwheeling."

"Just a modern man getting off on century old fairytales that were initially designed to inform children about the dangers of the world."

"Damn straight," countered Jerry. "What's a matter Chomper? Can't even enjoy Red over here." Hearing her accolade being proclaimed Jerry's wet dream sauntered over and began to entertain en face le space moi.

"Jerry, I lived through them. They are memories; not stories to me. I remember when they occurred, how they were initially spun, and how they evolved with time to yarns of hearts and flowers that made a man in Florida rich enough to freeze his head."

"Come on Chomper there must be something from your dusty childhood," he said as Red returned to him, disappointed by my lack of investments. "Something from before you were born that your mother told you when you went to sleep. Those usually make the dirtiest fantasies."

"No, no memories."

"Too bad," he burbled. "Your sex life must be terribly tame."

"I do alright," I said standing and sliding on my black cover. "We should get going. It is getting to be my new witching hour soon. I know you want to see your handiwork. We can grab a bottle, walk to the park and watch the sunrise."

"Chomper," he laughed. "If I didn't know better I would say you were propositioning me."

"Maybe I am."

At about four we headed to an all night packie store that despite certain strict blue laws sold spirits under the counter for three times their normal cost. As I purchased a bottle of something Italian for the aspiring alcoholic, Jerry scanned the headlines off the early edition of the Globe. "Hey it looks like Huguenot Humphries finally kicked the bucket. God, he must have been ancient. Back in the day that guy was my absolute hero. He fucked everyone, and their sister."

"The aeronautical Cary Grant."

"Who's Cary Grant?"

I did not even blink an eye, "Clooney," I said, "the aeronautical George Clooney."

"True Dat."

Always one for instant gratification Jerry opened it before we even arrived at the park. Minutes before sunrise I shredded him behind the children's playground. "To your handiwork, Jerry," I told him as I tore at his gullet.

As I stepped away from his castoff corpse now doused with red wine and I muttered, "Well now that is done."

I am glad it is over, but I still felt empty. I had hoped I would find more inspiration by killing Jerry. But, too drunk on ego and alcohol he could not even give me a good fight.

I had always despised Jerry, thus I thought that fulfilling the fantasy of ripping his tonsils out would have released massive amounts of passionate savage delight. But there was nothing, nothing but nothing.

Contentment should have followed me around like an eager puppy, but instead all I had was a missing dog sign.

### Chapter Seventeen

**Potboilder – noun - ('pät-,boi-l** ə **r) 1. A work of art produced merely to earn the necessities of life or in the case of the already successful, just to make money.**

It got only worse from there.

I started playing public Russian roulette. I begged for fire and brimstone. Please catch me, like the lover who is dying for his mate to find the unfamiliar restaurant matchbook in his jacket pocket, the lipstick on his collar.

I became more addicted then ever to my museum, my cathedral of color and canvas. I stalked the halls searching for a steadiness from the chaos. In the MFA, time stood still, the noise of unhappiness left me in these hallowed halls. In there I found window dressing on my black hole. In there I had four corners.

I joined the museum becoming a patron at the Ambassador level, which bestowed on me benefits such as free attendance to their Special Exhibits, reciprocal privileges to 23 major art museums in the greater metropolitan area, and ten percent off at the gift shop. Black figured vases, Renaissance frescos, Neo Classic to Postmodern it mattered not. I tore through galleries and multimedia experiments. Vaults holding the personal expressions of dead men became my houses of worship.

I became every docent's best friend. Before my illumination, the paintings and I had had only a few minutes together; like an illicit affair my glances during singles events were quickies in the night. Now, I was allowed the indulgence of time, able to spend hours absorbed with one painting, surrounded only by Japanese tourists and children on school trips.

I was adrift.

Giving up fundamental beliefs is harder on oneself than you think.

I had gotten so bold as to attack at supermarkets in broad daylight. People shopping in one aisle, and me gorging away on them in another.

Maybe I should have taken more of a hard look on whether or not it was right before I acted. In forsaking my belief in the roundness of the planet I was now stuck on ship being pulled towards the edge of the world.

There was wrongness, especially when it came to my girls. Before they had been my constant: my surrogate family for decades. But those emotions were evolving. The more I looked at them the less I saw them, and the more all I saw was a painting. My affections were waning replaced instead by notes of the artful techniques of a Sargent portraiture. I noted the choice of color scheme, the composition, and the use of light and dark; but I no longer wondered. My thoughts were not of Tulip, and Iris, and Ivy, and little Daisy.

They had ceased to be my little girls of delight.

I stared at the painting for hours looking for emotional emergence, like one of those suckers at the mall looking for the schooner in a field of dots. The void staring at its reflection in the mirror.

Time passed. Halloween arrived. I added another bullet to the chamber. Larry, Lobo, and I spent it viewing the timeless classic the Great Pumpkin; they had been good enough to look the other way when Jerry's disemboweled body was found among the Swan Boats. The next day there was a requisite obese man with a kettle well standing on every corner; with their fake beards, red velvet suits, and hand bells they were the perfect target for the holidays. But once you have disposed of one preeminent symbol of the commercialism of the labrador's season, you have disposed of them all.

It is surprising how you can do the most horrific things in broad daylight and get no reaction whatsoever. People just chose to look the other way. I guess, murder is only a tragedy if you know the person, or if it actually makes the paper.

With slaughter losing its luster and having to fill hours of daylight I bought a Get to Know the City of... Boston! Guidebook. I became a tourist in my hometown of two hundred years discovering sites that had been locked away by the now inoculated sunshine. I dragged myself on the Freedom Trail tour something that every college student, a whopping twenty-five percent of the city's population, had been subjected to during Parent's Weekend. I, along with the enrolled of Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Northwestern, Babson, Boston College, etc, viewed the site of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere's House, and the U.S.S. Constitution and Charlestown Navy Yard. I might have had a millennia plus in age over them, but the generation gap was bridged on the lack of thrill involved. Labrador help me, I even took a Duck Tour.

It was different when I was restricted to the twilight. I was out there enjoying my little chaotic havoc on the world. But the ability of omnipotence had only resulted in lazy regularity. All habit, pattern, routine. The electric doors at the supermarket always opened and closed on cue. The elevator always chirped three melodious dings before it opened. The sun always rose.

Welcome to the world of the mundane; I was becoming as boring as a human. I had devolved into a normal life. I had even begun to go to bed at eleven. The night's intriguing luster had been eclipsed by the more brassy sun.

Now I am a respectable mass murderer.

I was unable to sync right. I was a heliocentric vision in a geocentric world. I had taken the accepted model of the universe and smashed it to atoms for a more favorable equation. But I was beginning to realize that this newly accepted life was not the complete answer. The frame had been chosen not because it was the truest system, but because it was the most convenient, and so it did not support absolutely.

Who knew that playing god would be so boring?

I needed to find excitement in something, anything. So I started going to church.

Please, do not feign shock, it is so unbecoming.

It all began as personal dare. One day I flipped a page and discovered that I had checked off everything in the Get to Know the City of... Boston! Guidebook, everything that is save the plethora of scenic houses of worship.

There have never been any mandates restricting my kind from entering cathedrals, churches, temples, etc. but as an unspoken rule one usually avoids any place where every other object located inside of it could potentially end your existence. You could call it superstitious, but most Supernaturals would rather cross the street then cross paths with an abbey.

Being a Non-Fatal is so much easier when you live in a modern city, megalopolis of sunshine of such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Egocentricity has led these metropolises of sin to be built without ever a worry of acquiescing to a higher power. They are the Me cities, full of people living solely for themselves. It is much harder in older cities like my own, plagued by a goddamn cathedral or church on every freaking street.

On a vapid afternoon, walking absentmindedly down the street waiting for the Greig exhibit to commence next month having become quite bored with the Cassatt exhibit I had attended over dozen times this month alone. The autumn wind had the kind of breeze to it that propels you forward. Offering a goading momentum that you absorb and react to cutting shortcuts through parks, through alleys, and through doors. Like an aimless kite I followed the conspiratorial wind until I realized I was treading by one of the oldest churches in the city.

And there I stopped. The wind kept lashing at me to keep moving, but I stood steadfast. Like the dark voice the urges you to the edge of the cliff, but falls silent when its time to actually commit. "I want you to get close to the edge, but no jumping," screamed the wind. "Just thinking about it is enough." But my legs stood like headstones in a hurricane.

After what felt like the entire length of the Dark Ages I lifted one leg on those hard stone steps. I held tight to the railing as the leaves whipped past me in mini tornado clusters. I expected the brass to burn, but its only temperature was the chill of the month of November. Ascending the flush granite steps I stared at the massiveness of the Triune Church. After its former, more modest, residence burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1872, this garish replacement was erected under the direction one of the best known and most charismatic priests in the city's history. Designed by the renowned architect Miles Ledger Leeds the construction of this monstrosity took place from 1877 to 1891, when it was consecrated as sacred ground. Triune Church established Leeds's reputation as the first American architect to have his style imitated by European contemporaries. Triune Church is considered the genus and archetype of the opulent Leeds style of architecture, characterized by a clay crowning, polychromy, rough stone, heavy arches, and a massive tower.

It was the sensation of being guided, that I was walking on prosthetic legs foreign from my body. I, all at once, was able to sympathize with the Neil Armstrong. I wondered what deliciously tantalizing excitement would happen when I got to the top. Perhaps, I thought as I continued climbing, I would burst into a million pieces. Would that not be interesting? Would that not be entertaining? Would that at least be something to talk about? But all at once that leg was planted and then another moving me forward. And the wind howled as I moved up those steps quicker and quicker. Not running, but gliding up the world.

Then, as if by magic, I was at the shut door. I looked at the massive portal thicker than most people's self respect. What was I doing here? I stared hard into the intricate design waiting for an answer. I did not have a plan; unassuredness flew around me like a swarm of bees.

Known as the Ghiberti Doors, local tour guides, including Get to Know the City of... Boston! Guidebook, expounded the rumor that they had been removed from the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. But for those who have been around long enough to be in the know, during the early twentieth century a well paid sculptor was hired to take clandestine plaster casts of the original doors made by Ghiberti in Florence, and make replicas of the originals. The replicas were then installed in Triune Church so our fair City on a Hill could have its own personal Gates of Paradise. If there were ever a set of doors to make an entrance through this would be it. Nothing like showstopper to add respectability.

I hesitated, should one knock at a church door? It had been so long that I did not know the proper etiquette. My hand levitated to the side of my face hovering inches from brass. It then descended to my side. Coward _,_ I though. Here I am devoid of any form of death and I still could not convince myself to make it inside. The wind blew again chilling me more; meddling Mother Nature was not to be ignored. Contrasting possibilities swirled around me like dramatic chiaroscuro a Caravaggio painting.

And in a flash, I reached. I grabbed the brass handle worn with use and pulled, hard. I did not know what to expect, perhaps a massive sink hole that would plummet me down to the ninth circle of hell? Instead I heard the faint hum of an air conditioner. I stood there, my eyes adjusting to the lack of light, breathing in the contrast of architectural wonderment and the mundane.

After a precedent of blinding sunshine for months on end I was not used to the dimness of stained glass and vigil lights. From narthex I peered down the long nave of the building towards the enormous central Rose window waiting for my eyes to adjust. The pews were rows of wood lines in formation, like markers in a military graveyard. The psychological implications were nothing but condescending to the true nonbeliever. These children of the dog played make-believe among these bones of the dead, like rats in catacombs.

I turned to look at the window above the entranceway and recoiled, completely startled by the shock of the presence of another being. There standing if front of me was one of the tiniest adult humans that I had ever encountered. She stood barely four foot nine, a woman thoroughly immersed in her eighties. She was stick-like, surely only weighing eighty pounds soaking wet, but she imparted the strength of steel wool. She was dressed in a conservative brown button down shirt and modest black calf length skirt, but covering her head was a habit in a fire engine red, a color that only a streetwalker would wear.

I would have been able to identify her vocation even without the garish bonnet. There was a sexual void between us that I had not encountered since my ascension. It was like me looking into a mirror: nothing at all. But, surprisingly there was nary a speck of frigidity about her. Instead there lay in her deceptively youthful gray eyes a glow of pure maddening happiness. She quietly stared back at me.

Her presence flustered me to the point of falling into an apology. "Sister... Oh... I am sorry... I was just checking out your church... I always walk by... And wondered what it looked like on the inside."

She was silent for what seemed like the span of the Crusades, all of nine of them, and through it she continued her gaping. Truly, I did not know if the warmth glowing from the embers of her eyes was ever to end. And then as if with the switch of a light she smiled. It shone with a blazing radiance; it was the most genuine smile I had seen in probably in a hundred years.

"Don't apologize, you haven't done anything wrong," she croaked with a voice that would make a bullfrog jealous. "If we all apologize for all the things we don't do wrong, then when we finally do for something truly erroneous the apology has no meaning. You have to save room for those major fuckups."

Mentally I wrestled for my superiority over this diminutive woman, but I knew I had the upper hand. All that happiness was worthless if she could not even see what was right in front of her. I studied the architecture as if someone would be testing me on it later, taking in the tortured saints and hidden cloisters.

She noticed me staring. "Quite a beautiful church," she said.

Did the blissful ignorant know nothing of the concept of silence? Were not her kind supposed to take vows of muteness? Fine! I would answer. "Yes, I remember when they worked on it."

"Well that must make you the oldest man alive. It's been here for over a hundred years," she chuckled. "You must tell me the name of your plastic surgeon."

You would think that her theological spidey sense would feel it. That her body, ordained by the dog, would be screeching a high pitched theological security alarm. Newsflash: a member of the dark side is standing in your house of worship. But nothing happened but artful conversation.

"It is not worth it," I replied. "You would have to make a deal with devil just to get an appointment."

"It's better anyway. You can see from my wardrobe I'm not big a slave to fashion," she said displaying her vêtements. There was that smile again, goddamn absolute perfect joy.

"Just a slave to god," I countered back.

"Not a slave, just a disciple. My actions are my choice," she affirmed. "Free will allows me that option, just as it allows you the same."

"I am sure the rules are not the same for you and as they are for me sister," I said, countering her postulate.

"It's the same for everyone. God loves the saints and the sinners alike. Just as I, as an agent of God, equally have to counsel both the cops and killers."

"That sounds wonderful, all sunshine and daisies sister, but I just wanted to take see the sights. I was not looking to confess my deepest secrets today."

"Not today, but if you ever do we're here to help. Always open. Just like 7-11. Or maybe you just might want to come and sit quietly in the beginning. Church is a great place to just enjoy the silence of thought."

"Shaw said that, 'silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.' You ever think of that while you are lecturing to your sheep school children?"

I waited for her to chastise me for my insolence.

Instead she gazed for a moment and then smiled, yet again, and offered her hand, "My name is Sister Augustina. If you ever want to find your place in the world, you should come by." A soft sell, but that is all you need if you actually trust your product. And I knew in that moment that Sister Augustina completely trusted her product.

"Not today," I returned. My hands choosing to grasp the handle of elephantine doors instead of her outreached appendage. "You know the wrapping and bow are very pretty, but not everything fits into that package underneath. Besides, I am a free agent these days," I said, pulling my jacket tight in protection from the biting wind.

She smiled nothing but goddamn genuineness again; "Bow or not, you are always on one side or the other. Even in not choosing, you are making a choice." And with that she shut the door.

As I walked down the steps the blood in my veins, or I should say Mr. Yamagato's recently transferred blood, began boil. This is why I cannot stand the clergy. They make a few vague statements leaving you with a variety of questions that can only be solved through them. Middle management to the man who is really nothing but a ghost behind a curtain.

Well I was not biting. I was not looking for my place. Morons talk of a life unexamined as one that is not worth living. But what difference does that make if you do not even have a pulse? I was fine, perfectly fine. I am fine, where I am, how I am.

As I walked down the steps I passed plaid and blazer decked schoolgirls jumping rope and singing songs. Lyrics that once were warnings, but now were only idle entertainment for recess.

"Are you alive or are you dead? Is there nothing in your head?"

### Chapter Eighteen

**Foreshortening – noun - (f** ō **r-'shor-t** ə **n-ing) 1. The use of perspective to represent in art the apparent visual contraction of an object that extends back in space at an angle to the perpendicular plane of sight.**

Life continued all the same. I traversed the museum circuit. I watched the squirrels run the other way. I ate carefree couples walking out of the frozen yogurt store, oh those yuppies and their adoration of fat free chemicals in a cone. But thoughts of Sister Augustina's invitation flew through my mind like shadows on a wall.

It did not help matters that she started showing up at my public haunts. Always out of the corner of my eye I would catch glimpses of a houndstooth coat behind me. A shadow of color following a shadow of darkness. Infelicity crept into my periphery in a rainbow of Cerulean blue, Lime green, and Easter Egg Lilac habits. The colors were an ambitious array of hues, but the identity underneath was always the same.

She was clever that one, always choosing populous places. Locations where her appearance could be written off as a coincidence: handing out literature in busy underground entranceways or lighting a cigarette among the early christmas shoppers at Faneuil Hall. Sister Augustina never directly approached me, but her habits made her an annoyingly mesmerizing lighthouse in a sea of black wool winter coats.

Happily I had yet to see her step inside my museum. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of her across the street as I exited through the main entrance, but that is as close as she approached. She chained smoked cigarettes watching me, always watching me as if I was a painting hanging in the building I had just exited. That is, until the day she dared to enter my abbey.

The next time I conversed with Sister Augustina she was wearing a habit of prostitute pink. I had just walked away from a Pollack painting, drips and drops masquerading as passion and rage. You could say that its randomness was somewhat reflective of the anger that had housed inside of me, if I approved of that dribble in any way or form, but that might be thinking too hard for you.

I was strolling over to have my time with my girls. There was a perfect lack of people present, allowing for complete silence. I always enjoyed the holiness of our silent time together; just me, them, and some massive Japanese vases. The vases were a most beloved possession of the Boit family, packed and repacked across the Atlantic more than a dozen times. More than six feet tall, their massive tops flared into fluted scallop ripples as delicate as lace. The vases came to the museum in 1986, versus the painting itself that was donated almost four generations earlier in 1919.

When they arrived they contained handfuls of excelsior, fine wood shavings used for packing fragile items, but besides that the vases also housed a cigar stub, a paper airplane, a pink ribbon, a tennis ball, sheets of geography lessons, a letter on the repeal of Prohibition, an Arrow shirt collar, an old doughnut, an admission card to a dance at Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, three badminton shuttlecocks, a multitude of coins, and a feather.

I always enjoyed standing in front of the vast vases, it made me feel more connected to my girls. For as they dwarfed the daughters in the picture, they also dwarfed myself viewing the daughters in the picture.

I was on the precipice of them, my feet pitter-pattering over the blonde wood, when I heard the most peculiar sound. As if that shrillest mouse in the world had found a way to learn English. The agitation sounded like the random punching of blind possums on broken typewriters. What is that awful terrible din? I wondered. And then I realized with a moment of sudden horrification. I knew what that sound was: it was someone calling my name.

"Mr. Gray. Oh, Mr. Gray."

The voice was full of ridiculous braying determination. If I was a praying being, I would have gotten down on my knees to beg for only a docent wanting to inform me of some upcoming art seminar. Instead I turned to find Sister Augustina dressed like an anorexic flamingo.

I looked her up and down once. Then ignoring her I crooked back around and began to tread faster down the golden hallways. My Ferragamo shoes making more noise than is seriously deemed acceptable by museum standards.

"Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray."

I increased up my stride, but she was a wily one for being so puny.

"Oh Mr. Gray!" I felt her talons clasp around my forearm. I halted immediately causing her to bang into my body.

"What!" I said.

"I see that we are both art fans," she bafflingly commented, making casual conversation after such a pursuit. This is why Sister Augustina disturbed my quiet? This is what she chased me down halfway through the Museum of Fine Arts for? To tell me we are both patrons of the arts? I must be standing in front of the daftest clergy in the world.

I was in a quandary, how to escape from this bear trap disguised as a penguin. Finally I answered the only way I knew how. "It does seem so does it not? Although it is the first time I have seen you actually inside."

"You could say that I am playing tourist in my own city these days checking out the most popular sites."

"Well, now that you have seen the sights I am sure you will get back to your nunnery duties, we do not want to keep those children waiting too long for their beatings." I attempted to elevate my arm to loosen from her grapple, but her forearm had the strength of cast iron.

"Oh they can wait at little bit longer. It just gives them more time to contemplate their guilt. For what is being catholic without guilt? Come, let us discuss some artwork."

"What?"

"Yes, let's have a nice little chat about some of the artwork hanging on these walls."

"Please."

"You know you should give me more credit than that Mr. Gray. I could surprise you."

"I should not. You would not know a Chardin from a Caravaggio."

"I am sure I could be a good sparring partner, if you just let me play" she said with a mischievous twinkle.

"Listen lady I only play to kill."

"Okay, you want to see some credentials? I have studied art extensively during my time. I even wrote an article on Pablo Picasso that I was read at a religious conference in Pittsburgh."

"Thoroughly impressive Sister Wendy," I commented, drolly. "Though do you not think that Picasso is a little to radical for the likes of you. Would you not be better off studying the likes of Grunewald?"

"You don't like me," she said, more astutely than I was expecting. "Why is that?"

"You should know why," I non-committaly scoffed.

"Well I don't, so why don't you illuminate me on your reasons."

"Let us just say Augie, may I call you that?" I asked, not waiting long enough for a reply, "that I do not trust anyone who does not have sex." Through my wriggling we had ended up right in front of the girls. I glanced towards them looking for a solution to my painted penguin problems.

Her eyes followed my path and then something appeared in the corner of her mouth, not a smile of joy, but something more sinister and manipulative. "I see you are a fan of Sargent," she strategically commented.

"A portraitist," I said trying again to wrest my arm free. "Although, I do not think he is your type. No god found in his paintings, only ordinary people from ordinary life."

"God is found in the ordinary life. In every human soul."

"god dwells within?"

"That's right."

"Do you know who said that?"

"No, but I am sure you're going to tell me Mr. Gray."

"Heinrich Himmler. Maybe you have heard of him? Really good with baked goods."

She smiled. Whether she did or not her slated colored eyes did not reveal, damn this lady had a good poker face when she wanted to. What did she, this is silly colorful penguin, have to smile about?

"Funny, nobody likes to admit it now, but a good deal of people were big fans of those crazy National Socialists back in the day. You know they killed god too; something about enjoying the feeling of superiority."

She was still smiling. Why the hell did she have that goddamn grin plastered on her face? I wanted to destroy it any and every possible.

With quiet authority she spoke, "You know, I am not as lost as you think, I was able to find out your real name: Mr. Silas Glass."

She was right she had surprised me. "Congratulations Sister Augustina, I have had many surnames over the years. But a Fatal has not called me that particular one in about nine hundred years."

"Still it's your favorite isn't, the one you use with the members of your little club. But what do expect, it was your first. And don't worry the irony of its meaning, a man having to do with glass, isn't lost on me."

She turned back to my girls. "It's a lovely picture really. A little too dour for me, but still quite good, for a painting. Personally I'm more a fan of carvings than brushstrokes, I feel statues allow the viewer to experience—"

"—It is not lovely," I interrupted adamantly. "It is perfect. The most perfect piece of art in the whole museum."

She took her eyes off the painting long enough to roll them at me. "Art is like beauty Mr. Glass there is no one perfect thing."

"There is always a hierarchy Augie, there is always a pyramid with something on top," I countered sneaking another look at my girls from the corner of my eye. "Beauty is no different."

"Not in art."

"Come on. Okay, you are a human so you must love to make lists. Something is always has to be number one. I bet you have a favorite deity..."

"Okay, I'll bite," she said. "Tell me Mr. Glass what makes a perfect piece of art?"

"The clearer the message the better the painting."

"But what about those pieces of art that leave you to guess and ponder, like the Mona Lisa. Is she smiling or frowning?"

"That is the best kind of message because it is hidden for only the best and the brightest. The message is always there, we just need to decode it. The reason many do not know is not because of Leonardo Da Vinci's lack of vision, but that he chose not to tell everyone. The message is hidden so that the superior beings could find it and the dim would question its mystery. He invented an art technique to help in this willingness to embrace ambiguity. It is called..."

"Sfumato. Yes, I know, up in smoke and all that jazz," she interrupted. I was impressed maybe she was a bit smarter than I thought. "I also know Mr. Glass what you are."

"Oh, do you?"

"Yes."

"And what am I?"

"You want me to call it out?"

"Why not? This is not Harry Potter Augie."

"Aren't you one for dramatics? Come on, I don't really think that is necessary Mr. Glass."

"Too bad, it is always nice to be recognized for my work by a fan."

"And have your ego bolstered even more? Do not get me confused Mr. Glass. I'm not an enthusiast. I won't be hounding you for your autograph."

"But the fun and games part is always more enjoyable when you humans know what you are up against."

"Oh I see, a big fan of fear and trembling? It makes you feel important when the shake beforehand? Anything to get it up."

"Augie you have quite a mind for one who has taken a vow of chastity."

"How many people have you killed?"

"What is this confession?" She gave me a look that definitely refuted my last statement.

I smiled baring my Right Canine. "You know immortality and immorality are only one letter off? As they say, once you get past one numbers are pretty pointless."

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. Right, Mr. Glass?"

"I see you can cite your own fascists. I bet you knew the author of my quote too."

"Maybe I just wanted to let you feel superior."

"My superiority is a given Augie. The question is what are you going to do about it?"

Still clutching my arm she lowered her other hand into a large ratty brown shopping bag that resided at her feet. She fiddled inside reaching for surely one of her clerical props. What would it be a flask of holy water? A crucifix? The bag had enough contents it could have been a copy of the gutenberg bible.

"The props for your imaginary powers are null and void when it comes to me," I said with a smirk.

But she brought out of the bag's depths none of these items, but instead revealed a pack of cigarettes. She artfully shook the pack with one hand causing a weed to grow among the tobacco roots. Gracefully, she placed this twig between her lips.

"You cannot smoke in here," I said. "It is against the rules."

With the deftness of a child playing jacks she dropped the pack back in her bag and grabbed her lighter decorated with a picture of Jesus riding a motorcycle on its side.

"Now look who's a stickler... What do you care about rules?" she responded as she brought the fire up to her lips. I glanced back to my girls.

"It can hurt the paintings."

"So what," she infuriatingly said.

"I could very easily make you stop," I informed her.

"You could do that," she said blowing smoke slowly towards my face. "But if you do that then I can guarantee that you will never be allowed back in here again. This is not the Stop and Shop. You know the Board of Trustees still has some standards when it comes to taking lives."

"I can be very quick," I quietly threatened, no need to raise my voice. "A slow time of day, I could take care of this whole place in ten minutes. West Nile kills millions each year. Besides, since my type is really not that photogenic they would have no idea what had happened. A mystery like that might even make the papers for once."

"I can be very quick too," she volleyed back. "It only takes a moment for an oil painting to go up in flames." She waved her now halfway burned down cigarette towards the girls.

I glanced at over at the portrait. Little Daisy with her inward pointing toes, straight cropped bangs, and chubby face smiled back. "You are bluffing. You would not destroy a Sargent masterpiece. There are consequences."

"Sweetie," she said taking another drag from her cigarette. "I'm married to God. I can do whatever I want." She held the smoldering tobacco dangerously close to the portrait.

I stared hard at the austere canvas, empty except for the bewitching Violet, Tulip, Ivy, and little Daisy. I acquiesced. "Fine. We will play clean today."

She inhaled the smoke with a confidence that told me that she knew I did not have the intention of calling her bluff. She starred X-rays eyes at me and exhaled upwards, "the guilt must be overwhelming."

"Guilt is one of the least useful of human emotions and yet it's one of the most prominent."

"A broad statement for a hermit to make." She took another drag, "You live in a social desert don't you? Nothing but yards of loneliness surrounding you."

"No more lonely than any other god."

"I think God must be the loneliest person in the universe. Lonely enough to create all of us, including you Mr. Glass."

"Augie, I think that you are old enough to hear the truth: there is no god. And the reason I know that this statement is true is because I am standing here in front of you at noon in a museum illuminated by skylights."

"There is a God Mr. Glass. There is a force larger than us, whether you care to admit it or not. No one completely controls his destiny." It was like having a conversation with a big bowl of sickly sweet pink taffy.

"Augie, that is something the weak tell themselves because they just are not strong enough."

"You know, you're not as grand as you like to think you are." She used her cigarette like a schoolmarm's pointer for emphasis, "You, Mr. Glass, you sir are a partial being."

"And you are going to be the one to put me back together? Why would you want to do that? For some theological experiment to see how I work? Careful Augie curiosity killed the cat. Looking for proof? All you have to do is ask that pesky couple that gave you all mortal sin."

"I know there's something inside of you. You wouldn't come here if you weren't looking for something."

This was all starting to irritate me. "Do you not have a child to molest?" She exhaled the last of her cigarette and dropped it to the ground soiling the pristine blonde wood.

"You think you're so funny," she said lighting another one. "But you're so damaged you wouldn't really know how to laugh if it hit you like a banana cream pie between your eyes."

"And you do?"

"Yes."

"I laugh all the time," I affirmed.

"How post modern of you," she said exhaling.

"I do not have to prove my mirth to you."

"You do not know how to laugh from happiness. Cynics laugh because they are dying. The laughter comes from their slowing shrinking soul, gasping for breath while their humanity is taken away from them, inch by inch."

"My humanity was taken from me long ago," I quickly snapped back.

She voice trembled ever so slightly, "but you have been given a chance to get it back, Mr. Glass. You always have the ability to get it back."

Her plea came with utter sincerity. As I looked into her face full of hope the corners of my mouth began to rise. Slowly a rumble ascended through my throat. And there in the middle of the hushed tones of the Humphries Hallway I began to chuckle.

This giggle mutated at a rapid rate and soon I was laughing so hard I was crying. I was unable to grasp a breath with my lungs because the waves of mirth were shaking my body so hard.

Sister Augie's visage should have turned dark from my chortles, but it instead continued its course of absolute optimism. But, this only propelled my laughter stronger in might. Finally I had to drag myself down the hallway of masterpieces towards the door.

Walking through the long corridor towards the exit from the museum, snortling at the audacity of her faith I heard Augie cry out one more sound bite before I opened the door.

"You know Mr. Glass we're all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd, but faith isn't about being rational."

As the door swung, I heard the clueless guard finally perk up long enough to tell her that there was no smoking allowed in the museum. And then it shut with a slam.

### Chapter Nineteen

Found Objects – noun - ('faund ab-jikts) 1. Images, materials, or objects as found in the everyday environment that are appropriated into works of art.

As soon as I stepped outside my nonexistent blood began to boil. Temper, temper, temper. I needed to climb above all of this: endless malaise, boring clueless Fatals; and sweaty nuns with the stink of death's door. Sure we might have played nice today, but I was still above her. I recognized my superiority as one recognizes it over an imbecile.

But I lusted for a physical manifestation of proof. I needed to claw up the side of a building and look down at the ants the hummed below me, such little people with such little lives. I was ready to meet my equal in the sun.

I saw my structure, tall and proud with a crown of gold, the old architectural treasure, the State House. The apex is plated with gold, but inside it is as hollow as all human actions. Gold, the eternal promise of manifest destiny, of something greater to come that never is quite here yet. I bypassed gates and guards and dug hard into the building's red bricks, bringing out the powers and scaling it like Peter Parker. Did I forget to tell you about the super strength? Well maybe you should have seen this one coming; has Twilight taught you nothing?

The structure was fashioned in the image of some of Europe's greatest buildings. Naturally, for nothing in this City of Man is truly original. With each heel I thrust I rediscovered my assurance in domination over the mortal life. I was a being of superiority.

I am a being of superiority.

From the zenith I could see the golden sunset setting over the muddy water of the River named by the King for the King himself, nothing like being bashful... The beams of bullion reflected and refracted upwards onto my ageless face. I sat there absorbing rays of light from an ever-attentive sun.

It was mine. I knew it. It is all mine.

In dapper style, I waltzed on top of the skyscraper, flittering around the golden cupola towering above the entire city. Dancing above this house of human laws. Every few steps I would stop and smirk, simpering at my previous argument.

Patience, patience, patience. I understood it now. People like Augie were going to keep life interesting. She would be my dot of opposition.

Having opposition is what makes life palatable. Yes, I would always win because in the end everything dies; everything, save me. But even with a predetermined outcome, the game itself is a wonderful distraction of opponents of oppositions. Every king needs a jester, the one man who will hold up a mirror to his grace. Every red needs a green to contrast with.

Sister Augustina was my complementary color. Making my existence just a little brighter through contrast. A syllogism formed through mutual existence. Her colorful habits would be darker because of my presence. It is all about contrast.

Sure we can look at symbolic opposition from the beginning: day and night, black and white, alive and not alive, but the theory of opposition really came into its own in 1839 when the papers On the Harmony and Contrast of Colors, both by Michel Eugéne Chevrul, were published. Now pay attention class, Chevrul was the director of dyeing at the Gobelins Tapestry Workshop in Paris when he noticed that some colors lost their intensity when they were placed next to each other.

During what I am sure was a wondrous rousing life of wools and weaves, he discovered that black did not look like midnight when placed next to navy blue. From that he noted that maximum yarn contrast could be achieved by placing two colors next to each other that are complementary of a hue as the color of the portion of the spectrum it absorbed. Red absorbing green, blue ingesting orange, yellow devouring violet.

Color theory was then augmented by the breakthroughs on this artistic science found by physicist James Clerk Maxwell. In an experiment using revolving disks that blended violet and green painted segments into blue Maxwell demonstrated that colors could be mixed in the eye itself. American Artist Ogden Rood proposed that identical optical effects would "take place when different colors are placed side by side in lines or dots, and then viewed at such a distance that the blending is more or less accomplished by the eye."

If that sounds too complicated let us just say that is the principle on which your color television gives you your mindless entertainment and how the Mona Lisa was created through photos of illuminated sheep.

Nowhere are these theories of color opposition found in complete perfection as in the art of pointillism. And if you delve even deeper down the proverbial art rabbit hole the greatest illustration of this theory of artwork comes from its master of perfection: Georges Seurat.

Georges saw everything as the blending of opposites. His paintings used only pure pigments. The secondary hues were built gradually dot upon dot blending together merging into another tone altogether.

Pointillism was not for those with an impatient temperament.

It necessitated a lengthy approach, his most famous painting, his masterpiece, Sunday afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte, took over three years to paint. He was obsessive always trying to systematize the color so he could precisely predict how it would affect, and thus effect the viewer.

He believed the most important part of the painting laid in the space between the red and the green. Contrasting colors allowed for a stronger emotion to come from these color syllogisms.

In life there are no hard lines only the appearance that they exist. You see a hard edge, but take a step closer.

Maybe it gets a little softer. Take another step in. You begin to see that that line is not solid but composed of dots next to each other. Take one step in closer and you see that between the red dot and the green dot is really only space. But take a step back and it is there in the space that the colors blend to become something stronger. The feeling of a hard edge without the edge. A stronger color.

Like most great geniuses Seurat's art was misunderstood at first. The exhibit in which this huge painting was shown banished his work to a room that was too tiny, restricting the viewers from seeing the BIG PICTURE.

Huysmans a contemporary critic infamously noted that if you, "strip his figures of the colored fleas that cover them, and underneath you will find nothing, no thought, no soul; nothing. Nothingness in bodies whose contours alone exists."

But he, like so many of your race, was of little mind. He could not face the truth of the painting, and in larger context, life: that existence is nothingness. Seurat was telling the truth that there is nothing but nothing. Everything else is only a distraction.

But most idiots that stare at this marvelous painting in its windy city museum cannot see the truth. All they see is a pretty picture of people at a park.

Almost everyone in the painting wears or carries something red in color; this is contrasted with the green of the grass. The La Grande Jatte mocks the world that Seurat lived in. In the late nineteen century La Grande Jatte was an island in the Seine newly adopted by the Parisian middle class as a place of collective recreation. The artificial rigidity of the statue like postures of the painting's characters. Of all the complementary colors red green is the strongest, so forceful is this bond that some human eyes reject it all together, leading to almost ten percent of human males to be colorblind. Built on the strength of contrast is the color of stoplights, of Van Gogh's Night Café nightmares, and of christmas season, a surprisingly smart move on the part of the followers of the dog.

In La Grande Jatte all of these blood red characters, contrasted with terrifying emerald, stare away from awareness. They look at anything and everything else but the mirror of the viewer.

Distraction is the simplest solution for pointlessness.

Only the child in the center accepts the truth. In La Grande Jatte we are not moving through time, instead the clocks have stopped allowing us to the see the truth. For those intelligent enough to see, Seurat lets us know that we are all prostitutes to society, as seen by the women fishing on the left and holding the monkey leashed monkey on the right.

If it has not sunk into your peanut sized brain yet, everything in art means something. Art is the language of symbols hidden in human emotions. Look at any last supper picture. Trying to figure out who Judas is? He is always in profile giving jesus the "evil eye." Wondering if the chick in blue in front of you is the virgin mary? Just look for an iris or lily. Why is there a crow in the painting? Because it is hope personified, inspired by its call which speaks the words "crass, crass." Crass, for those who do not speak the now dead language, is Latin for the word tomorrow.

But you just see a pretty picture of people at a park.

They laughed at Seurat because they did not understand. Some actually thought he was not even serious, that he was playing a joke on Parisian society. But it was quite the contrary. Seurat was a man of integrity that understood that art was a science. He was a chromo-luminarist. When writing about pointillism he stated, "The purity of the element of the spectrum is the keystone of technique. Since I first held a brush, I had been looking, with this basis in mind, for a formula of optical painting."

We are all dots. You are a dot. I am a dot. From the Mir space station we are all just points in a bigger picture. The mongrel mutt on the street corner is the same as a wealthy billionaire. We are all blobs of color on a large canvas, but unlike you I can control my dot.

As I looked from my view from above the world separated into segments and I saw the perfection. I shivered at my excellence over it all. I had been too brash in wielding my power; there was more strength in subtlety.

Space is often misunderstood as the nothingness. It is not a vacuum, instead the margin between things is where the truth about our unions exist. It is in the space between the two of us where existence truly dwells.

Seurat believed that perfection in paintings could make life better. That the blending of colors could help find harmony in society. I could do the same thing, not in dots of oil, but blending of beings.

Starring at the sun set across the expansive city of Boston below I realized the power in accepting the nothingness of space. You look a chair as solidness, molecules of space. I look at a chair and see specks of dust swirling in nothingness.

I am just taking a step back to see the bigger picture existence.

I would let you dots affect me. You would entertain me for my liking. I could move around through the space sneaking though it like a butler is a castle full of secret passageways. An ultraviolet dot, unseen by the human eye, but still there.

Few people search for the truth. Art could tell them the truth, Seurat told them the truth. But the truth is eschewed for half-truths. Humans now put their faith in truth to be told to them through digital daguerreotypes. But these images are only veils, shadows that they allow to cover their eyes. Camera Obscuras that tell them that celebrity cellulite is more important than clarity.

I do not photograph but I am still here.

I stared at the sun seeing the rays of light travel to me in waves, and particles. Flowing with the duality of waves and photons. The acceptance that either definition is inadequate leads to the acceptance of both.

I jump between existing in the painting and viewing its dots and spaces in the museum with its cool blonde wood. I see perspective from both.

Nothingness cannot overwhelm me, as I am nothingness.

I continued to stare at the glowing golden orb of the sun knowing it would set because I dictated it would do so.

I would keep Augie around to affect her. Let us see if god is so easy to believe in when proof of his nonexistence being circles around her. My Screwtapelike presence would invisibly haunt her through daily visitations and chats. This simple act of persisting will wear her down like the tide, taking only a few grains with each wave but changing landscapes over time.

My dot affecting her dot through affection.

Effection. Affection. Tell me the difference. I am he who has the power to change man. There is nothing above me but me.

No one to challenge my power.

The world is my canvas of dots. I am Ra.

I am Inti.

I am Yahweh.

I am Amaterasu.

Others may have created and only watched. Sadistically ignoring all appeals for aid. A closed door. With no regards to sincerity. With a deaf ear pleas that go on days, going on weeks, going on centuries.

You might not know me, but I will be there. Changing your perspective through my existence. This was going to be a fun project for infinity.

I am Zeus.

I am Jehovah.

I am Chromo-Luminarist.

I am Apollo controlling the tarnished ugly whore that was the sun. The colors of the sky were now my choice.

I now understand my authority. Down it goes following an eventide path determined by my saying so. I will be selecting a palette as the golden orb slowly descends the sky. Dipping my brush is Carmine, Burnt Sienna, Sinoper, Madder, Realgar, Brazilwood, Dragon's Blood and Orpiment. Red tones for the unintelligently inclined...

I could say no.

I could refuse you the right to see it disappear into the West. I wonder how long would it take for you to look up from your masturbating Blackberries, your distracting things, to realize that something was different? Ever running towards shards of power.

And when would you notice its lack of descent? At nine at night would you look up from your sugary caffeine beverages loaded with swirls of whip cream and take notice? At ten at night would you begin to find the oddity of your sunburn? At eleven would the weatherman begin to talk of the phenomenon from behind his backdrop of frowning rain clouds and smiling suns? At midnight would the masses convene outside begging for the light to cease? Would you pray for it to finish; not caring for the cause, only that it ends?

But, not tonight. Tonight I will let you have your precious sunset. Tonight I will save your poor souls from cowering at my might. Tonight I say Yellow Ochre into Raw Sienna into Raw Umber.

It is perfection. With faultless precise everything proceeds exactly how I dictate it to be. Subdue and respectful, while still showing my power as an omniscient being. As the last shreds of light slide behind the horizon I smiled as darkness envelopes me. I am at peace. I am at power.

I will enjoy being god.

I turned to the East walking away from my visual symphony. I was eager to find my next feast of them.

But what to eat after declaring yourself supremacy over all other beings? Something strong, robust, and violent.

No soft weak placating females for me. Tonight I would gorge on a strong red blooded being. Something virile that I can take down at the top of his game. Perhaps something ethnic? Their blood does boil with passion. No watered down Americana for me tonight. My mind raced with possibilities. What to chose? There are so many choices: Italian, Mexican, Thai.

Suddenly out of the corner of my eye came a flash.

A brilliant Green Flash.

A brilliant Green Flash.

A brilliant Green Flash.

Where did this come from?

I stared dumbstruck at the patina-veiled sky. Everything glowed a bespeckled tint as if I had somehow tripped into the pages of Frank L. Baum's fables, it was not supposed to happen.

Known most prominently as the folklore of sailors, the Green Flash is seen by a scarce few, occurring in the most pristine of settings located in the middle of nowhere. Tropical paradises that required vast horizons and large quantities of boat drinks. This emerald brilliance had no right to be here in a city that has the visibility of a bad cup of coffee.

It was a singular moment of extraordinary beauty, that was not of my making.

A lingering golden measure that seemed to last on the cusp of forever. According to Scottish legend, by way of Jules Verne's pulp novels, it was said that those who witness the Green Flash would never be fooled in matters of the heart. A lie constructed to sell more dime store books, as the heart knows nothing but lies, but in this moment of staring at a world bathed in a clover coloring I had drunk this love potion and followed this dogma forever more. I glazed at the color with lucid drunkenness.

How do you explain pure color to someone who has never seen it before? Verdet, Verdigris, Viridian fancy words that can explain nothing about the purity of its color. The light flowed towards me like electric eels swimming through blades of Kentucky Bluegrass. In that moment of pure happiness I felt as if I had a soul again. I could have stared forever, and never seen enough of its Emerald color.

And it halted as suddenly as it started. When it ceased I was not sure if the absinthe phenomenon had been seconds or closer to the thirty-five minutes viewed by Admiral Byrd's South Pole expedition.

I had not willed it, but it had been there.

It does not fit.

I had not willed it, but it had been there.

It does not fit.

I had not willed it, but it had been there.

It does not fit.

My brainwave jumped to that quote, that quote I had always turned to when fuming over my formerly neglected existence. "There is more to heaven and earth, than is dreamt up in your philosoph--"

\--but that thought was interrupted once again by the atmosphere, this time from reference point of the barometer.

To say it was a remarkable descent would be an understatement. In mere seconds, we must have lost thirty degrees. An abrupt change that humans usually cite to ghosts or other macabre. Nonetheless a shock to the system since it had already been a forty-two, downright balmy for the month of November in New England. If I had been a superstitious being, if I was Larry, I would say things were getting categorically eerie. My breath pushed in front of me like a miniature mushroom cloud. I shivered, for more reasons than I care to admit.

Suddenly the smell of metal and vitality flared in my nostrils: blood. It was being spilled, precious amounts onto concrete and pavement, falling through losing cracks. The coldness made it burn even harder. It was close enough that my salivating tongue screamed supplanting my mind with that of a rabid dog, simultaneously hating and clawing for it.

I descended the building of man to find my spring's source.

From the outside, my city is a pretty city of colonial walks and recipes of baked legumes, but like everything out there there is always an underbelly.

Nestled between the quaint village green and fast paced turnpike, sits Chinatown. Although the unofficial borough ekes out only at forty-six acres in size, it packs a mighty punch. On paper it is happy to assume the required gaiety of paper dragons and dim sum, but underneath these niceties is a cloaked war zone. As college students cluelessly jog by the five thousand residents of Chinatown's sovereign city hide bitter battles for the streets, for control of lucrative gambling parlors, prostitution dens, and drug trade.

Turning onto Tyler Street I knew I would find some good old fashion violence, and I was not to be disappointed. Following the delicious smell I found two hoodlums embraced in a knife fight. It was a savage ballet with angry glinting metal and flickering overhead lights. The buzzing of the electric lines encouraged them like an inflaming crowd. A pas de duex of brutality, their rigid steel fighting to find refuge in the flesh of the other.

I guess it was Chinese for dinner.

I climbed a nearby fire escape to watch with elevated perspective. Its aloof alloy gave me shivers of anticipation of my carnivorous adventure to come, but I would practice self-control as I watched my dots. Restraint is the most effective skill of the mighty.

An orange dot, with Coke bottle glasses and a parka with a racing strip on the sides. A blue dot, with said color tinted in his spiky styled hair.

I watched from above as my two cocks fought it out for primary status. The loser would die by the winner. The victor would die by me, keeping me quite cozily heated on this newly frigid night. I was a sentinel from above in this battle of bread and circus for an unseen emperor.

The anticipation was agonizingly sublime. I made a bet with myself over who was going to win for distraction.

My two dots zooming around, like electrons inside a Helium molecule.

When orange's metallic appendage finally made complete contact with the flesh of blue it slid in without difficulty, like a hot kitchen cleaver slicing into a stick of butter. The resulting liquid created tiny drops of scarlet firework streamers. Steam rose from the wounds as beseeching gasps thundered softly. Eventually everlastingly milky clouds rose from his eyes.

Orange trumps blue. I must remember to pay up when I got back.

The ballet transitioned into a petite allegro with the victor ferreting through the dead's pocket's. He discovered a wallet and gun, which he inserted into his waistline. The fittest had definitely survived since the vanquished had seen no need to employ his superior firearm. Stupidity or pride, whatever the excuse, we would now never know the reason.

Then something quite curious: the orange dot decides to hoist blue's body upon his shoulders. Why I am not completely sure. Proof? A possible trophy? The melodramatic act of hiding the body? Perhaps the spoils of war are atypical for lower level members of the Chinese mafia? And, if we are trying to be rational, then why would have already searched the body for the wallet and gun when he was going to carry everything off? Oh, humans and their ridiculously illogical rational...

Orange trudges away from concrete bathed in red with the cumbersomeness of blue. His steps are unsure at first as he is carrying a hundred and thirty pounds of dead weight. Gradually he finds some slow-hearted steadiness when suddenly he is unexpectedly flooded with illumination. The glare's roots were sourced from a set of headlights.

But the auto body which housed these lights was not a police vehicle or chariot for a member of the Chinese mafia with its requisite racing strips. Instead preposterously located in the alleyway was a station wagon adorned with purple and yellow felt pennants. I forced myself to stifle the giggles; whoever was inside had just found themselves in the unluckiest circumstances of their lives.

Inauspicious bastards, who had made a gravely erroneous turn down a street with no return. Boston is full of dangerous one-way streets always taking you in the wrong direction. Most people lose minutes trying to re-orientate themselves to the Pike; but these Fatals were going to lose much more.

They must have been tourists in town for some college football game. If they had not proceeded with caution they might have had a chance, but in true dimness the navy blue wagon stopped in hopes of gaining some direction. I saw a face lean slightly out of the car, "Hey buddy," he said, "we're a little..."

It was easy for orange to drop his trophy and speed over to the astray in their mid-level luxury car to do what needed to be done. First the driver. Then the passenger.

The shots were quick and appeared like apropos fireworks in the darkness. Two each straight to the heart, greatly assisted by the rolled down window on the passenger side. It happened so fast there was not even time for noise from within the vehicle.

Mr. Triple Murder slid his hand down inside the window grabbing a wallet and purse. Quite a lucrative night for Monsieur Orange. He returned to his trophy hidden in darkness below the beams of the still running car. Unsure of the next action considering the number of corpses has tripled in mere seconds he makes an executive decision and lights a smoke.

I could not believe it, it was if I had walked into a Raymond Chandler novel translated into Chinese. And like any good noir, the Heavy is a complete dope.

I took Mr. Orange down in full illumination, surrounded by his deadly handy work. He was ideal choice, like binge eating testosterone.

It was getting cold, really cold. Perhaps the world was striving for Absolute Zero, the lowest possible temperature where nothing could be colder. Zero degrees Kelvin. Where no heat energy remains in the substance. Minus two hundred and seventy three degrees Celsius. Where the spring of the air disappeared. Minus four hundred and fifty nine Fahrenheit. A place where all movement ends absconding everything to the perfect stillness of vacumness space.

The silence is deafening.

Once I was done I went over the car to make sure that its former tenants might not still be circulating some red blood cells for dessert. The two of them were perfectly still like waxworks in a museum. The exploding blood of the man had splattered on his wife's face making tiny drops under her eye as if she was crying crimson tears. Very artistic, I thought, Liechtenstein would have had a field day with this. It was wasted on me with my repugnant dislike towards anything oozing or leaking from your smelly human's circulatory system.

Surprisingly, something strikes my head. I look to the ground discovering irregular lumps of ice: hail. These frozen water crystals began to tatter my body. They bounced on echoed at the navy blue car blending into the midnight around it.

I turned to leave, anticipating the sanctuary found in the warmth of my bed when I hear a most surprising near silent sound coming from within the assailed car.

I hesitated.

Slumber called, but curiosity ended up being stronger.

I took another step and the noise exponentially amplifies in decibels.

I leaned my head into the passenger side window to see if the dead had possible risen. I looked from the man with his full head of hair, lucky bastard I think resentfully, but not so lucky anymore, to the woman with her casually wrapped scarf of purple and yellow. No, they were still most definitely dead.

My eyes shifted to the backseat where, unnoticed before, was nestled a wailing female child in a car seat.

Her body must have sensed something. The absolute silence coming from the front of the car. The warzone of energy swirling around her. The icy temperature.

Her face stared directly at the floor, her hair covering every scrap of her visage. Her body was a bluish cherry in color, from freezing temperatures and her overzealous wailing, distinguished the pure frustration at being stuck in this place at this moment. Her tiny hands were bunched up so tight into balls of aggravation that her fingers blended into pure fury. The noise was unbearable, a din that echoed throughout this mobile navy blue mausoleum. Its reverberations were so strong that her body shook with the force of an earthquake. It sounded like the universe was being created all over again.

And then she stopped.

She raised her head and looked right into my eyes.

From those brilliant blue with gold flakes an explosion hit me, the shock of it separating every particle in my body.

There was a moment of utter blankness.

Almost immediately I was reconstituted.

With one look in her eyes I knew that I existed. Not with categorical logic, but with absolute grounded belief. Time stopped still when our eyes united. It was perfect, absolutely perfect. The brunette bangs falling down over her forehead, the questioning blue eyes with flakes of gold, a smile that lies on the cusp of fleeting and the eternal. I smiled with the strength of someone who truly knows happiness; it hurt.

"Hello Daisy," I whispered.

### Book Three

"Subtle is the Lord, but Malicious he is not."

### \--Einstein

### Chapter Twenty

Craquelure – noun - (krak-loor) 1. The network of cracks that can develop on the surface of old oil paintings.

"I need you to take this!" I thrust the crying child out like a five pound sack of potatoes. My hands dripping icy water as the precipitation had recently experienced a metamorphosis from irregular lumps of ice to your standard freezing fall rain.

Sister Augustina stood there a moment absorbing my own personal train wreck. Finally she spoke, her words had a quiet determination, the complete opposite of my frenetic energy. "Whose child is this"?

"I do not know, some dead people."

"You killed them?"

"No."

"Who did?"

"Not me."

"Who killed them?"

"Someone else this time."

"Who did?"

"Some Chinese thug."

"And where is he?"

"I can happily say justice was swift on the punishment of his crime."

"You killed him?"

"Does it really matter?" I did not pause for an answer. "What does is that you need to address this situation, you take this child out of my hands."

She paused contemplating it all before asking her next question, "What are you doing with her?"

"Augie are you daft? I just told you what happened to her parents."

"That isn't what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?"

"Why didn't you kill her?"

"What?"

"Why didn't you kill her? I am sure she looks appetizing enough," she said capping the sentence with probable cause.

I swear the awkwardness of this conversation is comparable to your parents asking you for recommendations on positions for fornication.

"Well," I finally said, "she is a little too ruddy at the moment for my preferences."

Apparently this was too weak of an argument for the good sister. "Why didn't you kill this child?"

"I just did not, okay? Now take her."

Augie looked at Daisy violently red from screams that recalled Munch's famous painting. She then turned her gaze to me. Augie searched long, hard, looking straight into my eyes. Not breaking this probing for even a moment, she reached for her trusty Jesus lighter, lit a cigarette, and exhaled.

"No."

"What? Why not?"

"She is not mine to take."

"What? Listen, I know most of you clergy are nuts, but are you crazy?"

"I can't take this child."

"Is this not your forté? Souls in distress?"

"Yes, it is. But it is not my place here."

"What are you talking about?" I waved my hand in front of her newly exhaled cloud. "And," I said, "do you really think you should be smoking in front of the baby?"

She gave a lengthy exhale before giving an answer. "She is yours. Now," she continued, "I have to ask you to leave now before anyone else sees you. The higher ups here wouldn't be pleased with me fraternizing with Supernaturals considering they stopped publically acknowledging them a hundred years ago."

And then she shut the massive doors.

"Sanctuary my ass," I yelled as I pounded on entranceway. "I am letting everyone know that your dogma is a crock of shit."

I waited for to her reappear as I held the screaming child with the angst of someone who did not ask for this at all. But the doors remained shut.

### Chapter Twenty-One

**Juxtaposition – noun - (j** ə **k st** ə **p** ə **zi sh** ə **n) 1. The act of placing or positioning items in the image area side by side or next to one another to illustrate some comparison.**

I was unsure of where to go next.

I could not take her back to the car. That was definitely the wrong solution to this problem, like trying to put a yolk back into a broken eggshell. Plus walking into a crime scene with three bodies just did not seem such a smart idea, even for a Supernatural.

But there was no cessation in auditory sight to the wailing, I might be overwhelmingly flustered but knew I needed to do something. Finally, I decided, with more than a bit of chagrin, to take her home. I am not prone to having entertaining guests at my abode so I shuddered at the thought of tainting my place with her screaming lungs, but with no other options, and numerous Fatals staring me down on the sidewalk I did not have any other actions of choice.

She screamed bloody murder on the underground, she screamed bloody murder on the walk home, and she screamed bloody murder upon entering my house of peace. My disesteem for little humans had magnified exponentially by then.

I have a steadfast rule that I will not consume at my own house. I do my business other places, but never, ever, within the confine of my home. It has always made things both safer and cleaner.

I threw her in the library in attempt to muffle her noise while I decided how to deal with her. But still she was crying, crying, crying so hard it was a Chinese puzzle to even think.

"Silence," I demanded, but she was nothing but insolent. I searched for solace in the pages of PBS Magazine, a bonus for my donation during last spring's pledge drive. Tragically my concentration constantly hovered out of reach, like an incomplete thought.

This would have all been so much easier if Augie had taken her off my hands. Really, it was her duty to do so. What the hell am I going to do with this teakettle of a little human? Really what a shitty nun Augie is. I cannot believe that she has not been kicked out of the catholic clubhouse if this is the way that she acts.

Fucking dog! I could not take the screaming anymore. I was going absolutely out of my mind. Why else would I have even thought it was a rational concept to bring this rugrat here?

The messiness of it all was claustrophobic. I despise pandemonium; any din, no matter how small, was awful. This was one of the major rationales for choosing to live on my lovely quiet block in the 'Burbs of Wellesley,' than the bustle and clatter of Boston. But this enfant terriblé would have none of this, and chose to not comply with homeowners' association's noise ordinance.

"Shut up," I shrieked. "Just shut up."

I turned on the television set, raising the volume to its maximum. But there was no alleviation from this devil child, she still screamed on. The Julia Child was deboning a chicken on the television, but the cacophony echoing from the library barred me from finding any distracting enjoyment. Suddenly the banshee's screeches died down for a moment, but something else replaced its deafening nature. As if reality was working with a mixing board the screams were tempered down to silence and another noise elevated to its decibel level: echoing of her heartbeat.

It was if a hummingbird had found a megaphone. My mind heard nothing but the palpitations of her heart lying in the other room. I needed to silence that beating for I could hear nothing else. Just the beating, the endless beating.

I needed to quiet that child.

As I stalked to the furthest reaches of the house, my mind flickered to memories of that hidden sunlight tile of so many years before. I hesitated, hovering before the door barely muffling the meter of her ventricles pulsating away.

Augie was right, labrador help me, why had I not consumed her yet? Forget the silly rules, I told myself, you should just eat her right here and now.

But I hesitated; there must be something to her being the mirror image of my beloved painting.

But that thought was soon drowned out, for as soon as I turned the doorknob any thought of tantalizing auricles was dominated by the vomitious sounds emitting from her lungs. Her screams releasing harmonic vibrations that made my body quiver in monstrous harmony. She was positioned opportunely with her back to me. Her auburn hair, cascading over her left shoulder that was more French model than toddler.

Her entire body was scarlet making her look more like a boiled lobster than my beloved Daisy. Regardless of her hue, I had lied to Augie. She was not ruddy at all. All of that screaming would make her blood flow stronger, circulating energy to all points in her body. My anticipating mouth, arid a moment ago, began to fill with clouds of moisture.

I stalked her stealthy from behind. My eyes shifted from her auburn tendrils to her pristine neck flush with flowing blood. The expectation was tingling; the silence would be so refreshingly simple when her life ceased, perfect actually.

My knees bent behind tenderly framing her body. If someone took our Polaroid picture at the exact moment they would think me the ever-dutiful dad and use it to sell disposable diapers.

With my left hand, I gently lifted her hair off her clavicle and swung it around her neck to her other shoulder. It was a thing of beauty her neck with the skin so creamy it looked like freshly churned butter.

This tactile moment created a catalytic start to her body, Daisy turned her head mesmerizing me with those soul shaking blue eyes. And then a miracle: silence. It was if a fire alarm that had been piercing for hours and hours went completely mute.

The silence of her eyes sucked my being towards her. I felt her gravity. It was a serenity that I needed to consume. A peace I needed to absorb. A beauty I needed to destroy. I braced my other hand against her shoulder preparing myself to pierce this bit of human sunshine. I knew, truly knew, she would taste absolutely divine.

But as I leaned into her energy I was sharply interrupted.

She bit me. Hard! That is right, _she_ bit _me_.

I could not believe it. I smiled at the simple irony. I had a biter on my hands. Daisy held fast to my hand gnawing on it. I yanked hard to remove it and stared at this little being who had acted so audaciously. Instantly she began to cry again. Flabbergasted to the point of desperation I quickly offered my hand again. She chomped greedily. Suddenly, something from a past, something lost in the smoke of time, popped into my head.

"Open wide," I said, as I peered into her mouth. I involuntarily smiled, my hypothesis was right. Her gum-tissue was a brilliant tender red, finely contrasting with her tiny pristine teeth. I did not have to look hard, there was already a gapping hole on the right, and there next to that void was the culprit. The Left Molar, dangling about like a Hanging Chad.

If I gave her something to chomp down she might shut up. Oh, where was a brightly colored chewy plastic thing when you need one? One of those objects parents were always searching for it, calling it ridiculous names like binky, something that... Then it hit me like a bolt of lighting on a giraffe: Bread. Day old bread, that was used we had issues with teething in the past.

I shivered in the wake of a simple memory that I had spent over a millennia repressing. I could feel the weight of the crustiness in my hand, a phantom object of the past. It was not really there. I knew it was not even possible since there had not been any food in this house since the day I bought it eight years ago.

Daisy bit down again, hard, as if to remind me of her presence. I needed to focus to the task on hand; get the train wreck coming from her lungs to cease while regaining the use of my appendage. I looked backwards again for something. I was willing to do anything for the sound to end, even remember.

Firelight casting shadows on the walls. I summoned up the image of a well from the darkness of my mind. A cloth soaked fat with moisture.

In a flash I tugged my hand from her toothy clutches. As the fire alarm began to wail again, I ran for my immaculately unspoiled bathroom with its stainless steel fixtures and fine cold porcelain. I grabbed one of the towels, the color of pristine snowfall. I ran the organic combed cotton under the marvelous modern waterfall faucet with its pure hard lines, enjoying for a moment the absolute coldness of the temperature.

I hurried back bestowing the towel upon the child like Don Quixote to his Lady Dulcinea. Cautiously I placed the cloth in her mouth like a trainer bit breaking a colt for the first time. Her eyes melted from anguish to ecstasy as the terrycloth began to numb her gums. Within minutes there was nothing but silence, interrupted by the subtle sound of teeth gnashing in delight. Daisy, the delightful little beaver.

I savored the absolute delight of silence, surprisingly appreciating it more now that it was contrasted with the tumultuous cacophony I had just experienced. I was not sure how long I would enjoy this moment of peace, but when I looked down again I discovered that she had stealthily snuggled into the crevice between my arm and leg. Before her, silence had meant nothing but only me, but now it was me and a happy her.

I stared down at her and made a simple decision with a lasting impact. Not tonight, I thought. Sure I could vanquish her, I would vanquish her, but I needed to do it outside of my sanctuary. Tomorrow night I would take her out and engulf her, but tonight I would relish the novelty of having this silent porcelain doll in my home.

### Chapter Twenty-Two

Sacra Conversazione – noun - (sak-ra kon-ver-saht-see-oh-nee) 1. Literally meaning "Holy Conversation," it is a piece of art where saints surround the Madonna and child. They are all in a single space and aware of each other, though not necessarily communicating with each other. Mostly found in Venetian Renaissance art.

My eyes open and I take it all in.

My brain knows that it does not fit.

It does not fit as logically neat as I want it to.

The little girl in the painting is Julia Boit.

She was four when John Singer Sargent immortalized her and her older sisters.

But, Julia Boit had aged. The little girl had withered, like a flower whose roots were wrenched from the ground, into a 91 year old spinster before dying in 1969. But my brain did not care. Julia Boit is no longer the girl in the painting; the girl in the painting is Daisy.

And now Daisy is sleeping next to me.

It is unusually rare for me to find myself somewhere other than my bed when I arise. It is more unusually rare for me to find myself on the floor of my library with a sleeping child in my arms.

But here I am.

It was strange she did not smell like the others, like livestock. She did not smell of desperation and greed. She had a perfume that could only be described as dictionary of colors: cherry blossom pink, moss green, and powder blue freshness.

As she stirs from sleeping on the floor next to me. I craned my neck around to see her ever-engulfing gold-flecked eyes. A tiny hand grabs towards my head, as if there was an invisible brass ring. She laughs. It is not the sound of money, nor the tinkling of a society prostitute, it instead it is a sound of absolute joy. This bubble of joy floats around in the room before shattering into a thousands pieces that go skipping about giving light to darkness. Before I can stop myself I coo to her, "What a wonderful wonderful toy you are Daisy."

Maybe I would play with her just a little longer.

Clothes make the man, and the little girl, and for that reason we find ourselves strolling past the lavish brownstones of Newbury, the city's plushiest of neighborhoods. Just a father and daughter out for a Sunday morning stroll together. Sure it had taken me the good part of the morning to get into the swing of things, realizing that human children need to be feed and attired. I had played many roles over the centuries, but this was a part that I had never been cast in, I have to admit I was clumsily fumbling with my cues.

But once the basics of the stomach were conquered the clothes on the back needed to be tended to. The modern glittery top and blue jeans I discovered her in held no merit in my eyes. Accordingly, we were strolling down a street of expenses in search of the purchasement of a new set of vêtements.

The picture could always be more perfect.

We procured a white pinafore from a French shoppé, which made sure to emphasize the extra letters in the second word to appear more prestigiously European. I was contently distracted enough to not feel the need to correct the saleswoman that those letters were silent in the language of diplomacy and snobbery. Surround by tiny striped shirts on minuscule hangers my little Daisy would become her authentic self, the little girl in the painting.

The ignorant salesgirl tried in vain to steer me against the choice; it was after Labor Day she noted, and white had no place on the female form during this period in the calendar. Seeing that this argument had no bearing on a thousand year old Supernatural she proceeded to inform me that the outfit was a summer one, and that it would be too cold for a child in this season. Salespeople will say anything to get a larger commission; even tell the truth. I compromised, and bought Daisy a scarlet red pea coat for any future freak hailstorms to come.

To compliment the pinafore: black tights and matching patent leather shoes that mimicked my beloved portrait. The shoes were cobbled with the past in mind, dedicated work and hard shoes. Imported from Switzerland, naturally, they were the most I had spent on a woman in eons. But Daisy being a girl of simple single thoughts pondered none on the expense. She only smiled and clicked them together with utter delight, a defiant Dorothy Gale never wanting to return home.

We traversed down the street towards a pond that with frozen baited breath was waiting for frolicking ice skaters. All around us were city workers tending to christmas decorations; evergreen wreaths and crimson bows welcomed the coming of the holiday season with intoxicating cheerfulness.

Funny how one day could turn these colors from violently ill to merry and bright.

There was no snow, nor any other precipitation at the moment. Wherever the hail had come from last night, thence is where it returned.

On the edges of the pond was a gaggle of tardy Canadian geese that appeared to be attempting ice-skating for the first time. Were they still here out of a place of comfort or they suffer from a painful toothache that caused them to delay their trip that their alabaster white chinstraps hinted out? Whatever the reason, they had decided not to holiday to the south yet, and thus they were attempting their initial synchronized triple lutz combination. Not everything works in a standard pattern, I thought.

Daisy laughed and ran toward the skating birds then hurried away out of fear when they got to close.

"Daisy," I summoned, "come here Daisy." But a Collie Daisy was not. She scampered off, running from here to there, only returning long enough to provoke the Sonja Henning of the group. Daisy scooted back using my body to block herself from the goose's caustic irritation. Looking for sanctuary from the fowl she reached for reassurance in my teeth marked hand. Hers was tiny and warm, like a lighting bug housed within my grip.

It was in that moment that I realized how, literally, cold blooded a monster I was. I shifted the weight of my eyes to the few people populating the park in the middle of blustery November midi. Were they observant to notice the soft glow penetrating from my hands? I held on tight trying to keep the radiance from escaping.

People talk about the greatness of experience in someone's eyes, how understanding creates facets in one's ocular diamonds. But when I looked in Daisy's golden eyes there was none of that. With the intelligence of experience comes cynicism, I should know. When I looked into her deep blue eyes, I instead found fascination in the freshness of her life. My existence on this planet had trudged on for five hundred times longer than hers, nothing was not mundane. But everything to her was a novelty. Daisy still had the pure accepting light of a simpleton seeing the world in simple moments: the clicking of shoes, the pastimes of tardy geese. She had not lived a long enough life to see her heart evaporate in front of her eyes.

She did not speak. She did not speak at all. Her eyes stared in wonder at everything including me, but she did not comment on it. She was not critic of life, but instead took it in with eyes like tea saucers supporting a cup whose bottom had been shaved off. A world of green and red swirled about her, but she happily stared straight ahead. The breathe of an instant and the repose of eternity held in simultaneous suspension.

After giving it a good dusting I had even plugged in my Frigidaire and christened it with food. As with my financially advisors, I was prone to moving households often. Every fifteen years or so I would move locations, I was never memorable enough to necessitate the time span to be shorter. When this house was purchased it had come with a stainless steel Viking icebox. After almost a decade, I remarkably had a reason to actually plug the appliance in. Its faint hum an embodiment of the purring of my tenderness.

Daisy was always running towards something else. Towards more wonder, away from me. "Stay here," I cried, "stay here Daisy." But this lightning bug was not to be caught with any net.

Daisy, my jejune, my Pet. Eternally disobeying me to investigate something else. Such the social archeologist. I would scold her, gently. "Daisy you should not run away. It is dangerous. Something could happen when you are not looking." She would look at me with liberal eyes that appeared to understand, but five minutes later she was running with zeal.

I was doing things I would have never thought possible. I found enchantment in even the simplest of reactions to her actions. She had become my ultimate entertainment, my infinite jest, my everything. Whether awake or sleeping I was fascinated by her marvel of the errant winter bug, of cracked sidewalk curbs, and her own beautiful toes.

In less than a week I had gone from Edgar Munich to Walt Disney and I did not care. I was in a world of saccharine sweetness, of pastel colors and sweetness in smells. I was blinded by a siren of dimples, pigtails, and pecks on the cheek. I was living in a world of emotional burlesque blinded by the colorful lights found in Daisy's zest for living. She was a bottomless pool and I could do nothing but stare.

What can you say about happiness? Misery is so easy to explain, but happiness; in its purest form is virtually impossible. Happy? Blissful? Bright? The ridiculousness of trying to find that perfect bon mot is enough that it would suffice to chose any word. Socks? Parapluie? Mona Lisa? I could use any and every word known to man, present or in the past. Chicken potpie? Altivolus? Cellar Door? But what does that accomplish? None of them are worthy of the pureness of this perfect feeling?

But like Narcissus staring into the lake gazing too long was detrimental to my well being. I had not left Daisy's side for a minute and I was completely oblivious to its effects. Inspired by life, I had forgotten I lived for death.

Still the days followed each other and I though none of it.

Until one evening, after an inspiring night of the simplicity of dinner. Who knew about the joys of spaghetti? The fun in chopping and adding, of measuring and stirring. Everything to exactness since there would be no taste testing for me.

We had dined in front of the television watching Gene Kelly musicals, myself preoccupied with giving a running commentary on the history of it all. Daisy absorbing everything with her blue plate special eyes. Sometime during the double feature she fell asleep. I chose not to move her until the rolling of the ending, credits enjoying the soft murmur of her gentle heartbeat.

I lifted Daisy, light as a sparrow, and carried her upstairs to her room, something I had fashioned after two uncomfortable nights on the library floor. As I placed her on the tangerine colored bedspread that we had spent the previous afternoon shopping for, she stirred rubbing the side of her mouth with the roughness of a rugby player. Even in a state of dreamland my Daisy was a tough one bugger.

I dotingly celebrated the ringlets falling over her face, her simple inhales and exhales billowing them ever so slightly. And then I noticed it: a perfect pearl in a tangerine colored oyster. Sitting on the pillow adjacent to her hidden visage was the notorious Left Molar. Her violent rubbing must have finally wrestled the tooth from her powerless to the inevitable gumline. I smiled.

Daisy stirred again this time gently brushing her auburn locks behind her hair exposing her veiled face. I exhaled, taking in the portrait of beauty in front of me. Gradually my eyes trailed from her tiny head crown to her charming nose to finally her delightful lips, and the tiny red trickle of blood sliding from the left corner of her mouth.

I sharply inhaled, two moments happened at the exactly same time.

Firstly, in that moment I realized that Daisy had become my existence. That she had give me the possibility of joy, not just pleasure, but pure joyful happiness. She was it, the one I had been searching for, perfection personified. I had only known her for droplets of my life but I knew her, and I was eternally hers.

She was my perfectly imperfect person, completely mortal in every way. She breathed and I felt it. Her heart palpitated and I listened on completely enchanted. I have never had the desire to be an everything to anyone, but now I had unexpectedly discovered I wanted to be something for a single someone. I felt it burning from my skin inwards and my center outwards. Two fuses running towards a stick of dynamite: I was happy.

Secondly, I realized I was hungry, very very hungry.

### Chapter Twenty-Three

Pentimento – noun - (pen-tuh-men-toh) 1. Italian for "repentance." A mark or alteration made during the creation of a painting that is subsequently painted over but which can been seen or detected, maybe as a ridge in the paint, maybe because the top surface becomes- transparent with age, or perhaps through x-rays.

Fuck memories, they are nothing but ghosts. Fuck them with all the might available. But fuck them as one may, the ghosts, with an unexpected gusto, haunt on. Like a Mack truck they can come from anywhere and anything a sigh, a touch, a smell, a laugh. Fuck them, they are not real. Yet supposedly neither am I, and yet you still read on my words.

It was sometime during the mid to late eleventh century, everything was blur for the first five or six decades. A large busy tavern, a larger busier city. Surrounded by swirls of humans I watched them all, remember they still fascinated me at this point. I watched them all, but I too was being watched.

I glanced towards the eerie feeling creeping upon the back of my neck, the intensity of his lock pulling me from the bread and circus of the viands in front of me. A deft multi-tasker, he actively flirted with a prostitute all the while he tracked me with his coal black eyes. But his meal took no note of his carelessness masking carefulness, but I did.

Right away I knew what he was. He looked younger, a budding man of fourteen or fifteen, but instantly I knew has was not. Despite the book's cover, he was quite a good deal older than me. Our eyes crossed paths and mine responded by widening to the size of saucers, his with a nod.

He finished spilling his drink all over the floor and whispered something into his meal's ear that made the whore blush like a virgin. He then rose from her side, purchased two metal steins being poured from the jug, and slid into the seat next to me.

He slid the drink over to me, knowing full well that neither of us would be imbibing nary a sip. There was none of the teenage savagery housed inside of me; all of the edges of his actions were curved and polished to perfection.

He questioned, methodically quiet, "Who are you?" I could only gape in utter fascination.

He patronizingly smiled, "Let us try again. Hello. My name is Paul. Who are you?" Truthfully, I did not know, and could only shy away in response.

He took note. "You're timid. I've never seen it in our kind. It must have something to do with only having one fully formed tooth."

This was the first time my handicap was pointed out to me. It should have had more of an impact, but I was could not contain myself any longer. "You are like me, right? You are, I know you are. Tell me, tell what you know, anything and everything," I blurted.

He dissected my enthusiasm with the deftness of the best of art critics, "You're younger than I thought. Well don't get any ideas, I only work alone. Most of us do; otherwise it's like putting scorpions in a bottle. No teams, no friends. You're going to have to learn to walk by yourself."

I did not know how to respond to any of this so I repeated my request again, "Please, just tell me what you know."

"You don't know anything do you?"

"No."

"Well, you at least know what you are."

"Yes, that I know. But nothing else."

"You want to know where you came from? How this came to be? How old you are?"

"Yes," I said.

"Sorry, I can't tell you that. Those are questions you'll probably never know the answers to. I only can guess what happened." He pretended to take a sip, expertly spilling the liquid onto the floor.

"So guess."

"Fine. I can tell you none of us are born this way. One day we wake up and are. One of our kind got to you and didn't finish the job."

"The job."

"Probably got interrupted. Not enough poison to kill you. Three days later, that's usually what it takes for an unfinished bite to kill the Fatal inside of you, you're dead. They bury you. But you wake up. Different. Changed."

"But what about before the changed? I was once somebody."

"You looking for memories? For moments from before?"

"Yes."

"No room for them, only room to feed and destroy."

"Monsters."

He shrugged, "Call it what you want, but you're no longer human. You're a Non-Fatal now. Don't worry, you get less hungry as you go along. You can become selective, find the artistry in it. You'll always need to feed, but it won't be as frequent." He coquettishly smiled at his well-paid conversation partner across the room. She returned with batting eyelashes and a coy head bob, if she only knew.

"But I have memories now of this time."

"No one knows when it stops, but it does. You become Conscious again. A couple of generations later you start to retain memories again. How far back can you remember?"

"The summer, about six months."

"That would seem about right."

"But how did I function during that time in between? How did I survive?"

"Stealing, both fortunes and lives. Money is the ultimate social lubricant. Most of Fatals don't ask questions if there's enough involved."

"But I do not even know my name."

"And you won't, so pick a good one."

"There must be a way somehow to get my memories back."

He sighed, "Listen Kid, it's better you don't. It's easier to exist with yourself when you don't remember anyone else. Chances are you ate everyone who could tell you your real name: your wife, your children, everyone."

"Why? Why would God do this to us?"

"No good looking for god. Questions can't help you survive. Because is reason enough." He rose to leave, expertly tilting his glass to his lips giving the appearance of finishing off a fullness that was not housed in its empty cavern. "Now if you excuse me I need to get back to my dinner."

But my questions were not finished; there was still one more that needed an answer. "Tell me," I said, as I grabbed his arm and searched his sooty eyes. "Tell me, did you change me?"

I quested his eyes for some sliver of emotion, anything at all. But, there was nothing, nothing but blank emptiness. "No," he said, and placed the stein glass in front of me. The polished metal happily shining back unaware that there was a lack of reflection in its gloss. I stared long and hard at that glass.

Was he lying? There was never another chance to find out. Sure there were more encounters with other Non-Fatals: of those who tore at existence like they did at human's necks. But never was the question of why discussed again with another of my kind.

Questions of why cannot help you survive.

Because is reason enough.

"I need you to take her." I again repeated to Augie again, this time with a different urgency.

"Who?" she said looking at my empty arms.

"Daisy."

Augie panned her mango veiled head left to right like the setup for a Marx Brother joke. Waiting for a punch line she started, "there's nobody h..."

"I left her with a sitter," I cut her off curtly. "What did you expect? I could not bring her out with me at this hour." My anger fueled more now that Augie knew the depth of my desperation.

And if there was a big labrador in the sky, I would be praying that he would be looking down on us right now because dog help me that sitter was Lobo.

I know what you are thinking, but I was desperate. I had tried to drop her off with Larry but, naturally, he had not answered the door out of fear of which federal agency was on the other side. So I had hasty run towards a Plan B, barely containing the angry hunger vomiting to the surface.

Lobo's apartment was disastrous tornado path of video games and spare rib bones. I shuddered in front of Augie from the ghetto tableau it painted in my mind. It was all I could do to hand her over and advise Lobo on what to do if she woke up. Astoundingly Daisy had lay dormant throughout the transfer.

"She likes PBS," I had whispered. Talk about the complete opposite of her surroundings, she lay in the middle of the room nestled in a lamb's wool Nova Scotia tartan wearing her pink striped seersucker pajamas.

One of these things was definitely not like the others.

She was fine, for the moment, but if she was not moved soon she was at risk of contracting airborne Tetanus, her mortality on the line with every contaminated article and rusted item surrounding her.

My mind returned back to the present, tightening the bearing reins. I was able to muttered, "I need you to take Daisy," with gritted stability. The anxiety grounded in every syllable of every consonant and vowel. I hoped for the strength to contain it long enough, so all of the veneer would not flake leaving me a complete savage. But, I felt it: I was losing ground.

"I'm sorry Mr. Glass," Augie said. "You've named her, and you what know they say: once you named it, it's yours."

This was not a time of joking for me. I would have torn her heart out of Augie's body if I did not absolutely need her assistance. I would tear it out and stare at it as it continued beating outside its hut, unaware of its new location until surprised by an unexpected breeze when it would look down like the wily fool for love that it is and realize its time was over.

"Augie, you smoked dried piece of canned soul, take her!"

"No," she said, responding with a voice strong and unforgiving, like the grave she would soon inhabit. "I will not help you with this."

She was almost convincing; I almost believed her. But her physicality faltered as she reached for her cardboard box of cancer sticks nesting in the folds of her oversized black bathrobe. She shook the coffin for one of her sidekicks only to find she was to flying solo on this mission. Her hands fumbled, forcing her ash colored eyes to glance down and verify that there was nothing by vacancy at the inn. When her eyes returned to mine I saw it: the uncertainty.

"Please Augie I will do anything."

"It doesn't matter, I can't."

"What do you mean you cannot?"

Unaware of how to continue the penguin puffed up her tropical fruit feathers before responding, "It's not my call Mr. Glass."

"What? Whose call is it?"

"You know who."

Right. The big dopey labrador in the sky, of course.

"You cannot make this decision on assumptions, and that is exactly what you are doing. I want you to make choice, one based in logic, that is all. It is not that hard."

"There are no assumptions, only one truth and that is that I can't take the child."

"I can not have her in my presence any longer. She is incorrigible."

"So get rid of her."

"That is what I am trying to do with you."

"That's not what I meant."

I got the drift. "I cannot believe you," I burst forth. "For a nun you are one of the most cold-hearted bitches I have ever encountered."

"Why not finish her off? You have had what, just outside of week with her? Surely, that is duration enough for the amusement to end? It must be time to cast her aside like everything else."

"No, I do not want to eat her. I want you to take her."

"Why? Why care about whether or not she dies? You've killed young and old. She's just another number. What's another meal?"

"How can you say that? Are you not the advocate the preciousness of life?"

"I'm just holding a mirror up to a bastard who hasn't seen his reflection in a thousand years. It's really simple, all you have to do is just do it. Enjoy the pleasure of the moment. There is always another moment of palpable ecstasy; always another event on the horizon."

"I do not want to," I replied quietly, feeling the control fall off my body.

"I bet chaos never tasted so good. Succulent richness swirling in your mouth."

"I do not want to," I repeated again. Invisible snowflakes of composure sullied the floor around me. If I cast my eyes to the floor there my ego lay like flakes of dandruff. I would, I could, still hold it together with my all my might.

"I bet she tastes delectable. Young and sweet enough to give you a taste of living energy. Vivacious life bubbling forward like the Fountain of Youth. Momentary traces of what it feels like to feel alive. It must be intoxicating to even be in a room with her and not bite down with the force of a thousand years of being in the crease between the living and the dead. You should definitely tear her apart limb fro—"

"—No! I will not do it." A stubborn barnacle clinging to the bottom of a sinking ship, "I will not!"

"Why not?" she demanded her eyes now mirroring mine in amounts of fury.

I was laconic, fully embracing the silence, my only available lifeboat. I could not release those damaging words into the air, letting the last flake of veneer slip from my composure.

"Why not?" she egged. "Tell me why or I'll go over there right now and kill her myself." There was nothing but truth, dark truth, in her voice.

"You would not dare," I snarled.

"Sacrifices have their necessity," she said shrugging ever so slightly, "What's one more death but another statistic."

I lurched for her neck looking to pop it apart like an English cracker on christmas morning. Instantly she bared her talons fighting with a strength that did not befit her feeble reed of a body. Her nails tore with retaliatory passion at my nape shredding everything in its way. I stumbled backwards, gravity pulling me towards earth below. I panted on the stone floor gasping for air to feed my long dead lungs and heart. She hovered there staring into my eyes. "Now," she said with untold strength, "tell me why you won't do it."

We were locked now, "I will not do it," I sucked in a breath of air, "because I cannot do it."

"And why can't you do it?"

I looked into her eyes; there was no comfort to be found in this abyss.

"Why not?"

"I cannot," I stammered, "because I love her."

And then it tumbled down; the last snowflake of composed control. Everything I had embraced about my existence for the last thousand years, since that sunlit tile had mocked me into bitter solitude. It can take hours for frozen snowflake to hit the ground and thaw into a puddle, in my case it had taken just a little bit longer. A millennia, roughly eight million hours, but eventually it had fallen.

"And I can not be near her," I whispered my confessional, "because I am scared. I am scared I will eat her."

Sighing she descended to the floor next to an iessorial stance. Her stillness was unnatural, like a hummingbird at rest.

"It has only been a week," I said, attempting to allay the shock.

"Any time, no matter how small, is meaningful for the lonely."

I felt like Alice on the other side of the looking glass, nothing was what it was supposed to be what it was.

I swallowed my confession, "I have devoured so many children in past."

Augie treaded with the tender steps of a Cherokee, "People you loved?"

"If you know anything of my kind you know that we cannot love."

"And yet you do. You've evolved."

"I do not believe I was what Darwin had in mind when he was sailing around the Galapagos Islands on the Beagle."

Augie smiled and chuckled a little, "Don't you see you've regaining your humanity?" I could only scoff.

"Don't you see," she continued, "that place where you show your emotions: it's raw. It's out on a limb. Somewhere you have never been. But it's the strongest place of power possible, because it is a place of being utterly and completely human."

"I will eat her," I snarled. "How human does that make me?"

"You will not eat her."

"How do you know?" I demanded.

"I just know."

"That is not good enough for me. It is in my nature," I countered.

"It's in my nature to have sex, but that doesn't mean I do it."

"That is because you are a frigid bitch Augie."

She laughed with gusto. "Okay, you will not eat her because I will hope for the best."

"Hope is a young man's game. And you and I know both, I am far from young."

"Hope is easy in the young, but it is more powerful in the experienced."

"I could kill her."

"Every parent fears killing their child."

"I am not her parent."

"Yes you are, you're all she has."

"Why will you not just take her Augie? Really it is the sanest of solutions?"

"The heart is sanctuary for the insane," she said calmly. "God talks to me. Plain and simple, he talks to me. This is something that logic would swiftly move to disprove. But I know because my heart knows, as it knows now."

"That is not good enough for me," I countered. "It is not enough."

"Well we need it to be good enough," her eyes were held in strong cloture. She hesitated, unsure of where to go next. Finally a decision was called, "Mr. Glass, I need to tell you something. That day when you first came into the church, I did not belong there." She paused to mutter the aside, "God, I wish I had a cigarette." Before continuing. "I was returning from a funeral, the journey was to take a few days so I was to rest at a nearby convent on that day."

"A blessed coincidence."

"Let me continue smart ass," she asserted. "And by the way, in this universe there are no coincidences. I was walking the church in contemplation when you entered. I was looking for guidance in my own life, and then you were there."

"How sweet, one conversation with me and you put in for a transfer?"

"It was a little more complicated than that. For the last forty years I have been a vita contemplative. I had lived a life of prayer and seclusion."

"Sounds like a wild and crazy time."

"Will you shut up and listen Mr. Glass. I had honored a vow of silence," she said, ignoring my dry running commentary. "I had not spoken to anyone but God during that time. Then suddenly there you were: a reason to speak. Before I knew what I was doing I was having a conversation with you. I was having my first worldly chat in over two generations."

"So you abandoned you calling."

"No, Mr. Glass. You were my calling."

Here was something surprising, more so than that I been physically bested by an octogenarian penguin, apparently the labrador and I had been battling it out for the proverbial girl. I had won, although looking at the wrinkles swathed around Augie's neckline at this angle, the term "girl" had been interpreted more loosely than I would have preferred.

"I know what you are thinking, but I did not give up God for you Mr. Glass," she said uncannily browsing my mind. "Instead I listened harder, and heard more. My instructions just happened to involve you."

Unsure of how to respond, I instead rose and began dusting myself off. Once I had finished attempting to save face, I dually, and truthfully, directed to each of us, "How am I ever going to do this?"

"It's not that hard, really."

"Easy for super nun to say."

"You just need guidance. The two of you should come to church."

"Ha ha Augie, you catholics might usurp the Jews as the funniest religion yet."

"I am not joking."

"Wait, wait, tell me the one about the virgin birth again," I said full of pretend mirth.

"Well if you won't come here then we should meet out there. I can help you. I'm an old lady, I know something about raising children."

"You are a nun," I responded.

"You're not the only one who had a different life before your calling Mr. Glass. I wasn't always a nun."

"I did not have a calling, I my absorbed by a naked swarm of anger."

She rolled her eyes at my dramatics. Okay I admit it was a little over the top. "Regardless, beggars can't be choosers. You need all the help you can get."

She was right. It had only been a week and I had almost devoured my ward multiple times, if there was ever a single parent that needed of guidance I was it.

"Alright," I said reluctantly. "I accept your help but I will not be raising a Sunday school child. That means no catholic school, no not eating fish on Friday, no piles and piles of guilt."

"Fine then we will meet at your church. Every Tuesday we will see each other at the museum."

"As long as you never threaten to incinerate its contents again."

She smiled that goddamn genuine smile of hers, "Deal."

"Those are terms that I can accept."

"Good. Now go find something to eat. Then go get your child, and go home. I need to go find a cigarette and pray."

### Chapter Twenty-Four

Contre-Jour – noun - (kon-truh-zhoor) 1. Meaning, "Against the light." Looking at things that are strongly lit from behind and so almost silhouetted.

I followed Augie's directives like a good foot solider, noshing on a few intoxicated college students more worried about scoring than studying on my way back to Lobo's.

I walked the steps with the nervousness of an eighteenth century English bridegroom, worrying about everything that could happen to Daisy alone, and everything that could happen to her in my care. But as the grimy door, thoroughly grooved with claw marks, awkwardly swung on its one and half hinges all of that evaporated.

There she was. My Daisy.

Sitting on the carpet silently playing with a China doll we had purchased a few days ago. In the background PBS moppet puppets taught valuable lessons for all to learn.

I stood staring, my heart tent-poling the rest of my body. It had been clerical days of ennui, of marking calendars through generations of tombstones for other people. Granite that crumbled through generations, a steadfast marker that someone, not me, had been loved. Love. It had been a silly stupid word until Daisy had come along, now it had weight, it had meaning. I had been a mole blindly burrowing through tunnels and caves of eternal darkness. But I had broken through the confines of blackness towards the light. I had finally seen the true sun and her name was Daisy.

When humans use the word angelic they are usually refer to things that are beyond the comprehension of their imagination. They grasp at ideas, but are unable to define the absolute picture.

But not me.

The image was right in front of me, and it was so sharp I thought my heart would be serrated.

The green amphibian on the television suggests to the chirpy turtleneck attired boy, "Okay how about we do... Umm. Want to do here and there? Talk about here and there? I'm sitting here. Where are you sitting?"

The dirty blond Aryan child drolly responds, "over _here_."

There was never such a pure thing in the world. I would swallow every moment with her, head over heels. There was no sleep, only watching. I would roost there gasping with her every breath knowing that with the next moment, this inhalation would be lost and gone forever. With her, colors were to brighten to the point of super saturation. She had come to me by conjurement; a package unexpectedly blown into my lap. A marvelous present that was constantly unwrapping into being.

The croaker on the television still does not get it. "You're sitting here?"

"No, over here," replies the Hitler youth in training.

The toad, not a smart one, retorts "No I'm sitting over here. You're sitting over there. Right! Now, you say it."

Before her, I had lived in a world of illusions. Lies that had helped veil me from the grim masque of death. Since my transformation these illusions had tricked me into believing there were rules. Rules about crosses, and sunshine, and silly dopey labradors.

Those rules were shattered.

Yet, I had not seen it at first, but still more rules were housed inside. But one look in her eyes and finally the house had been turned inside out.

There was only me.

And her.

And no rules at all.

The boy in the idiot box did not want to play ball, or have direct eye contact with the pollywog either. "You're sitting over there," he counters.

The green felt puppet contradicts, "No! I'm sitting over here."

"And I'm sitting over here," the boy tolerantly defied. This four year old has the patience of a saint.

"No I'm over here, you're over there. Right? The frog finally begins to find the answer through the maze of his pollywog mind. That can't be."

I was never to lie to her. I could tell her everything and she would accept it. I would tell her who I was and what I did. I could tell her my actual age and she would not blink an eye. It would be accepted; all was to be accepted. There was no reason to hide among the haze of half-truths. There was nothing but lovely wonderful time to make and follow plans.

Einstein had once grumbled of humanity that, "man was capable of imagining infinite happiness, why not infinite time?" I was a being of infinite time, and until this moment there had been nothing, no notion of happiness.

"I'm sitting here and you're sitting there. So that means you're there and I'm here. But if you say it, then you say. What do you say?"

"You're there."

"You say, 'I'm here.' You say, 'I'm there.' But I'm here. That's very complicated. It all depends where you are when you say it."

As I picked her up off the filth caked floor knowing that there would be nothing, nothing but her from now on. For this to succeed I would have to be meticulously carefully. Many had said that god was in the details, but I would prove them wrong. The details would be mine alone.

In this moment, Daisy fancied my hand. She played with it, turning it over like a map of a faraway world she was exploring for the first time.

What was she thinking? Part of me wished she would never speak so I would always be guessing.

She flipped the palm one-way and then the other. Then she promptly chomped her teeth into the tender breast right below my thumb, what a fortune teller would call my life line.

All I did was smile. Emotional indifference of the mind had given way to the inner chamber of the heart.

My heart bled love.

I was ready to unwrap my gift.

### Chapter Twenty-Five

**Trompe L'oeil – noun - (tromp-l** ə **i) 1. French for "fool the eye." A trompe l'oeil painting is designed to trick viewers into thinking that what they see** **is the real thing.**

"Well I can see that you didn't eat her."

As Daisy and I turned the corner, there Augie stood next to the vase that was featured in the painting as I held the hand of the child who I believed to be the reincarnation of the girl in the portrait. Got that?

"Hey Augs," I said with the awkwardness of a couple who had slept together once and were unsure what to do next. I prayed to a labrador that I did not believe in that she would not hug me.

"Mr. Glass," she echoed my awkwardness with curtness. It did not help Augs' case that she was wearing a circus tent of blue, green, and yellow on her head.

My hand was fastened hard to the tiny hand it occupied, my living breathing rosary.

The awkward silence was deafening. No wonder I had killed every female I had ever discussed art with here before this. It was febrile.

"Well," Augie said cutting the temporal space with a knife. "I think you should give us a proper introduction. Don't you Mr. Glass?"

I bent down to Daisy's height. "Daisy, this is Augie, she is going to give us some guidance on the finer points of raising you. Things like feeding, bathing, and avoiding hypothermia in humans."

Augie leaned down and greeted my ward. "It's very nice to meet you Daisy."

Daisy took all this in with vast indigo pupils flecked with gold. She and Augie stared in soul dialectic, their spirits speaking an inaudible language.

Finally I could not stand the exclusivity of this silent conversation, "Augie will be telling us lots of things, lots of practical things. Nothing about walking on water, turning agua into wine, and the resurrection of the dead. Do you agree to that Augs?"

"Oh now we're negotiating Mr. Glass?" she countered, crossing her arms. "It's not like you would know anything about the dead coming to life would you?"

I responded maturely with an obvious rolling of my eyes.

I bent down to my precious Pet, "Daisy, whatever she tells you," I countered holding her hand as I looked at her copious eyes, "you are welcome to laugh at the silliness of it all." Daisy responded by giggling at my seriousness.

"Come Daisy," Augie said picking up my heart up and swinging her around to her utter delight. "Let's look at some art."

Augie then guided Daisy through the halls allowing her to scamper around this way and that, here and there. If she strayed too far the rainbow penguin would call for her and Daisy would hungrily run back searching for hugs and kisses with affections that a thousand years of rigidity halted me from fully giving. As she scampered towards a Matisse of naked heathen woman I decided to bury the hatchet and start some simple small talk.

I looked around "Augs does it not infuriate you?"

"What?"

"The art of humanity. Stealing inspiration from your employer and instead giving it to ordinary life. When I first began existence, art did not exist other than the art of the Church. Nothing but mosaics of the Last Supper and christ on the Cross in gold. Now you get woman's breasts and swirling masses."

"Ordinary life is still about God, Mr. Glass."

"But it still bothers you does it not?"

Augie peered at me for a moment, "You've always been a critic haven't you Mr. Glass? You've never created anything of your own have you?"

"Why bother to create if it cannot be elite?"

"Because creation is expression, it is declaring your soul to the world."

"Right, not really that big a deal in my clan."

"Because you're such a social butterfly Mr. Glass."

"I might be a loner, but so are most humans. It is not like every homo sapien on the planet is running around declaring of their soul to the world."

"But for a moment you must have. Before your metamorphosis?"

"I do not talk about before Augs."

"Come on Mr. Glass once upon a time you were human. You lived a life." Her tiny feet nosily clipped the ground. "What did you do?"

"Do?"

"Your job? How did you eat before you ate humanity?"

Whatever Daisy's true age the face I made over these last two questions would have definitely found a more age appropriate home there. Regardless of whether Augie noticed or not she still had the audacity to continue, "What? Were you a court jester?"

I gave her a look of scurvy. "I was not the fool."

"I know, a tax collector?" This was followed by a muffled giggle by Augie, which I chose to ignore from tip to toe.

"Sorry Augie you are not going to find this one out."

"Come on Mr. Glass, it couldn't have been that bad."

"I do not know, okay. I have no idea whatsoever. No memories, nothing but a blank canvas."

"Mr. Glass, I'm sorry—"

"—Don't you dare pity me Augie. It is better to not to know. I had centuries of mediocrity in my current state, who would want to add humanity on top of this?"

"Mediocrity is just a word critics use to judge those who try."

"But it does not hang on these walls. Somewhere inside their minds they must have known of their failures. Why bother be an artist if you are just second rate?"

"Art is humanity. Like snowflakes, each piece is special in its own way."

"Wow Augie you could write catholic themed greeting cards."

"Nothing is going to be perfect in an imperfect world. Remember Mr. Glass you were not always on the top of the food chain."

"But I am now," I said. "And that is what matters."

"But what of embracing the ugliness and imperfection in life? What would Van Gough, or Matisse, or your beloved John Singer Sargent say to you?"

"He would say thank you."

"Thank you?"

"Yes, thank you for appreciating my art."

"But people appreciate his art, Mr. Glass. What makes you special on this count?"

"Au contraire Augs. The masses do not attend museums anymore, only snobs, tourists, and children. And when the common folk do enter this holy ground, they spend more time reading the sign plaque next to the painting then looking at the art in front of them. Nine times out of ten they look at a painting for the requisite length of time, and move onto the next one."

"Sorry Mr. Glass I don't fit into that syllogism, I am neither a child or a snob."

"That is right, you are just someone who believes in silly things." That went over like an icebox.

After ten awkward minutes I tried to bridge the gap. "Hey Augie, I have a riddle for you."

"I don't think I am in the mood Mr. Glass," was all I got for a reply.

"What do you get when you cross an insomniac, a dyslexic, and an agnostic?"

The flamingo simultaneous pursed her lips and furrowed her brow at me, making her look more like an angry rhinoceros.

"Come on Augs, what you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?"

I could tell she did not want to hear that joke, but she, rather reluctantly, placated my call anyway. "I don't know, what Mr. Glass?"

"You a whole heap of silliness who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question whether or not there is a dog."

Augie stopped our stroll in front of Gaugin's love letter to the heathens, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Quietly but crisply she spoke, looking me in the eye always looking me in the eye, "you need to stop fighting with me. Mr. Glass I am trying to help you. You need to let me do my job."

Gauguin infamously called civilization a sickness abandoning his native country for the savages of Tahiti. His paint strokes were thick and strong, especially in this particular creation. For Gaugin art was either plagiarism or revolution. The piece appeared to travel backwards through time, with the images flowing from old woman to young baby. But I will let you in on a little secret, that is only what the uneducated erroneously think, as these uniformed bootlickers are unaware that the painting was meant to be read right to left as the natives of the Tahitian island would have done.

I glossed over the painting, making sure to ignore the descriptive plague next to it. I halted struck by something I, who had lived and breathed the museum since my renunciation of a certain labrador, had never seen before. There next to the distracted baby was the front half of a dog leaping through the canvas.

Why had I never taken note of it before?

The canine's face was stoic, not a lick of emotion revealed. Just like another canine I knew. Had that dog always been there? It must have been, but even it had not, now its faceless visage bounded from the canvas.

I dismissed man's best friend and returned to my conversation. "Your job, Augie, is to help Daisy."

"I am helping Daisy by helping you. Don't you see Mr. Glass? You have swallowed an angel and it is more than you can contain."

"Is that printed on the back of one of your Sunday prayer trading cards Augie?"

She respectfully ignored my last questions. "Mr. Glass," she implored, "the only way that Daisy is to survive is for you to think about consequences of your actions."

"The last thing I need right now is morality."

"But you do have morals. If you were completely without integrity, Mr. Glass, Daisy would not be with us."

Damn. She was right.

"Fine," I countered, "but you need to keep religion out of this, Augs. Let us not ruminate like cows on ritualistic superstition. Let us deal with the here and now, on how to survive this moment."

"But we are dealing with the here and now. Is religion not the ultimate survival Mr. Glass?"

"Is survival not the ultimate religion?"

Unsure of where to go from there, we took out our frustrations visually accosting paintings on opposite sides of the gallery; the oils and canvas distracting us from metaphysical arguments that could only climax in acerbation. Here we stood, an immortal and a nun living in the labrador's waiting room, seeking distraction through pretty paintings on modern cavern walls.

Adorably oblivious, Daisy ran to and fro, churning the sounds of a Boston Whaler out of her mouth and swinging her arms around and over her head with all the verve of a Maxfield Parrish illustration. Augie and I, truly a poor man's version of American Gothic, followed behind, the flaxen wood tapping out our tempo of dialectical silence.

Augie's head filtered towards me with the languidity of a full moon in the daytime sky. She studied my stagnant face for a long time before speaking, "I once heard a story of a man sold his shadow," she finally said. "What did he need it for he thought? It didn't do anything vital for him. So being a practical man, he thought why don't I make a profit on it? So he sold it. But things have places in your heart that you don't even know exist. Something vanished with his shadow and he wasn't the same. Funny, I can't remember how it ended."

"Probably badly," I offered, "It is more dramatic that way."

"Or maybe not all," she countered. "That's the nice thing most about stories: they always have an end. The thing that makes life so hard, and so astonishing, is that it keeps on going. Whether we want it to or not."

Inadvertently this clumsy stroll had led us back to the beginning. We stood again in front of the bulky Japanese vases, and my bouquet of Singer Sargent girls.

"Look at them," I said indicating from one Daisy to the other. "Such a sight to be seen."

Augie eyeballed the old with the new. "You know Mr. Glass," she concluded, "I don't think she looks a thing like that painting."

My eyes referenced the dried oil with the flesh, "yet, another way that you are completely and totally blind Augs."

She peered like an owl, if an owl was dressed like a Technicolor rainbow. "Nope," she murmured. "I just don't see it."

There it was again more unwieldy silence. This is what I was doomed to, unbearable awkwardness week after week? "Listen Augs," I started, "I do not know if this was the best of ideas. It might have seemed smart in a moment of weakness, but really how are we going to do this week after--"

This dangling participle was abruptly interrupted by Daisy lively darting and dodging between our two sets of legs. She planted herself in front of me, a sapling next to a Sequoia, and swung her arms like two animated fettuccini noodles. She gazed up at me with her Notre Dame eyes, and their sincerity of youth, of something wholesomely untainted. Abruptly she spoke.

The words, "I love you."

I was dazed. I do not know which one hit me harder, that my Daisy had talked or the actual words that fell off her lips.

Smiling nothing but the biggest of happy-go-lucky grins, she dopely repeated it again.

"I love you." Did she really think I had not heard her the first time?

Augs looked at me with a condemnation that only a nun could inflict. "Aren't you going to respond to Daisy Mr. Glass?"

I was flabbergasted on numerous fronts, and now I was expected to reciprocate? It was one thing to admit such affections in the darkness of emotions, it was another to expose myself. I hovered in limbo for an infinite moment. Finally reacting I instead petted the top of Daisy's auburn head and purred, "That is nice sweetie."

The judgment bloomed like the Garden of Eden in Augie's eyes.

And as you would expect, Daisy noticed none of this. She spun like a whirly-top towards Augie and expertly wrapped tiny arms around the peacock. Daisy expertly wrapped her youth around Augie's age. Daisy stared at the Rhinoceros face and spoke to her, "I love you." The nun's eyes momentarily diverted my stare of dissatisfaction to my precious Petal.

Her pupils softened a little, sparkling ever so slightly, "I love you too, dear," she cooed.

And like a crosshair, her eyes then centered right back to mine. "Over 1,000 years old you'd think you'd have learned a little something by now Mr. Glass."

"Come on sweetie," she cooed to Daisy, "let's go look at some pretty paintings."

The two women of my life, bookends in the mortal spectrum of female existence, walked hand and hand together down the hall.

Augie glanced back over her shoulder towards yours truly. "Next week Mr. Glass" was all she needed to say, "next week."

### Chapter Twenty-Six

**Saturation – noun - (,sa-ch** ə **-'ra-sh** ə **n) 1. The degree of intensity of a color. 2. Pure happiness.**

As winter melted into the hopefulness of spring, and spring into the endlessness of summer, my existence became Norman Rockwellean.

I have become a goddamn illustration of happiness through the simplicity of life.

Days spent reading, cuddles during naptime, dinners at coffee shops, and paper kites in the park. My existence was an experiment in decadent mediocrity; I relished commonplace wholesomeness what had previously been reserved for power. Daisy would draw pictures, of me. Where a few months ago I might have only see scribbles, I now hung them about the house with tenderness of a priceless Picasso.

My first portrait in centuries, would not you?

I was surprised find that I was utterly happy; previously I had thought that only idiots housed this emotion.

Daisy was a precocious creature with endless claims on life. A child of ever growing desires and distractions; she was young and spontaneous under an open sky. She was constantly running away from my side, seeking and loving living sounds, and living movements, and sunshine.

She would have run towards the sun if she could have done so.

Daisy was my lighting bug, a blinking beacon in a world of darkness. There was sordid and ugly still in my life, but I did not see it when I was with Daisy. She was something to fully swim in. It was as if I had stumbled onto the shores of a lost version of my world, the existence I had always meant to be experiencing.

I was a Lotus eater.

I craved her constantly.

Still new to the world, her existence was defined by tactile interactions. Before Daisy my existence had been void of touch, now I did nothing but.

Daisy was a natural born hugger going up to strangers at the park or the museum and fully embracing them. She was warm and merry; something that seemed at times out of place in the gray world that existence lived in, like colorful christmas lights still up in April even though everyone else had forgotten the obligatory niceties of the holiday.

Whereas my existence up to this point had been a big game hunt toward the clocks of eternity, now there was never enough time. Happy people have no need to urge clocks on.

After her choice wordage at the museum, Daisy started talking, or perhaps started talking again. Once she began the words flowed forth as if her parents had been dictionary writers. A chatterbox she became a sage imparting her simple wisdom. Augie said that Daisy was touched by a higher power; Augie was always saying fruity stuff like.

The most treasured of attributes of Daisy was her faith, namely her faith in me. After a forever of lacking obligation this was ecstasy. She needed me.

Daisy believed I would always be there and so I was.

But along with my undying love came the impossible task of employing the word "no." I was not the disciplinarian in the family, that fun job I left up to Augie. But since penguins take such glee in the rejection of young children, in the end, you could say, I was doing the dear sister a favor.

Augie and I had turned into that pleasantly bickering couple.

Our Tuesdays at the museum had mellowed us to the point of gentle theological reparteé. With time I began to despise the wrinkled bulldog less. I began to view the crags and craters of her face with the affection of an astronomer for the moon's surface.

On this particular Tuesday her indentations looked like the Canyon Grand. She appeared worried, no not worried: nervous. She swung the ratty department store bag that she used to carry her coat when indoors; it swung in uneven oscillations like a sixteen year old attempting to learn the stick shift.

"Augie you look more nervous than a whore in church."

"I've been asked to officiate at a wedding."

I laughed, "Is that all?" She glared in return. "So you penguins are allowed to do that now? I need to keep up with the times, last time I checked the catholic Church would never allow the skirts that amount of power."

"Well not exactly. It's a little on the hush hush."

"An insubordinate Augie?"

"So I'm bending the rules a little. Not that you know anything about that Mr. Glass..."

"What is a religion without rules?"

"I prefer the word guidelines. Religion, and its rules, are a dried flower; it's a shell of the beauty of a rose. If you only focus on a dead flower you're missing the rose, you're missing God."

"I do not know if the men in charge would be open to that philosophy."

"I believe strongly in my faith. I don't believe strongly in the men who run it at times. I didn't enter my profession to follow rules. I did it because I wanted to help others."

"So do tell Augs, is this marriage anyone good? A modern day good catholic homosexual couple? Nothing germinates repression better than your American need to give a taxonomic rank, definition, and explanation too everything. You know what they called homosexuals from the fourteenth to eighteenth century? The French."

"Don't tell me Mr. Glass that you follow the folly of human gossip."

"Only for entertainment value Augs," I said with a wry smile.

"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but they are just a poor couple from the parish who wish to have a sealed sacrament between themselves and God."

"So why not use a priest?"

"The bride was previously married almost ten years ago. She has been divorced for ages, but the annulment proceedings have been held up by bureaucratic red tape. They are in love, and they just want to be married. Who am I to stop that from happening? Certainly not a priest."

"I highly doubt the priests gave their blessing for you to seal devotion of their love."

"They are all going to be a conference in Boise this weekend."

"Sounds thrilling."

"I'm not really worried about getting caught, I'm an old lady who has been a nun for almost half a century. They couldn't fire me if they wanted to. What I am nervous about is the ceremony itself. I've never done a wedding."

"You better stop worrying Augs," I laughed, "the only thing it will lead to is wrinkles."

"You may giggle, but I'm serious. It's the fun work for our kind so naturally it's never allowed for the females. The priests have always performed these ceremonies,"

"That would be a sight to see. A Jesus fangirl committing two people to the guarantee of having one of person in the world who will always disappoint you."

Augie's face lit up like the headlights of Apollo 11 landing on the dark side of the moon. "Why Mr. Glass, that is a perfect idea! You and Daisy should come as my moral support. Plus there will be some children at the event. Daisy needs to interact with other people her own age."

"I am sorry Augie, but we have something planned for that day."

"Please, you are a 1,000 year old immature immortal. What do you have planned that is so pressing that it can't wait?"

"Daisy and I do not do church; you know that Augie."

"I understand that you don't do church, Mr. Glass, but after weeks of me telling Daisy how she could be the flower girl she would be awfully disappointed if you wouldn't let her attend."

"Why you calculating piece of artic poultry, how dare you manipulate my child."

"It is for her own good, Mr. Glass. You can't keep hoarding her away. She needs to interact with other children. She needs to see the light of day."

"What does she need to know of other children?"

"Children need the company of others."

"What can they give her that I cannot? I will never abandon her. I will always be there for her. Not like humans, who will only disappear either eternally or internally."

"But you're not giving her a choice Mr. Glass."

"I am making the best choice for her. We are not going to the wedding Augie and that is the last of it."

"Of course Mr. Glass," she said as she pulled her houndstooth coat from the top of her ratty Big Brown Bag, not that she ever wore anything that even remotely looked like it had come from Bloomingdale's, and handed the remainder to me. "Here's her dress and shoes. The directions are also enclosed. It's a smaller venue in Roxbury. I'll see you both on Sunday."

"Seriously Augs, we are not going."

"Of course you're not," she agreed, but the tone of voice contradicted this statement. "And Mr. Glass, make sure to wear something spiffy."

Later that night, Daisy is trying to escape my clutches. Her sprinting is an amalgamation of not wanting to go to bed and delight in the fact that I look absolutely ridiculous running about after her. It is a vicious circle, with laugh infectiously driving me to chase on. There is an oddity to the adrenaline bursting through my body like battery acid. I was never one to enjoy the spirit of the hunt. I was always more inclined to meticulously stalk and then slide into checkmate. Why bother with heavy pursuit when the end result is just the same?

This vigor only increased my hunger; it had been three days since my last viands and I was beginning to feel the effects. Larry would be over within the hour to cover so I could slip out to quench my palate. Twice a week I sneak out for some rejuvenation, always returning right after I have finished.

All and all it takes a few hours to leave my classic New England small town for the city, find the right bite, and return, thus I had to hire a babysitter.

Initially I had employed Lobo to watch over the sleeping Daisy, all I had to do was bribe him with a couple of choice steaks and an all access pass to the skin channels.

But there was an unpredictability to Lobo that made him a shaky bet, especially after the time I arrived early to find him with an escort on my Italian leather couch, "I can't help it," was his only atonement, "I'm an animal."

"So are the lions at the zoo," I replied, "but they do not defile a five thousand dollar sofa with a fifty dollar hooker."

Thus, on Monday and Thursday Larry became my standing child-care provider. The poor sap actually cherished the predictability of this tightly regimented schedule; it helped add constancy to a week otherwise plagued with paranoia. Plus with his affinity towards wrapping things he was great about getting Daisy tucked back into bed if she awoke. Honestly Macy's should hire him for the christmas season.

But regardless of my mouth salivating with hunger and Daisy scampered about like Mercury, there is no rationalizing with Daisy. Ultimately I am able to pin her down and slip her wriggling body under her citrine colored bedcovers. Taken as a whole, her room looked like aftereffect of lemonade plant explosion. This was mostly because at the moment the walls were painted Happy Happy Sunshine Yellow. The bedroom had a history of chameleon-ing since Daisy's tastes were forever fickle. Daisy changed favorite colors the way single dating women changed loves of their life.

In prior short spanning lifetimes the aforementioned walls had been tinted Watermelon Pink, Orange Peel Orange, Blue Raspberry, and Caterpillar Green.

You must remember temporally nearsighted moles that you are, in your time color is ubiquitous. It is something you take from granted like oxygen or sunshine, but there was a time when pigment was a privilege not a right.

When only royalty could afford the luxury of dye and everyone else lived in a world of muddy browns and spectral dullness.

But no matter the hue, her sanctuary was always surrounded by a world of color. Yet another culture shock to an immortal who had a penchant for dressing like an undertaker, please no comments from the peanut gallery. It is quite fitting.

The walls, swathed with eternal optimism, were just a reflection of her.

It was if Daisy had finally caught her ever illusive sun and she had brought it home as a pet.

The newest version of the bedroom was a little too cheerful canary for me, but Daisy adored it, thus so did I.

We read our bedtime story, a yarn that Daisy always insisted on: a calendar inappropriate tale about a red suited man who had a tendency to fall down chimneys.

The tome was fitting because Daisy did not want to commit to closing her eyes full of sugarplummed excitement over the promise of the wedding we would be attending the next day.

Yes I had caved, naturally.

Daisy gets what Daisy wants and Daisy wanted to go to the wedding and be a flower girl.

We had no known affiliations to the bride to be, but Daisy was surely giving her a run for her money in regards for giddiness impending event. She wanted to know every ridiculous detail about it.

"And the wedding lady wears a long white dress and a veil?"

"Yes that is right Daisy. The bride wears a dress and veil."

"And the wedding man will give her a ring and then they will kiss?"

"You know you are a very smart little girl." Daisy giggled and smiled at this.

"And then they will live together forever and ever until they go to heaven?"

I cringed at the drabble that Augie had been covertly piling into my child's head. "Yes."

"Truly yes?"

"Truly yes, and now it is time for you to go to bed my little Bugger." I could not bother with a theological argument when Daisy needed to go to bed, especially when I was starving.

This statement did not carry. "Don't want to, Silas," she countered.

"The sooner to bed the sooner we get to go to the wedding tomorrow Daisy."

But she was not buying what I was selling.

"If I tuck you in will you at least try?" She weighed the options with the deliberation of a trial judge, eventually resulting in her head oscillated up and down.

As I worked my way around the bed, tugged her sheets tightly as a first wife's facelift.

"Now remember I am going out tonight. So if you wake up and Uncle Larry is still here please do not unravel him. It makes him terrible fussy."

She giggled, the noise tinkling like rainbow colored glass. I switched off the overhead light, causing the full moon shaped nightlight to arise.

"Goodnight, Daisy," I whispered.

I waited for response, instead she replied in a still tone, "Silas, do you think there a heaven?"

I could kill that Technicolor penguin.

"Do you think there a heaven?" my Petal asked again.

Why is it the hardest existential questions always seem to come from the heart of a child?

What was I to do standing there in the doorframe looking at my child of Sunshine and Lemonade? I could not tell her the truth: that I had given up any inkling of heaven for fame and fortune.

I instead chose the basic tactic that every adult executes when they do not know the answer a child asks: I flipped it back to her. "Well Daisy, do you think there is a heaven?"

"Of course."

There was such a lack of pollutants to her belief, nothing but spotless dedication.

"Well then, if you believe that there is a heaven, then there has to be one."

I thought I had carefully avoided the landmine, but her next proclamation only detonated newfound heartbreak on top of her previous query. "You'll be there to meet me so I know where to go, right?"

I paused for a moment hesitating, always hesitating in the big moments. "Of course I will Petal," I said smiling. It burned me to be a liar to Daisy.

"You promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

"Good," she said smiling and snuggling into swirls of her sunshine colored coverlet that glowed slightly in the imitation of moonlight "then I will see my two favorite people in the whole world in heaven."

An impudent grin slowly quaked across my face. I loved so the million different ways this child made me smile; with her a smile was the easiest most natural thing in the world to do. "But who is the other person?" I asked.

"Why Santa Claus of course."

### Chapter Twenty-Seven

**Hockney–Falco Thesis – noun - (\häk-n** ē **\ fa-co 'the-sis) 1. A controversial art history theory, advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco, suggesting that advances in realism and accuracy in Western art since the Renaissance, such as Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, were primarily the result of optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, rather than the development of artistic technique and skill.**

I know that all modern brides want their weddings to be spotless. To be as pristine and beautiful as the ones advertised in magazines so heavy that you could beat a man senseless with them. "And where is the murder weapon Inspector? Here it is Sir, a copy of Modern Bride." But from the start this wedding was sullied by the weather.

Although not located directly in the downtown area of our metropolis, the wedding was close enough to Boston Harbor that the fog that it manifested fell through the streets like a carpet being rolled out for a king. The atmosphere, gunmetal gray, was so thick that I would have doubted Daisy standing next to me minus the petite hand that held my cold appendage tight.

So many days we had battled the sunshine war. I would crusade to smother Daisy's body with sun block and she would squirm around like a Red Wiggler earthworm. Yes, I also see the irony in a creature who, as a rule, is allergic to the sun attempting, in vain, to smother fifty plus all over his ward. Luckily that battle was postponed to another day, called due to inclement weather.

Daisy, dressed in her pale pink dress, was a child of beauty.

We were greeted by Augie as soon as we entered the tiny chapel. The penguin was absolutely glowing.

"Felicitations on a happy day Mr. Glass." She then turned to the radiance of Daisy.

"Daisy you look beautiful, just like a princess." This made Daisy squeal with delight.

"And Mr. Glass, you look downright dapper," a bold faced lie, but I still enjoyed it all the same.

"Augie, I have never seen you in such as splendid mood."

"Weddings bring out the best in me Mr. Glass."

She said turning her attentions back to my Petal, "Now Sweetie, we just need to put your wreath on you," she said, pulling it from her ratty Big Brown Bag. Daisy stood as solemnly as the Virgin Queen at her coronation as Augie placed the hoop of striking red, pink, and orange Gerber Daisies upon the crown of her head.

"You know Sweetie," continued Augie, "flower girls have worn rings of flowers in their heads to symbolize innocence and eternity for thousands of years." Daisy nodded, and grinned, and nodded again, less out of agreement more out pure joy.

The big bold blooms surprisingly did not weigh her little head down, but instead seemed to lift giving her height more span. I have to admit I was beguiled. But inside crept the soft voice of dissent, was it the crown on her head, or had Daisy gotten taller?

Augie interrupted the thought by breaking the moment to nag at Daisy, "Now you remember what to do Daisy?" My Buggers nodded earnestly.

"Augs, you have been talking about nothing else for weeks behind my back," I felt compelled to interject. "Believe me, you thoroughly programmed her."

Augie had a momentary glint of a cobra ready to French kiss, but just as quickly this melted into a smile. Guess the ephemeral high of a couple declaring their love before the eyes of a non-existent labrador was a strong enough antidote to even my sarcasm.

"Mr. Glass this is wedding so I expect you on your best behavior. If you don't know how to smile bite your teeth together and clench, most people won't be able to tell the difference."

She plowed through before I could return her volley, "And Mr. Glass," she said forcefully guiding me towards the aisle. "I am going to need you to sit in the front row of the pews so when Daisy is done scattering flowers down the aisle she will have someone to sit with."

"Perfect," I travailed, "my favorite spot."

She ignored my last statement plowing through matrimonial seating instructions; "You should sit at the far end since that pew is mainly for family, although they have been forewarned about you."

"What exactly does that mean?" I wanted to know.

She ignored this one also, "You'd better get a seat. The bride will be here any minute now, and we need to have to have female time before she takes those steps down the aisle."

"You do not have to tell me twice." I said trudging down towards a crucifix the size of Cleveland.

A clueless usher rushed up blocking my path, "Bride or Groom?" he softly stuttered. "Out of my way gelding," I leered causing his voicebox to turn positively taciturn.

Once I had passed he leaned over to the vato in the daisy-ringed pew next to him and softly inquired "what's a gelding?"

As I walked down the aisle of the chapel visually browsing the stations of the cross, the statues of virgins, and other theological bric a brac that was scattered on both sides of the room my skin started to itch like a fourteenth century leper's.

I slunk into my seat and surveyed the swarm of Fatals surrounding me. My pallid skin was in stark contrast since their watercolor palate ranged mainly in the spectrum of a cup of coffee with two creams stirred in for good measure. They mostly flipped through the wedding pamphlets like a New York Times bestseller. Never underestimate the need for distraction from everyday life. People will read whatever is put in front of them; for this very reason ninety percent of this congregation could probably quote the front of their sugary sweet cereal box word for word.

It is quite the marvel, I thought, the things I would do for my Petal. Here I was on a foggy Sunday at one of the most unpleasant locations I could ever imagine for myself, but as hard as I tried I could not sulk, even for the show of making my point, all because Daisy was happy.

I passed my time staring at this sea of Fatals, trying to decide which one I would devour if the ceremony did not commence in the next few minutes. After twenty minutes I began to think I would need to go through with it just to alleviate my boredom. Luckily, for the benefit of social mores, the droning of compact disc music started to fill the chapel.

Everyone bristled their feathers like a clutch of chickens and rotated their necks like a parliament of owls.

Augie entered first, wrinkled and austere as ever, save the hodgepodge flower patterned habit of orange and pink she was wearing for the occasion.

Next up were the five non-descript bucks wearing all white tuxedos. From the shoes to the shirt every thread on their body was spotless alabaster save a pink tie choking their necks.

This chorus line of castratos was then followed by an equal number of bridesmaids in dresses that would turn Medusa to stone: their vêtements were everything, and the kitchen sink.

An orange and pink monstrosity, a strapless princess top and miles of orange tulle on the bottom. Augmenting this was a criss cross lace up back, rhinestone laced edges, pink tulle sways, orange bugle beads, pink sequins and flowers so big that they should have their own Broadway play.

To top it all off, two of five women walking down the aisle were pregnant, very pregnant.

You have to love breeders.

But the tackiness of these bridge and tunnel princesses was erased with the sigh inspiring sight of my Bugger slowly walking down the passageway.

Immediately the couple behind me whispered how unimpeachable she looked. "A little dear. Really, just like a little angel," they twittered.

I smiled with superiority; I only had to look down at the bite marks on my arms to know that this was not entirely the case. My Petal was a hybrid: part cupid, part Great White shark.

But at this moment in time, Daisy was lacking sharp teeth. She did appear absolutely cherub like as she scattered foliage down the nave.

Daisy does not wear a bad color, so the pink and orange, which looked garish on the bridesmaids and tunnels, was energetically radiant on her.

Whereas too much color was a disadvantage to the hags, the rainbow of Gerbers on Daisy's head only crowned her beauty more. The ensemble was capped by the hint of depravity that sparkled in her eyes.

My Petal, always having a mind of her own, did exactly what she wanted. Thus, she was absolutely terrible at her assigned duty, choosing to drop the petals into piles instead of sowing them like orange and pink seeds.

To me, this insubordination only showed more that she was the most beautiful thing in that hideous church.

Daisy got to apse and proceeded to drizzle a line of flower blossoms in front of Augie, like a fort wall of a drip sandcastle at the beach. After a proud look of satisfaction, she scurried over to my side.

She then snuggled into the pew glowing as if she had finally solved that riddle to the meaning of life.

The music mutated and everyone stood as the bride, a plain woman of Mexican, surprise surprise, ethnicity started her trip down the carpet.

Unlike her bridesmaids, she wore a simple dress and bolero jacket; her dark hair was capped with a chapel length mantilla veil rimmed with Spanish lace.

She was not a true beauty, by any means. She was chubby, with the remnants of pockmarks scattered on her skin, and her makeup was paint by numbers by a heavy-handed second grader.

But amazingly it did not seem to matter because the happiness glowed from her skin underneath. She was captivating mix of ugliness and inner beauty; her oily olive skin blush with expectation, her hazel eyes crinkling with complete glee, and across her tempura colored lips an intoxicating spell. The perfect storm of emotions, a Mona Lisa smile.

Ah Mona Lisa, La Joconde, she is the rock star of the art world and always will be. In case you had dwelled in a bubble since your conception she is the most fascinating of women. Mrs. Lisa has quite the checkered past, being a mistress to numerous Kings of France, and also an egotistical dwarf with the last name of Bonaparte.

La Giocond now resides in her own room in the Louvre, a distinctive space that was built exclusively for her at a cost of over seven million dollars, sheltered in a climate-controlled environment and encased in bulletproof glass. She is considered priceless and for this reason is uninsurable.

This overzealous protection is not without warrant; Mona has had her share of lurkers and stalkers.

In 1911 Vincenzo Peruggia, an employee of the museum, stole her in broad daylight from the Louvre. As the tale was told in the tabloid papers, the man simply slipped the painting under his frock and walked out of the museum.

Luckily the Merry One was recovered two years later when Peruggia obtusely tried to sell her to an antiques dealer.

Then in 1956, a Bolivian man with the unfortunate name of Ugo Ungaza threw a rock at the painting, resulting in a small scar of damaged paint next to her left elbow.

She is a painting so famous for being famous that most forget the perfection of the work itself. The untrained eye would not dare to notice, but the Mona Lisa was painted imperfectly perfect.

If you meticulously trace the canvas, an astute viewer will notice that the two sides of the dreamy landscape background do not quite make a puzzle match.

The left side of the horizon seems to lie much lower than the one on the right. Thus, when this semi intelligent viewer focuses on the left side of the picture, La Joconde looks taller and more erect than if they focus on the right side.

This background also influences her face, which seems to change with this altering of position, because, even here, the two sides do not quite match.

Idiots think this is because her creator Leonardo Da Vinci made an error, but DaVinci made no errors.

If I believed in a D-O-G romping around in the clouds of the sky above Da Vinci would be a gift from him.

One only has to look at the precise details of her, such as her diligent sleeves, to see that nothing about this painting was not knowingly orchestrated.

But it is that smile, oh that smile. In that smile, her true expression always seeming just to elude us. What is she feeling? Why is she smiling? Freud wrote that in, "Mona Lisa's smile lies on the cusp of good and evil, compassion and cruelty, seduction and innocence, the fleeting and the eternal."

She is a painting of opposites: of lightness and darkness, of knowing and wonder, of death and eternity, of the infinite and eternal mystery.

It is an eternal enigma whether the shadows that shade the corners of her lips are a result of a smile or if the smile is a result of the shadows.

The cause? One of the most fascinating of art techniques: Sfumato.

Yet another thing the Italians take credit for, Sfumato is defined as the vanishing of something without an exact point. The literal definition is "going up in smoke," this painting technique is an overlaying of translucent layers of colors to create no perceptible transition.

But those are just words.

The secret of her smile is a willingness to embrace the ambiguity, paradox and utter uncertainty of existence. The art historian Sydney Freedberg explained the Mona Lisa as "an image in which a breathing instant and a composure for all time are held in suspension." Like a bride on standing on the ledge of matrimony.

And so, as our white attired Mexican turned her back to Daisy, myself, and the room full of vapid Fatals, I was abruptly jarred back to the reality of a tiny under air-conditioned chapel with Augie stepping forward and greeting the congregation.

But something was not right; something was definitely off.

It took me a few sentences to conceive there was something queer about the way Augie was speaking. Finally I realized what the oddity was: Augie was not speaking in English.

She was addressing the congregation in Spanish. This revelation, naturally, arrived at the same moment Daisy turned to me and asked, "What's going on Silas? I don't understand."

"They are speaking Spanish, Petal."

My Spanish was a hundred years rustier than my Portuguese, so I was trying my hardest to concentrate on Augie's words in an attempt to conjugate verbs.

The congregation laughed at a joke that Augie made. "What are they saying?" Daisy demanded faster than my speed of deciphering.

"I am not quite sure, give me a second Bugger."

Augie at machine gun speed spit words out bits at a time, like melodramatic poet with Terets. "Love," I think, "Sacrifice," I think, "Piñata," I think.

Augie then stepped back and from one of the pews, an obese woman, wearing an absolute "Don't Hat," and a tiny man walked to a lectern. The woman began reading a passage in a tempo that can only be described as fast, obscenely fast.

"Silas, what is she saying?"

I was trying my hardest to interpret the sappy love poem, or biblical passage, or lyrics from a top forty-radio song she was reciting, but it was to no avail.

Then the man began to speak, even faster.

"Silas, what's going on?" Daisy asked one more time. I looked from Daisy to the man with a unibrow that should have its own zip code.

"What is he saying?" she questioned. "What is he reading?"

It was in that moment, that I decided to make an executive decision, for the good of the team.

"He just read Twas the Night Before christmas Buggers," I said with a single sharp-toothed smile. The one lie I had started with last night had the makings of a full on avalanche in less than twenty-four hours.

Daisy's eyes widen with delight. "Really?"

"Yes."

A smart one, my Petal was still skeptical. "Truly yes?"

"Daisy, this is a wedding. It is a big party where the bride and groom get to do what they want. If they want to read Twas the Night Before christmas than that is what they are going to do."

Daisy weighed this answer in her mind careful. Finally satisfied with this rationale she giggled softly, "That's my favorite story!" A fact I had more than duly noted since I had to read it to her every single night for months on end. It was a propagandist gift from Augie during the first few weeks of with Daisy.

By the time I had discovered its true nature my Petal was hooked like black tar heroin.

We had reached the question and answer portion of the ceremony. "Silas, what are they saying now?"

Great, another lie to make up. "Augie is asking the bride if pink is her favorite color?"

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Truly yes."

Even with my three hundred year old Spanish filter I could tell Augie was prattling through all that rigmarole of better or worse, richer or poorer, etc. "She is giving reasons why the color pink should be her favorite color," I told Daisy.

"Like what?" my Buggers demanded.

"She is saying that it is carefree and fun. She says that pink is the color of cotton candy, grapefruits, and watermelons. That it the best hue for bubblegum. That peonies, roses, and daisies are all pink," I said touching Daisy's nose. "Flamingos are pink. Sometimes elephants are pink. The best tasting cupcakes and cookies come in pink boxes from the bakery. Pink is for bubble baths. Yay pink."

Augie stopped speaking, there was a pause and then an agreement. I lean closer to Daisy and murmur, "with all those reasons the bride has decided that pink is her favorite color."

Augie nattered off the extenuating circumstances for the duration of their matrimony. "Now," I tell Daisy, "Augie is asking the same thing to the groom." After a pause and a 'Si,' I continued, "the groom's favorite color is also pink. And now that is figured out they are married." This makes Daisy happy.

Next I told Daisy that the two were exchanging rings to show that they would always be in agreement on their favorite color. The couple kneeled down preparing for the wine and crackers part of the ceremony, but before that began two middle-aged couples approached the pair, what could only be the bride and groom's parents by the amount of eye makeup and color scheme that the females of the species were sporting. The foursome proceeded to tie the shoulders of the kneeling bride and groom up in a figure eight lasso of, what else, pink and orange crystal beads.

"Now what are they doing?" Daisy asked.

I was dumbfounded.

I had no clue what was going on at this moment, but that did not stop me from explaining it to my Bug.

"See, they are tying them up so they do not run away. Augie is going to tell them a story that is really boring about how the color pink was created."

Daisy eyes lit up, "I know how to make pink. Red and white mixed together."

"See, you are smart Petal, you know how to say it quickly. Augie does not know how to do this so she has to tie them up because otherwise they would try to leave."

"Do people always try to run away?"

"You like to run away from me."

"Only at bedtime," she said, as if it was basic logic. "But do they try and run away from Augie?"

"Yes, everyone runs away, because the story is really long and boring, like most everything Augie says. So she has to tie them up."

As Augie started the communion process, I narrated, "but before she does that, Augie gives them a piece of bread and a small glass of juice to make sure that their metabolism stays steady."

Augie solemnly raised the bread in the air and yammered something in Spanish.

"Augie is going to give everyone a piece of this bread, but I will tell you a secret."

"What is the secret?" Daisy queried.

"Augie is a really bad cook. But nobody wants to tell her."

"Is that why everyone is very serious?"

"Yes. That is because if they were not, their faces would pucker up. She is going to give them drink of juice to make it better, but the bread still tastes bad. Too dry and too much garlic you see, Augie always uses too much garlic."

Daisy's face puckered up, "I don't like garlic," she affirmed.

"Neither do I," I agreed.

The congregation shuffled forward to participate in communion. And after everyone was finished, Augie prattled on with some more endless poppycock drivel.

Having lost interest in my tall tales of interpretation Daisy gnawed softly on my arm. Suddenly she stopped and began tugging at my sober colored sleeve. "Silas," she whispered.

"Yes Buggers?"

"My favorite color is pink too." Daisy stated this with steadfast sincerity. This absolution melted all possible fears about having, once again, to redecorate her room.

My existence opened wider like a flower blooming petal by petal. I looked at her, into my Petal's single-minded eyes.

I could never lose her.

I would never allow myself to lose her.

"Well then Daisy, pink is my favorite color also."

She clapped her hands lightly in delight. This too makes Daisy happy.

### Chapter Twenty-Eight

**Color Value – noun - ('k** ə **-l** ə **r 'val-yü ) 1. The relative lightness or darkness of a color: low value is dark, high value is bright.**

After the atrocious Mariachi band composed of at three violins, two trumpets, one Spanish guitar, one vihuela, do not ask, and one guitarrón, do not ask again, had played for hours, and hours. After the bride and groom's first dance where the guests formed an odd heart shape around the couple. After the partygoers had consumed numerous dishes made with massive amounts of poultry and beef than they care to remember. After the Dollar Dance, where guests bribe the bride or groom for a dance, in my opinion completely not worth the asking price. After the "Little Death," which is a name that is a little more than fitting, where the gentleman guests lifted the groom over their shoulders and tossed him in the air like a Mexican jumping bean. After two the bridesmaids had left the dance floor to vomit and returned to profit from their coveted status. After every adult partygoer's breath held the olfactory sweetness of rotting fruit that only Sangria can create. After the unidentifiable papier mâché piñata had suffered a beating worse than Black Beauty by the hands of twenty olive skinned children and my gringo ward. Apparently the person making it out of newspaper and paint had started the festivities early. If I had to make a guess I would say the eyesore resembled some beetle with wings. After Daisy had gobbled two and half pieces of the fruitcake soaked in too much rum for someone of her age to consume.

After Daisy and I had danced to the god-awful Mariachi music with her little feet standing on mine. After the moment where the joy bathed every cell inside of me like the ocean springing forth from a desert. After letting Happy Happy Sunshine Yellow love coat everything. After I ached for that moment to last forever.

After all that, I was left sitting at the end of the night with a tipsy Sister Augustina walking over to join me.

As she teeter tottered over I noticed her orthopedic shoes. I had never taken note before, but she had the tiniest feet in the world. "Augie, what size shoe do you wear?"

"A five," she answered proudly.

"How to do you stay up? How do you not fall over like a piece of timber?"

"Very funny Mr. Glass." We both surveyed the dance floor in front of us from different existential mountains.

Augie smiled a champagne smile, "you know besides people, both paciderms and parrots have been found to dance to the music," she emphasized the P sound in paciderms just a little too hard, a direct result of her inebriation.

"I actually think I see quite a few elephants on the dance floor also," I countered. "We should really call the zoo. They might be worried."

"Be nice Mr. Glass, it is a wedding."

"Very well," I said smiling with my eyes as I watched Daisy play tag with the bronzed candy hyper boys and girls. A simple game of hitting and pushing, theirs was an amusement that had no need for conversation. Not that it was feasible to begin with since many of the rugrats lacked proper master of the English language. But regardless of this language barrier they still played tag with verve of savage wild animals.

"So Augie what was up with bondage during the ceremony? Could the bride and groom not wait until the honeymoon to tie each other up?"

The alcohol caused a processing delay before the light bulb chain was pulled. "Oh, you're talking about the lasso?"

"Not even officially tied down and already they are tying each other up. You catholics sure are kinky bunch."

"You know what I think?" she said, not pausing a minute to see if I was at all interested, which I most definitely was not. "I think you are nuts."

"And I think Augie you are drunk, your teeth are swimming."

Augie smiled unhindered by the declaration of her state of intoxication. "The _lasso_ is a Mexican tradition, Mr. Glass. It is symbolic of the bride and groom's love which will bind the couple together everyday as they equally share the responsibility of marriage for the rest of their lives."

"And I am sure that they will have the best of luck with that," I dryly remarked. "Although, they did look happy up there."

Mirth melted upward on both Augie's gray eyes and lips, "yes they did!"

"They better watch out, that marriage might actually last if they are not careful."

Through her alcoholic fuzz Augie looked me up and down. She did not return the volley as my eyes ever focused on my Petal. "Come Mr. Glass, you can't be that much of a cynic."

"Au contraire Augs, I believe I am becoming quite the optimist."

"Really?"

"Yes. Do you believe in luck Augs?"

"No Mr. Glass. I'm a nun. I believe in God."

"Do you know how lucky was I to find Daisy that night? A free gift of perfect happiness tied in a box wrapped with a bow?"

"Nothing is free Mr. Glass; it just takes some of us longer to catch onto that fact. Whenever you get something you give something up, with love comes vulnerability **."** Her eyes drifted to Daisy dodging through the sea of banquet caterers, horny uncles, and dancing Pachyderms. "She's getting big."

"Really? I had not noticed," I lied.

"Yes, she is definitely growing."

"Perhaps," I countered, unwilling to commit to the obvious.

"Listen to the advice of an old lady, Mr. Glass. I know you haven't had to deal with this subject in awhile, but everyone swims upstream with the argument of time." She inhaled, fresh air only as the community center that housed the reception had a strict non-smoking policy. Augie then chose to shift gears, "you know, Mr. Glass, you have to start thinking about the future."

"You are worried about my future? I am a little beyond social security Augs, but fret not I am very firmly fixed financially."

"I meant Daisy's future Mr. Glass."

"Right."

"I'm serious Mr. Glass," her S's sounded like renegade steam escaping from a radiator. "What are you going to do when she gets older Mr. Glass?"

"What do you mean?" I deflected.

"What is going to happen when she stops looking like the painting Mr. Glass?"

I avoided the question. "I can do whatever I want with her, Augie. You gave her to me remember? She is mine."

"Look at her Mr. Glass. She needs to go to school. She needs to socialize with other children," Augie crossed her knobby knees for emphasis. "She needs human interaction."

"This coming from someone who avoided it for the last twenty years of her life? Besides how can it be better than what we have now? Human relationships have the moral fiber of a cheap potato chip."

"Silas."

"What?" I answered ruffled. How did Augie always bring out the bastard in me?

"You really should get her baptized."

"Now why would I want to get her all wet if I do not have to? It is hard enough trying to give her a bath right now as it is."

Deciphering my sarcasm, Augie decided to use another approach. She stared at Daisy running from here to there, and then back again. "Do you know the game tag Mr. Glass?"

"Do I know tag? Augie the twentieth century did not invent everything. Children always played it, always will."

Her eyes did not leave Daisy's scampering body, "you know it's very human to constantly be running away, never taking time to stop and see the bigger picture."

"Most people do not want to look in mirrors. It is easier to just keep running and look at pretty pictures for distraction."

"Says the man who hasn't looked in a mirror in forever."

"Oh, I look in the mirror. It just does not look back at me."

We paused for a moment to come up for air.

"Listen," I said starting up again, "I will take care of her okay. When the time is right I will find a solution."

"What does that mean?"

I knew it instantaneously, I had said too much. I chose the defense of silence.

"Silas, what do you mean by that?"

"Augie," I sighed, "you know what that means."

Augie's pupils dilated with sobriety as the impact of my statement sunk in. "Silas you cannot."

"I am immortal, she is finite. We have the limitation of a lifetime, her lifetime, and that is not enough for me."

"How could you even think of doing that?"

"Consider it a calculated risk on an investment. Why be vulnerable if you do not have to? This is what survival is about." I looked at her sickened face, and for some reason felt compelled to explain more. "Do not worry Augie, I will not be doing it for some time. Not until she is of a proper age. But let us be truthful, chances are you probably will not be around by that time."

"Have you done this before?"

"No."

"Then why now? Why Daisy?"

"Do not ask stupid questions Augie, it belittles your intelligence."

"You could be there to see her become a great grandmother."

"It is not enough for me."

"The finite nature of life is what gives richness of to the human experience. The inevitability of death gives life its meaning Mr. Glass, even if it's not your life." I again chose to respond with craven silence.

"Are you even going to give her a choice?" she demanded.

"I did not have a choice."

"And see how it affected you."

I ignored this statement.

Augie sighed, "You know you would only be giving her a life of torment. She would never be the same."

"She will not remember of any it."

"But you would Mr. Glass."

"What is my other option? That your boyfriend gets her? I am sorry Augie, he does not deserve my Daisy."

"But Daisy deserves God. Please Mr. Glass recognize the gravity of what you are saying. It is only once or twice in a lifetime, in an existence," she corrected herself, "that we get a hard line. Most of our lives our choices are grayness, smoke that blends into the in between. But, this Mr. Glass, this is one of those moments of black and white. Please, just understand what you are saying."

"I have made up my mind, Augie." I said closing the argument door shut. "I am just not willing to lose her."

Augie sat there next to me in perfect motionlessness.

Silence can be so accusing.

Finally she turned her body to directly face me. She opened her mouth to speak, her voice grimly calm, "I really did have hope for you Mr. Glass." Her eyes piercing me like sunlight once did. "I really did believe that somewhere you had the essence of humanity buried deep inside of you."

She tilted her head as if inspecting a statue from another angle; there was a complete stillness to her welling eyes. "But no," she pronounced. "Now I can see clearly you are just a monster."

And with that she turned and walked away.

### Chapter Twenty-Nine

Vanishing Point – noun - ('va-nish-ing point) 1. A point at which receding parallel lines seem to meet when represented in linear perspective 2. A point at which something disappears or ceases to exist.

That night the only way I could coax Daisy into bed was if we hung up her flower girl dress right next to her brimstone, soon to be rose, hued bed.

The crown of daisies rested safely in the refrigerator, in hopes of preserving it as long as possible.

Astoundingly Daisy was even more excited than the night before. She could, somewhat fittingly, somewhat ironically, talk of nothing but the future.

Her future as a wedding lady full of white dresses and husbands who would have the same favorite color as her.

She chattered on about these plans for her imminent future while twirling around with the balance of a Xmas ornament hanging from a tree.

"And when Augie wants to talk too much will you wrap her up Silas so I won't run away?" she asked.

"Whatever you want Petal," I murmured. "You just need to go to bed."

"Don't want to," she countered. "Please."

"No."

"What if we play one game of hide and seek, then will you try to go to bed?" Everything is a negotiation with children.

She weighed her odds. "Okay."

"Cover your eyes and count to ten. I will hide somewhere in the room."

Daisy did so and I slid myself under the bed. Yes I get it, Ha ha very funny, a monster under the bed.

From underneath the frame I saw Daisy's feet hit the floor and pad around, first checking behind the mirror and then in the closet. She then tip toed over to the bed and bent down lift the duvet.

"I found you," she squealed. "There you am, there you am."

"Yes you did Petal. But it is 'there you are' or 'here I am,'" I said begrudgingly, as I always hated correcting her. "And now it is time to go to bed," I said shifting lanes to a cheerful tone.

Daisy slid quickly into the bed, surely thinking of the matrimonial dreams she would have that night. I kissed her and walked towards the door to turn off the light.

"Silas," she said from the mountain of pillows on her bed.

"Yes Buggers."

"I love you."

This time there was no time for space. I answered back immediately, "I love you too Daisy."

"Good," she said rolling to one side. "Goodnight Silas," she yawned, and promptly fell into dreamful slumber.

"Goodnight Daisy," I returned.

Three days later it was a Tuesday and Daisy and I, or rather I, had decided to skip the museum this week.

I was not ashamed to be shameless. My existence has been achingly lonesome for longer than most humans could even fathom. Did I not deserve happiness? Was that not what the philosophy of life was based on: the pursuit of happiness?

What was so wrong with that?

Nothing, nothing, nothing at all; that was my axiom.

There was no motivation to attend the museum, no need to see the weakness of my choice. Instead Daisy and I decided to play in the front yard, taking pleasure in the last moments of the Indian summer of September. Global warming definitely does have its advantages.

I cannot deny that the conversation did not make an impact.

Why is it the words of a colorblind penguin could follow me about like no other?

But little voices in the back of my head were squelched by one look at Daisy, one listen to her hummingbird heartbeat. I had become a junkie; dependent on the happiness I felt when I was with her.

I would not, could not sacrifice this, for my soul had been kidnapped by the blue eyes of a three, or four, or five year old child.

It was a dusk so diffused, so delicate, that shadows dissolved and objects seemed almost to float. With twilight soon emanating Daisy was preparing to run the yard with a miniature bug net stalking the few lightening bugs that had found refuge in suburban blades of Kentucky Bluegrass.

The chances of the bugs choosing to make an off season real estate investment in our front yard was questionable, but that did not stop Daisy from swinging the net to and fro a whirling dervish blissfully humming christmas carols in a white cotton sundress.

The block was eerily quiet for the afternoon. Although it was weeks after Labor Day, the weather had compelled any member of the neighborhood association with any connection to a seaside residing relative into a Cape Cod Diaspora. Each had the blessing of a family they were obligated to slowly torture with the simple act of visitation. Suckers.

This silence allowed the rustling of the first fallen leaves to amplify more than usual, as they twistedly crunched under Daisy's never stopping legs.

Daisy was running about, entertaining both herself, actively, and myself, passively. I was thoroughly bewitched by this summertime caroler, when my peripheral vision caught the edges of a black cloud of sinewy arms and an eggplant habit.

"Hey Augs," I automatically responded.

"I waited for you and Daisy today Mr. Glass. Where were you?"

"Augie," Daisy squeaked as she ran over and gave her a hug. It was a perfect trap for a moment later Daisy's net swooped over Augie's hand.

"Got you," she squealed.

"Yes you did Sweetie," Augie said reaching for a coffin nail.

"Daisy, Buggers," I said, "hunt some more fireflies for your glass jar while Augie slowly tries to kill herself."

But before I had even finished the thought Daisy had returned to her cantering gait, bounding about in the yard.

"And Petal be careful of your dress."

Augie took a long drag on her cigarette, enough that if Dr. Freud were present he would definitely have something to say about.

She exhaled, "So Mr. Glass are you going to respond to my question?"

"Is it Tuesday? I must have gotten the days mixed up, just a hazard of being a being where time has no consequence."

"Don't play dumb Mr. Glass. You're not cute enough to pull it off."

As if mirroring the conversation the temperament of the atmosphere was beginning to shift.

Instead of twilight emerging, a slow fog slithered down the cul de sac. You just can never trust the weather of this puritanical state. Augmenting this rara avis, the temperature plunged fifteen degrees taking our lovely summer day to brisk fall in flash.

"Well," I repelled, "I had just assumed after our conversation that there was no reason for us to attend. That you had given up on us."

"No Mr. Glass," she said as she exhaled a mushroom cloud of smoke. "I had a moment of weakness where I let you get the best of me, but then I remembered something: you have been in a place of spiritual despair for longer than most people can fathom. In that aspect you are really just child."

"I am hardly a child Aug--"

"--You're ageless. You haven't been given the facility of perspective. Your body doesn't change, but more importantly because of this neither does your soul. The prison of your flesh is also a prison of your spirit."

"Augie," I giggled, and then thinking better tried to stifle it. "Do you know what the only emotion that does not exist in an animals' emotional vocabulary?"

Augie did not take the bait. The swell of vapors poured onto the block's front lawns with the bravado of lava. "It is the one that you are fruitlessly searching for in me that is not there: shame," I said recasting my line.

"Shame, the least useful of human emotions, but it is the most prevalent in you Fatals."

This sudden miasma forced the hard edges of my focus to take on a softness; wafting an uncertain sheen on everything. Through this fuzz Augie looked me in the eyes and uttered the following, "Mr. Glass you apparently have never had a dog."

Yes, she did actually say that.

"A dog? A dog?" I countered my embitterment fully apparent. "But Augs I did have a dog. I had a great big labrador in the sky for over a millennium, and a lot of good it did me."

The grayness surged, causing soft translucence to become masking opaqueness. As Daisy ran about she was now playing a visual hide and seek with my gaze. I was now minding her more with my keen auditory skills than my eyesight as she hummed away "Jingle Bells."

"Mr. Glass," Augie started, "I don't think you're seeing the BIG PICTURE--"

"--No." I said terminating her pathetic point. "Let me finish. So this big sloppy dog in the sky where is his shame? He bestowed this great gift of remorse humans, and those now immortal but formerly known as humans, but where is it in himself? In your favorite required reading, Adam and Eve got kicked out of Paradise after they developed a fondness for apples and went shopping for some clothes, but he is the one who created that tree. He put it there with full knowledge that they would find it, the king of entrapment. Oh he is a big fan of shame in others, but not a lick in himself."

Somewhere down the block a door shut, the sound reverberated down the concrete of the sidewalk, skipping like a stone across the water.

"Where is his shame in having me live forever?" I pressed on. "Well, it is time someone holds a mirror up to him. Where is his guilt in imprisoning me in a permanent midnight of unhappiness? He surrounds my existence with filthy humans who have the ability to know happiness, and there I was stuck in the limbo of hell on earth? But finally, after a millennium something comes along that makes me happy. A someone, I would like to remind you again, you bestowed onto me. So Augs, I would say it is you who did not see the BIG PICTURE. Did you really not think that I would not fight for that happiness with all of my strength? Without an ounce of shame?"

The mist was as thick as smoke groping at my skin. At this point Augie, or even the labrador himself, could have been standing next to me and I would have not been able to know the difference. But although her face was hidden in atmospheric ether Augie's words ricochet clearly, "You are following a doomed quest Mr. Glass. You can't find happiness at the expense of others."

"That is only because most people do not have the strength to go after what they really want. False hearts paralyzed by fear and shame, too scared to even live. You know there are more suicides than homicides on this planet?"

"And the world would be a better place if that number was turned around?" The bark of a dog surfaced from the vapor, probably Sparky needing the formerly Mrs. Dahl to come home so she could tend to his business.

"At least it would be a more honest world."

"Mr. Glass, if you do this to Daisy she will hate you forever," uttered Augie.

"She will not. She will not remember it. Blank slate Augs."

"She'll figure it out, she's a smart girl."

"There are no clues leftover for the inner Nancy Drew on this one. She will not remember anything for a generation or so."

"You'd abandon her?"

"I would keep my distance. I would give her space, until she develops into her new lifestyle."

"But think about it Mr. Glass, if she remembers--"

"--She will not, at most a patch here or a patch there. Besides I have years to utilize some propaganda so that is not an issue if she does rememb--"

"--Propaganda? Mr. Glass do you even hear yourself. That is not love you are talking about, that is power."

"Power gives you love."

"No Mr. Glass love gives you--"

But before she could finish that sentence the sound of a thud emerged from the sheets of smoky. It was a sound of grave dullness. This thud was then followed by a low muffled cry.

Suddenly all I could her was the echoing sound of a heartbeat, screaming with rapid speed. "Daisy?" I whispered. My heart seized, as the sound waves of tires screaming decreased into the fog.

I turned and ran towards the street. Augie hustling right behind. The gray obscuring my focus fissured before my Petal.

"Silas," she whimpered.

She looked so tiny, lying there on the asphalt, so tiny, absolutely miniscule. Not big at all. It's fine, I thought, she's okay. There was nary a scratch on body save a couple of nicks on her arms.

"Daisy..." I exhaled.

I knelt down next to my life, softly stroking her chestnut locks.

"Come on let's get her head up Mr. Glass," Augie pragmatically said. Gingerly I cradled her head upright.

And then I saw it. The spot that was turning Daisy's dress from white to pink.

Oh god, the blood. The blood. _The blood._

No.

"It is okay Daisy," I reassured her, "everything is going to be okay." But it is not okay. Her breathing was changing, it was already becoming dull work.

"Augie do something," I said. "You should be able to do something."

But then I gazed into Daisy's blue eyes with golden flecks descending to half-mast.

Our eternity had just transformed into the end of the world.

And in that moment, I saw it: the hopeless surrender.

"Daisy!" I cried.

Augie breathless inhaled, she knew.

"Silas," she whispered, already softer now.

"Come on Augie we need to fix it."

I felt Augie's fingers wrap around my arm. My eyes cast down to her grip, so delicately precise. I looked at those fingers wrapped around my forearm and then up at Augie's eyes, they had the graceful focus of a statue.

"I am sorry Mr. Glass," she spoke.

"Silas," Daisy called. "Are you there?"

I could hear the ugly hand of death in ever vibration of her voice.

Her heart tinkled dirges faintly like a macabre music box.

"Please help her Augie!"

"What do you want me to do Mr. Glass?"

"Do something. Anything." Daisy's breathe is drawing shallower now, a sandbar where there once was an ocean.

"Mr. Glass," Augie started, "you need to think fast now, if not--"

"Do not do it. Do not leave me Daisy," I said finally getting the strength to say no to my Petal. "I forbid it."

I lashed out helplessly at the aubergine next to me, "Do something Augie, you need to do something."

"There is only one thing I can do now Mr. Glass."

"What?"

"I can give her her rites."

Unlike sentences that had floated around in the past, these words did not creep, they did not wait to burrow and metastasize. These words detonated upon impact leaving nothing in their path but a mushroom cloud of nothingness. Time was left in absolute suspension.

And then I saw it: the BIG PICTURE. I knew what this really was about. This was not about Daisy; it was about me.

It was about a power play, pure and simple.

It was authority being asserted.

I had thought I had found a loophole, but in reality he was just biding his time for the ultimate double cross.

You see in the end, you just cannot cheater a cheater.

There was no use in playing a game of telephone when I could go right to the top.

Precedent would suggest that I should close my eyes, but I did not want to leave Daisy for even a second.

I took a deep breath for strength, "you win. I promise I will do everything you ask of me. I will let her live a full life. She can get married and have grandchildren. She can remain a mortal. I will let her die. Just do not have her do it right now," I begged.

But there was no great answer from above, only a child's whimpering heartbeat that was getting fainter by the moment.

"Mr. Glass if I am going to do this it needs to be now. But, I have to baptize first."

The softer Daisy's heartbeat got the louder it rang in my ears.

"She's going to leave you either way Mr. Glass. You should give her ever advantage you can before she does so."

I do not want to let him in; he does not deserve her.

"Are you there Silas?" Daisy asked again.

"I am here Daisy," I said.

"But are you there Silas?"

"Am I where there Daisy?"

"Are you there with Santa?"

I am afraid, more afraid than I have ever been before.

She was looking for me, looking for me where I promised to be. My eyes quivered spouting hot liquid, scared of what is to come.

"Yes, Petal I am there," a lie to me was the truth to her.

"Do it, do it quickly," I said to Augie. "She's looking for me."

"Daisy I am there, I promise," I said.

Augie was quick with the vial of water. Always carrying it in her ratty brown bag, along with a pack of smokes.

"Daisy, you just need to look a little more," I said lying through the pain. "Do you see me yet?"

"No, I don't."

I gave Augie a look of urgency.

She quickly started in on the rites. "I am there Daisy," I said, trying hard to maintain some semblance of composure. "Just look a little harder. I am just hiding at the moment Petal. Playing hide and go seek. But I am there, I promise."

Her beats were beginning to mimic that of a metronome finishing its last sways, each one echoing more precisely as it could be the ultimate finale.

"Silas?" Daisy whispered, by this time I had to bend my head down to hers to hear. Her breath almost plumb now.

"Yes?"

"Silas," she repeated, sounding so far away even though my mouth was millimeters from her neck.

"Yes Daisy? What is it?"

It was one of her last exhales, but she breathed the faintest of giggles. "I see you," she said as the metronome clicked its last click.

And with that my heart shattered. "No." I said, "No. No. No. Just a few more minutes," I begged. "Or even a moment. Please give me one more moment."

I wish I could tell you that the world is a fuzzy warm place where Daisy got to live. That she wore a white dress on her wedding day, that she had a thousand grandkids and danced at all of their weddings, but instead Daisy left me alone right there on my front lawn.

"She's gone to with God now," Augie said quietly.

"No," I roared. "This is not how it is supposed to be."

Augie tried grasping me again. "Mr. Glass you need to understand--"

I recoiled, swatting her away like a bug, "--I was not talking to you."

The impact caused her habit to tumble off of her head onto the ground revealing a scalp of white shrub like hair underneath.

"Now you listen to me," I said accosting the ceiling above. "I knew you did not play fair, but this pure wickedness. If you wanted to punish me, you could have done it some other way, but Daisy? Whatever did she do to you?"

"Mr. Glass, you can't blame God."

"Who else am I to blame Augie? No one but Mr. All Encompassing, Mr. I Run The Show."

"I know it's hard to see to the BIG PICTURE, but God has a plan for all of us Mr. Glass."

"The Labrador? How could he have that?" I said anger burning from every orifice possible. "Because a plan would mean premeditation, that that Bastard planned from the beginning to murder my Petal."

Augie did not have an answer to that statement.

Hatred pumped through my every square foot of my circulatory system. "Shame on you," I screamed upward. "Shame on you. You do not deserve her. Answer me," I demanded. "Answer me, Goddamnit!"

But there was no answer.

There is never an answer.

Only the sound of lonely mist swirling about.

### Chapter Thirty

**Deaccession – noun - (d** ē **-ik-** _'_ **se-sh** ə **n,-ak-) 1. A work of art that has been catalogued as part of a collection requires a formal act of deaccession to undo the formality of officially cataloguing it.**

Planning a funeral is not that entertaining when it is not your own fake funeral.

There was a normalcy to it all that contained such terror. Bella Figura. If only I had the strength to commit suicide.

Coward.

But, no matter how miserable you are you put on that smile, that painted face.

Planning a funeral is not fun, when your loved one is actually housed inside that tiny coffin.

Augie talked me into it.

I refused at first seeing no reason to have that rite of passage, just another moment for the Labrador to gloat.

But Augie insisted saying this would be my time to honor my Petal, to say goodbye.

I eventually acquiesced Daisy deserved this reverence. I had seen so much death in my existence, but this is the one passing of a Fatal that I would actually honor.

Death was not supposed to dance with Daisy. She was not supposed to be a Fatal. Where is the perfection in dying?

We held it at night, a necessity since I had since lost my tolerance for the ultra violets; that is what you get when good old G, O, and D comes back into your life.

The event was awkward to put it lightly. In attendance: Lobo, Larry, and about odd fifty Mexicans from the wedding.

There were flowers everywhere; it was if I had never left the Jardim Botanico.

Daisy wore her pink flower girl dress one more time.

Augie officiating the service wore a habit of black for the first time.

Per my request there was no mention of the Labrador. No mention of going to a better place or saying she was with God now. Sure I had to admit he existed, but that did not mean I had to like it. The reverence would be for her, not him. As personal fuck you I would be holding a party at his house, but not inviting him.

The Mexicans were on their best behavior, not one of them stared at Larry. Maybe it was because theirs is a culture that has a better understanding of Supernaturals and the degrees of deadness out there, or maybe they were just taught to be polite.

What can you say about misery? For eons I lived in it so I should have a litany of verbiage. Lurifical. Doom. Agony. It, unlike happiness, is so easy to explain.

Finally I was to speak, I rose and trudged towards the podium knowing that these were my last moments of Daisy, after I said goodbye to her she would be gone for good. I looked about at the crowd, and for once, I was at a loss of words. I look down in my hands to the words scribbled for an answer, anything.

Unable to find one I began to speak the words on the paper.

"Twas the Night before Christmas, when all through the house. Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

With every page I turned I beseeched that this moment would continue on forever. That time would freeze and never allow the goodbye, another step towards the inevitable closing. With every turning of a page I prayed that those reindeer would not appear, that Saint Nick would not act like a peddler opening his sack, and most of all that he would not say as he as he drove out of sight, "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night."

But despite my desperate imploring the story ended, it had to. Fighting for every last second, I stood there a moment longer, in my existential sadness.

I turned one more time to look at the tiny coffin behind me covered in colorful Gerber Daisies. The four corners of her wooden casket surrounding the void where my heart used to be.

I then stepped down off the podium heading towards my existence without Daisy.

In that moment I was Munch's masterpiece; a swirling mass of angry reds, haunting blues, ghostlike whites, and every other color that your limited human spectrum can see. I felt the earth scorched in a swirl of skies of bloody red and loudly silent unending scream piercing my existence. This silent scream carried throughout the room in the form of stretched wavy lines bouncing its reverberations about like light waves to every corner of the earth.

But no one notices this unsettlement. The tissues were dabbed. The feet are shuffled. The weight was shifted from one side of the body to the other waiting for the next transaction of this rite of passage to occur. I slid into the pew that less than a week ago my Petal and had shared.

My hand still had the faint traces of her teeth indentations.

Alone. The world was full of angry reds but I am only cold. It is not that I am at a loss of words; it is there are no words. There was no sun anymore, no warmth. Absolute Zero.

Augie rose and approached the pew. She looked absolutely ancient with her face framed against the austere black coloring of her habit. Her wizened hands held a piece of paper like it was a rosary. She unfolded the parchment and began, "Charles Baudelaire once said that 'genius is childhood recaptured at will.' It is in a child we see all the potential for the future..."

Augie glanced her drab colored eyes from the page towards the sea of Fatals and catched mine, connecting with the loneliness I was desperately trying to hide. Her speech halts, she looks down at the paper once more before dismissing it with a refolding and placing of it into her pocket.

She takes a deep breath and starts again. "When a child dies, we always ask why. We always wonder why was this little soul was taken before its time? If only it was that simple. Things are good or bad to us, but to God they just are."

She paused before continuing, "Neither you nor I are God, something we should be thankful for. We are merely aspects of God. No matter how clever or profound we think we are, we are not all knowing. We are not all powerful. We are just doing the best we can with him by our side, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not."

She continued, droning on about how God has a great plan for all of us. A plan my ass. After ten more minutes of babble Augie descended the stump.

And then it was over.

The congregation of olive skinned viands and monsters filed to the back; ready to move onto the next custom of the day. I sat there waiting, waiting, waiting.

Eventually two mortuary attendants came to move the casket _along_ , the funeral world is nothing if not full of euphemisms.

They swaggered in, two idiots in their twenties that housed the denial of one who sees death on a daily basis, but never have the balls to deal with it. They probably robbed the caskets for spare spending money during their union mandated breaks.

One was lanky tall prematurely balding at the ripe old age of twenty-two. The other one was stockier and all American. There is something about him that looked oh so familiar.

Then it hits me: standing twenty yards away from me was the doppelganger of Steve.

Almost an exact replica, my eyes focused on every inch of him looking for recognition in his eyes, but there was none.

It is not his ghost, only a shadow of similarity. In that moment I realized how many millions of Steves exist in this world. I would run into him crossing the streets, in the coffee shops, and on the undergrounds. There were millions of Steves to observe in millions of locations.

Millions of Steves, and not one single Daisy.

I watched the pair lift Daisy away; up, up, and away she is carried.

Further and further away from my chance at hope, at happiness.

The weight of the wooden box had a lightness about it that only comes from the death of youth.

I rose and turn to walk down the aisle that Daisy had sashayed down so briefly ago. When I reached the darkness of the night I found Augie sitting on the concrete steps sucking the life out of a nub of tobacco.

Augie looked at my pain, and extinguished her cigarette. "Why is it we always seem to be meeting on church steps Mr. Glass?" she says with a weak smile.

She looks like she might say something more, anything, but I answer her before she can fulfill that opportunity.

"Guess your boyfriend got her in the end anyway Augustina."

She saw it all: a void that had lost its four corners. She knew, there was nothing to be said. I descended into the curtly crisp shadows of the night. The grayness of that day had led to nothing but coldness. The first frost of October made the earth unforgiving, especially to the emotions of the lost, those left to exist afterwards.

But the hardness of the earth was of no consequence; there was to be no burial afterwards. Daisy would not be remembered earth marked with some atrocious statue. I would pour concrete over every inch of that graveyard before they would put her in the ground of the Labrador. Cremation. I left the specific details to Augie.

I instead returned home to an empty house.

Absolute silence; nothing else in the world can completely break your heart like it can.

### Chapter Thirty-One

**Gestalt – noun - (g** ə **-'shtält) 1. A basic way of finding order from chaos. The mind organizes what it perceives and senses, and makes the final result greater than the sum of the individual parts.**

Go away.

Go away.

Go away.

It was better before.

Before, when you were not there.

### Chapter Thirty-Two

**Memento Mori – noun - (\m** ə **-'men-t** ō **mor'-** ē **\\) 1. A reminder of death.**

The degree by which you can lose your mind through your heart is infinite.

I sequestered myself away from world. A modern day hermit cloisterd away from the inevitability of life, and death in others.

Picasso's maudlin Old Guitarist playing in isolation only for himself. His Blue period head too heavy to even cast his eye upwards for a moment, resigned to the pathos that is his lot in life. A soul suffering at the loss of its meaning.

Larry and Lobo gave it a shot, but it was more comic relief than anything else. Augie was a little bit more persistent. She showed first after the funeral. She knocked on the door, obnoxiously persistent. When her boney hands became raw with repetition, she then proceeded to smoke a cigarette on my stoop. She then rose attempting to knock again. This was naturally followed by another cigarette.

A cycle that continued until she was all out.

Augie kept doing this for months afterwards, depending whether she had a fresh pack she could be there for hours. She was nothing but persistent in the beginning, she always left the empty pack as a party favor. A gravestone of for her filthy lungs. But even the most evergreen bouquet must wilt, and this too faded.

My only emergence was three AM walks along empty streets; like Hamlet's father's ghost marching drearily through time.

Unable to rest I searched for answers that were not there. I rarely killed during these times; the pumping blood only reminded me of the empty house that I was doomed to return to. With urges to consume liquid lunches waning with each passing day, my eyes became sallow, my skin pallid, which is saying something for a member of the collation of the non-Fatals. The ultimate whimper of death, a Supernatural wasting away to nothing.

Always approaching, but never hitting zero.

It is a fact of life: there is a start and then an end.

You are here and then you are there.

Everything dies.

Everything, save me.

It cannot be a fact if you do not have a life.

Even before my breakup with the Labrador my concept of time was already askewed. A thousand years and there had been nothing to mark my life, but the ticks of the tock.

What did I need to measure? I doomed to an eternity with only the remembrance of happiness, something no man should ever bear?

Why did I do it? Why did I fall in love with Daisy?

There was my error in judgment.

Gods do not fall in love, it only makes them vulnerable. You cannot have feelings for something, anything, that is fleeting whether it be women, cities, or governments. You outlive them all.

In the end everything falls away.

### Chapter Thirty-Three

Insitu – noun - (,in-'si,tu) 1. Latin for "in the place," meaning in the natural or original position or place. 2. Refers to a work of art made specifically for a host site, or that a work of art takes into account the site in which it is installed or exhibited

On a vacant Tuesday I received a postcard in the mail. "Hello," it spoke in saccharinely chirpy font letters, "We've missed you... and your membership. Don't let the joy of art slip away from your life." Further down colorful letters, led by an asterisk, enticed in a smaller font. "And don't forget Friday Nights are Date Night at the Museum!"

Then I noticed the date, a loaded date. Had I really been a housed hermit for that long?

Had it really already been a year?

A dying year. Time passes, but where does it go? It fades into the mist of yesterday, further and further away. A year had passed. Three hundred and sixty five days without Daisy, it had been both a second and a millennium.

I flipped over the postcard to the opposing side: it displayed a collage of the Best of the Best. A TimeLife mishmash of all that the Museum of Fine Arts has to offer, especially for those willing to renew their patronage.

At the Races in the Countryside by Edgar Degas. Brother Hortensio Felix Paravicino by El Greco. Artist in his Studio by Rembrandt Harmensz. In the Loge by Mary Stevenson Cassatt. Morning Sun by Edward Hopper, just a bit ironic on that one... And then an earthquake tremored inside of me.

The image was miniscule, almost completely blocked, tiled below The Circus Lover by James Jacques Joseph Tissot and Winslow Homer's The Fog Warning, but still it was a knife to my heart. Tulip, Ivy, Iris, and little Daisy, my Daisy, screamed back at me.

So there I found myself, back where it all started, on a Friday night swarmed by biddy hens looking for a cock. They squawked and pecked, but I was oblivious. I was too close to my Daisy to take note.

I held the postcard in my hand like a love letter. The museum was packed with the desperati, apparently all the vicious whispers of broken heart art had been forgotten. I kept my head low as I dodged fortysomethings like a quarterback on homecoming weekend. The joyous anticipation was forcing its way up like air through water. Daisy, just one more corridor and there she would be. The playful posturing, the impish eye sparkle, the Mona Lisa smile. This was to be my communion; she would be eternally mine in a frame. I indulged in the fantasy that she would step out of the dried oils, returning to the land of the living.

Yards from the last corner I was sideswiped by Ms. Dahl on the prowl. "Mr. Gray," she syrupy cooed. I blatantly ignored her, circumnavigating to the left, but Ms. Dahl had spent years playing defense, her block would have made any coach weep at the perfection of its execution.

"Oh Mr. Gray," she honeysuckle trilled, slightly louder, and longer, this time.

I raised my ashen face to her eyeline. "Yes, what is it Mrs. Dahl?"

I did not need a mirror. Off her feebly masked reaction I knew I was grisly. "Well I was wondering," she said, now thrown off course and fumbling for niceties, "how are you doing? We haven't seen you strolling around the neighborhood recently."

I was still trying to grab a glimpse of my girls, of what was behind the multitude of walking corpses. A moment longer and I would be ready to start tearing at people's jugulars.

And then the sea of bodies parted and there it was: empty space. Nothing. No Tulip, no Ivy, no Iris, and no Daisy.

"Where is painting? Where is Daisy?"

"Ah yes, the Sargent painting. Turns out the museum sent it out for a cleaning. The whole explanation is right there on that plaque. I guess they're going to replace it with some Caravaggio next week, but there was some issue with customs so it's empty until then. I just hope it's not like after they restored the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Dahl took me there for our ten year anniversary," she said emphasizing the word anniversary with more than a pinch of pure hatred. "It was positively gaudy. I don't--"

"--You asked me how I am I doing Mrs. Dahl?"

"Yes Mr. Gray, how are you doing?"

"I am not doing well Mrs. Dahl."

She paused, realizing she definitely no longer wanted to pursue a conversation, but her fruitless obligation to social mores bound her now to make small talk. "Actually, it's _Ms._ Dahl," she tried unsuccessfully to interject. "But, I'm sorry to hear that—"

"--You see Mrs. Dahl," I noted looking at the empty space where my salvation was supposed to lie, "I am walking void."

A stronger pause; unsure of what to do she looked down to her deep glass full of cheap Chablis for answers. Finally, "I think I'm going to get some more wine. It was lovely seeing you Mr. Gray," she lied.

With nary a shrug I returned to the emptiness, the utter emptiness. I thought I might find solace in a shell of Daisy, but I was not to even be bestowed with this silver of a morsel of joy. So instead I just stared with unblinking eyes. Satre got it right in his potboiler: in his hell nobody blinks. Blinking meant the passage of time. Hell was nothing but people, when people could give you nothing.

Another clucker nestled on the bench next to me. I artfully ignored counting my blessings that she was not a squawker. But finally the loudness of the silence got to me. I turned to look, and there sitting next to me was Sister Augustina.

"I was wondering when you would finally reemerge Mr. Glass."

Her misty eyes cast to the void where there should have been a painting with four corners. Over seven feet long when present the painting looks immense, from the bench the barrenness looked immeasurable.

I instead chose to stare at Daisy. The image on the postcard was minuscule, but it was there, something tangible to hold onto.

"Are you finally going to say that you see the resemblance Augs?"

"Nope." She said, "I am not a sugarcoating type. I never did see Daisy in that flat painting Mr. Glass, it is too two-dimensional. But I have always been fonder of statues; they are just so much more complex. The view alters depending where you are looking. Seven different sides, seven different stories."

"Six, Augie, a statue has six different sides defining its location."

"Yes Mr. Glass, a three-dimensional object is defined by six sides: a top and a bottom, a left and a right, a front and a back. But for all those to work you need to note the seventh and most important location: that of the viewer. Depending on where you are your perspective alters. So you see Mr. Glass a statue is always changing."

I turned to acknowledge her lunacy. "I always knew you penguins were idiots."

The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. We then returned to the silence.

Finally Augie spoke again, "Mr. Glass I know you are hurting."

"What do you know of hurt Augie?"

"Anything that feels knows of hurt?"

We sat there in silence, again, for awhile, "Mr. Glass I know it's never fun to hear, but every moment in our lives has both good and bad. You should know that everything happens--"

"--God, can this get any more cliché?"

"In times of tragedy all we have is cliché."

"'Everything happens for reason.' Right? Is that what you were going to say? The only time someone states that expression is that is when they do not know what to say."

"Yes that's true. But, people also say it because it's true."

"I do not want to hear it, Augie. No reasons, no excuses. No talk of the BIG PICTURE in the hopes of making the pain less bearable. All I have is the pain."

"We all have our demons to battle Mr. Glass."

"Yes we do Augie, mine just happened to be your God."

Augie did not have a proper response to this statement so I instead returned to my Petal found in single digit pixels.

"It was less than a year that she was in my life," I observed, "a drop in the ocean to an immortal."

I shivered slightly, "it is winter again. Why is it always winter here?"

"Mr. Glass--," Augie attempted some conversational direction.

"--Augie, what if Daisy was only a chess piece? A pawn that the Labrador used to recapture one of his stray sheep? What if none of it was real?"

"Did it feel real Mr. Glass?"

"Yes."

"Than it was real."

"Now all I have is a painting for a gravestone. A gravestone that has been sent out for cleaning for the next eight to ten months," I said, indicating the void in front of me.

Augie took a big inhale before her next statement, "Silas, I prayed for her."

"What?"

"You see I asked that God give you a sign to reveal himself to you. To show that even though you had turned your back on him, he had not done the same. But it turns out it was not only a test for you, it was also one for me."

"What do you mean?"

"My test was belief. In believing in him enough to allow a dark being to care for an innocent child. And yet there was more, I didn't know that the true test would be trusting in him completely."

I could not process, so instead I turned to the image on the premium quality business postcard. "She was so young Augs, so little. She died when she was... Oh God, I do not even know Daisy's age."

I glanced at the empty space again searching for miracle, for Daisy to reappear, but I would have settled for the painting.

"You know, Friedrich Nietzsche once said, 'that we have art in order not to die of the truth.' It is a sweet escape, a perfect lie."

"That painting is not all you have left Mr. Glass. Art may be a lie, but as Picasso said, 'it is a lie that makes us realize the truth.' You've suffered an injustice Mr. Glass. But it happens every day. How you react to it defines who you are as a person."

"As a being."

"As a person."

"People do not change. They lie and say they do, but it is nothing but a lie."

"So nobody evolves? We are who we are and then we die?"

"If you die."

"People want more than themselves, otherwise they couldn't have something transcendent. All people need to transcend. You need to transcend to feel alive."

"I am not alive."

"Yes, you are. You might not be alive in the normal view of mortality, but you are as alive as anyone else."

"If this is what being alive feels like then I want out."

"That's the carnage of living in color, Mr. Glass. It's not pretty, but it's life. Love is watching someone die. If we're lucky we get a lifetime, fifty or sixty years, others get quick flashes of happiness. You know, you don't have the market cornered for dealing with death Mr. Glass. Once upon a time I had a husband. We were sweethearts, married right after we graduated high school. I was lucky; I had him for two years, two perfect years. Then he turned twenty and six months later was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It took three more years for the blackness to fully engulf him. But still I insisted I could take care of him, that he needn't be placed in a sanitarium. I unexpectedly had to go away for a weekend, to visit my brother in Pittsburgh; his wife had just had a baby that came a month premature. When I returned Virgil had become _dangerous_. I opened the door, walked into kitchen, and he came at me. It all happened without me thinking. His hands grasping, I couldn't breathe, my neck closing in, I couldn't breathe. I reached for anything that could save me. My salvation came in the form of a kitchen knife. And then everything was wet. Afterwards I couldn't breath, but now for another reason."

"And then you married yourself to God."

"Not yet Mr. Glass, I still had some darkness to fully dive into. As they say, 'for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and other things are not.' I spent three years hating God and doing anything I could to destroy myself. You know the suffering in the Book of Revelation is not inflicted by God but by humans on themselves and each other. Believe me Mr. Glass I may be dressed like a Saint, but there is nothing you could tell me that would shock me. Finally after I had severed any and all of the human relationships I had once had, I decided to finish off the job. The blackness had been enclosing me for weeks. It was just something I needed to do. It was the only thing that fit. I needed an ending. So I jumped off the Mystic River Bridge. It was so easy, I took a step and there I was plunging through the cold air towards freezing blackness. But, I knew as soon as I had done it that it was mistake. I knew that I was wrong. I remember asking for help. Saying I was okay with whatever happened, but if I had a choice I wanted to live. And then nothing. I must have blacked out. But, I'm sure with all your PBS watching, Mr. Glass you've learned that penguins can leap from the icy water straight onto their feet. When I woke up I was in Saint E's Hospital, attended to by the sisters. I was covered with bruises, but other than that I was fine; a one in a million chance, that's what everyone said. It was there I found salvation, I found my place in the world. My soul began to breathe again. And as much as it hurts to say it, even now, it turned out that Virgil killing himself was both the best and worst thing to ever happen in my life."

"And now you expect me to do the same."

"Mr. Glass you can find happiness in a million different ways if you let yourself."

"But in doing so, you want me to give her up."

"Silas, I was never one for rules. Daisy was getting into heaven with or without her last rites. Those were for you. Listen, I'm not saying forget her Silas, just acknowledge how you grew and move forward."

"What if I am not strong enough?"

"Then use it. When Pablo Picasso's was young his 8-year-old sister contracted diphtheria. During the illness, Picasso vowed that if she survived, he would give up art. The relief he felt upon her death for not having to keep his promise left him wracked with lifelong guilt. That episode would govern his life and paintings for the rest of his existence."

"So what am I supposed to do Augie? You want me to start painting?"

"I don't have all the answers Mr. Glass. I just know that you need to start figuring it out because I'm not going to live forever."

"Everything dies."

"Everything, save you. And there's purpose in that. Everything happens for a reason, even if we don't know the reason until it presents itself. But that's what makes life such an adventure; remember the best part of Christmas is the excitement of what's to come."

She fumbled through her ratty Bloomie's bag. "Now if you excuse me, I really need a cigarette."

Getting up she looked down me, her wrinkles swaying ever so slight. "I'll see you around Mr. Glass. Perhaps next Friday Date Night?" she said giving me her million dollar smile.

I hesitated, finding solace in the space, the void of silence. But finally I acquiesced, "Yes Augs, I will see you around."

She nodded and left, her shoes echoing as she shuffled off questing for her nicotine fix.

I looked down again at the tiny image on the postcard and then returned again to the blank wall.

I was here. Somewhere, not here, she was there.

But, in six to eight months from now she would return, forever frozen in Sargent's prophetic painting. I could see my eternity in front of me, of an existence as a reverse Narcissus focusing forever on the trapped beauty of the past.

And yet, I still stared at the emptiness. My eyes focused hard at the space, at the void of a white wall in front of me, looking, searching, for any sign of life. And all at once it happened: the Great Flash of illumination.

In that tiny moment of pause I finally I saw the truth:

Augs was right.

She was not in that painting. Daisy was not the flat lifeless reproduction of a dead Boit sister. The millimeter-sized image in my hand was nothing more than a portrait, a portrait with a mild passing resemblance. Julia Boit, what an ugly name.

And yet, I still stared at the emptiness. Like the points in a Seurat painting the space in front of me expanded, with every dot widening to the point of the infinite. And in that expansion I saw it, the true void, the grayness of existence.

There was no true life, no true death. There was no Labrador, there was no me. There was no duality. No subject-object relationship. No Steve, and Steve. No Maureen, and Maureen. No Jerry, and Jerry. No Lobo, and Lobo. No Larry, and Larry. No Odette, and Odette. No Huguenot Humphries, and Humphries. No Ms. Dahl, and Mrs. Dahl. No Sister Augustina, and Augs. No Petal, and Daisy. No Mr. Glass, and Silas. No here, and here. No there, and there. There was and is only Is. Here and there were one and the same. Daisy and I were never apart, since we were both here and there all at once.

And then I heard it: the voice of Daisy.

And Augie, and of Ms. Dahl, and Humphries, Odette, Larry, Lobo, Jerry, Maureen, Steve and a hundred others. The most perfect voice in all of everything.

SILAS, THERE IS NO YOU. THERE IS NO ME. THERE IS ONLY US, AND WE'RE GONNA BE FINE.

I smiled.

A Mona Lisa smile.

A smile of knowing and wonder, of death and eternity, of the infinite and eternal mystery.

And with that I rose to leave, walking out the door of the Museum of Fine Arts, and into the perfection of the grayness of existence.

####

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my family, my friends, and my guides. Thank you for everything you've given me to help allow stories to flow.

About the Author

A popular word for describing Kat Thomas is Renaissance Woman (which just means Kat's lucky enough to be blessed with the belief she can do anything that she puts her mind to). The CEO and Founder of This Way Adventures LLC, she is a creative powerhouse!

A Storyteller: she's written an existential vampire novel (this one!), a comedy screenplay set in a pyramid scheme, a screwball comedy set on the world's longest airplane flight, and a digital comedy about the ins and outs of the weed indusry.

**A Burlesque Dancer as**  Miss Kitty Kat DeMille **, she is a co-creator for Workin' The Tease which showcases self-empowerment through showing off what's underneath through their burlesque internet channel, touring company, and speaking engagements.**

**An artist: with** Pics of Peps, an art blog dedicated to her cat **and a photographer whose photo clients and places featured included: SeaRiver Exxon Mobile, Pin-Ups On Tour 2017 Calendar, Pin-Ups For Vets 2016 Calendar, Pin-Ups On Tour, The Willamette Weekly, The Fayetteville Observer, Workin' The Tease, and The Virginia Pilot.**

**A Reporter: having written for the Santa Monica Observer, Whole Life Times, and Verge Magazine along with her food blog** EdibleSkinny.com.

A Filmmaker: whose past and current projects include Workin' The Tease's viral burlesque documentary featured on the Huffington Post, a comedy about a Subprime Mortgage SEX talk that was an official entry in Los Angeles' Funny Women Festival, and a burlesque channel that has over 200 videos and 750,000 views collectively on multiple platforms.

Reading List

**This book could not have been written with the knowledge and wisdom of some amazing books! Please feel free to discover more about art with:** **Sargent's Daughters: The Biography of a Painting by Erica E. Hirshler, Carravagio: Painter of Miracles by Francine Prose** **,** **Leonardo da Vinci by Sherwin B. Nuland, Pablo Picasso: Master of Modern Art by Liz Gogerly** **,** **Basquiat by Marc Mayer** **,** **The Post Impressionists by Belinda Thomson** **,** **Norman Rockwell Illustrator by Arthur L Guptill** **,** **The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich** **,** **Art: A Field Guide by Robert Cumming** **,** **Impressionist Painters by Guy Jennings** **,** **Eyewitness Art: Color by Alison Cole, and the blog**  Seurat: Color and Politics
