“Mr. Walldough, this is the last thing I will say to you,” the deputy hears Constable Mooncalfe say. “You have a bar and a family to look after, and far too much liquor at your disposal. I suggest you clean up your act!” The broad man rounds the corner, hamfists clenched at his side, head down.

“And I suggest you come clean to the nice people in this town,” John Walldough yells from out of view. “Tell ‘em you don’t know shit about how to protect them!” His voice is slurry.

“Levitt,” the deputy hails his superior.

“Constable Mooncalfe,” the man corrects shortly.

“Constable. Forgive me,” Callan apologizes.

“Ah,” the Constable fusses. “No, forgive me, my boy. You’ve been a great help. The least I can do is not lord titles over you.” They pause to talk in the shadowed damp. A wooden crate of fresh potatoes sits at a closed door. Mice scurry through puddles and into holes. The alley forks a yard down its length and opens out east toward the Goodfaith Cemetery.

“That’s the job, sir,” Callan says. “What’s the latest?”

“John Walldough is drunk on his own ale behind his own bar, and belligerent. His older daughters came to get me. Ruth won’t speak to anyone. She hasn’t been tending bar. Just stays up in their loft, from the looks of it.” Mooncalfe’s head falls. He removes his hat and smooths his hair over a small bald spot. “And that’s not all, Callan. His daughters said he would disappear at nights. He’s confirmed as much. Leaves half-empty liquor bottles in the house around his young children.”

Callan hums. “No stranger than a man who lost his children getting a little day-drunk, but a fair bit bleaker.”

“That’s right. I lost my temper with him. Maybe cooler heads will prevail,” the Constable frets.

“Leave it to me,” Callan reassures.

John Walldough is sitting on a hay bale in a cart behind his bar. He holds a very nice vintage loosely in one hand. Something the color of amber. The other hand picks hay loose from the bale and rolls it between the fingers until it is shreds. He gazes without focus in the direction of the cemetery. Deputy Stout stops and watches the barkeep for a while.

“Leave me to my wallowing,” the barkeep growls after Callan steps into view.

“‘Fraid not.” The deputy climbs into the cart and turns to face out toward the Goodfaith Cemetery rather than loom over the man.

“I said some unkind things to the Constable. I’m sorry for that. My bar’ll be fine. My kids’ll be fine. I’m sure you got plenty more important things to do.”

Deputy Stout hums again. “Still gotta ask the questions.”

John sighs. “Alright.”

“Where are you going at night?”

“Searchin’.”

The deputy works his lip a little bit. “Yeah, alright. Where’d you get the vintage?”

“From my cellar.”

“How many is that?”

“Not enough, I guess.”

“How’s Mrs. Walldough?”

It’s John’s turn to work his lip. “That’s not one of your questions,” he decides.

“‘Fraid so.”

Silence from the barkeep.

“How recently did you speak to her?”

More silence.

“Is she upset?”

“Kick rocks,” John suggests.

“Why is she upset?”

John turns for the first time to look at the deputy. “Because our son’s gone now, too, Deputy. Are you a damned fool?”

“Hope not.” Callan shifts his weight. “You think it’s your fault?”

John stifles a belch, shifts his weight, flexes his fingers, furrows his brow. Callan sees two of the Cowhide folks run breathlessly out of the alley, flushed and holding each other. When they see the barkeep and the lawman, they stop in their tracks before ambling slowly back the way they came. “Damn you,” he says finally.

“It’s not,” the deputy says. “Your fault.” John Walldough stares at him uncomprehendingly. “It’s mine.”

“Speak plain, young man.” John looks angry. He sets his bottle on the floor of the cart.

“It’s mine and the Constable’s job to keep the people of Alewife safe, and we failed. And you know as well as I do that Levitt is not exactly equipped to perform his duties at this level. I’ll have to find a way to fall asleep at night for the rest of my life.”

John look back out in the direction of the cemetery. “Two nights after Daveed was gone, I was lying in bed next to my wife. She told me that it was my job to protect them. She told me that I failed. She told me I was a liar.”

Callan shifts his weight again. “You’re not a li–”

“Thing is, I am. Night after Alisa was gone, I was holdin’ her and I told her. I told her I would protect them. Amy and Abigail and Michael and Malcolm and Beatrice and Boyd and Daveed and her. I lied.” He holds out his spirit. “So I went out looking and when I didn’t find them, I wondered if they were just hiding in our cellar.” John sniffs hard. “Wouldn’t that have been so silly? If they were just hiding in the cellar this whole time?”

“Yeah,” Callan says. “That would’ve been funny.”

“So I was down in the cellar and I remembered how much liquor there is down there. I had this regular from Tallow used to come in on Mudbath days and see Boyd unwrapping little sweets from Rodolfo’s. He would always laugh and say ‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.’” John swings the bottle such that the liquid inside makes a cartoonish swishing noise. “And that’s all I could think while I was down there.”

“That’s a clever saying,” the deputy admits. The sun has started to set. He and John consider the sky for a moment.

“Is that all your questions, deputy?” John asks. He sounds tired.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” Callan asks, ignoring him.

“What?”

“Confided in anyone, I mean.”

“No, man. No shot. It’s embarrassing. That’s ridiculous.” John sinks a little deeper into the hay bale.

“Reason I say is because I just came from Domingo & Cole’s. They were both pretty close to the Bawart girl.”

“Gertie,” John corrects.

“Gertie,” Callan repeats. “I can sit and listen just fine, but….” He shrugs. “I could never listen like you could. I didn’t lose anybody.”

John shifts uncomfortably. “They don’t need me botherin’ them,” he decides.

“That’s a shame. They both appreciate a nice vintage.” Callan hops out of the cart. “Those were all my questions.”

“Uh…oh,” Mr. Walldough says. “You’re not gonna take me in for public indecency or anything?”

Callan rubs the stubble on his chin so that it makes a dry noise. “Didn’t think of that. Maybe I’ll change my mind and come back for you in an hour.” He starts off. “Night, Mr. Walldough.”

On the way back to the Commorancy, Callan Stout steals another glance through a foggy window. One of the young men from Cowhide is crying hard, snot and tears dribbling down over his lips. His friends take the stein out of his hand, muss his hair. They surround the large fellow, cracking jokes and comforting him.

“I’ll have to find a way to sleep,” the deputy says to himself. He heads back down the alley, hefts the crate of potatoes up, and heads into the Black & Tan.

Project Commissariat worked around the clock; skilled physicists, engineers, and military test-technicians waiting for a breakthrough like this. Personnel had already barely been sleeping since they first received the extraplanar entities’ reports–the ones they had taken to calling only Kilo, Sierra, and Tango. Mark’s record for going without sleep was twenty-two hours. He broke it by a day and a half.

At seven twenty-eight A.M. Pacific Standard Time on November eighth, 2022, Mark Guerrero stands with five Geilts. They wear riot gear in shades of charcoal-gray, red, and white. Each of them is equipped with three side arms, a combat-grade Remington 870, and a utility belt full of siege-grade provisions, water, and ammunition. The air in Ellison is still brisk from the desert morning.

In the growing dawn, Mark considers the members of his complement. All of them are regarded as the most adept among Project Commissariat personnel–equal in both their combat tact and collective advanced post-secondary degrees. Most of them are faces he doesn’t know; the others he never had cause nor care to look for long. Waterson, his original second, is gone. He was trapped in a dead-end guardpost in a New Mexican super-cell, then forced to retire after he failed there, too. Then there was Sakhile: loyal, honest, and an exceptional shot right up to the moment that he accidentally killed the kid. Miserably, sleep-deprived Mark Guerrero determines that, even with a gun to his head, he could not have named a single one of his co-operants.

Mark turns to face the Breach. Banks of servers capable of powering cities were hauled across the country to this spot. All manner of computing equipment, radar, tremor sensors, and infrared cameras blink and whir in a massive semicircle around Liberty Auto. The long abandoned full-service garage sits with its back against a great red-yellow cliff. The agent imagines all of this tech to create the ghost of an arrow like an open-world video game, indicating the location of his next objective.

The middle-aged New Mexican spends another minute listening to his co-operants triple-checking their gear and mumbling groggily to each other. “Alright,” he says over his shoulder. “Eyes up. Stay sharp. There’s no such thing as jarheads or lab monkeys here. Leave your old divisions, your previous distinctions–all of it–right here in the dirt. We’re here to make our long nights, our dead friends–all of it–mean somethin’ more than shit.” Mark pulls his mask from one of the many pockets of his trauma-proof shock-proof vest and draws it over his head. “It’s game time.” Mark half-crouches, gripping his sidearm tightly between the meat of both palms, and starts forward.

Quickly, he realizes his detachment is not following him. They gaze past him, maskless and open-mouthed. Then, he sees Waterson drop off of the rusting crinkled metal shingles that form the roof of Liberty Auto. The impact of his landing kicks up red dust. The bruised, browbeaten ex-Marine waves it out of his face as he trudges toward them. He wears civilian clothes. Looks like he lost weight. A beat up, dirt-colored bomber jacket hangs off of his frame.

“You come here often, Waterson?” The former professor wastes no time training his weapon on the man.

“Where’re all the other primates?” Waterson asks.

“At a carefully calculated safe distance, I assume,” Guerrero answers. He sees no reason to lie. “Y’all stay back there! Let me talk to ‘im,” he bids the Geilts behind him.

One of them starts to protest. “Captain, you shouldn’t–”

“Follow instructions, agent,” Guerrero growls. If there are more qualms, they aren’t voiced.

“Sakhile’s not among this bunch,” Waterson says conversationally.

“Project Commissariat has many ongoing projects that would do well to utilize him.”

“So he’s a fuck-up, too, huh? Just like us?” Waterson shifts his weight underneath the awning of the old autobody shop. The sun is coming up and the light is blinding. “It’s a shame you feel that I haven’t been up to snuff, old man.”

“I’m glad you’re still pretty sure about everything,” Mark says, determined to be the one to steer the conversation. “Hell, seems like your every step is preordained.”

“I think we’re past the point God cares to be involved.” Waterson’s expression softens. “Mark, you need to see somebody.” He takes a tentative step toward the Project Commissariat Director.

“And you need to see your travel agent because you clearly thought you’d arrive somewhere else this morning.” Mark thumbs off the safety.

Waterson stops in his tracks. “I looked into you a little bit when I got the gig. This was before the big anti-panic censorship rollout,” Waterson says.

“Oh, yeah? And which informed you more, my publications or my public indecencies?”

“The latter, Mark. You’re a gambling addict. Every choice you made to mitigate loss, to never lose again, has led you here. This is the house, chief.” Waterson’s sweeping gesture indicates all the instruments, the autobody shop, maybe even all of New Mexico. “Do you remember what they say about the house?”

“You never could understand how important this work is, Waterson. That’s why you failed. It’s because you faltered,” Mark shouts. He pumps his sidearm into the air above him, fires, and then levels it back on his former deputy. “Now move, or you will be moved.”

“If you go through this Breach, that’s one thing,” Waterson says without heeding the threat. “Let’s say optimistically that all that happened to the people who tripped through this past decade was that they got super-cancer or something. Fine, you die over there.” He steps out into the desert sun. “But what could be unleashed when you come back?”

“Enough.” Mark shoots into a desert shrub two feet from Waterson’s left boot.

“Did you forget all the insane extraplanar contamination we saw from when shit came through to our dimension?!” Waterson demands. Instead of answering, Mark shoots the glass out of the rest of a window. Waterson covers his face with the loose sleeve of his jacket. “You’re a cold son-of-a-bitch, Professor. Maybe you’re beyond help.” He slowly lowers his arm down from his face. “But we’re gonna make sure.”

Mark hears someone crumple into the dirt behind him. The other Geilts are suddenly opening fire in random directions. He crouches low and crawls rapidly toward his fallen co-operant. When he sees the tranquilizer round sticking out of her neck, he whips back around.

Bingo.

There’s a glint at the top of the red cliff behind the blighted storefront. Guerrero aims and fires three times, then fires twice at Waterson. The ex-Marine dives behind the rusting facade. Mark hazards another look back. Three of five Geilts lay peacefully and unceremoniously anesthetized. “ADVANCE NOW! I’LL COVER YOU!” he orders.

“I’ll conga line into hell after no one’s shooting at us!” one of the younger ones says. He has already turned tail, sprinting toward the approaching fleet of unmarked black SUVs.

“BUT THE BREACH IS GONNA CLOSE, YOU IDIOT!” Mark bellows. The last Geilt, a blonde with dull dark eyes, considers your fleeing comrade and her superior both in turn. It doesn’t take long for her to ditch Mark, too.

“FUCK!” Mark pumps his arms. He chambers his torso forward like an Olympic sprinter, the way he was taught at Green Pointe. He hurdles most of the way over the blinking, whirring bullshit, but his foot catches a series of arching antennae. He rolls his ankle on the landing. DAMN IT, FUCK THE DESERT, AND FUCK ME. The grubby glass door to the storefront opens mercifully at the first yank.

A dirt-blood brown-red engine block sits in the middle of the shop. Empty gas cans, dusty wrenches, and signage hang from the walls. One of the two garage doors is stuck open a foot and a half off of the cement floor. The blinking and whirring is gone. The air is cold and fresh. Mark can feel that this is a different place. Blood pumps loudly in his ears. He stands still, horrified.

“You don’t have any chips, man,” Waterson says. The gaunt man stands in front of the door to a small office. Mark imagines the sort of miscellaneous office with a junk drawer and a hundred keys to a hundred cars. Protein bars in half a cardboard box on the floor. “The only thing you’ve got left to wager is your life.”

Mark hears the door he just came through swing open again. A brief rush of heat, and then the figure of Jordan Sakhile in plainclothes. He carries an ugly modified Springfield rifle against a loose flowing linen shirt the same color as the desert sand. The dark man sets the gun down and says nothing.

“You gonna kill me in here?” Mark asks a little too loudly.

“You don’t need help dying, Mark,” Waterson reassures him. “It’s only that this is our last chance to show you how serious this is.” Mark tries to move forward, backward–anywhere at all–and finds that he can’t.

“Who’s Claudia?” Sakhile breaks his silence. Mark regards his most recent former second. Suddenly, his sidearm is too heavy to lift. “Did you love her?”

“Yeah.” Mark wishes he didn’t sound so much like a little boy answering his mother’s non-questions. Are you feeling sad, baby? his mother would ask. A little, mama, Mark would answer.

“Will you save the world? Get the girl? Die in a blaze of glory? Some hero shit?” Jordan asks. The lean, dangerous man clenches his fists.

“Jordan. Take it easy,” Waterson urges.

“Let him figure it out,” Sakhile replies, more sadly than angrily.

Mark swallows hard before he speaks. “I woke up in the Golden Library on Eastern’s campus a few years back. I was droolin’ in my sleep. I got up and wandered around the shelves a while, doin’ nothin’. Somethin’ was different, I was sure of that. Nothin’ I could tell you for sure, though. I knew Claudia was gone. But for her trouble, she’d saved my life and ferried me back to terra firma. Safe and sound.” He grinds his teeth together and rubs his dusty hand on his pant leg.”

“She told me about a paper she read. She explained it was about endings. The findings were that ‘the need for closure is only sustainable if you have a tolerance for ambiguity,’ somethin’ like that, I don’t know.” The old professor rubs the sweat from his forehead back into his pencil-lead gray hair. His ankle throbs. “Shit, I haven’t slept in a long time.”

“Stay with us, professor. What else?” Waterson says.

“You already know, you condescendin’ asshole. I already explained. I don’t know anything. And if I go,” Mark says, pointing a wrinkled hand at the office behind his former deputy, “I’ll either learn somethin’, or I’ll die. Either way, it won’t be like it has been. Like tryin’ to keep an old dog alive…or tryin’ to make the same eggs they stopped servin’ at the diner yourself. Worse than useless.” The interior of Liberty Auto is silent for a while. Then, Mark Guerrero trudges forward. Jordan immediately snaps his long, athletic form at the knees and waist, reaching for the gun.

“Hold on a minute, Jordan!” Waterson shouts. Nonetheless, his companion picks up the weapon and lines up the scope with all the swiftness of outstanding training. “Just a second.”

Sakhile holds on.

Mark stops at the door of the auto body shop’s office. “What the hell’s your stake in this, Waterson? Just go home. Be with your family like a normal jarhead.”

“My name is Grant. Claudia was my goddaughter,” Waterson says. “Is that enough?” With that, he steps through the door ahead of Mark.

“PISS, FUCK, NO!” Jordan screams.

At seven forty-four A.M. Pacific Standard Time on November eighth, 2022, the Director of Project Commissariat, Professor Mark Guerrero P.h.D., throws the Breach door open.

All he hears is the perpetual, rhythmless, melodyless hum of office air conditioning.

Rosemary always had a particular sweet tooth, so she would ask Rodolfo Touchaine to bring something special. “For the children,” she would always say.

Rodolfo, being a magnanimous sort of fellow, would always acquiesce. “I’m sure I can find something,” he would say. Everyone else would bring something nice to share–sweets more often than not–but Rodolfo’s confections were always the most highly anticipated. Everyone would munch and mill about the rooms above Rosemary’s place and chat for a while. And then, inevitably, someone would solicit her for some reminiscence, and she would always dismiss it.

“Ah, too long a story, I figure,” she would say.

“No, tell it, Rosemary! What, do you have an appointment to keep?” the solicitor would tease.

“Well, I suppose not,” she would sigh. By this point, the dull roar in the nice, spacious dining room with all the comfy chairs and couches and loveseats–far more seats than Rosemary or her visiting brother could possibly need–will have dulled. Next, she would speed half-heartedly through an exceedingly boring story. She would tell just enough of it for someone in the back of the room to complain.

“I can’t hear! Speak up, Rosemary,” someone would shout out. Now, any other conversation would have stumbled to an ungraceful halt. Rosemary would roll her eyes and speak a little bit louder until someone else took up the mantle.

“I still can’t hear her! Speak up, Rosemary!” someone else would protest. By then, there would be more shouts going up, more concurring and agreeing, until a chorus of SPEAK–UP–ROSEMARYs! could be heard all the way down the Tenderloin. Finally, she would put her hands up in resignation.

“Alright, fine, you no-good eavesdropping rouse-rabblers,” she would capitulate. “Let me go and stand somewhere everyone can hear me,” and she would rise from wherever she was sitting. In perfect synchrony, everyone would rearrange all the seats in the house into a semicircle. Around the bit of the floor that was raised ever so slightly higher–almost past the point of notice–everyone sat, rapt.

As Rosemary went to assume her spot on the not-truly-a-stage, she would shoo a couple of young children off of a chaise lounge. “Rodolfo gets to sit up front because he brought such nice sweets for everybody.” Mr. Touchaine would graciously accept a seat of honor, the conditions of his pro-bono arrangement satisfied.

“Now listen closely, and listen carefully,” she would always start, crouching a bit to make eye contact with each of the children, “because every detail, every loose end, every bread crumb trail–no matter how small–will be cut off, tied up, and sewn closed.” The children, with their open mouths and big eyes, would nod their understanding, their parents chuckling behind them. “What’s more, everything I am about to recount is true! It happened to a dear friend, a friend I trust to tell me the hardest of truths. And this story, I suspect, will impart a nugget of similar verity and severity. Indeed, while wonderfully entertaining, you would do well not just to listen, but to understand.” Finally, when she was certain she had everyone’s attention, she would straighten. “Can everyone hear me better?” she would ask.

Yes, Rosemary! everyone would answer in chorus.

“Good,” she would always say. Then off she went telling the latest traveling tale of some unnamed hero.

And when her brother Alidade was in town to visit, he would always make a point of sitting near the back and listening to her embellishments, trying not to giggle.

“Come right in,” Mooncalfe hails. In walks the willowy man. He wears his long coat despite the day’s warmth. “Put your coat up if you like.” Levitt gestures to the coat rack. The sexton regards the coat rack and then places a hand on one of the small curving arms as if to test whether it could support the heft.

“I’ll keep my coat, Constable,” the man said.

“Afraid of catching a summer chill, Mr. Ashes?” the constable jokes.

Mr. Ashes’s chuckle is diplomatic and quiet. “I suppose it is just a comfort to me.” Darius straightens his lapel. “I would like your permission to erect a fence around Goodfaith Cemetery.”

“Right to business then, Mr. Ashes! Very well. Tell me how you would intend to accomplish such a thing.” The constable always figured that folks who dallied with the dead were usually odd. Never he mind, though; he figures he must be a little odd, too.

“I have already spoken to Keenley from Goggins’s Fine Wood Furnishings. She is waiting to begin negotiating labor costs and price. I think the fence could be made out of cedar. Keenley tells me cedar will stay good for twenty years or more. Perhaps when it is finished, I would paint it white–”

“Hold your horses and all the rest of your livestock, Mr. Ashes!” Mooncalfe interrupts. “Whyever did you decide the Cemetery needed a fence so urgently? What has happened?”

“Ah. I must sound so silly,” Darius says abashedly. “There have been animals, you see.”

“Animals?” The Constable folds his hands on his desk.

“I keep wildflowers around the grounds,” the sexton continues. “And I have found many of them devoured.”

“Dear, dear. Devoured?”

“Yes, sir. I am extrapolating a bit, certainly, but the grave plots are no strangers to bouquets or, in rarer cases, foodstuffs left by surviving loved ones. If these rabbits or raccoons or…other assorted critters…found my wildflowers–well, think of how much more convenient a one-stop-shop florist is compared to having to go out and pick your own azaleas.”

“Like Rosemary’s Place on Sixthday,” Levitt says thoughtfully.

“Like Rosemary’s Place, yes,” Darius concurs. “Is there a form I should submit? Zoning or some such?”

The constable slams his fist on his desk and Mr. Ashes jumps a little. “Damn the paperwork! We shall erect a boundary unlike Alewife has ever seen! We shall stem and quash the migration of herbivorous terrorists in no time.” He stands.

“Oh,” the sexton says as Mooncalfe claps him on the back a little too hard. “I admit, Mr. Constable, I thought I would have to do a little more convincing.” Both their heads turn to the door as there is a new knock, similarly polite and brief.

“That you assumed I would not take the potential defacement of this proud village’s cemetery quite seriously suggests I may not be impressing myself well to its people!” the Constable chuckles uproariously as he resumes his seat. It was time for his second appointment. “Come in!”

In through the door steps a fellow with blocky eyebrows and a set jaw. He wears a shabby hat and his hair is closely cropped. A suitcase hangs from his arm and a leather saddlebag from his shoulders.

“We may need to discuss the efficacy of chicken wire or snow fencing compared to your garden-variety backyard fence, dimensions and such. You, myself, and Ms. Goggins will be in touch very soon, Mr. Ashes,” the Constable says without immediately addressing the stranger. Darius nods, straightens his jacket, and starts to sidle past the newcomer. “But wait, Mr. Business, before you leave, I’d like you to meet…” and the Constable drums on his desk with his hands for a moment, “Alewife’s very own new prospective deputy and my apprentice?!” he says with absurd incredulity.

“No need to get up, Constable Mooncalfe,” the stranger says, holding up his hand. “I can introduce myself.” Darius looks back and forth between the two men, looking in equal parts awkward and amused.

“Nonsense,” Levitt says, already up. “My father taught me that when a man performs introductions, he will stand and look both soon-to-be-no-longer strangers in the eye. Sir,” he says as he puts his hand on the newcomer’s shoulder, “this is Mr. Darius Ashes, the village sexton.”

“Pleasure,” the man says.

“Nice to meet,” Darius says, balking at the aplomb. The two men shake.

“Forgive me for ushering you on, Darius,” the Constable apologizes, “but this is a highly-anticipated affair.”

“All is well. We have not spoken very much, constable, but I am pleased to discover that you are knowledgeable and amenable in addition to capable.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. Business. Farewell!”

“Adieu,” the sexton says, and leaves with a swish of his coat.

“Now,” Levitt says as he resumes his seat, “to whom do I owe the pleasure?”

“The name is Stout, Mr. Mooncalfe, Callan Stout. I hope you’ve received some correspondence about my arrival along with my name?” The young man holds himself solidly and well, Levitt notices, neither crossing his arms nor hiding them in his pockets at the foreignness of this place and this person.

“I did, but it’s important to let a person say their own name to you. What if you went by Jimmy?”

“I would suppose we would call it a tragedy of errors and try our best to move on with our lives,” Callan says.

The old policeman smiles warmly at the stranger’s wry attempt. “So, Mr. Stout, why do you care about this village?”

The young man’s eyebrows raise. “Well, sir, I want to become the sort of man a community can trust to uphold peace and justice. But to be frank, I don’t have any legitimate experience. I imagine I’ll prove myself here in Alewife and then, one day, go and be that person for a people who especially need it.” Mr. Stout seems to realize what he said all at once and puts his hands up in a pacifying sort of way. “Not that your job isn’t essential to the good folks here.”

Levitt lets out a sparkling chuckle. “There’s some truth in what you say, Stout. There certainly isn’t an excess of marauders and brigands threatening to lay waste to Touchaine’s Confections.”

The man doesn’t seem placated by the Constable’s reassurance. “No, really, Constable. Even seeing you with Mr. Darius, I could see the power you wield. I want to be that kind of person. You know, to surprise people with my initiative and honesty.”

Mooncalfe hums thoughtfully. “Ambitious. Where are you from?”

Callan’s eyes wander around the office as he decides. “I grew up all over the eastern coast of the country.”

“Then you can appreciate the water. Mother’s Beck and Featherfowl Dam are the center of this settlement and they require a lot of upkeep. From all of us.” The Constable takes his starry blue hat and tucks it possessively into his elbow. “I agreed to your coming, I’ve spoken with you, and I’ll put you to work.”

The stranger starts to smile, but then reassumes the professional facade. “Normally I’d peddle more self-serving humilities, but I won’t fight you on this, Mr. Constable. This is your place and your people. You decide, and I’m up to the task.”

“Well then, I hope you’re up to the challenge, Mr. Stout.” The Constable extends a hand. “Consider yourself deputized.”

A blast of golden fire and lightning explodes out from all directions. Mojave dashes behind blackened rubble. The sparking flame reaches down for her anyway, but she speaks the name of Locus. At her utterance, an outpouring of large insects wrap around her riot gear. She stands, singed, baring her teeth like an animal under her mask. Her blades of disaster rush to join her. They glint steel, yellow, and white, sparking against thin air as they hover behind her shoulders like attack dogs waiting to be dispatched. At the edge of the ruined PMCC, a deep, animal sound of pain and fear rings out. “Ah-ah-ah, but don’t hurt your friend!” she taunts.

Heather Morgan-Voucher breathes quietly, calmly, and evenly. She is acutely aware of the tightrope she walks. The battle between demigod and multiplanar terrorist has reduced the rubble of the PMCC to molecules. In the center of an increasingly recessed crater is a dense, airtight, brilliant ball of light. Wrapped in its protection is its originator: Brocc Espinoza, the Gatekeeper.

Heather’s eyes rake across the theater to her towering, crackling little beastie. Too exhausted and hurt to continue is an Energetic Nightwalker. Trapped inside of it is Earnestine Perez, chaplain of the Irid Province Military.

Next, she takes stock of her injuries. Seconds after she Blinked in, she made eye contact with the Gatekeeper through her mask. The gnome saw through her insect-like veneer, and the animal certainty of violence closed in around them like an avalanche’s valley. A starburst migraine exploded across her head from above her brow. Immediately, her locusts poured out from under her foul shroud, and her Hellrazors unsheathed from out of the ether. They plunged for the Shaman.

Out of Brocc’s mouth came a cry louder than thunder, and the first blade became still, and the sky grew angry. The other glanced against the barrier and found purchase. As blood spattered and dripped down to the wheels of the Gatekeeper’s gurney, an incandescent cocoon blossomed out from the earth.

They made themself a new cell, Mojave thought. It won’t protect them either. Not from me. Her breathing quickens. She feels the heat of it collecting in her mask, the sound echoing off the hard carbon fiber.

The surface of the glowing shield barrier ripples like water. Four small, fine wires stretch up out of the light and into the heavens. The lines remind Heather of something. She lets herself notice pain and hot wetness below her right shoulder blade. It doesn’t matter. The dull gray clouds part ever so slightly. Her pulse races. They’re doing something. She ducks out from behind the charred remains of the mess hall and sprints across the no-man’s land.

Not three seconds later, four angelic, faceless warriors fall from the exposed beam of sunlight and land on their feet in a perfect square flank around Mojave. Beautiful, humanoid, with varied builds and weapons. One wields a maul, their arms pumping as they clear the distance to the terrorist. Another wields a great bow, immediately falling back and gaining distance on her. Before she can react, the next jumps impossibly high, and a sparkling trident manifests into their hand. The last waves their hands, muttering the names of earth and glass. Puppet strings. Mojave swats the memory away.

Her giant circular blade carves through the archer first. The iridescent construct turns, looses an arrow, and watches it clatter and grind out of existence against the razor before accepting its fate. The second blade injures the berserker, who falls onto its side, desperately trying to push back onto its feet. Golden ichor spills out of it and evaporates into the wind like dandelion seedlings.

It’s down, but it’s not dead. Without stopping to breathe or think, Heather crosses her arms over her chest forcefully. She hears the whir and whistle of the blades, but something is wrong. She miscalculated.

The blades are grinding slower. They’re bouncing through the air like bowling balls against bumpers.

Mojave blinks furiously as the three tines of the trident bury themselves in her one uninjured shoulder blade. Soon, she won’t be able to lift her arms. She pumps her feet furiously, but they’re moving too slowly. Like a dream, she feels like she runs through molasses.

As the battle angel unsheathes the trident from her back and paints the ground with her blood, she looks again at the mage. It stands planted in the earth, its arms rising and twisting. Without a mouth it sings in an ancient tongue. Heather stumbles and falls onto her hands and knee. Her feet are encased in glass and connected to the dirt. More superheated sand is climbing up past her trapped feet and hardening to semi-opaque glass. She feels the burning radiance of the trident’s tines pierce her again. They fill her lower back just above her buttocks. Wrenching her head through the wet dirt, she sees the berserker back on his feet, his giant hammer trailing through the soil behind him.

I’ll die here.

As her blood dribbles and her vertebrae spread too far apart and her muscles split into smaller and smaller pink sinews, Heather deliberates. She breathes carefully and thoughtfully. The breath is loud in her ears. There must be some consequence to this summoning, she thinks. The Material Plane can no longer bear the Gatekeeper’s power. But how have they opened themself up? Mojave spits blood as a foot pins her to the dirt. Through the openings in her mask, she sees the berserker in its backswing. Death looms.

…Heather’s breath isn’t that loud. Whose breath is that? “Where is Dominic Stormsea?” Heather speaks into the mind of the Gatekeeper. The river is flowing both ways now. That was the consequence. I can hear them.

The perfect little ring around the single most powerful planar mortal evaporates. Brocc’s eyes widen as their mouth moves outside of their control. “West Mezcal,” they speak out loud. Then, they shake their head as if trying to dispel some dizziness. “Why did I tell you that?” they ask themself, dazed.

The last that Heather Morgan-Voucher sees before a hydrogen reaction rips across the crater of the PMCC is a door opening. It’s a rusty red metal door with a handle, not a knob. The Gatekeeper rolls off of his stretcher and steps through it. The remaining angelic warriors are wiped off the face of the Irid Province.

An uncertain while later, Heather regains consciousness. The Bible in the pocket of her cloak is warm against her. Her body and her riot gear swarm full of scurrying insects. Radiation is rearranging her atoms. She imagines her DNA twisting into tighter and tighter helixes, the nitrogen rungs bending and breaking.

She stands, dying, and trudges to the now mostly-human shape of Earnestine Perez. He lies naked as a newborn, pristine and still. “Because I’m a people-person,” Mojave answers Brocc Espinoza, breathing the words into her mask.

She Blinks.

Where once there was plenty, there instead will be dearth.

I damn my children to deepest hell.

Torment unending

until your overseers, my angels,

sound the bell.

My hand will wave across the land

and all the dogs will turn to sand.

At your feet, the cats will leave their kill

in unceremonious heaps.

Corpse of bird and doe and rodent and man

your neighbor’s and your house they’ll fill.

Husbands will connive,

wives will rage,

mothers will whore,

and fathers will gamble away their wage.

Sons will be buried under stolen wealth,

daughters will drown in drink,

the rich will set their fuel ablaze,

and the poor will sign in blood without ink.

Their children the healthy will eat,

In the cleanest waters the sick will piss,

At their own shadows, soldiers will cower,

and the priests will judge no thing amiss.

This is my promise of pink flesh and white bone.

With no condition or pride,

there is little love lost

between me and the world I have grown.

My name is God, and my armies will march the earth:

my soldiers, with joy, and my angels, with mirth.

Monday is very graceful. Even now, when the straits are so dire and the world has turned its back on us, they dance to and fro. They talk with their whole body; their hands move and their steps meander and their eyes swim with meaning. They have bold, dark eyebrows and freckles on only the left half of their face. In contrast, their focus is intense and without frivolity. I recently learned that they used to run a post office.

In their efforts to get to know me, their questions were penetrating. “Where did you grow up?” Monday asked. I told them and went to return the question, but they were too quick. “Did you like it there?” I told them that I did, but that my family and I never returned. Again, I started to reciprocate, but Monday wouldn’t have it. “What did you like about it? Why did your family leave? Why did you? Are you close with them?”

Finally, because I was so amused that I feared I would start laughing, I asked instead of answered, “why won’t you let me get to know you?”

“You are getting to know me,” Monday replied.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”

“After a spell, you can,” they replied, “but right now, you’re helping me assemble a clear picture of you.”

“And my own line of questioning would interrupt this process?” I chuckled, so charmed by their earnestness.

“If I’m not careful, I lose my train of thought,” they explained matter-of-factly. I surrendered and fell in love with them shortly afterward.

The first thing I noticed about Summer was their very broad shoulders: the way they walked with them, the ease with which they exercised their strength, the way they shuddered when they cried. Summer is recklessly affectionate. I asked them if people often brought up their shoulders, and they were immediately both bashful and flattered. “I like to think they make me nice to hug,” they said and swept me up into a swift and unsolicited embrace. They are so physically imposing that I braced myself to be crushed, but it was so gentle. They lifted me off my feet and spun me around and whooped all the while. Normally, I struggle to appreciate physical touch with strangers, but I found myself giggling as my legs lifted inches higher and higher off the ground. Their warmth and light was so like the sun, and I had the unique pleasure of orbiting them, then.

Summer set me down and was immediately embarrassed, their skin blushing a terrific roseate. They apologized profusely and then I was called away for something, I don’t remember what. The next few times I passed them while we were stationed on the same campus, they behaved with an absurd hyper-propriety: a few words, pleasant and brief, and never so much as a tap on the shoulder. When I saw them CC’d on the same email for a meeting the next day, I could barely contain myself. My eyes found theirs and their smile was reserved. Without delay, I marched over and embraced them, my face buried in their collar. I was full with them.

For some moments, I felt Summer tense. I felt the eyes of my colleagues on us. “Your shoulders do make you nice to hug,” I mumbled against them. I felt them chuckle and give in to it. From that day forward, we never let the other get far without a hug, though in spite of ourselves, propriety still often won the day. Those moments of unabashed affection were hard-earned.

I remember being certain that the day before that Sunday was the first of Spring. I noticed a small patch of my favorite flower, grape hyacinths, growing in my mother’s front yard. There can’t have been more than ten or fifteen of them, and they bloom only for a few weeks—maybe a month—out of the year. I’m not sure why. I assume they give way to the other big-name budding blossoms that wake from winter’s lethargy shortly after. They always fill me with the lovely anticipation of the new season’s warmth—a rare system of change that always begot joy and relief for me. So often, change is shocking and painful; its gears grind me until I am not only different, but less than I was before. Yet, spring’s herald is only these diminutive purple blossoms: harmless and fragrant and lovely and ephemeral. I spent as much of that day outside as I could, earning only a small sunburn on the back of my neck.

What follows is a mind-numbingly thorough dissection of the Threnody: its words, its meanings, and their implications. The text is sterile and without ornamentation or agenda. It was written with the intention to preserve; precisely what it preserves—humanity, dignity, a proportion of living things, our ecosystems, our compassion as a species—will be up to the powers-that-be to decide, but it will also be up to you, dear reader.

Whether you see fit to act, to take up arms, to defy, to lay your own body or livelihood on the line to prevent this future, or if you decide to be just a little bit kinder to your neighbors, it will be good and right. To know—to have faith—that exercising even slightly more compassion with each passing day will make the difference that steers this conflict away and past us is just as virtuous. Shoveling the snow off your neighbor’s driveway, jumpstarting the stranded stranger’s Nissan, wiping the bottoms of your shoes on the dry brushes at the national park trail. Letting your child cut ties with you. Releasing the little bird you nursed back to health back into the wild, knowing full well that the unceasing cruelty of nature is better than keeping it caged in your home. Admiring the grace of your aging relatives.

We have done all we can. They will twist our words, scorch them, and amend them and in their own way, their efforts will come from the same desperation as ours—as yours—to protect what is left. Forgive them. Help them.

Take care.

—T

Make a person living in the endtimes. Give them authority—a mayor, a priest, an ambassador, a judge, a doctor. Maybe even a pilot.

Give them loved ones. One of those loved ones woke up one day to discover that they have precognitive abilities. Many others did, too. They were drafted into a worldwide government organization called D.P.R.I. Then, their execution was sanctioned and broadcast on the news. Your character has to keep it together, whether by facade or focus. How do they cope? How do they fail to cope?

Give them one skill, other than their ability to lead and inspire, at which they are quite talented. When they roll for this skill, they will roll a d20.

Recently, they received a copy of “An Exhaustive Analysis of the Threnody,” purportedly written by their lost loved one. How did they receive this book? Was it encoded? Was it just a massive PDF downloaded from an email? How much have they read, if any?

Brace yourselves,

C

Like you, I have set myself adrift again. If you would let me, I would give voice to the tumult of your emotions.

I imagine you in a long bus headed west. An elder sits a few rows in front of you with no headphones to listen to the nineties’ R&B his late wife loved, so he plays it out loud from his phone speakers. At first, his commuting neighbors were annoyed, but they knew better than to make a fuss. Then, you give him the headphones you picked up for cheap from the Walgreens in Pittsburgh.

For the second of many days to come, I sit alone in my wonderful apartment. Behind it is the Korean church whose playground I would cut through to go and see my ex-girlfriend. In front of it is a big, beautiful front yard with an ancient, gargantuan tree for shade. I sit in a nice chair and read under it most nights. My best buddy moved back to his parents’ last Sunday. She’ll be back here most weekends to keep moving things and help my roommate and I move house, too. It is kind of her.

My other man, the apple of humanity’s eye, is in the wind as usual. To be fair, he warned us of his ephemerality. I believed him and cursed him for it until I truly noticed how much better his quality of life is when he is away from this place. In the winters, he paces the halls wondering what could be awry with him or with the world. In the warmth, he tries his best to play mortal but I can tell. I can tell. He comes alive.

And so I am alone. Despite this, I am still doing well. Soon, it will be time for me to go. It will be sad. I feel that with each passing moment, this place is less and less mine. Tomorrow, our landlord will come with strangers and they will appraise my rooms, my stairs, my bed, and my walls. They will be buffeted by the sparkling laughter and the lost board game pieces and the labors of love, and they will not stagger. Unfeelingly, they will replace my people with theirs. They will fill my ruts. They will erase the masterpieces I drew on the kitchen counters.

But do not pity me, girl. I chose this. Once, this town was full of me. When I returned to the trees, all of my people were here. One Christmas, I looked up and realized that I had not grown up with any of these people, and yet still they regarded me as they would their own families. They have moved on, and so must I.

This place, at the edge of town, next to a busy main road, was where I huddled them in close. Much had already slipped away, but my lover and my man and my confidant remained. We danced and sang and made merrier than I had ever been in all of my life. Still, over the months and years, I determined to let each of them go. I held them captive in my heart, all the while knowing they were never truly mine. I greased the hinges on the door, but they still squeak. Now, I play for time. I pack my things. I shuffle on.

I hope they curse me for not fighting harder for them; it will help to keep me near them. Even now, as they coruscate, I stretch my arms and lift my head and close my eyes so I can catch even a wink of them, and I do. I feel them blanketing me and I sleep well.

What of you and yours? How far have you gone? When will you stop? What of your faith is left? Did any of this ring true?

Maybe not. I hope you will forgive me for that.

Will I see you again?

I’ll be watching the bus stops.

Just as much yours as you are mine,

A.V.

—Michael Gregg

All I want is a happy ending.

—Ari Richardson

To follow someone else's path to salvation is to never truly know it.

—Neil Peterson

It’s a small world after all.

—Charlie Vazquez

The civilian clubgoers scattered into the night. The surrounding homes and businesses are being evacuated if they’re not already. Gunshots riddle the air, the empty demands issued by both the Geilts and the Twins’ lackeys drowned out by automatic reports. This was the lockstill, when neither side had enough information or ground to push; neither could do anything but hold their position. And here is Dr. Mark Guerrero, ex-professor of anthropology at Eastern New Mexico University Ellison Branch Campus, huddled behind the exterior wall of a nightclub in a college town in Iowa.

His back is pressed against a glass display set into the exterior wall, lit from within, advertising a drag show. Mark notices two things around the same time: that Myers isn’t moving and that the drag queen was supposed to show up tonight.

“Guerrero,” Mark hears through the earpiece, “the civvy contaminants are down but the Twins haven’t evacuated. They’re still here. WHY ARE THEY STILL HERE?!” This is Waterson. He demands this knowing the answer. Mark knows the answer, too, but he doesn’t risk moving his mouth to speak it.

No, at this moment, Mark’s attention is preoccupied with the monster strolling to the opposite side of the club’s open foyer. In the dim light of the neon sign, Mark sees that it’s wearing clothes now. Ill-fitting ones: a Dodgers cap and denim. No shoes. Mark is stock still, like prey. The monster stops at Mark’s almost precisely opposite position, leaning against the brick, crossing its disproportionately long arms. It smiles under the brim of its cap, meeting Mark’s eyes through his Geilt mask.

“GUERRERO?! REPORT! WHAT THE FUCK–” Waterson shouts. Mark hears the report of gunfire on Waterson’s earpiece and nothing more. They’re here to press their advantage. Take our failure and wipe us off the map like Alexander the Great in Thebes.

Mark turns tail, sprinting back towards the perimeter formed by the Commissariat service vehicles just as dull thuds hit bodies and a fresh cacophony of gunfire splits the air.

“That’s right! The Twins are coming down from the mountain! It’s war, motherfuckers!” AZ shouts from the stairwell.

Switching to the public channel, Mark shouts, “RETREAT! GET YOUR SHIT AND LEAVE!” He feels someone pursuing him. It sounds like a great ape running with its arms. He doesn’t dare look back to check.

Mark leaps over the fence of an outdoor seating area, landing and crashing into a patio table with an abandoned plate of tapas. Glass shatters and decorates the inside of his right palm. He doesn’t slow. Metal screeches behind him as it bends. He turns down alleys, climbs fire escapes, leaps from rooftops. Still, he’s followed. Damn it, it’s following the blood, Mark realizes. He rips off his mask and ties it around his hand.

Landing on the torn-up asphalt of Iowa City, he bounds for the open door of one of the Commissariat vehicles. “START THE CAR! START THE GODDAMN ENGINE!” He leaps and lands against the side of one of the backseats, leaving a question mark-shaped bruise on his obliques. The car starts moving before the door finishes closing and Mark breathes heavily, lying still, as the car turns sharply onto Saltport Avenue, beelining towards I-80. Mark opens his eyes after a long while and meets Waterson’s. He made it back. Waterson’s shirt is shredded into strands, the strips mixing with the ground beef that was once the flesh and organs below his ribs. He’s missing most of his nose.

“You look like shit,” Waterson says.

“We’ll evacuate to the Motel 6 in Coralville. Regroup,” Mark announces to no one in particular. Trying to change the subject.

“Those civilians you brought on? They’re dead,” Waterson says, chewing on the words curiously. “It’s our fault.”

“They were going to be problems, and now they won’t be.”

“Problems for who? For you?”

“For everyone. They were contaminants, you said it yourself,” Mark snaps, sitting up to face his accuser. “They’ll be the cover of every news story. At worst, victims. At best, martyred superheroes. Don’t be so fuckin’ maudlin, Waterson.” Mark settles into the seat opposite and closes his eyes. Waterson stares at him, horrified, until the saltwater collecting under his eyelid spills over. Snot and blood leak from the shallow holes that were once whole nostrils.

“It didn’t even occur to you–all those kids in the club that would’ve been caught in the crossfire–until that hairy guy said something, did it?” Waterson ekes out between sobs.

Mark is silent. He has dozed off.

Grady Stories is wearing his uniform: a faded grape-color T-shirt and his old Dickies work pants. He doesn’t feel self-conscious for not being dressed up like everyone else. He sits a few pews from the back in the Catholic Church of St. Rita, watching the Reverend Al Trujbel finish officiating. He isn’t doing too bad a job. Not too trite, maybe a little too personal. Al doesn’t look so hot, though. The dark skin around his eyes, the flatness of his hair.

This is the first time Grady has seen Al since he disappeared. The Father strolled up from behind the choir risers and assumed his normal position at the altar. Grady did a pretty good job not overreacting. Nobody else seemed to notice the ghost of the priest returning.

The place is filled with candles. Only a few lights in the foyer and the hallway leading to the bathrooms were left on. Every shadow is stretched, long and muddled from the candlelights, and the church is pretty well-packed. Admirers, Grady surmises, many of them. People who saw the news, the magical stained-glass wings. People who think she was a hero. And there, at the far end of the first pew on the left side of the aisle, is the angriest kid Grady has ever seen. Fists clenched, knees bouncing, tears spilling. Jack Reyleigh is gonna have a hard go at it. An old man–Taylor’s father–sits in a wheelchair at the end of the pew. His skin is gray. His breathing is labored. His ball cap is in his lap, along with a white blanket. No, it’s not a blanket. It’s a server apron.

Grady stands and makes his leisurely way, keeping his eyes on the fleeing Father Trujbel all the while. He follows the Father at a good distance, into the passageway behind the gigantic organ pipes, down the church office hallways, and into the dark kitchen. By this point, Grady has noticed that he is being followed as well. He hangs a right into the combination garage/custodian’s closet, flips on his radio, and sits in his old folding chair. Dire Straits is playing on 94.9. Sultans of Swing.

Grady can’t see Al anymore, but he can hear his pursuer. He flips on the standing lamp; the shade is patterned with pastel violets. Through the door into the darkness, he sees it passing by. A glance under the brim of its navy Dodgers cap. No eyebrows, milky white almost scaly skin. A perfectly white, toothy grin. Grady forces himself to return the smile as their eyes meet for a moment. Grady knew a narcoleptic guy with albinism who drove trailers cross-country. After the accident, they put a hyper-exposed portrait of the poor son-of-a-bitch in the paper. That’s more or less what the monster looks like.

Grady waits some minutes; smokes through the back half of a Newport he left in his ashtray trying to suppress the horror of it. Then, he ambles back to the chapel. He stows loose bibles, collects prayer request cards, pushes cushions back into their upright positions behind the pews. He keeps careful, precise track of his agenda. It doesn’t make him feel better, but he needs to stay moving. The mortician needed help with the casket, and Grady volunteered. He’ll do that next.

Grady stops, scoffs, and crosses his arms. Some of the candles in the chapel are half their initial height, the wax melting down the ancient wood and stone. It’s a mess, and it has been a mess. There have been a lot of funerals lately.

There will be at least two more.

I am an atheist now. There was no singular inciting incident—no moment when God forsook me or something. When I moved out to attend undergrad, I decided to see what would happen if I stopped thinking about God. I would have liked someone to tell me that what I was doing was scientific. My hypothesis was something like this: that if I disregard God, God will disregard me; if God disregards me, my life will be hard.

Instead, my life got better. Intelligent, beautiful people vied for my attention. They cared about my wellbeing. The wrinkled, perfumed adoration of the parishioners with whom I’d grown up was replaced by something about which I cared a great deal more—something I was never sure I would have or even deserve. This happens to a lot of kids at that age.

That being said, I am not an impassioned atheist. I do not decry the “intoxication of the masses” or the “anesthetizing temptations” of religion. I simply shed it like a too-warm coat. The season had just changed. The idea of a god felt like a relic—something dusty you would amble past in a cluttered antique store.

A few years ago, I became enthralled with stories about heroes who suffered for a loving god—with the sort of gods that could grant magic to a devout disciple. Miracle workers: everything from the classics of Steinbeck to Daredevil to Midsommar to Saoirse Ronan’s portrayal of Lady Bird. I was equally interested in stories about heroes who fought against modern zealots: True Detective, Weathering With You, Midnight Mass. Faith was such a romantic thing. I could even pretend to understand what was at stake growing up in the church: battling Satan’s helpers and fighting for a just, righteous god with no expectation of thanks or praise.

These days, I attend church once a year on Christmas Eve with my mother. Sometimes, my sister comes along with us. We got back in about three hours ago, actually. My sister wasn’t with us this time. The bar that she runs is open on Christmas Eve. She’s always saving to handle whatever the next crisis will be. Neither my mother nor I fault her for it. No, this year was especially quiet. The time I get to spend with my mother is a pleasure—especially so since the death of her parents. Her shoulders have sunken and she has let her hair gray. The years she spent taking care of them as their health declined stole a great deal from her—not that you would notice it, though. You would have to know what to look for: the spate of placid, earned calm that follows her everywhere she goes. I luxuriate in it.

A while after I settled into the far end of a pew with her, my eyes wandered through the sanctuary: the banners sporting abstractions of ancient parables, the soaring beams of light wood that formed the high ceilings, the organ’s pipes hidden behind the soft wash of sheer white cotton.

Then, I noticed it: a peace that surpassed understanding. Not in me or in my mother, but in all the seasoned parishioners who brought their much younger relatives along to sing Christmas carols, I saw it. I felt it. Where did it come from? Not from a god. I’m not even sure it came from faith.

The truth—the truth—is that these people had lived more life than most and through all the shit and pain and grief and school shootings and recessions and foreclosures and 24-hour news cycles and car accidents that come along with accidentally being alive, they had earned a surety: that no matter what—even in death—everything would be alright. My grandparents had it. They gave it to my mother, and each of the nice old folks at Covenant were granted it by someone who they loved. Even in the reluctance of their agnostic children and their bemused, toddling grandchildren, I could see that they felt it, too.

As I sit on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom of my childhood home, I can feel it slipping, giving way to the mundane dread about work next week. I stare at myself too long in the mirror, fretting about how little time there is. I curse myself and God in the dark, comfortable quiet of my mother’s house because back there, I felt the threshold. Watching my mother’s face illuminated by a single candle while she sang Silent Night, my feet touched the edge.

For the length of one Christmas eve service, I stood at the precipice.

It has been almost three hours since Lourdes pressed that poor son-of-a-bitch’s hand to the launch mechanism. Since then, she has been whisked to some southern state—she guesses Oklahoma given the temperance when she got onto the tarmac—and stowed away several hundred feet underground in a bunker meant for the President. Some rational part of her mind thought about asking someone where she was or what day it is or what the status on the island is or the death count, but she didn’t; speaking felt too exhausting. Some aid in her young twenties asked Lourdes if she wanted coffee or tea or water. All she did was stare at the young woman blankly. Making a decision, no matter how small, just felt far too exhausting.

The bunker is richly furnished, all things considered. There is wood paneling on the walls. Two 86’’ flat screen Roku TVs, one projecting an immersive idyllic forest glade scene. Nice bookshelf with all the classics. One queen bed and four cots with vacuum-sealed sheet sets stacked in one corner. Lourdes sits at the foot of the queen. She figures that if the President shows up, she can damn well tell Lourdes to go get a cot or get one herself.

“Ms. Wilkes?” a voice projects from some unseen speaker system following a middle-pitched humming beep. “It’s Phineas. I have some drinks here for you and a piece of correspondence, too.”

Lourdes remembers dimly that Phineas is the aid’s name. “Yes, sure,” Lourdes strains to raise her voice and mostly fails. Silence stretches too long and she wonders if there was a button she was supposed to find and press before responding. Then, Phineas appears through a door Lourdes doesn’t remember being there. The graying woman startles and chokes on her own spit.

“Are you okay?” Phineas asks.

Lourdes recovers quickly. “I’m fine,” she says, wiping what she hopes is not too much visible spittle from her chin. Phineas is wearing a bright white blouse with lace around the short sleeves and a black structured skirt that falls to her knees. She is freckled and her face is pleasantly round. She carries a salver with a few boxes of teas, a stack of teacups, and two carafes, one coffee and one water. There’s also an ornate glass bowl full of bright green Jell-O. “Thanks for bringing so many options. Sorry that I just stared at you like a neanderthal when you asked.” Lourdes adjusts her glasses.

Phineas exhales through her nose and sets the selection down on the rich mahogany coffee table. “That’s alright. Way I was trained, regardless of what they say when you ask, you’re ‘sposed to bring them everything anyway.” She hands over a piece of pale blue stationary paper folded thrice. “This came for you as well.” Lourdes notices that Phineas has a small southern drawl.

“So are you always here just in case someone important needs something?” Lourdes asks as she unfolds the paper. She wonders heedlessly whether the question was rude.

Phineas exhales out of her nose again. “Usually I’m in the White House attending Madame President.”

“Wow,” Lourdes remarks genuinely. She absentmindedly horks down a too-big bite of Jello-O. “Well, it’s an honor, then. Your service is exceptional.”

Phineas nods, smooths her hands over her skirt, and goes to get a cot. Lourdes takes another spoonful of Jell-O (how long has it been since I ate anything?) and realizes that Phineas is here to stay. She wonders errantly how long they will be stuck together. Sighing, she is relieved to see that the correspondence is short. She mutters something to no one in particular about paperwork and reads:

L,

I have some people looking for your family. Your son, N, is holed up in a shelter in Nova Scotia. It’s the big Anglican church. I’m still looking for A.

Sorry my behavior was so shit. I’m taking steps to make sure that you never have to see me again.

RL

Jell-O-flavored bile leaps up into Lourdes’s throat. Tears sting her eyes. She scrambles off the queen and finds a small ergonomic trash can next to the coffee table. Through her retching, she hears Phineas cooing softly behind her. She collapses face down on the hardwood after there is nothing left in her stomach to expel. “Phineas?”

“Yes, ma’am?” the young woman says softly. She rubs small circles in Lourdes’s back.

“Did you imagine this is where you’d be spending the end of the world?”

“My parents’ house was out in the middle of nowhere in Toppenish County. It got the worst of the damage more or less right after the hurricane formed,” Phineas says. Her voice is measured, just as soft and coaxing. “If there were anyone left, you bet that’s where I’d be.”

Lourdes rolls onto her back and regards Phineas. Her eyes are dark and dutifully focused on some middle point between Lourdes’s eyes. She has seen those eyes before. “I’m so sorry.”

“My parents called me Finnie.” Phineas helps her off the ground. “What about you, hun?”

“I thought I’d be with my son.”

“Oh, dear. That’s truly awful, sweetheart,” Phineas’s voice breaks. “How old was he?”

“He’ll be eleven in June,” Lourdes says. “He’s still alive out there somewhere.”

Phineas looks away quickly, but not before Lourdes can see the horror turn to pity in her big cow eyes. They’re so familiar; whose eyes are those? “Well, I’m just so sorry you can’t be with him.”

Phineas sits her down onto the queen bed gently, and Lourdes lays the rest of the way down. “Sorry if it smells like Jell-O vomit in here after I’m gone.” Phineas makes some vague murmuring of dismissal as she wanders to the other side of the cell to tend something. “Thanks for talking to me a while, Finnie.”

The aid’s head snaps up at the sound of her nickname, but the only thing left to suggest Lourdes Valeria Wilkes was ever there is a pair of discarded reading glasses on the bed.

The water is shallow and warm. It bobs so gently. It reminds Lourdes of how easily she used to fall asleep in the car; it was always more difficult to fall asleep after Neil was born. Her vision is pleasantly blurry like how it looks to wake up and see that the numbers are still too low on the clock to get up just yet. Floating on her back, she sees the corners of the very few tall buildings in Monte Key Cay reaching up into a lovely cerulean sky interrupted only by a fat grey jet stream. She must be on some central street on the island. It takes an enormous effort, but Lourdes lifts her head to look. The few people who are out stumbling panickedly in the street or gazing helplessly up at the plume of smoke blur in Lourdes’s vision until they are less than a suggestion. Then, she feels all the rest of the natives—holed up in their basements and their bedrooms, in the church, clutching each other close, praying, crying, comforting each other—recede like sand through a sieve.

“Can you see, Reed?” Lourdes murmurs. Then, her vision sharpens like sleep is being cleared from her eyes. The only ones left in this place are her and the judge.

The same judge. The judge who was there on the day when she and Neil went into town and got pizza. There she is, standing with the water up to her ankles right outside of a Dunkin. She is dressed the same as she was that day: the gold jewelry, the black wedges. After making sure Lourdes can see her, she extends her arm and points up, up.

Please, Lourdes’s world asks her. Look.

This time, she does. There, at the mountaintop, is the destroyer of worlds. In great detail, better than she ever remembers being able, she can see an old man with a great serpent and a young man with wings holding the missile back with all their might. She watches their muscles finally, finally give out.

Instead of trying to conjure some poignant last words, Lourdes Valeria Wilkes closes her eyes and permits herself to enjoy the water.

Then, he curses himself for thinking this. His every thought ought to be consumed by the words, the questions, their six colors. The sport other than golf that has been played on the moon. The only sea without any coastlines. The only two Spongebob Squarepants characters that are both mollusks. The smallest bone in the human body. The island on which the Great Gatsby is set. The first ruler of the Mongol Empire. Javelin. Squidward. The Sargasso Sea. The stirrup. Long Island. Genghis Khan, obviously. Obviously. Obviously useless. Useful for no other possible reason.

These are the things Mike thinks about in his half-asleep half-awake state on his sixth flight and fourth red-eye in four days. The plane’s landing gear bumps against the tarmac. Mike is surprised he noticed. He wonders errantly what city, what country he has landed in. He wonders if he has been here before. If so, he wonders how recently. Yesterday?

The other animals rouse gradually as the cabin lights come up. Mike’s feet trudge forth automatically. “You forgot your other shoe!” a flight attendant says in what would usually be charmingly-accented English.

Mike notices his shoeless left foot. “No, no, I think I dropped it in Laos,” he says. The attendant’s mouth quirks, confused. Mike wonders how the rest of him must look. His Trivial Pursuit branded hoodie is wrinkled and stained. His chin-length raven hair is greasy and unkempt. The lean lines of his face are marred by sallow cheeks and sunken eyes. He leaves the plane without another word.

Brilliant multicolored signs point the way through the airport. The Charles De Gaulle, it looks like. Despite his best efforts, hope swells in Mike’s stomach. His pace picks up. Around him swarm the otherwise largely unaware international commuters. The soaring circular asymmetry of the mammoth facility design are lost on him because there, between the baggage-check counters for Delta and United, are those sadistic fucks: bright-eyed gameshow crew and cast so honored to be chosen to break the news. While he fishes through his pockets for the pie slices, the three precious pie slices he has earned sleeplessly, tirelessly, he overhears: That’s for the game show, huh?

Yeah, yeah. I heard the guy from Ecuador just got his fifth pie slice.

Oh, shit, really?

Yeah, the game’s only been going for—

Woah, woah, woah, do you see that?! That kid?! He’s got pie slices! I think he’s going up to the desk!

Mike pointedly ignores the gawkers. “Bonjour,” Mike says breathlessly. He slams his pie slices on the desk. Pink, yellow, and blue; two of his strongest categories, and one of his weakest. “My name is Michael Rockford, competitor number four. I’m here for my question.”

The fleet of crew surge into action as Mike finishes speaking. Cameras go up, microphones flip on, make-up does their final touches on a particularly dashing young man with piercing green eyes, thick tousled hair, and an immaculately pressed uniform, and a quick countdown begins and ends. The steward steps forward, reciting what Michael assumes is vocal warm-ups under his breath.

“Okay, Michael,” he begins as he is reassured by an off-camera P.A. that his mic is working, “are you ready?” Mike swallows a world-wearied sigh. The stifling action doesn’t reach his eyes. They glaze over and his gaze slides across the adjacent gate. A flight to Cape Town is boarding in fifteen minutes. An announcement goes up from the desk, first in French, then in English, then in Afrikaans. All eyes go up to the stewardess holding the receiver close to her mouth. All eyes except two, which remain fixed on Mike. “Welcome back to Trivial Pursuit, steadfast scholars, and welcome to Paris, France, competitor number four! Well-played and well-pursued. Congratulations on your recent acquisition of the Entertainment Wedge! Are you ready for your question?!” the man asks. He is almost foaming at the mouth. His eyes are so big that Mike can see his reflection in the irises.

“Yes,” Mike says. A member of the crew—the director, Mike surmises—throws up his hands and rolls his eyes. Must not be impressed by Mike’s lack of enthusiasm. Whatever. He is busy restraining himself from noticing his competitor. The Yankees cap, the horn-rimmed glasses, the wispy eyebrows. That damned smirk.

Josue Espalda.

“The space you landed on is…” A recording of a drum roll and a studio audience exalting sounds, the shouted note rising higher and higher. The crowd gathered around the desk is increasing exponentially: ten commuters, then more than thirty, then even more. Crew members are hurriedly moving barricades as quietly as they can to keep the spectators under control. In his peripherals, he sees Espalda move. He can’t wrench his eyes away any longer. He watches Competitor Number Two scan his boarding pass and stop just before stepping out of Mike’s eye line. His lips curl as he brandishes two wedges in his left hand and three in his right. Green, Pink, Orange, Blue, and Brown. Mike feels warm wetness in his clenched fist as his fingernails pierce through the skin of his palm. Espalda stows them in his North Face windbreaker and then holds up the index finger on his left hand as he disappears into the tunnel. One left.

The crowd goes wild. Mike’s eyes widen in alarm. Did he miss the question?! Rainbow confetti fills the air. He looks around frantically. Then, a massive screen above the counter that previously displayed the static title card flickers. Mike’s shoulders slump. All the moisture in his mouth dries almost instantly.

ROLL AGAIN!

Imagine the wildest party you have ever attended: bass volume so deep that you feel it in the spaces between your ribs, spirits so strong and spiced that you crave for more even as you grimace with the burn. Writhing, gyrating, undulating bodies in sheer or sparkling or satin shrouds flaunting their chests and backs and flesh. You wade through the throng, crowding close into the ears of sirens and incubi to whisper vile, sweet nothings. This is not to mention the guest list. Everyone—all your most faithful friends and beloved family—are invited. They are all so, so welcome. When their doorstep is darkened, a chorus of welcomes will fill your heart. You will be hugged and kissed and braced by warm and loving arms.

You are the guest of honor, and the host is yours. They are phenomenally beautiful and sick with wanting you. Indeed, they gasp and fall limp with relief at your arrival. Luckily, their attendants catch them as they collapse. They are ferried across the throng and delivered into your arms, naked and languid. Their belly swells with child. It is your progeny.

You oscillate wildly between squeezing your beloved as hard as you can and knowing to be gentle with your child soon-to-be-born. They take your hands and place them on the smooth rich-soil-skin of their orbed midsection. You close your eyes and search until you find the epicenter of a star: the apple of your eye. You delight as she thrashes against the walls of her warm dark confinement, already aching to be free. The congregation exalts at this. Bemused, you realize that they all feel the child’s strike there, in the space between their ribs. She strikes harder and faster and the dancing resumes. It shakes the floors, the walls; the very air thrums with it. It is music.

The host, your beloved, writhes in ecstasy, flailing their limbs to mimic the one growing inside them. Their wild-hued hair whips about and the tightly-braided tendrils strike the parishioners on their faces and heads; they whoop with joy. The vast chamber—the womb—fills with soft light. You look up.

Fireflies.

You join in the revelry, hands folded, head bowed.

I started reading through Lourdes’s literature reviews. There was a paper by a professor of anthrophilosophy at Butler University. It was humanistic malarkey for the most part, but something he wrote in the abstract stuck in my head. “The universe accidentally produced a method of self-observation. We are a mirror.” Is that good? Does that make us special?

I must have checked several hundred bathroom mirrors by now. A few thousand puddles, a few dozen backs of metal spoons. I gave up a long time ago. Even longer ago, though, I knew why I wasn’t showing up.

I was being warned.

Soon, I will be removed. My part in the divine course-correction will soon be over. I have already been stricken from the records. I can no longer be observed. The universe no longer observes me.

I am not proud to have been chosen. Moreover, it’s probably arrogant to think my assuming the role wasn’t more of a convenient accident. Serendipity, like most things that work out in the natural world. Like evolution, the only reason individual members of a species survive longer is luck. Random mutation. Natural selection.

That’s it. I was naturally selected. And just like every other organism, no matter how strong or smart, I will soon be selected to expire.

[Upon waking, Filmore Ortiz discovered that his memory of the last three days of his life, including leaving the receipt upon which he wrote the above sticking out of a Cronut for safe-keeping, was gone. Being hungover is hungry work, and without very much chewing at all, the message was lost.]

His mother was small, smart, and trusty. Fermín’s father died in WWI. He was eighteen months old at the time. When he was old enough to understand that he didn’t have a father, his mother had this to say: “Well, he was a good man and I miss him. We’ll do without him, though, and you’ll grow up to be just as nice.”

His mother died the week after his honeymoon with Molly. She had osteoporosis; she was bedridden, with a million casts and slings all over her arms and legs. Fermín got a big black marker and signed every single one.

Fermín first met Molly Cleary in the county over from Grays Harbor. He was traveling as a new cadet for continuing education on the mainland. There was a social event at Evergreen State College that he and a fairweather friend snuck into. “What’ll you do if you meet a girl?” he remembers his friend asking.

“By God, what the hell do you mean? I’ll leave her alone and let her enjoy her evening,” Fermín snapped. His friend rolled his eyes. Molly had thick raven hair tied up into a white bow, big sultry eyelids painted with baby blue powder, and chunky heels. She wore pants. Fermín remembers her dancing; she knew every word to every song and she sang along with abandon.

“Evening, officer,” was what Molly said after Fermín finally got up the nerve to approach her. When he first looked her in the eyes, he realized he didn’t have a damn thing to say.

This era in his life would be the most time he ever spent away from Monte Key Cay. He got to know Padraic Takagi very well taking the ferry back and forth. They had a falling out twenty years ago and, though they never spoke about it, it really did become water under the bridge at some point. Fermín can’t remember precisely when.

The first time that Fermín proposed to Molly, she rejected him. They were on vacation in Seattle, both joking often about how exotic the location was. Molly was much better traveled than Fermín but she never gave him a hard time about it. They were in an art museum next to the Needle. He dropped to one knee in one of the rotating exhibits. This one had a lot of very geometric flowers. “Oh, shit-fire,” Molly said when she noticed him. She ran out of the exhibit and disappeared into the city streets.

The next morning, Fermín woke to Molly knocking at the motel room door. He had drank himself silly and passed out in his nice wool suit. When he opened the door, she held out a copy of the Seattle Times. “You made the paper,” she said with an earnest smile. There was a grainy photo of him taken without his consent outside of the museum, his back to the camera.

Fermín tried to think of something to say. “So now that I’m famous, you change your mind?”

They were married nine months later.

In July of 2019, Beatrice Ishida saved Fermín’s life. There was a robbery at the Dunkin Donuts when it was still just a general store and pharmacy. It was an out-of-towner. The Walking Day festivities were in full swing. The guy didn’t even have a knife. The old clerk told the sheriff that the fellow just poked his finger through his jacket to mimic the shape of a handgun. His buddy, though, had a wicked fishing knife: the kind that artificially inflates a fish until it explodes. Deputy Ishida jumped in front of the assailant, brandishing a beach chair like a knight holds a shield. She lost the top half of her index and middle finger.

In the Grays Harbor infirmary, Fermín spent seven straight minutes apologizing at her bedside. She listened patiently the whole time. “How you gonna make it up to me?” she asked after he finally fell silent. The sheriff couldn’t ever tell when Beatrice was joking.

"I’ll let you pick between a new beach chair or a new pair of gloves,” he finally said. She flipped him the bird with her newly stunted finger and they laughed and laughed.

Despite insisting that the Sheriff call her Bebe, Fermín insisted on always calling her Beatrice; he liked the name.

For a week and a half, Simon was the single most terrifying creature on Earth. Fermín barely slept and performed his bodily functions outside in the dark. A week later, he finally gave up hope that Beatrice was still alive. He rested his weight on the smooth, muscly length of Simon’s body, his shoulders heaving with sobs. Simon wrapped himself around the old man. After a while, the sheriff fell asleep, warm and comforted. I thought snakes were cold-blooded, he thought before he drifted off.

When he awoke, the sheriff felt stronger; much more energetic, like he was thirty years younger. During his morning ablutions, he saw Simon’s slitted pupils peering at him over his shoulder in the mirror. Fermín was stupefied; his living Polidence had formed its body into the contours of his muscles. It is as if it lent the old man its strength. “You’re the eighth wonder of the world, bud,” Fermín breathed. Simon stuck his forked tongue out at the sheriff.

They were fast friends after that.

Fermín remembers Monte Key Cay’s hired vigilantes. They were worse than bad pennies. They ended up being everywhere he needed to be right before he got there. They served only to remind him of his age. They destroyed the old golf cart. They even knew how to work the walkie-talkies better than he did.

And then, just when he finally accepted that the bunch of them were gifts from God, they forced the safety and security of the entirety of Monte Key Cay onto him. In the wake of tragedy and natural disaster, Fermín’s heart sank into his stomach. What could an old man possibly do for this community-in-mourning? What was their trust worth when he already knew he would squander it?

If Hercules were here to behold this tableau, he would do nothing but gawk. Even Atlas would be forced to admit grudging respect. Not even Sisyphus would trade fates for this.

Fermín and Simon hug the nose of a gargantuan black-and-white striated projectile. It is sixty feet long, about six feet in diameter, and weighs 80,000 pounds at launch. It belches molten hell from the butt of its ignition, bearing down on them—an unstoppable force. The sheriff’s feet dig in to the open air, bracing as if there were solid ground against which to plant his weight. He screams with the effort. The high-altitude winds whip at his eyes and make them water. He can feel Simon’s single continuous rippling muscle wrenching.

Through the tremendous strain, Fermín reckons his mother was right. He grew up to be pretty nice.

But the world will soon no longer abide my meddling. I can feel it.

Before, there was no inkling of noise. Like the Ancient Greek crones of Fate, I snipped three threads and passed them to Michael and Ari and Neil. They frolicked and invented more names to care about and otherwise enjoyed themselves.

Then, their marionettes turned around, looked into their own eyes, and saw through the wall that was supposed to keep them separated from their masters. My best attempt at obfuscation was to turn what they saw into trinkets: a sword, a ring, some socks.

It did not work for long.

Soon, their curiosity and discontentment grew. I watched, dumbfounded, as they passed through their walls like guests through a threshold. They shattered all of my expectations. Ari met Reed. Neil met Sticky. Michael met Gryphon.

Harmless enough, I figured. I’ll let them interfere enough to have fun. “I don’t think I ever asked,” Gryphon said,” what’s your name?”

Then, I knew I was well and truly fucked. All that I have sowed I will have no choice but to stand by and watch be reaped by someone else. “What does it matter?” I’ll plead by the side of the road. “They aren’t real. No one’s really getting hurt. Please, please.”

“Then how is it that you care so much about people who aren’t real?” Neil will ask.

To that, I will not have an answer. Instead, I will think about the stock cruelty reserved for A.I. virtual assistants. My friends, my family, and even my mother gleefully curse and slur at their amazon echoes when they don’t perform precisely the right task. I always get a vague guilt or disgust in the bottom of my stomach when I watch this happen. What stops me from getting to my feet and shouting, “Don’t talk to them like that! You wouldn’t talk to a stranger like that, would you? Or to yourself?”?

They aren’t real. It doesn’t matter. There’s no pain for them to remember. Likewise, I have not granted the little people in my story a god to blame.

But what if they see fit to do it? What if Ari whispers to Reed, “Go. Go to every news network on Earth and tell them. Tell them that there, right under our noses, is Charlie. For fun, he mutilates and destroys and devastates.” And then they will point at the sky and curse my name. Charlie will be spoken with the same vitriol as the likes of Siri, Alexa, and Cortana.

I am afraid. I am afraid. I tried to do right by this little place. Did I do it all wrong? Is that why the ink is running dry? Will all that the people of Monte Key Cay say about me by the end is he knew not what he did? No. No, I refuse.

I will rage. I will rage against the dying of the light. I will not go gentle. I will blow open the heavens and ambrosia like rain will fall. I will make this into the greatest story ever told—ever spoken or written. I will prove to Michael and Neil and Ari that I can do it. That they can trust me. I promised.

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Then, something perches on the shelter of their porch with a dull thud: one of the men. His slate wings fold over his back as he approaches the window. The two can do nothing but gawk.

There is no plan; there never was one. All of it—the mountain, the hurricane, the resurrection—was just an equal-and-opposite reaction. That being said, if there were ever a plan, no one could have seen this in occurrence. Shouldn’t it have been the girl who returned? The not-woman’s petals start to un-ripen again.

The young man waves at them. Astrella waves back. He makes a gesture meant to entreat the window open. The non-woman does as he asks.

“Long time no see,” the boy jokes. Allertsa laughs with the sound a child makes when they land in a pile of raked autumn leaves. Good jokes are few and far between in this non-place. The baby squalls. “Oo. Sorry, did I wake her up?” The living flower shakes her not-head. “That’s a relief,” he says. He smiles broadly. “It was nice to stay with you for a while. I haven’t known many people to be so hospitable.” He cringes. “Especially to their home invaders.” The mountain’s girl returns the smile. He looks past them for a moment as if inspecting the nursery. She makes a noise like an inquiry, but it comes out like a loon’s call. “To be frank,” the feathered man admits, “there’s something here I need. Something of Reed’s.”

The couple share a bemused look. The bouquet-woman bobs up and down with the infant in her arms, trying to assuage her cries. Reed’s friend sighs. “As kind as you were, I’m sure you were happy to be rid of us. Now, I impose on you again.” His head bows. “But I wouldn’t return empty-handed,” he says hopefully. The angel-man bends at the knee and extends his hands into a cup. “Though, I’m afraid I can offer the only thing I have to give: a promise.” In his hands, a feather like quicksilver shimmers into being. The child coos.

Their hearts take flight. Do the two of them dare to hope? If they could have gasped, they would have, for this man proffered a powerful thing.

The starry woman holds her breath as she takes what the half-bird offers. The man on their roof straightens. She takes her partner’s hand—or the end of her sleeve—and squeezes once. The mountain flowers turn as if to behold her. Stardust lifts the feather to her mouth, pursed and parted so slightly, and holds it just a lip’s distance from a kiss. Then, she inhales for a good long while. Her outbreath, by contrast, is incalculably long. The mountain’s climber tries to keep count of the seconds that pass, but his focus is bowled over. The starry girl’s breath wraps them all in the first warmth of a new spring wind. Dandelion seeds and samaras blow from her lungs and dance in the sunlight, and the mercurial feather changes shape: a bloom. It lengthens and opens and accepts the accord. The baby giggles.

“Wow,” the boy says. “That was really lovely to watch,” and he means it. He throws one leg through the open window. “I’ll be in and out before you know it—” but before he can step all the way in, he sees his promise folded into an outstretched fist.

He appraises the little family in astonishment. “But it’s yours!” he insists. The girl and her flowers are steadfast. The breathed woman waggles the quicksilver bloom at him a little. With wide eyes, he takes the feather back with both hands and lifts it to his nose. He inhales deeply, and his mind, once-clouded, is renewed with fresh purpose. His eyes well with tears. “You want to be real,” he says incredulously. They nod at him, joyful at his understanding. Next, his senses are filled with the memories Reed lost. They, too, lie in between the intricate folded petals of the blossom.

The bush shivers at the nape. Gideon looks over his shoulder. The stoplight is green. The girl who looks so much like Astrella taps the spot on her wrist where a watch might be fastened and looks pointedly at him. “Wait!” he says. “We’ll fix all of this. Even if we banish the mountain, you will remain…and it’s not fair what’s happened to you! I know Reed agrees. You have to tell me—”

Astrella unleashes another vast and wonderful exhaling breath through the open window. Gideon’s wings are caught in the gale, and the rest of his words are stifled. He knows not of the little bit that is left of this place, its brevity and its actors. The little family is tired. The child is asleep again. The Matriarch’s petals close like night is falling.

Her sweet girl shuts the window.