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Do it. The last words she spoke before we cinched the green ribbon around her neck, a stark line bisecting her head from her body, a scrap we’d buried to gather magic under the mother tree. We tied the final knot. She took up her sword, a girl become death, the edge of her blade fine enough to cleave three dimensions into one.
“How long do I have to have my membership with Juno before he proposes?”
“Well, is he subscribed, too?”
“Lifetime with Venus.”
“Girl.”
The great writer had lived well past his appointed lifespan, not by years but decades, and now existed less as an ongoing contributor to the literate zeitgeist but as an icon of a past age. He was a super-centenarian, just topping an unbelievable 110 and still appearing at literary conferences.
I know what you’re going to say. That I got what I deserved. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Nothing like kicking someone when they’re down, eh? But here I am, dressed in all my mistakes. Huddling inside a house I don’t dare to leave.
Mother used to say I am a child of the river. I never understood her. I thought I would be a child of the wind, like her. Like all the children of the wind, my mother could fly. When I was younger, I liked spying on her.
“What do you mean, ‘no?’” I said. “We have a deal. I kept my end, now you have to keep yours.” She showed me the face of a willful child. “I’m not doing it.” Then she turned her back and summoned the royal guards.
We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?”
Buddy and I abandoned our hydrogen nomad at the edge of the wastelands before trudging around the rusted chain-link perimeter of the abandoned fairgrounds, waiting for the blast of steam and guttural earthly moan to escape.
At first, it was the not-quite-hidden things. Worms suspended from sticky silk, tree-trapping the unwary. Glassine jointed lines, half-helical, hardly seen vitreous shadows. Diamonds caught in fallen leaves.
Next war, the angel decided, he was going to sit out. Before the dust settled, before hosts rose and fell depending on their actions and inclinations, he fled. Cowardice, maybe. More like pragmatism, he rationalized.
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