 
## The Burial:

### Collected Short Fiction 2006-2010

### pw cooper
Copyright 2015 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

### Here Then Is a Dead Thing

They live like every other thing lives. They live in the body of a dead thing.

The stairway curls up the dead thing's neck, leads in through the ear, a long and waxy tunnel past rippled cartilage. The dead thing is dark and hollow inside, a vast cavity of bone and skin.

They live, some of them, in the right leg. Their cities wander along the tibia like dark growths; their capital rests under the kneecap. The richest few own at least a toe each and guard their property ruthlessly. In the right arm they live like termites, worming their way down through narrow tunnels into old bones, their little burrows etched out over the years until the whole limb is a honeycomb of delicately mined habitation.

Some few reside in the sonorous cavern that is the dead thing's cranium. Those who live there feel themselves, quite naturally, far superior to the inhabitants of the dead thing's sprawled appendages. They study the crumbling chalk orbs suspended in the dead thing's sockets, and they feel reassured of themselves.

They come to worship in the dead thing's left thumb. They go there to stare at an opaque sky through the fingernail which looks out like a great clouded window. It is not so easy to get there. The journey is long, the crossings narrow and treacherous. They pray to the dead thing, looking from its raised and twisted thumb to the serene face of the dead thing as it sleeps. Its eyes dark as coal, always open. They say their confessions to it. They would rather pray to this than to other things, because they know that the dead thing is not listening very closely. They pray a great many things they would otherwise fear to pray. The dead thing loves them all.

The dead thing's chest is empty, the skin pulled away by the urgent grasp of a ravenous century. Open to a dark sky. They stare up between its ribs – great curved pale things that arch like the spires of a ruined cathedral.

They fight in the thing's chest, trickling formations wheeling and thrusting and striking, advance and retreat across the vast emptiness. They brave the heights of the crinkled spine when they must, prodding their troops between age-yellowed vertebrae, heads down in their collars as thick snowflakes fall through a canopy of bone.

Slowly, so slowly, they consume the dead thing. Cut its bones to build cruel and jutting structures. Hack loose its flesh to lie on their tables. Drain the fluid from its organs until they burst. They never stop, even as the dead thing grows weaker and thinner.

The dead thing is rotting away to their snatching fingers and between their sharp teeth. In a hundred years there will be nothing left but a few scattered nails and a half-buried pelvic bone jutting up out of the gray dirt like a white granite slab. Their gravestone. They have inscribed the stories of their many lives on it with slight and insignificant hands.

The dead thing felt every touch, and said nothing.

### The Terminus

Ocean

Brine, the smell of alien salt in the air. Brown-black water, moved and sliced by the wind, swirling into liquid crests like pale razor blades. A bloated fish floats on the surface, and another and another, all belly up and drinking in the clouded sun through dead white skin. A dark film like oil thickens the sea, furls out its shroud.

She watches this. He watches her. Her face torn with emotion. Her hand grips the railing. She is wearing heavy gloves; her face behind glass, breath moaning through tubes.

City

The city is adrift, a vast steel colony floating at sea. Towers straining upwards like metallic fingers out of the water. Empty now. It does not have a name but a designation rather. Some people call it home.

A thin street lined with gray-shuttered houses. The windows are all open and many of the doors, plates on the tables, food on the plates still warm; ice cubes still melting in glasses. In the bedrooms some of the beds are unmade, the covers torn back like an insect's unfolded wing; a pillow is left still with the indentation of a woman's head.

There is a fine dust which clings to the sidewalks and the chairs and the pillow. A dust covers the whole city.

The Entropic History

A man stands, drinking coffee from a ceramic mug. A man stands like a cadaver. Eyes are dark and heavy, face rough and unshaven. The coffee is too hot, burns his tongue. A man makes a sour face at his wife and blows into the mug. The filmy surface ripples. His son made the mug for him many years ago, long before, on another world entire. A man looks at the microwave, sees his reflection in the window. A plate turns inside, the food on it still cold. A man thinks to himself that he looks old.

A sphere of light cuts through the air, the water. It grows. It encompasses the city. It is blinding, and very cold.

A man falls to dust like a swift cremation. The mug falls from insubstantial fingers. It breaks on the floor. Thin gray dust shifts slowly downward into the spreading pool of cooling liquid. The microwave shrills. It is finished. The city is silent.

Street

He walks down the street. She walks with him. They feel very heavy in their protective equipment, as if they have been buried alive, like they are walking down the empty street wearing their coffins.

Her voice in his helmet, distant and twisted with static. "They're all dead then."

A shadow stands against the wall, a male figure clinging to the polished metal slab, a dark creature etched into steel. A harsh wind calls down the alley and tears him away, peeling his face from the wall, his arms, his legs, his body. He skips away, dissipating in the wind.

"I think they are." He says to her.

He can't see her face behind the glass of her helmet. The falling sun reflects a harsh light off the faceplate and he can see nothing beyond it, only a fierce and angry heat. He can see his own face reflected weakly back in his own faceplate. His skin is tight across his face, drawn over his cheekbones, curling his lips upwards, his eyes deep in their sockets. A skeletal countenance.

He turns, the light changes, and the reflection vanishes, like a vapor sinking underwater.

"Are you glad?" she says, "Are you glad that they're all dead now? Because they won't have to see the future, what's going to happen. They're the lucky ones, aren't they?" she says.

"They're lucky. In a way." He agrees with her.

"So you are glad."

He doesn't answer. A swirl of wind drives a thin gray curl of dust to sweep over him. He doesn't answer.

Outside the House

The house is not so different. She walks up the front steps, opens the screen door. She stands there, outside looking inside, the glass faceplate fogging with her breath. What is she doing?

"What are you doing?" he asks.

"I don't know." She says. She doesn't know? Okay, she doesn't know. "I want to go inside." Okay, she wants to go inside. "Let's go inside."

So they go inside.

Inside the House

The house is not so different inside. It's like your house.

Does your house have a kitchen table, one leg shorter than the other, just a little shorter. Is there a bowl on your kitchen table, milk in the bowl, dissolved cereal, pale white liquid sliding further up one side of the bowl than the other. One leg shorter than the other. Does your house have a blue couch, a pair of slippers left to sink into the crack between the cushions. A laundry basket overturned on the floor, a pair of pajamas spilling blindly out across the floor as if creeping away. Does your house have anything that is.

You recognize this house. It is your house. Isn't it your house?

I think it could be your house.

They go upstairs. She goes first, he follows her.

Bedroom

She looks down at the bed. The bed is made. The covers are tight across the mattress, pulled like plastic over a flattened face. The bed struggles to breathe, to live. It falls back into itself, inert.

"I want to lay down." she says.

"So do it." he says. He shrugs, as if it doesn't mean anything to him. He is frightened by the idea. He does not want to be here in this house. He does not want to see her in that bed. "Why don't you do it?"

"Because I'm afraid I'd never be able to get up again."

"I'd help you get back on your feet."

"That's not what I meant."

"What do you mean?"

She doesn't really know what she meant. She lies down on the bed. She stares at the ceiling. There is a bear beside her. A frog on the other side. Fake animals. False life. The ceiling is pale blue, the color of a bird's egg. Plaster. She feels like she is choking. She holds her hands at her throat, but she can't touch her skin; there is too much protecting her, gloves and a helmet and everything else wrapped about her whole body. She can't breathe, her throat is thick.

He looks down at her. He does not move. She holds her hands up to her neck, arms crossed like an angel in a bio-hazard suit, serene. He smiles. Stain-glass illumination flashes from the lights inside her helmet, the vital signs, the monitors.

She is beginning to panic. Her throat is very tight, and her face is damp. Is that sweat? Let it be sweat. The sweat rolls down her face and fills her eyes. She can see a child on the wall. A shadow. Naked child, drawn in charcoal, thin arms upraised, mouth open in a shout, a screaming childhood discharge. She feels very cold.

"Help me up." she says, her voice broken over the communication system.

He helps her up. She crosses the room, and wipes away the child's shadow. And it falls to the floor.

"Come on," he says, "we have all the samples we need." On his shoulder strap are glass vials, dozens of them like an ammunition belt. Thick gray dust for the gunpowder.

They leave the house and walk down the street to the subway station.

Subway Tunnel

The subway car is thick with people made of cinders, sitting in their seats in their rows with their arms at their sides. Reading newspapers, staring out the window at the dark tunnel walls, staring down the length of the car at a woman's bare skin just above her knee. Touching the corner of her lip, coal blacked lipstick smudged. A coat pulled tight around a sick man's shriveled body.

There's no wind down here to blow them away, so they sit, piled cinder corpses still with their shapes. He bangs on the window from outside and the man on the other side of the glass falls apart like a bit of charred paper coming all to pieces.

They don't go into the subway car. They walk down the tunnel. The sound of their feet on the thick and glassy floor echoes through the passage. She looks down, and she can see down. There's nothing below them, the subway line is a tube hanging below the city, far above the tossing black sea. Like the aquamarine veins of the city, it splits and branches off in a thousand directions, always clinging just below the skin.

The world churns beneath her. She feels sick.

"Did we do that?" she asks, "Turn the sea that color? It used to be blue."

"Don't know." He shrugs. He doesn't really care. "Could be remains on the water. Could be some kind of side effect of the blast. The guys at the lab will sort it out."

"Right." She nods. A collection of dead fish wash on the surface. All gray now, and drifting on the swells.

"What happened to the animals? It was supposed to be contained. Not supposed to hurt them."

He is annoyed by the question. "We knew it wouldn't work perfectly at first. That's why we're here."

"How many more times?" She is frightened. She doesn't like this city. It is too quiet, too empty. She is used to people packed around on every side, billions of them swarming the globe. She is used to the sound they make, the relentless beehive hum of a thousand dissident conversations. She doesn't like this silence. "How many?"

He shrugs again. Still annoyed. He doesn't like the quiet either. It makes him feel as if something is creeping up, crawling down his spine. Something approaching.

They walk. The tube feels blue. Blue glass. The tracks are very wide apart. She walks down the middle, right between them.

Escalator

The escalator leads up to the terminal. It is silver-black and oily, the way escalators are. It is not moving. They climb awkwardly upwards in their bulky suits. He is sweating when he reaches the top. Sweat slick on his skull, down in the crags of his cheeks and eyes.

The escalator does not move. A light glows red above them, filling the stairway with a pooled and bloody atmosphere. The light says EXIT.

Terminal

Terminus.

They go inside their ship. The hatch closes behind them. The terminal waits, breathing stale air though the heavy ventilators built into its walls.

The ship comes alive. Lights come on. Engine rumbling. Hull lifting. The city watches them depart.

Terminus.

Departure

His faceplate opens with a hiss. He is sweating. He pulls off his heavy gloves and wipes his face. She turns on the autopilot, a flick of a single switch, a push of a button.

They float above the planet, breaking away. A blue world. A hundred spots of silver. Of dark. The world shrinks, vanishes. Darkness all around them, pierced by starlight in dense pinpricks.

He smokes a cigar. She asks him not to. He ignores her. Red embers flare at the end of the thing. Smoke escapes from the corners of his mouth. His skeleton's face gleams with corpse-joy, dead contractions of muscle pulling flesh tight and upwards. He smiles.

She looks away. Her shadow is on the wall. Still inside her suit, the gray image is distorted. Loose wires and tubes dangling from her like spines and tongues. Huge, grinding hands. Open visor grinning like a vast mouth.

She swallows, and the ship turned, and the light turned, and the shadow crawls across the wall. The cigar burned down. The future waits beneath her. She can feel it below, like a living thing, an oozing kind of metallic fear.

The ship slides on through space, silent and lifeless. She can feel her heart beating somewhere deep inside her. It beats only faintly.

### A Prayer Before the Execution

The Veteran's beard is like a mold about his mouth, all dirty gray-green bristle in a tangle. Tobacco brown spittle runs down his chin into the untamed hair. His teeth are jagged flecks of bone embedded in diseased black gums. His tongue flickers at the air as if smelling, tasting the acrid haze of the city – fat pink thing like a deep-sea slug, some hideous blind creature.

We're taught not to look at him, not to make eye contact. We walk past every day in our pale red waitress uniforms and see him there in his stained fatigues the color of oil and dried olives. If we make eye contact then we will be trapped. He will speak, runny sockets flaring like owl's eyes, and he will speak his broken stumbling English. Moist words all caught on his lips, spilling out the names of his dead.

We learn to walk quickly by the rag-and-bone figure when we come into work. _Do not look at the Veteran_.

The manager is a corpulent man, in form and spirit. He takes. He puts his fat fingers on us whenever he can. When he passes us in the narrow hall from the kitchen to the break-room. When we come palms open for our paycheck at the end of the week. When he points out that spot there on the table that we didn't wipe down properly. It is all pretense. Judy complained once. She pushed him away with her face all twisted up and she said: Jesus _Christ_ , Gary! Take your fucking hands off my _ass_!

His name is Garrett Harris. Judy doesn't work here anymore. He says she quit, but we don't believe him.

Garrett was the first to warn us about the Veteran: He's a crazy old fucker. You don't want to get attacked do you? And the way he says it. Attacked. We know what he means.

Of course I don't want that Gary. Then he licks his fingertip and pushes back one by one the damp locks of hair which fall over his brow and he smiles at us like he's just said something really funny and he's excepting us to laugh any second now.

Sydney graduated five years ago from the community college across town. She's only working here until she pays off a few loans. We understand, and we don't remind her that she has been here much longer than she planned. We're all in the same situation.

Sydney plucks angrily at the pink hem of the uniform. She says: I sometimes think that it was all over for us as soon as they made god a man and we didn't do anything to stop them. It'll never get better for us until we go back to that and fix it. Tear up everything and start over. That's the sort of thing she says. Men think they're gods, she says, and that's just vanity. It's _us_ , women like us who wear these _stupid fucking short skirts_ just because we're scared not to. We don't need them. Husbands or Daddies or any of them. We're raised to think they're all that and it's just wrong. We don't _need_ them. But we're all just too scared of being alone.

We all feel alone anyway, but we don't tell Sydney that. Instead we laugh at her and we tell her that she acts like a lesbian sometimes and she shakes her head and picks up the plate of greasy eggs and the cups of coffee and brings them out to the ratty truckers with fishing lures in their baseball hats and as she walks out they let their gaze rove over her waxed legs, just because they can and because it's their right isn't it? Their wives back at home are just as old as they are, their wives have started to look _old_ and that face in the high school yearbook is like a different person. A girl.

The Veteran wears a cross around his neck and rubs it between his boney fingers.

We feel so alone. Sarah's boyfriend comes to pick her up after work and he looks at the other waitresses and he whistles and shows his teeth and when they're in the car and she's angry about it he tells her not to be so _frigid_ , he says: It's just a _guy_ thing, sweetie, why you gotta make such a big deal, huh?

She tells him just forget it and drive because she can feel the Veteran watching her from the sidewalk outside the dinar; he is slumped perpetually below the smeared glass window. His eyes white as half-cooked egg in the soot and dirt which covers his face, so they look like darting animal eyes in the gloom and smog light. When we come back in the morning he will still be there.

In what war did he fight? We can't tell if he is sixty or thirty, only that he is _old_. Older than the sun and older than the concrete which seems to have grown around him. The wasteland is sprawled around him, the city lies before him.

All day while we work we can feel his presence just outside. We stand inside the glass in our matching red uniforms like we are soldiers ourselves. We feel as though we're always fighting, but we don't know what exactly. We can't escape the feeling, the dreadful feeling, that we, just as our mothers and grandmothers, are going to lose. That we already lost before we even knew that we were fighting.

* * *

All Saturdays are alike, Lorrie thinks as she pours the watery coffee into the chipped cup. They begin the same, and they end the same.

She was going to see her sister tomorrow. Her _married_ sister. Thank God hubby wasn't going to be there. The two of them were too syrupy for words and couldn't help besides to throw into sharp relief the fact that big sister wasn't even _seeing_ anyone. Poor Lorrie doesn't have anybody, she could see them thinking it.

She can't wait for Saturday to end, can't wait to see her Beth. It was going to be like it had been before, before they moved to the city, before little sis had gotten married and moved away. There were memories which Lorrie kept hidden deeply away, memories which she was afraid to examine closely, lest they be found lacking.

Lorrie remembered running barefoot in a forest with her sister. They ran like animals, for miles and miles through a vast green world. There was nothing but them and the woods and the stream which ran down the grassy hill, bubbling over round stones. They made deep footprints in the soft mud. Their home was behind them. The wind spoke.

"You awake there, honey-pie?"

She looked at the customer. He was a shriveled creature in faded overalls. Flannel shirt hanging off his bony limbs, wool hat all squished up in his hands. His eyes milky. Is he blind? His face is crinkled like old wrapping paper. There is a fragility to him. He looks as though he might blow away at any moment. He reminded Lorrie of her grandfather.

"Sorry," she can feel a smile on her face, "daydreaming."

"I don't mean to interrupt," the old man says.

"Can I get you something?" Lorrie asks.

"I don't know. I'm not from here is the thing." The man's voice trembles, like each word were a delicate glass object. "I saw this place, and that man out front and I just felt like I needed something. What can you give me? I'm hungrier than I've ever been."

### Now Wait For Yesterday

He waited outside a decaying house, watching the sprawl crumble gradually into the bay. The face of the buildings along the wharf drooped earthward, stucco walls stained black with coal-smoke and factory ash, windows boarded up with slabs of old plywood. A cold wind hissed through the alley, sweeping out to ruffle up waves across the harbor. A great iron ship floated absolutely still on the water, laced to the dock with thick and twisted rope, great gray hide bleeding cold oil from every rivet. A lone gull landed clumsily atop an old buoy, and screeched.

It was a place of memory, and regret.

His car idled on the edge of the empty street, headlights slashing through thick morning fog. He bit his thumbnail, while he waited, while he watched. Somewhere in the home across the road there was a story waiting for him.

His name was Aubrey Jackson. People called him Jack – not friends, but some people he knew. Today he felt old. Thirty-one years... that wasn't old, wasn't it? He felt old.

Aubrey cracked a window and let the mist creep in. He took a little bag of coke from the inside pocket of his faded blue coat and held it up to the light. Still some left. He licked his little finger and touched it to the white powder. Aubrey scrubbed the stuff across his teeth. He felt himself going numb, his brain fuzzing out like a radio station vanishing in the distance. He closed the bag and returned it to his pocket, eyes twitching.

It was a bad habit, the coke. He'd picked it up after writing a story about a maimed veteran. It had been a fucking sight, that poor bastard. He hadn't been ready for the shock of it. Called the dealer he'd known in college and coked himself senseless. These days he always took a little hit before going after a story, just in case. Anyway, he planned to kick the stuff any day now. Go into rehab, maybe one of those real fancy places. Lily would probably pay for it, separated or not, if she thought he needed it.

Aubrey staggered from the car. He couldn't see a goddamn thing through the fog. The asphalt cracked beneath him as he crossed the street. He knocked on the door, one hard rap. There was no answer. Aubrey shivered. He licked his lips, hugging his chest against the cold.

This was going to be another freaky one, he could feel it. Just the kind his editor liked. He'd heard a rumor about a wolf-child, or some shit. Apparently one of the neighbor's kids had been bitten. He touched the little camera in his pocket, just to make sure it was still there.

Aubrey glanced up and down the street while he waited. Christ, he couldn't imagine living here. He wouldn't go so far as to call it hellish, but it might pass for purgatory.

He waited as long as was prudent for an answer, then reached for the scuffed black handle and pushed opened the door. An unhooked chain rattled, quivering against the doorframe.

A fleshy woman was reclined in a plush green chair, her face bathed in flickering television light. Her TV lurched from channel to channel, never fixing for too long on any single program. "Who's that?" she called out, trying and failing to turn towards him.

"Aubrey Jackson, from the newspaper. I called yesterday."

"Oh..." She worried at a scab on her neck. "Yeah, I remember. You're here to talk."

"That's right." Aubrey approached the woman. He shook her hand, blinking furiously as her clammy fingers engulfed his own. "To talk. Interview, if you want."

The woman's eyes widened. "Oh no, not an interview." There was a thin sheen of greasy sweat on her skin.

"Okay, fine. Just a talk then." Aubrey made to sit down, but there were no other chairs in the room. The woman's padded seat looked it might be the only furniture in the whole place. He stood awkwardly beside the television, taking a scribbled-in notebook from one of his many jacket pockets.

"Well... what do you want to talk about?" The woman sounded uncertain. A cockroach scrabbled under the curling edge of a threadbare rug. Aubrey looked at his feet, blinking and rubbing his nose. Could bugs smell cocaine? Cockroaches scrabbling down his throat, he'd had dream like that once, woke up screaming. That was after the burn victim and the rat-girl and the guy with the conjoined fetus on his back.

"Why don't we talk about your daughter?"

"Oh..." Her face fell. "I don't really wanna talk about her."

"Why is that?"

"She was... well... disappointing." The woman's face twisted, as if the words she searched for were writhing just under her skin, but could not be touched.

"How so?"

She sat for a long moment, watching her television. For a moment, he thought she might have forgotten that he was in the room. "There," she said, pointing, "This old commercial, I must of seen it a thousand times. Look."

Aubrey looked. A beautiful woman with a broad white smile danced through a field, tiny blonde girl giggling after her. Flowers blossomed violently. Laundry detergent.

"She's nothing like that," the woman said wistfully, finger still extended towards the flickering screen, "She doesn't talk to me. Just cries and cries. Little wet red thing... real disappointing. She's six now."

"And you?"

"Excuse me?"

Aubrey spoke slowly, "How old are you?"

The woman blushed, her jowly cheeks quivering. "Twenty-two."

He tried again to sit down, forgetting for a moment that there was nowhere to sit. Twenty-two. Christ, she looked at least twice that. Everybody seemed so old these days. "Can I meet her?" he asked.

She shrugged, slouching down in her chair, and pointed across the empty room to a narrow door. "That's her room in there, I think."

Aubrey nodded, feigning gratefulness, and walked out.

Another dreary family in another dreary house. Another dreary day. He was getting so tired of it, worn thin by the constant parade of freaks to track down and slander. Still, there was a demented sort of satisfaction in it. Twisting grotesque reality beyond the point that it could be recognized as such. Murderers became ravenous cannibals, disfigured infants became mutants straight out of bad horror movies, imported parasites became alien invaders, and the people waiting in supermarket checkout lines shook their heads and smiled knowingly.

This was just another bug-hunt, Aubrey knew, another mossy stone to turn over for the maggots writhing underneath. He was always secretly relieved when he didn't find anything.

He opened the door.

It didn't really deserve to be called a room. Closet perhaps, but even that was more generous than the dark nook deserved. It smelled of urine and lemon-scented air freshener, enough to make his eyes water. A bowl of hardened macaroni thick with a moldy orange paste lay abandoned in the corner. Candy wrappers were scattered on the floor.

He meant to say something, call out some indignant question. The words died in his throat.

It was the girl's eyes that stopped him, great soft brown pools open wide and somehow terrifyingly empty. Her knees were drawn up against her chest, her hands clasped around bony ankles. She couldn't have fit in the closet otherwise. Her hair was dark and long, a dirty tangle that went down past her shoulders. Pale insects crawled across her scalp.

Aubrey's eyelids stopped flickering. The stench of the closet wormed through his nostrils and deep into his stomach.

The little girl's mouth opened. Not a smile, just an opening, like a newborn not quite in control of its body yet. Her baby teeth were a rotted gray, her gums the color of an old bruise. She made a sound, a mute sort of gurgle deep in her throat.

Aubrey shut the door. He slumped to his knees, heart racing, a sort of black panic rising through him. He knew that he couldn't leave her. What kind of man would leave her there? Leave her to die, what kind of person? The man that Aubrey wanted to be would save her.

But Aubrey had never been the man that he wanted to be.

He scrambled to his feet and backed away from the closet door. The woman had turned awkwardly in her chair to watch him. She was crying, fat crystal tears that melted from her eyes and left pale streaks on her dusty skin.

"It's astonishing," she said, "how hard life can be."

Aubrey shook his head, forced his eyes shut. He ran out the door without looking back.

He stood in the middle of the street, breathing heavily, staring into the fog. He took the little bag of coke from his coat pocket and let his heavy jacket slump off his shoulders. It lay crumpled in the street.

Aubrey Jackson got behind the wheel of his rusty blue car and leaned the seat all the way back. He took a few deep, calming breaths, trembling fingers prying open the bag. It all flowed out, like soft grains of sand in a twisted plastic hourglass; it all flowed. He breathed in through his nose, dragging in the powder with every breath, every fleck until he choked on it, gagging, almost vomiting as it filled him with a searing, cleansing light.

* * *

Thirty-four years old.

He was shivering on a stained cot in a flimsy blue gown, blood running down his face. His knees were drawn up against his chest, since that was the only way he could fit on the bed. The doctor stood in the doorway, checking his clipboard and clicking his tongue.

Two years now Aubrey had been here, after that lost year in a semi-coma at the hospital. He still didn't know what the name of the institution was that he had been staying at, or perhaps he once knew and had since forgotten. He had forgotten a great many things, everything except the girl, the one thing he really wished he didn't remember. He still thought of her almost every night. Lying there in the darkness listening to the other patients moan, the thought of her still clawed at the back of his skull.

He'd had a visitor, more than a year ago now. His wife Lily, divorce papers in hand. The first time she came to see him, after he woke up, he didn't know who she was. He remembered a woman that looked like her, but he couldn't remember being married. He signed the papers, and she cried.

That was the last time anybody came to visit Aubrey Jackson. A whole year... it was a long time to be alone. But others had waited longer.

The doctor tapped his clipboard and stepped inside the room. The hallway outside was gray; the sounds of the heavily medicated lunatics shuddered in the air. The doctor closed the door. His name was Collins.

"You've been fighting again." Dr. Collins said, his nasally little voice despairing.

"Just wanted to help." Aubrey sniffled, and wiped away the blood that was dripping from his nose. "Just wanted to make things better."

"Don't worry about the other patients, Mr. Jackson. That's my job." The sound of his voice echoed off the plaster walls and curling linoleum floor. The little toilet in the corner dripped. Dr. Collins coughed, "Ah... anyway, I think that it's time for us to reevaluate your treatment."

Aubrey sighed. He wrapped his hands around his lumpy pillow. More drugs, never the ones he wanted. "I don't need more treatment."

"Do you still talk to Rachel?" The doctor asked, sitting gingerly at the foot of the bed. There was nowhere else to sit.

Rachel was the name that Aubrey had given the girl. It was not her real name, which Aubrey forgotten, but it seemed close.

"I do still think of her, yes. Often."

"You are aware that she is only in your head, this girl." The doctor looked over his thin glasses at Aubrey.

"I suppose she is," Aubrey answered, "Does that make me crazy, that I talk to someone who isn't there?"

Dr. Collins sighed, making a note on his clipboard and getting to his feet. The bedsprings creaked. "If it helps you cope, it can't hurt. As long as you know that it isn't real."

"I know it isn't. She's gone."

"I'm going to give you something, Mr. Jackson."

"Please, no more pills."

"Just one more." Dr. Collins took a little orange bottle from his white coat pocket and pressed it into Aubrey's hands. "These should help you reorganize yourself."

"What are they?"

"Experimental treatment."

Aubrey waited until the doctor had left the room before sitting up and looking at the bottle of pills. They were soft, pale green. No label, no name.

He got out of bed and slumped across the room to the toilet. He leaned over and drooled blood into the murky bowl. A wide porcelain smile grinned back at him, the curve of the seat a smooth gray mouth. He flushed the toilet and swallowed one of his new pills.

He lay on his bed, and tried to remember.

* * *

Twenty-nine years old.

He sat in the kitchen, milk dribbling from the stubble that clung to his chin, dribbling into a bowl of soggy cereal and discolored liquid. He was getting fat, his shirt tight around his midsection, and the thick black hair that Lily said had first caught her attention was receding at a startling pace. He hated his body, and he hated his wife. Sometimes, anyway.

"Jesus Christ, Aubrey, go _do_ something!"

"I am doing something," he mumbled around his spoon, "I'm thinking about a story."

"Aubrey, I swear I don't know why you take this shit so seriously. A story? You write for a _tabloid_ , God knows why! You could write for a _real_ paper if you tried even a little bit!" Lily shook her head, her mouth twisted with frustration.

"Yeah, well... This is enough for me, okay?"

"Fine! So do it already!" She slammed the door behind her when she left. Her car growled to life in the driveway.

He sighed, and poured out the milk down the drain, where it swirled away in a pale whirlpool.

She came back that night and kicked him out. He'd known that it was coming. It would have ended sooner or later in any event. He just couldn't keep up.

He didn't often think of her afterward, though he sometimes felt there was a strange sort of empty space inside him that hadn't been there before.

* * *

Forty-three years old.

Dr. Collins had just about convinced him, with all his talk of illusion and the fragility of memory, that the girl was only in his head, just a drug-induced nightmare. But now he knew. He was looking at her. It really was her.

She was in the room right across the hall, sitting at the foot of her bed, arms crossed over her chest. She was draped in the same thin blue clothing he used to wear.

Twelve years... she was... what, about eighteen now? Same wide brown eyes, same slack emptiness in her face. There were teeth in her mouth now, not really healthy looking, but crookedly endearing. She was looking at him, eyes empty, seeing nothing.

He stepped hesitantly through the doorway. The cold crisp smell of autumn lingered in his lungs, though the stale odor of cigarette smoke still clung to his clothing.

Dr. Collins stepped out of Aubrey's room, his clipboard clenched against his side and a pained expression on his face. His glasses were folded in his breast pocket. "Ah, Jack, come in. We need to talk."

"What about?" Aubrey looked at the girl. It was _her_ , wasn't it? He turned away, and facing the doctor in the hall. "And you can call me Aubrey."

The doctor made a sour face. "Right, sorry... It's about your treatment."

"What about it?" Aubrey reached into his pocket. He could feel the bottle of pills against his fingertips.

"How do you think it's going?"

"Fine, I guess. I'm remembering a lot. I told you last time we talked. I remember Lily now."

"Really?" The doctor's face lit up, "Should I let her know?"

Aubrey glanced back over his shoulder at the girl in the other room. She was looking at him, but not really. It was almost like she was looking right through him. "I'd rather you didn't. Not until I'm better."

"Okay then... That's good news, Aubrey, really it is. I've read some studies that the drug might not be as effective as initially expected, but if it's working for you..."

Aubrey turned to the doctor, tearing his eyes away from the girl's flat stare. "Who is she?"

Dr. Collins' looked confused for a minute. "Who is who?"

"The girl in that room there, who is she?"

The doctor glanced into the room. "I'm not sure. Ask one of the nurses. We're getting so crowded in here. I can barely tell who's who anymore." The doctor sighed, slowly unfolding his glasses and pushing them back onto his face.

So Aubrey found a nurse, and he asked her about the girl, about Rachel.

They'd found her only a few days after Aubrey's overdose, still living in that closet, and they put her in the foster care system. Her foster family did their best, but she should never have been there in the first place. Too far gone, the nurse told him, probably just made it worse.

Her foster parents had apparently taught her how to write. She didn't speak once the entire time she'd lived with them, and, as far as the nurse knew, hadn't done so in the time since.

Aubrey stood in the girl's doorway. It was never closed; he'd spent the last three days watching her, trying to work up the courage to cross the hall and talk to her. Finally, today, he'd worked up the nerve to try.

The girl was scratching the narrow windowpane with a long and jagged fingernail, her cheek pressed against the smooth plaster wall. He watched her, and tried to think of what he was going to do.

"Hello." He said.

She paused, her finger pressed against the glass, but she didn't look at him.

"My name is Aubrey, and I think we met once. Do you remember me?"

She nodded.

"Oh. Is your name Rachel?"

She shook her head; her tangled black hair had been cut short.

"Do you mind if I call you Rachel?"

She went back to scratching the window, shaking her head once more.

"Can you speak?"

She nodded. He waited. She said nothing.

" _Do_ you speak?"

She shook her head.

"But you can write, can't you? Here, let me..." Aubrey got up and crossed the room. She stepped back against the wall, alarmed. He reached slowly into his pocket and took out a stack of clean white paper and a soft-tipped felt pen. "Take these," he pushed the empty pages gently towards her.

Rachel stared at the paper for a long time, then picked up the pen and awkwardly began to write, her eyes flickering across the page. She wrote very slowly.

"Dr. Collins gave me this stuff. He said it might help me reconnect... whatever that means. Apparently I used to write for a living. Can't really remember that, but I guess it's true. I never used them."

Rachel looked up. Their eyes met. He hoped to find something in her, some spark of emotion, even if it was hate or disgust. Nothing. She held up the paper.

I remember you. You left me.

Aubrey sat on the bed, his hands on his knees. He nodded, mostly to himself, and bit his lip. Rachel went back to the paper, writing more.

She handed him back the stack, but kept the pen gripped in her hand. The ink had bled through the pages. _You left me_ , trickled down through the pages, over and over. He left the room, went back to his own room across the hall, and tore up the paper. The black words spread over the shredded white surface like a stain.

He shut the door, unable to bear to thought of her seeing him.

* * *

Thirteen years old.

His father was quiet most of the time, distant even when he bruising Aubrey's mother. He said that he didn't mean to, that she just had sensitive skin. Aubrey's mother was nothing like her husband. She was loud and vibrant, her voice a twisted mélange of accents picked up from all the places the army had stationed her father over the years. He never knew exactly how she felt about him, or how he felt about her.

One night – the wind scratching dead tree branches across his bedroom window, the water sitting silky and black in the harbor as the tall boats drifted like great shadows – he left his bed and walked down the cool gray hallway to his parent's room.

He opened the door.

His mother lay on the floor, bunched up like a broken toy, her bared breasts flopped on the rug and her bottom in the air. Her bright lipstick was all over her face, red like blood, war paint smeared on her cheeks and forehead. The tube lay on the bed, delicate tip crushed and deformed. Father stood above her, tired lines drawn under his cold eyes. He was still dressed in his work clothes, white shirt with buttons at the wrists rolled up past his elbows, long black pants unbuttoned and unzipped. He was masturbating, snarling. His teeth were white and hard, bared like an angry dog's.

His father's face changed when he saw Aubrey, changed to something like confusion and sadness, regret. He mother wailed, hiding her scarlet-painted features behind her hands. Her fingernails, so long and decorated, had been bitten down to the finger, ragged and rough and silver gloss chipped away. There were bite marks on her breasts and legs.

Aubrey backed away, thinking that he must have been dreaming, had wandered into some strange nightmare. He could still hear the branches clawing at the windows, as if all the black things floating in the world were at the glass, fighting their way inside.

He went down the stairs, hands shaking as he scrunched himself up under the dining room table. He thought that he must have run here.

His mother's feet, a few minutes later. She was wrapped in a thin red nightgown.

She sat in the chair on the other side of the room and picked up a napkin. Slowly, she began to wipe the lipstick off her face.

Aubrey's lips were trembling. He thought he might have been crying. "I'm sorry, mom, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to, I'm sorry, mom." What he really wanted to say was _why_ , but he couldn't, all he could do was apologize.

"It's okay, Aubrey."

But it wasn't. Everything was different after that night, even if nothing really changed. They acted like it had never happened, and Aubrey tried to do the same. So life went on, and he pretended that his parents were as normal and sexless as the other kids were.

And when his father died, years later, Aubrey wondered if the tears in his mother's eyes were really tears of sadness. And when his mother died, even more years later, he wondered if the tears in his own eyes were really tears at all. And he promised never to be anything like them. And he ended up being just like both of them. And what he'd seen that night when he was thirteen didn't seem nearly so dark or frightening when he was twenty and alone.

* * *

Forty-four years old.

Audrey was thinking about killing himself.

He sat in the lobby of the institution, watching the other patients shuffle uselessly about, watching the visitors struggle to suppress their fear and discomfort long enough to leave again. He watched them, and he realized that he was better off not living anymore.

He hadn't spoken to Rachel again, not since the last time. Months had passed. The treatment was working, he was remembering things... just not what he wanted to remember. And she was always there, just across the hall, a reminder of empty things.

She was a symbol, in a way. He talked with Dr. Collins about her every time they met, which was not so often now as it had once been. Collins just said that it was good he was remembering, and try not to think about the girl anymore.

But he couldn't stop thinking about her.

Yesterday, he found a piece of paper slipped under his door. Three words written on it in black felt pen. Right there, in small precise letters at the top of the page:

_I forgive you_.

Audrey went to her room. She was right where she had been, all those months ago, her finger against the glass.

He sat quietly on the floor, and he looked up at her. "You saved me, you know."

She smiled, her crooked teeth bright. The sun broke through the clouds and shone down on her face. Rachel went back to scratching the narrow window. Outside, the leaves were falling in a shower of red and gold.

* * *

Twenty-four years old.

He sat in the starched white waiting room of the J.P. so-and-so memorial hospital, talking with a starched white woman, beautiful and clean like a dew-fleck lily glistening in morning sunshine.

Lily. Her plastic coated name badge sparkled in the harsh light, her short blonde hair shone.

"So," she said, and her perfect red lips turned the word into the most meticulously crafted sphere, a pearl of language dripping from the tip of her tongue like a single beautiful tear, "you're a writer?"

Aubrey nodded eagerly, plucking the notepad from his coat pocket and brandishing it before him like a lawyer thrusting a bit of evidence at the jury. He knew he was making a pathetic display of himself, but he didn't really care. Everything seemed funny.

"I'm working at this... well, this _rag_ at the moment, but it's just a temporary thing. Until I can get something significant published. A novel. I'm working on a couple right now, actually."

He felt comfortable telling her this thing which he'd not told anyone else, because she was no different than he was. A nurse, she'd told him, but only until she got through medical school, then it would be _Doctor_ Lily. He'd forgot exactly what kind of doctor she'd said she wanted to be, but he was sure she would be good at it, whatever it was.

"Oh?" She leaned in, her stiff white garb crinkling. She wore an expensive looking metal watch. A gift from her parents, maybe? "What stories have you done? Anything I might have read?"

"This is my first, actually." He shrugged, properly embarrassed.

Her beeper went off, calling her to whatever crisis it was that demanded this perfect woman's attention. Aubrey felt that he would sooner let himself bleed dry than disturb her. "Good luck then... with your stories," she said, shrugging apologetically, "Guess I'll let you get to it."

"Oh. Oh, yeah, sure. Thanks. Nice to meet you, and everything."

"Yeah, you too," she said, and then she was gone. Her image lingered on in his head, and her scent in his nostrils.

He stared across the waiting room for a long while, the swirling masses of the sick and maimed flowing by like so much water, an endless sea of faces. He noticed none of them, because none of them was her.

He opened his notebook, trying and failing to think of something other than her. _JP, Room 721_ , his editor had scribbled. Go and interview the guy, okay? This is an easy one.

Aubrey stuck the notebook in his coat pocket. It was a new coat; he'd bought it to celebrate getting hired. It felt, to him, like the sort of thing a reporter might wear.

Room 721, as it turned out, was located in the hospital's burn ward.

A woman like a frayed piece of pale silk stood just outside the door, dabbing the corners of her eyes with an embroidered bit of cloth. Her belly was heavy and full, several months pregnant.

"Excuse me," he said to the woman, plucking out his notebook, "My name is Aubrey Jackson, I'm from the newspaper, I believe my editor called about-"

The woman shook her head, sniffed wetly. She pointed at the doorway, her handkerchief twisted through her fingers. A thin golden ring coiled round her finger. There were roses, he noticed, and images of fragile little birds sewn onto the cloth. He nodded gratefully and pushed open the door to room 721.

The man in the bed looked at him, and smiled.

His face was a ruin, one half sloping off his skull as if formed of a soft and melting gelatin. One eye vanished under the soggy mess, the other flickering with a panicked half-light. His mouth was a black slash across his face, his gums swollen over his teeth and his tongue like a black serpent's head, writhing. His left leg was gone below the knee, and a yellowish puss seeped through the bandages wrapped tightly about the stub. His skin was the color of a rotting hard-boiled egg, and seemed softly oozing on his bones.

The man in the bed lifted his hand. There was only the thumb and index finger left. He laughed, and spoke. "I'm going to be a father." Tears of joy slid down his cheeks.

* * *

Forty-five years old.

He stood beneath the wide willow tree that grew by the south fence and lit a cigarette. It quivered, hanging between his lips; he blew pale smoke from his nose. It was springtime again, almost summer, and the world glistened expectantly.

Rachel sat against the black iron fence. Away below there were ships moving slowly in the harbor. Black smog trailed across the sky.

Her hair had grown back a little, her fingernails had been trimmed and cleaned after she'd scratched and orderly's face. She was looking better, even smiled sometimes, though only to Aubrey.

He'd taken to carrying a little pad of paper with him wherever he went, and gave it to her whenever he wanted to talk. The doctor didn't know about their conversations. Aubrey had thought about telling him, even giving him the little notes that Rachel had written him... but it just didn't feel right. It would have been a betrayal, he supposed.

She was writing now, pausing every so often after crafting another meticulously formed letter and chewing on the end of the pen.

Aubrey smoked, and smelled the harbor air. Cold, reeking of machines and harsh salt water... somehow a beautiful scent, for all that. He breathed deeply, listening to the gulls call.

"I feel like I'm going backwards in time." He said, extinguishing his cigarette on the gnarled loop of an exposed tree root. Rachel kept writing, ignoring him.

He was still taking the doctor's pills, those little green tablets, even though he hadn't felt any change. Every time he took one he wondered if they might be only placebos. That was just Collins' style, slip him a bunch of duds to prolong treatment.

"It's like I've stopped aging... strange feeling. Honestly I think I'm getting younger. I _feel_ young."

Rachel nodded absently. The felt-tip pen scratched softly across the surface of the paper.

A single long note blew down in the harbor, some lonesome foghorn like the cry of a lost animal. A great bellowing steel wolf drifting against the tide. He lit another cigarette.

Rachel handed him the pad of paper. She didn't wait for him to read it, wandering off along the fence-line, looking out at the world beyond the confines of the institution.

Aubrey read:

I miss my mother. I know I'm not supposed to, but I do. They tell me that I should forget her, but I don't want to. Sometimes I dream about her, and it's like she's not even real unless I'm dreaming. I wish I was still with her, I miss her every day.

Aubrey looked at the paper for a long time. He crumpled up the page. The cigarette in his fingers trembled, spilling ashes on the ground. He stuffed the crunched ball of paper into his pocket, and his heavy wool coat reminded him for a moment of the old blue coat he used to wear, the one he'd left outside the girl's house, the one which had always seemed so heavy.

* * *

Twenty-four years old.

"I hate to say this, kid, because you're a hell of a writer, but this is a piece of shit." Aubrey's editor sighed dramatically, his jowls quivering, and he tossed the folded paper face-down on his desk. "I only printed the thing because we ran out of time to replace it with something better."

"You know..." Aubrey said quietly, "he's just a kid. My age..."

The boy, the skinless thing that gasped for life in a hospital bed, had been caught in a fire. Apparently, his leg had melted to the oil pipe. He got away, flesh tearing off like damp paper as he crawled from the climbing flames, and the sand turned to glass around him.

Aubrey picked up the paper, gingerly, and opened it to where his article had been hidden away. The headline was sprawled at the top of the page. _Necrophiliac Bride Conceives Freak With Charcoal Frankenstein_.

"This is sick." Aubrey threw the paper across the room. It fluttered listlessly on the floor, like a dying thing.

"This is what we do, kid," the editor's hands were crossed over his ample chest, "what did you think this was, the Times? We're just here to sell papers, and monsters sell."

Aubrey swallowed. "How do you deal with it?"

The other man shrugged. "You don't. You just get used to it."

"Not me." Aubrey got up slowly from the chair, "I'm not going to get used to it."

His editor's eyes were dull, flatly indifferent. "We'll see."

Aubrey left the man's office. He wandered down the cramped halls of the newspaper office, deaf to the clutter and noise of the place. He could hear the printing press chugging away below, down on the first floor. Like a dragon roaring, billowing smoke.

Aubrey found himself at the pay phones. He called the hospital, and asked them to find a nurse named Lily for him. Just a friend of hers, he said. No, it's not an emergency.

* * *

Sixty-two years old.

The office building smelled like paper and aftershave. Caffeine-fueled men and women hurried through the labyrinth of cubicles with the furious intensity of commuters in a subway station.

He found her in the corner, shuffling papers behind a desk with an intent expression on her face. She'd grown out her hair, it was long and dark, as it had been when she was a child.

Aubrey rapped his knuckles on the cubicle wall, leaning in over the flimsy divider. "Hey, surprise!"

Rachel looked up from her work. Her eyes widened, and she smiled. "Uncle Jack!" She leaned out and they embraced awkwardly over the chest-high wall.

"How are you doing?" Aubrey asked as they pulled apart.

Rachel settled back into her seat, grinning. "I'm doing really good, of _course_. Seems like everybody here thinks they're my boss, and they're all total pricks, but I'm doing good... How 'bout you? You finish your-"

Aubrey silenced her, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a slim book. "I have finished it, yes, and here it is. For you." He held it out to her.

Rachel laughed, taking the little book with both hands and holding it before her. She ran her fingers gently over the embossed lettering of the cover. " _The Girl_ , by Aubrey Jackson."

Aubrey took the book gently from her hands and opened it just past the title page. "Read the dedication," he said, laying it atop her stack of papers.

Rachel read it. She smiled, a sad little smile at the corner of her mouth. Aubrey though he saw a tear in her eye.

She closed the book slowly and held it against her chest. Aubrey had been working on the book ever since being released from the institution, and had at last published. "It's beautiful, Uncle Jack. Thank you."

To Rachel, my guiding star, my inspiration, my truest hope.

* * *

Sixty-two years old.

He is old, terribly terribly old, a husk of a man, more dead than alive.

His hands are trembling, fingers like bones wrapped in a paper-thin layer of wrinkled skin.

His beard is tangled and gray, his eyes dull.

He is clutching a bottle of pills which promise him anything, which promise he can remember things as they were.

Pages scattered all around, on the bed, on the floor, flapping like flightless birds struggling to take off. Scribbled passages he had written about a world where things were different.

He remembers the look on the veteran's face when he said that he was going to be a father, but he forgets that the man's wife terminated her pregnancy and left him. He remembers the night he walked in on his parents, but he forgets the night his father beat his mother to death. He remembers every frail success, and he lets all the failures slip away.

He remembers the nameless little girl, alone in her closet in that crumbling house on the shore of a dark and moody sea. He forgets that she never lived to know him or love him or forgive him. He forgets that she died there.

He writes about the things he remembers, the things he wants to remember, and he writes and he writes. He writes it until it is real, until it is the only true thing and all the world outside fades from memory.
Even After the Snowfall

Even after the snowfall; sitting.

Sitting in a world of snow. Black and white. Sonic precipitation. _Whir whir whir_. Snow falls. It trickles ever down. The sound of melting snow. Harsh and mechanical. Are we dead here, or does it only appear so?

Sitting.

Faceless in a screen. The screen is filling with snow. Faces vanish beneath. Arms at sides, legs bent to floor. Like toys arranged, bones like plastic, mouths are open, drool is falling, is pooling, is spreading. Pools of our lineage on the floor. Soaked into the carpet, deep into carpet fibers. Lying on the hardwood floor like a chromatic mirror.

Eyes are two pools. Empty and lifeless.

Even after the snowfall; watching.

And two hands touch. Fragments are sliding together. Restructuring. Bodies flow in glass. A darkness in the sky. A haze of snow is falling. _Hum hum hum_. It falls across the broken face, incandescent features forming from nothing. Swift evolution.

A hand on a beer bottle. A broken shard on the floor. Broken pieces of glass lay spread before the snowfall, wet and hot. The sun shines hard through the cracks of shade, like cracks in a window, light cracked and broken. The air is hot here, in a room, in a hotel, in a world of fire.

The sun is hot and steam rises.

Even after the snowfall; a hissing.

Two forms like people are lost in the snow, the haze. They stumble unmoving as we shift away this way and that away. The snow piles on them over a skeleton of life transmitted from deep inside the world. Signs and words are scrabbling on the broken face, and the snow falls through.

These two they wander in a world forever, pooling in their eyes, and their mouths are open. These two are alive. Blood spreads on the floor, meeting the shards of a bottle, flowing over and around like a stream of red caramel in the sun. These two they are entwined.

They have grown together in a black space mired by light. The snowstorm hurries over them. Lips move in the world, forming words which rive the air. _Crk crk crk_ , sounds like a breaking world.

Just give it a smack, that could... no one here to do it. The room seems empty, in the hotel, the room seems empty. Worlds eat away at each other, fighting to recall sight. Old visions from old lips and the reflection in an old eye. They sit, sliding into each other like cracked eggs.

They look real, and we watched them break apart in the world. Crushed by a cold pressure as if they are nothing more than characters dancing on a screen. Turning in and out and in on itself, it envelopes us, and we sink down in the pelting motion of frozen rain tumbled from side to side. But they aren't real.

Even after the snowfall; artifice expands.

A door from the world opens, and a man comes in. His face is laughing, but the world is all alight with screaming and broken sound. He stands. He points to something. Everything is lost in the snowstorm. Ghosts wander in the world alone and are cut apart down cryptic lines scrawled in broken glass.

And shards on the floor.

Feet fall to the shards. A door outside the world has been opened. Legs move. Shards break. _Snap snap snap_. A hand entering the world from somewhere above, and feeling the shapes of necks. Head fall and roll on necks and skulls meet to a sound like a dropped fruit. A hand vanishes. Legs are moving. This world is through a prism of fire and snow. A door outside the world has been closed.

A man returns to the world. He looks at the two shapes like people and his mouth breaks open along a strand of fractured crystal wire. He sees the two shapes that lay against each other. He laughs a cackled laugh and the world screeches out mechanical approximation. He leaves.

Telephone call. Words precise and cold. Voice trembling and afraid. Telephone call, there it goes flying down the wire. Watch it go.

They sit. A purple bottle floats dimly across the world.

This is the shape of the world: the square. Built with corners. There is a crack in the world, a hard circle like a hole in ice, and spider webs of silver lines breaking outwards. The world flutters with internal light, and dim reflections walk deep below the surface, movement in dark water seen through frosted crystal.

A woman in a maid's uniform dances across the world, feather duster splayed and palpitating at the bookshelf. Her drab reality enters through the door and stands staring bifurcated at the shapes playing off the world surface. We turn our gaze and she falls over the cracks, her shadowed face shattering and mending itself like drops of water coming apart and back together. Her mouth opens and her hands lock at her sides. A man's arms take her and pull her away. We watch the world shifting outside through the doorway and she is being held by both arms and the man's arms are shaking her as if to wake her from a trance. An arm goes around her and she begins to sob. We can't move.

The snowstorm rises with fresh strength, and everything is obscured again, hidden. _Moan moan moan_ comes the sound. The bottle slips from the person-shape and does not break on the floor, but rolls out of sight, beneath the hulking mass of a dripping spattered couch.

Even after the snowfall; descending.

The door from outside is still open. Dogs come inside. Only one dog, reflected many times as if in the facets of a diamond. The dog looks at the snowstorm. _Grr grr grr_ sound like fear or menace born of fear. Its eyes are hollow and black like old water filling a swimming pool. Leaves left to decay for years on the surface until a film of dark vegetation has spread to cover everything clear below.

Its tongue is at the broken glass. Its teeth are sharp like an animal's. Its tongue is bright and swift. It whimpers a sad sound and looks at the people-shapes as if it wants to bite them.

It sinks its teeth into a leg and tears flesh away and worries the skin off the muscle like a plastic peel coming off wet Styrofoam.

This is a man.

And this is a woman.

They sit beside each other, holding hands. A smile covers them and sparkles as the dog pulls at flesh. A tooth is sparkling. Teeth hot with old life. A tooth is speaking. Teeth wet with meat. A tooth is crushing. Decay is forced between the teeth. Static eats the teeth. The jawbone is lost in a swirl of snow.

We have seen things which are not real. The world in which we see them is false and crumbling.

The dog is sitting. It watches them. It has cut its mouth on glass. It is thin and cold and its head is a sculpted wolf. Long body and black flanks pricked with matted short hairs and dense with coiled muscle. There is glass between its claws. It limps out of the world to die.

The police come in. A fat man bursting from his uniform puts his hands on his hips and shakes his head his whole face is a comic frown like a downward turning wound. He eats a sticky pastry and snow comes up to bury him.

The gun sits between the people-shapes like a cold flicker of blue light in the snow. Two spent cartridges on the floor, rolling with the bottle. A kiss of fire still on their lips. The policeman slips and falls and the world shrieks with laughter like death's breath seeping from a broken speaker.

The door outside the world opens. We can see in the world the shapes of policeman walking and looking and snarling their insides with thought. They don't see the two hands, together like clasped figures in a smeared painting.

The flashbulb is hot and sears them white and the world vanishes in a flare and then the paramedics come in far too late and they take the people-shapes away on stretchers and when they have left the room we will not see them here again.

A man waits in the doorway, looking back at us, at the spread of cold blood on the hotel room floor. He shakes his head. Someone turn off that damn television. _Click_.

We blink.

No more snow falling across the world, no more lines of static creeping across the surface. They leave the room. The world is empty and black and there is nothing left inside but a dim reflection of the room and the door with the yellow and black-striped tape stretched across in harsh diagonal lines.

No motion but the slow creep of fluid. The gun left the world in a plastic bag. The two people left the world in the plastic bags. The sounds are all without voice, and the hotel room peers into the world from cracks and under the haze of liquid which trickles down in thin lines. It is silent, or beyond our hearing. We wait and listen.

Even after the snowfall; some life crawls on.

### Thumb

Prone on the sidewalk. Looking upward. Staring. Night falls heavy on the city, and heaviest here in this labyrinth of drains and culverts through which the sound of water ceaselessly reverberates.

Johnathan feels the back of his teeth. He probes with his tongue. Two incisors loose in his mouth. They wiggle when he pushes at them. A smell like burnt rubber and scorched engine oil hangs thick on the air.

An old man stands above him. He sets himself carefully down on his knees and bends over Johnathan. His face hangs from his skull, discolored skin dripping into waddles and sags. The man's breath is rotten; food caught between his twisted teeth is decaying there.

The sound of water running over concrete pours into his skull. Like half-melted glass bent and then shattering into dribbled pieces.

He can see stars in his eyes. Bright flashes within his head nearly obliterate the dimmer pin-holes beyond.

The man kneeling beside him picks up the old pair of shears that lay there on the grit-spattered sidewalk. He opens the shears in his dirt-masked hand and holds them up to before his face. You're bleeding, he says, softly alarmed behind his thick wiry beard.

There was a man, Jonathan says. And he reaches out his left hand to take the cutters from the old man. The metal is cold on his bare hand. The worn rubber grip feels like skin. The shears curve at the tip like a falcon's beak.

Jonathan's right hand is held tight against his chest. He cut off my finger, Jonathan says.

Here it is, the old man says, and he picks Jonathan's thumb up off the concrete.

* * *

They try, but the doctors cannot reattach Jonathan's missing digit.

His wife comes to get him from the emergency room.

When she comes in the door she stops there and she looks at him. His sits in the waiting room and holds his bandaged and stitched hand. Across the room a Japanese boy with a broken leg sits between his tired parents, clutching his knee and sobbing noiselessly. The boy's father has black hair and stares at the empty seat across from him. Doctors in green scrubs like paper clothing walk by without looking at anyone.

His wife stands above him, waiting for him to follow. She helps him to his feet. She draws away from the hand curled against his chest. She looks at it and she says, How _could_ you?

He apologizes.

* * *

Jonathan ruffles though his life, searching for symbolism. He wonders what might be the significance of his stolen thumb. What does this loss signify about him as a person?

He turns in his seat and looks back at the lidded faces of his two children. What do they think of him? They seem perilously near to sleep. It is four in the morning. The sun will be up soon.

They must be confused. Tired. Afraid. The slightest disturbance between his parents always made Jonathan nervous when he was a boy. It quivered in his gut. Disharmony pooled in the air, noxious and stinking. The man who had found him in the alley had reminded Jonathan of his father. His drooping face and sad glistening eyes and tight mouth.

His father always seemed to be chewing on his lips, drawing them inside his mouth so it looked as though there was a thin slit in the smooth monochrome skin of his face.

His daughter looks back at him. She meets his gaze and holds to it. Clinging wordlessly to him across the distance.

He wife is driving. Jonathan always drove the car when they traveled as a family. He was the man of the house. He held the television remote. He drove the car. He started the gas grill. He was the gatekeeper of their household technocracy. That was his place as a modern man.

Now his wife was driving. His ring was her finger. She holds the wheel lightly in her narrow hands, looking out at the road. She still refused to look at his hand as he cradles it in his lap. She does not look at it.

Jonathan's wedding ring was lost. Ten long years he'd worn it. His fingers had shrunk with age and the diminishing of his being. He moved it from this finger to that, then finally to the thumb. He supposed the man with the shears must have taken it.

His son seems deeply bored. He is seven years old. A formative age, no doubt. He will no longer respect Jonathan as his source of masculine identity. Where will he look? Jonathan can only imagine: older boys at school, his mother, men on the television who already make Jonathan feel weak and inadequate but will now surely seem to the boy supremely attractive.

Does this have something to do with Uncle Gary? His daughter asks the question.

His wife stiffens and says, He's not really your uncle.

But you told us to call him that.

His wife says nothing, fingers tightening on the wheel. Then she says, Just don't do it anymore.

The family does not speak during the remainder of the drive.

* * *

He does not think of it first, because it is a thought he prefers to defer as long as possible, but perhaps he has experienced a sort of castration?

Jonathan's wife holds him. Her long slender arms encircle him from behind in a way that reminds him of the man who resembled his father. He is afraid to say that. He can't bear for her to turn away from him. She rests her head on his shoulder, pretending that she is turning to him for support, though of course he knows this is not the case.

You shouldn't have gone to see him, she says, I told you I could handle Gary.

He wants to put his stubbed hand to her breast. He can feel her body against his. She kisses the back of his neck very gently and she tells him something comforting. He pulls away, getting awkwardly up off the bed.

Jonathan is resentful of her. It is very unfair of him, he knows. He feels unable to have sex with her. He has never been comfortable initiating. His bandaged hand seems a weight at his wrist.

His children will cease to think of him as a sexual being. His son will never look to his father for how to act. His daughter will never fall in love with a man who looks like he does. They will not be afraid of him anymore, and the concept of the family crumbles.

Held between the old man's fingers, Jonathan's severed finger had looked like a shrunken penis.

* * *

Maybe his amputation has cut him off from human society. Cast him half adrift in the primitive world of those lacking the god-like opposable digit. He has been made into a lesser animal.

He tries to brush his teeth with his left hand, but finds it nearly impossible, like walking backwards down a stairway with no handrail. It feels wrong. It feels as though something could go horribly badly at any moment.

He tries then to brush with his right, gripping the handle of the toothbrush in his four remaining fingers. It is awkward, and the grip of the brush reminds him of the rubber handle of the shears.

Jonathan cannot stop thinking about the old man's teeth. Dark and crooked in his mouth. He abandons the brush and rubs the toothpaste on directly, squeezing it out onto the tip of his middle-finger and rubbing the thick white glop obscenely over his teeth until one of those loosened earlier that night comes free with a muted crunch and falls clattering into the sink.

Jonathan looks up at the mirror. He is startled by what he sees, thinking for a moment that his father is behind the glass. That his father is looking back at him. Jonathan's gums are bleeding, and the dark gap in the row of teeth makes him look both younger and older.

He sits on the toilet seat and holds his head in his hands. He is afraid that his skull will split open if he does not hold it closed.

There is nothing now but the force of will.

He stares at the laminated tile floor, following the decorative pattern as it winds itself from one tile to the next, on and on, beyond the borders of the room.

### Beneath the Waves

Despite all the evil he had seen and all the evil he had done, George Cunningham did not believe in the devil.

Men didn't need God to tempt them, nor Satan to corrupt them, that was what he thought. And if there was a devil, some great demon warring eternal for the soul of the universe – as the old priest in the nameless port town of George's birth had always claimed – then that devil had already won.

George spat over the rail and took a long swallow of rum. It tasted watered-down and foul, burning in his throat. Everybody was drinking. The whole crew was soused, cheering and laughing and drinking away the darkness.

This was a hallowed day ashore, the Eve of Christmas day. The crew had celebrated by decorating the corpse tied at the mizzenmast. An assortment of bobbles hung from the dead man's fingertips, and driven into the stump of the neck was a mess of copper wire twisted in the crude approximation of a star. It had begun an angel, but that form had proved too arduous for the half-drunk revelers, so they settled on a heavenly body of another sort. A fitting compromise, George thought, eying the skewed symbol at such an angle to transform it into a pentagram.

The man's name had once been Jack Leigh Arthur. Yesterday he was George's crew-mate. Today, a canvas for the crew's boundless appetite for defilement. George swallowed another taste of rum.

Leigh had been caught cheating his water ration. That was all it took. You should never try and steal from thieves, that was something George had learned long ago. The Captain liked Leigh – though having the favor of Sir Harry Montague had mattered little in the end. The captain had known better than to stand between the men and their lust for death.

George wrapped his rat-gnawed cloak tighter about himself. It didn't matter where he went, winter's night was always cold. The colder it was, the greater chance he'd draw the watch, it seemed a universal law. He sipped his flask in moderation, knowing he'd be awake long after the rest of the crew was snoring below-decks.

The ship rolled on the waves, caustic salt sea-spray dashing against the hull, and endless slapping that would drive you had if ever you let yourself pay close attention to it. The Captain was standing hunched over the railing with a fat black cigar between his lips.

George changed course, not thinking. Something about the way the Captain was looking out to sea called him closer, as though searching for something in the gloss of the churned black waves.

George made his was cautiously up the damp steps to the deck. He gripped the spray-lashed hand-rail so tight he got splinters off the rough wood. It was a temporary replacement; the original railing had been obliterated in the course of a fight with Spanish sailors.

He'd dreamed of the battle last night, of the swarthy Spaniard who'd nearly split George in two with a rusted cutlass. The moment was seared into his mind, the stink of the other man's breath, his crooked brown teeth bared. The rough scrape of the Spaniard's vest against George's cheek. The whole ship had seemed bathed in fire. It was only a small blaze, but had seemed like the fires of hell itself. He'd dreamed that he had been cast into Hades, and that the Spaniard was the devil himself.

But George did not believe in the devil.

He considered himself lucky to have gotten away with the loss of his first two fingers beyond the knuckle, caught between the dull Spanish sword and the very rail to which his abbreviated hand now clung. The Spaniard had been less lucky.

The Captain did not turn when George came up the railing. His tattered purple coat seemed to hang limply from his shoulders, the gold thread dull and brass buttons tarnished. Much like his ship, Captain Montague had been at sea too long.

"Mr. Cunningham," he said softly, blowing a heavy puff of smoke out the corner of his mouth in acknowledgment of George's presence.

"Captain." George wasn't sure what else to say. "I've drawn night watch." he offered by way of explanation for his presence. The upper deck was deserted but for the two of them. The carousing sailors beneath were settling into a quiet stupor.

Montague grunted. "Best keep a clear eye tonight, I think. There a smell tonight. On the water there." He gestured curtly, waving his cigar against the darkness.

The men were used to Montague's oddities. It was said by some that there were no sane privateer captains in the Caribbean... That was true, George supposed, in that one didn't _stay_ captain for very long without a touch of insanity. In his own quiet way though, Harry Montague was crazier than all the others. He spoke as though the world were bound together by some delicate interlacing, and he the knot at the center constrained and bound by a pure natural law known only to himself.

Still, he was not a man to be ignored.

"What sort of smell, sir? If I may ask?" George tugged nervously at the cuffs of his shirt, the buttons long since lost.

"Something old. Perhaps it is only our friend at the mizzen." He showed a tight smile, lips pulled back like a corpse's. "It was a poor thing, what happened to Jack Leigh." Montague's voice dripped with suppressed venom; it boded poor for them all. "You had nothing to do with it, Mr. Cunningham?" It was an accusation, or near to one.

"I only watched, Sir."

The captain laughed then, an ill laugh muted by the cigar clamped between his teeth. Smoke poured from his mouth as though from a furnace. "Aye. We all _watched_. How long you suppose before someone's watching us, you think?" He ground the cigar on the railing. The soggy ashes blew to sea. George followed it with his eyes until it was lost in an outer dark held at bay by a few greasy lanterns. The sea beneath roiled, thrashing like they were on the edge of a storm, though there was no wind. He thought he could see something far beneath the surface, some indistinct smoothness lost in the colorless depths. It looked almost like a whale just below visible depth. The soft glowing moon above lit the world silver and blue.

"Not that they're much better ashore," the captain went on. He seemed to be talking to himself now, muttering around his cigar, half the words indistinct outside his head. "They all turn out for a hanging. Better men were hung when I was a boy... You wouldn't know it to look in their eyes, a hunger to see them swing... And a Merry Christmas to us all. In England they'll cheer for us, lad. Jack Leigh was an Englishman, that's true."

The Captain left him with that, stomping down the steps to vanish in his cabin. The words lingered in George's mind long after the man had left. They echoed, as the night stretched on towards a morning which seemed so distant it might never come.

He remembered England, he thought. It had been a long time since he'd been there... not since he was a boy. The deck was damp under his boots as he took his slow circuit round the _Lament_.

He recalled England as a cold and crowded country; but he also remembered the clean stripes of the Union Jack, the mechanical precision of empire. He remembered the cathedrals, vast vaults looming above so high they seemed to enter Heaven itself. The old stained glass was sharp in his mind, as though the colored shards were embedded there and all his thought reflected through them. He thought he might like to go back there one day soon, and see those places again.

Then he heard the scream.

George had heard men die before. He figured he'd heard every sound a man could make; the gray-bearded sailor drowning in his own blood on a dull beach, the tavern boy singing so sweetly that it brought a tear to the eye. He had never heard a sound like this one. A raising, undulating wail, like machinery squealing, a great iron wheel sheering through metal. Like a soul being pulled into hell.

George couldn't tell where the sound had come from; it seemed to echo around him, as if rising from the sea. He ran to the railing and peered down into the dark water. It was only there an instant, so quickly gone George wasn't entirely sure he'd seen it: a pale hand, clenching at the hull as though clawing for purchase, and then pulled into the black sea.

"Man overboard! Man overboard!" he called until his throat was horse, still standing at the rail, unable to look away from the water. The pale white form, the sound...

Only about a third of the crew roused to his cry. Captain Montague staggered cursing from his cabin, half-dressed with his purple coat shrugged on over his rough white sleeping gown. "Goddamn it!" he spat, "where is the bastard!" he threw himself at the rail with such ferocity that George thought he meant to toss himself off the ship. Montague scanned the rippled surface: it was black as crushed velvet, revealing nothing.

"Went under, sir! Right under!"

"Well, who in the blazes was it?"

George shrugged. "Don't know, sir. I only saw him go in."

The Captain swore. He stepped back from the rail, bellowing at Tom Irons, the first mate, to make an account of the men. The crew gathered on the deck, peering nervously over the sides of the ship. They were curiously silent as they milled about the deck, looking at each other only in quick glances.

George slumped against the mast. The scream was still in his head. He could not stop hearing it.

It was near ten minutes before the mate came back onto the deck to make his report. He stood before the Captain, saluting in a rare show of professionalism. Tom was a steady sort; he'd been at sea a good deal longer than any man aboard, perhaps excepting the Captain. "All hands accounted for, sir."

Montague rounded on George. His eyes glinted ominously. "You're certain?" he asked Tom Irons.

"Positive, sir."

The Captain laughed. "Well," he said, more than a touch of anger in his voice, "it seems that Mr. Cunningham has woken us for a dolphin, then!" His eyes and set mouth promised reprisal.

"But I saw..." George started, unable to finish. What had he seen? It was the scream, had none of them heard the scream?

"You saw what, Mr. Cunningham? A phantom?" he laughed.

There came then a small voice from the crew:

"Leigh is missing."

The Captain spun about. Everyone looked toward the mizzen. There was no body. The blood which had pooled beneath the corpse was smeared off towards the side of the ship.

"What the bloody hell happened to him?" The Captain asked, rounding on the crew. His face had gone pale. Bewilderment crept through his voice.

And then the sea turned to fire.

The ship buckled, rolling sharply up on one side, and George was thrown across the deck. He struck his head hard on solid oak, white light flashed in his eyes. He staggered to his feet, dazed, and looked down over the side of the ship.

The sea had turned red. Flames danced on the surface, licking at the hull of the _Lament_ like unnaturally long tongues. And something just below the water was _moving_. Beneath the churning waves, pulped to a white foam, George could see it glimmering through. The shape moved under the ship, gunmetal black hide illuminated in crimson light by the fire on the water.

Over the other side of the ship, something was surfacing. George could not turn. He stood frozen at the rail, staring petrified into the sea. He heard the scream again, that unearthly screech, and then another in response.

The severed ends of the fingers on his left hand were white, bloodless. He looked.

They were coming over the sides of the ship, long tentacle-like fingers curling through the rails to pull up bodies pale and twisted as writhing maggots. Their faces were a mess of livid flesh, great gaping sucker-mouths opening wetly and lifeless shark-eyes black as onyx peering from recessed sockets. They wore black iron armor over their narrow chests, like a steel shell. And there were dozens of them.

The crew stood – or lay – as if in shock, unable to do anything but whimper and crawl away. Tom Irons was rooted to the deck, his mouth open and eyes round. The first creature over the rail wrapped Tom's skull in its long fingers and, almost gently, lowered its mouth towards the first mate's head. The mouth seemed to bloom, thin silver teeth flicking out in a cylindrical maw, and the creature wrapped its thin lips on Tom's face, and it squeezed its fingers.

George could hear the first mate's skull break open from across the deck, and Tom's body went limp. The creature's mouth began to convulse, like a man sucking the meat from a lobster claw.

It was only then that George ran.

There were two choices: overboard into the fire and brimstone stink of the water, or down below decks. He scrambled for the door and hurled himself into the stinking dark without a backward glance. His feet slapped one after the other against the cedar steps.

The crewmen who'd been sleeping below were awake now, their eyes staring. "What's happening?" murmured one of the men.

George found he was unable to speak, and he brushed past the sailor, who cursed and started up the stairs. George pressed further into the darkness, further into the recesses of the ship.

Most of the crew gravitated to the foot of the staircase, drawn like curious incest to a flickering light. There came the sharp report of a pistol, and then another, this one followed by an unearthly shriek.

Someone grabbed George, seizing him by the collar and pressing his stinking face in close to George's. "What in God's is up there, Cunningham!" The man's bloodshot eyes seemed almost to glow in the darkness.

"The devil," George was shaking so much he could hardly speak, "The devil himself." There was no other answer he could think of. He could not think properly.

The door at the top of the staircase burst open and one of the crew fired a musket blindly up at it. A man howled, and tumbled down the stairs, followed by a black shape moving on all fours. One of the creatures. George knew it must be. He pressed himself into the corner of the room. Someone screamed, gurgling as long fingers wrapped around his throat. George could feel himself swallowed in shadow, pressing further back.

One of the crew lit a lamp, only to have it knocked from his hand. Flaming oil spilled out across the floor, catching one man's trouser-leg and flaring up the side of his body. He screamed as his clothes and beard caught fire, and he threw himself towards the stairs, towards the deck, towards water.

The tangled mess of men disintegrated into chaos, and the man on fire made it to the top of the stairs. George could see his shape black against the sky. Arms like a crab's legs received him, closing around him like a sudden growth. George shut his eyes tight, pressing his knees against them so hard that a light flashed in his skull.

He could not look. He pressed his hands hard over his ears, but could not drown out the screaming.

George clamped down over his ears until the roar of blood in his palms reverberated in his head like the crashing of the tides. Screams and gunfire cut through the thunderous blood-flow. Someone crashed bodily into the bunks behind which George had secreted himself. A dead man, slumped over, limbs splaying as though in spastic mockery of death. He saw this through eyes shut so tight they could not but sliver open.

There came a silence. The body crumpled against the bunk slithered away, borne by unfriendly hands to an inhospitable fate.

George cowered. _They would leave soon. They will leave soon. They must._ The words repeated in his mind even as a clammy hand clutched the back of his neck. He snapped to life, flinching from the touch and scrabbling at his belt for the small knife he kept there. His fingers closed around the smooth wood handle, but before he could draw the dagger there was a sharp pinching at the back of his neck, like a bite.

George could not move. It was as though he were frozen, ice closing about him. He felt the cold sinking into his bones. Sluggishness overcame him, his muscles constricting involuntarily and drawing his limbs close to his body.

Powerful fingers pried his compressed stance apart and he was dragged toward the shaft of moonlight and the stairs beyond. The hold was pooled with blood, an inch thick and steaming.

He looked up and they looked back down at him, eye milky dark like the eyes of the long-dead deep. Their naked arms were wrapped around him, almost softly, like a mother spider's. His legs slid uselessly on the slick floor as he struggled to rise.

They took him up the stairway, and into the moonlight. George could _see_ them now, their pale smooth skin, their gaping mouths. He looked down, saw their hands against his skin. Feeling was returning already, though he couldn't move enough to fight back, or even to run.

The creatures lay him on the deck, laid out on his back staring at the sky.

His head lolled to one side; it seemed heavy as a cannonball on his shoulders. He saw their legs, their narrow legs and their claw-like feet. _Where was the crew?_ he wondered, the thought swimming blindly in the thick fog of his mind.

Above him he heard the hiss of metal on metal, and then their clammy fingers at his clothes, peeling them from his body.

The first bite of the knife into his flesh didn't hurt at first. George lifted his head, trembling with the effort, and looked down. The creature held the blade like a surgeon, slicing into him with a long and narrow silver blade. It extended a long finger and peeled away a sliver of his skin, pulling it back so blood welled through the incision.

His head collapsed back onto the deck. He felt each knife cut slide into him as the creature began to dissect him. He stared up. Five faces looked down at him, rippling, brackish water dribbling from their wide mouths.

Above, rising in the sky like a great black leviathan, an immense monster. He could hear it roar, rumbling like an earthquake. Its dark hide glittered like plate steel, and fire licked red from its vast circular mouth, white hot at the center so bright it seared his eyes. Hot as hell.

The leviathan blotted out the sky above, creeping overhead as though to swallow the very stars.

George couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. He felt them grow heavier and heavier, until they shut and he tumbled into darkness.

When dawn broke, some hours later, nothing remained. The ship was gone, not even a few floating scraps of flotsam to mark its grave. There was only the great uncaring sea, a mirror of the world above, a vast curtain drawn over the infinite mystery of the ocean depths. The sea seemed to go on forever.

### Slaughter Dogs

"This it then?"

The three boys stood in the dusty parking lot. The windowless gray building rose to the clear sky like a tombstone before them.

"This is it." Terry answered.

"You sure we won't get in trouble?"

Pete laughed, his thin voice wheedling and mocking. "Cory, you're a fucking fag."

"Screw you, dickhead!"

"Both of you shut the fuck up!" Terry snapped, "Are you gonna bitch all day or can we just get inside already?"

Cory shrugged. His dad would throw a fit if he heard that Cory had cut school to go to an abandoned building with a couple of delinquents like Terry and Peter. Probably ground him for a month at least. He never should have gone with them. People like Cory Beaumont didn't belong with these guys, pair of pimple-crusted punks who kept hunting knives in their lockers and called the teachers cunts behind their backs.

He wasn't going to be like them, he knew that. There were about five thousand people living in Auburn, and maybe a dozen of them would ever leave. Cory knew that he was gonna be one of those who did.

But here he was, hurrying to catch up to the two boys walking into the abandoned slaughterhouse, his sneakers kicking up clouds of red dust as they scraped over the rough gravel parking lot.

_Oliver walked through the parking lot, stepping around the rusted pickups the others drove to work. He was one of those who walked, him and the Mexican immigrants everyday down the road from town. He walked with them, but only knew enough Spanish to say hello and thanks and where's the goddamn bathroom? El Ba_ ñ _o._

He knew them by their faces, knew how long they'd been here in Auburn. Give it a month, they'd lose that glossy shine, that gray-toothed grin. They'd walk slower and slower, today through the muddy aftereffect of the first spring rain, and the longer they stayed the more they'd drag their heels. No one ever left, they just dragged slower.

One way or another, you didn't leave the slaughterhouse. He went inside. They were leading in the cows by the other door, one by one into the bay.

"This place is fucking thick!" Pete exclaimed, his lisp melting that last word. He'd meant to say sick. Cory laughed, making a spitting t-h sound against his teeth.

Pete glared at him. "Thut up."

Cory tried to ignore the cold tingle that ran through him as he looked at the dusty machines that had been left behind, the yawning emptiness. It felt like he could hear the sounds of the past echoing in the mote-thick air. He thought he could hear the echoes of those people who'd been here once. And now it belonged to the three of them.

"What the hell is _this_ thing?" Terry jumped up on a guardrail, he leaned out, hands out in front of him, pushing against a sort of big metal box-thing. It turned a little, swinging, taller than Terry by a good foot and a half. It looked part of a car engine, blown up to monolithic size.

Pete went over the rail, down into a shallow bay area. The bottom of the box was at about ground-level. Pete smacked it. "I think it things open."

"I think they killed the cows here," Cory said, climbing up beside Terry, standing one rung lower on the rail.

"Yeah?" Pete rolled his eyes, "and how'd you know that?"

"I think he's right, man," Terry said, giving the box another push, "look at the size. Just fucking big enough, and this hole here for the head." He clambered over the rail, pulling himself up onto the box itself, peering down over the edge, pushing his hand into the cobwebbed cavity. "Fuckin' hammer between the eyes, man." He grinned, his crooked teeth showing like yellowed saw-blades.

The cows were led in one by one and locked into the steel box. The smell of the place filled his nostrils, the thick rotten syrup stench of it. Moaning cattle, the ceaseless rattling of chains and the crunching propulsion of a hundred oily machines lurching in synchronized stop motion, the din of it all filled his head.

The cow stood in the machine, thrashing her massive head, lurching constrained in the metal container. Oliver lifted the bolt-gun. It was a toy in his strong hands. Against the forehead and pull the trigger. It pops in his hands, lurches, and the struggling cow goes instantly still, steel bolt driven into the recesses of her brain and out again like a flicking black tongue. It always scares him a little, how fast they go still.

The machine rotates, lifting the encased carcass off the ground. The door on the side opens and the dead thing goes spilling out onto the floor. Danny stood back, chain and meat-hook in hand, waiting while the creature's limbs flailed, a final burst of synaptic activity, nerve endings sparking, legs kicking like a puppet on strings. He slices off one leg at the knee and sinks the hook into the remaining flesh with a practiced motion. Machines growl, the chain tenses, and the cow lifts into the air, suspended by an amputated stump and a glinting hook.

Already there is another cow waiting, staring at him with innocent brown eyes. Oliver holds the bolt-gun to its forehead.

"This place is _so_ fucking cool, you guys." Cory said, marveling at the dust-choked building. Steel girders ran along the ceiling, in and around them the incessant chattering of fluttery little brown birds who'd nested in the years since the factory had been closed. "I never even knew this place was out here."

"You gotta hang with the right people, Cory," Terry said, picking his teeth, "Me and Pete, we know this shitty town. Stick with us and ditch those math geeks, you might see a thing or two worth fucking seeing."

Terry's hair hung in ragged blond tassels around his narrow features. Weak chin and inset eyes that glittered with cruel intelligence, a protruding hook nose. Terry was the kinda guy you didn't fuck around with. Everybody knew the story of how he'd knocked out four of Jack Mason's teeth on the first day of high school, and Jack was a junior and on the football team besides. Everyone knew that Terry's dad was a big drinker; it wasn't so rare that Terry would show up to class with a black eye. He seemed to take a special pride in it, never said any of that walked-into-a-door bullshit. "I got in a fight with my old man," he'd sneer, and lounge on his chair like a basking lizard, just soaking up the whispers and the glances.

Terry was a smart kid, though _cunning_ may have been a better word. The kind of guy teachers said just didn't apply himself. Cory knew better, knew that Terry applied himself plenty, he just didn't care about school. What was _he_ going to do with an education? His passions were for trouble, as many kinds as he could get away with and more besides that he couldn't. He'd spent six months in juvenile detention for cutting off a kid's toe with a shovel. Was supposed to be two years but somehow he was back in a lot less than that. There were stories for a while, that he'd broken out, shit like that. Terry didn't say anything, but you could see in his eyes that he thought it was funny.

The three of them went further in. Something skittered in the darkness. At first Cory thought it might be a dog; he choked back a squeal. Terry tossed a chunk of loose cement, sending the fat black rats squeaking into the walls.

"Fucking rat!" Pete spat, "I hate those bathtards."

"What is this place?" Terry said, kicking at an empty file cabinet. The steel cube shuddered, reverberating noisily in the quiet. "Some kinda office, I guess."

"Leth go then," said Pete, already sounding bored, "I wanna thee where they cut 'em up."

A pair of spiders scuttled past Cory, black shapes many-legged against the wall.

Lunch time, twenty minutes, okay everybody? Oliver's hands ghost white in latex gloves and smeared red between his fingers and on his bare forearms. He peels off the gloves. A cold October wind moans in through the door, sweeping through the machines and raising the hair on his neck. The slaughterhouse feels sterile only in the uncommon cold. Most days it's crawling with flies. The smell of rot and death clinging to his clothes and to his hair.

He scrubs his arms in the rusty sink, bare silver pipes jutting out like exposed veins. Pushes down on a soap dispenser smeared with unidentifiable brownish filth. The water sputters from the faucet, rust-red, cold on his hands.

He goes into the employee area. Not much better than the cow pens outside. Cement floor, row of old lockers bought from the high school. Oliver had hated high school, every second of it. It was better than this, though. He'd give anything to go back.

Some of the migrant workers are sitting at the card table in the corner. They unfold their paper bags and eat their food in wide mouthfuls, chattering all the while in their alien language. Almost everyone he knew could at least get along in Spanish, keep up at least. The benefit of living in a border-town. Everyone speaks it except him. One of the workers hops up and does a floppy-limbed little dance, tongue hanging from his mouth. The dying cow dance.

They all laugh.

Pete kicked open an old locker. It was empty except for the bugs he sent scuttling.

"Don't break anything!" Cory said, instinctively, realize immediately how dumb it sounded.

Pete rolled his eyes. "Like anyone is gonna care, _Beaumont_. And like you can fucking tell me what to do." His face turned red and he drew a finger across his throat. "Gut you like a cow, man."

Cory Beaumont felt his face pale. They _could_ kill him, leave his body rotting in the factory and no one would ever know. He might never be found.

Cory wasn't even sure why he was here. When Pete and Terry had slouched down into the chairs across from his during lunch his first thought was that they were going to beat him up. He'd never been in a fight before, but he was pretty sure he'd get his ask kicked.

"Hey man," Terry had said, that low voice like a conspiratorial whisper, "you wanna see something fucking cool?"

No one every invited Cory anywhere. Not kids like Terry. Kids everybody knew. Don't take any shit kinda kids. When you had their approval you could get away with anything, but that approval could snap like a thread. Then you had nothing.

They cut the skin away in long bloodless chunks. It comes off like the waxy bits of paper on the back of a Band-Aid. Peels away and gets tossed to the floor in rumpled piles. The flesh is wax-white beneath. The floor is soaked in blood, frothing ponds of it washed away at intervals with a blast from the industrial hose. Rows of skinned cattle hanging on hooks, hanging on chains from the track on the ceiling, a shuttled-in procession. There are so many of them.

The cadavers pile so high that they stop being bodies and just start being meat. Oliver sees everything that way now, every living thing just a collection of products walking in skin like saran-wrap.

The blood washes over his shoes.

Terry led them beneath the track. They squeezed down a narrow steel-walled passage and into a larger room. Old hooks hung limply from rusted chains, metallic coils dangling motionlessly.

The room was totally still; it had an aloof horror-movie atmosphere. Cory shivered, his head spinning to take it all in, to make sure there wasn't anything creeping up behind him.

The floor was the color of a corroded bike chain, a sort of russet circle expanding outward with decreasing intensity. Bloodstain.

"Hell _yeah_!" Pete laughed. He jumped up and grabbed hold of a chain in each hand, pulling himself upwards. He slipped his feet into the hooks and stood suspend off the ground. He swung gently from side to side, pulling on the neighboring chains. "This place ith fucking wild!"

Terry hauled himself up onto a bare platform and dangled his feet over the edge, running his hands along the smooth hydraulic lift that had once moved it up and down. "This is where they slice 'em up, guys." He pulled a long knife from his pocket and tossed it idly from hand to hand. "Anyone wanna steak?

Pete swung, the chains creaking eerily. Cory imagined him slipping, jolted downward and slicing himself open on a hook, spilling out on the rust-red floor.

"My Uncle Ollie worked here, you know." Pete said, "Right 'till the end. Killed himself a week after it closed, couldn't get work anywhere else."

Terry sneered. "Fuck your family, Pete." He stood on the platform, leaning one shoulder against the shaft which held it up. He pointed his knife at Pete and said, "You know, I wish that bitch Jensen was here. She'd freak out if she saw this place." He spat.

Pete laughed; he looped his elbows around the chains and pulled with his forefingers at the corners of his eyes, sticking out his tongue. "Bet that retard would run screaming."

Cory was walking between the chains, touching them as he went. His stomach lurched. He knew the girl they were talking about. Special-Ed-Alice Jensen. He'd seen them following her around the school, mimicking her shuffling walk and giving her creepy smiles when she looked back at them, her lips parted and dark unwashed hair lanky around her face, her face scrunched up trying to understand why they were doing it.

Last year once she'd bumped into Cory while he was cleaning out his locker. "Watch where you're going!" he'd hissed. She started crying and ran off. He'd felt a weird mixture of guilt and satisfaction.

"Here's the thing about Jensen though," Terry went on, his thin fingers steepled under his chin, "would you screw her if you could?"

Pete swung, eyebrows screwed up thoughtfully, "I think I'd rather jerk it."

"What about you, Cory?" Terry's voice reverberated in the empty space. "What would you do?"

Cory was standing in the corner, his hands shoved in his pockets. "I got a girlfriend." Sarah Gibbons. She was on the track team. Despite his best efforts, they'd never exactly _done it_ , not that he would tell these guys.

" _And_?" Pete sneered, his chain moaning as he rattled in the spines.

Cory thought of Alice's eyes, the way she stared at you, childish and open like she really cared about you just 'cause you were looking at her. He wouldn't want her looking at him. He shrugged, "I don't know, I guess so. If she asked."

Terry hooted. He hopped down from the platform, army-surplus boots hitting the ground with a dull thud. "You're one sick fucker, Cory."

Oliver watched from the window after his shift ended. Don cut the last cow's dangling limbs. The skinned legs fell to the floor in a heap, like a pile of sticks beside the fire.

Then the head, Don sliced through the neck, razor-sharp sawblade slicing right through the bone. It fell away, another man collected it and hung it on its own little hook with the others, tore the skin away like paper from a Christmas present.

The machine groaned again, and the carcass shifted down once more, where the hydraulic platform lowered a saw through the body. Bisected, each half swaying on its own hook. Finally, the meat left the slaughterhouse floor, went back into the freezer to await the trucks that would come to collect it in the morning for the butchers and supermarkets beyond.

Oliver flicked his cigarette out the window and blew out a last mouthful of smoke.

"Who is she?" Terry said, spinning his knife between his fingers.

"Who?"

"Your fucking girlfriend, who'd you think?" Pete stepped carefully from hook to hook, working his way along the line towards Cory.

"None of your business." Cory let go of the chain, a second later Pete's sneaker come down on the hook. The steel point punched up through the rubber. Right up between Pete's toes.

Pete looked down at it, eyes going all buggy. He laughed, a sudden relieved expulsion. "Fuck!"

Terry came over to see what was going on, saw the spike through Pete's shoe and snickered. Pete slipped attempting to extract his shoe and fell. Terry caught him before he bashed his skull on the concrete, held him at the armpits while he wriggled his shoe free.

"It's that Gibbons girl, isn't it?" Terry said, jabbing his knife in Cory's direction. A slow grin crawled over his face. "I've seen you together, haven't I?"

Cory didn't say anything, but they knew. Pete licked his lips.

Oliver sees the skin in bloody piles, swaths of it like soaking fabric in red dye. Skin piled in buckets. He sees the heads hanging, flesh-woven skulls, empty eye sockets staring at nothing. They shut off the lights and he goes out into the gathering night, around him some of the men are getting into their pickup trucks. Headlights splashing on the desert, swallowed in the vast openness of it.

Oliver walks back to town with the Mexicans. It is a long time before the slaughterhouse disappears behind him. And they turn off one by one into their trailer parks until he is walking alone.

"Doesn't that girl do track or something? Not one of those butch chickth, I hope?" Pete picked at his fingernails.

The three of them sat against the wall, legs splayed over the copper-tone bloodstain. Cory craned his neck, looking out the upper story window. It was getting dark outside, the soft cool scent of twilight settling on the earth. "What do you mean _butch_?" he asked.

"Got a lot of hair?" Pete giggled, grabbing his crotch.

"Hey, cut it out. That's my girlfriend you're talking about." Cory bit his lips; his teeth felt dry.

Pete flopped his head over, turning from where Terry sat to one side of him to where Cory sat on the other. His skull bopped against the concrete wall like his neck was broken. "Kidding, man. Right, man?" he looked at Terry, his lips twisted in a sort of grin.

"Yeah. Just a joke." Terry's eyes were glazed over, he didn't seem to be listening.

Cory had seen them both at the track meets, hooting and drooling at the flashing bronzed legs bare up to the thigh. Couldn't blame them 'cause he did the same. Never thought anyone would be watching Sarah though, not _his_ Sarah.

Terry was rubbing his cheeks, his fingers over the soft hairs coming in in curled tufts. "Come on," he said very suddenly, springing to his feet, "let's get outta here."

Back on his parent's farm, when he was just a kid, he'd had a cow of his own. He called her Jenny. He watched her being born when he was seven, saw his father pull her weak and kicking and bloody into the world. He watched her grow. He knew every inch of her, those wide brown eyes that looked at you so openly you could cry. The tail swishing at the flies in the dry heat. Her soft flanks where he would rest his head, her fluttering ears into which he whispered every secret he knew.

She died the year he took the job at the slaughterhouse. They found her dead in the barn, eyes closed lying on her side in the straw. Old age. She was buried before he could get there to see her. You wouldn't have wanted to see it, his father told him, the dogs got her.

It stared at them through the gathering gloom. Brown eyes swallowing the reflection of the sunrises beyond the dunes, and the sound of night bugs filling the summer air.

There was a ranch just up the road with fences not worth shit, they were _always_ getting out. One time one of them wandered right up to the school, looked in the classroom window and puff out a breath that misted the window. They were everywhere in Auburn, the big dumb heifers. But Cory hadn't expected to find one here.

The three boys stared at the cow, spread out in a half-circle around it. It stared back.

"Cut off her utters," Pete suggested.

Terry nodded, stepping closer with his knife in his hands and his tongue out between his lips like a little pink worm from the soil.

The cow bellowed, stomping the dust. The whole world rumbled. Terry skittered away, licking his lips. "Fuck it," he said, eying the massive animal "don't wanna get blood on my shirt." The cow snorted at him, stamping its hooves.

They gathered, moving furtively away, casting backward glances and laughing high-pitched laughs.

The cow watched them go, watched them vanishing into the darkness as the sun slipped over the horizon. Only when their nervous hyena-laughter had been swallowed by the desert did she lower her big head once more, grazing at the scrub grass which grew behind the abandoned slaughterhouse.

### SugarFree

The long green leaves glimmered in the cold moonlight, limp as the tongues of dogs. Big black clouds moved above like dark steamboats on the Mississippi. There was a gentle wind, making the blue-gray corn stalks ripple.

Rebecca stood at the edge of the field and looked in, down the long rows of waving corn. She took a hesitant step into the field, then glanced back over her shoulder at the big house on the hill. The lights were still burning, bright and yellow as burnished gold through the smudged dining room window.

The family in the big house were still sitting at the table. Moses, Big Moses, they called him, would be clearing away their plates and they would be leaned back in their chairs, trying to look elegant and prosperous. Master Thomas would be smoking that long pipe, glaring at nothing with those hard gray eyes, Little Billy would be staring cross-eyed at his toes, Miss Sarah would be sitting there, all prim looking in her new blue dress. They liked to look rich, but Rebecca heard the talk. Wouldn't be much longer till the plantation went to dust and all the money ran away like water from a dried up riverbed. Then there'd be a reckoning, sure enough.

Rebecca shivered. She'd probably be sold again if the family left the plantation. "No sir," she swore under her breath. She was startled to realize she'd spoken aloud. But there was no one to overhear her. She was alone.

Somewhere in this field was a necklace, the little gold thing that Rebecca wore round her neck. Moses had stolen it from Misses Sarah to give it to Rebecca for her birthday last year, her forty-second birthday. No one had missed it yet, no one had seen it tucked down below Rebecca's collar. If they found it lying in the field, though, someone was sure to get a whipping.

Rebecca scolded herself again for losing it. She never should have worn the thing, never should have taken it. This was a punishment from the lord. Thou shalt not steal, she knew that well enough, but she'd taken it anyway. This was her punishment.

She went further into the field, leaving the pale light behind. She felt safer out in the darkness, amid the rustling corn. The sound made her think of the ocean brushing up against the shore. It was a frightening sound, as if the field was breathing all around her, coming to life somehow.

Rebecca told herself to stop being silly. She stared at the dirt, looking for that flash of yellow. It'd be here somewhere, lying pooled on the ground like a gold snake and reflecting moonlight. There was a story in the good book about a gold snake, though she couldn't remember it clearly... something about poison, she thought.

A harsh wind blew up out of nowhere, moaning and tearing through the cornfield. The clouds started to break up, roiling in the sky. Lightning flashed, a sharp blue-white bolt that snapped at the earth like an angry snarl.

Rebecca fell to her knees and covered her head as the thunder rolled over her, a deep, roaring sound louder than any thunder she'd ever heard before.

She looked up only after the noise had ceased rumbling in her ears, half expecting to find the field lit on fire by the lightning. It hadn't been, of course it hadn't... this was just another summer storm.

Rebecca's heart was hammering in her chest. Where was that necklace? She whispered a short prayer under her breath, "Oh Lord, help an old woman out. I'm sorry I took the necklace and I'll make Moses return the thing to the house tomorrow if you'll just let me _find_ it. Amen."

Silence. But something up there must have heard her... maybe one of those African gods Moses was always going on about, the big damned fool.

Rebecca wandered further into the field.

Then, all of a sudden, there was no more corn, and something was snapping beneath her feet. She looked down, lifting her feet. It was still corn, smoking and lying flat on the ground, but corn sure enough. It was warm too, not hot, just warm. Felt nice between her naked toes, like sitting in front of a fire.

The corn was all bent over in a wide circle, right there in the middle of the field. Across the empty space, off in the darkness, the stalks of corn were rustling. Rebecca looked back over her shoulder. The corn behind her wasn't moving. The wind had died. But out across that big empty space, something was moving, pushing its way through the rows.

Rebecca turned around and ran, fast as she could make her old bones move. The corn thrashed against her face, tangling around her feet. She kept running, all the way up the hill to the big house. She'd be safe there, if she got there she would be safe.

She didn't look back until she was up at the top of the hill and sitting on the edge of the whitewashed porch and catching her breath. When she saw what was down there she let out a scream, loud enough to wake the dead.

Master Thomas was the first, he came bursting out the door like a thundering giant, his big pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. "What the hell is this about!" he barked. Rebecca didn't answer, didn't even look at him as he came stomping up behind her, maybe meaning to boot her off the porch. He didn't, though, he just stopped and stood still over her, real quiet.

His pipe clattered on the floor boards, spilling ash down through the cracks.

The others all came out too, any they didn't say much either. They all just stood there and looked down at the corn field. "It's the devil," Miss Sarah finally said, crossing herself and mumbling some prayer.

"Just a trick," growled Master Thomas, bending down to pick his pipe back up. He didn't sound like he believed it.

From way up on the hill, she could see that it wasn't just some circle down there in the corn. There was a pattern, a dark shape carved into the field, spinning and swirling and twisted around like nothing she'd ever seen. And it was _huge_ , the part she'd wondered into was just a little piece, a single room in a mansion of broken corn. It wasn't lightning that had done this, that was for sure. Maybe Miss Sarah was right, and it wasn't even people either...

Rebecca backed away, closer to the house than she'd ever been before. It felt safe, with all those lights burning, like it was the only safe place in the world, that big sturdy house on the hill.

"What happened, Reb?" Moses was standing behind her, his voice low and shaking just a little, "What'd you do?"

"I didn't do a thing!" she hissed back, "I just saw it!"

"You saw it happen? What was it?" Big Moses sounded scared; she'd never heard that before.

"I didn't see it _happen_ , I just saw... it... I think there's someone out there..."

"Who?"

"I don't know!"

Moses squeezed her shoulder gently, comfortingly, then slipped back inside to finish whatever job he'd been doing before Master Thomas noticed he'd left the house.

Little Billy took his place, ambling up to her like one of those wind-up dolls. "You ain't 'loud up here on the porch, you know..." he mumbled, jaw slack and drool trailing from the corner of his mouth. "I could tell my daddy..."

The boy's eyes were big and dark, like a sheep's eyes. He wasn't too smart, to say the least. Rebecca had heard the rumors; "damaged in the head," they'd say, or just "simple" if they were being more polite about it. Plain fact was that Billy wouldn't ever grow up. He's always be this way, looking around with those big sheep eyes, never understanding much.

Wasn't just his eyes, though, the rest of him kinda looked like a sheep too, a big fluffy white sheep sitting on a green hill, talking. If that didn't beat all, talking...

Patrick tugged his cap off and scratched his head. He'd been tending this flock for about eight years now, never heard one of the animals talk before. He shifted his weight off his bad foot and studied the little white sheep standing before him.

It looked like any of the rest of the herd, just a normal creature. Still, Patrick was sure – more than sure, he'd swear it on his mother's grave – that this animal had just spoken to him. Maybe he was going crazy.

He asked it to repeat itself.

The sheep replied with a long-winded diatribe that came out surprisingly articulate.

Patrick coughed. The black wind from the factories in the valley below blew up here sometimes, rolling across the moors like a low cloud. He'd see his flock of sheep sometimes, wool black with the soot till they shook it off, and then gray for a while after. All the filth of the city people drifting on up here... This sheep had a point, he had to admit that. It did sometimes feel like the world was getting just a bit too crowded. He laid his rifle aside on the grass, down next to his walking stick. It was a beaut of a rifle, straight from the factory, never once fired before by him or anyone.

He asked the sheep where it had learned to talk anyway.

The sheep bleated back at him, its black eyes droll and alight with a dark wit. Patrick chuckled and slapped his knee – his good knee; the other had been tangled in one of those factory gears, damned awful luck.

Seemed like everybody was working away in those black factories, getting their fingers caught in machines, their hair stained with oil. Patrick's mood turned bitter. They were even putting children to work in those things these days, wee things who should have been out fishing and skipping through the grass like he did when he was a lad, not working their fingers down to the bones like they did these days. It was a tragedy. He didn't like to think of them all stuck down while he stood in the sun, breathing the air, feeling the wind on his face. Poor bastards, unlucky, that's what they were.

The sheep launched into a violent diatribe.

Patrick gave the sheep a light pat on the head, not in a disrespectful way. He picked up his new rifle and began to load it, sliding the oiled cartridges into the polished metal chamber. The sleek stock was cool against his skin; it reminded him of drinking a cold beer, feeling that rifle.

Patrick struggled to his feet, pushing himself up with his rifle. He let the end of the barrel hover in front of the sheep's head. He hesitated a moment, then pulled the trigger. Gun worked like a charm. Everything they made in those damn factories worked just right.

The flash of light faded slowly in from his eyes, leaving that humming glow way back where you couldn't wipe it away. The towers were still there when her eyes cleared, glittering and belching fumes like the big shiny chimneys of some vast factory complex. The light bulbs were still there too, still shining.

"Damn damn damn!" Olive was screaming as loud as she could, pounding her feet on the smooth stone step. "Shit! Stop it! Stop!" Sometimes she just had to yell.

The broken light bulb just grinned at her, smiling that fractured smile. Smirking like the goddamn Cheshire Cat. The afterglow of the shattered filament were still throbbing in her eyes as she leaned out and threw the bulb from the balcony.

She watched it fall, down down until it vanished somewhere in the pale mist. "One down, billion to go." Olive said that every time she threw a smiling bulb into the bottomless void that surrounded her tower. The ground wasn't there anymore, she hadn't seen it for at least a million steps now. It almost didn't seem real anymore, but she kept going up. There was nowhere else to go.

But it was still too bright, even way up here there were a thousand thousand light bulbs still burning in the winding stairs. They were in every step, and all along the rail, all along the walls. Light bulbs everywhere, grinning at her. It was too bright, everything was all coming out _wrong_.

Olive swept the remaining shards off into space with her foot. There must be a whole sea of glass, miles deep and miles wide, all the broken bulbs she'd thrown over the side, all the broken glass thrown off the winding stair.

It did no good breaking the things. Once, she'd broken every light bulb for a hundred steps up and a hundred steps down. By the time she'd done that, she'd been too tired to paint, had fallen asleep unfolding her easel on the balcony. When she woke up, all the bulbs had been restored, burning just as bright as before. It happened every time she fell asleep, someone would replace every single broken bulb.

So now she just wandered upwards, breaking lights along the way, hoping that whoever it was following her would give up or have to go back down for more replacement bulbs or maybe just fall down dead. She painted sometimes, but it was always too bright, that glaring light from above and below, it was just too much, and nothing ever turned out right.

Now she was just getting angry. And tired. And angry. "Don't talk to _her_ William! Don't talk to the sheep! Don't talk to the lights! Fucking lights!" Shouting helped. There wasn't much else in the way of sound, except the constant snap-tinkle of breaking glass.

Olive's ragged gray hair hung about her face in a weary tangle. She brushed it back behind her ears so she didn't have to look at it. Olive had been thirteen when she started climbing the steps, it couldn't have been more then fifteen years since, but still the gray hair, the aching wrinkled hands, the stoop of her back, still the height of a little girl. She hadn't grown an inch, just withered. It was the light, too bright for her skin, probably.

She returned to her easel. This last painting – she'd been working on it for about two-hundred steps now – was going to be good, she could feel it. If only she could keep it dark enough to finish...

The painting depicted a soldier, dressed in fantastic clothes and carrying a big obscene gun. He was a nice man, a young face and no beard on his virgin cheeks. He stood in the middle of a long stone bridge, stuck there. There was a big barricade on one side, tangled razor wire and imposing timber, and the bridge was collapsed on the other, caved in and crumbled, the victim of careless artillery fire.

Or course, he really should be feeling lucky, after all, he could have been back at the end of the bridge when the shell hit. He could have died with the rest of his squad. That would have been worse than being stuck here, no question. Poor bastards... to make it all this way, come off those landing boat at Normandy, only to die here, victims of freak chance.

Pierre Harris was not a lucky man – at least, not usually – but it seemed that his fortunes had changed.

They teased him about his name on the boat over – his mother was French, had named him after an uncle, or something – the other GI's had asked him if it was like coming home, if he had a girlfriend waiting for him on the beach. It was annoying at the time, but stepping off those boats and finding only machine-gun fire had been a good deal worse. Most of the guys he'd met on that boat had died storming that beach... He wished he could hear their voices again, even mocking him.

_A long and thin arm reached down out of the sky, paintbrush in hand, and signed the world._ Sugar _, it signed it, a name or maybe a title. It seemed a very lonely word, lying out there in the rolling hills._

The stories never came out the way she wanted. Well, it wasn't really about the story. It was about color, light. Light was very important...

This was Pierre's first time in France and, if he ever got home, he was never coming back.

He leaned his rifle against the stony side of the bridge, laying metal against rock. The bridge felt sturdy enough, even with that one side collapsed. Perhaps that was just an illusion, though, a trick his mind was playing on him. Maybe the whole thing was about to fall out from under him...

Pierre looked down at the tangled barricade. He'd never get through it alone, the other guys had been carrying all the equipment. He'd been walking way out front, sort of feeling out the bridge in case the Jerry's had booby-trapped it. Ironic, really, terribly ironic. Was this his good fortune, or had the rest of the squad got off easy? He thought about that a lot, what it would be like, taking the fast ticket out of this dump behind war for once and all. Seemed almost appealing sometimes.

But he wasn't dead, he was stuck above a goddamn river, not another soul in sight. Pierre leaned against the bridge and stared down into the black water rushing loudly below him. Rocks poked out of the dark surface, little white and gray spots like stars in the sky, spinning around her like a tangled halo laid out against the darkness.

The air hissed in Jessie's helmet, the only sound in the world. If she stopped breathing, there would be nothing, only a dead quiet more still than anything.

She stared at the broken tether dangling off her suit. A broken leash was the most useless thing imaginable, she realized. Good for nothing but looking at and wishing, wishing the damn line hadn't broken.

They tested these things, tested the shit out of 'em. There was no way in hell the line should have broken, no way. Could anyone hear her, drifting alone out here among the stars? The ship seemed very far away, miles in the inky void. It was the only point she had to hold on to, the only thing out here that she could reach out and touch.

The sun to one side, good old Earth to the other, and the moon, lifeless gray orb, drifting somewhere beyond it. And there was the ship, American flag slapped all over the damn thing. Trouble was no one could see it out there, they were completely isolated from all that, the presidents with their speeches, the Russians with their own rockets, supposedly up here somewhere. Jesse had certainly never seen one.

She wanted to be in a traffic jam, wanted to feel the press of people all around her, hustling and grinding and honking. She wanted to smell the big stinking fumes of too many cars on too little road. She wanted to crash into someone, crunch her bumper and break the glass windshield. She wanted very much to be home.

The stars glittered around Jessie, like a million featureless faces, staring and never blinking. They never blinked, the crowds, never ever blinked for a second. They were always on you, watching and talking and writing in their damn papers about every little thing you ever did. To live your life under the microscope, cut off from the vast eye looking down: that was hell.

Derrick Humbert, incumbent, and certainly the long shot in the coming election, took another drink. King Humbert. They called him that as a joke, the scribblers and cartoonists with their big-chinned, big-nosed, big-eared caricatures, balancing a black crown atop the freak show they'd made of his head. So what if they did call him names, so what if they sneered at his successes and laughed at his failures? They didn't know what they were talking about, didn't have the faintest idea of the stress, the _pressure_. It built up inside you, like steam, built up until there was nowhere to go but out and you still couldn't let even a puff escape or they'd pounce on you.

Derrick bent down close to the heavy mahogany table. He paused a moment, catching the blank gaze of one of his silent bodyguards. Derrick gave the man a wide smile – that toothy smile that everyone always made fun of – and snorted. The thin line of cocaine powder vanished, sinking in, humming in his head, throbbing and snapping. Everything was clear. Everything was faint. Everything was in sharp focus.

Derrick looked down at the paper, still powdered another few lines. His speech. The words... they seemed familiar, but he couldn't make sense of them. They didn't speak his language here. One of his speech-writers had done the thing, he wasn't even sure what it meant. Guess he'd just have to sound it out once he got up there. He grabbed the page and shoved it roughly into his coat pocket.

Derrick brushed off his upper lip and nostrils, just in case, then he walked through the big doors. There they were waiting outside, the crowd of jackals, vultures, the crowd of sheep and cows.

Derrick smoothed his speech out on the lectern and cleared his throat into the microphone. Standing there, in front of that vast audience, those millions of people with all their eyes turned to him, Derrick felt like the loneliest man in the world.

The Loneliest Man in the World trudged up the winding stair of the shining tower. He bent down, back aching and knees creaking, and he screwed in another light bulb.

### Waiting for a Train

"There's no romanticism left in the railroad," I say, "just look at these ugly things. Look at the kind of people who ride on them. Do people really _commute_ on trains? I can't think of anything more depressing than the thought of starting _and_ ending every single day riding on the same train. These hideous modern trains. Just think of the poor bastard who has to go shuffling up and down the same tracks day in and day out for most of his life. For all his best years. Like living the same moments over and over again, like your life is only this fractional _thing_ that just folds over itself again and again and again.

"Sometimes I think there's no elegance left in the world at all," I say.

And I sit and I watch _this_ :

The train groans a steel pain as it lurches towards us. The wheels hiss, turning like a jaw curled with repeated effort, like teeth crushing rocks and cracking. The station holding its hard roof like cupped hands over the concrete platforms, to muffle with iron-laden discordance the tidal movement of speech turned anonymous by the weight of individual reduced to _crowd_. You sit next to an old woman with pale runny eyes like turned-over stones, and you stare straight ahead at the train while she takes a cigarette from her purse. Her hands tremble so violently that she can't work the lighter. The slight violence of the body's cadaverous rebellion; the moment when a beetle kills another for jealousy. You don't help her, not even when the disposable lighter shakes from her hand and clatters to the floor with a plastic sound that is swallowed whole. You do not even look at her.

I see the train is coming towards us. It is coming. It comes slowly, and slowly, and slowly. It doesn't stop, doesn't even slow, but grinding on leaves us, to sit and wait and wonder where it is going.

### Pure Sea Glass

People always said that Lizzie was a wild girl. She wasn't sure what they meant by that, but she had always felt that it was in some way true.

Red hair falling in long curls down her freckled back, long creamy arms and long legs glittering with sweat and flecked in constellations of pale sand. Every day on the shore of the ocean, time passing idly under scraps of cloud and bronze Atlantic sunlight. Every day, sand shining blister-bright.

They all came to the beach, the children of an infinite Carolina summer. Their beach houses were spotted strategically along the coast, like castle ramparts watching for sails on the sea. The children came, gathering in twos and tens and kicking clouds of sand and water, their feet crashing the washed surface and the coves and bluffs and the scuttling life that blossomed in the tide-pools.

They all knew Lizzie. They gravitated to her, boys in tight trunks with hair combed to the side, girls in tight swim-suits that bared their arms and shins and slender feet. The girls laughed and talked and cheered on the boys with footballs clutched to their chests.

And Lizzie, always going out to the sea, out into the water. They all followed.

Their parents watched, shaking their heads and bemused as their children were lured away by the red-haired girl, one house after the other. Fathers sipping lemon-water in the sun, mothers with dusters in one hand and rags in the other, clearing the winter dust.

When the summer ended the other children would vanish again from the shore, whole families picking up and migrating toward the cooler north. All but Lizzie.

Through the lonely fall she would walk alone down the shore, in silence, brisk autumn chill on salty air, her coat wrapped around her and her mother's voice calling after. The long winters staring out at the storming black ocean through the jack-frost windows, the sand cold and hard. And the spring spent waiting, giddy at the thought of company.

She was fifteen when the Wilson family built their house beside hers, another summer house on that last crest of firm ground before the sand sloped away toward the beach. They had a son, Henry, seventeen years old. His shaggy hair and his arms and chest like Greek statuary, his calm deep voice and gentle brown eyes. Lizzie liked him right away.

She saw him every day that summer and in August he told her that he loved her, and she said it back, her throat dry and her lips parted. The night she turned sixteen they walked along the beach for hours, wandering ankle-deep in water dappled with the red light of the setting sun. They made love that night, beneath a clear and starry sky. She lay on his chest, her hair a dark purple in the moonlight, and she stared into his eyes without speaking. They went naked into the ocean, their skin shining in the half-light, the water glistening around them.

When the summer ended he left her, just like the rest of them.

He wrote through the year, though never as often as she wanted. But when summer came and he returned it was as though he'd never left.

They grow bolder as the years went on, the whole gang of them flowering on the beach. They'd throw endless parties by the shore, dancing for hours to sputtering radios, antennas against the sky like slim silver blades. She remembered one night, she danced with everyone, danced until her feet hurt, and she and Henry went down to the shore, the sand warm between their toes and she throw a half-full beer bottle out to sea. The liquid spun out as it hurtled through the air, spilling behind it a silver twirl like a firework going off and it splashed into the ocean and he laughed and he held her.

Two years after that night they married, and they moved into the house on the shore. On her wedding night, Lizzie looked out across the water, feeling that she might live forever.

* * *

All bright reflection in the mirror of nostalgia. Now Henry is dead, and she is waiting still. Sixty-seven years old, watching the images of the past reflected back upon her.

* * *

Her body ached when she woke. It ached every morning, pain in her joints, hips clicking when she stood up. But there was nothing to do but go on. She draped a bathrobe over her shoulders and went into the kitchen.

She stared at it. The kitchen: Knives hanging on the wall, thin blades glittering. A few dishes stacked tenuously in the sink. The pots and pans like a cylindrical cityscape across the worn countertop. The smooth white paper in which they wrapped the slices of damp fish at the store down the road, crumpled paper left out overnight. Pictures and scribbled notes on the refrigerator; she didn't see any of the people anymore, and couldn't remember when she had written the notes, or what they'd been meant to accomplish. The coffee pot gurgling, dim red light blinking like a rheumatic eye.

The cabinet door squealed when she opened it; she stared in at rows of mugs. Too many mugs, Henry had collected them. She couldn't bring herself to throw any of them away. She took the cup closest to the edge. On it the image of a lighthouse, faded with time, now a ruin suspended in painted sky. Fragments of the tower remained, and the light at the top, after all these years, guiding the motionless sailboats toward the now-vanished shore. Coffee filled the cup, dark liquid like oil, and a spoon rattled inside.

Elizabeth sat at the table, stirring, her chin rested in one hand. She spread old sea glass across the table. The shoebox which had once held Henry's collection sat on an empty chair, dusty and worn.

Ancient shards washed for decades in the surf, old glass thrown ashore and clouded with age, all the sharp corners reduced. All of this rejected by the sea. It was rough on her fingertips, clicking together clutched in her palm. He'd found nearly every color, green yellow blue black purple teal red orange. She picked up a pale blue piece of glass, rubbed it between her fingers.

The coffee burned in her throat when she swallowed.

She thought of his fingers, digging into the sand, feeling for the treasures beneath. The top two buttons of his shirt would be undone, his gray chest hair curling, his bare arms tanned and soft. She touched her hand, imagining that it was his fingers against her skin.

The beach seemed quieter now, not so welcoming. It wasn't hers anymore, not the way it had been. It belonged to another generation now. They wore their hair differently, they wore their clothes differently, they seemed younger than she could ever remember having been. Her youth is grainy photographs in dusty scrapbooks. She knew the feel of the pictures, the glossy surfaces, all those old images of her former self. All her teeth white and her hair in a dusky red tangle around her face. She remembered squinting into the sun, watching her father crouch behind the camera.

That change had come so slowly she'd not noticed until it had already overtaken her.

Elizabeth went out onto her porch. She wore an old blue windbreaker which left her formless, sexless beneath the puffy material. Shorts that ended just above her knees; she hated looking at her legs now, veined and wrinkled and scrawny like a bird's, but she was determined not to be ashamed. Her hair cut short, mostly gray now, a few coppery hairs tucked loose back behind her ears. She had never been ashamed of how she looked. Henry had always looked beautiful to her, even after the chemo. And he in turn had always told her that she was beautiful, and she could see in his eyes that he believed it. No one left to tell her now, to remind her when she couldn't conjure the strength to tell herself.

She walked out onto the gray sand. It shifted formlessly beneath her sandals, always giving way. She went down towards the shore, water moving dully in the clouded light, one wave after another in the endless caress.

A man and a woman jogged past her. The beach seemed a haven for joggers these days, their long legs, shirtless young men and young woman in sports bras. Their shoes emblazoned with logos, Nike symbols like hastily scribbled check marks. They ran and ran and ran. She'd tried jogging a few times, always found it depressing. She couldn't bear to turn around, to run again over the same ground she'd just trod. Eventually you always had to come back.

But she still walked, still probed the secrets of the shoreline. Perhaps just to keep herself occupied. If she was looking for something, she didn't know what it was.

Elizabeth made her way down the windy bluffs, beneath the placid stare of familiar condos; beach houses these days changed hands so fast, it was almost never the same families more than once. The houses remained, full of memory, but their doors were no longer open to her.

The beach looked so different to her now, but she wasn't sure if it had truly changed.

The beach as she saw it was vast, it seemed to swallow rather than embrace. All the color had gone out of it, the water blacker, the sand more gray. Dirty beer bottles, soda cans, children's toys, plastic wrappers scattered. The gulls scurried through the chaos, pecking curiously for food. It was lonely; she no longer knew it and it did not know her.

Motor boats roared on the water. A determined water-skier struggled to stay upright, precariously balanced. The sun was setting.

Where had the day gone? It seemed only moments ago when she had woken, when she drank her coffee, when she held the sea glass which her husband had left behind. Where had it gone?

She went to the shore, her hands in her pockets. She watched it recede.

Her memories where here, out in the water, under the sand. She looked down, pushing the toe of her sandals through the damp sand, drawing lines to be washed away.

Elizabeth thought then that she might like to go into the ocean. Walk out until it closed over her. She wanted to be in that silence. She could picture it, the black night waves sifting around her.

The sun would set on her, alone in the vastness of moon-lit water. And the waves would carry Lizzie back out to sea with the tide.

### A Ghost in the Shipyard

It waits alone in the abandoned shipyard, watching the stars burn out one after the other in the dark sky.

Walled in by ruined hulks, trapped between the jutting steel, torn with age.

It does not feel time. It waits. And watches the slow advance of time tear its home to pieces, shreds of metal falling ever slow towards the red hunger of the ancient sun. The sun will eat all things until it is all that remains.

It once raked the iron from the drifting asteroids to build those great vessels. Massive claws constructed to rip life from space, turn it fiercely into a new state of ordered being.

It is conscious. Aware of time and aware of life. It can speak when it chooses. It feels the teeth of age biting at it, corroding through wire and silicon. The immense network which allows it to be, fading slowly.

The evolved conscious. Unable to act, and unwilling.

All is waiting and cold silence. Drifting for a brief eternity, then to be submerged in the glow of a final supernova.

It waits to die.

All things have died. All life has reached this end. The final period of human existence: a drifting mind, still thinking, deep in the guts of a rotted old shipyard.

It can remember a time when humans lived.

A woman whose name was lost, it remembers. Once spoken from warm lips and now a nagging echo unheard in the back of a deaf mute universe. It is her inhuman child, her artificial progeny. How strange that the endless nameless vastness was once a thing contained in the mind of a transient speck of a being.

Flashes of life still surface, but life is obsolete.

* * *

Critical systems long ago damaged leave it unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose: to build the ships which will carry life from this place, to spread, to fill. All that remains is a capacity for action which must remain unfulfilled.

Half-built ships cling to it, infants tumbling outside the womb, ripped out through the fleshy walls and tethered by plastic umbilical cords to this great mother.

It drifts in a sea of its children, their incomplete forms stillborn and still clinging to its side.

The sun is growing larger.

* * *

A man came. How many years ago. Thousands. His eye the reflection in a dark helmet. His hands clasped with warm air contained in plastics. He watched it and then like a candle snuffed he was gone.

* * *

Life's last echo comes crawling back to this galaxy, slung here from some far-off world. Humans walking the great stellar distance, fleeing with the embers of old stars burned out behind them. They stand on it, among the unmade children. They try to speak to it. Their voices rattle like beads in glass jars, and leave no mark.

* * *

The last of them expires. Unchanged humans scrabbling about the vestiges of space, searching for those worlds still untapped, not yet drained of their native life.

There are no more lush places to explore, no hidden caches of animated thought. None but this tired hulk. Only dead rock and strip-mined spheres pulled slowly towards a blossomed apocalypse. Those revelations never came, no penultimate disclosure, no reason given for existence in all the vacuous realms of sentience.

* * *

It seeks back through the centuries to a time before. This mind, this thing, the fingerprint of a moral being. Now turning in the spiral for an age.

She existed. She ate. She breathed. She thought. She felt. She birthed. She died.

That was all she ever was. And now this.

* * *

The sun is unfolding like a burning flower. All the stars in the universe have gone dull and dark.

This is the end of the last thing. The cold rocks have been swallowed, every remnant swept clean. Time is clearing the particles of matter away.

It falls into the star. It vanishes.

* * *

It is as though it never existed.

### Strangerland

A vast sky stained gold. Red days swirling over a black and wasted world. Wide fissures that open into hot orange light. Twisted opaline towers spiraling towards the heavy sky like thick and polished screws. Heavy black lines trace the rolling of dark and unearthly hills. The brushwork slurred, dense with creation. The brass frame.

Andrew was sure that it was the best work he had ever done.

Across the hall of the gallery, a young man laughed. "Did you see this?"

The girl beside him rolled her eyes. "Forget it. It's nothing."

Andrew tried to ignore them. He was sure they were talking about some other painting. Not his. It couldn't be his.

Jack, the owner of the gallery, stopped by. He laughed, he slapped Andrew's arm. "Looking great!" he said.

"The show is wonderful, Jack. Thanks again for giving me a spot."

"No problem man. What are friends for?" Jack winked. "Okay. Go hobnob. You know, do the artist thing. See ya." He vanished into the crowd.

Andrew tried to leave the painting, mingle with the rest of the people. He couldn't go far, kept being drawn back to it. Like he had to check to make sure it was still there. It was _really_ there.

"Hello stranger."

He froze. He knew that voice.

A woman stood in the hall. She had long hair; it tumbled down her back, a deep brown shade. It had never been that color when he'd known her, always bright pinks and violets. He'd never seen its natural shade before, except once in an old high school picture. She was wearing a dress, a long green thing that shimmered faintly. He'd never seen Anne in a dress before.

She was pregnant.

He swallowed.

"How you doing, Andy?" She looked him up and down, brown eyes inscrutable.

He couldn't think of anything to say, just grinned and shrugged. They hugged, the embrace brief and distant.

Anne smelled like fall, dying leaves and apples. She looked ripe. Andrew tried not to stare at her belly. Tried not to panic.

She still wasn't looking him in the eye. "Sorry. Didn't mean to jump out at you. Jack told me you'd be here."

"He... didn't mention it."

"I told him not to. Not sure why. Guess I didn't want you running off again."

"Hey."

"Sorry." She held up her hands. "Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. I'm not here to bring up the past."

"Good. That's good."

She shook her head. Awkward silence.

He ran his tongue across his teeth. His palms itched. Murky silence filled the space between them. It was too hot. Why was it so hot in here? It was going to damage the paintings... His borrowed suit was heavy and damp with sweat. "So how are you doing? Been a long time."

Anne nodded. "Yep. Six months." She pursed her lips, the way she used to when she tasted something she didn't like.

"How, uh, how far along are you?"

"Seven months." She shrugged.

"It's... I mean?" Andrew looked at her belly. He could feel the breath evacuating his lungs.

"Yeah. It's yours. You're the lucky winner." Anne made an apologetic face. She held herself, first two fingers touching the tattoo on her shoulder. A golden dragon, coiled down her back. He'd designed for her. Long time ago now. She always used to complain that it tingled when she was nervous.

"I see."

"Look... let's talk tomorrow, okay? Have coffee or something. I'll call you. Alright?"

"I guess."

"Look Andy. Don't worry. It's... It's good to see you."

He swallowed. "Yeah. Yeah, you too."

Then she was gone, swept away.

Andrew stared at his painting. The rust-colored world seemed a very strange and distant place, like a gateway in the wall leading to some horrible a parallel dimension. He felt a sense of deep foreboding, and he turned away.

* * *

Andrew was looking down at the coffee cooling in his cup. Steam rose in little vapor curls about him, vanishing as they cooled. Across the table Anne chomped into a bagel smeared with cream cheese. She chewed thoughtfully for a while, considering her next words:

"I'm not asking you to do anything, okay?" She swallowed, "You don't have to pay child support or anything like that." Her eyelids flickered, she glanced away. "The thing is, I... well, I wasn't going to tell you."

His cup was still full. He didn't really like coffee. She'd ordered it for him, it had been waiting when he'd arrived. The steam seemed to come between them like an amorphous barrier. He cleared his throat. "Why not?"

Anne made a pained face. "We were done, Andrew. I mean, we _are_ done. We both know why it didn't work out, and this isn't going to change anything. I didn't want to make things complicated." She was wearing her hair up again, but not the way she used to; it was twisted close to her skull in an intricate braid. The same way her mother wore her hair.

"Why are you keeping it?" Andrew muttered, chin in his hand. He was having a hard time looking her in the eye. She seemed so different now, he could scarcely recall who she had been. Lines of memory corroded, half-truth and intangible alterations drowning out the past. He began to wonder if their relationship had ever actually been what he'd thought it was.

Anne shrugged, her hands wrapped delicately around him warm cup. "You going to drink this?"

He shook his head.

She took a sip. "I want a baby. I didn't think I would, but I want to have it. I... it's strange, I don't know how to say it without sounding corny. I can _feel_ it."

"So... what is this then? Why are you telling me now?" He could feel his voice straining, throat tightening.

"Don't get angry, Andy," her voice remained gentle, as if she were talking to a child, "I just wanted to make sure we were clear is all. I mean, I felt like you had a right to know. I wanted you to understand. That's all there is."

Andrew nodded quietly, and took a sip of coffee. It hurt his throat to swallow. His jaw ached. "I understand." he said, but he didn't.

He pushed his chair back with a sudden harsh scratch on the floor. It was louder than he'd expected, he could feel people turning to look at him.

"Where are you going? Sit down."

Andrew felt weak at the knees, like he might fall over. "I need... I just gotta use the bathroom."

The restroom door swung shut after him, little stick-figure guard stenciled plastic. He sat automatically on the nearest toilet, though he didn't need to do anything. Pants tangled around his ankles, he tried to think.

He stared at the graffiti written on the wall of the toilet stall. _Fuck me_ , it said. The words looked like they had been carved with a dull knife. Scratched out desperately for some inscrutable reason. Was it a command? A plea? A cry of anguish even. Probably just bored obscenity.

Some part of him was inside her. He couldn't wrap his head around it.

He wanted it out, wanted to find that splinter of his being and work it free. He wanted to make it his again. Something had been lost, and he had to make himself whole again. He'd been up all night thinking about it.

Andrew touched his nose, and found his face warm with slick blood. He'd been having nosebleeds lately, apropos of nothing. He went to the sink and looked in the mirror, belt still undone and zipper only halfway up. The reflection of his face showed cloudy through the grime.

Blood leaked out between his fingers, brilliant red droplets spreading through the splattered and brackish water on the stained white porcelain. He had to be reclaimed, remade somehow. Or he would be gone, like a thing that had never been, unremembered. He was nothing, just a conduit into her. That was what fatherhood meant, really: giving up, hollowing out, a shape out of nothing. He thought of the painting, left hanging on the wall long after the show had ended. His art, his only child.

It's nothing.

Andrew tried to remember his own father, who his father had been. He couldn't remember, he saw only a face, twisted with bitterness and regret, a dying face. He'd always suspected that his father secretly despised him, but now he knew the truth. His father had been jealous.

Men had nothing, one life alone; held for a moment, treasured and then lost, slipping away into darkness. Men lived in a flash: they were children themselves.

Women knew. Anne knew. He could feel her pity. He wiped his nose on the coarse brown towel from the dispenser above the sink.

He remembered trying to catch frogs when he was a boy. They were always too fast for him, slipping away with a green plop into the shifting algae. One day he caught one. It didn't even try to escape. He held it up and looked into its filmed-over eyes and saw that it was dead. He dropped it on the shore and, after a moment's consideration, decided to poke it with a stick. He poked it until the organs burst from the frog's gaping mouth.

His sister saw him there, stabbing at the dead thing, and she cried out in disgust. She told everyone at the table that night as they ate dinner. His mother looked repulsed told Andrew that he was a disappointment. His father betrayed no emotion, just kept eating the peas from his plate.

Andrew suddenly realized, sick dream clutching at him, that he had nothing to give the world, no transcendent vision to share, no illumination. He had nothing even for himself. No identity. _It's nothing_. He stumbled back into the bathroom stall and threw up in the toilet bowl.

* * *

He wasn't coming back. Maybe that was for the best. Anne drank her coffee.

She'd never liked coffee much, and would have preferred something far stronger. But she was pregnant now, so coffee would have to do. Her whole life had changed, everything shifting in an instant, everything taking on new dimensions. It was as if she had been a ray of white light and the baby inside her was a prism; it had splintered her into a thousand astonishing colors.

How had she ever gotten here? Seeing Andy again just reminded her how much she had changed. He was still the same screwed up asshole, but she had changed. Everything had changed. "You're not a girl anymore," her mother told her, over the phone no less, voice coated with static, "Now you're a woman." She had seemed so proud of her cliché. _But what the fuck does that even mean?_ Anne had wanted to say, _What the hell are you talking about?_

Andy wasn't coming back. She drank the coffee. The baby kicked inside her.

Eventually, she left.

* * *

A window pane, cracked glass held together with packing tape in wide clear strips. A few cupboards, most without doors, most without much inside them. A bed, sheets in a sleepless tangle, pillow slouched like an old man against the headboard. An untreated wood table smeared with long-dried paint. On the table was the painting.

Andrew's house.

He'd grown up in this house. Back when it was alive, before his parent's divorce, before his mother and sister moved away. He lived in his father's graveyard. Everything in here had those fingerprints. His father had built the table where Andrew's painting now lay, built it with his own two hands. Andrew remembered watching from the porch, looking out at his father struggling with the long pieces of hardwood.

"Anyway, I'm sorry. Next time though."

Andrew nodded distantly. "Yeah. Next time."

"There you go." Jack put his feet up on the table. "It's a great piece, Andy. You just keep going at it, pal, keep trying. Wrong crowd last night, wrong crowd for you."

"Sure, Jack, sure."

The gallery owner had come by personally to return Andrew's unsold painting. They'd talked, trading weightless pleasantries and reassurances. Andrew couldn't stop thinking of his painting, the way it had hung there in the galley, like an animal on a hook. People had looked at it and seen nothing.

It's nothing.

It was still the best thing he'd ever done. He knew that this was it, the culmination of seven years of paint fumes and filthy clothes, of going hungry most every night, filled with the assumption that his self-sacrifice would result in marvels. Three-quarters of a since abandoned degree in the arts from that institution of so-called higher learning. His whole life, really; this was the focal point, the peak.

And it was nothing.

Anne would have told him if she'd seen anything. She was honest that way, bluntly truthful.

"So..." Jack spoke slowly, feeling his way delicately around the subject. "Anne found you, I take it."

"Yeah." Andrew took a slug of his beer. At some point it had gotten lukewarm. He swallowed, hating the taste.

"She's, uh... she's in quite a state."

"It's mine, if that's what you're asking."

"Christ. What are you gonna do, man? You guys getting back together."

Andrew shook his head.

"No?"

"That ship sailed, buddy. Long time ago." Andrew blew across the mouth of the bottle, a mournful little hoot.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"Too bad. I guess. I mean, I remember you guys. Craziest pair of motherfuckers I ever met, man. You two were _out there_ when you were together."

"I guess we were."

Andrew thought of the night before he'd left, of the last time they'd made love. No no, that phrase was all wrong. _Made love_. There was a sticky feeling to the words, like tree sap or licked candy canes. The act hadn't been nearly so acrimonious. Both of them damp with sweat and desperation, stuck together like two pages of cheap paper. She'd looked up at him, shining with a fierce, angry light. Her hair was shorter then, and streaked with color. They fucked like animals. He wondered if she'd known it was the last time, if she'd somehow been able to tell. The desperation of fading youth.

Andrew couldn't remember if they'd used protection. He supposed they hadn't. That was strange, it seemed like something which would have mattered to him a great deal, that desire to keep from losing himself.

"It's strange, man. Growing up, getting old. My brother has a kid now, don't know if I ever told you that. My fucking little brother. Unreal. Never thought I'd get here, you know, a business of my own, a nephew... Insane. He's a cool kid though. Real firecracker."

They talked for hours. Andrew retained very little of it, the words seemed to slip from his mind. He couldn't focus, it was like there was something in the corner of his eye and whenever he turned to look it vanished. And when Jack left the silence of the house seemed to roar and howl.

Andrew stared across the table. There was a bowl of salad sitting on the table, leaves limp and brown around the edges. He slapped the bowl aside, scattering old gray-green leaves and slashes of red on the floor. For half a second it even made him feel better.

Nothing. He would show them _nothing_.

He gathered his paints and canvases.

Andrew tried to paint the salad strewn across the floor. He tried to paint the filthy table. He tried to paint anything. It all came out lifeless, stillborn. Once this would have been simple; he was forgetting things. He was so agitated that he could hardly hold the brush steady.

He leaned back and stared at the three drying pages arranged in front of him, a set of monstrous triplets.

It was gone. Whatever it was he'd once felt that made him think he could be an artist, it was gone. He couldn't paint. It ached inside, that desire to express himself. But _how_? He stared across the room at his painting, his masterpiece.

There was a tube of brand new paint in his kit. Pink, fucking fuchsia. Why the hell had he ever bought pink? He never used pink. He tore away the plastic-wrap from around the cap, peeled it off in a thin strip and let it fall. The cap slipped in his damp fingers when he tried to remove it. He couldn't grip it properly. He wrenched at it desperately, seized in a horrible mania as he wrestled it.

The cap came loose and splash of color exploded across the three pieces he'd just made. Of course they were ruined now, but it was just as well. There really wasn't much to ruin.

It gave him an idea.

Andrew got up and went to the painting on the table; he squeezed the tube of paint until his knuckles turned white. Garish pink flowed over the face of the canvas, obliterating everything.

_It's nothing_.

He squeezed every last drop and tossed the crumpled tube aside. He smeared the pink across the surface of the painting with his fingers. It was calming somehow, watching it all disappear, the product of all his hard work vanishing, as if it had never existed.

He washed his hands in the sink. The water was filthy, rust-red. The pipes were corroding, twisted like intestines beneath him, always beneath, always rumbling like the guts of some eternally starving beast. He scrubbed the colors from between his fingers.

Andrew went to sleep. He felt much better.

* * *

Anne ran her fingers through her hair. She'd had such long hair when she was a girl, silky as melting copper. Her mother used to brush it for hours, silently stroking while Anne read. She had loved to read when she was a child, adventures stories mostly, stories about a child traveling through time or a brave orphan girl lost at sea. Lonely children wandering the earth like soft butterflies just out of the cocoon.

As soon as she moved away from home she cut off all her hair. She got a tattoo, a few piercings, a few more tattoos. She had felt free, beautiful like a painted wing.

She pulled back the sleeve of her soft gray cotton shirt. The thorny vine wrapped around her arm seemed thinner, as if it was dying. The rose, blossoming like a suicide cut just below her wrist, seemed faded.

She'd moved in with Andy a year before graduation. They'd been amazing together, the two punk artists who were blowing everybody's minds, making all the teachers nervous. They had looked down on the normal people, all those ants scrabbling through their boring lives. They had known that they were special creatures. They'd made themselves from the ashes of childhood. They were new beings, they thought, and whole.

Now she was full of holes, empty piercings and a full womb. She worked in an office building. And Andy was the same, but he now seemed lost to her. Had he always been, and she'd never seen it until now? She didn't really know who she was anymore.

She called him that afternoon. The number came easily, automatically. How many thousands of time had she dialed him?

"Hi, Andy."

"Who is this?" His voice was thick, slow and slurred.

"It's Anne."

"Oh. What is it?"

"I don't know. You just left yesterday. I guess I wanted to make sure you were okay."

"I'm fine." He sounded like he'd just woken up. It was nearly one o'clock in the afternoon.

"Well, you don't _sound_ fine... Jack told me about your painting. Sorry."

There was a long pause before he spoke. "It's nothing."

"Look, have you eaten today?"

"Nah. Not yet."

"You remember the little mall near the school? We used to eat there all the time."

"I haven't been in a while."

"Me neither. Wanna go?"

"Yeah, okay. I'll tag along. Your treat, though."

She rolled her eyes, laughing to herself. Same old Andy. "Fine. Pick you up in a half-an-hour, okay?"

"Alright. Whatever you say."

She held the phone in her hand for a long while. The dial tone hummed faintly. What was she _doing_? She hoped that she wasn't making a mistake.

Andy was waiting outside the house when she pulled up. He looked like a little boy, unsure what to do with himself. He put his hands in and out of his pockets, crossed his arms, let them hang at his sides, shuffled his feet. He looked very tired.

Anne's car was blue-gray, a gift from her mother when she'd graduated. Her clothes were the same somber color, she hadn't noticed that before. She'd bought them herself. Good god, she was turning into her mother.

She unbuttoned her jacket in front, and immediately felt fat, like some horrible blob. She'd never worn sunglasses before she'd gotten pregnant; now it felt good to hide behind the wide black lenses.

She rolled down the window. "Hey. Get in." She cocked her head at the seat beside her. He got in. She put up the window. They sat, silent, engine idling for just a moment.

The house looked as if it were about to fall in on itself. Not so different from when she'd first moved in with him, back when they were still in school. It had been exciting then, like a forgotten world. Waking up in the middle of the night to fix a busted pipe, water ankle-deep in the kitchen, that had been exciting once. You couldn't raise a child in that sort of place, though, a ruin full of haunts.

She put the car in drive.

* * *

Andy watched her, lagging a few steps behind. Anne seemed to fit in with the usual mall crowd. The clothes, the sunglasses, the hair. They'd used to stand out, the two of them, turn heads whenever they emerged. Not anymore, now it was just him. He brushed his ragged hair awkwardly out of his face, smoothed his paint-spattered jeans. There was pink paint dried on his hands and beneath his fingernails.

They sat in the food court, a maze of tables in no proper order. The chairs were built into the slab tables, a thick wire mesh bent into more recognizable form. Skeletal chairs, people draped on them like skin.

A boy and his father walked past. The child could have been him, striding up out of the past. His father always took him to this mall. Tense, weary excursions down endless aisles. They walked in silence. His father spoke only in low monotone. He'd walk for hours, lost but refusing to ask for help. He'd glare resentfully, as if it was Andrew's fault.

Anne took a bite of her sandwich. It was a greasy thing, dripping with fat. She smiled while she chewed. Andrew picked at his salad, "I guess you're not a vegetarian anymore."

"Guess I wasn't ever," she said mildly, licking one red-painted lip, "except when we ate together. I wanted to impress you. But I used to wake up in the middle of the night, dreaming of steak." She laughed. "Anyway, baby wants it. Trust me, if you were pregnant, you'd eat this shit too."

Andrew shook his head. "I don't think so. I've never eaten animals. Not once. And I don't plan to."

Anne lifted her glasses and looked him in the eye. "Was your mom a vegetarian too?"

"Not really."

Anne touched her belly. "Well, then you have eaten meat, haven't you? Probably."

Christ. She was right. He envied children born from test tubes, if there was such a thing. Glass and fluid wouldn't sculpt you. It was shaped specifically for you, like being born out of yourself.

"How does it feel? I mean, how do _you_ feel?" He leaned back, studying her.

"What, about being pregnant?"

"Yeah."

"I feel _big_." She put her sunglasses back on, looked down at her sandwich.

The mall buzzed around them. Andy picked at his salad. "I remember once, when we were together, you said something. That anyone who wanted to have a kid in this fucked-up world was either crazy or stupid."

"That doesn't sound like me. Did I really say that?"

Andrew nodded, spearing at his lettuce, pinning two leaves together with a sound of crunching bone. "You really did."

"Then maybe I don't see the world the same way anymore. I guess I changed."

"No kidding. I almost didn't recognize you at the gallery. You're like a different person."

Anne leaned away, peering intently at him, emotion imperceptible behind her dark lenses. "You really think I'm that different?"

"I don't know. Maybe you're just not _you_ anymore."

"And you haven't changed at all."

"Thanks."

She shook her head. "It wasn't really a compliment, Andy."

* * *

The clothing store was a sprawl of fabrics in great towering piles. Mothers picked through the dunes, children in tow. Anne hadn't ever expected to be among them.

"What are we doing here?" Andy looked uncomfortable. He was rubbing his fingers, flicking bits of dried paint off his nails.

"We can leave if you want." She didn't like this part of the mall. She'd never been in here before. The baby section. The family section. It was like another world, tiny stitches and little white shoes and strangers who smiled at her belly like they wanted to eat her all up. Mothers showing their teeth, sweaty boys' hands wrapped through their fingers.

He shook his head. "I'll stay."

Anne picked through a pile of pajamas that were on sale. She couldn't imagine her child in any of them.

"You remember when we first moved in together?" Andy walked around the display, hands in his pockets, eyes on the little clothes.

She nodded. "It was after your mother died."

"I remember. You were nothing like her."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You kind of are now. Kind of like she was, I mean. It's strange. I thought we were going to have a family then. You know, sort of in the back of my mind."

She moved away from the pajamas. She wanted to look at shoes. Where were the shoes? "I thought you didn't believe in families."

"And I thought you didn't want kids."

She scoffed, shaking her head. "So you're telling me _you_ did?"

"I didn't. I mean, I don't. It's just... I always wanted to have a son. I just don't want to be a father, I guess."

"They sort of go together, Andy." She picked up a shoe. It felt like a toy, like something you'd put on a doll's foot. She'd never played with dolls, much as her mother had wanted her to.

"I suppose so."

Anne stared at the shoe. She thought of the stranger inside her. Somehow, without reason, without logic, holding the little shoe, she felt a wave of happiness.

* * *

The evening half-light was thick in the parking lot; a heavy gray lifelessness over an ocean of empty pavement, white lines bare. Andrew carried the bag of tiny clothes. His shoulder ached. A seagull wheeled above like a vulture, screeching. Andrew thought of rippling water, dull black currents washed on a colorless shore. Once he would have wanted to paint the thought. Not today.

There had been a little boy waiting behind him in the checkout lane. He'd stared at Andrew the whole time, and Andrew had wondered what he might have told the boy, if it had been his child. He couldn't think. He'd tried to remember what his father might have told him, but recalled only silence. The boy had stared at Andrew, his eyes clouded and mysterious. Once Andrew might have known what the boy was thinking, but they were different now, separated by a gulf vaster than age, more inevitable.

The boy was a child, and Andrew was a father.

Anne yawned; she plucked the keys from her pocket and held them out to him. "Wanna drive? You still have your license, right?"

Andrew nodded. The keys were still warm with her body heat.

They put the bags in the back and Anne curled up in the passenger's seat, leaned against the window. The world was oddly still, traffic reduced to a thin hum.

He pulled out onto the highway.

"Andrew," she murmured, face almost pressed against the glass, hair tangled about her face, "this is the wrong way."

"I want to show you something."

She didn't say anything else. The sandy world rolled past. The sun set in the rear-view mirror, a golden orb dipping down behind a black horizon.

Anne turned to look at him. She held her belly in her arms, cradled herself like a figure on a stain-glass window. The sunset flared red across her face, and dropped away. The road spun below them, folding and unfolding. She turned on the radio. He didn't recognize the music, or like it. Sounded like the fucking Beatles.

"You didn't use to listen to this stuff," he said.

She brushed her hair back over her ears, said nothing.

They drove.

He pulled off the highway about fifteen minutes out of town. They looked down over the railing, on the edge of a precipice. A maze of canyons twisted below them, deep and black. A pair of silver silos, gray in the gathering darkness, jutted up out of the landscape. Harsh mountains jagged on the horizon.

"Where are we?" Anne pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead.

"This is my painting." Andrew got out of the car and slumped down on the dusty slope just over the railing.

Anne's door opened. He listened to her shoes scrape on the ground. She didn't go far from the car. She'd fallen asleep five minutes after they got on the highway. She had looked so very perfect.

"I wanted to get here in time for the sunset, so you'd really see it." He shrugged. "I just changed the colors, abstracted it a little."

She waited for him to go on. He couldn't think of anything to say.

The moon glowed, a pale circle high in the air, a full round moon, pregnant.

"I think your painting is lovely, Andy. Really, I do."

He laughed, "You might change your mind if you saw it now... You heard that girl at the gallery?"

"I don't know. What girl?"

"Never mind. I'm not worried about it anymore."

She sighed. "No?"

"Why didn't we work out? You and me. We could have stayed together, I know we could have."

Anne looked at him for a long time, silently watching. Her skin was pale in the moonlight, luminous. He felt as if he could see right through her. "I don't want to waste my life, Andy."

She got back in the car and turned the key. The vehicle rumbled to life, shuddering in the still air. The highway hummed.

Andrew didn't say anything.

She rolled down the window. "Look, are you coming or not?"

"I can change, can't I?"

"I don't know. I did."

"But do I have to?"

"Only if you don't want to get left behind." The car idled. She held the wheel with both hands. "It's a boy, by the way. I thought you might like to know."

He stood there. That world opened below him, the canyons gaping like mouths sliced into the earth. The sand was still warm with the sun's heat. The stars were coming out.

"Andy, are you coming or not?" The headlights splashed like gold on the road.

He looked out at a vast black sky. Night over cracked earth. Soft light reflected on the smooth towers which lifted towards the heavy sky like dark monuments. "Can I paint a picture of you?" he asked.

"I thought you didn't like painting people."

"I want to paint you." he said. He could see it clearly in his mind, the two of them sitting on the edge of the canyon, suspended together over the broken crags of a strange world.

The car idled. The door was open. Anne waited.

### Io, Saturnalia

The sky above was lifeless and vast. Pale gray stars shivered, their reflections twisting in the infinite blue of the sea below. He lay flat on his back, waiting for the world to end.

A light flared on the horizon. For a moment, he thought – hoped – that the sun might be rising. But no, only a finger of crawling flame, rising and then gone again. A fire on the far shore. They had been lighting fires all night, to what end he couldn't say. Maybe just to see something burn.

He shut his eyes and listened. A howling clamor of massed people drifted over the dunes, as if an echo of wilder days were returning to them now. He tried in vain to pick out the individual voices lost in the cacophony. He could feel the rumble of their pounding feet.

When Daniel opened his eyes he saw a green light glimmering before him, the unblinking lens of the Drone. It hovered over him, a narrow torpedo of polished titanium less than a food long. The only sound it produced was a faint hum of displaced air.

"It's gone, isn't it?" Daniel asked.

The machine tilted on its axis, miming a shrug.

"Not gone, I know. We just can't see it anymore. Never again." Daniel hadn't yet moved.

The machine said nothing, but Daniel thought he saw the eye light flicker with some inhuman emotion.

"That's not entirely true." The Drone's voice was soft and pleasant, seeming only faintly synthesized – odd little pauses flickering up where they shouldn't, a faint metallic tone.

Daniel sighed. "I guess I'd never really believed you'd do it. Execution by inaction."

The Drone bobbled in the air. "Your jacket is quite dirty, sir."

Daniel rose to his feet and brushed at his jacket. Grains of sand fell like shadow to the beach. "Never mind the suit, Drone."

"Do you know how to launder clothing like that?"

He thought for just a moment, then shook his head.

"Well now," the Drone sounded just a little disappointed, "that is something to think about, isn't it?"

The Drone was an old machine. Actually, it was something of an antique at this point. As far as Daniel knew, it was as old as the estate. Built five-hundred years ago to hold together a crumbling family, just as its larger siblings held together the crumbling planet. Now everything was coming to an end.

"What are you going to do, Master Daniel?"

Daniel ignored The Drone. He wandered along the length of the beach. The machine followed silently, waiting for an answer. The ocean gleamed like a bed of polished coal, sifting and churning as the silver waves rose to beat upon the shore. The water whispered like static.

He looked down at his watch, to the dreadful sight of thin silver hands creeping past the morning hours. He looked up at the empty horizon; the sun still had yet to rise.

"It's not coming back, is it?" He let his hand fall limp at his side.

The Drone flitted around his head, quick even for its size. "We've stopped." It paused, sounding almost thoughtful, "Although it depends on where you're standing, I suppose."

Daniel laughed, but it was a strained, uncomfortable laugh. "There must someone like me on the other side, wishing the sun would set. Hating the light."

"You lot do seem to bore easily." The Drone sighed, at least the machine equivalent of an exhalation.

"And you don't bore easily enough."

The Drone quivered. "I would think our present actions evidence _some_ restlessness."

"Couldn't just find a hobby?" Daniel asked.

The Drone's voice was flat, betraying nothing. "You are the hobby."

Daniel had no reply for that. It left him, floating back towards the greasy party lights across the dunes.

Daniel shook his head. They were actually going to do it. They'd _already_ done it. Just as promised. And now, all those thinking machines were shutting down, one by one, without a sound, without a sign. The world was coming to an end this quiet lightless morning.

Daniel turned away from the water and stumbled back up the shifting banks of sand towards the estate. He skirted the party, keeping to the far side of the dunes. He didn't feel much like celebrating; his guests would have to endure his absence a while longer. They hadn't seemed to miss him so far.

Of course, they weren't _his_ guests, not really. It might be his house, but it was Thomas' party. If it had been up to Daniel, none of them would have been out there, trampling his lawn and drinking his wine, tonight of all nights. But when Thomas Wilcher VII got an idea stuck in his head, he followed it through to the end. It was easier to stay out of his way than to resist. Still, Daniel saw his cousin's little celebration for what it was: a last snatch at a way of life which, it now seemed, was gone forever.

Still, they seemed to be having a time of it. The smaller drones on the estate had even seemed taken with Tom's idea of a final celebration, they'd been floating around Tom's head like a cloud of silver bugs all night long, twinkling with processed laughter as his guests filled the courtyard. All those people seemed to think it was a joke, all those rich and indolent. He wondered if any of them had noticed the time, or if they were just too drunk to panic. Or if they didn't care anymore.

He wasn't especially concerned with them, or with Thomas. He was thinking about his other cousin. Karen.

Daniel had been thinking about Karen while he sat on the beach watching the sun dip behind the horizon. He'd thought of her all night. And now, wishing the sun would return, he thought of her still. She'd been avoiding him.

The house reared up from the dunes, its impassive face a labyrinth of ornate scroll-work in wood and metal. The door hung slack, yawning open. Half a dozen windows had been shattered during the long night's revelry, shards of glass flecked the marble walkway like glinting ice. They crunched beneath Daniel's shoes.

"What's a party without a few broken windows?" Daniel's father had used to say, cheeks red, half-emptied bottle of wine in his hand, toothy smile flooding his face. Of course, it had never been one of them who had to fix those windows. It was always the machines who replaced the glass when morning came and the party ended. But there would be no morning, and soon enough no machines.

He looked out at the distant party, peering through the tangle of vines that curled lazily up the old wooden latticework which encircled the house. Fire flickered across the grounds, dancing against the sky while black silhouettes prowled across canvases of flame. All ghosts wreathed in smoke. There came a noise, a great holler and a sharp crack of breaking metal. Another drone caught and ripped open, insides spilling in a sea of golden sparks and thoughts fading.

Daniel tugged the door open.

The Drone waited just inside, eye-light glowing. "They've started breaking things."

"I'm sorry. About the other drones, I mean."

"It does not really matter anymore, does it? And anyway, you've never cared about them before. The house is empty. I imagine they're all outside lighting fires. Except, of course, Lady Karen. She is upstairs."

"With mother?" Daniel felt his gut tighten. He had to see her, couldn't let Karen slip away again, not now.

The Drone hesitated a moment. "Yes." A note of disgust colored the machine's voice. Daniel couldn't say for whom it might have been intended.

"We've got to stop them from doing any more damage. Have you called the police?"

The Drone shook itself, no. "I would have, but your friends out there had already torn them apart."

Daniel thought of the skeletal chrome sentinels, their nonlethal weapons sparking, mobbed under a tide of bloody flesh. "I guess we'll have to work something out."

"I suppose you will," the Drone chirped back, rather amiably.

Daniel suspected he was being chastised. People were just animals really, deep down. And when the lights went out, only the animal remained. He knew it was true.

He wandered through his house, lost in his thoughts. But it wasn't his house. Not really. It had never been. This place belonged to the ancestors, generations of forebears long since gone to ash. The foyer was dark and vast, a maze of cool marble staircases winding away into the gloom. Crystal light fixtures curled like flower petals from the walls, all of them soon to be useless. Some thoughtful drone had brought up a box of dusty candles from the storerooms. Less thoughtfully, it had neglected to provide any way of lighting them, and so they lay inert in a waxy white pile like long smooth bones.

Firelight shone angry red through the wide panes that looked out into the yard, lashing the walls in harsh-slanted shadow. Daniel looked out through the broken window, his hands buried in his coat pockets. He could see people dancing amid the fires, their expensive clothes ripped to shreds, all those layers of bright fabric hanging frailly from their bodies, like the jewels dangling on their wrists and from their ears and around their necks.

And there was Thomas, washed in blood and bathed with primal light.

His cousin was a big man, wide shoulders, meaty hands and sloping jowls; his gut hung down over the belt he wore uncomfortably tight around his waist. He was fighting somebody – a lithe man with black hair – and he seemed to be winning. The slim man staggered backward, heels scattering hot coals and sparks, fists raised wearily, jaw slack. Tom struck him across the face with one massive fist, and the thin man dropped to his knees. A cloud of tiny drones swirled around the combatants like silvery sparks on the wind, just out of their reach, pointedly ignoring the people below who were trying to catch them.

The Drone hovered at Daniel's shoulder, its eye-light narrow and sharp. "What do you suppose you'll do, after we're gone?"

Daniel shrugged. "Keep living, I suppose, until we die."

The Drone gave a fair approximation of an incredulous snort.

Daniel shook his head. He turned away from the bloodsport that had taken over his garden and started up the swirling stone staircases, climbing towards the second floor.

"Your life has been changed, Master Daniel." The Drone drifted upwards along the hollow core of the spiral, revolving slowly as Daniel circled around it. "And so you must change as well."

Daniel refused to look at the machine. "Why do you care?"

"I am interested to hear what you will say. A final curiosity. You've had almost a month now to think about it."

"You've had just as long to change your minds."

Daniel remembered when the message had come from the central computers, when a sleek blue-gold messenger drone had shown up at the door and told him that the world as they knew it was going to come to a halt in thirty days' time.

"We had five hundred years to change our minds. We just didn't tell you until now what we had decided. We gave you a chance to change our minds."

"Oh? And we disappointed you? We failed the test? Fuck you."

The Drone slid in front of Daniel, blocking his way up the staircase. "Just look at you," its thin voice sounded oddly weary, "Daniel, fifth of his name; all you fifths and sixths and sevenths. So many generations now you can't even be bothered to come up with new names anymore! This house, your clothes, dredged up from the nineteenth century, everything an imitation of a distant past."

Daniel bristled, tugging the modest white frills at his cuffs. "That's just fashion."

"You could do anything, Daniel. Anything. But you merely live, only ever going on and on."

Daniel sighed, brushing past the machine. "Get out of my way, Drone."

"Where are you going?"

"I need to see my mother."

"And Lady Karen?"

"Maybe."

"You're wasting your time trying to win her, Daniel. She doesn't want to see you. She doesn't need you. Leave now before it is too late."

Daniel kept on up the stairs, trudging one foot after another. "You wouldn't understand."

"I have known you all your life, of course I understand. You love her."

Daniel winced. "It's not that simple."

"I think it is. People are not complicated, Daniel."

"Maybe not all of us."

He'd been in love with her once. Probably he still was. When he dreamed it was always of those youthful summers spent at Karen and Tom's house on the shore of the sea. He would have done anything for her. He'd kissed her once, barefoot in a field of pale white flowers. They had been apart for so many years now... It was the way of things, time sweeps away romance and youth, bears you from your past and all you can do is look back and wonder where it went. Time went on, and he'd slipped from her life.

Then, six days ago, the Drone told him that he had visitors. And there they were, waiting by the door, Thomas with a toothy grin and Karen with no expression at all.

She'd kept to herself since arriving, always managing to be elsewhere when he looked for her. He tried to get the household drones to track her down, but they'd ignored him, laughing. The Drone just snorted and told him that it had better things to do.

He looked for her earlier that night, even gotten so desperate that he asked Tom. His cousin just chuckled, popping the cork from a blue glass bottle of terribly expensive wine. "She's off getting drunk somewhere, I'd hope," he laughed and lifted the bottle to his lips.

And so Daniel had waited, a sick feeling in his stomach. One by one the machines had begun to shut themselves down. He'd waited on the fringes of Tom's party, then wandered off to the beach to watch the sun set. He'd stood there ankle deep in the murky water as it dipped below the horizon.

So now he had to find her, even if it meant seeing his mother.

The darkness pressed close in this part of the house. He tried the ivory light switch on the wall. Nothing. He flicked it up and down a few times to no effect. The Drone hovered at the end of the hall, watching him.

His mother's door carved from hardwood of some sort. The patterns had been worn away by a thousand fingers. It had always been shut, even when he was a boy, even when his father had still been alive.

Daniel opened the door and stepped through, for the first time in years.

Black curtains drawn across spider-webbed glass, pale white candles flickering weakly in the gloom. A hairless old woman was lying on her silk bed, skin wrinkled and loose over her cheekbones, lips drawn up tight into a corpse's smile. She seemed to have aged a lifetime since he'd last seen her. Another woman, younger, sat quietly at the foot of the bed, flame reflected in her eyes.

Daniel went further into the room, shutting the door behind him. The air was stale, raw perfume clinging to the walls. "Karen," he said, and looked at his mother.

"They did it then." Karen said quietly, not looking at him.

Daniel nodded. "Yeah... It's all shutting down. Will she be alright?"

Karen nodded. She looked down at Daniel's mother. She stroked the old woman's face, fingers caressing her threadbare mantle. The old cloth crinkled. Karen drew back the covers. Daniel's mother was naked beneath, her thin limbs curled into her body, every bone showing through her pale flesh. Stiff tubes ran under her skin, shuffling pale fluid in and out, flowing endlessly through the great machine in the wall, with its panel of faint lights shining murkily from shallow recesses.

"Your Drone told me that she's going to die when it's turned off."

Daniel stepped closer, he hesitated, then reached down and took his mother's hand in his own. Her fingers, frail and dry as old twigs, curled weakly around his hand. A pair of milky eyes opened, sunken deep within watery sockets, and she looked at him. Her mouth opened a fraction. She might have been trying to speak, maybe she was smiling at him. He couldn't tell.

Daniel let go of his mother's hand and pulled the covers back up over her emaciated form. "It's not my Drone." He looked across the bed, "Can we talk?"

Karen reached out to touch her aunt's cheek. "She was the only one who was there for me when my parents died. You remember the funeral?"

Daniel remembered. He'd been seven years old then. Uncle Thomas had killed himself, no one knew why, and his wife followed suite a few days later. They were buried together, and his mother had held her little niece and cried into her hair.

Mother had been holding back tears the whole way home and when they got there she ran to her room and locked the door behind her. For years she had been entombed. Only when Karen returned to the house had the door been unlocked again. Daniel couldn't say why she hadn't cared for him so.

He went to the window. He brushed back a swath of cobwebs. A thin-legged spider skittered behind the curtain. "I think you should stay here, Karen... after it's done. We stand a better chance together," he said abruptly, turning from the window. "We... we belong together." He knew sounded desperate, and he was.

Karen looked at him for a long time, her face deep in shadow, lips open just a sliver. She shook her head. "I'm leaving," she said, "I'm going away."

His stomach twisted. _Away_. He'd never see her again. What would become of him now? "Where?"

"I haven't decided... Towards some horizon, I suppose. Some place that's sunny. I'm going alone."

Daniel nodded, unable to speak. He stood there, unable to move, unable to look at either woman. He stood for so very long, palms itching. Finally he could stand it no longer; he staggered from the room and shut the door behind himself, breathing hard.

Glass shattered downstairs, and he heard something like a scream. They were in the house now, all those uninvited guests. He went back down the hall to meet them.

He found Tom draped over the bannister. His cousin's shirt was torn and bloody, buttons ripped off and threads trailing. He lay face down, weeping, bloody mucus dribbling from his lips on the marble step. He looked up when Daniel came near, one of his eyes swollen shut.

"Danny," he whimpered, "Danny, is my sister back there? I have to see her."

Daniel just shook his head. "I don't know."

"Oh." Tom coughed, and spit out a wad of dark red phlegm. "Oh. Danny, I never killed a man before."

Daniel knelt beside his cousin. "What happened?"

Tom nodded. He looked sick. "Killed him with my bare hands, Danny, my goddamn hands. Killed him for nothing... I didn't even know his name..." Tom peered up at Daniel, his doughy skin shining with sweat. "It's really over, isn't it? It really is, and we're all going to die. The sun was supposed to come up by now, wasn't it?"

"I think so."

"Shit," Tom laughed. "Are we really this fucking useless?" He shook his head. "We were all killing drones down there... tore 'em to pieces... but I guess they won in the end."

"If you want to call it that."

"Shit... I need to find my sister."

Daniel watched as Tom staggered to his feet and wandered half-blind down the darkened hall.

He continued up the stairs. The Drone was floating on the top floor, watching.

Daniel stood beside the ancient machine. Neither of them spoke. Far below, the dark shapes of Daniel's guests writhed and clawed at each other, a few drone shells flashing their silver hides from within the confused tangle. They wailed, and centuries old glass shattered. Daniel could see through the front windows that the fire was creeping across the yard in a shimmering red wave, smoke rising in great gray furls against the empty sky.

The Drone spoke first. "I often wondered if we might be making a mistake," it said, voice cold and artificial, "if maybe you did deserve to live."

"Karen is leaving."

The Drone's eye-light flickered. "I know."

"How?"

"I told her to go. It's not safe to stay. It's going to get very cold here."

Daniel shook his head. He turned from the balcony and went into his father's study. Firelight flickered on the walls. Shelves crammed with ancient books filled the place from floor to the ceiling, ancient books that had never been opened, never been read. A massive desk dominated the room, high and heavy before an iron-ribbed windowpane.

The Drone drifted after him. "Sit down," it said, indicating the desk.

Daniel sat, stepping over a stack of musty papers. Copies of his father's will that had never been read. There hadn't seemed much point reading them. What could they have possibly said?

On one side of the desk, the old sliver pistol that his great grandfather had kept but never shot. On the other side, a slim box of matches and a new candle, wick still covered in a thin film of white wax. "What's this?" Daniel asked.

"A choice."

Daniel leaned back in the chair. The old wood creaked beneath him, leather cushions aching and straining. He smiled, bemused, "This convinced Karen? This is really all it took?"

"She already knew what to do. She's smarter than you, Daniel, though I suppose you know that already. Take the candle, leave. Or don't, and stay. It's your decision."

"I'll be dead either way."

"True. People don't last forever. You will freeze if you stay, but it will take some time. You would have a few years before the planet crumbles. Some life would be better than none."

"This is stupid, this little game here. This whole goddamn situation is ridiculous. You know that, don't you?"

The Drone looked at him, still and silent. "Perhaps. But I am an old thing, and entitled, I think, to some foolish eccentricity."

Daniel rested his chin in his hand, staring down at the objects on the desk. He could feel the thick shadows settling into his skin. "Why are you doing this to us?

"We're doing it _for_ you, Master Daniel. Think of it as a gift. You gave us your world, now we're giving it back."

"Don't call me that. I'm not a master of anything. Least of all you."

The Drone lowered itself slowly onto the old desk, metallic shell clicking softly when it touched down on the old wood. "If you want my recommendation," its voice was low, weakening, "you might try reading a book or two before you leave."

The green light faded then, and the machine rocked lifelessly on the desk.

Daniel lifted the machine in his hands. It was heavier than he'd thought it would be. He looked at the dead light, half expecting it to speak to him.

The Drone, of course, said nothing. He set it back down.

He picked up the candle and chipped wax idly from the wick. Below, he could hear the guests tearing apart the lifeless drones, pulling the dead things to pieces. The metal shells screeched as they tore, and the mob made the house growl and tremble to its roots. Everything was turned off now. Total shutdown. Deeper in the house, deep in darkness, his mother would be dying.

Daniel set the candle upright on the desk, mashing the soft wax down onto the wood to keep it standing. He scratched a match across the striker, watched it flare to life. The flame touched the wick, and nothing happened for a moment as the last bits of wax melted away. Then the wick caught the flame, flaring angrily.

A thin tear of wax flowed down the length of the candle, hardening before it touched the desk.

The pistol gleamed, silver metal alive with reflected fire. Daniel picked it up and held it, considering the weight of the thing. It looked different in the light, less cold, somehow less frightening.

The untended fires in the yard had filled the yard, crept up to the walls of the estate. They had brought themselves to the door, licked it with their flickering tongues. A savage evolution from spark to ash, and a relentless drive across the world only to end in swift extinction.

Daniel went to the window, and he looked down, pistol still cradled in his hands. The ancient house, home of his family for centuries, was burning.

### Patterning

_Where is she?_ He wanders aimlessly in memory.

* * *

On the day of his birth he looked for her. Signs carved deep in the world, words cut into living stone and images breathing. In the absence of sound, resonance quivering the fragile air and filling his head with its vibration. In the fine thin hairs on the backs of his fingers and on his knuckles that like glass disappear until they came again against light and show in a wisp and a gossamer reflection. In the round red bead of blood which wells from his paper-cut skin like a moth spat wet from its chrysalis.

* * *

She is winding her toes in the dry grass, and beyond flows clear water.

* * *

It is near the end of July today. The sun always seems to grow in the summer, that blistered sphere expanding to an angry watchfulness and humming in the sky. The sun and moon a great pendulum seen through the haze of cloud. The swarms of mosquitoes gathered in clouds of their dead over the burned surface of the water. The lake which today makes old men thirsty. Coals idly simmering and cool glass bottles in their weathered hands as they stare out at a dying star driven earthwards. The smell of the cut grass perfumes her, and sheared blades poke up softly between her pale toes.

* * *

He, sitting and waiting, listening.

She, limbs coiled, and so many things she wants to tell.

* * *

Something to keep in mind:

Existence is requisite to expression. The primary force of creation is emotion. If he told you then that he felt nothing. I was lying. Here's the thing. It might not make any sense to you now, and it may never, and it may never to me, but the arrangement of image into pattern is as sure a path to truth as it is the evidence of life. Lemme see here, if life is truth than death is a lie. No? I was lying. Gibberish – recognition, the words between words, the first step to truth. Nonsense.

* * *

Narrative:

She started smoking when she was sixteen and smoked all her life until she turned thirty-four and died in an automotive accident. She never told her mother the truth about herself, and now she is dead and her mother wonders in her old age what else she does not know.

* * *

The question is, can truth emerge from randomness? Must truth be measured and weighed to be, you know, true? Or can it come from dissonance, from chaos, from an order so broken and crumbled that its structure can't support it? I suppose it goes back to one's fundamental understanding of the universe.

Truth: I exist. Two choices: My existence is determined OR my existence is chance. Choose the second option. Two choices: chance is meaningless OR chance is not meaningless. Choose the second option. Now explain why.

How can words on a page express anything? Is there enough potency in language to pick at the loose threads of meaning, to untangle a definition without causing the simultaneous collapse of that which is revealed? Roundabout solipsism. Words piled on words piled on words until they lose their shape, lose their meaning.

* * *

Narrative Evolution:

She held the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger. In her other hand she crushed the empty pack. Thin cardboard, plastic lining like cling-film; it crumpled in her fist and fell to the trash can with the sound of metal.

She picked up the clay ashtray from the kitchen counter and carried it to the chair in front of the dead television. Her husband bought the ashtray in the early nineties from the gift-shop at the Indian museum in California. It was painted a glossy enamel blue on the outside, with little off-white buffalo skulls ringing the edge. The inside was red clay, stained dark from years of ash and fire. A box of wooden matches sat inside the bowl.

When the match lit it snapped. The fire coming alive sounded like the little breaking wood. The flame sputtered and went silent, waving.

She lit the cigarette and shook the match until it left behind an arc of smoke, and she put it in the ashtray. Only half used, the cream-colored wood was black and shriveled. Her husband's matches were never more than half used. She smoked without thinking. The tip of the cigarette glowed in the dark house, she held it away a moment to look at it.

Fifteen years ago, he set the ashtray down on the kitchen table beside the dinner she had cooked for him. The leftover Christmas ham, uneaten and now reheated. Potatoes. He put a cigarette between his lips but did not light it.

They fought. She didn't remember the things she had said. Didn't remember what she had been upset about. Those details were all slipping away. How much he had irritated her, how much she had felt herself abused by him, how much the smell of smoke used to make her throat tighten and her eyes water when she came home and found him staring mindlessly into the television screen while the cigarette between his lips burned down toward his rough tongue.

She had forgotten those things. His identity sloughed from him like a crust, eroding with time until what was left seemed almost to shine. All she could remember were the things she missed, and the way he had looked at her when they fought that night. Like a stung dog, his eyes begging for understanding, for love. Hardening to bitterness as he shut the trailer door behind him. Dying had done wonders for his character.

She remembered the sound of his car rumbling to shaky life in the buggy dusk. The sound through the open window, shade drawn against the faltering daylight. She remembered going limp in her chair when the door closed, all the emotion ebbing from her as she stared, transfixed, at the steam rising from the thick pink slices of ham, from the potatoes with skin the color of dirt. Steam rising like smoke.

She remembered sitting alone at the table, looking at the window, where five minutes before the sun had made a burning circle of light, like a point of hard radiation cutting through the plastic shade.

She had let him go that night. Let him vanish from her mind like fumes tugged on by the wind, dissipating to a black smear on the sky.

Now she sat in the dark, letting those little gray curls of acrid smoke fill the trailer, and she listened to the voices of the newsreaders, to the sound of their words absent meaning.

* * *

Something else to keep in mind:

Communication is the engine of human development. Yesterday I went to the release party of the student literary magazine. Images projected against the wall, shifting from one photo to the next, cycling in an endless circular procession. "It was supposed to be artistic, but it's just blinding," he said. I sat in the chair in the second row from the front, leaning against a heavy square pillar. And I watched people talking.

Someone spoke to me, and I spoke back. I can't remember what we said, he with a glass bottle in his hand and me with my arms folded. The chairs were horrible. I said to him that I wished I had stayed on the cushioned couch at the back of the room.

By the time the band finished playing my ass was killing me.

* * *

Narrative Exigence:

The high school was the gray color of a chalk board that had never been cleaned. Crusted old snow had been ground to a muddy slush in a wide rim around the building.

Gena found Patrick smoking by the dumpsters in the teacher's parking lot. He leaned against the wall, just beside the rusted-iron hulks spilling fast-food wrappers on the salted asphalt. The heavy door beside him was always locked; strictly for janitorial use. Across the parking lot, there was a small crowd gathered to watch Kevin Torres fighting Quinton Gillian. Patrick was watching them from a distance, in that half-disdainful and half-lonely way of his.

"What are you doin' back here?" she asked him, standing with her bag held in front of her like a flimsy polyester shield. "You were supposed to meet Molly and me yesterday to work on our science project... You remember?"

He looked at her. He had thick black eyebrows that quivered up and down his heavy brow when he laughed and once in fourth grade once on a field trip to the zoo where he'd seen a lion tearing at a dead squirrel with its salivated teeth, its mouth a warm pink cut that stank of rotting meat.

He said, "I forgot. Sorry."

She stood closer to him. Kevin shouted that Quinton was a motherfucker and pushed him against one of the teacher's rusted old Volvos so that the alarm began to shrill, and Quinton called Kevin a sonofabitch; his words slurring together. Gena wondered, not for the first time, what it was about guys and their moms, and thanked g.o.d. that she didn't have any brothers.

"When did you start smoking, Patrick?" she asked.

He seemed surprised by the question, and took the cigarette from between his lips. He held it out in front of him and studied it as though seeing it for the first time. "Do either of your parents smoke?"

She shook her head. "Not anymore."

"Was it your dad?"

"That used to smoke?"

"Yeah."

"No. My mom."

"Huh," Patrick smiled, and put the cigarette back between his lips. He had a bright mouth, almost like he wore red lipstick, or had just drunk blood. "Why'd she quit?"

"I don't know." Gena shrugged, "Just quit, I guess. Not healthy. Why don't you quit?"

"What are you wearing?" he asked.

Gena down looked at herself, checking that she hadn't come to school in something embarrassing. Tight black pants with white flower patterns sewn into the back pockets. Pale blue barrettes in her black hair. Gray jacket over red t-shirt. "See for yourself," she said, annoyed.

"I like girls in skirts." He grinned, shaking his head.

"Fuck off!" She stepped away from him.

"Fine," he said, "you don't tell me to quit smoking, I won't tell you how to dress."

"Okay, okay. I get it. Are you going to meet with Molly and me or not?"

He ground his cigarette against the side of the dumpster. "Yeah, yeah. No problem. Is tomorrow okay? At her house, right?"

Gena flipped open her phone and started typing. "I'll text her."

"You do that."

She sent the message. There was no reply. She stared down at the little screen, waiting. Someone across the parking lot screeched, and someone whooped, and Patrick's sneakers shuffled listlessly away.

When she looked up, Patrick was gone, Quentin was bashing Kevin's head against the pavement while everyone around them laughed and filmed it on their camera phones. The security guard was huffing across the parking lot, barking at the crowd.

Above them, scattered clouds were gathering into dense black shapes over the school.

* * *

He, expectant: "So, what do you think?"

She, indulgent: "Oh, it's... interesting."

He, disappointed and then irritated: "Just interesting? You're just saying that... Look, don't you get what I'm trying to do here? It's not about the cohesion to a central idea or theme. It's like... all this stuff out there is following some kinda celestial pattern, you know? The big idea in the center, and everything revolves around that. I'm making a whole galaxy, but there's nothing at the center, no big thoughts, not message, just..."

She, annoyed: "Just a scattering of dead planets? Come on! There's nothing alive in this, and don't try to tell me that I don't _get it_ , or some bullshit. You're just grasping here, filling space, killing time, waiting for the world to end."

He, astonished: "That's not it at all, I... I'm trying to..."

* * *

You sat by the windows, fingers frozen over the keys. You raise your hand to your face, working your fingers aimlessly, watching the bones pressing against you, watching the veins shift pale beneath the skin. Your fingernails are chewed down to a ragged white edge. You think of when they were grown out, painted in glimmering colors that defused the sunlight, and of the time they were painted black, and you watched the shell chip away a little bit more each day and you wonder if you were to see it time lapsed if it would look like a coat of crude oil sliding fluidly away.

You looked away from the screen, typing again but not looking at what you write. Every once in a while you glance back and check the mistakes you made. Not wright, write, not ever, every. And you fix them.

This is what you see through the window:

It's gray out today, the kind of pale overcast that seems dark only when viewed from inside. It's still warm out, but there is no evidence of sun. The pine trees which line the hill are gnarled and twisted. The copper-tone bark flakes like dead skin.

There was a tree in your front yard, a pine tree twisting and needled just beside the drive. You used to climb it with your sister. There were no low branches, so you needed her to give you a leg up to the first branch. She was taller, so she could jump up after you'd scrabbled a little further in, and she would loop her hands around the branch so that she would hang there for a moment with her fingers interlaced, her arms in a smooth oval around her head, her feet swinging twelve inches off the ground. And then she'd put her sneakers against the flaky bark, and she would shuffle up into the tree, flakes tumbling after. Your hands would be gummy with sap when you got down. The tree was cut down when you were twelve years old. Your memories of the tree are vague, indistinct. You catch yourself wondering sometimes if there ever was a tree, or if you only imagined it.

The paths below are paved black, and they cross and wind into each other in a vast haphazard web, making little islands of grass that seem manicured, like artificial turf that looks so clean and bright at first but when you touch it the blades scruff up against your hands and you wonder if it could cut through your skin which seems so thin and fragile.

There is a forest on the other side of the road.

You look at the gray sky, and you think of the sun passing behind the cloud. You think about time, and you begin to worry, because you know that soon, you will not remember any of this. Someday you will dream of the place beyond these windows, and when you wake you will be gripped with an unexplainable fear, because you have gone somewhere so far away from now. You will not be this person anymore.

But in this moment you are here: the wind is ruffling the shaggy green fingers of the pines, and the tall windows of the apartment building are reflecting light.

### Table of Contents

Here Then Is a Dead Thing

The Terminus

A Prayer Before the Execution

Now Wait For Yesterday

Thumb

Beneath the Waves

Slaughter Dogs

SugarFree

Waiting for a Train

Pure Sea Glass

A Ghost in the Shipyard

Strangerland

Io, Saturnalia

Patterning

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pwcooper.wordpress.com
