castirongoldfish

Hey. That's not fair. Can I object? Do you really want me to be the one deciding by myself how this story ends? Well, if you insist...

If you were looking for a way to keep me busy for a while, you just may have found it.

Anyway, for your next task, you need to write the last page of this little project.

That's it.

Love to...only one problem.

No Computer.

Not a total show stopper, but as I attempt to relearn cursive, it does delay. I am so unencumbered for 2-3 weeks.

Yes, I know. You still owe me Feng Shui and tropical fruit. But it's Monday - reason enough for me to start causing trouble. No rush, no pressure - just a little more food for thought. So here it is, your next topic:

a piece with no people in it (and by "people" I also mean these "others" we've been writing about)

Have fun.

"Liar!"

When the punch came, Rose wasn't expecting it. Doubled over, gasping, she swore at the sight of her cigarette, floating dead in the puddle at her feet. She straightened in time to see Valerie's quickly retreating figure though watery eyes as she reached the sidewalk, turned left, and disappeared from view.

What a fool, Rose thought angrily as she started after the girl, not quite sure which of them she was referring to. She reached the end of the alley just in time to see Val turn down the next block. The streets were nearly deserted, wet and dark - 3:44 am by Rose's internal clock. A shape in the shadow of a doorway at the corner became a man in rags, huddled sniffling over a coffee can full of fire. He lifted his head to stare as Rose charged past, and kept staring long after both women were gone.

The next block was a long one with no alleys or intersections, and yet Val was nowhere in sight. Rose came to a stop and surveyed the possibilities. There were shops and restaurants on either side of the street, but Val couldn't have had time to cross to the other side without being seen. On this side of the street there were only a few places still open. A tiny convenience store, shopkeeper with his feet up on the counter reading a newspaper. No, not that one. A late-night liquor store with a bar, where a group of boys huddled nervously, cash and little packets changing hands beneath the counter. She wouldn't have gone in there either. The Cheerful Monkey, a dizzy maze of hanging paper dragons, vinyl booths, old carvings and golden bells, spilling noise and light onto the sidewalk. Bingo.

Rose stepped though the door. A few businessmen lingered at the bar. In a back corner, three tables had been pulled together, and the owners and staff sat deep in noisy discussion over a communal dinner. Near the door to the kitchen, a man holding a mop hesitated, glancing back and forth between the kitchen door and the busy table. Without pausing, Rose strode past him into the kitchen.

The argument taking place inside didn't pause for breath at her entrance. She took in the piles of chopped vegetables, bowls of fresh noodles and unlabeled jars of spices and condiments with a glance. Two cooks bickered in Chinese, gesturing wildly with cleavers and wooden spoons, all the while chopping and stir-frying. The smell of garlic and ginger filled the space with a cloud of stinging oil smoke.

Rose rolled her eyes elaborately and cleared her throat. "Ok, where is she?" The debate paused long enough for both men to favor her with a pointed glare. As she stepped around the main counter and into the middle of the kitchen, a cart lurched wildly toward her, piled with huge bags of shrimp and shiny whole fish, staring glassy eyed upward. Val bolted in the opposite direction, crashing into a rack of pots and pans on her way to the rear exit. The shorter cook began bouncing up and down, pointing after Val with the spatula in his hand, shouting accusing syllables while the other rushed at Rose, waving his arms. The cart struck her, knocking her to the floor, and a 25 lb bag of fresh shrimp spilled into her lap, followed by a rain of trout.

Cursing, boots slipping on fish and brine, Rose hauled herself to her feet, pushing past both cooks, and stormed out the back door after Val. As the door slammed shut behind her and she paused in the cool quiet of the alley, she realized she was alone. Up and down the alley in both directions, there were no other doorways for several hundred feet. She was surrounded on both sides by old, very solid buildings. Reaching out to touch the damp bricks, she shook her head, half grinning despite her anger. "Well, shit. I guess the girl's remembering more than I thought."

http://www.atomicsockmonkey.com/products/mnpr-rpg.asp

Yeah, it's rough, but they all are.

The coffee cake served as a grim reminder of a breakfast that was not to be, warm on its tabletop perch. Peaceful and whole, it mocked the swaths of chaos in content cinnimonitude. It entranced Joseph, he couldn’t remove his eyes from this visitor from the past, this baked encapsulation of mere minutes before, benevolent sweetness in buddhist simplicity. And so they stared each other down, Mama Priyaveda’s Oblivious Coffeecake and the Sideways Walker for some unbreathing moments, until, plate and all, the violator was ejected from the apartment. “Of course it would have done you a bit of good to open the window first.” Rose smiled at him from the empty doorframe. “Next time I mean. Feel better?” Joseph smiled back, or tried to, an attempt that faded quickly. “This shit is getting old, you know.” “Old? Yeah, I might have an idea.” There was the edge of humor, in Rose’s voice as she attempted to scrape some flame out of a gas station lighter. After a half-minute of this futility, Joseph tossed her his matches and she lit them off her scarred boots. In return she passed him the first of the lit cigarettes, while she contented herself with the second. “These things will kill…no, on second thought, probably they won’t” he tried, as he accepted the offering. “Nah, got other plans” and sucked down about half of its length in one strong pull. “Of course, on the flip side,” she said, focusing on the ash, “after a couple decades of these, most of the buzz is gone, long gone, leaving only a pit in their absence. A lot of things get that way. So, what do you want to do about her?” “Well, she’s got a sister who works with her, for her actually at the diner. She should know. And she’s got some family in Conneticut, I think.” Joseph was distant, talking in the direction of his smoke. “She’ll be taken care of. Other than that, find the bastard, which might take some doing, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. She was a friend, she’s owed that much. Hell, don’t have that many, and one less now.” “Figured, well not about the sister, but most of the rest,” replied Rose, still hinting at a smile through her knot of hair which cascaded in every direction. “The other one.” “Don’t know, really don’t know, you said yourself there’s probably not much of a chance for her now.” Looking away from the waltzing whisps of grey, he saw her, staring at him with her odd eyes, gold edged in green, oddly bright in the twilight of the apartment. “Not quite sure what I am supposed to do against a force that once sandblasted cities off of maps and can turn people into saltlicks. Maybe see if he’s interested in working for the Beef Industry. They need some grazing lands, you know.” Her face didn’t change, so his topic had to. “Anyway, he’s ancient beyond words, from before we had words even. How is a man supposed to fight something like that? There’s not supposed to be any of them left. Sure, I’ve kept clean what I can, hunted the errant who crossed the line. And that’s been a lot, a lot of them strong, but, screw beat them, how am I supposed to save her?” “Maybe you don’t have to,” Rose spoke, and as she did, even as that air of good humor surrounded her, Joseph noticed it was not in her eyes. “Maybe she’ll save herself, but I doubt she can do it all by herself, if that makes any sense. She’s got a small hope and we both know you are it. Sorry. He’ll smell me a mile away, and after all, me against him, it’s apples and apple, a mere matter of subtraction. Your kind, even still, he doesn’t get. It ain’t much of a chance, but at least it’s a chance.” “Is that supposed to be a peptalk?” Joseph almost sat down, but thought better of it, the police would be through here soon enough. His legs were weary, it’d been a long day, at least what he remembered of it, and the corralling of his wandering focus were starting to hurt his head. As he leaned against the wall, she actually broke into a Cheshire grin. “No. Be a shitty peptalk if it was though, wouldn’t it? So, are you going to do it or do I have to go off and get myself destroyed alone?” Looking at her, smiling there, something clicked. “Why are you so worried about her?” “You wouldn’t understand…trust me on this one. Either you’re in or out.” “Alright, in, but we’re going to regret it” he said with a wan smile. “You already do. I do too, but yes, it’ll get worse. I’ll buy you a drink when this is all done.” Joseph just sighed, shook his head, and walked toward the door, stopping by the open door to the bedroom. Inside, the pool of blood had grown and kept him from walking too close to the doorway. “We should at least put her in the bed and cover her up. She deserves that much ” “I know, but the cops wouldn’t quite understand, I think. C’mon, it’s time to get going. I’ll help you find them later. They’ll probably find us soon enough.” And not for the first time, Joseph found himself missing Sellars.

What I mean, perhaps, and lately I have been writing much without thinking sufficently (too much of the art's been out of it, but that just might be the caffine trying to do a stand in for sleep), is that it is easy to disappoint yourself, with little impact, easy to disappoint a friend if they are used to it, but it can be rather difficult to disappoint a crowd. Pressure and pushing forward, though, honestly I haven't found a compass for directions in such nebulous things. I would like it open for the observation, but not the input. Might make me edit my crap before I submit it.

-Sd.

First of all, an administrative point - I finally noticed all our timestamps were wrong (you may be coherent enough to post before 8 am, but I'm certainly not) since our blog thought we were on the west coast. Silly. We are now in the present time.

My thoughts on witnesses? No objections. My thoughts on intervention? Not so favorable, but I have a hard time imagining what effect the occasional constructive or destructive criticism could have at this point. We're slow moving, but we're well on our way in the general direction we've chosen. And we're both just a tiny bit stubborn (dare I say prideful?), at least when it comes to our writing.

But there are so many metaphors to choose from... more hands lightening a load? That sounds nice, but not if it's a creative burden. I'm not interested in gaining participants right now, though I have no problem with an audience. I think we're really talking about pushing forward rather than lifting up, if there's a clear distinction. But how about too many cooks spoiling the dish? And why do I always decide to post when I'm hungry?

Seriously. I welcome anyone who can wade through this nonsense and find anything interesting to say about it.

I have, of late, mentioned to a few folks that I am working on this project. I am understandably proud of the progress, the fact notwistanding that I have yet to actually submit anything new. It's much more palpable in its present form (thank you for that). The response that I've been getting is "so, can I see it?".

I've got two frames of mind on this one actually, but it's not my call. It's our call, and I would rather it be without reservation if blessed at all.

The concern is intervention, the undue influence that their opinions might have on the writing. It is not even germinating right now, I pretty much see a pile of shit (at least in my recent creations) mountaining up on a seed. Hopefully it'll sprout, and hopefully it won't have too much leftovers to work through until it sees the light. It doesn't need others defining it. Hell, we haven't defined it yet.

On the other hand, we needed to write, and the best tool we found was to rely on each other to push us. The more the hands, the lighter the load...

-Sd.

And the shrimp can't fight? But perhaps they can resist...

Considering this latest challenge is much too easy, and considering you owe me one or two pieces, I'm going to take my time getting in the right mood.

And that was, "the coffee cake served as a grim reminder", by the way. Mmm. Coffee cake.

It's only fair, as I have two seperate topics to write in (the cake or somesuch served as a grim reminder and feng shui & tropical fruit...almost finished) it's only fair I give you a second....a scene of violence and action, simple drama of a baser kind.

Oh, and shrimp. The nautical kind.

Enjoy.

Val’s eyes returned distractedly to the tap, where the water was bleeding rust, slowly turning clear. She ran her fingers through the ground-cold stream, imagining deep wells, sucking water like aquatic lungs beneath the frost line. Silly, she realized. There were no wells to be found in this city, only acres of pipe. But returning to her apartment after such a long absence, she could feel the rooms around her waking reluctantly. Like that first week at the cabin each year, lighting pilots, checking for burst pipes, listening to the creak and groan of thaw. So hard to wake a house, to wake anything long asleep.

She realized she had been staring at the bottle again. By now, it must have been there for at least a year, resting on its side in the gutter of the building next to hers. Val had no idea what month she had started watching it, idly, from her kitchen window. But it had become a routine, something to do while washing dishes in her little sink.

It was a Coke bottle, half full, probably pitched there by a neighborhood kid. It was ugly, out of place, as distracting as a sore. It bothered Val because it was litter. It blocked the gutter, trapping leaves in the fall, out of place on the roof of the plain brownstone. But these were also the reasons her eye kept finding it, half-seen though the dusty slats of her yellowing mini-blinds.

The thing that bothered Val most about the bottle was that it never changed. True, the paper label had long since fallen off, bleached by sun and rain, but the plastic still seemed solid, and the liquid inside still appeared to be soda. She had seen it freeze in jagged crystals, the cola expanding to fill almost the entire bottle. In mid-summer it had formed sweat, the pressure inside making the plastic bulge. She had expected to wake up one morning to find it burst, split open to the sun’s glare. And now, seeing it again, being home again, she felt almost dizzy.

What was left to ground her, now that everything had changed? Not this – certainly not this feeling that she could be standing here at any time, a month ago, six months ago, a year.

Shutting off the water and turning away, pot of tea forgotten, Val sat at the table in front of the pile of junk mail her super had thoughtfully saved for her. She already knew nothing here would really be for her. Nothing in this pile would care if she read it. The stack of glossy fliers and catalogs lay there muttering and shouting its colorful nonsense like the violent art of the brain-damaged, or poetry written during a migraine. After a moment’s hesitation, Val reached over and grabbed the empty trash can by the door, and the entire pile went in.

Shivering, holding her hands over a hissing radiator, Val thought about the cabin again. Long after her family had outgrown taking vacations together, she had brought Roger there for a weekend. She smiled to think about it. The first night, they hadn’t been able to figure out how to keep the wood stove burning without filling the place with smoke. It had turned out to be simple – the chain that pulled the flue open had come unhooked and was easily fixed the next day. But that night they could feel the cold seeping through the walls and floor and see their breath in the air.

Roger had joked at first about using body heat for warmth, both of them giggling, passing the bottle of cheap, sweet port they had brought back and forth. But an hour or so later, empty bottle discarded, they were fumbling beneath layers of sleeping bag, wool blanket and thermal wrap, as awkward and exciting as the back seat of a car. They both gasped at the shock of heat when skin finally found skin.

Afterwards, as they lay drowsy, Roger started to sing, half-mumbling, as if to himself. His voice was flat and muffled in the freezing air. He was in the habit of singing Val to sleep when he’d been drinking. Now, as he often did, he made his way through American Pie. Val wasn’t sure why he liked this song, so different from the music he usually listened to. She had the feeling something about the ballad style drew him. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that the song bothered her. Now, pressing her body against his, feeling their heat slowly leak through the blankets and be swallowed by the frigid air, she cringed every time he reached the refrain, “…singing this’ll be the day that I die”. Somehow, she slept. Twice during that long night, Val opened her eyes with a start and found herself in complete darkness, unsure what had woken her. Then, she would lay still, counting Roger’s heartbeats (so slow), waiting for morning.

Vomit cascaded within the abalone bowl until settling in as ochre kaleidoscope skin, thick over the toilet water. Wedging himself, Joseph held, sweat pooling to the tip of his nose, and focused on the quickly retreating echo of the expansive bathroom. "C'monc'monc'mon" broken again by viscous spittle as he stared at surviving scraps of rejected egg. Eventually coughing gave way to silence.

It was a minute until he hauled himself, erect now, before the decrepit mirror, wiping away the past with fierce passings of his 59 cent comb. Squinting to bring his pale, blotchy reflection into focus, he saw clearly enough to determine that he looked like death, and tried his best to submerge his head in the undersized bar sink, producing what tomorrow morning would be an utterly mysterious faucet-sized lump on his forehead in the process.

Coming up for breath, allowing a moment of peace while the water dripped from his face and hair, dampening the shoulders of his well-wrinkled jacket (ha ha, wash and wear, some part of his brain snickered), he followed his gently reeling mind as it searched for the answer to life's most pressing question: "How the fuck did I end up here?" Unable to handle the full implications of the question without triggering another wave of nausea, aware that a weakness for Guinness and bar eggs, while surely a factor, couldn't completely explain his current state of disrepair, Joseph settled for trying to recall the events of the day.

Strange to realize that only this afternoon, stepping into blinding daylight from the subway station, he had first seen the very thin girl holding the very thin rose, plastic-wrapped, street-vendor purchased, thawed from some greenhouse freezer. She wore short, dark hair and long, dark coat. She seemed lost, standing still at the corner. But why would anyone buy a flower when they didn't know where they were going? He had shaken his head, brushing off the momentary impulse to approach her, see if she needed help. He was running late.

Later in the afternoon, practicing his 2:30 pm time-killing ritual, or what he optimistically thought of as "spam mining", Joseph scanned through his e-mail trash. He found many subject lines distressing. He feared that the dozen or so pleas to stop someone's pain - cheap - with images of small, colorful pills in shades of blue, purple, brilliant white, little letters stamped in the center, only hinted at the sheer scope of pain that must be spreading throughout the world, a constant presence, like the low hum of speakers, white noise. He could feel it - it made his teeth ache. And then, to heal other types of pain, the offers of sex in every form, or at least its representation. He would scroll to the bottom of these, looking for the baffling strings of nonsense words that seemed to hold a cryptic message: "admiral foistgoodman lone ahemairfare pervert doecrematory gopher relevantemanuel throwback haspcalliope arousal embracenotion great drizzlelimb abrogate breakwaterodorous philip ain'tnarcissism." What could it mean? Perhaps it was poetry, or the beginning of a story.

Admiral Foistgoodman - lone ahemairfare pervert, doecrematory gopher, relevantemanuel throwback - struggled to suppress haspcalliope arousal at the thought of embracenotion by the great drizzlelimb, all the while thinking, "abrogate breakwaterodorous Philip! ain'tnarcissism!" The Admiral sounded like a troubled man.

Ignoring creeping article deadlines, Joseph began a quick character sketch of old Ralph Foistgoodman. Late fifties, grey crew-cut, wandering eye... a slowly decaying man with a sagging tattoo, sagging wife, grown daughter. The rest of the day til nearly 6 was spent writing a quick and dirty short story to be submitted with equal hope to Playboy and the Atlantic. Whenever Joseph sold one of these stories, which was seldom, he vaguely pondered the implications of this type of plagiarism.

Slowly, digging his way through the past, Joseph managed to, bruised and wet, descend back into the present. A buzz, punctuated by clattering plates and steady scraping of violent cooking, rose up. He took one last deep breath, braced his eyes, and dove out the door.

The light was angrier than he expected, his head ripped open, leaving him to careen off a drunkard on his way toward, something. He expected he had a table here, somewhere between the neon lights and tinfoil glint of lobotomized dragons dancing above the counter. For a moment he was stuck in the ecstatic haze of the thrumming conversation and divine fluorescent light, but what little peace he had achieved was subsumed from by the rising bile brought on by Sellars, sitting by himself by the tall windows and backlit by cancerous neon light.

As he approached the seat, really there was no point any more trying to avoid these little serendipities, he looked at Sellars, sitting ramrod straight, not touching the back of the chair. Sellars tried, he really did, trying to get it right, but it was in the little things that he came out as what he was. Sighing, Joseph fell into the chair, rocking back precariously on two legs, until his form settled in an ambivalent incline. Looking over a haphazard pile of Chinese food and the pitiful tea candle flame, he wondered if Sellars had a first name. Probably not. Whatever the reason, it probably didn't matter.
"So. Were you here when I left?" Sellars looked at him, unblinking, with his hollow eyes, weighing the question with almost mocking severity. It had ceased bothering Joseph long ago, he did it with almost all the questions.

"I guess it really doesn't matter," sighed Joseph's shadowed companion, "but no, I got here as you were leaving to take care of a few things, I suppose. Good day at work I understand."

"Happens to the worst of us I suppose." Joseph smiled. Sellars did not. "Alright, it's the story. Isn't it?"

"Do you have any idea how dangerous this is?" Sellars didn't bother waiting for a response. "It's meant to hide in plain view. It's the point. What you've created is kabalistic, no good can come of this. These episodes are getting rather perilous."

"Episode, how very antiseptic. Hell, let's get this straight: you're worried about someone reading the articles in Playboy!"

The seething crowd let loose a lone girl, young, trying to look younger. Surprised by Joseph's sudden outburst, she quickly turned, and with an intoxicated stumble, her elbow passed through Sellars' throat. Save for a slight chill in her arm, she noticed nothing. Apparently neither did Sellars. Joseph, however, found himself dwelling on the pendulum swing of her retreating hips and sighed.

"She isn't doing it for you any more?" Sellars' question floated without mirth.

"She who? Rachael?" Joseph's head knotted and his stomach started grappling toward his tongue. Somewhere he had started eating the noodle and beef spew sitting in the plate before him. He had lost track of when. "No, not exactly. Haven't seen her in three months. Tends to be a barrier." He could feel the oil as he ate, and some perverse way, he began to enjoy the brinkmanship as he continued with the meal. "Hey, let's face it, I appreciate the mock attempts at charity, but neither of us give a shit. The only reason you're here is because I'm all you got left." Strained joviality had given over to words like gravel. "Cut the fucking horseshit."

Under the onslaught, Sellars had darkened, the outline of the chair and crowds behind him no longer visible. "Tell me at least you still have it."

With that Joseph lifted the right side of his coat with a deliberate laziness, just enough. From beneath, soft multicolored hues reflected off of his white shirt, dancing as if arriving late after a long ocean journey.

***

Stepping outside some hours later, Joseph let the door of the Cheerful Monkey Palace Six swing shut behind him with a surprisingly delicate jingle of Chinese bells. In the silence of the dark street Joseph felt for a moment born in reverse, leaving the world overfull of lights, smells, sounds, colorful and distracting visions, to sink into this warm after-rain dimness, drinking in the fog-thick air as if immersed in liquid. He had left Sellars behind at the table, confident that the man would eventually go wherever it was that he went, and also that the check would somehow be taken care of. Though he could never quite bring himself to ask Sellars how.

Just across the narrow street he could see the boardwalk, and beyond it the water, short choppy waves lit dull sliver in the haze of refracted harbor lights. The gentle slap of tide against the docks seemed deadened, hollow. Further beyond, water and sky met, unseen.

"Funny, I can remember when the water was a few blocks further out." Joseph snapped out of his own vague, slow-moving thoughts to realize this had come from an elderly gentleman in a tailored suit, who had been smoking silently next to the entryway, quite possibly forever. Thin and elegant curls of smoke rose though various shades of fluorescence from the Cheerful Monkey's animated sign just above, before becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding mist. The Monkey, grinning out into the night, tail moving back and forth, green, then yellow, then pink, seemed about to share a crude yet obscure joke.

"It wasn't that long ago. This city goes through so much effort to keep the water out, but the water always wins because it doesn't exert any effort at all. It just keeps finding the easiest path." A brief gesture with the cigarette took in the whole of the shoreline. "If you look closely right out there, at low tide, you can see the current changed by what's underneath. Foundations, sidewalks, rail tracks... Some people would even say that there are older cities beneath this one."

Joseph, head beginning to throb at a new and unpleasant rate, which he suspected matched the nearly visible oscillation of the fluorescent glow, gave his best attempt at politeness. "I'm sorry, but how long ago was this? I've lived in this city all my life, and I don't remember there ever being more blocks here."

"Oh, it was only a few years ago. Perhaps '44 or '45. Nobody remembers. Why would they? There was probably a place just like this on one of those blocks, and a newsstand like the one on the corner, and a tarot reader, and an alley where the prostitutes waited. Nothing unusual or different, just another set of city blocks."

The cigarette glow flared briefly, showing thin pursed lips, lined hands, reflecting off an old fashioned pair of steel-rimmed glasses. "Didn't you ever stop for coffee at the Tea Tree Cafe? On the corner of M and 15th? Or eat Armenian food at that place next door to it?" Joseph shook his head, confused. They were standing on K and 12th. M would have been...

The man had already gone on without waiting for an answer, as if talking to himself. "...built this part of the city where there was nothing but water. We built it out of concrete. But concrete is nothing but water and stone. And water returns to water. Stone returns to the earth. We can only hold things together for so long. You can feel it happening even now if you hold still."

"Feel what?" Joseph found himself lowering his voice, holding his breath.

"Entropy."

“Entropy?”

“Entropy.” By the second echoing of the word, the word tasted different, deep now, ancient in its timbre. Heavy, he looked out upon the waves, loosing the peripheral vision to encroaching blackness. Each ripple shoved itself upon the shore, sacrificing itself upon a short, shorn field of albino sand. In its wake he could see the sprouting bubbles, leaving micro-craters behind in potmarked imperfection. The wave struck again, smoothed out the grains, but in its descent left fertile ground for the quavering eruptions of air and pitiful avalanches of sand, chasing after the retreating water. And so it had gone, without architect or plan, until the sand finally succumbed or the waves gave up.

And so it would go.

A burst of flared in the darkness as Joseph absentmindedly lit a cigarette, he forgot which brand. It smoked lazily for a long slow minute until, realizing the rudeness, he offered the crumpled package to the old man. The old man’s moist eyes didn’t leave the horizon.

“So…what, it sunk?” Joseph savored the image of submerged city blocks, empty, quiet. No car horns, no pedestrian vitriol, no dueling cabbies. It didn’t seem such a bad fate.

“No. It’s not always that easy. It didn’t go anywhere. It takes time

Joseph woke to seagulls caterwauling around him. The shock brought his eyes open, his first mistake of the new day. The horizon was fat and pregnant with the sun, the viscous redness stuck like tar against where the sky and sea met. That first blastfurnace sight, snapped whatever remaining hope of sleep was left in him, and averting his eyes, he proceeded to gather his collection of crinks and cramps that were his muscles into some gait away from the beach. As left the beach to the sea pigeons and their catfights over crustacean carrion, he unearthed two realizations. He was some six, seven miles from home. And he had no idea where his car was.

Bereft of any money, he bore the first half of the journey in a quiet attempt to catch up to sleep through his paces. When that failed, he tried to let his mind wander over a monotony of cement squares that constructed, in the manner of the earth’s silliest jigsaw puzzle, the city. He failed, caught instead in the cracked, the missing, the patched, the stained, and the sprouting nature peeking through.

With unsettled mind he arrived at Mama Priyaveda’s, a basement diner still some three miles from home. Crowds were waking up, herded by cars and subways on their cattledrives to work, and it was safer to wait it out here than hazard that much humanity. Mama Priyaveda herself was working this morning, she always was, and the crowd was thin, as it always was. Mama P wasn’t that much older than himself, and, as far as he could tell from their occasional conversations, not a mother either, but he knew he could come here, even if it was a half mile out of his way and get shelter. It hadn’t been that long since his real work found him in her basement, and while he had been too late for the street kids he found there, Mama P hadn’t forgotten.

By now she could recognize the signs, and came quickly, leaving two cups of coffee (one to shoot, one to savor), a fiery omelet on a pita, and, of course, as in every diner on earth: hash browns. But most importantly she brought him space. Stolen newspapers from an abandoned stall were thrown open and finding the crosswords in each, he intertwined them on the blank placesetting. He carved letter after letter into each space, fully immersed in his zen word duel.

Following number seven, puzzle two, up, eight letter word for process method to turn oil into gasoline (“cracking”) and number twelve, puzzle three, right, four letter word, were it to smell so sweet (“rose”), Joseph was stuck on number 22, puzzle one, left, eleven letter word for chance kismet, when Mama P, looking over his shoulder as she gave him the fourth refill on each, gasped a little laugh.

“Serendipity! You know, usually there’s no bother trying to help you. You must be exhausted…what were you doing last night.” Mama P spoke quickly and playfully, but with Joseph she dropped the fake accent. She smiled, for more than the little trivial success as Joseph smiled solemnly at her and added in her donation to the word dance.

***

His car was where he left it, in all the glory a Chevy Nova could muster, right out side his apartment. He kicked it for it’s Benedict Arnold ways on two different tires, for good measure. He didn’t dare kick it anywhere else.

Fixated as he was to the thought of his own bed, though, to be fair, he doubted he would bother to use it, he almost missed the teenager watching him, crouched low behind a stump. As he looked over at him, the teenager, fearing that he’d been seen dived into the stump, eyes flashing feline yellow as he turned away.

Joseph sighed as he walked back to his car. Normally he wouldn’t bother, but this one was too close. It had been nice, this little crossroads within a block of home. He’d used it too. Twice, just to get away from himself. It was twice, wasn’t it? The plastic gasoline jug was heavy, the weight dancing in his hand has its contents threw themselves against the sides of the container, as if eager to get out. He took his time, walking over to where the stump, vibrant with life in browns and grays, had set its mass waist high against the tenement. It formed half an arch there, enclosed in a few audacious ferns, and through it lay, well, he’d rather not think about, looking at his burden.

Gasoline is a funny thing. Touch it, no matter what the temperature, and it’s cold. Look at it, it’s clear. Watch it evaporate, and it twists reality behind it. And, of course, spark it, and it rages. So innocuous, so dangerous, some poetic element of Joseph felt kinship to the gouts he poured over the entrance. He made sure to hit it all, every mushroom, every slug, every inch of moss and wood. Stepping back, he slowly drew the match across, three times until it lit and guttered dead before it touched. Minutes passed as he stood there looking at it. The second match was not as casual, though he didn’t remember lighting it, and the doorway blossomed into flame.

He could watch the immolation until it was done. He usually did, that’s how he picked up smoking. Today though, no, he shook his head slowly as he turned to walk up to his apartment and call the fire department, let them know what some damned fool had done outside his home.

Of course, if the interloper was experienced with the waywalking, this would be little more than an inconvenience. It would be easy enough to find another route in the Behind and not get trapped in the winding paths.

If he was experienced.

Upstairs he hung his white shirt up to air, curry and coffee intertwined obscenely on its collar. The computer was booted, its 486 engine roaring, as he prepared to go online. Thoughts of work crossed his mind, subdued by a cup of recycled coffee.

The cigarette pack was gone before the hour was, and Joseph let loose his full might on his mailbox with arachnine fury. He sorted through the several hundred emails since last night, picking out the junkmail for discount adult diapers and twisted S&M chat partners who promised true carnal love as soon as they got your name and/or money and proceeded to send their advertisements to each other. Financial planners received offers for holistic Viagra in response of a promise to “make your assets grow”, job recruiters given invites to pyramid schemes, and a stray PTA invite was countered by a invite to watch “barely” eighteen-year olds being cradle robbed in Oedipal orgies. That’ll teach them. Junk mailers were junk mailed for everything, but Joseph had a knack for finding the owner’s real work emails and hit them with gusto, spreading the offers to the corners of the world. Joseph made up dozens of emails at complete random, and sent off packets of junkmail. Never did they come back undeliverable. It was a cyclone of digital fury, and by lunch he was spent, sitting in his one chair, rolling around on stained glass hardwood in a collapsing orbit.

***

The boy was in the dark again. Gasping, shaking, reeking of gasoline, he stumbled down yet another short flight of stairs only to find steps going up again as soon as he reached the bottom. He moved through these narrow corridors with arms stretched out to either side, running his fingers along the damp and often slimy stone walls, searching for intersections.

He was not good at this. Yet, he kept telling himself. Not good at this yet. But getting better. Just relax and breathe. He was still learning, changing. He had called himself Lupus for a few years but grown tired of explaining that no, he didn’t mean the disease. Lately he tried to avoid calling himself anything.

In this absolute blackness he forgot whether his eyes were open or closed and almost raised a dirty hand to his face to check. Don’t. He could never tell if these pathways were in his mind or in real life, or even what the difference was. One thing was certain – he had never met another being here. And right now, alone as he felt, he wasn’t sure he would want to. He could feel his heart in his ears.

Without anyone to explain, he had formed his own fragile theories about how this world worked. It was like what happens in a dream, when you realize you’re dreaming. You have to be very careful not to let on that you know. You have to move slowly, relaxed, with a quiet mind if you want to keep dreaming. Or, it was like watching the sky, out in the dark fields with his father, ages ago. You can see some double star systems with just your eyes, but the trick is to look a little to one side of the point of light. Then, two stars will emerge, seem to pull away from one another. Your eyes will ache to look directly, but don’t do it – they’ll go back into hiding, blurred to a single point again.

With these superstitions in mind he kept moving, trying to remain relaxed, indifferent. But he could taste blood, and the images that flashed before him came with feral, incoherent emotions. Blinding glare of sun on snow. A hare, running, swerving side to side, eyes showing white. Big brown dog, lanky but fast, kicking up snow behind, mouth hanging open, breath steaming, panting hard. Yellow teeth. Impact. Blood. A wordless shout, a gunshot.

The boy froze. The sound was ringing in his ears, but he wasn’t sure he had really heard anything. He was shivering, and he thought he could smell snow. And under his left hand, the wall was gone. A branch in the path.

***

Joseph woke with a start to realize he had nearly fallen out of his chair. Time to get some real sleep. He not so much crawled as fell into bed with most of his clothes on and immediately had one of those dreams. He was really starting to hate those dreams.

***

In this variation, the Internet was a huge, dimly lit warehouse filled with row upon row of tall metal shelves. They faded into the shadows without visible end. Each shelf was filled with objects. Metal, glass, wood, plastic, fur. Shiny new. Cracking, rusting, covered with mold. Familiar, disturbing and strange. Joseph somehow knew his role here was as vehicle – that he must move objects from one shelf to another, sometimes carrying them across a mile of maze-like rows to their destinations. He felt an unspoken pressure of time, and was also aware of being observed.

Awake, he would not have been able to say how he knew where to move these objects, what should be paired with what, or which things should be separated. But within the dream there was a pattern, a flow, a balance. The mechanical pencil sharpener was brought near the spool of copper wire. The ornate feathered ladies’ hat was brought near the box of glow-in-the-dark condoms. The dime store watch was moved as far as possible from the “drinking bird” toy. He worked fast, but never fast enough. What would happen if he failed, and why was he alone here at this infinite task?

This dream, as always, he felt time running out. He could only transport one more object – futile, perhaps, but better to keep trying than to admit defeat, curl up on the cold warehouse floor and wait for… what? He pushed the thought away and reached out to pick up the last object. And stopped. A simple red rose, barely open, wrapped in green florist’s plastic. Wait… Something itched the back of his mind. He felt a presence behind him and spun around, terrified, tripping backward into the shelf now behind him. For an instant the idea of the domino effect he had just triggered panicked him. He could hear shelf after shelf falling with a deafening metal echo, objects scattering to the concrete. Then he was awake, sitting up in bed, gasping, wrestling with the damp sheets binding his body.

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later, after a blissful shower, followed by the first beer of the day, that Joseph clearly remembered how the dream had ended this time. A rose? He shuffled through the breakfast-stained crosswords of the morning and found the clue. Four letter word, were it to smell so sweet: “rose”. And that girl downtown yesterday, what felt like weeks ago. He searched back for why he had noticed her, among the sea of anonymous faces and endless variety, but found no answers. Thin, neither short nor tall, plain brown hair. Standard business dress from what he could recall, nothing striking. Not especially “his type”, though he couldn’t honestly say what that was anymore. What color were her eyes? He couldn’t remember but felt fairly sure they were some ordinary color. Brown, blue… And yet something had caught his attention, and not just the flower she was holding, though that had been odd.

Finishing the beer and shaking his head, he put the question aside for now to gnaw quietly at a corner of his mind. If he could just figure out what day it was, he’d be able to decide whether he needed to go to work.

***

Mama P. was wiping down the little counter of her now empty diner, humming aimless snatches of broadway show tunes as she worked. It had been a fairly good day for business, with a thin but steady stream of customers through breakfast and well into lunch. She should have some peace between 3 and 5 pm to get ready for the dinner crowds.

She must have been lost in thought, her mind busy with inventory and recipes as she cleaned, because when she noticed the elderly gentleman seated at the end stool she actually jumped, letting out a little oh! of surprise.

“I am ever so sorry, sir. I was so concentrating on my cleaning, I was not noticing when you arrived. What would be your pleasure? Coffee? Tea?” Her hands never stopped moving during this quickly spoken greeting, tossing her rag in the bin beneath the counter, bringing out a fresh place-setting, clean cup, saucer and spoon.

“Tea, if you would. Thank you. I don’t suppose you have any chai?” His words were deliberate, as if chosen one at a time, spoken with perfect diction and a complete lack of accent.

“Ah! Honored would I be to serve you my own homemade chai. It is a family recipe, and I make it fresh always, so it will take me but a few minutes to prepare.” Mama P. turned and hurried into the kitchen. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what was making her nervous.

When she came back to the counter with the steaming, fragrant pot of chai, the gentleman was sitting with head bowed, meticulously cleaning his glasses with a green silk handkerchief. At her return, he tucked the handkerchief back into an inner pocket of his jacket and settled the glasses back on the bridge of his nose. Mama poured the chai, blinking, thinking the spices had blurred her vision.

Mama P. always made a point of truly looking at her customers – she liked having regulars, and besides, you never knew when remembering a face would be important. But this man… she couldn’t quite see his eyes. Perhaps a trick of the light? She glanced up at the hanging lamps. His glasses seemed to have an unusual reflective property, but she had seen them in his hands – they had certainly looked like ordinary lenses.

The gentleman seemed to be enjoying his chai, and for the moment didn’t need anything else. Mama gratefully moved away, returning to her afternoon chores while keeping a quiet eye on her customer. Ten minutes or more passed in silence. Finishing his drink, the gentleman cleared his throat.

“I wonder if you could tell me – did you have a particular customer early this morning? A fairly young man, dark hair, tall? A bit thoughtful looking? He would have been wearing a grey jacket and a white shirt. He and his clothing would have perhaps been a little worse for wear?” What little Mama knew about Joseph set alarm bells off in her mind.

“I see many, many customers, sir. Quite a few of them are looking worse for the wear. I’m certainly not sure I know who you are asking about!”

The gentleman sighed. “Very well.” Rising, he left a bill on the counter without asking for a check. “Thank you for the chai. The addition of anise to the spice mixture is a fascinating choice.” He stopped to take in the whole of the little place with a slow look.

“I have to assume you do know the man I seek.” He cut her protest off with a small gesture. “Please, there’s no need for further discussion. I only ask a favor. If you do happen to see this man again, simply give him this.” He placed a small glass object, suddenly in his hand, on the counter.

Mama couldn’t suppress a gasp of awe. “It’s lovely!” It was a small crystal snow globe, simple in design, but more an object of art than an ordinary tourist trinket. The fine snowflakes sparkled gently, now falling back to the surface of a beach scene complete with sand, ocean and seagulls. The “ocean” was made of a viscous fluid of the clearest tropical blue, some sort of liquid that tended when separated to return gradually to itself. The effect of sand and ocean settling after being shaken was surprisingly wave-like.

Realizing she had been gazing fascinated for quite a few minutes, Mama P. looked up with a question on her lips. But the elderly gentleman was gone. He had finished the entire pot of chai, she noticed with satisfaction. And he’d left a fifty. Shaking her head in wonder, she couldn’t resist turning the snow globe once more. Then she put it safely beneath the counter. What could this mean?

***

Joseph meant to go to work. When he stepped out his door with the sun high and oppressively lording over the sky from its distance, it was with the intent of ending up within the cattlepens of labor. The cubicle farm had a Cheers-ic effect, at least there someone knew his name. At least, he thought they knew his name. Walking along the endless cement walkway, tapping each parking meter as he ambled, he tried to remember the last time that someone had actually called him by name.

He failed.

His travels brought him through many distantly familiar locales, and, with each of these steps, the echoes appeared.

On 4th and L, it was six sailors, on shore leave in their whites, drunk on acohol and geography. Hungry for the company of culture, namely the culture of women, Joseph left them with directions to the Convent of St. Therese, though in their oblivion, the band wandered off in a cloud of braggadocio and bravo.

On 6th and M there was a store, where, as a dozen times before, he pulled a random bill out of his pocket, deposited it on the counter, and, as a dozen times before, asked to be surprised. It was Manschwetiz. He was surprised.

On 7th and N, after buying three newspapers at random (the price of the newspaper does not the quality of the crossword make), he stopped flipping to the comics long enough to notice the cars. Watching, he saw, in automotive patterns, a Morse code R-O-S-E repeat four times, and not for the first time, long fingers of concern burrowed into him.

Before he even reached 9th and N, laden by his papers, he could feel the throb of plastic bucket drums and frying pan cymbals. The pair, hunched and riding each beat and blast, working in enviable tandem, smiled at no one but the music. Across the street, an elderly women challenged them occasionally with fiddle music from her frayed cassette player, and somewhere along the meridian, where the music met, where Joseph found himself walking, it made music. Not good music, but city music: raucous, violent, and wholly without order.

And on 11th and O, Rachel died.

Not today. But three months didn’t make the pain any cheaper. The agony any easier.

Twenty-one steps. Here, seven stories, up, she took twenty-one steps, and again he walked each one. There were no prints, there was no residue, but he could close his eyes, in fact, he did close his eyes on occasion, and he would follow each step in the precision of grave guardians.

At this moment, he was reminded that, comforted in the fact that the graves of heroes were as cold as the graves of the nameless.

He had to find comfort somewhere.

He’d met her in therapy. His therapy. She’d spoken often about how wrong it was, how perverse the relationship was. Usually when she was against the wall, feet in the air, moaning. He smiled at the thought, sweet memories mixing with the sweet, now half empty bottle of wine. Their sessions had taken on a perversion of the usual ritual, he became a safe place for her, solace of sorts.

She’d looked at him, that makeup she war out of desperation to hide her late twenties smeared by tears, a mass of color under tight, black curls that caught his fingers as he tried to romance in the fashion of the silver-age movies she loved so much. She looked at him, and he beheld hopelessness.

It was a long moment, there. Their eyes met, and nothing else, across the distance. He remembered the heat, oddly out of place, and remembered stepping toward her.

And he remembered counting twenty-one steps as he chased her.

Twenty-one steps until she reached the lip. That twenty-first step that brought her leaping, those silly heels hitting the brick embankment. Then seven stories, seven stories he watched, unable to tear himself away.

In one corner rainbow shards of a dozen glass bottles he had cast sprawled haphazardly. Once, when lying down, rather, when the imbibing laid him down, he had read her name in the jagged edges. That had stopped him from throwing the bottles in the corner for maybe a week.

She stepped outside onto the wide, manicured boardwalk into one of those rare afternoons when objects are empty of meaning, when the crowded, distorting haze of memory sinks away and leaves the physical world free of content. Edges are sharper, the light off windows is blindingly bright, the air is colder, sounds carry further. The distant buildings of the city across the water have the look of being uninhabited. Sailboats in the harbor seem brittle and weightless.

Later, as the sun sets, memory will return like the buzzing of insects. But for now, the strangeness of objects is glaring in this stillness. They stand apart from each other as if superimposed, without the haze of memory to draw them together and blend sharp edges. Later, when shadows begin to dull boundaries, some of what was here before can be seen, ghostly, on the edges of vision - in the remains of demolition and the unfinished sidewalks of this place. In the broken concrete and asphalt under the docks and the boards washed white by salt. Then she can almost make out the shapes of dark, echoing warehouses, smelling of mildew and rust, every window broken, concrete floors stained, heavy steel doors swinging open.

This is when her mind will drift again, loose focus, distracted by the things it can no longer see clearly in the fading light. Songs, words spoken, scenes from movies, things forgotten, disjointed facts will come to the surface one after another, They will inhabit the buildings and fill the spaces between the atoms of the sailboats, taking on the shape of objects and replacing their structure like the forming of petrified wood.

But tonight is yet to come. For now, in this deliberate sobriety, the world slowly descended as she stepped short narrow steps through the shades of the every day. With the darkness comes that caul of banality. Guardian ignorance shorn, hungry eyes harvest the expanse about, digging into the shadows of doorjamb, unfiltered. She walks alone through the crowds, in the silence of her head, filling the absences. It's on one of countless forsaken corners, abandoning the sun under a latticework of upper story porches and hanging banners that the shadows begin to reveal themselves in echoing familiarity. Penned in by smog stained shafts of light, it, for simple denial of each and any other pronoun, watches in absolute fear with only it's pitiful cardboard box, held together with grease, loose change, and asphalt water, between. High noon approaches with long, sure summer strides, catching this one unaware. This it looks out, with eyes gouging deep into its cheeks looking out from its patched black merchant marine cap and painfully, small sweater, woven coarse and stained nicotine by age, frayed from many nights of service as bed linen.

She barely peruses the rest of it, not the jaw that hangs open to its tumorous knees, not malformed and overjointed fingers, nor even it's booted feet, straining in elephantine dimensions against cracked army leather. She sees the eyes, wide and desperate, trying to look past the light for deliverance. She sees the gold.

She sees the gold and remembers. Remembers deep, the whisperings, caught gossamer, creeping on the peripherals of dreams. In the darkness of her, one by one, sentinel stars open to reveal themselves. A reason exists for the scar behind her left thigh, now bound in steel does reason latch. Once, she tells herself, of a chase down an accidental streambed, though whether for frolic or fear remains untold. There is a door that opens to nowhere.

Memories begin to weigh, to forsake all pieties of politeness, and turn from trickle to avalanche in but a moment.

For a moment she remembers.

Until, in the darkness of her, one by one, heavy lidden stars forsake the hope of the moment and close, once more securing their charges in the endless chill.

There, staring at her leather pumps, that she sees the shadow shifted, marking the passing. The ascent to that moment of apogee is done, and the retreat has begun. Looking to the beast, there’s now a disparate of society in its place, seen frame by frame between passing cars and the throng now rising back to their place as a empty tide of the pedestrian.

Reaching up, she wipes a tear from her eye, and wonders what it's doing there. Lunch. Lou and his crew are waiting, and she's already late. Picking up a jog, she quickly grabs a Diet Coke from a nearby kiosk, sucking it down to clear out her cobwebs.

Lunch. Valerie finds herself halfway through a flavorless salad, vaguely aware that she's been smiling, nodding, rolling her eyes, supplying all the expected content-free responses of the dialect spoken here - a private language heavy on sarcasm and self references. Examining the croutons piled like rubble in the corner of her plate, she feels the weight of gravity, as if slowly surfacing from someplace very deep.

What just happened? She glances around quickly from face to face. Nobody's staring... good. She retraces her thoughts though the many overlapping conversations of the past 20 minutes of lunch, probing carefully for the point where she had become unanchored, sinking.

She finds the thread.

Shortly after the food arrived, the conversation had, predictably, turned to complaining about work. Kevin the techno-geek supplied his latest conspiracy theory, this one involving spam. "Haven't you noticed? Not only is there more of it every day, but it's getting weirder. It's not just sales pitches and bogus internet links anymore. I think there's a hidden message..." The last spoken in a dramatic stage whisper.

Andy, in need of a haircut again, ever willing to bullshit, agreed though a mouthful of burger. "Hey, I know whatchya mean! Especially the porn stuff... there's always a bunch of words that don't make any sense. Subliminal messages, right?" Catherine, the wife, began shifting in her seat, clearing her throat.

Seeing Andy veering toward the edge of this marital cliff, Lou broke in with mock seriousness - "Or so you've heard, from your degenerate, single friends... right Andrew?" Who stuttered comically, pretending to fish around for a response that would save his ass, while Catherine next to him shot him a look with those expensive eyebrows before raising her hands to her face and shaking her head in dismay, cueing laughter from the whole table. She's always showing off her hands nowadays, Val noted, as if she's proud that ring cost Andy as much as a new car, damn ugly too. The early afternoon light caught the ring and it burned gold, suddenly the brightest thing in the room, and Val was unable to look away.

Gold. Remembering now, she stands, muttering apologies, leaving a twenty by the limp remains of her lunch, hearing the voices behind her resume their normal volume after a polite pause. They're used to her by now.

Outside again, she breathes, expecting a weight to lift, but it doesn't. The air is heavy, clouds coming in, streets and buildings still hot and sunlit, sky becoming the color of steel. It's going to be the worst type of summer storm - slow, lingering, malicious in its laziness. She wades back through the lunchtime crowd, crossing streets, feeling as if she's out of sync with the flow of traffic, fighting upstream, meeting elbows and briefcases.

And reaches the corner again, somehow knowing the creature and its cardboard shell will be gone, having to see it anyway. What remains to save her sanity is an unbearable stench, staining the landscape, causing those who pass by to hold their breaths and quicken their strides. Nothing else, not a single piece of the organic structure - the rusted coins, pieces of string, scraps of newspaper, aluminum cans, broken pens - gone, swept away.

Valerie steps inside a nearby doorway, out of the crowd, out of the first fat drops of rain, and stares blankly. "What's a matter, miss?" A flower vendor, packed up for the day in anticipation of the storm, has stopped his covered card in front of her, parting the sea of foot traffic. She manages a weak smile, which seems to worry him more. "Here, for free." She realizes he is handing her a single red rose, long-stemmed, barely open, wrapped in plastic. And he is gone, humming tunelessly, through the crowd.

A block, maybe three, later she’s tucked the rose away in her purse, and it is now, with novice professionalism, impeding her attempt to reach an almost forgotten pack of cigarettes, mocking her from behind the green hermetic seal of a plastic baggie. Ripping it out from under layers of the weekly priorities, Valerie’s success was short lived.

Hit hard and quick, some faceless body and successive invective comes from the unceasing onrush and the packet goes flying. As Valerie turns, scanning between footfalls for her fix, she’s bumped again, loosing what little footing her obnoxious pumps can provide and collapses. Only accidentally Samaritan hands keep her from the cement as a few of the herd pause out of rubbernecking curiosity, drawn by imagined scents of blood.

She looked, crowded by heads backlit faceless by arcing lightning, and felt the seething race all around her. A heartbeat, the cadence of the footstep, the unified breath of something massive smacked at her across that instant, she felt it to her bones. Twisting, cutting supports with flailing arms, she was caught roughly by the cement, and forced herself through the gathering crowd, which parted in confusion. Desperately, painfully, she ran, though she knew not how far until she found a small alleyway to collapse in.

Fuck it. With that the last of her defiance washes out. It wasn’t like she even had a lighter. The brick here was cool, uncomforting but reassuring none the less in its resolute solidity. She slides, uncaring that the rust colored puddle she lands in could probably do more than just ruin the skirt that had served as last week’s great accomplishment, on sale at just $80. Bright red pumps sneak glances at her over her knees, and bundled there, under an umbrella of collapsed hair fanning down past her shoulders, she stares back at them.

She takes some time to look up and out of the canyon alleyway she’s wandered into. Prerequisite dumpster roots and reaching fire escape trunk define the borders of the hollow center between the two self-important buildings. Unusually, cascading down its side, the entire far wall had fallen victim to some parasitic ivy, which guided the hammering deluge into a breathing, heaving waterfall of green.

Warm as it is, the wet is infiltrating, digging cold deep in with insidious speed, but thoughts of getting a cab, while offered up by that quiet rational voice in the back of her head, sounding too much like a grade school know-it-all, were promptly ignored. Here she felt safe, just her, the roiling clouds above, the assemblage of precipitation, the resolute stone, the expansive ivy, and even the occasional peal of thunder. She surveyed her little kingdom, and saw that, in fact, she was not alone.

At the entrance to the alley, opposite the chainlink-razorwire which guarded it’s other end, stood a form little larger than herself. Striking red hair cascaded in tight curls, unaffected by the pounding rain, and circled shades and sharp features. Walking forward, her boots, jeans, and leather jacket cut a primevally unsettling air, giving her stature beyond her size.

“You are a hard girl to find,” the intruder spoke, with humor edging the words from a joke only she understood. “You know that, right?”

“Look,” Val looked around, but it appeared, save some silly ascent into the fire escapes, the only real way out was the way she came. “I don’t know what you want, but it’s been a long day, I was just about to be on my way.” She quickly thought about telling some lie about being expected by some mythical boyfriend, but doubted she could sell it as anything more than a pathetic little lie, considering her present condition.

“But I told you I was coming, even made arrangements,” the newcomer spoke, and Valerie felt uncomfortable under the intensity of her scrutiny, even with her sunglasses offering some small respite. And then yet another memory came up for air in the butterfly stroke of this day, and she looked down at her purse still on the ground.

“Rose. Your name is Rose, isn’t it?” She didn’t know why she knew, but she knew at least this much, and that was the first thought all day she could remember feeling confident about.

Her interloper nodded, with sadness twingeing the edges of her smile, if only for an instant. “At least you’re not all gone. Look. We need to talk. There’s a Pogrom on, and we’ve not much time.”

With no further formalities, Rose turned on one sharp heel and, to Val's numb surprise, headed for the back of the alley, winding gracefully deeper into shadow, between piles of trash in every colorful stage of decay. Filled suddenly with far more undefined dread at being alone in the alley than at following this woman, Val wrenched herself to her feet, scooped up her soggy bag, and hurried clumsily after.

The twisted, rusting chain link fence at the back of the alley, far from solid on closer inspection, turned out to have a jagged, dripping, ivy-covered gap only visible from one angle. Rose ducked, slipping quickly and effortlessly through, jacket and hair remaining unsnagged and dry, leaving the suggestion "careful" behind over her shoulder as she disappeared.

If Val had thought she couldn't get wetter she would have been wrong. Emerging painfully on the other side of the fence with a scrape across her ankle, hair drenched, a tear in the left the arm of her raincoat, she paused, blinking in the dim.

The ivy formed a canopy overhead, arching between the two neighboring buildings. The sky was not visible, and Val's eyes slowly adjusted to this green filtered light. She had the sensation of being underwater. The air at ground level was cool and moist, the rain only reaching the earth as mist. Lichen bloomed gently on piles of crumbling brick and cinder-block underfoot. Pools of water green with algae and teeming with life filled erosion hollows in overturned foundation stones. The ivy had developed, over decades, a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship with the walls themselves, roots slowly finding their way into masonry gaps and replacing mortar, forming a soft, fibrous support structure in its place.

Val took all this in and the word "balance" came unbidden to her lips. She sensed that this was a living, breathing space and realized she had been holding her own breath, trying to make herself small and light, dreading what a thoughtless intrusion could do here. The pressure of green life and stone above was as palpable on her skin as the humidity.

But Rose, seeming to move through the place without effort or fear, stepped between piles of rock as easily as she had navigated the rotting garbage of the outer alley. She made her way to a part of the wall on the right, about ten feet from the fence, which was all but invisible beneath the green. Val saw that what she had thought was a trick of light was actually a depression in the wall here, tall and narrow. A door. Rose pulled what appeared to be an old skeleton key from a jacket pocket, and a moment later was pushing the door soundlessly inward and stepping in, and down.

***

Rose, pausing inside the doorway for half a breath, had a moment of doubt that this girl would follow. Was this too much, too soon? No time to baby her.

Rose was impatient. She had spent February in Seareach, sitting by the window in the only waterfront bar left open for the "locals". The Water's Edge Tavern, known affectionately as The Edge, stayed open in the off-season as a form of community service, catering to fits of manic depression, tourism withdrawal and seasonal financial hardship with cheap beer and a few run-down arcade games to get these grey half-people through the winter. They spent their days at the bar, resolutely not looking out the window, eyes fixed on any one of three televisions, waiting out the cold until that spring day when all the lights would come back on, the taffy machine would receive its yearly maintenance and crank to a start, the rides would be oiled and polished, the stuffed animals, plastic toys and cheap metal watches dusted.

Rose had resigned herself to seeing the winter out here, and had even been looking forward to the day when these people would fill with light again, stand up straighter as if re-inflated, begin speaking to one another again, joking, laughing, made whole again by the prospect of another chance at summer. At her seat in the nearly-empty bar, she had gotten into the routine of spending her afternoons with a gin-and-tonic and a stack of newspapers, methodically going through every crossword section. She would pause for a moment after each paper to note the changing tide as it slowly advanced to eat last night's fragile snowfall, then receded to leave a line of cold, damp sand where hunched sea birds optimistically pecked.

She had even gotten to enjoy the songs the pinball machine sang to itself, on a short loop, with a five-second pause between tunes that was somehow relaxing in its monotony. She had developed an understanding with the lone bartender, Mike, a young college dropout who meant well and who had been woken up by nightmares he could never describe after attempting to hit on her for the third time. The next day, pale from lack of sleep, he had treated her with almost old-fashioned respect and seemed relieved enough to cry when she gave him a genuine smile. After that, he would find her new out-of-town papers every few mornings, bringing them like offerings with her drinks.

It was one of these papers brought by Mike, a weekend edition Times, that cut her stay at Seareach short. She could remember vividly even now, months and miles later, how the words had slowly emerged out of disorder, forming the meaning she had been looking for but had admitted to herself she was hoping never to find. Putting her pen down, she had finished her drink slowly, watching the waves. An hour later, she was on a plane.

Even then, there was more waiting. Rose spent the spring and the first weeks of summer sitting at the windows of every Blue Moon Coffee Roasters in the City, knowing there was one on nearly every corner, each identical except for the accident of position. Over the first weeks of April, well described as the cruelest month, she began taking her coffee black, first out of convenience, then slowly out of some harsh internal principle she couldn't quite explain. She filled five and a half cheap stationary-store notebooks with tiny, dense handwriting while watching delivery trucks and taxis drive by with obscure or catchy slogans. "Big Ed's Masonry - done right the first time." "Chang's Kosher Chinese Food and Pizza." "Repent!!! Jesus Loves You!" "Victory Cab". "Harmony Cleaning Service – let us make your house sing!"

It was late August 8th when Rose found what she was looking for. The next morning, as caffeine withdrawal tightened the skin on her scalp and throbbed at the corners of her vision in fuzzy dark shapes, she carefully set things in motion. Now, despite the nagging of this coffee ache, which she could still feel in her eyeballs, she was fairly proud of her planning. Behind her, she could hear Val stepping into the corridor and gently closing the door behind her. Time to get to work.

Val didn’t even notice that she was closing the door until she was half way completed. Pavlovian urges coasted her through the process until some neuron, way in the back, dared to raise it’s hand. She just came through a gap in the fence, and there it was, ivy covered walls, trash strewn along the corners, placid in its normalcy through the portal, deceptively far away.

“Shit girl. Shit or get off the pot.” Rose’s yell careened off the wooden library corridor, finding Val from all sides. “You can come with or you can go back, but you can’t just stand there gawkin’.”

>>>>

And so they went. Bookshelf inlayed walls surrendered to basement drywall with a quick dash through a door on the right, and then to an balcony promenade. Through the bushes it was a manhole, dropping into a sea of cloth. Stumbling, caught on the swaths in all directions, Val forces herself free in the direction she thought she watched Rose escape, she saw instead rose running perpendicular to her exit, sprinting through a dance club oddly naked in the fluorescent light of its off hour maintenance, stripped of all it’s shadow glory. She chased the beacon of the red hair under the main dance stage, behind the curtained edging, and into what she expected to be some storage crawlspace of cobwebs and dust.

She collapsed on the tarpaper roof, falling out of a broken vent some seven floors up on a fraying tenement. Beyond the lip of pot marked teeth of brick, the city rose, drained colorless, a crown in a rainbow of gray. Val stared, entranced by this perverse vision, hoping it to be some snapshot backdrop, some fallacy to rise and laugh in some shared joke. But there it was her city, and even now, as she stared, open-mouthed, she saw, in each building from shack to skyscraper, the dancing particles of TV snow, violently playing underneath their forms in cardiac throws.

Behind them, the sky rushed out, drunkenly vivid and rude. No blue eked through, instead a psychedelic scream rose out from the horizon. Purples clashed with oranges, with thick, Van Gogh clouds cut into the sky, ignorant of the color poor graveyard below them.

Rose had not continued her escape, instead she perched, one foot mounting the edge, sunglasses in hand, and let the rushing wind lift her hair into a massive knot of clashing locks. Walking forward, wary, as ever of the edge, she came just short of even with the stark redhead. Below her she noticed the caged trees with their, now gray, iron collars, verdant and richly green, almost luminescent in the street.

Valerie took the moment and, while Rose absorbed whatever it was she absorbed with each digging breath, absorbed Rose. Closer than ever previously, she examined the features, broad, full and deep, framing, not unexpectedly, two eyes of deep burnished gold, where hints of the sprinting clouds reflected. Occasional leaps of hair showed ears long and narrowing to a point further than anything natural. The features themselves though showed profound peace, simple, uncomplicated joy.

“Where are we?” To Val, it could have been the Back Bay coast, couched, as it was, with water to the east. But that was four, five miles from where she started and that little dash had been, maybe, a half minute. If that.

“Somewhere safe. Well, at least for a little bit” Rose didn’t look at Val as she spoke, still caught on the horizon. She sighed: “hell, we can’t stay here all day, not for wanting. Best we’re off.”

Suddenly she lurched forward, jogging ordinarily down a electric wire connecting this building with the adjacent. As Valerie watched with wide open eyes, she stopped halfway, turning, as she stood causally there as the wind whipped her hair about.

“Alright, guess it was too much to hope…”
>>>
Valerie landed, starting to enjoy the rush, having even snuck peeks the distant ground in her last span. Here now, two blocks from where they began, Rose had stopped, looking at her intently. She was examining her, top to bottom, bottom to top, where Valerie, flush with her aerial journey, met her stare challenging. Rose nodded.

Before Valerie could react, Rose had struck her, hard enough in the sternum to send her floorwards. She landed on her hands, and before a word escaped her, she felt it, nothingness. Where flesh met the sandpaper surface, she felt the intrusion, stealing the nuances of sensation from her, first the wrist, then elbow and shoulder before she knew what was happening. There wasn’t enough strength left in her arms to try to escape it as it rushed up, boiling nil passing her neck and washed over her head in tidal certainty.

Struggling, both her small hands refusing to let go of the cold knob, she tried again to twist, hoping that, maybe this time it would be the time. She failed again. Again. Dropping, sobbing, she reached up, pulling at her short, natty hair that smelled of kerosene, fingers sliding through the tufts.

Through the darkness and crying which had given up on tears, on noise, on comfort, she stumbled back to the stained blanket. She swatted at an already retreating spider, and wrapped herself tightly, trying to conserve what warmth she had left. Though she didn’t see her breath, it had been so cold, so long, that she couldn’t remember warmth. No, that was a lie, she could remember it, probably better than it was, sitting down here in the basement. Occasional cracks, under the door and in where the ceiling met the walls poorly, let in the light. It wasn’t much, the darkest she’d seen when she got there, but she’d learned. She’d learned much, and again she looked at the empty glass and plate long ago licked clean. Daddy would come down soon, she’d learned her lesson, she knew better now.

Please Daddy.

Rocking, head covered by the blanket, it was almost too late before she heard the sound. They were back, low and sleek, blooming out of the darkness at her. She ran from them, these rats now bold from their common hunger. Recent cuts on her arms and legs would have been scars of victory.

The first one that lands on her she grabs and throws into moldering boxes in the corner, and a second that bounces off the ceiling in rage spiced strength. But she is weak, from hunger, from lack of sleep, from the dreams, and they are legion. She runs. They bite. Her arm explodes in pain. There’s on her neck. Blood flows. She bats desperately at it as yet another rat scales her leg and bites the back of her thigh, and the heat engulfs her, searing along her body, slowly, lovingly.

The pain is exquisite. Valerie feels herself licking her lips at sensation. From her shoulder to her knees she felt the flesh hot and abused, transient, unfortunately. The burnt incense and fats couldn’t hide the smell of her flesh for long, but it had ceased bothering her long before.

There would be a pattern. Caller always left a pattern. Sure, she would have to wait, but it would be there, Caller’s signature on her body. At least until it healed, but that might be decades. She could hope.

The agony was removed. She looked back, an action which resulted in her head fishtailing. As Valerie struggled to focus she realized she, this she, must be stoned, but what remained to delineate the two quickly faded.

She looked over her shoulder, a naked shoulder, over a naked back scarred and still smoking in spots, to the man behind her. He was standing nearby throwing the last of the irons into a iron kettle of water, eliciting pops and hisses of steam.

She reached over and scratched his arm with her foot, playfully. He looked back, with wild hair encompassing unkempt features, and eyes that refused to reveal themselves. It was a face of shadows, and showed the little hints of smile he left in response to her advances. He, unlike her, was dressed, jeans and a black shirt, now spotted with the tell-tale maroon of blood.

“That’s it, we’re done.” He dropped the words, sadly.

“You sure Caller?” her voice was filled with euphoria, it had been a long morning. She stretched her body on the fur, trying to look coy at the same time she realized it would probably only make him angry. “Remember, this isn’t just so you can collect my smiles”.

Caller stepped back, severe now, against the earthen walls of the room. Oily smokes billowed in his passing and now defended him in a wall of translucence. “Do you think I enjoy this?” There was quiet disappointment in his voice.

“If not you should, why should I be the only one enjoying this. Hell, when was the last time you enjoyed anything.” The anything died on her lips as she saw him harden to cast iron features. Shaking her head, she hopped off, bare feet on the irregular stones, hair touching her tailbone, and walked outside.

Outside the barrow, rising out of the earth, the snow’s still falling. Bushes are laden with albino fruits in the junctions of branches. The wind, domesticated by the flanking hills, still managed to nudge the trees to sway, leaving a quiet chorus of groaning to escort her walk.

The goat is where they left it this morning, its stuffing still spread across the stump where the left it, it’s body hanging from the tree growing out of the barrow mound. The creature had long since ensanguinated, and once she had wiped the snow off the top, a thin layer of ice separated her from the blood beneath. Her reflection came clearly, Valerie’s own face, but harder, colder. She stared, brushing away the errant snowflakes that descended upon her meditation.

So caught up was she, she didn’t notice Caller until he placed the blood ruined fur over her shoulders. She looked back at him, and on to the blood spatter and footprint track she had left behind her.

“Still not going to tell me what the goat said?” asked Valerie.

“There are rules to these things.” Caller looked as frustrated as Caller could allow himself. “Is there any chance I could talk you out of this fool venture?”

“What do you think?”

“Didn’t think so.”

“Caller,” she wanted him to be happy for her, but she knew better, “how can I refuse a challenge like this?”

“I will miss you then.” With this he nodded, and walked back to the barrow. Valerie watch him until he closed the door behind him, then turned toward the south. South, where past the farms plots abandoned back to the trees, past the three building towns, past it all, someone waited for her.

“What the hell was that?” Valerie tried to keep it steady, but she knew the words were sobbing out of her, heaving through the hands that were trying to pull the tangled curtain of hair from over her face and wipe away the asphalt crumbs. She didn’t know how long she had stood there, but Rose sat, there on the edge of the roof, a pipe in her mouth, absentmindedly streaming smoke which caught in her curls.

“A horror. A dreamer died here.” Rose’s

“No…The…” Valerie, looking for the words saw only Rose, her severity split as her lips opened into a smile, revealing a row of perfect, pointed razor teeth.

Valerie’s tears stopped, replaced by fear.

“Oh. Did someone remember something? I had hoped you were smart enough to sew some memories into you.”

“I… I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this at all. Who… no, what the hell are you, anyway?” Val tried raising her chin, stressing the “hell” with what she fancied might almost be a defiant tone. It came out as defensive, with a tremor she failed to steady. Damnit!

“You do understand, honey,” Rose smirked, then softened with a hint of sympathy. “You just don’t want to yet. You will, when you’re ready.” She turned away, adding under her breath, “I just sure as hell hope that’s soon…”

Val looked back out over the city and realized with a start that at some point the late summer sunset had come and gone. The sky was filled with the dull purplish haze that never really went away, even in deepest night, a glow absorbed from streetlamps and the gaping windows of skyscrapers. So hard to find a true darkness here, as if the city always had at least one eye open.

She looked around to see Rose striding over to a rusted trapdoor in the flat roof surface, boots crunching on the loose gravel. She hauled the door open with a grunt. Val winced at the sound of shrieking metal. “Time to go.”

Valerie tried a little laugh. “What, we’re taking the stairs?” But Rose was already gone.

***

Val tried counting the number of flights they descended, but soon gave up, dizzy. The darkness was punctuated by tiny landings, most but not all of them dimly lit by the cold, abandoned blue of a mercury vapor lamp. Val concentrated grimly on keeping the flash of Rose’s hair in sight whenever possible, and keeping the hollow sound of her boot heels close. She didn’t notice passing any exit doors.

Almost lulled into a trance by the pattern of ten steps down, three steps flat with a turn to the right, ten steps down, Val collided with Rose when she finally stopped, eliciting a mild curse. She was amazed to find Rose warm to the touch, radiating heat through the stiff leather. “Hang tight,” the woman advised dryly. “Here’s where it gets a little tricky.”

With that she slid aside a narrow door into an explosion of light and sound. Val’s cry was lost in the roar and screech as she jumped backward, almost falling. Then it was gone just as suddenly, and they looked out into the empty subway tunnel, lit by small maintenance lights recessed in the walls.

“You’ve got to be joking!” Val managed to choke out.

“Nope. Sorry, kid. Just watch where you step.” And Rose hopped out onto the concrete between the two sets of tracks. Swearing under her breath, Val followed, heart pounding, trying frantically to remember which part was electrified.

With Rose leading, they jogged through the tunnel, northbound according to the small metal markers they passed every minute or so. Without them, Val would not have even hazarded a guess which direction they were moving, or even which part of the city they were under. Other markers, green, showed a series of letter and number coordinates. Green line? Not much help. She thought she could hear the creatures moving out of their way just ahead of her field of vision. Mice. Rats. Heaven knew what else. Val shivered.

Suddenly she was aware of a low hum in the distance. “Rose! Is it a train? Goddamnit! Rose!”

“Almost there” was the only reply. But a moment later Rose slowed, then stopped. “Ah, here we go. Almost missed it…” She hopped gracefully over the southbound track and onto a small iron ladder fixed to the side of the tunnel, up five steps, and onto the narrow access platform.

The hum was getting louder, more insistent. She found the door, slid it aside, and motioned to Val. “Don’t just stand there, girl.” Val held her breath and jumped, not for the first time of the night cursing her slim-cut skirt. She caught the ladder and was up.

Not a moment too soon. The metal hum had risen to a cry, and the sucking wind ripped at their hair and clothes. Val turned to look just as the train went by on the opposite side of the tracks.

Car after car, almost quick enough to be subliminal, she caught the faces of the travelers. The late commuters on their way home from the office, worn, weary, some standing gripping the rungs with eyes closed. The early partiers on their way out to the bars, laughing, joking, teasing. The homeless, hollow-eyed, resigned.

Each face was unique, but what was captured in the instant was something inexpressible, massive, uniform. Mindless. Or, not quite mindless. Primitive. It was what she had felt earlier the same day, in the anonymous crowd on the street, in broad daylight. The recognition smacked her.

She turned to Rose and saw that she felt it too. For the briefest instant the bravado had fallen and her face showed simple fear. Their eyes met, and without a further word Rose stepped through the door with Val close behind.

***

They passed through countless more flights of stairs up, winding featureless corridors, flights of stairs down, doorways to other corridors. Val was fairly sure they had gone down more steps than up, and thought she noticed a slight drop in temperature. The walls, where she could see or feel them, seemed damp at times and had decayed from smooth concrete to flaking plaster, then to brick. She had long since lost any hope of finding her way out alone, and felt like a small child as she hurried after Rose, helpless.

When they came through one last doorway and stepped into a normally lit room, Val blinked as if staring into full sun. As her eyes adjusted, she took the place in. They were in what seemed to be an old elementary school classroom. Wooden desks, the kind with the chair built in, were pushed against the far wall. Small institutional chairs were stacked high, nesting, or scattered throughout the room. The wood floorboards were dark and stained with age. Blackboards, filled with tiny writing, smudged with messy erasures, took up most of the front wall. To one side was a heavy oak desk. Every square inch was covered with newspapers, pencils, notepads, empty Styrofoam cups, computer components she couldn’t identify, and three old-style computer monitors.

Perched, elbows resting on knees, on the back of one of the chairs behind the desk, was a grey man. He had pale skin, steel grey hair, dark grey goatee, and his black shirt, pants and boots seemed to be covered with a thin film of dust. He had been staring at one of the monitors as they walked in and didn’t look up. The weight of time was heavy in the room, as if he had been seated there for eons. A steaming cup of coffee sat on the desk just to his left.

“Zeke, be polite for once! Say hello,” Rose teased.

“Hello, Valerie.” The grey wings at his back swayed slightly with his soft greeting and Val twitched. She had mistaken them for drapes or an overcoat. A wave of nausea struck her and she sat heavily in the nearest chair.

“Zeke! See, now, you’ve given our guest a fright. She’s still finding her way back to herself. Why don’t you take a little break and tell us a story or two.” Rose grabbed a chair, swinging it around backwards to straddle, elbows resting on the back in an expectant posture.

Zeke sighed gently with one last glance at the screen before him, unfolded himself from his perch and stood to pace the front of the room. He was nearly seven feet tall and swung his joints carefully, as if out of practice. The great wings were folded neatly as a hawk’s, close to his back. Val could see now that they were made of an impossible number of the tiniest of feathers, ranging a full spectrum from dirty white to dirty grey. His eyes, like Rose’s, were a deep gold. He began his first story.

***

Long ago, when the Earth was new and fresh, God sent down some of his angels to watch over the sons and daughters of man. They were meant only to watch, never to involve themselves. But they may have been unprepared. In Heaven all was bright, clean and orderly. Unchanging. They had always thought of this as the ultimate beauty.

The Earth seemed dark, decaying, composed of soil and flesh. The angels did not understand their Father’s creation, but being supremely wise, neither did they recoil in distaste. Instead, some of the sent ones felt they should involve themselves in the doings of man, for how could they truly watch what they did not understand?

Time passed. The sent ones began to see beauty in what changes, dies, is reborn. They began to understand, began even (if it were possible) to enjoy the weaknesses and illogic of those they watched. As a certain affection blossomed, some of the watchers found the strangest thing to be true. They found that they lusted after the daughters of man.

Unsurprisingly, the daughters of man were not difficult to seduce. The watchers lay with them, and God was angry. But how could he punish them? The Lord being perfect in all things, he naturally found the perfect punishment. The fallen would live with their choice, forever. What was new and enticing would, over the ages, reveal itself for what it truly was. The fallen would have an eternity to realize their mistake in choosing Earth over Heaven. As part of their punishment, their wings were ripped from their backs, leaving ugly scars that never healed to serve as a reminder of what they had lost.

***
As he finished, Zeke directed a pointed look toward Rose, who glanced around behind her with a mock “who, me?”. Val looked from Rose to Zeke and back, realization slowly dawning. “But… you’re a woman…” Then flushed bright red at Rose’s exaggerated wink.

“Oh, don’t worry, honey. You’re safe. I’m taking a break from all that for a little while. Too much else going on nowadays.” Zeke rolled his eyes and began his next story.

***

Ages ago, when snow covered the lands to the north and thaw was not yet a known word, a race of pure beings lived in peace. The fair folk spoke to the land, understood its signs. They had little need for shelter or clothing, dwelling in warm hollows in the living Earth. They were graced with wings of snowy white which they used to reach the treetops and look out on the vastness of the continent.

Centuries passed in quiet. But gradually, the winged beings saw change. The snows were shrinking and their beloved trees were changing. The snow rabbit and the white wolf were moving further north in their eternal dance. To the south, they could see smoke from settlements rising above the gradually thinning blanket of the evergreens.

The fair ones wondered what kind of creatures could be living down there. For a long time they considered but did nothing, being thoughtful folk. But as the decades passed and the smoke of cooking fires gave way to something darker and more troublesome they decided a few must venture down.

Those who returned from the expedition came back terrified, speaking of an ugly, wingless race that lived above the ground and could not hear the language of the Earth. A suspicious, jealous, greedy people, these humans spent their time mindlessly reproducing, burning the land, creating poisons, squabbling amongst themselves.

The humans were a brutal, powerful people, and the winged ones were afraid for the land. But a few of the youngest had hope, and they volunteered to sacrifice their peaceful lives and live among these humans, sure they could teach them to listen to the Earth and to one another.

Because the humans were such a suspicious folk, the volunteers had to do the unthinkable – give up their wings, their most obvious mark of being different. They chose to keep their scars as a reminder of what they were leaving behind.

In the many years ahead, the brave volunteers who had begun with so much hope and love slowly changed as they lived among the humans. They began to despair, began to hate the humans, and possibly worst of all, they began to understand them. Eventually, they gave up trying to change the humans and concentrated on simply getting by. They never returned to the lands to the north.

***

Finished, Zeke turned back toward the desk, stopping at Rose’s insistent throat clearing. “Oh, alright,” he sighed. “Just one more.”

***

In the ancient era, a race of winged folk lived among the wingless in relative peace. It had always been the case in the brief and dim memory of the people, and no one thought to question. It was an age of survival, and the winged had certain skills they were more than willing to share.

This time of hardship continued for generations. But gradually, the winged and the wingless built a life they could rely on. Winters slowly became less of a race between resources, strength and the cold as they learned together how to prepare, store food, build homes in the hillsides. Spring was always a joy of celebration as the days lengthened and life returned to the plains.

But one April, just as the people were drawing in deep breaths of the first hint of warmth, a terror came to the sky. A shadowy hand approached the life-giving sun. Cold and darkness seeped over the land. The people panicked, watching helplessly as the sun was entirely swallowed. And in that final moment, as darkness fell, the most astounding sign appeared in the sky. It was a great bird, feathery wings of flame reaching out on either side of the blackened sun as if holding it prisoner with great talons.

(Here Zeke paused by a blackboard, erased a swath, and sketched an illustration.)

In the unnatural darkness the wingless ones turned as one on the winged, driven mad with fear. The winged who survived fled far into the hills. Naturally, the great sky bird released the sun and fled as well. The survivors traveled, nomadic, from continent to continent, staying among the wingless people of each land until the coming of the next sign.

Sometimes the winged would be hailed as gods at the coming of the great sky bird, but most often they would be persecuted. They studied the sky and learned to predict the coming of the terror, disappearing quietly just ahead of it. But some grew tired of this restlessness and wished to stay among the wingless people. They did the unthinkable to go unnoticed, removing their wings at the shoulder. Some say this physical change, amplified and carried out over the generations to come, eventually became mirrored by a soul-change, an atrophy of a less visible kind.

***

Val felt groggy, as if coming out of a dream. She had no idea how long she’d been listening to Zeke’s gentle voice.

“So… which story’s true?” She asked hesitantly. Parts of each story had rustled deep memories in her, or memories of memories. Thankfully, none had been as shocking as what she’d felt on the roof earlier that day.

Rose grinned, shaking her head. “All of ‘em. Or none of ‘em. Take your pick, darlin’.”