 
Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears

Stories by James Comins

Smashwords Edition

Published by James Comins on Smashwords

Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain

and the Mountain Disappears

Copyright 2012 James Comins

Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form.

Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

This book is a collection of fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead, places, events or locales is purely coincidental.

If you enjoyed this book, please visit the author's Smashwords page at

<http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jamescomins>

**Table of Contents**

The Soft Operative  
The Silent Pasture  
Maxwell's Demon  
Red Sox Yankees  
The Old Open Door  
The Woman on the Other Side  
Four Seasons of a Man: Spring  
Four Seasons of a Man: Summer  
Four Seasons of a Man: Autumn  
Four Seasons of a Man: Winter  
A Guide to the Apocalypse, by Henrietta Stevensen, Age 46  
Who's Afraid of the Big Beowulf?  
Moonwalk  
The Sky Fell  
Places  
The Coffin Worms  
The Death of Piers Plowman, or, The Barley-Child  
The Singsonger  
The Rise of Arch-Lord Evil  
Matt and Maggie  
About the Author

The Soft Operative

The burnt cinnamon smoke of the flares crept up to the rusting high-carbon ledge. Twinkling red LED eyes reflected off the aluminum towers and poles far below, clouded by the chemical burn of layered smog between the distant ground floor and the security platform. The grated catwalks were cantilevered over the deep, valleying gulfs of metal that formed the outlying harbors and aerospace ports of the conglomerate.

It wasn't a factory--the word rang with thoughts of tiny, archaic leather conveyor belts and oblong spinning cogs and the cold, authentic authority of preprogrammed robots that Colombian automobile manufacturers still used to produce the little gas-powered scootermobiles that delivered illicit Vioxx and DDT to developing nations. The word for Martial Industrial wasn't "plant" either: a plant was a fabrication site for brightly colored chemicals and girders and wires thicker than the thighs in a Dutch whorehouse.

The Martial Industries conglomerate, a rumpled patchwork sheet of corrugated aluminum draped over a concourse larger than Texas, was a core. A department store for the military-industrial complex, the core stretched for miles in any direction, including straight up and straight down. Many of its power stations were geothermal, huge turbines creaking away so far underground and in such perfect unison that a rumbling heart-murmur emanated through the steel beams and rebar up to the transit gondolas suspended a thousand feet above the roof, making the gondola cars hum and sing as they skittered through the moldy skies. At the same time, since the increasingly swampy atmosphere didn't block out the sun yet, elevated sheets of photovoltaics and orbital-beam microwave plants hung above, the light refracting off each little brown cloud in the soggy sky.

I looked down over the edge of the platform. To understand the depth of vision I was seeing, crouched over the guardrail of the security monitoring station, think about perspective. Normally, parallel lines appear to converge in the distance, although they never quite touch until they reach the horizon. From where I was huddled, looking down, all the aluminum seams stretching out below me faded to blue-gray long before they vanished in the smog. Grubby rivets clung to thin, flush aluminum panels, stretching down to checkerboard oblivion. I turned away. There was more than enough metal and clouds here to occupy me without diving into vertigo at the same time.

Rappelling down metal siding is quick and painful--no way to slow yourself except by ramming your feet through a window and ducking inside, orangutan-style. The security AI was offline for an emergency patch job. It was a hack-and-slash response to a very delicate and subtle subterfuge I uploaded with one of Sarah's old security clearances. The antiquity of the clearance code was obvious and the bug was caught before it got close enough to smell the digital smog, but the sabotage virus clearly outlined a potential security breach that a real employee with a real clearance code might be able to take advantage of. No one in a position to do so actually would, of course--no one with the credentials to get a desk job at the core would possibly consider jeopardizing that status. There was just too much money and too few corporate jobs. But no corporation was going to tell its stockholders that it didn't try to stick all its fingers in the leaky dike just because there wasn't any water on the other side.

An AI servo was strung together to patch the hole. It took their processors about three microseconds to write the code, but uploading to the entire intranet of a building the size of Texas takes up to three minutes, just enough time to stage a meat invasion. Security nowadays focuses on quantum software malfunctions, overloads, and q-jump sabotage, a way of using fishbowl computers to remotely alter data--sort of like tossing a solar flare through a memory bank. No one ever expects a computer attack in person, so with a few precautions you and your meat can just walk into the core and dick around with hardware.

In a massive bank of legacy computer parts like the ones they use to store old information at the core, a computer part must, must, must be easily accessible if god forbid it should break. There are simply too many pieces in a corporate information retrieval system, and eventually a random power short makes the solder overheat and the plastic burn.

Nowadays, any hunk of silicon with information in it is always backed up by at least one redundant hunk of silicon. They both say the same thing. If the first hunk of silicon goes up in smoke, you flip a little plastic toggle, pull the silicon out, and throw it away. Eventually another hunk of silicon exactly like it will take its place and copy the data. Easy.

When sabotaging information-retrieval systems, synchronicity is the mother of invention. As long as every checksum matches up with everything else, no one bothers to review it. Even autism-AI code relays won't see the error. All you have to do is swap out all the hardware cabinets in a redundant array, swap in new ones, hit the on button, and wait for everything to purr into motion. It doesn't really matter what information the new drives have on them, because the chance that anyone will actually need the information is microscopic. The practical upshot is, you can steal a block of data from the core with impunity.

I skittered along cheap, mottled carpeting down an interior corridor. High-traffic carpet muffles your footsteps, and the air conditioning mutes the long, tenuous echoes. The hallway had the dank, dim fluorescence of a place human beings could go if they wanted to but never did. No respectable bureaucrat would have an office out this far away from the center of the core, and soft operatives had their own clearly-marked stations. This was safe no-man's-land, the back alleys built by the janitors, for the janitors. Boxes of flickering blue striplights were set into the ceiling, nestled in between the Swiss cheese tiles. Spindly metal sprinklers added a festive flair. No one had bothered to pay for closed-circuit cameras out this far, so I was safe until some no-account employee showed up in person.

It was as comfortable and welcoming as those segmented pipe-ramps you stumble onto when you disembark a commercial airline flight. Further and further down the irregularly sloping and angling passage, I crossed small patches of darkness where all the fluorescent lights had flickered out. I butted through the odd set of double fire doors with the little windows and long metal push-strips for doorknobs, the ones designed so wheelchair people can get through . . .

I was looking for a professional-looking unmarked door, the sort that would lead to a tech center or engineering storeroom. There's always some useless junk in the backwashes of an office environment, and there's always that one room where all the storage space for all the computers is kept. I burst through another set of fire doors, started down the hall, and then realized what I'd gotten myself into.

I know there're legacy silicon computers in the core. I've seen them. They're plentiful and expansive. But this corridor was not a security corridor for a legacy silicon computer array, although it had sure looked like one. It looked just like an array corridor. But it wasn't.

This was a soft operative cel.

The smell of putrefying tissue clung to my nose the moment I passed through the double doors. Airlocks. That's what they were. And the Formica ceiling tiles were vapor diffusers. Beneath my feet the carpet squelched with sick-smelling moisture, then ended with one of those brass carpet-trim strips. From here on out the floor was slick, damp corrugated steel, the sort that has diamond-shaped bumps so that you can keep your footing. Organic smells wafted out of the irregularly-structured doorways. The soft gray doorframes were curved, arching up to form a smooth loop, crusted with skin and pulsing with unseen, half-atrophied human capillaries. Just my luck to end up in the one spot in the core with no hard drives whatsoever. Unable to restrain my curiosity in the light of good sense, personal hygiene or time constraints, I peered in.

Eyes looked up at me. Lots of them. All different shapes and sizes. Some were elongated, some were pinpoints, most were asymmetrical. Few seemed to possess frontal-lobe intelligence, but a number of them were cognizant of my presence there. Even some of the faces whose eyes were shaded by monitors or wired goggles or socketed to pipes or who simply didn't have eyes turned their heads towards me, drawn by sound or light fluctuation or telepathy or something. The faces were neither alarmed nor defensive, merely curious. Feeding tubes swarmed around each of the mouths, so I forgave them all for not asking me questions about what I was doing. Being on a corporate sabotage mission is a lonely business, after all. On the other hand, I perversely wanted to know what _they_ were doing. At the very least, the information might be worth more than anything on a data drive.

From the HUD layouts visible on the monitors, I decided the cel was an engineering-repair center, the sort of back-alley techie bunker where Geordie LaForge would have hidden his porn stash underneath a plastic panel full of red and green LED lights and color-coded wires. The soft operatives seemed to be remotely controlling something--probably "hard operatives," come to think of it, the brainless repetitive robot arms and mechanical Swiss Army knives that fluttered around aerospace complexes fixing things. The robot arms were probably acting under the supervision of these guys here.

The cel was driven by semi-human brains scattered throughout the irregular masses of flesh and bone, most of which were probably linked to external memory drives. I remember reading about the arguments between the group of genetic developers who insisted on treating soft operatives as human, giving them light and heat and pleasure centers that could be accessed on a conscious level, and the group of genetic developers who kept trying to digitize everything. They implanted electrodes everywhere, disabled sensory inputs and audio outputs, and recreated the human body into these practical little lumps of fused bone and epidermis. They were the ones who won out, eventually.

It smelled awful, what a chocolate cake would smell like if you buried it in the Florida Everglades for a few years. No need to worry about the smell if your employees don't have noses, but to me it smelled as if they had tried to teach a herd of camels to dance like the Rockettes. Organic odors clung to the inside of my nose like a GI to the last baby out of Saigon.

Time running short. No action I took in the next minute and a half would register on security. What the hell, I grabbed the most important-looking soft operative, a smug, squat little Kewpie doll with a spiked external backbone and no eyes, tucked it into my bag and ran like hell out of that place. Climbing a nylon rope with a duffel under your arm is slow and painful. I swung my leg up over the railing and pushed the sail craft over the side of the core.

The sail craft, an aluminum can with a rotor and a tendency to shine sunlight directly into my eyes, hummed to life just below the layer of colorful plumes of noxious gases and just above the radio and microwave transmitter towers with the blinking red lights. The sail craft was a cross between a dinghy, a Chinese kite and the Wright brothers biplane, a little aluminum ultralight that could take off and land almost vertically. Even with a heat-diffusing aluminum chassis, the bench seat was seething hot from the sun streaming through the gases, and I had to keep hopping from side to side to keep my butt from burning. Sweat made the legs of my trousers stick together, squelching and peeling off the dirt and grime-covered seat. I maneuvered past the outskirts of the complex and into the raw sunlight.

The Silent Pasture

Beauty and the beast sat in the garden of Eden, waiting for a tree to grow. Beauty named the woodland creatures while the beast dug its claws into the topsoil. That will make it harder for the tree to grow, she said. The beast growled at a rose-hip.

In truth, Beauty had never known anyone like the beast. Thorns covered its boots, and its topcoat was sewn of peacock-feather lace that she had stitched herself. The beast was meticulous to keep its topcoat tidy, almost as if (she thought) it cherished her affection. Carrots and parsnips grew beneath them and the beast pulled them to the surface. She washed the carrots and parsnips, and they would eat. Thank yous and pleases hung in the air, like dust motes in light, but were never spoken. After all, the beast couldn't answer back.

Beauty's eyes were gray and wide open all day long. Sometimes Beauty wondered if the beast was looking at her. They could share the world through sight, she thought. It could not be blind, after all. The wide garden would be so difficult to move in, and the beast was so very graceful. She wondered if it practiced at night, as she slept, practiced delicate grace to show her in the morning. To Beauty, nothing less would be believable.

Night was peace, for Beauty. In sleep she always found herself in the same tranquil dream. In a room with no doors or windows, she sat in front of a curious dresser made of boxes. Each box held the head of an animal. Beauty would imagine she heard them speak, and it was a comfort--the beast, had he been in my dream, she thought often, would speak. Words of love. Words of such love.

Never did the beast sleep. It keeps watch for the tree, Beauty told herself. For it was a wise old thing. It must have seen acorns grow to leafy forests and still it keeps watch, she imagined. At night, the wide garden grows, she told herself, and the beast watches it grow from its place by my side. The hard edge of its muddy print was always there, right beside her head, the night vigil of the beast.

* * *

The beast bit down on a rabbit and let it run away. The rabbit would heal by daybreak. It always did. If too much joy filled the garden, the tree would begin to grow, the beast thought. The beast couldn't let that happen, for Beauty's sake. He kept telling himself that she'd never survive.

The garden was small, tangled, and green with red and orange trumpet-shaped flowers wending through ivy and vines. Beyond the garden on all sides was pasture, always empty. The beast thought this chill emptiness was enough reason. No place so chalk-like, so vacant, seen through such haze could be enough for Beauty. Enough for them both.

While it was, after all, true that the beast knew where he was, knew what an ocean or a desert or a moonscape might look like, he had for so long seen the same parsnips growing in the same place, seen the same ivy and rose-hips and bleeding rabbits, that the beast could no longer remember _why_ he lived in the garden of Eden. That was too far in the past. He alone had known, and he had forgotten. All he knew was that Beauty must not change, must not see the tree grow. Her luminosity, her grace. The beast wondered if she was in love with him.

A flicker of memory, but that was all.

Maxwell's Demon

1965. It was October in St. Louis, the leafy bald October, horses coughing out filmy billows in the cold snap that takes the rolling Mississippi time and again. Old Chet the paint docked his head, trotting before the surrey as me and Momma and Pop got in line with the folk from the riverfront, masses of uptown gentry, wharf scroungers, Negroes, a few bearded Chinamen. Some on foot, some in hacks, women sitting dainty on the backs of ponies. The arch they was building was half-complete, visible down the way from where the rivers met.

The telegraph tower was a rickety thing, about to tumble. We gathered under it, waiting. The man at the top, at the tall meeting of the wires, wore a bowler and a string tie, Boston-style. Even from down here under the linen surrey bonnet, you could see his sweat and twitching fingers as he bent over the key, the country stare and the sense of purpose.

Everyone had heard the talk: they had made a machine in San Francisco that could talk to the demon. The Nazis in their fancy Paris labs could do it. The demon could pump power to ships and motor carriages and sky-machines. Truman had asked Einstein about it years ago, and he had confirmed it. If word came down from Washington, we too might have a way of dividing light from darkness. Just like the good Lord did, once and away.

A noise like a beehive in a storm. Sizzling like I never heard took up across the wire. The operator's tongue was pink in the corner of his mouth as he furiously translated Morse code onto paper with a stub of a pencil.

A bird landed on the traveling wire and fell to cinders.

The buzz of the line faded, and good talk was struck up. Pop called up from the board, asking for the news, but the whoop stopped him short.

"The engines are turning! The engines are turning! Thank God Almighty, the engines are turning!"

Red Sox Yankees

A man stood in the shadow of the thirty-story brick library. An umbrella was tucked under one arm. He stubbed out his cigarette with the tip of his heel. Rain broke and drenched him. Waiting was the easy part.

She came alone, the only colorful thing in sight. Embracing, becoming one shadow, the girl and the boy began the long walk up to the riot.

A single automobile trekked past along the curve of the center road, beneath caged trees with broad branches. It was not yet winter. A few meandering foreign students were missing the game. Everyone else was inside watching.

They had been talking about the players on the team. She was telling him who was Puerto Rican like her, who was Dominican, who was Cuban. Everyone was one or the other. Lightning hit the old South College, not too far behind them, a sound like a slow whip. He didn't understand the game. She was explaining. The city needed to win, she said.

"Do you know what it's like for everyone to think you're a loser?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

The tunnel hid them until they reached the southwest quad, where the riots were to take place. Highrises filled with flickering televisions sounded ooh's and aah's at every play. They held hands and waited at the tunnel mouth.

People only left the building to smoke cigarettes, one big drag before dashing through wedge-propped doors, desperate to return.

Someone peed out of an upper-story window, matched by enthusiastic voices.

The rain cut away to misty late nothing. Her hand was cold. After a while, their hips touched and he laid a hand at the pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled her beside him. Thin short fingers wrapped his shoulder and they didn't talk anymore.

The misty five towers lost their mist as the game hit a long rally. Muddy grass waited. The entire city took the last gasp.

Roaring became a collective euthanasia for every anger, every humiliation. Every ball and strike elicited gasps from twentieth-floor windows. She stood on tiptoe and poked her nose in his cheek. They kissed. The game ended and the doors exploded open. Tall young men carried toilet paper rolls toward the little caged trees.

"I hope no one dies," he said.

"Why?" she replied.

The frisbee amphitheater between the towers filled with people. Shouts and hoots were the air. Chants began. Toilet paper streaked the sky. Three girls mud-wrestled, while a group of boys cheered. More girls joined. Angry underdressed men took spray cans and beer cans into the tunnel, elbowing past the girl. Spray hit the brown brick. The boy looked frightened. The girl held him and watched everything.

Encased in mud, the wrestlers began a hugging campaign. Light rain touched everyone with a winterness. The chanting became louder and angrier and dirtier. He clenched his fingers around her and wondered if she would protect him. As the crowd continued to burst forth from the doors, the bowl filled and the seedier people sought refuge in the tunnel. Smoke and light and sickly narcotics billowed out. She led him through narrow gaps to the outer rim of the mud pit. Fists pumped and catharsis roiled.

"I wish I felt this way," he said.

"You will," she said from his arm.

Briefly, he joined the simpler chants, even tried clapping with all the angry men. It was, however, a shirt that was not his size. She smiled sadly at him and led him to the street, toward the downtown cafes. A frat house was strewn with stolen furniture. They watched as men lit a fire on an overturned sofa and tossed unopened beer cans onto the nascent disaster. Women cheered.

They went closer to the hub of the city.

Down a sidestreet was commotion.

"I want to be there when it happens," she said to him.

"Why?" he asked.

Different screams came from a rundown street of rundown houses. Police were there. He kept her away; she delighted in being a witness. A man was on his back, screaming. Sirens sounded. Men rushed out of a house and smashed the police car windows. They flipped the police cars. They took away cordons. They barricaded the doors. An ambulance took away the screaming man, whose leg was a swollen smashed-up thing.

He turned her away. She kept looking as they crossed the street.

The cafes and bars were full. She pushed him through the standing flesh. People brushed against him, elbows and knees and a stray breast. He shuddered at her smiling hand. It was his first bar, but the Sam Adams she brought him was not his first beer. There were no tables. A crash from the upstairs dance floor brought police and ambulances to the bar. She led him out.

"We didn't pay," he said.

"Don't tell," she said.

They moved through the departing bar crowd and went back to the riot. It was too dark to walk outside the radius of streetlights. Policemen smashed boomboxes, so boomboxes were moved into dormitory windows. Further in, lights flashed around the bowl. At the crest of a curbed hill under trees, they watched paddywagons take everyone. She let go of his hand and left him there. She entered the circle of police, crouching between unoccupied cars, and got into line for the paddy wagons.

He watched. She waved.

The Old Open Door

Flowers bloom, and they bloom bright  
I can't tell the tale again  
The starlings catch the deadest night  
I'll tell you each as I can.

They took her when the last mouse sang  
This tale is growing colder  
They carried a bag and a paring knife  
Her tomb will grayly moulder.

I went to the graveyard where they told me she lay  
I can't tell the tale again  
She was laid out, but headless, for they cut it away  
I'll tell you each as I can.

The flowers lay where the shears had cut  
This tale is growing colder  
That old open door had once been shut  
Her tomb will grayly moulder.

She walks, she walks, of this I'm sure  
I can't tell the tale again  
I hear her knocking on the old open door  
I'll tell you it all as I can.

So now you've heard all that I may tell  
And I won't be telling more  
Now pour me a pint of the darkest ale  
And I'll up and shut the door.

The Woman on the Other Side

Janice woke up in the hospital, feeling alone. The catheter itched, but she hesitated to pull it out, not knowing if it would wet the sheets. Surveying the dark out the window and the dimmed rheostat lights, she realized that the other bed, shrouded by a tattered cream-colored screen, was occupied.

A ruby-red light blipped on the wall behind her, next to a little chain, like an old-fashioned draw-pull toilet. She pulled it and waited.

Minutes passed. Minutes and minutes and minutes. The nurse's red-dyed hair swung past the door window without stopping. So invisible.

"Hello?" The voice that rattled from her was not her own. "I need a telephone. Hello?"

That other nurse, the bushy blonde, popped the door open, stuck her head in. "Your cell is right where you left it, Janice."

"How do I use it? Do I press nine?"

"Just hold down one, two or three, Janice. Like they showed you."

She pressed one. "Hello?"

"Jan?" The voice quavered, like she was talking into a mirror. "What are you calling to talk to me about?"

"I was going to ask you the same question!" She laughed. "I'm here, where they put me."

"How they treatin' you?" the mirror-voice asked her.

"Waaell, they've put a tube into me and stole my panties, but they're all very nice to me here. They've got a red nurse and a blonde nurse, and I feel just about like the queen of hearts. Anyways, I guess a warm bed's more than some folks get. Alls I can hope for is to get better before I die." She laughed again. "Nothing like death to wake you up and get you out of bed."

"What can I do to help, Jan?"

A gentle shaking woke her up. It was the nurse with the dyed-red hair. "Would you like me to hold the phone for you?"

Her mouth sagged open. "I was just talking to . . ." The name left her. " Just now."

"I think you fell asleep, Jan." The nurse pointed to the cell phone dangling from Jan's hand. "Maybe you ought to go back to sleep." She lifted the little clamshell, folded it shut, set it on the bedside stand. Janice nodded contentedly and laid her head back. The nurse departed.

A sound came from the bed on the opposite side, not quite words. It rasped, helpless and frightened against the faint hum of tube-strung machines. Must be a woman, for her to be in the same room.

"Hello, missy." Janice chuckled to herself. "Stuck in the same boat, huh?" The harsh breath continued. "Janice Harris. Jan. Out here from just under St. Paul. Town called St. Peter. Bad omen, eh?" She tried stretching her arms and caught the IV tower before it fell. "Are you local? I don't get up to town as much as I used to. Old legs, old truck, old eyes." She arched her back. "It's all old these days. Family come up to see you much?"

A nasal grunt met her, a pthhht and a moan.

"Got you on oxygen, have they? I had to get a _machine_ after the first operation. Took me a month to get over the sneezing!"

The redheaded nurse came in and turned a knob.

Jan woke up in a different room, feeling alone. The IV needle had been removed. There ought to be a doctor here, telling her how she was doing, or a crowd of family she could scold. With a start, she realized the breathing tube was back; she sneezed involuntarily.

The cell phone rang its dingaling tootle. Unsteadily she picked it up, felt it shake as she pried it apart.

"Hello? Is this one, two or three?"

"It's me, mom." The voice was unmistakable.

"Dolores! Oh, thank God! Let me tell you, they've taken me out of my room and brought me out here. I made a friend and they took her away, too. It's like they're taking bits and pieces of me away," Jan cackled.

The voice on the other end sighed. "It's Maggie, Ma. Button one. Your daughter."

"No, no, button one gets me to the other end of the line. You must be number two!" Jan's stomach gurgled. "Speakin' a which. Could you tell the front desk that I need a bedpan, Maggie dear?

"Ma, you've called me four times today. This is the first time you've answered back. I've been worried sick."

"Well, they've been moving me here from the other side. My friend's probably worried sick now, too, so don't you bite my head off." Crying slipped out of the little telephone. "Oh, don't start that, dear. Tears eat the soul. That other woman is going through an awful lot, but she keeps it together. Say, you know who never cried? Who I never saw cry, not once? Was Dad. Let me tell you, and this isn't easy for me, but . . . Dad always liked you best."

" _What_? Really?" the other voice sniffled.

"That's right, and don't forget it. I'm tired, so I'm going to get off the line."

"Okay."

"I'll talk to you tomorrow, Dolores."

Jan collapsed into the pillow. "I need a bedpan!" she called. Her hand grasped for the pullcord, but it was on the other side of the room, now. "I need a bedpan! Hey!"

An angry red dream followed, something deeply imperfect.

When she awoke, someone was standing beside her.

She woke up, feeling alone. The little phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Mom? It's Randy. How've you been?"

"Well, to tell you the truth, dear, I've been lonely. Nobody visits me and nobody calls."

"What? I've told Maggie to call you a thousand times! She hasn't called?"

"I was talking to my sister just a minute ago. How old is she now, Randy?"

"Inez is 92, mom."

"No, no, I mean Maggie. Is she talking?"

"Apparently not enough," Randy barked. "I'm going to call her."

"Give her my love, Randy darling."

Janice pressed the red button on the phone, laid her head back. The cream-colored divider ruffled slightly as the ceiling fan clicked on. A low wheeze rattled from the other bed.

"Have you seen my husband?" Janice croaked to the other side of the room. "Not that I'm expecting to find him, poor soul passed on last spring. But have you . . . seen him?" Another rattle. "Such a man. Strong lines, a good mustache, and his hands! He made furniture. Cabinets, hutches, chairs. Did all his own upholstery, too. His hands were the best leather. I remember him playing baseball with the kids, pitching with one of those big baseballs, whatever they're called. His hand could grip it like a marble. So gentle, my Howie. I do miss him."

"Where is he?" asked the woman on the other side.

"Oh, you're awake. Hope it wasn't me that woke you. What's your name, anyway?"

"Where's your husband now?" asked the old voice.

"He's in the cemetery, dear, like I said."

"Sounds like quite a man."

"That he was. And funny! Always quick with a joke. "

"I'd like to meet him, " the other woman said.

"Have met, dear, have met. But enough about that. Let the living dwell on the living. We raised two wonderful children." Jan sighed and laid back in the bed. "I wish they knew."

On the other end of the phone, Maggie was yelling at her, asking her about medicine, something upsetting. "Was I a bad mother?" Janice asked the phone. That shut it up, gave her a moment of peace.

"Don't use the past tense, Ma."

"Am I a bad mother?" Janice repeated.

"No, Ma, no, of course you're not. I didn't mean that. I'm just saying that you need to . . . to hold on the best you can. You can't tell Randy that I never call or visit. You know how he gets about that."

"Oh, I know, I know, dear. He sometimes reminds me of Dad. Getting angry about the littlest things. Where is he?"

"Dad's dead, Ma."

"Yes, I know that, Maggie. I'm asking you where Randy is."

"Minneapolis."

"Has he come up lately? I don't remember seeing him."

"Makes excuses. Asks me to visit for him. You and I have had this conversation before."

"If he isn't coming to see me himself, he shouldn't be chewing you out. You're your own person, Maggie. Don't let him push you around, okay?"

"Okay, Ma." Maggie paused. "Thanks. It helps to hear you say that."

"Life's hard enough without a man yelling."

"Yeah. We'll come by tomorrow. You'll like him."

"Only if it's convenient for you, dear."

"See you then."

The other nurse, the one with bushy blonde hair, delivered a tray with soup in a mug and half a sandwich.

"Where's the other lady?" asked Jan. "The one with red hair?"

The nurse gave her a look, tucked her in.

"She's gone east of Eden, Jan."

Puzzled, Janice sank into the shallow tilt of the bed.

She awoke. Someone took away her tray.

When she woke up, Maggie was getting up to leave. Crying tears covered her. Footsteps paced outside.

"Going now, dear?" she asked.

"Of course! Do you think I could sit here for another second and put up with this? What the hell is wrong with you, Ma? Why would you say that? Do you just, just not care? Or remember? Is it not important to you? Am I not important to you?"

"Of course you're important. You and Randy are the most important things in the world to me."

Maggie exhaled, hard. "You say that so often. Sometimes I almost think you mean it." She drifted out of the room.

"Dottie? Come and talk with me."

Down the hall, Jan heard her daughter yelling at someone. She closed her eyes, opened them again. The anger in her daughter's distant voice collapsed her heart. Those nurses, having to listen.

Maggie stormed back in.

"Ma? I'm not coming to visit any more. If you want visitors, call Randy. He can do it himself." She marched away. Janice lost her daughter's footfalls in the hallway. She heard the weeping for hours after. The ache of ending. The sound kept her awake.

The red-haired nurse changed her sheets, replaced the bed entirely. The woman on the other side complained in her sleep, the rasp peeling away at the world. Light fell away from the window, burrowing into the evening. Light lit up across the screen, threatening to break through. People came and went, none of them naming themselves. Old stories flew past her, replaying themselves in her mind. Memories flew past her, replacing themselves in her mind.

* * *

Maggie stood over her mother's bed. Her young man, the one whom Janice had declined to give her approval to, stood in the periphery. He was faint and thin for so tall a man. Large hands clutched the little draw-pull fearfully, like a child with a lollipop in a town full of candy thieves. Randy still hadn't arrived. They were waiting.

"Dolores?" the old voice asked.

"No," whispered Maggie.

"Janice?" the old voice asked.

Time passed. Chastened, Randy arrived. Maggie informed him that his mother was still living. He sat down beside the bed.

"You must be Randy," the old voice called out. "She's told me so much about you."

The words caught in his throat: "Some of it good, I hope?"

Blinking, the old woman nodded. "Where did Janice go?" the voice asked.

"Maggie's here, mom." Pressure tightened his eyes.

"The woman from St. Peter. The one who was with me at the Mayo's."

"She's right here, mom." Randy stood, mouthed "I can't" to his sister, went to talk to the nurse in the hallway. Her bushy blonde hair shook through the frosted glass. They spoke at length. When he returned, Maggie's fiancé caught Randy's arm.

"What did the nurse say?"

"I don't remember," Randy said.

Maggie took his hand. "That's the most she's spoken in weeks. It's like you brought her back." She stared at him, pleading.

"That isn't her. She's already gone, Maggie."

From behind them, a rattle: "That nurse."

Randy spun. "Do you want me to get the nurse, mom?" He ran to her side. "Do you need something? Water? Anything?"

"That's what the IV's for," mumbled Maggie.

"Anything?" said Randy.

"With the red hair." The woman lifted her head, examined the room. "That nurse took the screen away, too," she whispered. "You can see clear across."

Randy nodded helplessly.

"Could you ask her for that cell phone? Janice asked me to call Randy. Give him a few hard words." The old woman closed her eyes. "What else . . . something about I'm sorry."

"Mom," Randy said. Maggie's fiancé hugged Maggie.

"Said sorry for being a bad mother." The old woman's eyes closed and she went away. The red hair hung over her, taking things, pulling things away until there was nothing left but an old dead body.

On the other side, Janice woke up and got out of bed.

Four Seasons of a Man: Spring

"M. F. P. V. L. R. V."

The Navy optometrist, a grave, furrowed, honest bastard, turned his eyes to the sheer wall of the one-way mirror and shook his head slightly. A gesture of fear and solicitude.

The commander broke in through a side door and cussed for a few minutes, a forefinger upraised, prepared to stab into the optometrist's chest. Spittle flew from his dripping canines, a shower of jowls, a shower of violence. They could run more tests, whimpered the optometrist, standing his ground.

In the end, though, it was decided. Spring would not be a pilot. It was his thyroid.

The NROTC bunker was a concrete chasm dusted with snow. Two men in dress uniform and parkas leaned against the white wall, facing the campus, cigarettes glowing in intermittent red flares, dropping sparks. Spring emerged through the heavy floor-to-ceiling door and punched one of the men in the shoulder.

"Did you get in?" the man asked.

Spring hit the concrete beside him and hurt his hand. He explained.

"You can snipe with glasses. Edmunds wears glasses."

"Those are polarized lenses. They aren't prescription."

"Then what can he do?"

"Papers. He has to take a desk job. Like a C-O."

Spring was in a bar, a tangle of antlers and red cushioned French wallpaper, a padded room, lines of academic shot glasses scattered on unwashed tables, a flank steak and creamed spinach before him, a buzz of early American anger, all of it drawling across Spring's consciousness. They were three men and a table, pickled, uniforms on the backs of chairs, cussing out the Navy optometrist.

"Caught it too late," said Spring into his elbows.

"Can't kill anybody," said one of his friends. "God damned gooks."

"Have you signed for your hitch?" said the other. "You could stay home."

Spring's fist landed on the table, sending shot glasses to the floor.

From a far table, strains of "Alice's Restaurant." Nods of heads. The coded chorus spread like Naval syphilis. Spring at his table felt hemmed in. An anti-war ring of fire sprang up around him. Eyes with needles focused on the three cadets. Even the bartendress joined in. "Walk right in, it's around the back." The voices unified. Including Alice.

"Nuke the gooks," shouted one of Spring's friends. This caught on, too, and the bar was a war, the song and the slurs dividing the branch-nursing fiends down the middle.

Spring took his flank steak by the corner and sent it across the room, up toward the incandescent bulbs. The room caught its breath at the perfect beauty of the steak's spiral, the gridiron elegance, the way it seemed to hover, godless, deathless, a UFO, an alien presence, rising above the melee and descending in a whirl of glory into the eye of a protest singer, thin and bearded, wearing Hendrix scarves and a four-pocketed denim leisure suit.

From that passing glint of perfection, the night disintegrated into broken glass.

Spring and the commander, deep in thought. The windsock of the Navy airfield, motionless out the window. A pile of red tags reading "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" on a bench. A chart of faces in uniform up on the wall. The scent of training Jennies. Barometers. A parachute pack the size of an automobile airbag. The sleeve of "Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)."

"I hate to say it," said the commander.

"You're going to let me in?" said Spring.

"I know a man who can do something for you. Owes me."

In the darkness, in a room, in a file folder, papers were falsified.

Spring was in Texas, now.

"Look at you. Pathetic. You're pathetic. You'll never be a Marine. Get out of my sight, Skinny." It was the fifth hour of patter. Spring had not moved. His stomach gurgled. A pair of eyeglasses sat unnoticed in a dorm room in Georgetown.

The mess hall. "You came over from Navy."

Spring nodded imperceptibly.

"You musta been a real asshole for them to send you here."

"Do you want to be a sniper?" someone asked him.

Spring shook his head.

"Everyone wants to be a sniper."

"I don't want to do paperwork," said Spring.

"You want to shoot the gooks?"

"You want to make Daddy proud?"

"I want to get into the shit," said Spring.

"Son," said a man, "you gonna be a Marine."

An M14 along Spring's arm. The iron sights a deadened blur, the black and white target a deader blur, the muzzle bobbing in a slow circle.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

Outer ring.

Outer ring.

Inner ring.

Again and again, for long hours, pockets full of brass, until even the Marine optometrist was fooled.

An exemption, punched through with the Marine Corps seal.

A ticket to violence.

Palm trees. Tuk tuks. Tamarind candy. Ho Chi Minh's face full of darts.

The last helicopter into Saigon.

Four Seasons of a Man: Summer

Summer was taking his time in the hinterland of the Bahamas, well away from the shadow-box shacks with black locals carving and sewing and selling cornhusk dolls and banana-tree furniture as they sat in shade. Beyond the purview of the expatriate Americans in their long beachside hotels and grim, well-lit dive bars in Nassau. No tourists carrying Junkanoo masks and pineapple daiquiris. All that sat behind him.

In his pocket was nearly a thousand dollars in hundreds and small bills. His wedding ring was nestled against his index toe. A now-soggy wad of fives and singles squelched under his insole. On his head was a stringy straw hat, itchy, keeping the biting star off of him. Summer waited for chicken, and it was coming, but until then he had someone worth talking to.

"Let me get dis straight," the short, mustachioed black man said to Summer in a careful voice. "I getcha set up. You take care of somebody." He tapped the table twice with a middle finger. "No money exchanges."

"It's no problem." There was young steel in Summer's eyes.

"Don' wanna know where you been, don' even wanna know what t' tings you done 'a' been. Don' know your reasons for dis." The man swung his head, squinted at the sun. "Alla dis, dat's the ting bothers me. Youse motivation. Eh? Uman beans a big ting to wash away. Certain kind a mon. Eh?" He peered heavily at the door where the jerk pot was hissing.

"Big thing," Summer agreed.

The roof above them was three small, brightly-colored celluloid umbrellas duct-taped together on the top of a five-foot dowel hammered into the ground. The gouged card table rocked when they set their beers down.

"An' I ask moself, who is dis? Who's he running from? What's da one coming after you gonna do if he gets to me? What happen den?"

Summer's steeleyes faltered. He looked back, across the Bahamas, at a cruise ship. He stretched the tendons of a hand. "You wouldn't believe it."

"Mon, I've heard crazy tings. Seen crazy tings. Maybe even done a crazy ting once an' again. You see? If you don' tell me a story, den dere's no trust between us. 'Sa big ting we talking about." The man hit his palm with an open hand. "No trust den dere's no deal."

"Gonna believe me?"

"Sure, sure, fit's close enough to the real ting."

The smell of fried cherries and ginger and lime peel and oil thickened. A woven basket of hot-brown drumsticks and gizzards appeared in the huge hand of the cook, who also brought another sixpack of Red Stripe. A churchkey and fallen bottles were on the table already. Sweeping the glass to the ground with an arm, the cook deposited the food. "Good as it gets." He returned to the prefab.

Summer took a gizzard, bit, let the intensity strike him. "It's a woman," he said.

"You joking? Ain't no woman killer." The man pulled a drumstick apart, watched it steam.

"Not a killer," Summer whispered through a chewy mouthful. "Wife."

"Oh. Crazy bitch, den?"

Summer shook his head.

The man appraised him, then laughed deeply. "Dat's the shortest story anybody has ever told anybody in the whole Caribbean. So. Let me tell all dat back at you, ya? You do some tings getcha into trouble. Either d'wife finds out or you try an' get away to protect her from finding out." He stared into Summer's face. "Dat's d'one, huh? You're here protecting her from someting."

"Maybe."

Summer, feeling his arms reddening, shifted his folding chair to the shade of the umbrellas, out of the turning sun's view.

"I'm-a believe you, bote remember. I'll know right where you be if somebody comes after me."

"Yeah."

The man slid a hand into a satchel beside him and pulled out a photograph. It was an oversized print of a surprised-looking Dominican in a pinstripe suit walking along a row of shops. Summer examined it in the sunlight beside him, gave it back. "Draw a map."

The man took out a fountain pen and sketched.

"And I'll get everything I asked for?" Summer asked.

The man's eyes flicked up. "Dis worth a lot to me. Lot more'n you askin'. You get everyting you ask for."

When he had finished and returned Summer the photo, Summer rose and reached for his wallet. The man waved him off.

"I'll even take care of de tip."

Summer felt the straw of his hat cut into him. The hot wash electrified it. Each step was measured, stomping, his eyes before him only. He left more and more things behind him, put away this man, the food, everything. Briefly it occurred to him that there would be no gun this time. Not here. Not with this one. Fingers were all.

Summer needed nothing.

Picket fences, plants too short to be palm trees, dogs and stucco and thatch and push lawn mowers and stretches of shanty. Sand in the road and the very occasional car, driving hard as an appetite and no sidewalk. Dodging casually.

A toddler ran across the street, chased by a woman in orange. Orange, like the ship's berth he had come across in. That ship and the people on it, they smashed across his head. Onward. Forward. Everything behind him. There was too much time. He watched the orange lady scoop up the child. Fear of time hung heavily upon Summer. Not the future, only time. The arc.

The house was a mansion. Plantation-style, in bright white like falling snow, columns and a brick gate that might fit inside the Georgetown of his memory. It took two tries to vault the gate, the bars knocking into the lock as he clutched them. Summer went straight up the walk and opened the front door.

Inside was a thin entryway dressed in Italianate splendor. Painted plates, mahogany buffets, leather wallpaper, and at the far end, a man holding a gun with his back to the wall. One. In moments he had the Sterling trained on Summer.

"Hey!" he shouted behind him. "Someone 'ere!"

"Woss he here for?"

"Looks pretty strung out!"

"Ah-h-h." A black man in white came down the stairs, his hands open wide. He was not the Dominican. "Welcome, my friend. Miguel! Bring our guest in. My friend. What is it we can getcha?"

The man Miguel took Summer by the shoulder and they entered a baroque foyer. The ceiling was not tall. Stairs led up to a mezzanine. Palladian windows illuminated the space.

"Cocaine," said Summer.

The man in white grinned. "Dis we can provide for you." The man in white tapped a forefinger against his palm. "Dollar a gram, cash only. Eh?"

"Let me see it."

"Take him."

Miguel frisked Summer, then led him back out the front door and around the kumquat shrubs. The grass was only mown to the edge of what was visible from the road. It faded quickly from overgrown wildflowers to gravel covered with loose thin leaves and fallen twigs. An old, slanted concrete outhouse sat incongruously behind the mansion, hidden from the beach by a dense line of palms.

"Rememba de Bikini Atoll?" Miguel asked.

"Heard about it."

"Dey built dis jos' in case, coppla years ago." He grinned. "Dey ever bomb de Bahamas, we here be de only ones alive." From his belt he took a key and removed the padlock from the metal door, which had a radiation mark in old yellow paint. Concrete led underground in steep steps. A knife switch brought the dangling light bulbs online.

As Summer took Miguel's chin and the back of his head and tipped it back and twisted, he felt the fragmentation mines of Gia Dinh break around him in steady concussion. His leg was torn by two wooden pikes, and a shaft of light far above the inward-facing pit was the only thing he could see.

The Sterling came loose in Miguel's dead hand. There may have been someone else deeper inside the bunker, VC maybe, but they might not have heard. No use pushing his luck.

He left the key on the corpse, but replaced the padlock on the way back to the light.

The far half of the mansion became sandstone, longer and taller. An open window, _there_. Slinging the short rifle around him, Summer vaulted, took himself up, checked for rope hauls or deathtraps, checked for occupants.

A woman, sleeping. Summer clicked the gun to single shot and went in the short window headfirst with the gun on her, rolled silently and stood, stepped through with the gun on her, watched with eagle eyes to hit before she screamed, left with the gun ahead.

The corridor was straight and empty, light gray and beige. Odd end tables held wondrous conch shells. Blessedly the floors didn't squeak. Rooms he passed were empty, some not even furnished, some filled with piles of water tanks, gas tanks, empty plywood crates, toilet paper, necessities. Ending the corridor were unlocked double doors leading to the bright balcony of the mezzanine.

The man in white was not there.

Summer crouched and advanced. These narrow tunnels held the enemy, tunnels full of simple death in traps and Kalashnikovs. Charlie waited, behind and above and below.

The white banister around the balcony led up on either side to the _piano nobile_. Summer took the left side, caught the corner at the landing, stormed ahead. Switching to burst, he found the sitting room empty. Two doors. Silently he came to the first door and opened it. A bedroom. He found the man in white, now wearing nothing at all. He lay in bed with the Dominican.

In blindness Summer fired, the last price for his escape from that old America he threw away, the two-year-old and the beautiful pregnant woman who were, even now, coming after him or letting him go or who might still be searching the cruise ship for him. The ship that had docked in Nassau a week ago. This was his wife he shot. This was his child.

This was his heart in Time, the merry clock. This vegetable glass of nature.

Summer took the ear to the short black man with the mustache. He waited on the deserted beach, where a large dory bobbed. Someone was beside them.

The mustachioed man whistled. "'Fie go to the house, who's alive? Totally empty?"

"There's a woman. Maybe others. Big house."

"Understand you not killin' a woman. Ok. Now. Betchu tink I'm-a double cross you, mon. Bote I'm not."

Summer waited.

"Look at dis. Everyting you ask for. Eh? All dere. Right dere. See in d' distance? Uninhabited island." The man tapped a forefinger on his palm. "Year of food, plus all d' bananas and coconuts and fish on de island. Jerome will row you to de lagoon, help you get set up."

"I don't need any help."

"De agreement was, we keep de boat. Eh? Come back in a year."

"You also said it was worth more than I was asking."

The man's eyebrows rose. "You changing the terms of de deal?" A threat lingered.

"Fine. Let's go, Jerome."

The mustache spread wide in a grin. "Good man. Good doing business wid ya." He ushered Summer onto the long boat. Jerome followed.

The water was the strange cerulean of a brand-new Volkswagen, before the paint fades. As Jerome manned the oarlocks, the sun brought deep, unimaginable colors to the sky. Summer examined the water tanks, charcoal briquettes, and crates of food that weighed the dory down to the brim. The sea-leg lull brought his family back to him.

When Jerome stopped halfway there and the man in the mustache watched, and Jerome reached for his gun, Summer snapped the neck without any emotions at all. The future lay ahead, a world of life and wonder.

Four Seasons of a Man: Autumn

Autumn came clamoring. On his shoulder was a strap. From the strap hung frypans, teakettles in blue, messkits, birdcages, spare walkingsticks, hats, tissue boxes full of long-defunct circus pasteups, a bag full of bric-a-brac, another bag of a size and shape to hold nothing but Autumn's harmonica, and a hock of processed ham on a string. The bridge under his feet clanked, the things on the strap clinked, but his walkingstick stayed silent. When a car full of kids slid over the line of the bridge, the bridge lit up with sound. Melody. Jazz. _From_.

There was a spot along the river. No one came, not even kissers in June, not this June. It wasn't a park, but once there might have been industry there. There. A concrete chunk of pipe, abandoned by all but nesting birds. That'd be a night's rest on a bedroll. It had been years since he had passed this way.

The sky tipped gently from blue to red as he stomped through, stomped down, right along the river. Autumn's sharp eye found a clam, two clams, and a baby, a feast. Briefly he wondered where his kids were and what they did. Kicking a stone, he led himself along to the pipe, hoping there wasn't a snake or a skunk inside.

Round the side there was a flash, sparkwise. The river grumbled, knocking away any small sound, but the sky had darkened and there again, an oval of cast light, really too small to be anything.

Clink, clank, clunk, and Autumn came astride, came around, his walkingstick whipping along the not-quite-fallen riverside. Inside the pipe segment, a pile of wet grass and a book of matches in his lap, was a young man. A boy, actually, more like a tyke. The sort who couldn't buy Molson at a Canadian bar with a fake ID.

Autumn's cheeks pinched as he squinted. Tyke froze, all adeer. Good long look between them.

There are things you say to a hobo: how weather changes, where you've been last and whether it paid. There are things you say to a thief on a beef: the home team, the cost of a Baby Ruth bar, the lay of your life.

What do you say to a tyke shivering in the evening?

Nothing. First, Autumn took a dry slat from his bag and lit it. Not on the concrete, but just beside, with a dollar camp lighter. A few handfuls of orange needles, the short, soft kind from up the bank, under the protecting spruce. A sprig of dead maple. The whole thing on a flat stone firmly in place, without stray grass.

"Dry," husked Autumn. "That's important."

The tyke hadn't moved.

So Autumn lay the two and a half clams in, took out a penknife and cut himself a chunk of ham, chawed.

"I'm not a creep, son." He went down to the river, filled a kettle, set it to boil. "Tea or coffee?" Autumn rubbed awkwardly at his whiskers.

The tyke said nothing.

Clams had opened, two of them. He pulled the beards off the big one and the baby. Was the last one dead? Ought to hold a funeral for the lady. But slowly, slowly, that one bloomed as well. All three, alive together before him.

A scratch and a spark. The wet grass caught and thinned orange to an empty garden.

Oh fer crying out loud.

Autumn took the end of a branch, pickupsticksed it from the fire, took it to the front of the concrete pipe, laid it over the wet green grass. "Get the red flower." Autumn chuckled. "By the Broken Lock that freed me." The second fire caught.

The tyke withdrew.

Shrugging, Autumn withdrew as well. Withdrew to make tea from a big tin he had bought for a song in some far-off Chinatown, in another state. The mottled blue of the kettle contrasted wonderfully with the aching-gone of the river, barely too dark to see. The sky smelled plain, moist, thunderous distant. Wonderful.

As the clear water warmed, Autumn laid back and sang.

I hail from back in Texas  
My name I cannot tell  
For I'm a-running from the law  
Where the cattle-drivers dwell.

The tyke, miraculously, joined in the chorus. That old Monticello song.

Music, of course. That's what. How you reach a young gun.

Now the tyke sat along the hissing grassfire that was petering away. He was looking far from skinny and far from happy, but maybe a little warmer than before.

"Now how you come by that old song?" Autumn asked him, taking a second slat and filling the fire out a little.

"Gordon Bok. He's local."

"Have you heard of Stan Rogers?"

"The Lock-Keeper!"

Autumn rumbled his baritone to life and the boy tremulously chimed in. And then he caught on fire.

Slipping, kicking, panicking, the tyke jostled his way to a stopdroproll across the dirt and stones, flapping ineffectually at the orange blur near his green windbreaker's zipper.

Autumn stood. He took a frypan to the river, filled it, threw the water as if it was a baseball bat. The tyke got smacked across the gut and the fire was out.

"Thanks." He shivered.

"Gonna need more fire to dry you. Be back." Autumn lumbered, clumbered, stumbered, lifting each foot as if he might slip. But he didn't. He faded into the darkness, silent as the end of a ghost story, replaced by empty nighttime and treetops. Crashing and bumbling and crunching. Emerging from the empty, he brought a limb longer than the cab of a Mack. He sat beside the fire, pulled a crooked little saw from a leather sleeve, made firewood in moments.

"Warm up, son. Hungry?"

Nod.

"If I been rolling in dough, I'd take you to Dysart's. Been?"

Shake. Shiver.

"Scoot up, son. Got this fella." Autumn swung the hock into view. "Ain't clean, but I'll cutcha piece from th' middle."

"No thanks."

Autumn shrugged, slid his knife into the hamskin, ate it off the knife. "Are you going to tell me why you're out here?"

"No."

"Well." Autumn took a narrow look at the tyke across the fire. "I think you should head home now."

Tyke stood. Scuffing, he left.

The river ran, it pulled and dragged and spat. Autumn chewed, chewed over his honeymoon, chewed over his daughter's birthday in a far-off place, over his son's first step and first fall. Mulled where they were as he took his tea, listening to a chickadee who had lost its way. Autumn looked at the place where the night had taken the boy, knew where he was headed, wondered why he had left. The bedroll fit the concrete pipe like a glove, and Autumn dreamed to the sound of the river.

"Blue Mountain" originally written by Judge F. W. Keller. Variant lyrics used under fair use.

Four Seasons of a Man: Winter

The footpaths were the fallen leaves of the tall trees, wending in mossy grades up the hillside, lined by violets already past flower and fiddlehead ferns, past the bony rocks that the grass wouldn't grow on. The tall trees gave their leaves to the forest ground each year. They loomed beyond the sun, bowed and shaking in the rainclouds above sight. The leaves were sharp, golden, hurtling in windy flurries, caught in the evergreens just above the path, pulling free, landing and skidding in flocks of thousands before coming at last to rest upon taproots and acorns. Winter watched every year from his home on the mountain. He knew when the downward migration would begin, knew when the trees would be empty and gray in the distance. He was alone, his beard was coarse, and he saw nothing new in the world, nothing at all. The tall trees seemed taller every year, while the calling birds that flocked beneath them seemed fewer. Nothing that he saw on the mountain trails mattered much to Winter as he trudged the same mile every day to the gas station to buy a loaf of bread and some cigarettes.

Mr. Edmunds, the owner of the gas station, hated him. Halfway up a mountain clogged with rock, above rotted plank roads and potholes on the hill below, there was one gas station: his. He sold just enough gas to make ends meet, much of it to hikers and snowmobilers. The only regular customer was Winter, who had no car. For his part, Mr. Edmunds was comfortable with steady events, with foggy sunrises and pale, cloudless sunsets, but to hear the torn screen door jangle every day, see the same boots and brown fur-lined coat, the same worn features . . . Mr. Edmunds couldn't even trouble himself to put the bread out front or to have a carton waiting. Winter came every morning, more reliable than the post office.

Winter didn't carry a walking-stick. Years on the mountain kept his legs strong. Though he had a canoe and cross-country skis, he walked most everywhere he went, all year, to keep himself moving. On the track leading up from the store, the road was rough, mottled, and not too wide between the trees. It ended a ways before his home, a narrow yard tapering away to the steadily-encroaching moss carpet and a thick clot of pine, the sort that always has a maple sapling or two inside it, reaching out. Today, like always, he gripped his loaf of bread wrapped in its rough plastic, ducked along the side of the pine, along the two big rocks, across the two-by-four he had laid along the muddy stream bed, sometimes bending the odd switch or branch away from his head. Past the wide, dying sugar maple, past the old fallen one beside it, Winter trod upon scattered, simple leaves, fresh leaves that folded easily, brightly, but never tore. He swept past burrows of animals, decades old and derelict, past the two tall stones that were propped up above his two dogs, Daisy and Lily, and clumped up the steps of the bare porch he had built last year--mostly to keep the skunks and raccoons at a distance, the unfinished lumber being inhospitable--and pushed on the old glass panels of the door, the small rectangles set like windows and topped by a wicker sunburst, pushed hard until it opened into his house.

The smell of smoky burnt firewood, hornbeam this year, lingered. Winter took a knife and slid it across the wood in the fireplace, lifting away the old ash to reveal fresher wood. Hornbeam, gently ruffled branches and eiderdown bark, made a nice fire. He left the firewood in the hearth and moved to a drawer nearby, set in the wall. It was that time of year again. Time for pilgrimage.

Pulling on the handle, rocking the uneven slats till they allowed the pitch-sticky drawer to slide open, Winter let his fingers fall into the blanket inside, let the grip of his hands unsettle the cloth, feeling the grain, letting that old familiar scent drift up. The blanket was dark and smooth, with pieces cut from it along one edge. He lay his thumb along the fold, squaring it neatly and brushing it until it was even, starting again when his ragged nail caught a thread.

After closing the drawer, he knelt and lit a fire with old matches taken from a bar in another town, long ago. The hornbeam bark lit up as fast as dried grass, and the rippling bark's edges bent inward and blackened. Warmth would take awhile, but it was bright and there were shadows where he wanted them. Winter sat, cleaned his fingernails, and thought awhile as the sun crept up above the trees. It was still morning.

At noon he made a carrying-lunch, wrapped it and put it in his rucksack. He put out the fire for the moment and again opened the drawer beside the hearth.

After cleaning his knife on his sleeve, he cut a square from the blanket a few inches across and held it. He smoothed the folds of the blanket down with his thumb. Heavily the drawer slid back. Winter turned from it.

From a cupboard he took one of the rosemary sprigs that lay drying. From the backyard he snapped a parsley leaf and brought it inside. Winter shut his eyes and silently cradled the cloth around the two herbs. Twine tied it shut, and the sachet tumbled into his rucksack as well. Shouldering the bag, he counted his footfalls out the door, down the path, past the old rock wall, and finally lost count as he found the way down the mountain.

Soon each tree he left behind seemed the same, the orange needles blurring along the side of the steep path downwards, and gravity led him through the sandy inclines and sunlit streambed valleys that coursed down the mountain towards the hill, each step the same as the last. Near the bottom of the mountain a quarry still remained from years ago. Winter pulled himself up onto a cut stone and ate lunch. From the stone he could see the tall trees just beyond the ridge of the hill. Leaping the broken seam in the stone and the holes drilled in those stark quarrying lines across it, Winter swung his rucksack down and walked on.

Each time Winter climbed down the mountain to the hill, each year when the fallen leaves made footpaths and he made his pilgrimage to the tall trees, he would shut his eyes and feel the thick, fibrous, rough spring in the grass, so different from the moss and ferns of the mountain. It was early in the year and cool, although the breeze was warmer today. The scattered junipers and shrub cedars were pleasant after so much bare rock.

Winter began to lose the harsh gravity that hung behind his eyes as he followed the hill toward the tall trees, which were no longer far away, and slowly climbed down the shallow cliffs that marked the end of the journey down. The paths shone yellow in the early afternoon. Winter smiled. Everything was the same, and perhaps that was good. Taking the familiar path, hidden but for his memory, he sought the tall trees, glad to be on soft, even ground at last. On this day he was glad to be on this footpath, glad to walk along it. The ash and oak were gold, the bluejays laughed, his arthritis was not too bad, and the sun kept the brisk wind pleasant. Ahead, the clearing was the same, the tall trees grand and frightening, and Winter no longer needed to watch the ground as he walked.

Crying, Winter knelt at the tall stone that stood before the tallest tree, opened his rucksack, and lay the smooth, dark sachet on the soil. He did not leave that place for a long time, a slow, endless time. He wept bitterly without thoughts. He let the sight of the tattered remnents of another square of cloth, laying untied and faded far from the stone, pass through his mind without letting it rest there. Winter stood, turned around, and walked back along the hidden path, yesterday's gold shining in the sunset.

A Guide to the Apocalypse, by Henrietta Stevensen Age 46

[Everything is intentional]

When the world comes to an end, the only people left standing will be the ones who have read this guide. When the fires start, you can bet they will stop eventually. Where will you be? When the eagles fall hard upon the mountaintops and flowers of evil spring fully-formed from their guts, where will you be? When you're knocking the brains out of the zombies with the reports presented by the guns of the rampants, where you'll be so gallantly streaming, Where Will You Be? What will you do? Have you stockpiled batteries?

Are you a hot-blooded American?

So hear this, America: the Devil is coming, and his revelations are encroaching on our freedoms! Our American freedoms to not be murdered by the Angel of Babylon!

My name is Henrietta Stevensen, but you can call me Henny and you can just follow me into the future! Where I live and who I am is no business of yours, thank you, and anyway by the time you need this book I'll hopefully be dead. God, what a morbid thought. At least if God is my witness, I'll be in the Kingdom by the time all this happens. But you probably won't, or you wouldn't need this guide. I guess I'm writing this for the sinners, then, because Lord God would have punched the rest of us out of the whole program by the time the zombies come. I suppose I still ought to write this down, because the Bible teaches us to love the sinner and you'll all want to live as long as you can, because once the zombies have got you, you have got to be going to hell. Jesus the Lord wouldn't want zombies in heaven.

Anyway, my name is Henny Stevensen and I'll be your guide to this exciting adventure.

The first thing to talk about is the ocean. Big sign in front, Keep Out! Let me tell you, folks, when the Martians and the red tide and the Jaws and all the Bible monsters are after you -> At The Same Time <\- you'll be glad you listened. That's why I live in Colorado. Even after the second coming of the Flood, I'm going to be high and dry. I'm from Florida, originally, well I was born in Atlanta but after Dad filed the restraining order Mom moved us. But Ron, oh, that's my husband, when Ron joined the Air National Guard to help balance the checkbook he had to go to Co-Lo Springs for training. We drove--isn't that a scream? He wanted to be a pilot and we couldn't afford plane seats! Of course, later we added up the price from the gas station receipts we saved and it actually cost us almost twice, this was back in the eighties. Not to mention the beef jerky. And then everyone was awful surprised to see us, apparently they had a plane seat all paid for and he wasn't on it, and he was marked as a deserter or something but we went to the desk and Ron got it all straightened out. But apparently wives aren't welcome in the Air Force so they found me a motel and I spent a few weeks looking around and just absolutely loved it. But we couldn't move until Ron's time was up because his Guard duty was at the Cape.

The hurricanes were a pain. Back in Florida, I mean. One time I saw some punk kid standing there with his arms crossed, just standing there in front of this wall of water, and I swear to goodness a bright red snapper jumped halfway down his throat before the hurricane even hit, and by the time this kid figured out what had happened and got the fish out he was soaked and running, and I told Frank my first husband I said it was the fish that looked the most surprised.

So like I said earlier: stay away from the oceans. The flood'll take out California, which I heard was starting to tip. It's going to break off and float away. Remember, folks: the Mary Anna's trench is where sinful Californians are going to live. It'll suck 'em right down. Nevada's going to be prime coastal real estate. Hopefully Las Vegas will be spared. Frank took me for our second honeymoon, and we stayed at the pyramids. I never realized how big the pyramids were, thank goodness for the escalators. Except, do you remember that Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, the one where the woman gets her heel stuck in the escalator and gets pulled under? Of course you don't, you're living in the future and all the books have been burned. Anyway, you won't believe this but it happened I swear to Jesus, but Frank--no, it was Ron--Ron pressed the emergency stop button. When was the last time anyone had to press one of those? They're practically fire alarms. In case of fire, just run right past. But Ron--maybe it was Frank--had to help me crack my heel apart, it was plastic so it took half an hour of bending my ankle back and forth to snap it, and I had to walk back to the hotel room with one heel and one flat. Weren't the folks behind us on the escalator mad! And I couldn't even save the shoe.

The next thing to talk about is all the dead rising from their graves. I've got the Bible beside me, that's the one we brought back from the Tulsa Super 8. Oh, so it must have been Frank in Vegas. Anyway, it says right here that all the zombies are going to crawl right up out of the sea, and the only way they'd get all the dead people into the sea in the first place is to have everyone move to California. I suppose God could just raise the oceans, but I don't buy all this global warming crap, so it would probably be easier to just have all the countries sink. That explains Atlantis, too.

That would probably mean that the people reading this book would be all the people living on top of Mount Everett, and of course I don't write Japanese, so I'll have to get this translated.

When I copy-and-pasted it from the Bubblefish, which Richie showed me how to use the last time he was up from Co-Lo State, it was just boxes. I looked really hard, but I couldn't tell the difference between the boxes. I guess that's how Japanese looks on a computer. So I'll just put a few lines in and hope it helps. [][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

So I told you to keep away from the water. The Bible says so, too. You can probably just wait around once Armageddon starts for Jesus to come down from heaven, put up his dukes and take out all the dragons and giant frogs that are coming. Bam! You shouldn't get too close to the Gulf, which is where I think the fight would be, but with a good pair of binoculars you should be able to see the whole thing from Wichita, assuming Louisiana's mostly fish food. If you have a camcorder it would be a fun video for the tubes.

I overheard Richie having a conversation once about who'd win a fight, Spiders-Man or Bruce Lee. I don't know what it is with boys and fighting, but the answer is definitely Lord Jesus. He is the strongest man who ever lived, just read the Bible. He's going to fight every monster that the Devil can think of, witches and goblins and snakes with medusas in their hair. And Lord Jesus is going to roll up his sleeves and flex, really deep, unnng, and with one big punch he'll show them all who's really Lord of Hosts.

I had thrown a party once, everyone in the neighborhood that I could think of, and I was having a great time and I had just complimented Beezy on her brooch, it was one of those sideways pictures of an old lady. She had got it at a store called the Antique Boutique and I thought that was a really great name for a store, just perfect, that's why I remembered it. But then Frank, who had taken a bottle of Triple Sec that I had only bought for mixing and locked himself in a closet with it, well he came out and started calling me all sorts of names, he even broke my mother's lamp. Nobody said anything, except of course the little neighbor boy, I can't remember his name, whom I had just invited out of sympathy. I was sort of surprised when he showed up. He took one swing and my husband was out cold. This was just before the divorce.

I watched a documentary about zombies once, and it seemed to me that the biggest problem was that everyone who wasn't a zombie was hyperventilating all the time. So when the zombies get here, I think it will be the people who can't not breathe wrong who will keep their heads. So it's time that men learn Lamaze. That's how I got Richie, and he's doing fine. I would've used it with Rhonda if she hadn't a been a mis. After the funeral, and Frank told me we didn't need a funeral, by the way, but it was at seven months and I know that life had begun so sue me if I wanted a proper funeral, but we couldn't fit six people around that sweet little coffin, Frank said if we were going to be so ghastly we might as well have an open casket but that sonnagun undertaker overheard and nailed the box shut. I found out later he had already flushed Rhonda down the toilet because he thought the idea was wrong, too. I had the whole story from the undertaker's son just after the funeral. This was the same guy you might have heard of who was cutting off feet so he could use the next smallest size casket. He went to jail for three months for that.

Once the libbers and the African-American president Obummer take away all the guns, the only ones we'll have left are the ones we've buried in the backyard. My husband Ron came home one day with a handgun, he said it was easy to get. But the baby was only two so we buried it in the garden under the stargazers. I'd recommend you do the same. Once they outlaw all the guns we'll be sitting pretty and you'll wish you'd thought of it. That's why I'm writing this.

Of course, everyone knows that zombies eat brains, I guess because that's where our souls are. They'd have to be, because we look out through our eyes and not through our love handles, right? So if you want to protect yourself through the Argamemnon you'll need a hat that'll withstand teeth. I practiced on one of Ron's old Rockies hats in the bathroom and that seemed to work all right, but it occurred to me: the thing that stops biting best is tinfoil. When Richie was teething Frank made him a dog bone out of tinfoil. It seemed to calm him down. So anyway, I tried wrapping it around my head a few times and I was cutting holes for eyes, but the scissors slipped and I had to tell people I slipped on the ice for the next week. I never actually tested it out, but it still seems like that would be the best way to stop zombie teeth.

If you've read this far, it's probably because you know you're a sinner and need to stay alive as long as you can before you die and wind up in hell. But I think it would probably be nice if I gave you some tips on how to not end up there.

First of all we as a nation, we as an American nation, have got to stop this Cirque Das Olay nonsense. Just cut that out. That's not how a circus is supposed to look, and the way they move their bodies around is sinful and they know it. Next those goons will be touching themselves in the mirror. It's just not right.

Next, obviously we need to get Ron Paul more involved in politics. I bet he's sitting right there on his couch, feeling bad that more Americans haven't wisened up to his incredible message of freedom. So let's get him to run at least for mayor of your township, and he'll get your local economy straightened up in no time.

And lastly, we need to work together to preserve the sanctimony of marriage.

So anyway, I think you'll do just fine. My husband suggested putting the rampants in, because they're in the national anthem, so I went back and put them in. Ron says the rampants are in Washington, but I told him I said America started in Jonestown in Massachusetts and that's probably where the rampants are. We were having this discussion on New Year's, and we had just sung the anthem, like you do, and the TV was on and somebody said the ball was dropping and Ron thought that was just the funniest thing he ever heard, and Phil, who is great at the office but difficult and I must say a little crude with drinks in him, suggested that the ball was dropping because the rampants were streaming, and Ron collapsed onto the La-Z-Boy and started peeing and just couldn't stop. After a few seconds it burst right through and got onto the collapsible spare couch-bed I had purchased specially from IKEA. Well let me tell you I didn't think it was very funny at the time. In retrospect I think it's a good story and I tell it often.

So anyway, I think you all will be just fine if you follow the instructions I've written down in these pages. If Hell has got postcards I look forward to hearing what it-all was like for you.

I suppose they'd burn up, actually.

Who's Afraid of the Big Beowulf?

He came back to her. Such time. So much time. The wind was up, the sun was down, and her love came howling in. Branches reached in, the wind flew out, the crashing surf of night as it blew. How old? Old and old? How many times had she cursed him, whispered against him in the small places she kept for herself, all the days fallen in as the child grew old with no father. The imprecations of the damned. It was long, long and long since the child had left, since the child grew, became a woman, o my lassie-o. The young grow up and the old lay down, such time, my lassie-o. And here he came, that thin great man, his eyes boiled fire before him. He brought her low, say there-we-go, as the wind swept in the door.

Then far away, that lightless day, betimes betimes the morning, the babe awoke with a song on her lips and a spring in her stride and ran out to the yard to see the sky and blue it was, blue and blue, and off to forever it spanned. Inside again for a biscuit and milk, a glorious day, a glorious day. For today was the day to go up the road, the long road, the white road through trees. For today she'd be traveling alone.

Apples and pears, rolls and cakes, piled up in a basket. No time to spare, she must be off, she told mother so, must go, must go, down the long white road.

Her mother sat with the child there and gave her the lessons, all the lessons, the lessons to live. The white road guides, the white road leads, so keep to it, keep to it, let it along. Follow the road, follow the road, meet no one but your gram. For the pale things lurk, they shuffle and moan. There are things in the world worse than being alone. Where the shadows wait, the pale things peer. And they'll take you, take you, take you.

So the song on her lips lost a brightness-o. But still she danced aflutter. A cloak she wore for the restless wind, and a kiss she wore from her mother.

Then it was time, lassie, lassie, she ran out to the winding road, the long road, the white road early. And she stayed on the path, stayed on the path, and the pale things watched her journey. She knew them from their shuffling eyes, their moans of death and waiting. The trees above her shook and waved, cutting the sun, cutting the sun, their leaves thick, o my lassie.

Her song came back with cheer, cheer and cheer, a cheer to stop the silence. All alone she walked, alone and alone, down the winding road.

What then, what then? A fork in the road. Her mother hadn't told her. Not one nor the other went straight at all. They turned to distant corners. First time gone and she was lost. Lost and lost. All was still as she went to one, took steps along, and the way opened on before her. Swept on, swept on, the path took her.

Then strange. Upon the white of the path stood someone red a-smiling. Smiling smiling o.

"O won't you walk beside me, lady-child my lassie? I'll show you the way, indeed I will, the path is long and you're lonely. We'll talk of things that are gentle and fair, and I'll show you the way to go."

So spoke the man all dressed in red. She knew little, little to say.

"I'm not to meet you, my mother said. Sir, I must be going."

"Onward?"

"Yes."

"Then so am I, we'll walk on, my child. Come, come, there's little to fear." The man in red took her hand and drew her, drew her down the long white road.

They spoke of things (well, mostly him, for she said little and even less). He told her of the heights and depths. He told her of his palace. The palace he'd keep her, where she could live, forever, my lass, forever.

Further and further he brought her down, down the road, till at last they burst upon a shady grove, a willow grove with a bower. And at the bower the road did stop, the trees all circled around her. He drew her to the willow-bower and beneath the tree he sat her down and kissed her, once, twice.

"I must go back," she said to him. "My gram is waiting, sir."

"If you go I'll never let you into my palace," said he in red. "The windows are tall, tall and tall, and look upon my gardens-o."

"I must go back," she whispered then, "though I would live in your palace, sir. Before I go, will you tell me your name? Good sir, good sir? O would you?"

"Fox," he said, then rose and fled like fire through the shady grove.

And the babe rushed away, far away, far up the road in the morning. She fled and fled that man in red, so far up the road away. Always looking, looking around her for the fork in the road she had left by. But never did she find it again, no, never, nor the road home. The road ran on, straight ahead, always ahead, and never lay behind her.

On she went, for the fox lay lurking, slinking where the pale things went. And none off the path may ever return. They all watched and waited as well.

Up the road was a man in gray, with a black sash round his forehead. Upon his back was a mighty ax, he held it across his shoulder. There he stood awaiting her, proud and mighty, the woodman in gray.

"I'm not to meet you," the lassie-girl spoke, she whispered it, whispered it, "for my mother said I mustn't."

"We needn't talk, just walk, just walk, for the darkness visits each corner. I'll stand as you walk and guard you, lass. For the darkness it surrounds us."

Without a word the woodman followed with his ax upon his cloak.

The road led on and the darkness loomed and the pale things sharpened their claws. The woodman led and cut right through, cut across the dark. Four times, five times, he cut the gloom through and led the lass upon the long white road.

In front of a house the woodman stopped, and a light was on inside.

"Now say to me, lass, good it did to have me beside you, darling."

"Thank you, good sir, for walking there. The sky is bright with you beneath it. Now I must go up, up the road, and I fear the sky will darken-o."

"Sure you'll go, and I'll go home," the woodman told her plainly. "But sure my help's worth something to you, worth something surely, lass."

"What would you ask?" the child said.

"Only let me chop you down."

And he brought the ax above her head and chopped her, chopped her down.

When she went on up the white road ever, the dark had fallen upon her. Alone she went, alone and alone, only on the long road, the cold road, the only path she could follow. No one more did she meet, and at last she fell upon her gram's.

Knocking, knocking, an old voice answered. "Come in, my duckling dearie. The night grows tall, my child, my girlie, come in o dearie-doe."

Gently the child opened the door, the wood door, the old door into her gram's. The fire burned brown and the fire burned down and the wind swept her in the door.

But her gram was nowhere, nowhere inside, and the apples and pears were a-rotting. The rolls and cakes were burning, burning and the basket was ash, my lassie. Cold wind spun her, twirled her-o, caught at her hair, pulled at her cloak and she wept to find her gram.

Feathers led her to the highback bed, the fourpost bed, hung with lace, lace and lace, strung up with feathers and dusty dark. The shadows held it.

"My gram! Are you dead and withered, my gram? I've brought you things from my mother. But they're gone, and the dark and pale things peer at the window, and I'm frighted, gram!"

"My child," came a dead and withered voice. "Be not frighted, but come by the bed, for I've secrets to whisper, my dearie."

A clock as tall as an elm-tree-hand chimed and chimed atop. The smoking heap from the cold fireplace let out a tusk and kissed the clock. A drop of rain from the frozen dark fell in through the door and licked the coals. The window-shutters clapped in the rain and the wind it pulled them under.

And the babe in her torn and tattered cloak crept and crept, crept and wept, to the bed where the death-voice waited.

"This house is yours now, child, child, this house is where you belong-o. But there's a man, a man, a man, and he's all that's left, child."

And out from the fine and dusted dark jumped a wolf of a man, a wolf of a man, a thin great man with boiling eyes. On a brown-black cape he laid her low upon the folds of the bed. The clock swung open to where skeletons hung. The ash twirled a dance in the wind of the door. The shutters clattered and the rain came in, but all she could see was his boiling eyes. The cold eyes, the bright eyes, they filled her, filled her, his eyes they filled her, lassie.

It was late, late and late, and years away that she told her child the tale. But the babe ran away that fatherless day and the wind swept in the door.

Moonwalk

The International Moonwalk was a cord between the ocean liner bloc of the orbital station platform and the luxury hotel perched off the near white moon. Some days it was a speck in the Fargo skies, other days it was a light above Greenwich, or Cairo, or the ocean. It was a steep chunnel of racing shuttles and foreign dreams.

Sam stooped and allowed his finger to draw the wallet up out of the khaki butt pocket of a girthy bearded Swede who stood reading a business magazine near the Customs spaceway exit. The boy's heart throbbed in his throat as a flippy leather corner poked out. The man shifted, his gray Vegas-magician long hair swishing, and Sam followed the massive, rippling butt with a finger, balancing the pressure, no one was looking, he found a loose spot and got the crooked index finger deeper in, waited for a big inhale--

The Swede turned again, bumping Sam with a thigh like a gelatin stanchion and muttering an apology in some alien English. A beeping yellow maglev rode by, piloted by a Muslim in a Mets cap and piled with used cardboard. Sam plucked at the wallet, tapping the Swede firmly with his shoe. The towering sweaty pillar apologized again. Sam brought the wallet onto the yellow steel of the luggage tractor and rode it away.

Rachel was there on a white formica bench in front of the unmarked door that led to their nest. Sam hopped off the electric car and sidled around the corner to one of the invisible forgotten parts of the concourse and sat beside her. Charnie--that's what Sam had called him when everyone was younger--Charnie the Big Teenager wasn't there waiting for him. Just Rachel. A shout piped from the Swede in the distance.

The girl had hit her growth spurt. She wasn't sallow and chubby anymore, but narrow in her forearms and calves and waist and topped with a wreath of frizzy hair. She could still squirm through the vents and ducts, but only just. Her t-shirt was blue, with a peace sign printed large. It had become crusty from being washed in the fountain and dried in front of the hotel dryer vent so many times.

"Where's Charnie?" Sam asked, sitting down beside her.

"They got him."

It hit like a slap. Charnie had been tall, brave, a super teenager. He could wear his stolen uniform to get into storerooms and Pizza Express Dumpsters for free leftover pizza. More than that, he possessed raw mutant fecklessness and had infinite teenage boy tricks and had invented games for Sam and Rachel to play to squeeze around the security guards and passengers when he wasn't around, like the Have You Seen My Dad? game and the I Spy a Guard game.

And they got him. They.

Most of the security guards knew about them. More than once Sam had seen a white-uniformed guard flicking his eye away and smiling as an overstuffed wallet or a fat billfold had been withdrawn from some Upper East Sider or Berliner who was spending more to visit the moon than a security guard would make in a hundred years. They were a cabal, Sam and Rachel and Charnie and the guards they could trust.

"Where'd they take him?"

"Dunno. Down."

"We have to get out, Rach."

She got her fingers into her hair and stretched stretched a fingerful of curls to their tips. "I've got a secret." She pulled a lady's old-fashioned coin pouch out of her bag and clicked it open.

Prismatic crosses of light spun.

Diamonds. Five of them.

"That's enough for two tickets," Sam breathed. Rachel nodded. Her hair boinged.

"There's a jeweler on the twelfth floor," she said.

"He won't believe us."

"I want to try," she said.

"Okay. Tomorrow."

Through the maroon utility door, its steel handle bent like butterfly wings, was their nest. In the electrical closet, Rachel took out the pin that held up the big scuzzy beige grate and crawled in, her skirt baggy over her underpants. Sam went in backward, pulling the grate back in place and jabbing the bent pin around the bars until it caught in the machine threads and held.

Every forward-scoot of his hand, every slide of his shoe and bump of his knee into the metal floor resounded down the dark square tunnel, whaaangaangang. The sound was a tell-tale to the evening travelers and crooked guards and to that one elderly electrician who came once in awhile to surprise them. The sound was an alarm telling everyone where they were and that they were here, and all the kidsnatchers and sneaky ghouls would creep in and take them where Charnie went, down to some secret cell or maybe locked up in a box as baggage on some rocket on a collision course with the surface.

Early on, Charnie had rigged up a wire running into the nest, jacked into the fuse box by his teenage electric wizardry, and had attached by black tape a glass bulb shining blue down the cornering corridors. You couldn't turn it off; you had to cover it with a can. Now that the older boy was gone, Sam wondered whether he'd be able to find another and tape it up right without shocking himself, once this one went thwink.

Empty wallets filled one corner. Rachel had insisted they keep them out of sight. The money, piles of counted bundles thick enough that they folded like hairpins, was held under spare shoes scrounged from the recycling barrel in the back room of a Payless. A scatter of foreign coins filled the bottom of a mason jar.

Rachel wrapped a huge bathrobe over her shivery body. Sam stretched out on his pile of blankets and flipped the can over onto the light. A flat blue halo demonstrated the darkness.

"Tomorrow," he told her.

* * *

They were playing the Follow the Leader game. Rachel picked a likely adult, who was It, and Sam ran childishly after her as she strode behind It like a mature young woman, across PeopleMovers and down escalators. When It noticed, or began hiking in the wrong direction, she picked a new It. They had both mastered their roles, big sister and little brother.

Today's It was a nervous-looking man in a baseball cap emblazoned with crossed spiky letters, looking something like an off-duty sports announcer, towing a clacking hard brown suitcase by the telescoping T-bar and distracted by an infant strapped to his chest, its tiny hands rubbing its eyes sleepily in little punches. It, the man, was wholly consumed by the blocky gate numbers and the clock on his smartfilm. Every four or five arrival gates, he unrolled the rectangle of electronic cellophane from its pen case, checked the time, clicked the zip button and sped up with a lurch.

And there, at last, was the reason why: a giggling tawny woman marching out of a broad, propped-open door marked "arrivals."

Switching Its, Rachel guided Sam to the elevator. A middle-aged blonde woman followed them in. Rachel pressed twelve, where the jeweler was, and the button lit up neon green.

"Where are your parents?"

Time to play the Dad Sent Me game. Sam was the super-best at this.

"Dad's in the jewelry store getting diamonds for Mom. We were just checking to see if she's at the gate yet," he told her.

"Yes, but." Firm dislike and suspicion pulled her eyebrows down. "What are parents doing these days?" she huffed to herself.

"I didn't go alone," Sam added for sizzle. "Big sis came."

"Better than nothing, I suppose," the woman muttered. "If I was your--"

Ding.

It was early, and the ritzy shops up here were barren of customers, so they played the Shut Up and Run game.

The jeweler was two women: one was prim, bunheaded, with pearls, and the other was large, older, in a poinsettia scarf. Sam and Rachel eyed each other.

"I'll--" said Sam.

"Me." Rachel led Sam up to the poinsettia woman.

"Is it okay if we talk to you in the back room?"

The scarf lady's smile was feline, giving her a pointy harelip. "Are you lost?" she asked the girl.

"Yes," said Rachel.

The woman held up the wood employee divider gate and Sam and Rachel slipped behind the counter. The pearl woman's eyes were darting, practically robotic; she stayed where she was behind the low glass and black velvet cases.

The back room did not have loupes and gemcutting equipment, although a pressure-back watch setter and a laser engraver stood next to a cappuccino maker and microwave along a long orange countertop. Sam and Rachel sat in bouncy recurve chairs, and Miss Scarf straddled a walnut stool. An air purifier hummed.

"Tell me who you're looking for, and I'll call it in," she said.

"It's not a who, it's a where," said Sam.

"We live here," said Rachel. "Remember the Fiddler's Green disaster?"

Scarf Lady went very still.

"We got out," said Sam.

"No one got out." Conviction ran through the poinsettia words.

"We did."

"We're trying to afford a ticket up," said Rachel.

"We work for the guards, and they give us money," Sam lied.

"And I found these in the trash."

Revulsion turned to a big breath as the diamonds tinkled out onto the counter.

"Is that enough?" Sam asked.

"Enough? For two tickets to the Moon?" The words were pitchy and stifled. "Izza!"

The pearls swung around the doorframe as the prim woman in her black ribbed blouse leaned in. "Yes?" she asked.

"Come in here."

Rachel raconteured again for the pearl woman.

"Martha, these belong to someone."

"They found them in the trash, Iz. It's karma. I can feel it. Haven't you heard the stories about wedding rings in fishes?"

"The lost and found department--"

"Oh, pooh, the lost and found department. No one ever registers with them. Besides, anyone who could take the highway can afford to throw away a few diamonds."

"Martha," Izza hissed, "I'm not going to be a--a _fence_ for some waifs." The smell of Izza's grown-up perfume was making Sam's eyes water.

"Well, I am. Let me call Abram and we'll see what he says."

"I say we ought to call lost and found."

Sam and Rachel sat and crunched big brown pretzels supplied by Izza while Martha made a hushed, emphatic phone call around the corner. A lot of nodding and hand sweeps could be seen through the doorway.

The receiver settled back in its square plastic dents and Martha approached Rachel.

"We'll buy you the tickets. Follow me."

Izza gave her a disapproving look and added a dimpled crowsfooted smile for the children.

The elevator shot them down to the mezzanine. Martha led them around to the Galaxy Skylines ticket desk. An old Latina shaped like a Russian nesting doll gave them a look.

"I'd like to buy two tickets. They'll be traveling alone."

"Who will they be meeting at their destination?" the Latina said tonelessly.

Martha licked her lips. "We'll arrange that privately."

"Next available flight--" She ended it like a question, and Martha interrupted yes as the ticket lady finished, "two hours."

"That's fine."

"Luggage?"

"Ah, none," Martha began--

"Luggage!" the Latina screamed behind her.

Charnie came out of the conveyor-belt tunnel, wearing a freshly pressed waistcoat uniform with a Galaxy Skylines pin and name tag.

Sam gaped. Their eyes met. Between them, the Latina tapped aggressively on the touch keyboard, her fingernails eroding indentations in the plastic. She cursed in Spanish and backspaced.

Charnied gradually pulled a walkie-talkie out and lifted it to his lips, the rest of him frozen, as if he was facing down a wild boar.

"I've got them for you."

Sam ran. Rachel didn't.

A guard stepped away from his post. Another followed. Sam wheeled away from them, his feet slapping the upscale tile, swinging around a corner, his fingertips centrifugalling him against a square column, winging his face into the leg of a man who was stepping out of the bathroom corridor and wiping his hands on his pants. Sam rammed down the narrow polite hall and clicked the red alarm bar hard against its emergency exit. A whoop and a lady's voice. "Alarm has been activated. Alarm has been activated."

On the other side of the emergency exit was a dark stairwell, a black maw ringed with distant aluminum floors and handrails flanked by hallways leading around the guts of the station. Sam took the black metal stairs two at a time down to the next loop of the spiral, switched to three at a time. He hit the landing badly and his ankle surged with cold as he dove around to the next flight of stairs. By the shadowy tenth floor, he was limping, and as the door to the upper level was re-opened by backlit guards peering down for him, he plunged into one of the vacant hallways, keeping his feet quiet, like he was in the resonant traitor tunnels leading to the nest, every step a betrayal . . .

Where was he? He couldn't--

The long, curving hall was familiar. Really familiar. Sam took his shoes off and looked for the . . .

No. Tenth floor.

The unlatched vent. This was where it had started. Far down this hall was the wreck of the Fiddler's Green. They had probably taken the twisted metal out and patched the hole in the International Moonwalk station, but the vent he had climbed through was still open. Sam pushed his shoes up into the narrow round duct and slid up after them. It was tight, tighter than it used to be, and he couldn't turn around to close the grate. He slid as far in as he could and gave up, snuggled his face into his outstretched arms in the filthy darkness and waited, his bare feet out in the corridor, hooked around the cracked paint flakes, the tops of his feet pressed flat to the torsioned aluminum vent slots.

Waiting in silence, Sam heard the pang pang of echoing feet draw closer and slow. He was a flattened seed in curvy darkness, a rock, a spy, a secret hero. He was going to go back there, once they'd abandoned the search, and rescue Rachel, he was going to punish Charnie for being a useless traitor, hurt him so bad, he was going to save up, dollar by dollar, and go back to the counter, and he and Rachel would fly away, fly to the moon, where grape juice flowed from fountains and nobody ever ever ever had to cry.

Pang.

Pang.

Rough hands cupped the tops of Sam's dangling feet and pulled, rumpling his pantlegs into a bunch as he slid. He kicked, but the only thing kicking accomplished was to make his stunned tendons shriek with tingles again. One shoe waited behind, sliding away from him in the black tube, just ahead of his reaching fingers, but Sam had the other, a sturdy thumping weapon. As strong arms wrapped around his gut, steadying his fall, the shoe waited, his arm bent to spring like a threatened serpent. The darkness of the hollow hole turned to vapid red brassy light, and Sam lashed out, slapped, slashed, trying to break bones and noses, twisting his torso against the tight arms that clasped him up in midair, he was a free warrior, a tyrant, no crooked security guard was going to impress him into His Skymiles Majesty's service, brainwash him, drag him away to--

"Cut it out, son. You're being rude."

"Lemme go!"

"I don't appreciate you making me go running all up and down this house, man."

The security guard was black and bald and thoroughly out of breath. Frown lines were etched permanently between his eyebrows; snazzy California sunglasses sealed his eyes off from the world. Sam's shoe arm paused.

"I know you. You're one of the good ones!"

"I don't know what that's about. 'fyou think I go running around after every kid with young legs--well, I don't like it. But they tell me, they say there's two kids on the floor causing trouble. And I don't like trouble."

"I don't cause trouble!"

"Son, you are trouble. On two legs. Come on."

"Please."

The guard bent his head, puzzled at the tone.

"Please just let me go. Say you couldn't find me."

Sam went really quiet. The guard set him down and gripped the boy's shoulders.

"Say I was too quick for you," Sam said.

"Say you were too quick for me," the guard repeated.

"Please. I can't afford a trip down to Earth, so I'm saving up to get to the moon. I don't have any friends. Just let me go once."

Two wide-faced Sams, stretched like circus mirrors, peered down at the boy darkly. Lips swam back and forth, sharp, deliberate.

"Once," Sam whispered.

Big hands went gentle and lifted away.

"'fI get in trouble, I'm going to be right back on your tail."

Sam nodded.

"Once," said the man, nodding to himself, listening to the sound of the word. "Once," he said again, this time for Sam.

The man stepped back and ushered Sam away.

* * *

After two weeks of searching, Sam had found Rachel. In retrospect, it should have been obvious. He had been playing the Leading the Flock game, a game he had made up himself, where he ran just ahead of a crowd of sleepy travelers looking for their connecting shuttles, getting in the way, making everyone think he was someone else's obnoxious boy, when he saw a large bustling woman in a neon-colored cat scarf.

Martha.

And, beside her, Rachel.

Rachel, in a fresh blue sundress from Macy's.

A thin mannish woman in a sports bra powerwalked into Sam from behind and began snapping at the people around her, and Rachel turned, her eyes shy and different, and she looked as Sam picked himself up, she looked and saw, turned back and followed Martha away.

The boy slunk into the rows of pleather waiting-area seats, sat and put his chin on his arms, his elbows folded around the chrome armrest, and imagined.

The Sky Fell

The sky fell into the earth. Blue dripped like pudding into the trees. People ran screaming at their sunset faces. Above was only the pure white of sunlight.

It was hard to breathe. You had to drink the blue, which felt like syrup and tasted like cotton. Everyone panicked.

I was fourteen when the sky fell. There had been a parks & rec soccer game. My team wears red shirts. The Veazie Firefighters. I was on defense when the tall girl on the other team swarmed around me. I got really frustrated. Luckily, just before she scored an easy goal, the sky hit her. It hit me, too, of course, but I waded through it, slop slop slop, and got the ball to the front end and the strikers before she recovered. Everyone's jersey was purple, now. The game was canceled, but I knew I had won it. My mom had trouble driving home through the river of blue.

My sister and my parents and I clustered around the set. The news was full of big lies, then bad explanations, then no explanations. Religious people were on all the channels. People talked about the end times. But God never came down.

It took a few days for all the colors to go away. Then it was blue everywhere. I started to forget colors. Yellow, for example. You still saw red balloons in dreams. That was always where the dreams took you.

My sister and I would sit with white mugs full of blue, drinking the blue sky and talking about the colors we remembered. We tried to recall the different greens of plants: pine needles. Tulip stems. Dark spearmint leaves. But our memories turned everything to a pastel blue-green.

Skin was the hardest color to remember. I kept thinking it was orange. In my head skin became the blank orange of an orange. Oranges were white, now, and I started to remember them the color of peaches. When I told my sister she mentioned the Simpsons. I never saw the show. All the crayons were white, now. Even the black.

For the first weeks, everyone tripped over everything. Eventually you saw the grays. I didn't have a problem with gray, but my sister told me she had wanted to be an artist. On a school trip to Paris just after the sky fell she visited the Mona Lisa, but it was just a rim of black hair with an empty space in between, now. She kept telling me how not even the eyebrows were still there, but I don't think Mona Lisa ever had eyebrows. Since the trip she's had nightmares about faceless people with black, hanging hair. I've had those nightmares, too. I wish she hadn't told me about it.

Decorators learned to tack the sky up to the sides of houses. Rich people even got the insides of their house done, white and blue. Electric spotlights and mesh grilles could put gray patterns up that looked like wallpaper.

Scientists at MIT and CalTech kept trying to make LEDs come out other colors, but it never worked.

Apparently the first deaths came from sky deprivation. After that there were suicides. But people adapt. I really didn't mind a blue and white world. Color just got in the way.

The American flag was gray, white and gray. The government decided to hang Old Glory in front of the Capitol steps, in defiance of the gray. Eventually they took it down and built a private memorial for it beside the Smithsonian buildings, in requiem for the red, white, and blue. More people came to see it than the Vietnam V, and more people cried. They kept the national anthem despite the rocket's red glare. You could still see the stars in the right light, just like the Vietnam V on a dry day. "America the Beautiful" didn't get sung anymore. The mountain majesties and the waves of grain were both the color of chalk.

Streetlights were built that flashed or didn't flash. We all started learning Morse code in school. Black people started getting paid almost as much as white people. David Alan Grier and Chris Rock co-invented the term "blank." It was a joke at first. Nobody was black anymore. Jesse Jackson still wanted "people of color," but they talked him down.

Dress designers started focusing on outlandish silhouette shapes for the white carpet. Shoulder feathers and big hats came back in fashion. With black and white movies back in vogue, Mel Brooks said it felt just like Old Hollywood. Woody Allen was delighted. Baz Luhrmann retreated to Broadway. My sister went into moviemaking to replace her painting. All the movies were washed-out, and they gave you sunglasses in a little bag at the ticket marquee. Theaters sold cups of fried sky with butter-like spray. At least there wasn't any Red 40 in it.

The black of books was reflective. People learned Braille for fun. Computer screens went out of style, although you could buy special polarizing filters to make them look like shimmery PowerBrick screens from the eighties. They were replaced by pin-screens that would jut out and cast shadows in the shape of the Internet. They got them so they looked pretty good.

Twelve years later, the world's supply of sky started to run out. We were assigned oxygen tanks, but without sky the oxygen didn't work right. Mom and dad filled up the swimming pool. We got a dog to defend it, but the dog died of asphyxiation.

Now we're all just waiting. My sister's making pretty good money, so she can afford all the sky she needs. She's wiring home enough to keep us going, as if we were Mexican immigrants, but it's more expensive every day. They say it'll hit a hundred dollars a barrel soon. Australia's the biggest exporter, followed by Greenland. Sinclair Sky in Wyoming keeps chugging along all right, too. Cow and pig farms used up a lot in the early days, but the government culled all the animals pretty quickly. Environmentalists whined about the ecosystems. The rain forest is already dead from sky deprivation.

My sister called yesterday. She's been panicking more and more. I tell her we'll make it through, but I'm lying. We're all going to die.

Places

A rusty watch. A penknife. An orchid in a jam jar. Rain dripping through old wood. Cracks in windowpanes. Sunlight and mist. Three pairs of boots, out of order. A family of mice, unseen. Floorboards. Tall rafters. Brass doorhandles, curved. The smell of brass.

A tan adobe bridge held up by square adobe walls. Small hollow windows with warm air and no glass. An orchid. Settled dust. Rippling air. Sand and mountains.

A ladder of painted wood fixed to the hillside. A small cusp of loam and stone that trails downward. Tree roots under a cliff. Wind blowing dirt and peat like dust. Pale blue sky. Not yet night. Wildflowers.

A tunnel. Metal shapes. Machines. A sail.

Blue plastic. Footsteps.

Hair tied with twine. A greeting card. Pads of paper in different colors. An open drawer.

Sprayed water. The sound of compressed air. Steel nozzles. Orchids without flower. Old shoes. Moisture.

Hubcaps. Cans of food, dusty. Cigarettes. Treetops.

A piccolo, damp. Climbing flowers. An oil painting.

Birdhouses, lived in, with pastel roofs. Three stone sundials. A beehive. A green hose.

Iron poles in the ground, in a circle. Footprints leading away.

Tulips. An alarm clock.

Half a bridge, made from wood. A yellow door with a heart-shaped window. A city street. Wrought iron.

A curved plastic bench. A crayon, forgotten. Luggage. Advertisements. A clean, busy smell. A rusty watch. New shoes.

A vase. Darkened rooms. China cabinets, the doors ajar. A felt hat. Old perfume.

The Coffin-Worms

Listen, child, and you'll hear  
The coffin-worms a-coming.  
In the rain upon the roof  
You'll hear their hearts a-thrumming.  
The darkness bids them enter  
And the silence bids them stay  
And the sound of falling water  
Bids the slaughter of the day.  
When coffin-worms are gnawing  
At the lining of the walls  
You'll hear the length of every worm  
That from the coffin crawls.  
This worm is six-foot seven,  
And that one's five-foot-eight.  
The heartbeat of a gravestone  
Dies a hundred years too late.  
You hear it in the crickets  
And you hear it in the rain  
And you hear it in the hooves of horses  
Trotting down the lane.  
The coffin-worms are breathing  
In the shadows on the frost  
And each one strives to live for us  
The lifetime that it lost.  
For few are blessed with all their time  
At once, in quickened flesh,  
And those who die too early,  
Nailed inside a pinewood creche  
Return in wind and icy rain  
That pounds against our door  
For those sounds are coffin-whispers  
From the worms that live no more.

The Death of Piers Plowman, or, The Barley-Child

Piers lay down his sword and took up the plow before him. His wife lay down upon the loam and became the land. Her skin the grass was turned in the plow. Her blood the rain wet the soil. Her bones the stones became the foundations of a house. Her heart the sky was the field above the field, plowed by the heavens as Piers plowed the earth. But nothing grew.

Piers would wake and plow and sleep. He would not eat, for he had no food. Then came the barley-child.

It did not come from the village, for it did not bear the mark. It was not bright, not tall, but wise, wise as psalms. The barley-child came to Piers and asked for life. Piers killed the barley-child with his cudgel and gave him death. He took the boy beside the house and set the not-tall body on a farmer's stool, milked the blood of his wound, called it wine and drank it.

Piers took the meat of the boy, called it bread, supped upon it. From the bones he built an altar to the Father, prayed there.

For forty days Piers would wake and plow and sleep. Still there was no food. At the end of forty days the barley-child came to him and asked for life. With his cudgel Piers gave him death. Again he milked the corpse for wine and took the meat of it for bread. With the new bones he made a better plow, threw away the old iron plow hammered from a sword, and plowed his field with bones. He prayed upon the altar and loved his wife and for forty days ate nothing.

The barley-child returned in winter. Piers took the wine and bread. The bones became a chimney and an ax. Piers threw away his cudgel and cut down the one tree on the furrow's edge and was warm throughout winter. He prayed upon the altar of bone and kept the plow sharp. And still he had no food.

For a year the barley-child did not return to the farm of Piers Plowman. Piers was thinner each day until he was a wisp of a man. Each day was plowing time; night was the time for hunger. He prayed on the altar. He kept his plow sharp. His mule was thin, but not so thin that he had no meat. As Piers plowed with his bone plow, his eyes were always following the meat of the mule. At the beginning of that winter, one year since the barley-child had come, Piers took his bone ax and laid his mule low. The meat was poor and brown and wasted. It was tough and there was no wine to soften it and no wood to cook it. Piers stood in front of the house of his wife and chewed the last of his mule.

The next day the barley-child came. The barley-child came to Piers and asked for life. Piers held the bone ax, held up the tendons and bloody sinews of the mule that had pulled the bone plow. Meat of the mule was caught between all his teeth and pulled them out. Blood of the mule ran down him, staining him red and running over the ground. Bones of the mule, scattered across the ground, cut his feet and Piers knelt before the barley-child beside the altar of bone.

The barley-child asked for life. Piers Plowman lifted his own skull and gave it to the barley-child. From it spilled the cornucopia: fruits of the earth, vegetables and grain. The cornucopia yielded all things, and the heart of Piers Plowman fell to wine and spilled across the fields. The barley-child planted the ribs, and each became a tree bearing seed. From the sinews of the mule came worms, which turned the fields into a garden. And from the altar grew a vine into heaven.

\- Bangor, Christmas '09

The Singsonger

With a robbly-ob-scob the singsonger sang, he beat all about with a drum. With a tizzy-top-tap he tossed off his cap and caught it with an upended thumb.

"Why not pray with a prancer? Darry a dancer? Break out the bubblious wine? If the jape's what you're after, I'll swing from a rafter while I gargle the grape. It's just fine!"

Now the priestesses prambled, the fimblybuns scrambled, and the milliner murdled a yarn. The rip-tippy-tamber yelled the lewdest palamber and the carpenters threw up a barn.

"Loverly done, loverly done." The singsonger sumbled a smirk. With a greedily groan he took buttercake's own off the trumbling-tray of a clerk. The fare-thee-well fattened, the gimlet was slattened, while the gainly-top greymonk bedired. The lordies were laundered, the barleymaids saundered, and the hearth-tender-girls were all fired.

"Bob me a nuncle, the gailies I'd buncle!" barbled a bilious don. "What Dardenelle dainty would I offer a sainty to procure a punctual fawn!"

"Tuppance a tankle with a mummery-mankle!" a gillybird bawded with glee.

"Put me down for a ducat. I'll prink it and pluck it," said the kissing-quick-Tom beside me.

The Rise of Arch-Lord Evil

Arch-Lord Evil, Destroyer and Scourge of the Lands Beyond the Sea, was born Timofey Brown, bastard grandson of a wood-sprite and an alchemist's handsome apprentice.

The apprentice in question, one Fedorus Brown, had been sent by his master to the Swamp of Despond to collect ultraflower blossoms, source of a vital alchemical component. Fedorus spent leisurely days swimming through muck and sleeping in the tick-infested trunks of fallen floating trees. Something in the flow of the stagnant water awakened a zest within the young man, a spirit of honest adventure, and he became enamored of the life. Electing to stay in the swamp, he decided to make a man of himself and became a private contractor. Selling the waving pink blossoms as well as a few other priceless plants directly to the alchemists of the city, he managed a fair start to his business. In time, as a hobby, he became an dabbling alchemist.

After purchasing a floating wagon and an alembic with his ultraflower proceeds, Fedorus set to work testing every toad, salamander, firefern, fermented mushroom and disease tree for its properties. Inside one tree he hacked down was a young woman with butterfly wings. The handsome apprentice convinced her to throw away her wings and spend her life with him. Together they moved into the wagon and set about putting together a world for themselves. The young alchemist was sure he understood her. Of course he did. She was very happy. Her moments of passionate delight sent violet sparks flying out the chimney, visible from the Dragonmountains of Faravell. The rest of her miserable life was soaked in tears.

Their first child was named Shadowvein Brown, a name suggested by the nymph and hated by father and son alike. It was a sickly child, bedridden and friendless. Fedorus spent all his free time at the boy's bedside, teaching him tricks of business and alchemy. Business was good business to Fedorus, but alchemy was a passion. A fascination. Alchemy, in the man's mind, was decadence.

For long hours Fedorus pored over his components, mixing and remixing to gauge every possible effect. Drying bark, grinding it into powder, separating it into tiny glass jars, and adding a drop of this oil, a flake of that moth wing, and dabbing the precipitate onto his arm, watching his skin buckle or turn purple or smell like daisies. For long hours it went, until he had forgotten his wife. She watched him, and whispered secrets into Shadowvein's ear.

At a certain point, the fact arose that the boy's mother already knew the magickal properties of all things in the swamp. Indeed, she could tell the properties of any item. Why hadn't she shared this, he shouted. They were poor. It took so much time to painstakingly purify and test everything. She could have given him the answers. She hadn't. Why hadn't she? Why, why, why?

Because she did not care for Fedorus any more, she said.

So he hit her, there in front of Shadowvein, over and over until she went into premature labor. The wood-sprite kept her daughter alive by channeling much of her magickal Natureforce into the wet, wriggly fetus.

As the sprite lay damaged in bed with her daughter, Camellia the Preborn, her young son Shadowvein went to pick arcodees, his mother's favorite flower, hoping to lift her heart. He gathered the silver shimmering blossoms and spread them beside his mother where she lay.

Fedorus, still angry beyond reason, grabbed the lovely singing flowers and burned them for their pitch. From the dew he developed a Natureforce cordial that cured arthritis if taken daily. When applied to sod, the cordial promoted the growth of healthy lawns. When given to animals, the animals grew larger and more delicious. Labeled "Brown's Health Panacea," he brought it to town, where it was an instant sensation.

Money came in. He burned more and more of the silver blooms. The price went up. Soon, thieves followed him home to discover the recipe. Peering in the window, what they saw was a wood-sprite covered with bruises. Naturally, they assumed the liqueur was made from wood-sprite blood and immediately set up a rival shop. After a kidnapping pogrom of the wood-sprites from their forest city, the thieves extracted the captives's blood, bottled it and sold it as Gray's Cure-All.

Natureforce flowed thickly in the blood of the wood-sprites. Gray's Cure-All proved to be nothing more than a concentrated version of Fedorus' cordial. Imitators imitated the imitators, and Shadowvein, tiny premature Camellia the Small and their parents all watched through the wagon window as captive phalanxes of wood-sprites marched past them in chains, their golden wings gone forever.

Guilt-ridden for many reasons, Fedorus was unwilling to draw his wife's blood. The thin cordial no longer sold. His children, whose ears were whispered into nightly, no longer loved him. He had lost their respect. One night, in the muddy barrens surrounding the wagon, Fedorus Brown dug into the sodden turf with a shovel. He dug until he found an urthan pox plant, brown and bending in the moonlight and coughing out deadly puffs of killing spores. Adding it to an old bottle of Brown's Health Panacea, he lay down in the hole he had dug and drank the poison, felt the pox take over. The last thing he saw was a patch of grass growing mightily out of his own vomit.

* * *

Shadowvein, his shrunken sister Camellia the Tiny, and their mother, whom they disguised as a filthy old crone, immediately left the swamp. Avoiding the horror of the city, they settled deep in the ruins of the lost wood-sprite castle, Caer Arboethia. Every day, Shadowvein cast the murder spells his mother taught him, one on every entrance. Every evening, he threw the fresh corpses into the Soulfurnace, where their Lifeforce powered the altered magick of the sprite keep. Camellia the Clever used the Lifeforce cleverly to sustain them, developing unusual spells and powers. They lived like this for years.

One day a crowd of diplomats from the Harrow-elves of Sharrenness slipped past Shadowvein's death-cantrips and marched in their solemn procession into the throne room. The elves finally opened their eyes and examined the spritely world around them. Aghast, they discovered that the color, the music, the joy of the wood-sprites had retreated. In its place was ebon shroud and haunting lost voices, dripping into the echo chamber of the hollow hall. Skulls shook their teeth from the ceiling, bones spun absently, and candles burned an angry blood-brown.

"What's happened?" they asked, in their slow, ponderous way, lasting some hours.

"It has been the end of the world," said Camellia the Little plainly. "We have built a different world in its place."

"We welcome the Harrow-elves," whispered her mother, her limbs curled around the twisted throne. "What will you have of us?"

The emissaries, Mme. Hesheplewinias and Mssr. Cassarlewinian, bowed to the wood-sprite on the throne. "Your majesty is brought a gift from the land of Sharrenness." He led forth a beautiful woman from beneath a veil. Her bangled ears arched upwards in shapely crescents and her green eyes sparkled like the emerald-crusted fourth moon. She was beautiful beyond comparison, smiling and pearlescent.

"May I present the Princess Acarine," said the emissaries together.

The wood-sprite on the throne looked puzzled, an unaccustomed expression. "You give the daughter of the elfish premier as a gift," she said slowly. "It is wondrous, and a danger to accept."

Cassarlewinian stepped forward. "Perhaps you have heard of the breeding experiments of the vasty Mad Demiurge, whose very thought commands the elfish races? It is his opinion, eternal and unchanging, that the course of time is ready for a Conflux of the two great races of magick, the elves and the elemental sprites. As wood is strong, supple and constant to its purpose, the elementals of wood were chosen."

"You wish my son betrothed to Princess Acarine?" asked the sprite on the throne.

"Yes."

"It is agreed."

The marriage, its parade and the events immediately following are not important, and few now survive who remember them.

Some time later, when Acarine was pregnant with Shadowvein's son Timofey, the truth again came out that Shadowvein's mother was not what she appeared. She was not, as she seemed to the elves, the wood-sprite queen by lineage. Rather, she was the spirit of some dead swamp tree. Her name was Tree. She was unworthy and had given Shadowvein unworthy blood.

And there was something else besides.

"He is half-human!" screamed Hesheplewinias, her eyes burning hate-blue. "You have gifted the grandchild the right to choose evil! Such power, the supreme Confluence of Natureforce and Heartforce and the humanic Lifeforce, will surely destroy us all!"

"I know," said Tree. "I have made this decision."

And, in the way of things, the boy Timofey Brown was born.

* * *

Every wise and learned teacher of magick that could be found was brought in to teach the boy. It was hoped that they might convince the child to choose a path of light and peace. Rasucalth the Twelfth Eye; Bronson the Cactus-Eater; Shabrath, Known of the Dead and Keeper. All were sent for, teachers and sophisticates and mages of light, taking turns to shape the child. Wealth in abundance was offered to all if the child became a follower of the happier paths of magick. Shadowvein spent all his time attending to his son's education. Every waking second. It became an obsession. All day and all night, the young man knelt beside his son and attended to the teaching. He had not a moment to spare for his elfish wife.

It was around this time that the Princess Acarine went on a walk through the woods, where she met Hank, a hardy, well-built lumberjack with a firm and attentive hand.

When he called for his wife to attend the boy's training, he found her absent. Gradually it became known where she had gone. Shadowvein, neither as handsome nor as abusive as his departed father, bore her disappearances with dignity. His face became an imitation of happiness.

Without recourse, darkness grew inside Shadowvein. Anger at the betrayal of his beloved became Darkforce, that virulent dark energy. It spun around him like stalking ghosts. His son, possessed of a certain Demiurge-granted sensitivity, pulled his father's Darkforce inside his own elfish belly. Evil was evilly born.

Every day it became clearer to the mass of gathered tutors that the boy was lost. In desperation, the boy's aunt, Camellia the Weensy, called Council.

"We must kill the child," she stated simply to the assembly of elves, dwarfs, wizards and men.

"Och, but he's been taught every blasted defensive spell in the Land Beyond the Sea!" the grumbling dwarf Fritzlspritz grumbled.

"Indeed," said Camellia the Wise. "But we must kill the child."

"I have personally taught the child the Solar Light Shield, capable of repelling a direct hit of dragonsbreath!" cried Mairen the Mage, Greatest of All Time.

"Show-off," muttered Fritzlspritz.

"Impressive," agreed Camellia the Bright. "But we must kill the child."

"I could cast the Fluttering Daisies Demonic Slice Thunder Power Boom spell on him," said the garrulous Shoko.

"And if that durrn't work, the lad'll know we're onto him," mumbled Fritzlspritz mumbily.

"I see one solution," said Camellia the Sage calmly. "He must be killed in physical combat in a place where no magick can be employed."

"Then I'll be the one to kill him," muttered Fritzlspritz, hefting his axe.

Camellia, aided by the council, created a damping field around the three-year-old. They cut off all paths to magick. As they did this, they couldn't help but imagine that the diapered child was watching them with calculating eyes.

Fritzlspritz hefted his massive bearded axe, let it fall. Timofey, lifting a hand placidly, swapped their heads on their bodies for only a moment and returned the dwarf's split skull to his neck. The boy then crushed the iron axe into powder with force of will alone.

* * *

The passing of beloved Fritzlspritz, a dwarf of warmth and humor, was commemorated the following Wednesday. Fritzlspritz enjoyed tending his rock garden, orienteering, and spending time with his family. He is survived by his son, Fratzlspratz; his wife, Glurt'Blart; and several nieces.

* * *

Camellia the Great, knowing that her mother Tree desired the ruin of the world, laid sleep upon her in secret. With a gentle spell, the tiny wizardess hefted the wood-sprite into the tower, lay her upon an old bed, and crossed the delicate hands upon the delicate hating heart. Likewise observing the dotage of parenthood, the wise sorceress placed Stop upon her brother Shadowvein and his wife. Camellia the Wondrous then called upon the great warriors of the Land Beyond the Sea, offering endless wealth to the one who could kill Timofey the Confluent.

So in trooped Farstrider, Layer of Waste. As he approached Timofey, his longblade was turned into a small frog, quite adorable actually except for its lethal oils.

Brbdtd Czdtdl'idtd, the trickster assassin, died with his innumerable daggers well-hidden within his guts.

Urrrg Hits-Until-Ded got melted.

The child, enjoying itself wantonly, even changed its own diapers during a fight with DarkRaven, He Whose Breff Freezes tha Rivva.

As battle after battle raged, the inner chambers of the archaic wood-sprite hold became riven, even as the damping field remained intact. It slowly became clear that the child needed no magick for its spells. His confluent nature allowed him to channel Nature, Dark, Life and Heart energy through the fabric of reality itself.

In a new, emergency Council, Camellia the Exalted explained her new plan to the remaining nabobs. It was simple: expand the damping field and vacate the castle. Leave the boy to starve. The plan was effected immediately.

In the exodus, something was neglected. The mother of Shadowvein and Camellia, the wood-sprite named Tree, lay abandoned and accursed in magickal sleep. While Camellia the Hero's Stop spell was designed to end after a few days, the sleep spell was not. The exalted Councilor's mother reclined upon her bed in the top floor, unable to awaken.

* * *

Indeed, there she lies to this day, worse than dead, for the Natureforce of her blood has linked to the sealed chambers. Roots and ivy grip the crumbling walls of her room. Creepers dance around the window frame, blooming sullen arcodees at the unseeing world. While the ruined castle stands, the damping field prevents the awakening spell, but if the castle should fall, the Natureforce keeping her alive will crack, ending the race of wood sprites for all time. It's very sad really.

* * *

Timofey Brown brooded deep within the tower. He grew apples, dangling off little trees for him like bleeding hearts. He used Natureforce to grow mandrakes: one, two, three little poppets with faces like his family. He used elfish Heartforce to connect these effigies to the true people, heart to heart and soul to soul. He watched them move. Camellia the Holy, her crooked spine leaning toward unseen Councilors. His father and his mother, two figures who abandoned him the way they abandoned each other. He saw his parents fleeing, hand in hand, away from him.

The mandrakes scooted around the stone floor of the keep. The child watched. He lit the flame of Darkforce within himself, as his father unwittingly taught him, and threaded the foul energy into the mandrakes. A thread for Shadowvein, one for Acarine, and all the rest for Camellia the Hated, Camellia the Wicked, Camellia the Cruel.

For his father, Timofey took pity. He saw within his father damage done by others. For him he decided only to stop the heart. Far away, a half-human man fell, released of his hidden pain.

For his thoughtless and unknowing mother Acarine, who even then stooped for a last embrace with the man she tore, Timofey gifted the gift of total empathy. In that instant, staring at her dying husband, she felt all the years of loveless pain. Overwhelmed and despairing, she fled, flooded by the thoughts and feelings of all who looked upon her. She would die later in catatonia, surrounded by chirgeons whose rotten home secrets engulfed her.

Lastly, Timofey pondered the fate of the aunt who had engineered his isolation. Her punishment could not end in death. This had to be special.

It began with the most obvious gift: immortality, forged by a pipeline to the immeasurable energy within Timofey himself. Through this hidden connection Timofey drained much of Camellia's bright power, leaving enough for her to live dismally. In a distant place, she was astonished to find that her magick failed her again and again.

Timofey fed his aunt Darkforce, just enough to bring guilt, anger, self-loathing. When she jumped off the balcony of her new home, Timofey kept her alive in a shattered body. When her position as head of Council was inevitably questioned, he gave her enough power to keep herself in charge. When the Council splintered, Camellia accidentally slaughtered the opposition. She had meant only to startle them. When war was declared, Timofey gave her access to his limitless destruction. Any mage or warrior who might have been able to fight him was crushed by his puppet.

Then he took the power away, keeping Camellia alive to witness what she had accomplished.

* * *

Alone and friendless Camellia walks, hunted and haunted and hated. Still she walks.

* * *

Young Timofey began expanding the damping field to cancel all magick except his own. With the exception of the arcodees of his grandmother's chamber, all life died. First the castle, then the grounds, then outwards, a meadow of graves, the land's greenery fading to brown and bone. Timofey drew up the Lifeforce into his confluent soul and grew stronger. As the boy's power increased, so did his cruelty. From his father's murder spells, he made twisted magicks to blind and mutilate all who entered. As crusaders arrived at the stronghold, determined to defeat this newly-sprung evil, their gallant steeds fell out from under them, their legs snapping apart like rotting twigs and their skin peeling away like a snake's to reveal their throbbing guts. The crusaders themselves fell to the burnt ground and were blinded. Now sightless and weak, they could neither continue on to the castle nor return home to safety. They wandered the death-gardens as their souls were emptied of Lifeforce in the jaws of the Soulfurnace and then tied to the cursed grounds upon which they stumbled. And as with any foe not yet overcome, more challengers kept arriving. They were all brought down, only to rise again.

The sphere of the sky above the castle became lightless. The sun was torn from it. In the glowering darkness, the dead crusaders and their deformed mounts stood, strung up with Darkforce and driven out, out to kill. Willfully and with undying hate, the Horroring began.

Matt and Maggie

There is love in the darkness. Death was all they ever talked about, huddled together under a blanket in their special place in the corner, the TV flickering a Svankmajer film, distant. How they would die, what the worst ways are, sharing the stories of how celebrities kicked it. They touched, casually, under the blanket, wondering if this was how living things felt. Clutched to each other, they talked about dying as if it was all that was left.

When Maggie came home from work and saw Matt flat across the kitchen, and the world bent around her, and the legs, the shoes horizontal and motionless and she drew away, not looking, not finding the rest of him, hiding behind the bullnose, crouched, and feelings made her arms twitch, and the gap under her throat, and the faint perfume of an almost-gone incense stick, it was their special terrible incense, they had found it together at a crappy dollar store and it was awful and they had learned to love it together, when they were just learning. And and and all the talk about death, it was a shield, it kept them, it was a way of talking, talking around the problem, oh my god.

That bitch-ass boy never told her. Never said _suicide_. Hours together. Comparing lives. Playing Cabela's ironically at the arcade just to balance the scourge of their veganism. Running into countless high school enemies everywhere, greeting them as if they mattered, just so they could introduce each other as true loves. Now she had a thousand people she wouldn't get introduced to. True loves.

Why? Whywhywhywhywwwwwwhh. Hff.

Tattered, tottered up. Tottered out the apartment door, to the steps, a smoke. That was always the flavor.

She let the Bic flame touch her fingers, felt more alive than she had in years. More alive than she had since she and Nick and Claire and everybody went sledding into the stream and Matt had gone into hypothermic shock. This was before they were dating. And she had pulled the dumbass out, even though he had held her under the water at the pool party. He hadn't remembered it all, not with hypothermia, breath rattling under his coat and sweater, but seeing him helpless and dying let her forgive him. She had never shared her side of that memory with Matt. Never ever.

It took a few sucks to light the smoke. Time to call the police. The po-po. She hated that phrase. Time to call them.

Instead she tripped down to her car. In a sense of volume, of noise and thickness and strange and atmosphere she found herself pulling into H's mom's house.

H's real name was something else, maybe Georgina, but who cared? She was nobody to rename. She had decided she was H. Maggie knocked and H's mom came out.

In time Maggie was sprawled on a couch and covered in blankets and tears and shaking, her feet up on the sofa arm. The police had been called. H sat beside her. She was unwrapping a bandaid.

"What's that for?"

Silent and prim, H leaned over and stuck the bandaid on Maggie's shirt, between her breasts. "It's for your heart."

Maggie blinked, lay back, hugged herself. It didn't feel right, but it felt different, and different was nice.

"I have a hedgehog now. It is the freaking cutest thing ever and I believe it wants to meet you. Mm?"

"Yeah, okay, H, I'll meet your hedgehog."

H's form vanished through a flapping wooden door and came back with her hands before her, like the girl who brought the Holy Grail before the supine Fisher King. A wiggling thing landed plop in Maggie's lap, poky and squirming, and Maggie vaguely wished she had found someone less enthusiastic about cheering her up. Her stomach hurt and she wanted a Midol or an Advil, and she all of a sudden thought of a torrent of pills, Matt's face streaked in green, like in _Girl, Interrupted_. Sour water and a bit of Chunky Steak and Potato Stew filled her mouth, and she found she didn't feel like swallowing it, so she stood, stepping on the blanket, stepping and stepping forward to make the blanket go away, heading for the bathroom and feeling something wiggly squish under a heel and spikes pierced her heel and she fell and coated the gray Berber carpet with spew and H screamed.

And Maggie's only thought as she ran barefoot to her car, puke down her bandaided shirt and hedgehog blood on her feet was _I'm pregnant_.

She drove to the park on the residential side of the neighborhood, realized she didn't have a bra on, flashed half a dozen distant children as she took off her puky shirt, rolled down the window, let the shirt flop to the curb. It left a streak on the side of the car. Bare-breasted, Maggie swore as she put her work shirt on. Next stop was the drugstore, for flip-flops, a washcloth and a pregnancy test. For a moment she thought the gangly, extra-tall McConaughey dude was going to call her out on the "no shoes, no service" policy, but a look got her through to the drugstore bathroom where she got more unhappy and more positive--positively unhappy--ninety seconds later. For as long as she could, she just sat, delaying the inevitable trip to her parents.

All the things Matt wouldn't find. All the love-wonders that had flown away. There was a real estate guide to starter houses that she had hidden away in his sex toy box. There was a length of chain, just long enough to circle Matt's skinny waist, and a special lock. It was in her car. There was a store window on Minneapolis Street with engagement rings on sale. They were to have discreetly walked past, and she would stop and tie her shoe for as long as it took. Forever, maybe. There were the Botanical Gardens, which he suggested for a date once and she had said it was the faggiest idea ever, but now she secretly wanted him to take her anyway. There was the flirty way they had danced around the three little words. She had said them once, accidentally, truthfully, when he had bought her the Garbo DVD collection as a late Christmas present. And then he had kissed her apologetically, because he had been in Pennsylvania with his great-aunt and her family, and his great-aunt was not getting any younger. He liked to say, "She's not getting any older, y'know," to see whether people noticed and mentioned Benjamin Button or Merlin. Sometimes he said, "At least she hasn't died."

Maggie noticed, there on the women's john, that Matt's great-aunt had outlived him, and wasn't sure how that made her feel. Someone jiggled the door and it was finally time to run away again. She swore, loudly, at the pseudo-polite tapping, which paused for a shocked moment and then resumed. After disposing of the accursed objects she had bought, she slammed the door open, got in the face of the ginger housewife: "What?" and left.

In the car her cell phone rang; she turned it off. An Oldsmobile almost sideswiped her, and she honked. Examining the river bridge from the hill, she wondered whether her car could break through the railing and plunge in a swarm of twisted metal fragments into the frigid deluge below. Probably not. Probably her insurance would go up and she would need to call AAA.

Driving in a frenzy, she shot past the marauding car of an ex-boyfriend and the house of her kindergarten best friend.

She had left so much behind already.

Maggie--no, prepare yourself, Margo--circled the block once angrily, frustrated, before pulling alongside her parents' house. Ralph's collar hung alongside Maizie's on the ceramic cat outside the porch.

She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to him.

"Margaret! Did you bring your laundry, dear?"

"I threw my laundry away. And then I killed a porcupine!"

Her mother poked her head around the corner. "You _threw_ your _laundry_ away?"

Maggie let one hand slide over the other and over the other as if she had a mouse running. Then she dashed over and cried. "And Matt k-k-k." Heat thundered from her face as she fell onto the doorframe. Her mother became alarmed in the eyebrows and observed her, her arms crossed.

"Matt what, dear?"

"Killed himself." Maggie let her mother grab her shoulders, clutch her in her incompetently motherly show of brief comfort, release her. She was led to the second couch of the afternoon.

"Do you need an ice pack?" her mother said shortly.

Maggie winced. "For the beer you're going to bring me?" She smiled a ghastly, pained smile, which was not returned.

"Margo."

"Maggie."

"Maggie. I don't . . . I don't like the idea of you drinking. It's not right for someone your age. If you have to do . . . that stuff, I'd prefer not to know about it."

"Mom." Maggie's voice was as precise and controlled and unthreatening as she could make it. "Mom. Bring. Me. An. Effing. Beer. Now." Each word outlined. Nothing else.

Her mother rose and fetched a Michelob and a glass, scratched her thumb twisting it open. Maggie took it, poured. Her mother might've said something like, "out, damned spot" to her thumb, under her breath.

"Now. Why don't you tell me what happened?"

"I got pregnant."

" _What?_ " her mother shrieked. "Margaret Isabel Harris!"

The cats all ran in at once. Elmo, Rutgers, Ducks, Mr. Grumblypants. Ducks tried to chase Elmo out of the room, but he hid inside the couch head rest and began to chew Maggie's hair. Ducks gave her a look of scorn for accepting his affections.

"Are you sure? Totally sure?"

"Yes, mom."

"You're twenty!" Scandalized. She attempted to extract the beer from Maggie's talons.

"Mom, I'm twenty-one."

"You're twenty-one?" Shocked. "I've been telling everyone you're turning twenty-one!"

"I'll be twenty-two in May."

"I know when your birthday is, dammit. I'm your mother."

Breath strung out of Maggie all at once, rattling out like an unwound guitar string. She poured beer into herself, felt bubbles catch her pharynx at the wrong angle, choked it up and coughed and snorted as the bubbles multiplied.

" _That_ is 'you shouldn't drink,' exhibit A," her mother snapped. Elmo clawed his way around the underside of the couch and found Maggie's pant leg, dug into her calf, suspended himself a few inches above the carpet with it.

"WhatdoIdo, mom?"

"Turn." Maggie let her mother squish her shouldermeat like putty, felt everything drain away a little. "Do you plan on keeping it?"

"Oh, God, mom, I don't know. I--I don't know. I haven't even, I mean today's--Matt."

"Oh!" Just an intake. "I had completely forgotten. Tell me about that."

Maggie crumpled. It hit her. As sick heat radiated from her, again, she managed to say words, a few things like, "he didn't tell me" and "I hate him" and "I can't ever go back to that place" and other things. They held each other vaguely. Ducks hissed.

"Mom," she finally whimpered. "Do I have to get back together with Derek?"

"Why on earth would you say such a thing?" her mother said. "He _hit_ you."

"But if I have the baby I'll need a father for it. And how many guys would be willing to put up with months of baby-bump me just for a chance to sex me later?"

"Put that out of your mind this instant. He _hit_ you. Until you find . . . someone, your father and I will support you."

"Yes, we will," came the familiar boom. Elmo bolted headfirst along Maggie's pantleg into the underside of her kneecap, which she snapped down reflexively, banging the scrabbly spotted cat against the couch frame.

"Dad!" and "HOWIE!" sounded sharply. "What did I tell you about doing that?" her mother said.

He poked his head around the front door window. "Jan, I can't stop until I've got my timing--" he gave the okay sign-- "just right." Maggie's dad's grin was unstoppable. "How'd I do?"

"Howard Harris. This is absolutely no time for your little games."

"It's all right, mom. Dad's a funny guy." She cleared her throat. "Dad. You're a funny guy."

Whatever her father might have replied was pre-empted by a sound so unplaceable that Maggie felt her guts tinkle like bells. It rose from under her feet. Elmo, who had been perched at her side, sniffing at her beer, suddenly went bushy and frizzy. Ducks froze, and Mr. Grumblypants left the room abruptly.

"Was that . . .?" Howie began.

"Oh, not another one," said Jan.

With spiders all over her, Maggie leaned over the couch and recoiled at the dead cat. Its eyes were open, shining in the afternoon light through the slats, motionless in a way that no cat ought to be. Rutgers. He had suddenly become reptilian. Maggie's mother frowned, puzzled. She got up, crouched, sniffed.

"It didn't even poop!" she exclaimed.

"I'll get a plastic bag," said Maggie's father on his way to the kitchen.

"Would you look at that. It didn't poop. Must have been something wrong with its insides."

"Hell of a way to die," called Howie, returning. "Choking to death on your own poop."

"Well, he was sixteen, after all. Nothing lives forever."

"Can you get his collar off? I think the clay cat needs a new one."

While Howie took the cat out in a plastic bag, Maggie got a second beer, hiding the empty first bottle at the bottom of the trash. "Goodbye, Ruckers," she whispered very quietly.

She returned and was about to say something to her mother when a knock came at the door. Her mother opened it.

A seven-foot-tall anorexic man stood there. A pickup truck had sunk into the front lawn. "Heyyy! Have you heard about me?" The man held a styrofoam box wrapped in twine.

"Why _no_ ," Jan said. "Are you . . . new in town?" She turned to look hard at her daughter.

"Uh, yeah, you'd deffily say that. Look," the man said, bouncing on his toes, "I'm sellin' meat. You got any meat in your freezer?"

Maggie's mother blinked. "Have I got meat in my freezer?" she repeated. "Why yes, I do, actually. Sorry to disappoint."

The guy waggled his free arm. "Ahh, I don't believe you. You're going to really like buying from me." He chuckled, shrugged. "Free delivery?"

" _You don't believe me_." She crossed her arms. Ducks hid behind the Wii.

"Yeah, man, I know you women. You're going to have to let me see it to believe it." The guy put a hand on Jan's shoulder and shoved, took a few steps inside. Then Howie hauled him back out again and pushed him toward his truck, growling. A pack of Albertson's ground beef hopped out of the guy's cooler. In seconds the lawn had new grooves, dirt spitting from the tires.

"I'll call the po-po," Maggie mumbled. She hated that phrase.

"Ehh, he won't come back." Her father grinned toothily.

"I'll call. You talk to your daughter." Jan took out her cellphone and went into the other room.

Maggie examined her shoelaces carefully as her father placed himself beside her. Elmo dug into the gap in the couch cushions, becoming a secret cat under a twitching conning-tower tail.

"So I hear I'm gonna be a grandfather!" Howie said proudly.

"Mmhm."

"And Matt-your-boyfriend's the daddy?"

"Mmhm."

"So how's he feel about it?" her father asked.

"He committed suicide. Before I could tell him," Maggie whispered.

Howie's face fell like a stone, becoming a mask of astonishment. For a long while he just gaped.

"Ya-you told Jan?" He pointed.

Maggie nodded.

"Guess my timing isn't much good after all."

"Guess not." She shrugged. The sofa growled menacingly.

"Oh, honey." Her father shook himself. "My little girl. I--"

"You didn't know. It's okay, dad. You really didn't."

"Maggie."

"I've got to go, dad." Maggie stood, hugged him, kissed his cheek. "I'll be okay." He kissed her cheek back.

Maggie's mother came in and sighed. "The police already knew about the guy."

Mr. Grumblypants pulled an RCA plug out from the VCR with his teeth. Jan sat on the couch, said "OOHH!" and stood up again as the barracuda struck.

"Bye, mom."

"Oh, you're going?" Jan sighed. "We're here whenever. Don't be a stranger. I--"

"She's going to get mushy," Howie said.

"Margo."

" _Maggie._ "

"Whoever you are. I know I'm no good as a mother."

"Mommm . . ."

"You don't have to say it. I know. Anyways, I am your mother and I'll help you through this. If you want advice, I'll never run out. Promise."

Maggie hugged her mother and left. She started up the PT Cruiser and bumped into the engaged parking brake in her hurry to get away. It occurred to her that she'd had drinks and might be tipsy, but she scooted away up the road anyway, lighting a cigarette as she went. A coffin nail. She'd die when she got lung cancer and not a moment sooner. She'd chosen it. That was her death. She'd wait for the lightning bolt.

The rest of the afternoon loomed. Talk to her brother, find a motel, go back to the apartment, go talk to the police. Seagulls wheeled over the river, landing on the occasional ripped bag of trash. One for sorrow, two for joy, three a girl, four a boy, five for more sorrow. Fuck. She wheeled it to Hiawatha Park to listen to the falls. The bike trail led gently around the lake through brush. Seagulls were replaced by songbirds and a pair of wood ducks. Bicyclists were out in force, and she climbed across cattails to the gravel beside the water to avoid getting gunned down. There was a tree, a special tree, a magic tree with a trunk for stretching out on. Good. No one was there. Maggie scrungled up the trunk and lay along it jaguar-style.

Absently, she dug out her cellphone and held the on button, let it flash and dingle. With her hands propped on her elbows, she examined the warm thing, wondering if she had the concentration to play the stupid rafting game or the balloon-popping monkey game. Her DS was in her backpack, which might or might not be in her car. Or in the apartment, which was by now certainly cordoned off by yellow tape and thousands of vicious po-po. Monkeypopper it was, then.

And then the text messages arrived.

Seventeen of them.

From Matt.

She fell off the tree.

* * *

call me

hey, call me

where r u

im not dead :)

at the hospital call me

hey mags u saved my life

why werent u with me when i woke up

i know ur mad. call

need a slde out kybrd dammt :)

Maggie turn your pussy on

* phone autocorrect

* * *

She began running to the car, still reading.

* * *

OK here i go 160 chars maggie i love you but it seems like there is lust so much about myself and you and everything. i dine myself rotten and dammit

* * *

She could see her car.

* * *

Find myself rotten and the world rotten and weve come so far and even after an epic journey of milo & otis selfdiscovery i still hate myself and wish i was dammit

* * *

The car started and the Tomtom navi glimmered.

* * *

Dead :(

they have me under surveillance and pumped my stomach :(

But i will be ok

cu soon :/

* * *

Before she left the park she texted, "Which hospital dumbass?"

Almost immediately he texted back. "Hennepin". She shut her phone off again.

Minutes later she was in the front door, asking the information man where Matthew Larrabie was. The guy sent her to the third floor, which she was delighted to notice was not the ICU. Up an elevator, around a million squirrelly corners, almost bumping a number of absent-minded medical folks with clipboards. Through a door with "Observation" on it. Asking a nurse, who led her back to the weird busy part of the ward that makes you feel like you shouldn't be there, to a short corridor with windows.

There he was. Sitting up. God Jesus there he was.

Resisting the urge to throttle him, she went in and stood. He looked mournful.

"They have me on lithium," he whispered. "I can't feel anything."

"I thought your great-aunt had outlived you," she whispered back.

"She totally will. _She cost six million dollars._ " He pretended to be Eddie Izzard pretending to be the theme song to the _Six Million Dollar Man_ with his arms. "Ba da ba baaa . . ."

"Ruckers died. And I murdered a hamster. And my mom got attacked by a meat salesman."

"Whoa." Matt smiled.

There was a chair. She pulled it over and sat and took his hand. "Matt." Gentle. "Tell me."

"I'm stupid and rotten and hateful and you have no right to care about me and I wish I was gone."

She examined him. "You didn't say it."

"What?"

"You didn't say dead."

"I told you, I'm on lithium. I'm not myself."

"Hm."

Maggie thought about the baby. She thought about Derek. She thought about this boy.

"Matt." She thought about what to say. "Matt," deep breath, "I love you, you stupid fucker."

"I know." He nodded like Han Solo.

"I just lived through a whole day of unimaginable bullshit and then I find out that the boy I love, who just committed suicide, has come back to life like Jeezy effing Kreezy and after a million things go wronger than they already were I find you and I tell you that I fuckin love you and all you have to say is 'I know'? Not even close, Matt." She crossed her arms.

"Why do you love me?" he mumbled.

"I don't fucking know, Matt. I couldn't talk to anybody today. When things came out of my mouth, it was somebody else saying them. De Mornay's _Rebecca_."

"Du Maurier."

"Whatever."

"Oh my God, Mags, I'm sorry. Oh my God. I didn't mean to say anything. It's totally Rebecca de Mornay who wrote _Rebecca_."

Maggie had a you-have-to-laugh-or-you'd-cry decision to make, and started crying. "I said shut up. I can't talk to you right now."

Maggie got up, walked out of the ward. Impulsively, she left the hospital altogether. After sitting for fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes in her car, she started it, drove to I-94 and headed for Fargo.

At the first rest stop she stopped and picked up her phone, stared at it, rolled up all the windows, auto-dialed.

A nurse picked it up.

"Um, who is this?" said Maggie to the female voice.

"Is this 'Mags'?" the female voice asked in reply.

"I'm the one asking who's who!" Maggie shrieked. She added, "Yes, I'm Maggie."

"Are you outside?"

"Why?"

"You'd better come inside."

Holding the phone away from her head, Maggie swore into the steering wheel. "Is he dead?"

"He's in surgery, but I don't think it's going to be life or death. Not now. If you'd step inside, the head of observation wants to speak with you."

"I'm halfway to fucking Fargo!" Maggie hung up.

The road back had an eerie sense of jamais-vu, of driving through a mirror, everything backward. She felt part of a Magritte painting, sitting on a train thundering through a fireplace, the same fireplace she had thundered through every day in the loopy, faded past. Stomach acid weaseled around inside her. Every part of her car, from the stick to the crooked steering wheel to the tinniness of the CDs, was pissing her off. David Byrne's plastic phoniness was aggravating her, and her fingers marched across the sunflap, looking for Morrisey and finding only Concrete Blonde, which was maybe good enough.

Maggie spun it ahead to "Joey," warbled along under her tears, kept the windows tightly shut as she screamed "Joey I'm not angry anymore" and felt the dark places opening up and the letting-go begin.

She sat blindly, flatly through "I Don't Need a Hero," usually her feminist fist-pump.

Then "Tomorrow, Wendy" came on.

The first chords sent her back to the eighties, the neon clothes, the brick walls and tough gay guys and pretend technology and dumb songs and skateboards. For awhile she didn't remember what song it was that began this way, all Phil Collins without the vagine.

Then the chorus arrived, and she remembered what the song was about, and threw up onto the steering wheel again. In her hurry to hit the eject button she knocked the car into neutral and skidded through a traffic light.

And the po-po (she _hated_ that word) came ululating from behind a stopped car before she could hit the clutch.

Wrangling the car into an outlet mall parking lot, Maggie wiped a chunk of puke off the steering wheel. Rooting around, she found her dropped cigarette, which was starting to darken the edge of the floor mat, and stubbed it out on the crumbs and drinking straw sheaths in the ashtray. Absently, waiting for the pope to arrive, she wondered whether smoking affected a baby, whether they came out needing a smoke, like crackbabies. That would be awesome.

When the tapping shadow arrived, she flinched and scrambled for her registration and dug out her wallet from her man-purse.

"Ma'am? Couldja open your window?" It was not an angry bald man. She hated angry bald men. It must be an angry young man, since it was not a short, tubby lesbian.

The window button wasn't working. First she gestured helplessly, then, as the officer mumbled about maybe opening the door for him, Maggie turned the key to auxillary and got the window open. She handed him her license and registration, which he wrote down.

"I did it. You're right. I suck at life." Maggie noticed her mouth was making stupid shapes and sounds under her stupid, stupid red face. "I didn't say that to you," she informed the cop. He didn't seem to have a dirt squirrel under his nose.

"Well, that's good to hear. Been a hard day?"

"My boyfriend's in the hospital with a bad case of suicide," she blurted. Why not keep blurting? "But that isn't the reason I ran the light. The real reason is that I'm a spaz and I slap things when I puke."

"Thought I smelled something," the cop said good-naturedly.

"Jesus Fuck!" Maggie puked again, briefly considering whether to hold it in or to aim out the window at the cop before settling for the passenger seat and missing. Puke covered the gear shift. She considered it philosophically, then slapped the steering wheel. "See?"

"Aww, now, honey . . ."

Honey?

"Have you got a towel?" the cop asked.

"Where do you keep your mustache when it's not in use?"

The cop straightened up a little and rubbed his mouth.

"Ma'am, if you need some paper towels I can give you some. Understand you've had a hard day. But please be respectful." The cop handed her a business card, which she caused through force of will to merely be placed in her purse, instead of flicked into oblivion.

"I'll let you off with a warning. Please be careful and, uh, don't let your feelings get in the way of your driving."

"Yes. Yes--" rrrr "sir."

As he walked back to the cruiser, Maggie leaned out the window and shouted, "You're not as jerky as most" _police officers_ "people!" She gave him the thumbs-up and started the car.

There's a certain feeling you get when you get off an airplane in an unfamiliar city in the early evening. The rumrumrum of luggage wheels in the tunnel, the strange hairstyles of the locals, the snippy attitude of the taxi driver who takes you where you're going. It's a unique feeling: the fatigue of a long time coming. The fatigue of all that and we haven't even started.

It was early evening when she got back to Hennepin. The information guard waved to her, and she wiggled her hand at him and grim-lipped a smile.

The elevator blinged and shuffled open. Navigating through the corridor, she wondered how it might feel to sit underneath a magic tree in Hiawatha Park and contemplate the death of her intended, late into the evening. It occurred to her to wonder if she could sleep there on the branch, and she mused that falling off the branch after being awakened by a po-po was not as bad as everything that happened since the text messages arrived.

Then she thought of Derek, and that idea left in a hurry.

The orderly (nurse? caregiver? caretaker? she didn't know) was doing paper-and-computer things. Maggie stood at attention and ahemmed.

"Oh, hi, sweetie."

Sweetie.

"You're Mags, right?" she went on.

"Magg--yes. Yes, ma'am."

"Come into the other room. There are some things we need to talk about."

Various angry urges crept up, but she squashed them in the hopes that this person was also not so jerky.

They stepped into a room with shiny metal and pleather patient chairs and a table with punched-out plastic wire holes and some wallfuls of animal paintings.

"Is this your first conversation about suicide?"

Maggie blinked. "Um, no. Matt and I--" hm. "We--" Rm. Hrm. "We talk about it, like, um, all the--" Um.

"So he's told you about his feelings before?"

"Yyyeah."

"How did it make you feel?" the lady asked.

Like she wasn't the only one? She shrugged.

"Like I wasn't the only one."

"Did Matthew speak to you recently about any big changes in his life?"

"There's always big changes," said Maggie. The ongoing urge to be snarky and sarcastic and rude and vicious to this, this _authority figure_ crept up higher and higher, but again she squashed it. "He had me. And um um I ha-had." Maggie hadn't stuttered since second grade. "Had--I mean have him." She shivered.

"Would it be all right if I showed you something?" the lady asked.

"As long as it isn't dirty." Maggie grinned, mostly to herself, then stopped.

The nurse took out a trifolded photocopy from the pocket of her scrubs. "This is called a symptom-matching hierarchy. When we begin treatment of a person who has thought about or attempted suicide, we ask them to list all the things in their life that make them feel bad, being as honest about their feelings as they can. This is what Matthew wrote." After a moment, she added, "We asked him if he would be comfortable sharing it, since we thought it might be helpful to you."

This was getting a little more personal than Maggie really wanted right now. All the nightmares came today. She prided herself on resisting curiosity. Her highly trained impulse to give no shits, leave until Matt came back to the apartment and then yell at him was on overdrive. On the other hand, she had developed ways to vanquish her flight mechanism long enough to look at dead things on the Internet, or talk to her mother.

Running away was infinite coward.

Examining this document as disdainfully as she would a picture of a diseased rat on the Internet, she began reading.

* * *

Things That Make Me Hurt

A Novel

Knowing my lack of self-worth, knowing

it with the same gut sureness that I know

the moon is cheeses, makes me hurt. Note

to self: add bullet points with butterfly wings

for dramatic effect. Knowing that I am

procrastinating about all the things I need to

say and do for Maggie super hurts.

Slowly learning the fact that I won't be

a millionaire or a movie god or a rock star

hurts. I want to be a sensation.

* * *

"Nothing too shocking, I hope," said the nurse. "Is there anything specific you'd like to talk about?"

"Not really." The note was uncharacteristically earnest. Even the _Fight Club_ reference was something she hadn't seen from him. "So now what?" Maggie asked.

"We're working with him to resolve these symptom-causing thoughts. But what we need you to help us with is to provide him with an environment of support." The nurse's voice had the firm deliberateness of a rerun-TV show district attorney. "We want you to understand how you impact his life. Is that all right?"

Maggie considered vaguely what the weather in Milwaukee was like and whether she could get there by morning.

"It will be worth it," the nurse said in her reassuringly firm voice.

"Okay," Maggie mumbled blearily.

"Let's talk about self-worth. Self-esteem."

Maggie perked up and began aping high school assemblies. "What does self-esteem mean to me?" she began brightly. "Self-esteem is that warm, rosy-eyed snuggly feeling where you know you're a good person even if you act like a total jerk to everyone! Everything is a little bit sunnier when--"

"Cut it out," the nurse said firmly. "What you say affects how other people feel. If you don't care about other people or what they're trying to do, you can be as sarcastic as you like. That's fine. But some of us are working very hard to make lives better. Matthew," and there was a mark of finality in the way she said his name, "is someone who I'm working with. Supporting him without sarcasm or condescension will directly benefit both of you. Maggie, you can be sarcastic about anything in the world _to me_ and that's fine," although Maggie suspected it really wasn't, "but Matthew almost died today. You really need to start stepping up and taking some responsibility for helping him get better."

"We could just hide the pills," Maggie said lamely.

"That sort of thing doesn't work. Look. The second time he tried--"

Second time?

"He used the tip of the IV needle to slit his wrists. This was right after you left. The only way to keep someone away from the tools of suicide is to stick them in a straightjacket in a padded room. That's not the way we treat depression."

Second time?

"B-but you g-g-g-fuck." Holding in the shivering was getting harder now. The pressure was increasing. "Gave him haaappy p--" She held the tears down. "Pills," she sounded out in her smallest voice.

The nurse softened. "Maggie."

"You remembered my name."

"Mmhm." The nurse smiled.

"Matt calls me Mags because I read Us Magazine. Jerk."

"It sounds like there's plenty to talk about on both sides of this relationship. If you're interested," she continued, "Hennepin has several counselors who focus on relationship counseling. They aren't the arrogant kind of therapists either. I know what that's like. They're the kind who'll listen to what you want to talk about that day."

"A head shrinker? I'll think about it," Maggie said.

"All right. Now. The last two things on Matthew's list aren't really things we need to spend time on right now, after all we've talked about, but I think before you head home for the day it might be important to look at this second one. Could you read it aloud?"

Frumpily, Maggie read, "Knowing that I am procrastinating about all the things I need to say and do for Maggie super hurts." She really wanted to add something about Smashing Pumpkins, but couldn't find the right avenue in.

"Can you think of what things he might mean?" the nurse asked.

"Um, marriage."

"And how do you feel about the subject?"

The end of the evening was happening now. Maggie took in the nurse, evaluating her with a dubious chin: she was not quite black, hair short and floppy, with angry eyes and decades of carved crowsfeet. Maggie's urge to be snotty began to mutate into an urge to ask this sad, angry woman how well she was doing at getting happy herself. Then, when she got angry or defensive, Maggie would point out that if the nurse--and, while she was processing this train of thought, the nurse's nametag spun around on its lanyard to reveal the name _Michael_. An odd, surrealist touch.

"Michael?"

The nurse blinked. "Yes?"

"Is that your boyfriend, or did you lose an office bet?"

The woman folded her arms and tipped her head to the side. She really did look like a TV district attorney. Special agent, do I have to remind you to follow protocol?

"Maggie," the nurse said sternly.

"I've been trying to get Matt to marry me for fucking ages."

"Was he resistant? Evasive?" Ms. Michael was still pissed but was talking through it. Such a professional.

"Well, I never actually told him. That he should propose. Or anything. He slit his fucking wrists?"

"Yes. That was why we asked you to come in. May I ask why it took you till six?"

"I was halfway to fucking Fargo. I said that on the phone." Maggie's frown was Shakespearean.

"Do you think that marriage would help Matt's self esteem?" Michael would not be flustered.

"Can we do this tomorrow?" Maggie answered.

Nurse Michael Ratched withdrew, gathering herself back up. "Of course we can. I'll be here until twelve noon."

"I work."

"Then I'll fill in the NOD, let 'em know you're coming." Mikey Mike Mike stood.

"The nod?" Maggie asked.

"Nurse on duty." A certain you-should-have-figured-that-out touched the explanation.

Maggie departed without seeing Matt. At all. Definitely better to let Matt tangle with this exasperatingly serious suicide-ward matriarch himself. Plus it would be hard to talk about anything other than the parents who named their daughter "Michael."

Driving back, it occurred to her that the floor beside the dishwasher in the apartment might be . . . weird. There would be pills missing from somewhere. Po-po tracks. The door might be knocked in. No, she hadn't locked it. That might not stop the pope. They loved knocking doors in.

For the second time today she found herself circling the block. This time, she was hyperventilating and stuttering vaguely about wrists. There wasn't anyone to talk to, to tell how she felt. At some fundamental plane, she realized that H was probably lost to her forever. The dead mouse was a Berlin wall that the Gorbachev of friendship could never tear down, no matter how much the Ronald Reagan of needy, friendless moments might demand it. And Matt was the only other person she could really talk to. She needed a third friend.

The door was unlocked. A bootprint was nestled on the tiles just inside the apartment door. The floor of the kitchenette was fine, at least in the dark. The empty bottles were ibuprofen and aspirin.

After putting the plastic bottles in the trash-bag-on-the-floor, their trashcan, and taking the bag out to the Dumpster, Maggie carefully locked the door, ran to the snuggly mattress-on-the-floor, inhaled Matt's scent, and thought about death until she fell asleep.

The next morning she went to work, pulled away from everyone and stretched herself out like a handful of dried-up condoms. Her eyes darted to one supermarket customer after another, daring anybody to ask her why she was so uptight. But maybe they didn't care. Yes, that was almost certainly it. Her forearms shook, and crazy interjections died on the tips of her lips. The day was eternal.

She took the long way to the hospital. It wasn't quite as late as the day before, maybe three, but she had the same late-night feeling lurking inside her. The day loomed, heavy with clouds parading around. With a deep breath, Maggie plunged into the hospital. The lifelessness of the fluorescence hung above her, buzzing.

The Nurse On Duty's nametag read BEN, which was just the right name for a wiry, chinstubbled fashion mannequin.

"Um. Michael said to expect me?"

"Okay," he said inconclusively. "And your name?"

"Maggie." There was something just a little off about the guy, but she couldn't quite . . .

"Oh, yes. Michael left me a list of things to talk with you about." He never quite smiled, and he never quite frowned . . .

"Is it Matt's safety-matching list? Cause we've done that."

"No, this is something she wrote out, just for you." It was almost as if BEN were scared of her, ahead of time, but felt guilty about it . . .

"Oh, great. So it's a list of shit that's wrong with me."

"No, no. Absolutely not. It is--" he looked for the words--"a list of ways we can all help Matt feel better. That's all it is," he finished in a slow, creepy, vacant-eyed way, bobbing his head. It wasn't quite guidance counseloresque . . .

"Is there anyone else who can present this list thing to me? You're really bothering me." Maggie started getting the brave/stupid shakes, the feeling that you're messing everything up but you've just accidentally dug yourself in too deep to return.

"Well, in two hours another nurse will come on shift. I could brief him or her if you like." There was some anger beneath this pussy-gentle nurse.

"I'll wait." Maggie sat in the outer lobby for some time, flipping magazines. Then she changed her mind and went back in to BEN. "Um, hey. Remember me? That stupid jerk?"

"Are you comfortable talking about what happened now? I know it's always hard to look at things this big. I understand what you're going through."

The impulse was to shout, "no you don't," like in _In the Bedroom_ , but Maggie decided to give this flimsy man-nurse a chance.

She said: "Who did you lose?"

"My brother. Taylor."

And like the frontman for the band stepping onstage after a gratuitous ten-minute preshow ovation, BEN arrived as a real person. His weirdness became forgiveable after that.

"Okay. Um, right. I guess I could listen to you."

The conference room hadn't really changed since yesterday. It still felt like that mediation room in high school where she had told a physics teacher that she wasn't going to apologize for starting a fistfight with him.

Ben had kindly not brought the actual list, whatever it might have looked like. Maggie had a brief vision of a note with 1. ATTITUDE PROBLEM. written on it.

They sat.

"Is there anything you'd like to begin with?" Ben asked.

"Um. Um. Nnno." She sort of wanted the beginning to be over with without doing any talking. "Wwwould you tell me, please, what Michael, um, um, wrote?"

"Sure. She thought your resistance might have started after visiting with Matthew. For some people, trying to start the healing process right away can be a trigger. Unless . . ."

"Look," blurted Maggie. "I really really haven't got the patience to do this. 'Kay? So could you make it sound more like a HeadOn commercial? Like, 'Maggie, stop yelling at Matt. Just be nice to him. Maggie. Beee nice to him. Stoppp yelling, Maggie. I hate your commercials but your advice is amazing.' "

"What I was going to say," Ben went on placidly, "was that unless you absolutely need to be with him right now, spending a few days apart may help clarify . . ."

"Okay. Yeah. I'm outta here," said Maggie. "Could you tell Matt I'm only not visiting him because you told me not to?"

"It would be better if we explained that to Matt together. Communication is always important."

She collapsed. They rose.

Gray light flung itself through dark windows, filled in by the horrorlight of the overhead fluorescent boxes. The hall to the room stretched out, as if an assistant principal was crouching behind a frosted door at the end. The door bent open freshly and Matt's garbage can face fumbled darkly upward to witness their entrance.

"Hey."

"Hey," quieter.

A toneless silence stood between them.

"Matthew, Margaret and I have been . . ."

"Shut up, you stupid gay nurse!" said Maggie. "Go get yourself a soul patch ride from a saxophone instructor! God Jesus!"

"He's actually been really good at . . ."

"Brainwashing you? Licking your nuts? Teaching you low-impact tantra?"

BEN's face was bright red and loaded up.

"You know what this guy's faggot advice was? He says I should just go home. And leave you for, like, how long, Benjy? A week? A month? Until his indoctrination's complete? What?"

Ben left the room.

"Maggie," Matt whispered. "Shut up for thirty seconds while I talk."

She exhaled, jiggled her bracelets, stared at the picture of a New England somewhereorother. "Fine."

"If--if you don't want me to talk . . ." said Matt.

She closed her eyes in anger. She opened them again. "You could talk over me," she said.

"God, we haven't done that in monkey's years. That used to be so much fun." His eyes fell ten stories. "We had so much fun yelling at each other." Pausing in that thinking way, wincing: "I can't yell back. Not right now."

"Okay. Thirty seconds and then I get mad at something again," said Maggie.

"So I've thought about all my girlfriends. All of them ever."

Maggie frowned with one down-eyebrow.

"And I can't figure something out. Mags. Every other relationship ever has been, y'know, with someone kinder and gentler than you. And I, it, um. It, like, um. It never lasted. Something screwed it up. Something. Me. With you, it's lasted years, right?" A sound wiggled out of his heart. Not quite a goodbye. "Then," on and on and on, "then this happened. And then this happened," he finished. Lithium and tears blurred red across his face. "And, like. What the fuck? Y'know? I guess what I'm trying to tell you, Mags, is--"

The door to the observation room banged open and a new person stalked in just in front of Ben.

"Miss Harris." The voice was tall and sharp, unlike the voice's owner, who was short and square. "We all understand how difficult this experience has been for both of you. These are the times that try women's souls. Grief goes through many phases, and anger is always one of the most important. But here at Hennepin we must ask for a modicum of decency toward our staff, and we are nearing the end of visiting hours for the day. Since we consider some of your language to have overstepped the very minimum rules of behavior expected of you, I think it would not be inappropriate for me to ask for both an apology to Ben, and for your departure. As CMO of this hospital."

"First I'm groin to I'm g-going to foral to frrl a frrml complaint against whoever you are. Let me see your b--where do I, fr-find the complaints? Uh uh the cards? Fuckit. Ben, you are the uh, um gayest jerk, and I'm leaving. Um." Wild mind spikes zagged out of her. The two angry doctoids were in the doorway. CMO man wasn't stepping aside.

"Leave me alone!" Maggie screamed. Her folding knife was on the floor of her car, dammit.

"Ben needs an apology, Miss Harris."

Agape with rage, Maggie stood aside, helpless, unbelieving.

A new, angry voice spoke. "Hey." Matt was using his hockey heckler boom, the one that made Maggie's legs clench a little. "Hey Doc Marten. Hey Benjy. Get back in your prams and get your tongues out of each other's asses. You've got all the qualities of a dog except loyalty. Piss off."

Maggie gave an emotional cough/burp of relief and a weird giggle watching the doctoids melt away.

"Come here." He was whispering again. Gently he pulled the IV line out of his arm, reached under the sheets and pulled something else out, waited for his own startled look to fade away, then swung over the edge. There were EKG pads; he peeled them away. There were real clothes, _there_. He got naked and dressed himself and threw the paper clothes on the floor. From a box beside a counter he pulled a big handful of rubber gloves, which he stuffed into a pocket, winking wearily at Maggie.

He and Maggie left.

The temptation to make out with him swelled the minute Maggie swung into the driver's seat. Strange things dug into Maggie's gut. She started the car, looked at the boy, turned the car off again. Moments later his fingers were digging under the tight band of her panties, streaking past the best places inside her.

"Gently," she breathed into the hot confines of his mouth.

"A time like this and all you can say is gently?" he said, licking her canines and fighting his way into the arc of her flank.

"Gently!" she giggled. "I'm fucking for two now."

Without withdrawing his fingers Matt pulled back to take in Maggie's eyeshadow.

"Wait," she said. With a fist keeping his probing tentacles inside her, she arched her way to the back seat and drew a length of very pretty steel chain out. Rustling further, she found her specially modified soldered-shut lock, paraded it.

"Lift your shirt."

As he slowly plunged in and out of her, his thumb massaging, his eyes wide, she strung up his waist and hooked the till-death-does-it-part lock on and straightened the chain from one end to the other. "Ready?"

"Yes please."

"You'll never get through airport security without having your cavities searched again," she said.

"That's hot," he said, and went knuckles-deep within her, scratching a thumbnail down her pubis.

Her back arched. Click. An old lady was watching them from the sidewalk. Maggie waved to her with the tips of her fingers as Matt kneeled on the passenger seat and assualted her chest with his face. She pushed a middle finger against his ass. "Any fireworks in here, sir? Or drug paraphenalia?" she drawled. "Bet that container fits more than three ounces," she mugged, jamming her fingers in deeper against his underwear. His breathing started to become the sputtering honeycomb it became just before he let go. So she stopped, opened the glove compartment for handcuffs, snapped his hands behind him and blew him, hard.

"I'm going to marry you," he whispered as she spit slowly into his mouth and touched his chin to make him swallow.

"I know," she said, not at all like Han Solo, and drove her prisoner home.

About the Author

James Comins is some punk kid living in the city of Denver. He is grumpy, fat and Jewish, he only listens to cassette tapes, he drinks homebrew like an alcoholic hipster, and he hates, hates, hates writing about himself in the third person. Contact him at jamescomins@gmail.com or follow him at @jamescomins if you want endless retweets of funny Cheezburger-affiliate pictures. For more books, go to <http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/jamescomins> for current updates. Incidentally, isn't the cover image rad? I did that myself. Thank you.
