The first time I saw Simone, she was taking my photograph. The flash blinded me. When the sparkles faded, I saw her sitting at my table. Her mouth smiled but her pale eyes never stopped probing. They were hungry eyes, the kind that were too curious to be self-conscious.

“I hope you don’t mind.” She peered through the window beside my table. “What were you watching? Ducks?”

I followed her gaze and saw a flock of mallards floating in a pond. I hadn’t seen the ducks. I was thinking about my girlfriend, who had abandoned me the night before for a “sick friend.” I was thinking the only sense I had was bad sense, always striving forward, ass first.

“Doesn’t matter what people are looking at.” She rotated the lens and replaced the cover. “Just what they’re looking for.”

She buckled her camera into her shoulder bag, while I nodded, having no idea what she meant. I spent the next three months trying not to fall in love with her. As effortlessly as air, she entered all the spaces caution left unfilled.

My morning habit was to track the markets on my laptop near the window. Across the coffee shop, she had breakfast with black coffee and Rimbaud. I watched her read. She sipped from a steaming cup, her moist lips forming words in silence.

I recognized some of the words she mouthed. Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse, Des satyres lascifs, des faunes animaux. Watching her so absorbed in a libertine’s fantasies made me wonder what her marriage was like. When she fluffed her black hair and loosened her top button, I didn’t care at all about her marriage.

She was the only daughter of an aging philistine. Her mother was an actress who left the stage to become the old man’s trophy. Because she was Catholic, she stayed with a man more interested in screwing his caddy than his wife–despite the successful union of cigarettes and self-abuse that kept her own figure boyish.

We each smiled and nodded and went about our business. She would glance at me, let me know she saw me. My appreciation, my desire, was nothing I wanted to hide. I knew she wasn’t what she appeared to be, wasn’t who she wanted to be. She was a reflection in search of a mirror.

When she finally shared her portfolio with me, her cryptographic allusions returned. A woman clutching a wind-blown hat stares down a crowded sidewalk. She said this was a photograph of herself. A well-groomed cadet in yellow boots strides through a deluge of rain. This was her husband. An orange sun eats away the edges of pensive woman’s silhouette. This was her mother. A fat priest in a worn cassock shuns a crumbling brick church. This was her father. Two children wait on the curb of a busy street to retrieve their ball. These, she said, were us.

After translating a poem for me one Friday, she invited me into her limousine and introduced me to her “green hour.” With ice water, a special spoon, and a sugar cube, she performed a louching of a glass of absinthe. The spirit turned milky green. A sip of the licorice-laced liquor, banned for nearly a century, infected me with uncanny lucidity.

“The most luminous geniuses used absinthe to liberate their art,” she told me. Her pretension was more satire than salesmanship. “Baudelaire, Picasso, Van Gogh, Hemingway, and, of course, my dear Rimbaud.”

The elixir had helped generations abandon their gritty reality in favor of symbol and imagination. It was no less for us. She was a photographer in search of scenes. I was a widow at a grave. We talked and read, and our days together were a collage of impersonations.

After one green hour that lasted three, she had us driven around four houses comprising the fifty-acre estate she called “Dyle Creek.” She spoke casually about her wealth in a way that showed she didn’t think of it as belonging to her. We ended our tour at her pool house. The hum of the pump echoed off the high ceiling, and along with the institutional smell of chlorine, gave me a sense of exposure.

I anticipated an invitation to one of the bedrooms upstairs, but pleasure was a burden for her. She stepped away. I stepped near. We moved across the room in this way until she was against a wall.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she said.

I set my lips to her cheek, and my words rained onto her skin. “I’ll keep your secrets.”

The promise changed something in her. She tossed her pink blouse onto a chair. She slid out of her black skirt and stood before me in panties. Her soft contours seemed even softer under white satin.

“I want you,” I said, my throat tight.

“I want you,” she said, her voice dull, as if an echo had returned from the ceiling.

She removed her panties and settled onto a mahogany settee. She squeezed the slight scoops of her creamy breasts and eased her legs apart, leaving her blushing inner lips peeking through glistening brown curls. Her pussy, nestled in the smooth landscape of her thin thighs, held such primitive beauty, I understood why men killed each other to possess it.

Her sharp blue stare and assertive shoulders altered the kitten-like vision into an Amazon dream. My thoughts couldn’t articulate all I longed for. I tossed my clothes aside and fell down beside her.

Our naked bodies entwined. She coaxed my tongue into her mouth and dragged her teeth across it. She began to suck, tentative strokes growing rhythmic. The Siren touch lulled me, sought to cool me with tenderness. I didn’t feel tender.

My unsteady fingers groped into the tangled patch between her thighs, parting the curls as I searched for the little pad of flesh and found it fat with pleasure. I scooted down and took one of her nipples in my mouth. I rolled her other breast and then squeezed until she cried out. She pushed her chest against my face, so I abused her pink nipples until they were tight, raw lumps.

“I can smell you, Simone. I want to taste you.”

She lifted her head from the settee to look down at me. One eyebrow darted beneath her messy bangs. “You can have anything you want, Darling.” Her words made me ache with desire. You can have anything you want.

What I wanted was to unravel the moments weaving this pleasure into history. Losing myself in lust would leave the blaze of touches and smells and sounds little more than embers in my memory. The paradox of losing control in order to find it left me wanting every moment to remain a flame, even when the heat was gone. There are those who say love doesn’t fail through denial but through excess. This wasn’t love. It was excessive, and there’s no stopping a waterfall.

Simone was utterly carnal, a thing to be possessed, to be used but never used up. That was why the priests had it all wrong. I didn’t want to risk living for the moment, but it was the closest thing to God I knew.

Delving into her, I flattened my tongue and laid it on her swollen clitoris. Tension eased from her thighs and she spread her legs a little wider. I was drunk from the moist heat rising in waves across my face. Breathing her in, I lost myself to fantasies of orgiastic freedom lived out under a tropical sun.

Impatient with my wandering tongue, she reached down and parted the short curls of hair, inviting me back to her clitoris. Instead, I licked her fingers. They poked into my mouth, touching my tongue, my teeth, my lips. I raised my head, and we watched each other as she explored a mouth as small and sensitive as hers.

Her eyelids drooped and her breath grew agitated again. With teasing slowness, I returned my tongue to her source. I sparred with her stubborn curls until sucking left the settee soaked. I pulled her to her feet, and she led me upstairs to one of the bedrooms that overlooked the pool.

The room was dim. Wisps of smoke hovered near the bed, where a white taper in a brass stand had been burning for some time. The aroma was of vanilla poured over warm wood. On the nightstand, a pile of linked red beads lay atop a prayer book. The rosary’s metal glinted, like memories fading. She glanced at it and then at me. Her nostrils flared.

She wanted me to believe she was the victim of a strict upbringing. She wanted me to believe conscience forced her to honor a covenant made ten years ago before a priest–as if that was all God would remember. Fantasy had me liberating her desire. Desire isn’t a blind spot to eternity. It is eternity’s heart.

After stripping the patchwork blanket from the mattress, I pushed her backward onto the sheet. Kneeling on the floor, I rested her legs over my shoulders. With reverence, I rubbed my face against her, smearing her wetness across my cheeks and lips. Her musk washed over me, through me, a current stirring my blood. I held her hips, guiding them as they began to circle. She whined when my nose bumped her clitoris.

Her hips rose, and she said, “Finger me.”

Spreading wider, she drew her legs up enough to allow her feet to rest on the edge of the bed. My finger plunged into her.

She erupted with a cry. “That feels good. Don’t stop.”

I licked all around, and she groaned with guttural joy. She crossed her arms over her face and began to rock her head back-and-forth. “Come on,” she said, her voice like a girl denied candy. “Oh, sweet Jane, why can’t you make me come?”

We both grew desperate for something more, so I took the candle and blew out the flame. She recoiled in alarm, until I flipped the candle around. She tried to say something, but couldn’t finish her thought. Hardened drips crumbled to the bed as I worked the candle into her.

“Simone,” I whispered when she had grown quiet. “You like this? Tell me you like it.”

“I need to come.”

I swirled the candle and tried to fill my mouth with as much of her as I could. Her clitoris was throbbing as she ground against my teeth. She grew quiet, but as I continued to suck, she began to moan again, and what little control she had released itself in a gasp of gratitude. Her hips left the bed, even as her hands pulled my face against her, and she grunted in rhythm to the waves of orgasm.

I crawled onto the bed. When I held her, I found my heart hungered for her in the way my mouth had earlier.

She looked at me. “Jack will be home in an hour.”

Her sudden coldness didn’t surprise me, but her dispassion was a lie. When she got up to leave the room, I blocked her way. I wasn’t the first woman, maybe not the only woman, in love with her, but she was a passive lover. I didn’t want to feel like I was somebody else. Even less, like I was nobody in particular.

She had contrived to bring me here, planted the image of herself as conflicted. I knew she shared my faith, that the only sins were in our lies, not our love. She used my fetish as a mirror, another green hour spent in feverish fantasies. Unlike her, I needed something more than imagination.

“Bored with all the fucking?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed. “You can’t hurt me.”

I wanted to hurt her. At least, I wanted to be able to hurt her, as only someone she loved could hurt her. She treated body heat like a foreign language. She wasted love trying to invent herself. She was something to be discovered.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re not done.” Curiosity held her in place until I spread my legs. “Your turn.”

She seemed aroused or fearful or maybe they were the same thing. She said, “I’ve never done that to a woman.”

“Hot breath, wet tongue, patience.” I shrugged. “Women are easy.”

With hesitant steps, she made her way to me and settled onto her knees. Resting her arms across my thighs, she speared her tongue and touched the tip to my clitoris. She reached a finger to spread my labia. I helped her, showing her places to explore.

When she continued to use the tip of her tongue, I said, “No one’s watching. Use your whole mouth.” She was intrigued but still didn’t understand. She didn’t understand what taking pleasure, rather than receiving it, might reveal. “Imagine it the way I do.” I let my head fall back onto the bed. “Imagine you’re in heaven.”

She brushed a hand through my pubic hair. “You mean worship it?”

Before I could answer, the heat from her mouth spread across the entire lower half of me. Her tongue licked my labia, found my clitoris, found inspiration. Her lips caressed and sucked. Her teeth tugged and nibbled.

Her restless desire grew wanton. She pressed her face hard against me. I felt her mouth quivering, twitching, clenching, as if she couldn’t decide what to do. When I began to come, she moved her face to my leg and bit my thigh.

Clutching her hair, I pushed her away. I shouted at her and she apologized and I let go. Tentatively, she returned her soft mouth to me. I rocked and moaned, and whenever her tongue or fingers flagged, I told her not to stop. I felt as though I were experiencing an epiphany. Maybe an apotheosis. She had become an island of meaning in my sea of chaos.

“Feels good,” I said.

“Feels good,” she echoed, only this time it didn’t sound like an echo. It sounded like lust. It sounded like hope. It sounded like her faith would never again consist in who she spread her legs for, but in what she risked for the revelation.

O Venus, O Goddess!
I long for the time of ancient youth,
lascivious satyrs and animal fauns,
Gods mad with love bite the bark of branches
And among water lilies kiss fair Nymphs!
I long for the time when the sap of the world,
The water of rivers, the rosy blood of green trees
Put the world into Pan’s veins!
When the ground shook, green, beneath his goat feet;
When gently loving the fair syrinx, his lips
Murmured a great hymn of love beneath the sky;
When, standing on the plain, he heard all around
Living Nature responding to his call;
When the silent trees, rocking the singing bird,
The earth rocking man, and all the blue Ocean
And all animals loved, loved in God!

From “Sun and Flesh” by Arthur Rimbaud, 1870

END

Literary erotica. Copyright © 2010 Teresa Wymore. All Rights Reserved.

She had lost weight. At least ten pounds. Her black-and-navy fatigues belonged to someone much larger, but along with the oversized clothing and wild brunette curls, her wide eyes deceived if they suggested childlike innocence. “You’ve looked better, Alex,” I said.

“Not going back.”

“You’re all leaving.” The voice faded behind the thud of cleats as a ragged soldier stepped from behind a stack of metal pipes. He charged his rifle and nodded an apology to the bald man standing beside me. “Sorry, Colonel, but they don’t belong here.”

“We lost twenty soldiers in the last offensive,” said the colonel. “We don’t need trouble with the Nation, now do we, Sergeant? Alex is leaving. They’re all leaving.”

The Nation’s reputation encouraged cooperation from a careful man like the colonel. The sergeant was another matter, but they were both traitors to their army, their faithlessness hardly a surprise to me. I had spent my life defending my species against sapiens aggression.

Heat from the sergeant’s charging rifle shimmered the air, and when the colonel raised his own, it gleamed with an oily seep. I carried a revolver loaded with jacketed hollow points. The load gave good expansion without excessive recoil and, more importantly, it avoided extensive meat damage. Like all Patriots, I might have been mistaken for an Old West gunfighter, complete with leather boots, a black blazer, and a lawless revolver holstered on one hip. That is, if a woman had ever ravaged the American frontier.

With a discreet finger, I unstrapped and cocked the hammer. My adjutant, Ricqa, did the same.

The sergeant swung his rifle, gesturing with exaggerated movements that covered for trembling hands. “You let one in, and more always follow. And what do you think they want? To help us? To help themselves!”

I watched the sergeant’s lips compress into a tight, white line, and color drain from his cheeks, so when the colonel growled his order again, I was already diving at Alex.

The sergeant fired. Ricqa fired back, his bullets scarring the steel walls as Alex and I rolled. Caught in the crossfire, the colonel dropped like dead weight, a rifle burn leaving a black crater in his chest.

The sergeant took aim but stumbled, hit by a ricochet. As he sprawled onto the floor, his rifle spun away. Ricqa flipped him to his back, used a boot to break his nose, and stood awaiting an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. When I gave a slight nod, he shot the sergeant dead.

Alex fumbled with a rifle until I plucked it from her grasp. Ricqa cuffed her wrists and escorted her to my ship.

***

I spit black water and splashed away from the roar of tanks, their metal hinges groaning as their steel belts crushed the forest. After the water receded and my boots hit hard ground, I felt renewed strength. The deafening roar had faded to a hum, punctuated by explosions of grenades that fizzled out quickly on a planet with no oxygen.

Although a viroskin covered me like a second skin, absorbing the radiation from Dahmin’s suns, the stinging ammonia rain made my lungs burn. Metabolizing drugs created oxygen internally and filtered poisons through accelerated sweating. What the film didn’t protect, the viromeds repaired, but their turpentine reflux was nauseating.

I was on my way to meet with the colonel, and not for the first time. I had been through this moment over-and-over, hoping to undo everything I had done. I wouldn’t make the mistake again of leaving her at the mercy of those with no mercy.

I carried a map and note from one of the cells of Resistance fighters that littered the valley. If I could avoid the tanks, I might also work my way clear of other cells entrenched in the outskirts of the city.

Picking my way through blue foliage, I glanced around, searching through the darkness for something alien on the alien world. I thought I saw the grimy face of a pale man, and when I blinked, the world became a riot of ghostly images. Across the landscape, people stood superimposed, their entangled iterations like trails of motion, but nothing moved. Although I swiped at the closest ones, I failed to move them. Unlike my mind, my hands were trapped in time.

Time travel was not so glamorous as one might imagine. Mostly, there was the insanity. If Einstein had been right, and light speed was a constant, then time travel would have become a technology as popular as the Integrid. Since science had not been entirely successful with its notion of time, metascience developed its own. The technology of Shifting had yet to achieve what I discovered on Dahmin. The trouble with “shifting” your mind from one probability to another was the inevitable confusion of who, exactly, “you” were. Hence, the insanity.

I stepped into an iteration of myself and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the phantoms were gone, but my throat was dry. I choked on my own saliva. As I coughed, an exquisite rush distracted me, and I tasted a mouthful of scotch. The heady burn was too real to be a mere memory. Distracted by taunting desires, I didn’t notice the body until I tripped over it. Alex gazed up at me, her body charred and smoking as she sighed away her final breath.
I would have to try again.

***

Ricqa was in his sleeptube for the journey home after helping me retrieve Alex from Dahmin.

I sat at command, appraising Alex a moment before I said, “I can medicate you, restrain you, or we can have a pleasant visit on the way home.”

She stood with arms crossed over her chest. Her belligerent jaw called my bluff, so I raised the stakes. “We have the sergeant’s body.”

She glanced away.

I softened my tone. “Aren’t you tired of synth?”

“You’re lying. They would kill you if you went near it.”

My lip curled as I thought of what she had suffered. “Is that how they’ve been treating you, these friends of yours? Burying fresh meat in mud? They’re mindless, humping apes. Morality so twisted it defies logic. They’d rather feed worms than us.”

“It would be illegal.”

“It’s wasteful.”

“You’re responsible for his death. You’d be breaking a dozen laws. It’s the kind of thing that makes them think of us as monsters.”

“They’re the monsters.”

“You’re so casual about your crimes, so relentless about mine.”

“What crimes? Do you think the truth matters more than their fear? It’s the notion of what lurks under their sapiens exterior that so frightens them. They blame us. They’re the wolves.”

She closed her eyes. “Just let me go.”

Her plea made my heart pound faster. I wondered if I could ease surrender from her exhaustion. I left my chair and tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned away, so I kissed the rise of her cheekbone instead.

After a moment, she acquiesced. “I’ll do whatever you want.” She turned to me, eyes full. “If you tell him I escaped.”

She began to unbutton her shirt, but I stopped her. I couldn’t let go of her hands until the discipline that had circumscribed my last twenty years reasserted itself. Accepting her offer might solve my dilemma, but it wouldn’t solve hers. The premier wanted his daughter home.

She smelled inviting, like warm vanilla, so I stepped away. “It’s because of the Protectorate that you can make speeches about all men living in peace, about all men being equal,” I said. “You do what an ‘enlightened conscience’ dictates, but I make sure the Nation’s preserved in spite of its idealists.”

“She’s experiencing withdrawal,” said a metallic voice. I shifted my focus. The translucent human face of my sentinel stared back from the contact in my right eye, its voice piped directly to my auditory nerve. It faded from view, replaced by clouds of color. Patches of blue overlay parts of Alex’s body, revealing the poor functioning of her liver and several surgeries from her childhood. More than a thousand users routed access through her bioprocessors, and a routine crawler was examining her genome. Nothing concerned me until I saw her hormone fluctuations, the result of sedative abuse. The sapiens soldiers ate the drug like candy.

I refocused on Alex. “How are you feeling?” Her eyelids drooped, so I guided her to the command chair and addressed my sentinel. “Scream, direct 5 cc’s GBVH to Alex. Go hot.” Along with the bioprocessors that comprised the Integrid, tiny microarrays floated in her bloodstream, allowing her own body to manufacture the medication I prescribed.

She pushed away. “Don’t drug me.”

“You’ll feel better in a minute.” I carried her to a sleeptube.

Afterward, I sat in the command chair and thought of home.

I had left Earth in late November, when high above Lake Michigan, the scarlet tiles that jacketed Embassy Tower recalled the saturated autumn. The bright glass building was more than an idiosyncrasy amid a brittle season. It was the first defiant apportioning of a world that had once belonged to a single species of man.
A Patriot had saved me from a lynching when I was seven. Not that my would-be judges knew what I was. It wasn’t easy to tell a virens from a sapiens.

Like most virens, I had resisted becoming a citizen, but unlike many, I quickly accepted the inevitable. By training, I was a psychiatrist. I was a Patriot serving the Protectorate of the Virens Nation. I was a protocol redactor, an agent who fit history to policy, and so, in essence, a woman who recreated the Nation almost daily.

My age had given me a certain perspective and my career a certain status, but the path I followed had turned me in a direction that was much less than certain. Alex had silenced the guiding anthem of my life.

***

Second time around, I blinked away the bright light. Tasted turpentine. Missed the scotch.

“You think of yourself as a tool.”

I spun to find the voice.

“You think that makes you strong, but it only makes you cynical.”

The colonel sat at a metal table.

I had arrived once again after bribing my way into Dahmin’s second city, where the Resistance had their headquarters. But I couldn’t bribe the colonel, at least not with drugs. It’s true he was a traitor, but you didn’t reach his rank in the sapiens War Ministry unless you were a company man.

I had tried another iteration, hoping to arrive in time to keep myself from taking Alex home. If I could get hold of her again, it wouldn’t be to return her to Earth this time. My thoughts darted about, searching for something to convince the Colonel to give her to me, and as it happened, it was the truth. “Alex is prone to mystical thinking,” I said. “She’s a creative child who believes if she wants something enough, it will just happen, as if her thoughts can magically change reality. I have a warrant for her. You know the Protectorate won’t leave a citizen of the Virens Nation out here alone. More Patriots will come. If she’s declared rogue, bounty hunters will follow.” I took a deep breath to clear my thoughts. “I don’t care about your war. I care about Alex. Give her to me, and I’ll leave you to your treason.”

“You’re right, Doctor. Thoughts can’t change reality. They create it. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be fighting for a free Dahmin.”

“That’s revealing. Have you heard it said that one’s philosophy is just unconscious autobiography?”

“The fact that you’ve memorized Nietzsche is maybe even more revealing.”

I couldn’t help smiling at this grunt of a colonel who knew his philosophy.

“Despite protests from my soldiers,” he said, “I let her stay because she believes in our fight, but she doesn’t begin to understand why it’s important, what this world has to offer.”

“You have an interesting perspective on things. I think one should understand something before one believes it.”

“Then you’re a faithless woman.”

“Do you know what I do, Colonel?”

He leaned forward. “You create the fictions that are the impulse of our age.” He leaned back.

“How concise.” I repaid his insight with a nod. “Then maybe you realize the kind of access I have, the kind of information I can create. I can write your story, push it, make sure it’s discussed. You’ll become freedom fighters instead of traitors, heroes not cowards. Give her to me.”

“She’s not mine to give.”

“Of course she is, Colonel.”

Later, as I waited for him to bring her, my skin began to itch. Despite the many times it had happened, I still had no idea how to prepare as the world again became a ghastly morgue of frozen moments. I was coming to understand the thriving trade in sedatives.

Afraid of getting lost in some strand of time, I closed my eyes and didn’t move. Sensing the heap of potentiality surrounding me made it difficult to concentrate, so I lost track of what I was doing. Then someone was talking, and rifles fired. I opened my eyes.

Ricqa chased after the sergeant, who ran from the warehouse, and the colonel was lying dead nearby. Alex was on the ground.

Dropping to my knees, I pressed my hands against her stomach to stop the bleeding. I ordered Scream to increase her fluids, but he didn’t respond, and I couldn’t get any readings to appear on my contact. Only then did I realize rifles had always been firing and Alex had always been dying.

I would have to try again.

***

Halfway home, I woke Alex from her drug-induced sleep and offered her meat. Good nutrition, comfort, and expectations of satisfaction were the best tools for control. Her youth gave her stamina. A habit of deprivation gave her courage. Unfulfilled in life, she was bland about death. She had been following the path set by her ideals, but that had to end at some point. I needed her surrender, her acceptance of what she was. It was the hardest step to pass from the dreamy midnight of what one wanted to be, to the cold morning of facing what one was.

The death rates for my generation were twenty-percent before the age of seventeen. I had seen childhood friends not only beaten but beaten to death. What good did it do if they punished criminals, when they created them to begin with? If not for the Protectorate, the old species would still be making bonfires with us. And what were we but reminders of what they hated in themselves?

Alex took a bite after some effort to ignore her plate. To weaken her resolve, I chatted about events back home—the work of friends, promotions, marriages.
She seemed to be assimilating until resentment darkened her lovely green eyes. “So Grace, did you find me or was it Scream?”
Finding Alex had not been the hard part. Resisting the urge to medicate her into submission was. “Address me correctly. I’d hate for anyone to think I didn’t command your respect.”

One eyebrow rose. “Well then, Doctor Witcher, was it Scream?”

“It’s humbling to see heuristic algorithms slowly replacing you.”

“Humbling? Since when have you ever been humble?” She looked me over. “No, it wasn’t Scream. Human intuition can’t be reproduced, especially not yours.”
“That’s what they said about quantalogic predicting events in chaotic systems, and look how well we can predict the weather now.”

“But chaotic systems are still completely deterministic. Data miners can handle non-repeating and complex functions, but behavior is entirely different.”

“Are you trying to tell me behavior is not a chaotic system, that it isn’t completely deterministic, that free will is somehow an unquantifiable, unpredictable, non-probabilistic event?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Interesting.” I took a bite of my roast. “That hasn’t been my experience. In fact, I’m often quite amazed at just how well behavior follows patterns of probability. The key to prediction, of course, is understanding how to weight the choices, and that requires experience. If we can instill that sort of intuition into sentinels, then my profession will be unnecessary. And, you know what? We have. Scream can accurately predict human action eighty-percent of the time.”

“Only when you supply the data. The best sentinels can predict human interactions sometimes, but that’s not intuition. That’s just counting cards.”

“You sound like an old woman. It’s the young ones who usually embrace our technology like a religion.”

“Is it a religion to you?”

“Eat. You’ll think more clearly.”

“You mean I’ll be more pliable.” She scowled, until my attention brought a sly smile to her face. “I can be anything you want me to be.” A mocking pause. “Doctor Witcher.”

I was too introspective to believe she had ever appreciated me as a woman. I was her warden, a status resulting in the pendulum of worship and loathing that had her promising me ecstasy one day and death the next. “The one thing you won’t be is ‘rogue’,” I told her. “You can’t imagine what your life would be like without the Protectorate.”

“I imagine it all the time.”

***

I sat on a rock, black with volcanic dust, knowing already that I was too late to retrieve her from this timeline. With so many iterations to step into, I kept finding the wrong one. In principle, the longer I stayed on Dahmin, the better I should become at reading decoherence, but exactly what “longer” meant, I couldn’t say. Quantum decoherence was just as obvious but just as immeasurably complex as metascience claimed.

Dahmin had few animals and no sentient natives, so I wasn’t sure who the Resistance was fighting to free. I found areas entirely devoid of animal life, including a valley inhabited by plants that looked like footstools for dinosaurs. No telling how long ago that had happened. Or how soon to come.

I made my way to the warehouse. My viromeds were running low, and Scream couldn’t help me. I had counted on Dahmin’s fuzzy reality to make myself disappear from the Integrid, but I hadn’t considered how much I had come to rely on it.

A thud on my back drove me to my knees. Working to breathe, I crawled forward and dragged myself to my feet with the help of a table. I swayed as I turned around.

The sergeant grimaced, revulsion fighting with fear for dominance. The barrel of his rifle pressed against my chest as he reached forward and tore my revolver from its holster. “God, I can’t stand your stink!” He stepped back.

I looked up into his red face. “And may I say I have no such difficulty. In fact, you smell delicious.”

I took a blow that broke my eye socket and sent me tumbling across the floor. He followed and yanked me up with the ease of snatching a doll. He had dropped his rifle, freeing his hands to squeeze my neck, and my hyoid felt as if it would snap any second. With no hope of loosening his grip, I clawed his eyes with my fingers. One good stab and he finally yelped. I doubled him over with a kick to his gut.

“I’ve been beaten by better men than you,” I rasped, rubbing my throat. “I’ve been smeared with shit, hanged, shot, burned, and stabbed. If you think you can hurt me, you’re an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, like most of your kind.”

I picked up my revolver and shot him dead.

I would have to try again.

***

“This is your last chance.” Alex sat at command with her eyes closed. “We’ll be home in a few hours. We can still get out of here. Kimir Station. No, we can join a ship of pirates out by Irahu.”
Leaning against a console, I tracked her liver function, adjusting her medications with Scream’s help.

“Is he going to put a security bracelet on me?”

She had already cracked or conned her way out of every system her father devised, so there was no point in telling her of his decision. She would plead or threaten. I preferred her defiant and dreaming. “What about Ariadne’s moon?” I said. “I always wanted to see the webbed clouds.”

“We could be there in a couple of months. Then on to Marksdawn. I hear its rivers are liquid diamonds. In a few years, we’d have enough money to buy at least a small moon.” Her laughter faded as she stared at me. “How can you be such a good liar? You’re so obvious.”

“Obvious?”

“It’s that distance between your charm and a fractured nature I don’t get. Most people mistake the sadness in your eyes for kindness. You’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“Most people don’t see a sheep in me at all. They claim we’re evolved from some mix of humans and wolves, but they don’t realize the demon in us comes from them, not the wolves.”

“You work for protocol. You’re a redactor. A liar.”

“A Patriot.”

“You don’t get me at all.”

“I know everything about you.”

“Do you know I love you?” When I didn’t answer, she closed her eyes. “He’s really angry, isn’t he?”

“How does it look for his daughter to run away while he’s negotiating extradition for unregistereds?”

“He can forget about me. Disown me.”

“The War Ministry once vivisected us, and there are still Resurrectionists running around who think with enough injections, they can de-evolve us. Even if he didn’t love you, he couldn’t allow you to leave.” I paused for emphasis. “And he does love you.” It was the best I could do.

She was already shaking her head, not hearing me. “The Nation tells us we never had the same rights as sapiens, but when the World Constitution talks about citizens—hell, aren’t we citizens? Don’t you see? The Nation makes us think we’re different, and that just confirms the sapiens notion that we’re also less.”

“You can’t change reality, Alex. You have to realize you’re much safer with me.”

“The laws are our laws, too, so we’re asking for something we already have a right to. We don’t need special protections, because we aren’t special.”

At eight years old, Alex had seen her mother murdered by a mob of sapiens in a mining town. Resentment never surfaced, but like a libertarian, she spoke of freedom from labels, from laws, from the Protectorate. She was a daughter of the premier, and she had publicly denounced compulsory citizenship in the nation he governed. She didn’t want to see the differences that oppressed us. She wanted to be “normal,” which meant she wanted to be like the old species.

I couldn’t tell her how truly “normal” she was to become, sapped of any drive but to obey. After the chemical lobotomy, she would take her place alongside the premier’s other children as a docile member of Earth’s second species. Her anxious father would never again awaken me in the middle of the night to evaluate her escape route or grant me a hiatus from my duties in order to chase her across the solar system. As his oldest friend, he used me to clean up personal messes, but this would be my last time chasing after his youngest daughter.

The premier wasn’t a heartless man. He was out of options, unless he could take the step his daughter demanded and see beyond the ghetto. I knew he couldn’t. He was trapped by history, like all virens. Like me.

***

I kept wondering about this point of view, who this “I” was. What happened to the “me” who had been here, or the “me” who had left there? Metascience said time splinters consciousness, that consciousness is a product of the space it inhabits, an emergent property of the universe expressed through a person. You can share a wave, after all, but you can’t take hold of it, so it’s a delusion to believe you’re merely yourself. Like most people who came to Dahmin, I discovered time is a place, one I could move beyond, but experiencing unified consciousness was less like transcendence and more like dying.

I had died in many small ways before I found a timeline where I managed to keep Alex alive. I had arrived in time to have the colonel bring her to me before the sergeant turned up. Ricqa and I shuffled Alex off to my ship, where he retired to a sleeptube, while I sat with her, appreciating the fire in her eyes even more after so many tries to revive it.

As usual, she railed against protectionist laws and the fear that kept us believing sapiens rhetoric. I didn’t need to listen. I needed to change reality, the one that had consumed her in a way only a fear of sapiens could. “They’ll find me wherever I go,” I said. “You, too.”

Suspicion narrowed her eyes. She tried not to smile, as if she couldn’t bear to believe me, but the gullibility I had always abused was now her gift to me. Despite her effort to appear stoic, her smile broke through. “We can do it, Grace.”

“You can do it. They don’t abide rogue Patriots. I’ll be terminated. Heart attack, I assume.”

She seemed stunned. “Murder you?”

“No one could prove it.”

“My father wouldn’t allow it.”

“Your father has authorized many such … terminations.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’ve programmed the cocktails, Alex.” I didn’t enjoy the roast as much this time around. I pushed my plate away. “I’m taking you to Jupiter. You can seek asylum at the colony there, which should give you a few months of bureaucratic fighting before extradition. If you can sneak away, I recommend you get out of the solar system. You’ll probably be running forever.”

“But that means I’ll be alone.” The sparkle faded from her eyes.

“Yes, well, I’ve been a mother to you long enough.”

“My mother’s dead. I don’t need another one.”

Her solemn mood didn’t affect mine. My good humor was the result of a success that couldn’t be taken away. I had found my path and a new anthem. “Then what? Big sister? Guardian angel? Is that what you want?”

Leaning forward, she took my hand. “Come with me.”

“You would have to watch me die.”

“What about Dahmin? There’s such chaos there. Maybe they wouldn’t find us.”

“I found you.”

She let go of my hand. “Because I left that article behind. You think I don’t know you rifle through my quarters every chance you get?”

Not as gullible as I thought. “They’ll terminate me and send another Patriot.”

“Even to Dahmin?”

“Alex, you can’t possibly want to go back to that insane jungle. The soldiers are going mad, at least the ones who aren’t overdosing. It wouldn’t be long before the same would happen to you.”

“You managed, and I know you wouldn’t medicate yourself.”

I don’t know why I hesitated, except that I had already planned to return to Dahmin alone and didn’t want to risk her life or her sanity. And really, I had no need for her to come, because she was already there.

She rose from her chair. “Suppose we did, Grace. Suppose we went to Dahmin anyway. It wouldn’t take us long to get back. A day, two? And some of the soldiers have been there a year at least. We could make it that long, couldn’t we? A year? How long do you think we’d have?”

Another hesitation, this time to brush away an unruly brunette curl from her eyes. I was pleased that I would never have to see her without them again. “If the Protectorate gives me forty-two hours,” I said. “I’ll give you forever.”

***

“We’re going back to your quarters now, Alex.”

Two days after returning her to Earth, she sat on a bed in the psychiatric wing of Central Hospital. I helped her dress. She wore black slacks and a white blouse. Her hair was boyish, her curls, like her enthusiasm, gone. When I began to button her vest, she pressed my hand against her chest and stared with unfocused eyes. “I remember. I remember, Grace.”

Leaning in, I touched my forehead to hers. “Don’t call me that. Especially not here. You know better.”

Foreheads still touching, she squinted at me, her focus making her cross-eyed. “I know many things. I know I’m a warning to anyone who can see through walls.”

I kissed her forehead and wrapped my arms around her. “No one can see through walls. No one needs to, because you can always go around them.”

She giggled. “Sometimes you only think you can.”

Her relentless drive for freedom was nothing less than pathological, but I found the experience of an Alex devoid of that passion demoralizing. Losing her self to preserve her life sickened me, and I knew the only one who could understand that sentiment was Alex, at least, the Alex I loved.

I spent weeks trying to figure out how to reverse a chemical lobotomy, but even Scream couldn’t solve the equations. And if I had managed it, crawlers would have discovered it. There were no secrets in the Nation, except those of conscience. I dreamt of escaping with her and spending a lifetime by diamond rivers, but I woke from nightmares that had me hemorrhaging before I left orbit.

From Earth, the Protectorate can send an order for the microarrays in a rogue to manufacture cancer, or something a little more invalidating if she’s a threat, like psychosis, or something immediate for a really dangerous one, like a heart attack. It’s an efficient process of detection using bits that both exist and don’t exist to generate probabilities relayed through living nodes. They can find a rogue anywhere because all virens are part of the Integrid, and yet, they receive output at an informatics lab, where the probability wave collapses, and all those ambiguous options result in a single fact. They need that single fact.

What was inevitable was not so clear anymore. Like rocks hardening out of a lava flow, our spacetime actualizes from the possibilities, but all possibilities actualize somewhere, and that means when things begin to make sense, information is already lost. What we know is only what we know, not all that is, so I would pass beyond this mortal horizon and enter Dahmin’s unchanging season, never before imagining a splintered life could be made whole by knowing less and desiring more.

END

Speculative fiction. Copyright © 2007 Teresa Wymore. All Rights Reserved.

First Week of Advent

Drifting through the house, Raphael passed the kitchen table where a wreath encircled four candles propped in brass holders. One of the candles had been burned, its tapered contour lined with a hardened flow of wax. By custom he knew the candle to be violet and the wreath pine, but in his spiritual form he could not distinguish such features.

Raphael had come to St. Mary of the Angels Parish to puzzle over the mystery of Lillian. Already, he had marveled at her melancholy afternoon as she stared out her kitchen window, and he wondered at her feverish evening, when she put written form to chaotic thoughts. Now, he settled beside her and roamed the landscape of her dreams, listening as only an angel can, while attending to the longing of her heart.

Everyone had a prayer, but Raphael could not find Lillian’s. Although he had scrutinized the sad woman from the time she made her morning coffee to when she slept, he could not find any hope left in her. Nevertheless, she simmered with intensity, as if ready to brim over with torments yet untouched. She seemed the type of woman meant for tragic love, not one to bring fulfillment to a sincere priest struggling with his vows.

But Charles loved her. It was his shy wish that had captured the attention of God’s Archangel of Healing. The only son of an overburdened widow, Charles wanted to help people because he had never been able to help those he loved most. He needed to be needed, which is why he had devoted two decades of his life to the Church, and why Raphael happily received the task of answering the hidden prayer he tried so hard to deny.

***

In the late hours of a Sunday afternoon, Raphael walked a gravel road, his boots leaving tracks in the pristine snow as flakes floated through the frigid air, icing his golden eyelashes and blurring his vision. He adjusted his red plaid scarf, tossing it behind his back, and then lifted it to cover his nose. It was soon wet where his warm breath puffed from him as steam. His gloved hand was stiff from clasping a heavy suitcase, but he pressed on, knowing he was almost to his destination.

As an angel, he had few sensory impressions unless he took on a body, and despite many incarnations, each one surprised him with its dazzling sensations, even a harsh prairie winter. Touching and hearing the world with his spirit was more informative, but it was hardly more interesting.

He skidded a few feet as he descended a hill, leaving two trails behind him. He glanced back, seized with a sudden desire to throw himself down and create a snow angel. When a gust of wind whipped a tree branch, flinging a pile of snow onto his head, he brushed it off and returned to his task, accepting the divine prodding with his usual good nature.

He ascended the steps, set his suitcase into the snow, and pressed the doorbell. A flurry of curtains in a nearby window was followed with a request for his name.

“Raphael.”

With a swoosh, the door opened. Lillian flipped a mess of auburn bangs from her heart-shaped face and apologized for the delay. “Come in, Father.”

Raphael stomped the snow from his boots and stepped into the warm cottage.

The house had been part of an estate willed to the Catholic Church before the First World War. A generation later, the diocese sold most of the land and buildings. All that remained to the parish was thirty acres supporting the chapel and rectory. Lillian’s grandfather had purchased the cottage, which had been servants’ quarters for the original estate and overlooked the parish graveyard.

“I didn’t expect you so soon.” Lillian took Raphael’s coat. “But of course you’re welcome anytime. I’m Lillian McKenney.”

“Father Bristol had a meeting with a parishioner, so I thought I’d walk over and introduce myself.”

Lillian glanced out the window. “My thermometer says it’s twelve degrees.”

Raphael wore his hair short, and his body carried a middle-aged stoutness. The appearance of a lingering tan and wind-burned cheeks allowed him to blend in with other men in the rural community. His face tingled, and he pressed his hands to his stiff cheeks. “I’m sure that’s right.”

“You must be freezing.” She ushered him to her kitchen table and returned a warm kettle to the stove’s burner. “I’m sorry if I’m distracted.” She tapped her head as she turned back. “Been working all day.”

Raphael adjusted his collar and snapped the hem of his black clerical shirt to remove the wrinkles. After he sat down, he touched the table’s centerpiece, a wreath surrounding four candles. One violet candle, its wick darkened, stood among the three yet to be lit. The pine branch was real, its fragrance the source of the fresh aroma he had noticed since entering the house. “Father told me you’re a good poet.”

She turned to look out the kitchen window. “I’ve had two volumes published, not like my dad, you know. He was brilliant.”

“Logan McKenney was, indeed, a brilliant poet. I know of one very worn copy of ‘Ransom Soul’.”

When the kettle whistled, Lillian dropped teabags into two cups and sat down. She sipped her steaming tea. “Were you raised near here?”

Raphael tasted his tea. “Apple-cinnamon?”

“Ginger-spice.” She looked him over. “After tea, I’ll show you the house. There’s plenty of room here, so I hope you won’t feel crowded. I keep to myself mostly.”

“Father told me you never leave.”

A blush spread across her cheeks. “My writing keeps me busy.”

He realized she had taken his comment as an accusation. She was sensitive to what people thought of the reclusive poet’s reclusive daughter. Although he recognized her discomfort, he could not look away. Despite visiting her many times, this was his first experience of her precise voice, her soft red hair, and the mutable green of her sad eyes.

He spoke with her a while longer, doing his best to avoid her questions about his life. He had no capacity to lie.

Later, after he had unpacked, Raphael examined the objects in the house. The wooden Advent calendar hanging by the fireplace was an heirloom from Lillian’s mother. Its thirty blue doors once held the traditional mystery of peppermints and prayer cards behind them. Nearby, a purple cloth covered the shelf used as an altar, where she set a sterling crucifix her father had given her the year he died. Behind the crucifix lay a brittle leaf from Palm Sunday, a box of white votives, and a handful of holy cards, including one painted with an image of the angel Raphael.

He picked up the fanciful portrait of himself, rubbing his finger across the glossy print of a young man with long golden locks. He had not taken on such a body since all those centuries ago when he accompanied young Tobias on his journey. The prayer on the back of the card was a request for Raphael to intercede on the petitioner’s behalf, but he did not recall Lillian ever reading the card. This was not her prayer.

Much could be understood from a woman’s attachments, and Lillian maintained the cottage as if it were a museum, displaying artifacts from her childhood, some unmoved since her parents had lived there. The house was an anchor, stranding her against a familiar shore, and Raphael decided he would have to find a way to free her.

“I put some towels on your bed, but feel free to get whatever you need from the hall closet.” As Raphael returned the card to the altar, Lillian stepped closer to peer at the calendar. “My mother used to put candy in it for us. She passed away when I was ten.”

He brushed a finger across the glossy wood. “Us?”

“My brother and me.”

As she crossed her arms and forced a smile, he realized how difficult it was going to be for her to live with someone in the house, to remain attentive when every day felt like another weight added to the heavy burden of life. “Does your brother live nearby?”

“I need to do some laundry. Do you have anything you’d like me to wash?”

“Thank you, no.”

“Feel free to use the machine whenever you like, or I can do your clothes if you leave them in the hamper.”

“I don’t expect maid service, Lillian. Just having a room until the repairs are done is a blessing. I’ll take care of the rest, like I would at the rectory.”

She smiled at a thought. “There was a time when St. Mary had a housemaid. My father use to talk about stopping by the rectory to see if Gisele had made a pie. She often favored the altar boys with a slice of rhubarb before Mass.” As she left the room, she commented, “I guess it’s lean times for the Church now.”

Raphael thought of Lillian’s brother, Lew, who had committed suicide two weeks before graduating high school. He already knew from his spiritual visits that Lillian thought of Lew every day, often as she had last seen him before the closed-casket funeral. She had been the one to find him, dead in his bed, music playing so loudly no one recognized the sound of the gunshot. Despite having nearly twenty years to heal, she lived as someone experiencing a recent loss, like a shadow impatient for the light to go out.

Second Week of Advent

“Well, I just don’t think we can stay with this parish. This isn’t what the Church teaches.” John Gottschalk’s lips remained tight, and without making eye contact, he left with his wife following along silently behind him.

Father Charles Bristol stood and smiled as best as he could while watching his parishioners leave. When he was alone, he sat down and clasped his hands together. He dropped them onto the desk and silently prayed for guidance.

He could have smoothed things over, could have sounded more understanding, but he was tired of compromise. He was worn out from the tightrope he walked as a liberal priest, not that he considered himself liberal. He felt merely Christian, faithful to the message of freely chosen service, of Love over Law.

What would it look like, he often wondered, to serve the needs of every man and woman without expecting them to be just like you? He knew what it would look like. It would look like scandal. It would cause the bishop to call him and it would cause people like the Gottschalks to travel another fifteen miles to Mass in Maquoketa.

Charles waited for some sign, some sense that God had heard him, but he had a difficult time listening. After several years of asking, he was used to leaving these conversations empty-handed. Besides, he so much wanted to see Lillian.

He left his desk to don his coat and boots. He slipped two silver compact discs into his pocket and cradled a sack of groceries in one arm. He left the rectory, choosing to walk the half-mile around Reiter’s farm. Fat flakes collected and softened the edges of tire tracks on the road. The crisp air filled his lungs, refreshing and reminding him how big life really was. He smiled, thinking this was probably God’s answer for guidance.

By December, evening came early, but the snowfield reflected the town’s glow and brightened the terrain like a dim sun. Many people adored the hush that descended with the snow, but Charles loved most the brightness, this emergent light that accompanied the Midwestern winter, as if the night had a soul.

When he reached Lillian’s cottage, he knocked and waited. He had not worn a hat and the wind blew especially cold through the tunnel made by the porch structure. The sting of his ears had gone numb by the time the door opened. As he left the blue of the night and entered the warm yellow light of Lillian’s living room, he dragged a swell of cold air with him.

Lillian quickly pushed the door shut and hugged herself. Charles handed her the compact discs, and while he pulled off his coat and boots, she put both discs into her player.

“Scarlatti’s Concerti Grossi,” he said after setting the sack of groceries on the kitchen counter and returned to the living room. “There’s some Mozart and Beethoven, too.”

She wore faded jeans and a khaki sweater and smelled fresh, like a warm field of grass just beyond a cool wood. Her reddish hair was a mess of soft curls, and everything about her invited his desire. He watched as she closed her eyes and listened. Her attention left, as if the music were a lovely old house she had not recently seen, and she wandered through its rooms. She remained gone through much of the first movement before she again opened her eyes. “Sounds like Bach.”

As she shifted, he noticed her body heat and realized how close he stood. His nervous hand fiddled with the volume control, but he did not move away. “That’s because Bach was the culmination of the era.” He smiled at his next thought before he said it. “I suppose you might know the difference if you listened to something besides the radio.”

“And if you listened to something besides two-hundred-year-old dead men, you’d know the youth group was actually thanking you when they called you ‘phat’ last week.”

He followed her into the kitchen. “They might have saved me the embarrassment by just saying ‘thank you’ instead of singing that song.”

As she put groceries away, he sat at the table appreciating the contradiction of her delicate frame and decisive movements. Even when he was supposed to be listening to her, he often found himself moved to an internal distance, where he would appreciate how her mouth formed words, how her eyes lighted, how her skin flushed. She sometimes stopped speaking in an effort to get his attention, believing his mind was elsewhere, when it was entirely focused on her.

She carried the teapot and cups to the table and sat down. “Father went for a walk about half-an-hour ago.”

“I wondered where he was. Wait. He went out in this weather?”

“Said he was going to look for angels in the snow.”

“So what do you think of our new parochial vicar?”

“Compassionate and funny. He has really bad taste in movies, but makes great cocoa.”

“I’ve spent every Mass and lunch with him for a week, and I couldn’t tell you that.”

“Well, we had a few late nights.” She paused at the change in the music. “I do love those violins.”

“Who doesn’t love Baroque?”

“Is this Mozart?”

“Oh my, no.” He laughed when she rolled her eyes. She had always declined an invitation to share his music–until recently, when she finally agreed to listen to a few of his favorite pieces. Trying to decide how best to educate her had preoccupied half his week. She knew a great deal about art, so he thought he would begin with a comparison. “What’s your favorite kind of painting?”

“The Pre-Raphaelites. Remember? You called them ‘decadent,’ not that I’m at all sure what that means coming from a man who loves Bougeureau.”

Her sharp eyebrow remained arched, and he accepted her scolding with good humor. “Oh yes, all that passion and self-referential honesty, if I recall your lecture to me. I still don’t connect you with such…melodrama.”

“Melodrama?” A sly smile spread across her lips. “I suspect you hide an unhappy Ingres inside you, Charles.”

He knew something about art history, too. “You think I’m a frustrated romantic?”

“Hardly frustrated. You pour it out over everything you do. Like this thing with the Hewitts. How did your meeting with the Gottschalks go?”

Charles leaned back in his chair and scratched his thinning crown of black hair as he peered at her over the black rims of his glasses. He took pride in his consistent lack of color, always wearing a black clerical shirt and slacks, along with black socks and loafers. “It’s what you thought. They’re probably the ones who complained to the bishop. Have you mentioned anything to Father?”

“No, I thought you would want to explain the situation to him, but I don’t think it will be a problem, not from what I can tell anyway.” The music distracted her again. “Is this still Scarlatti?”

“How can you know so much about art and not care about the music?”

“I love all kinds of music. I just have no taste and don’t want any, you know. Better to be simple. I learned my lesson with wine. I used to love my nine dollar Napa Pinot Noir, and now I can’t drink anything unless it’s from the Russian River Valley–all because I spent time educating my taste buds.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a little sophistication.”

“My bank account disagrees.”

“You’ll catch on quick enough. Romantic composers are a lot like the painters. They’re easy to spot. All that lush sound.” After removing his glasses, he held them up to the light and wiped them with a napkin. “Augmented chords, diminished chords, things the Church had forbidden for centuries. I agree Tchaikovsky’s beautiful, but Wagner? Mussorgsky?”

“What’s wrong with Mussorgsky?”

After adjusting his glasses, he answered her with his own arched eyebrow. “How long did Father say he would be gone?”

“Didn’t.”

Charles left the kitchen to raise the volume on Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

***

When Raphael opened the door, he was immersed in sound until Charles turned the volume down.

After removing his icy boots and coat, Raphael set them on the stand by the door. He used his foot to push the door snake back to block the draft, and rubbing his hands to warm them, he made his way to the kitchen.

“How was your walk?” asked Charles, following behind.

“Chilly.”

“I haven’t even thought about what to cook.” Lillian set a cup of tea on the table for Raphael. “I have some pasta sauce left over. Light wine, lots of garlic. That okay?” When they had agreed, she began heating a pot of water and returned to the table with a box of matches. “Should we light the candles now?”

Raphael nodded, and Charles began the ceremony. “The second candle of Advent is the Candle of Peace. Peace is a gift we must prepare for, given to us when we turn to God in faith. Our hope is in him and his son, Jesus Christ, and we light this candle to remind us that his coming brings peace to all who trust in him.”

Charles lit two candles. “Lord, set our hearts ablaze like John the Baptist, that we may we bring light and love to all we meet, that the darkness of sin and fear may be overcome. May we love one another in your peace, never to be separated again, for your peace is everlasting life. In Christ’s name we ask this. Amen.”

Charles and Lillian left the table again to prepare dinner. He went to the cupboards and took out plates and glasses, silverware and napkins and set the table as she heated the sauce. They glided around each other as easily as water around rocks. Once, when she dropped her stirring spoon, he kept her from kneeling with a hand to her shoulder, as he returned it to her and then wiped the floor.

Raphael dunked his teabag and watched the routine. How odd it seemed to him that two such isolated people should possess this gentle affinity, especially when they refused to acknowledge it even existed.

Lillian set a plate of hot bread on the table, and minutes later, the three were sitting before a pile of steaming spaghetti and a pot of savory red sauce. They ate in silence until Raphael abruptly announced, “Our Lord came to make controversy, both when he befriended outcasts and when he became one himself.”

“That’s exactly what I say, Father.”

Charles glanced around. “Did I miss the conversation?”

“It seems I have.”

Charles recognized the question though Raphael had not asked it. “You’ve heard I agreed to baptize a special needs child. She’s three, newly adopted by the Hewitts.”

Raphael leaned forward. “But why is it a problem?”

“The Hewitts are a lesbian couple.”

“But why is it a problem?”

Charles offered a smile of relief. “The bishop’s worried, doesn’t want a controversy.” Charles pointed his finger like a gun at Raphael. “Controversy, right. That’s what you meant, but where did you hear about it?”

Despite his indignation, Charles seemed more wounded than angry. His surprise at the resistance to the baptism showed his true character, and the years of managing people had not made him cynical. The unexpected encounter with genuine humility warmed Raphael, who winked at Lillian before saying, “It’s what I don’t hear that would surprise you.”

Lillian stretched her hand across the table to get Charles’ attention. “You’re right to trust your heart. The bishop is only concerned about prestige.”

“You know it’s not that simple.” Charles set his hand on Lillian’s. “It’s about confusing people. It’s about a slippery slope that might take the diocese somewhere it shouldn’t go.”

“No, it’s simple. It really is. ‘Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor. Then come, follow me.’ What part of that means preoccupy yourself with how everyone else is living?”

Charles squeezed Lillian’s hand and returned to his spaghetti.

“You’re not going to let the bishop cow you, right?”

“Lil, if it’s the last thing I do as a priest, I’ll see that child baptized.”

“What does that mean?” Lillian’s green eyes took on a hard light.

Charles feigned confusion, though it was obvious to Raphael that he had meant to seed this discussion. “Just that it’s important to me.”

“No, you meant something else. Are you being transferred?”

Charles shook his head.

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“Lil, really…”

She left the table.

“I should have told her.” Charles picked at his spaghetti. “I guess I let it sound like this is just a stop for you.”

“You could tell her now.” Raphael gestured for him to follow Lillian, but Charles returned to spinning his fork.

Third Week of Advent

“What’s that?”

Charles looked up in surprise. Raphael stood at his office door. “Nothing. A book of art.”

Raphael took a seat. “What kind of art?” Charles slid the book across the desktop, but Raphael did not need to look for the title of the color plate. “Do you like the Pre-Raphaelites?”

“This is the only one I like, and it’s rather maudlin.”

“You think so?” Raphael bent close to study the painting. “A lovely story. ‘The ending of the tale ye see; the Lover draws anigh the tree, and takes the branch, and takes the rose, that love and he so dearly chose’.”

Charles laughed. “Right, maudlin. You know the story?”

“The painting and the verse were inspired by Chaucer. Here is the Pilgrim,” Raphael pointed at the cloaked figure on the left, “who holds the hand of winged Love and stands in awe of the Rose.” He pointed at the impassive woman seated on a throne-like hedge.

Charles was nodding absently.

“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. Rather like a fairy tale, but glum.”

Raphael flipped the book closed to see the title. “If you don’t like it, why get a whole book on it?”

“Trying to see what Lillian sees.”

“You want to see as she sees?”

Charles paused as if unsure what Raphael meant. “This is her favorite art. I’m trying to figure out why.”

“She likes it because it’s beautiful. That’s what the Pre-Raphaelites were all about. They were aesthetes reacting against stifling academic procedures, the kind Bougeureau embraced.”

“I see she’s been sharing her opinions with you, but you don’t know her very well. She’s not an aesthete. She’s quite–I don’t know–practical.”

“You bring groceries to her each week. You bring communion to her because she never steps beyond the boundaries of her yard. Have you read her poetry? She’s visionary and sensual. She’s not practical.”

As Charles’ brow puckered in thought, Raphael wondered at the enormous blind spot in the man. “You’re the practical one,” said Raphael. “You’re the ethicist. That’s why you don’t see the beauty in the ‘The Heart of the Rose.’ But there may be hope for you yet.”

“You like this work, too?”

“The reason for hope is that you see the beauty in Lillian.”

Taking the book back, Charles flipped through a few pages. “She’s been a good friend. I’ll miss our conversations.”

“Why did you tell her I was your parochial vicar? Leaving the priesthood is a serious decision, one you must have struggled with for years.”

“She wouldn’t understand. She loves the Church and can’t imagine a priest being a man. I didn’t want to burden her with my troubles.”

“Lying is a burden.”

“I didn’t lie. Besides, she’ll have you once I’m gone.”

“I’m not in love with her.”

Charles stood, hands clenching into fists as he leaned on his desk. “Forgive my bluntness, Father, but I don’t think this is your business, and you’re wrong. I’m not leaving because of Lillian. She doesn’t even know how I feel.” As he said it, his eyes widened with surprise, and he stepped back, bumping into his bookshelf. He squared his shoulders. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Why are you leaving?”

“I can no longer be effective in an increasingly sectarian and reactionary church moving away from Vatican II.”

“Yes, that is, word-for-word, what you wrote to the bishop. But if you leave, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant to the fight. If that’s your reason for leaving, you should stay and use what authority you have.”

As if worn out, Charles closed his eyes. “I’ve stopped asking why I’m leaving because the real question has become, why have I stayed?” He stabbed the desktop with his finger. “This is why. This baptism is why I’ve stayed. Look, I spent my first year in a suburban parish, listening to parishioners bicker about parking lot space, and my first church was a rural parish noteworthy only for how many still took communion by mouth rather than by hand. After twenty-two years, I still find I’m just facilitating men and women who gauge their spiritual progress by how much better they follow rules than their neighbors. I believe God is pushing me into this conflict, demanding I do something, and if I leave the priesthood with nothing else to my credit, at least I’ll have had one worthwhile battle.”

“Do you really think God pushes and demands and encourages battles?”

“I have a Mass to do.”

Raphael accompanied Charles to the church, where he found a packed house for Sunday morning Mass, perhaps ninety families. Three families had stayed away in protest, their regular seats near the front empty, and Raphael guessed they would not return until the new pastor arrived.

The Hewitt women stood at the back of the church holding their toddler, who appeared appropriately angelic in her white dress.

Under the inspiring presence of Raphael, neither the girl nor her parents noticed the many judgmental eyes appraising them from the pews as the tiny girl was born again through the power of the Holy Spirit.

***

Charles kicked through the powder along the highway. After Mass, he had spent some time congratulating the Hewitts and then met with several families who had complaints about what they had just seen. He usually found conflict with parishioners emotionally draining, but this had been invigorating. It was Gaudete Sunday, and he had brought one more soul into communion with the saints. He felt as joyful as the day.

After skipping up Lillian’s steps, which she had not shoveled, he knocked. She was usually conscientious about shoveling, insisting she liked the exercise. He overheard loud music inside, so he knocked one more time before opening the door.

A modern song with drums and repetitive lyrics assaulted him, and he quickly reached the player and turned off the music. He looked around and shouted for Lillian, but she did not respond.

He returned to the kitchen and peered out the window across the serene winter terrain, where only cemetery headstones and deer tracks broke the even field of snow.

Lillian stomped down the hallway, wearing a flowered nightgown and shouting through angry tears. When he came to greet her, she brushed him aside and turned the music back on. It thundered, the powerful base buzzing as it overloaded the speakers. Charles turned the volume down, fighting Lillian’s hands to do so.

He took her by the shoulders. “What happened, Lil?”

“You had no right to turn it off.”

“It hurt my ears.”

“Then leave. Why are you even here?”

“Why are you crying?”

“You turned off the music. You had no right. If you listened maybe you’d like it, too, but you never listen.”

Charles stepped back and looked around but did not find any tissues. “Come, sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.”

“You need to calm down.”

“I don’t want to calm down.”

“Lillian, just sit in the kitchen with me.” He guided her to a chair and started the tea kettle. “Can I get you a tissue? Where are they?”

“Bathroom.”

When he found the bathroom, he took the box of tissues from the sink. In the few years he had been visiting her, he had never been in this part of her house, and he lingered brief seconds admiring the potpourri and the painting in her hallway.

Back in the kitchen, he set the box in front of her and prepared their tea. “Not that one,” she said as he took a box from the cupboard. He set the box of spice tea back and reached for the Earl Grey.

When he was sitting beside her, he asked, “Are you feeling better?”

She nodded, tissue to her nose with one hand and the other dunking her teabag.

This was not the first time he found her distraught. A half-dozen times over the years, she embarked on an irrational episode, accusing him of some presumption or thoughtlessness. He refused to take the accusations personally, assuming his presence merely provided a safe way to vent a particularly difficult day. Since her mood always resolved itself quickly, he learned simply to wait her out.

After a time, he asked, “Where’s Father?”

She set her teabag down. “He brought communion and then said he was going back to the church.”

“I haven’t seen him since lunch.”

“How did it go, the baptism?”

He spread his arms expansively. “It was wonderful. I’ve never felt more alive, Lil. I made a difference today.”

“I know how much that means to you.”

“It wouldn’t mean as much without being able to tell you.” His revelation preceded an awkward silence. “But I’m being insensitive. I’m sorry about the music.”

“I’m fine, really.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You never want to talk about it.”

“No, I don’t.”

He nodded, his jaw flexing as he reminded himself to be patient. “Okay, how about I make an early dinner? I know you don’t believe me, but one day, oh, one day…” He caricatured blowing a kiss from his fingertips. “However, tonight, you’ll have to settle for…” He went through the cupboards, found a can, and set it firmly on the counter. “Tomato soup.”

Lillian laughed behind her tissue.

He collected ingredients for grilled cheese sandwiches and had dinner on the table when Raphael arrived. After shedding his winter clothes, he greeted Lillian and Charles, but declined an offer to eat. “I thought it would be a good time to get my things together and settle into the rectory.”

“The remodelers haven’t finished dry-walling your room,” said Charles.

“But they did. I was in it just minutes ago, and the fresh paint smells amazing.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, then.”

Raphael drew Lillian to her feet and hugged her. “Thank you for your hospitality these weeks, Lil. You made me feel welcome, and I’ll miss our pajama parties.” He kissed her cheek. “I hope I can visit.”

Lillian rested her hand against his cheek. “Of course. I’ll have the popcorn handy.”

“And dinner?”

“Absolutely.”

Raphael nodded at Charles and went to pack his things.

“Pajama parties?” asked Charles as they both sat back down.

Lillian let go a hearty laugh. “He sleeps less than I do. We started rendezvousing at two a.m. I can’t tell you the bags of popcorn we went through.”

He tried to appear amused. “You never mentioned this before.”

“I thought I did.” Lillian began to eat her soup.

Raphael was too good to be true–an attractive, middle-aged man with unnaturally golden-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. He was also unusually attentive, giving every person he spoke with the impression that they were the most interesting person in his day. He never lost his temper, had endless patience, and offered no words of criticism about anyone. Charles did not trust the man and he was beginning not to like him, either. “I suppose it’s a good thing he’s moving back into the rectory, then.”

“Why a good thing?”

“You know how people talk.”

“I don’t think I do.” She frowned. “Do you suppose they talk about us?”

“We’ve never given reason for gossip.”

“Neither have Father and I.”

“I didn’t mean you. I like him well enough. He’s just a little, I don’t know…charming.”

“Charming?”

“They don’t teach ‘charm’ at seminary. It’s not something a priest needs to cultivate, especially not with a lonely woman.”

“A lonely woman?” Lillian scooted her chair back. “Is that how you see me?”

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

“Maybe you did.”

Raphael returned from his room with his suitcase. “Thanks again, Lillian. Father, I’ll see you at the rectory later, and I’ll be glad to look over your Christmas homily, if you still want me to.” He winked at Lillian and left the house.

Charles began to stir his soup and felt Lillian’s stare, but he would not meet it.

“Why do you come here every Sunday, Charles?”

Charles felt his chest tighten and the words threatened to spill from his lips. His heart struggled with his good sense, and he settled for a compromise. “Lil, you don’t realize, do you? You were like finding a diamond. The folks here are friendly, even when they hate you, but they’re so simple. I look forward to our Sundays together. Haven’t you ever noticed how I store up everything from the week to share with you?”

“So why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?”

“I should have.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve spoken with my brother in Kansas City. I’ll probably move in with him for awhile.” After another long silence, he finally admitted, “I’m a leaf in the wind, and it’s a very strong and ugly wind, Lil.” He pulled the white tab from his clerical shirt and set it on the table. “I need to answer the questions people bring to me with integrity. I can’t do it wearing this collar. It doesn’t fit anymore.”

“Integrity? You mean something like ‘passion and self-referential honesty’?”

He accepted her point with a short laugh before his humor soured. “You’ve always been careful not to personalize too much, but one more appropriate silence, one more careful avoidance of how I feel about anything other than a sonata or a homily may send me to a bell tower with a rifle.”

“A bell tower?” Her concerned expression eased after a moment. “I don’t know what to ask next, but by all means, just give me a minute to think of something.”

“You’re making fun of me now.”

“No, Charles. Well, yes, but it’s just that you’re wound so tight, you make me look normal.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lil.”

“I’m completely dysfunctional.”

Her twinkling eyes enchanted him as they managed to deepen with compassion and remain mirthful at the same time. He lost his usual reserve and blurted, “I just want to be a man. I want you just to see me as a man.”

Her smile shrunk and her eyes searched his. Her reaction of complete surprise told him all he did not wish to know. He pocketed his tab and went for his coat.

Lillian stopped him. “You can’t go. We haven’t lit the rose candle.”

His cheeks burned, and he needed to get somewhere he could breathe, but he returned to the table.

She shoved matches into his hands. He avoided her eyes and stared down at the wreath, focusing on the role that had insulated him for two decades and hoping it would last at least one more evening. “Today we light the third candle of Advent, the Candle of Joy. This day reminds us of what Mary felt when Gabriel told her of the child that would be born to her. We light this candle to remember that he is the bringer of true and everlasting joy.” As he lit three candles, he prayed, “Lord, help us prepare our hearts to receive your son. Help us to hear and do your word. We ask this in the name of Jesus our Lord. Amen.”

He thanked her without glancing her way and went again for his coat and boots. As he left, closing the door behind him, the cold air shocked his face and allowed his lungs to expand. He walked steadily toward the rectory, the snow no longer powder soft but crunching under his boots.

***

Raphael slipped through the house like a breeze, wondering if any music were playing. He could only imagine Lillian’s house with the sound of music, whether violins or guitars, horns or drums. He chose to move through the rooms and hallway as he had done for several weeks, though no walls could block him in his natural state.

He glided alongside Lillian as she slept, finding her dreams rather odd but pleasant—lake fishing in the summer with her brother. He engaged her dream, roaming through its story, still in search of her prayer, but he did not find it, so he made his way to the kitchen where three candles retained a faint essence of fire.

He coaxed the fire back to life. Then he fed it with thoughts of an inferno, until hot wax streamed onto the table and the wick touched the brittle pine. White smoke rose in fitful puffs until flames erupted.

As the fire engulfed the table, Raphael went to Lillian’s bedroom. He made a pine branch tap the window, until it shattered the glass. She screamed with fright just as smoke began to roll into her bedroom.

When she raced to her door, intent on saving her possessions, Raphael used all his ethereal will to hold her back. Raphael recognized confusion and fear, but there was another emotion present, a much darker one, and that dark mood seemed to take hold of her. She watched the smoke fill her room.

Now, instead of holding her back, Raphael began to push on her. She fell backward onto the floor and lay unmoving, her lips speaking something and her mind swirling with images of her family. Light slowly filled her mind as the smoke surrounded her body.

Raphael realized he had miscalculated her reaction terribly, though he knew from long experience that unpredictability was the most serious liability when caring for people. He threw open the window and dropped her into the snow. He followed and then carried her some distance from the house, where he left her sitting against a tree. He raced across the field toward the rectory as a sheriff’s car arrived with siren wailing.

Fourth Week of Advent

After receiving a phone call, Charles drove fifteen miles to the hospital in Maquoketa. Lillian had been under observation without any serious injuries, although she remained in a state of confusion. The attending physician would not release her without someone to accompany her.

Parting the curtain from around her bed in the emergency room, Charles found Lillian peaceful, her eyes closed as she breathed steadily through a mask.

“Lil?” She opened her eyes. “Are you all right?” He squeezed her arm. “The nurse told me there was a fire. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Father Bristol?”

Charles turned to greet a young doctor. The woman’s brisk strides brought her to his side where she shook his hand. “Doctor Wendt. Ms. McKenney is very lucky. The house had no smoke detectors. A few minutes more, and she may have had serious injuries. She has some bronchial irritation from smoke, but we’re not seeing significant swelling. She’s been rather confused–knows who she is but has been going on about angels. I’d like to watch her for another hour before discharging her. I understand she has no family. Is there a place she can stay?”

Trying to make sense of the doctor’s rapid summary, he stuttered before saying, “Of course she can stay at the rectory. Was the house destroyed?”

“I think so, though I only overheard the sheriff talking to fire rescue. I’m not sure if any of them are still around.” The doctor commented again how lucky Lillian was, before leaving them alone.

Charles pulled up a chair, sat, and rested his hands on Lillian’s arm as he offered a silent prayer. He noticed she was watching him. “Would you like to pray together?”

When her eyelids drooped, he squeezed her arm and settled in to wait.

***

Charles watched Lillian carefully for any sign of anxiety. She had not stepped away from her home in over fifteen years, so he assumed she would be unable to function, especially after having everything taken away so violently and so permanently.

But she quite methodically did all she was told, although she remained subdued. She wore scrubs and sneakers given her by a sympathetic nurse, the oversized clothing only adding to her pitiable appearance. He thought of offering her a soothing bath, but decided she needed sleep more.

He showed her to a room on the second floor of the rectory, stopping first at a closet and scooping up sheets and a blanket. Her new room was hardly bigger than the full-size bed, desk, and dresser inside and was heated by a steam radiator that created condensation on the window. Walnut stained woodwork contrasted sharply with white-textured walls. A small double-hung window, also framed in walnut, appeared painted shut where the white ledge met the old sash.

Charles made the bed and fluffed the pillow. “You should get more rest, and I’ll see what I can do about getting some clothes that fit you. The bathroom is down the hall, and I’ll leave towels there for you. Nothing fancy, you know.”

She crawled under the blanket, and he stood for a time at the door, wondering how she felt, until he heard someone knocking around on the first floor. He closed her door and made his way downstairs to find Raphael setting a large box on the couch in the den. The pungent smell of burnt plastic filled the air.

“This is all that survived. No clothes, I’m afraid, but Sister Melinda was bringing some from Maquoketa. All I have here are some books, a paperweight, coffee mugs, a few records.” He pulled out a white cardboard album cover, edge worn to gray, and tipped it until a black-vinyl record rolled into his hand. “This room is probably the only place in the county where an album can be played.” He set the record player’s needle onto the middle of the spinning vinyl.

Charles was intrigued by the sound–unfamiliar, though his trained ear could tell the era clearly. The piano was brooding and nostalgic; it was Romantic and probably Russian. “Who is it?”

“Mussorgsky. This song is Reverie.”

From his reading, Charles knew the piece. He wondered why Lillian had never mentioned owning it.

“The composer wrote this after his mother died, but it’s been preserved with his Crimean music. He was a resentful alcoholic and rarely finished what he started. He wanted to relate art to common experiences and believed form and content are opposites, but those who finished his work did not. Such is the trouble with allowing others to speak for you. This intimate tone-poem became an ode to nationalism.”

Charles watched the door long after Raphael had left, wondering if the strangely intense man was making a point. The album continued to play repeatedly the rest of the afternoon, while Charles sat in his office across the hall completing paperwork.

Early in the evening as he was working on his Christmas homily, he sensed a presence and looked up to see Lillian standing at his door. She held her white blanket wrapped around her.

“How are you feeling?” He left his desk.

“What are you listening to?”

“I’m afraid there was only one box of your things that survived the fire.”

She followed him into the den, and he brought the box to her.

“It’s not mine.” Her jaw flexed.

“Whose, then?”

“Lew’s.”

“I’ll turn it off.”

“No. Let it play. This was one of his favorites.” She tightened the blanket around her. “Music can change the color of the day, can’t it? It was all orange this morning.”

“What color is it now?”

“Green.”

She had told him very little about her family and usually bristled at any questions. “Odd for a boy to like classical.”

“He played the violin. My father loved symphonies, so we heard them all the time.”

“Ah, then you know more than you let on.”

“Not really. I preferred the radio and made fun of Lew–a little old man stuck inside a boy’s body.”

Her eyes shone as she spoke about her family, so Charles encouraged her with more questions. “What about your mother?”

“She liked anything you could dance to. She had this Petula Clark record she would play over and over. When we were little, she taught us the words to ‘Downtown.’ She died when I was ten.”

“How old was Lew?”

“Fourteen.” Her smile faded. “Without Mom to calm things down, Lew and Dad just got worse and worse. They argued all the time. Dad got red-faced once and hit him, said he lost his wife and nothing was bad as that. Lew threw a chair through the window and said he lost his mother and that was worse. They spent the next four years arguing about who Mom hurt more by dying.” Lillian lost her breath. She pressed her hand to her chest and bent forward as she began to cry. “I guess Lew won.”

He took her in his arms. As he stroked her hair, she buried her face in his shoulder, and the more she cried, the more tightly he held her.

Her crying deepened as twenty-years of grief seemed to well up at once. “Everything hurts. Oh my God, everything hurts.” He felt her wet tears through his shirt and found it difficult to understand much of what she said until she sobbed, “Why does everything have to hurt so much?”

He wanted to tell her everything would be all right, but he was not sure it would. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but he was not sure that would comfort her. He found he had no answer, so he simply held her, thinking that maybe in the silence, she would find her own.

After her crying slowed and her gentle shaking stilled, her grip on him eased. She looked up at him, her eyes bloodshot and puffy, the radiant green dulled with pain. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“That makes two of us. I mean…” Only he was not sure what he meant. “All we can do is hold onto our faith.”

“I guess it’s about all I have left.”

After he tucked several curly strands behind her ear, he surrendered to his compulsion, touching his lips to hers. The unfamiliar impress of her skin startled him, and his heart raced. He worried that this was not at all what she wanted and drew back. “Is this all right?” She offered no reply and waited for him to continue.

He was on fire. A place inside him burned like a cut so new, he was not sure how deep it went. Nor was he sure why he hurt when he also felt such elation.

Regret began to dawn on him, a regret he did not expect and no one ever talked about, not in all the love poetry he had ever read. As he trespassed this threshold, admitting his love and pursuing his desire, there at the heart of his devotion was a small but undeniable sadness. His nature had brought him into this profession, one that dealt with issues of life and death, purpose and meaning on a daily basis, so perhaps it was not unusual that, as a new hunger for life awakened every nerve in his body, he experienced with painful certainty that he would one day lose her forever.

“We’ve wasted so much time,” he whispered as he kissed her again.

She seemed to know what he was thinking and held him tighter.

As they kissed, they bumped and tangled until they finally submerged entirely beneath her blanket, and not until Raphael cleared his throat did they realize they were not alone. Charles stared up at him from the couch, blinking away the erotic fog that had him trying to remember where he was. Lillian found clarity much sooner. She leapt to her feet, taking the blanket with her as she raced upstairs. When Raphael took a seat on the far end of the couch, Charles braced himself for an argument.

“They haven’t found anything else. The rest is a total loss, but she should be able to count on some insurance money. She could rebuild. Do you think she will?” Raphael nodded as if Charles had answered, though he said nothing. “You can expect her to be insecure. She’s dealing with a lot, as you can imagine.” He rose to leave and pointed across the room at the pine standing in the corner. “That’s going to be a nice Christmas tree.”

“That’s it?” Charles demanded, rising to his feet, fighting a shaky feeling in his knees. “You’re not going to make a comment about what you saw?”

Raphael paused at the den’s entryway for a moment. “Maybe just that you should take things slowly.” He nodded as if satisfied with his remark before retiring to his room for the night.

Christmastide: Feast of the Nativity

Raphael left behind his life as parish priest on Christmas Eve. It was a tradition that none of the angels should remain enfleshed through the feast day of the Lord’s incarnation. So he disposed of his possessions and shed his body with a mixture of relief and regret. He wandered through the rectory, experiencing the phantom-like memories of the many lives that had passed through the venerable building. He took a winding route on his way to Lillian’s room, quite aware of the old saying that men go where angels fear to tread.

Unlike many in Heaven, Raphael found human compulsion rather charming, so when he entered Lillian’s room, he was pleased to see two bodies wriggling under her blanket. Charles had not taken things slowly.

Raphael watched love made physical and wondered, as he occasionally did, if he should not try the experience. After all, God’s continual creation sustains the world at every instant; he had a reason for putting flesh on spirit, although Raphael had never learned what that was.

The window rattled from a strong gust of wind. A winter storm had moved in, but Raphael knew the rattling was a call for him to hurry along. Time did not matter in Heaven, but Raphael could not prove that given the frequent prodding he received.

He threw open the window. Lillian gasped in surprise as a cold wind billowed in, pushing a cloud of snow across the bed. As Charles leapt naked from under the blanket to shut the window, Raphael drew near to Lillian, searching one last time for her prayer, but he still could not find it. Saddened by the thought that her prayers had died with her brother, he whispered a word to her soul, and then he was gone.

***

Charles rushed back to the bed and hugged Lillian for warmth as his body overcame the cold left by the wind.

“I couldn’t open that window earlier today,” said Lillian with circumspection. “It was painted shut.”

“It’s a strong storm.” Charles began to kiss her neck. She smelled like autumn–like licorice and wood. He reached his hand to her breast. “You’re so soft, softer than anyone.” His tension erupted from him in a short giggle. “Not that I would know.”

He stretched onto his side, one arm under her neck and the other sliding to her hip. When she scooted close and rested her leg over his, her belly pressed against his erection, and his hips reflexively pressed back. He stared into her eyes, though the dim room kept them mostly in shadow. “You’re the first woman I’ve ever seen naked, except for the Blessed Virgin.”

“You’ve seen Mother Mary naked?”

“And Venus and Psyche and some nymphs.”

“Oh.” She rolled her eyes. “Your awful Bougeureau.”

“You’re a snob, my dear, and you’re going to have to learn to appreciate him. I don’t own much, but I have five prints that I plan to frame some day.”

“The garage will do fine.” When her fingers crawled across his hairy chest, he lost his breath, but then her smile fell away. “What are we talking about?”

“I love you, Lillian.” He kissed her, tasting her breath and then spreading her lips with his own in order to taste more. His hands brushed along her backside. He reached his hand to her inner thigh and slowly moved between her legs. When her leg lifted slightly, he felt faint, and a sweat broke across his neck. His hesitant fingers explored her pubic hair, before meeting her heat. “Dear God,” he muttered, surprised at how unbelievably soft she was.

Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, leaving one hand raking through his dark hair and the other stroking his broad back. He had never allowed himself to spend much time wondering what a woman felt like, but he doubted he could ever have truly imagined it anyway.

The nightlight, low near the door, provided just enough illumination to see her face. Her eyes were weak and glistened. In the dimness, he could not see the green, but he saw the passion. His fingers rubbed between her labia, and as he fondled the small lump of her clitoris, she closed her eyes and her nostrils flared.

She clenched him in a tight embrace, dragging her smooth face against his stubbled cheek. Her hips began a rhythm against his hand, and when she brushed across his erection, he began to ache. He tried to penetrate her with his fingers, but she moved them back, whispering for him not to stop, and her freely-expressed desire liberated his own.

His kisses were hot and breathy as his lips fought his lungs for attention. He trembled as a wave of heat sweated from him again, and he lost himself to the friction. Too late, he tried to redirect his thoughts, but he came with a cry, turning his face into the pillow and moaning until he drooled.

As soon as he gathered his scattered senses together, he began to apologize and did not stop until she pressed her hand to his mouth. She trailed her fingers down his torso until they reached his penis.

“I should clean up,” he whispered.

“No.”

“Aren’t you—“

“No.”

Her hand gripped his softening penis tightly, squeezing and pulling as if to test the limits of its movement. Although he tried to recall all the pieces of information he had received over the years, he really had no idea what he was supposed to do until she coaxed his hand back between her legs. He returned to stroking her clitoris, trying his best not to lose it in all the wetness. When he realized how aroused she was, his erection began to return to life.

She clung to him, her body flushed and pulse racing. When he touched a particularly sensitive spot, she shuddered, and her rocking grew more rapid. “Right there,” she whispered. Her moans rose in pitch until she shouted and strangulated his throbbing erection with her unthinking hand. He was nearly blind with pleasure when she fell limp beside him.

Wondering only briefly if he had satisfied her, he tried to roll her over. “Now?” he asked, impatient to be inside her.

She pushed him to his back and climbed on top. He held her hips as she settled her wetness on him. She slid back and forth across the sensitive belly of his penis until he felt delirious, and then she curled her hips forward so that he could slide into her.

He lifted his hips, but she withdrew, and though she tried to take him in again, she stopped with a small groan and finally gave up. “I’m sorry. It hurts. It’s been so long. It hurts.”

He hugged her as she lay on top of him, his body still pulsing with arousal, his will struggling to overcome the needy ache. He wanted to bury himself inside her, but he also wanted every moment with her to be pleasurable, so he silently talked himself down. He lay focusing on his breathing—the expanding of his chest, the stretch of muscle, the rush of air through his nose, the rapid but steady pulse that began to slow down, breath-by-breath…

“Let’s put up the tree.”

He stirred at the voice.

“Charles, wake up.”

He opened his eyes to see Lillian’s eager eyes framed by handfuls of red curls. He thought he had slept only minutes, but she had turned on the lights and was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that she must have scrounged from his closet. “You want to decorate the tree now?” he asked.

She tossed clothes at him. “When did you want to do it?”

“Tomorrow. Is it tomorrow?”

“I’ve been decorating my tree alone for fifteen years.” When he saw her enthusiasm dwindle, he put on the clothes and followed her downstairs.

At seven-feet tall, the pine tree he bought at a charity auction stood as a splendid compliment to the den’s fireplace. He opened the boxes of lights and ornaments, and as he began to hang them, Lillian made hot cocoa and played an album of carols she found among his stack of records.

As the night became morning, she sang along with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and asked Charles questions about each ornament. He had been collecting them since his seminary days.

“I’m sorry you lost yours,” he told her. “I know they meant a lot to you, especially the calendar.”

“Thank you. It’s all right.” She shook her head and sat down, fiddling with a silvered glass ball.

“Is there anything I can do?”

She smiled and shook her head, but when she started, “I found Lew that day,” he realized the thing he could do was listen.

“He was dead,” she continued. “You always think of blood as a fluid, but it was more like dried paint, like something plastic and fake. It didn’t seem real. It never seemed real, even now, and yet I’ve been stuck there in that room for twenty years. I’ve stayed there with Lew all this time because I didn’t want him to be alone. Isn’t that ridiculous? I didn’t think God would be in such an awful place, because if he were there, how could that have happened? But I was wrong. He was there with Lew, even when it happened. I just didn’t want Lew to be alone, that’s all. And I know he’s not. I know that now.”

Charles felt a pain in his chest, and he closed his eyes as it tightened. His sense of loneliness seemed suddenly overwhelming, as if it might suffocate him at any moment.

Lillian squeezed his arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry, Lil. That’s such a terrible place to be.”

“It shouldn’t have taken me so long to get over it.”

“You’re not over it.”

She smiled and then her eyes filled again with tears. “No. I don’t suppose I am. When will I be?”

Charles shook his head. “I’ve known people angry at God for less.”

“I’m not angry. I’ll never understand what he did, but I won’t diminish Lew by blaming someone else for it. It was his choice. Lew didn’t want to change. He didn’t want to give up control. We have to allow God to keep creating us.”

Charles had been waiting for a sign and missed the whisper–the whisper of Lillian’s loneliness, the whisper of an abiding love he had been denying. The fantasy of a wholly average life had been more frightening than contending with his sense of failing at vows made twenty years ago. He had been too busy following a list of rules like the many parishioners he once condemned, but he realized his love for Lillian was his love for God; one need not be a rival to the other. He could serve God best by loving her completely.

As if she had heard his thoughts, Lillian said, “He whispered to me. He told me my vigil’s over. Lew doesn’t need me.”

Charles handed her the treetop star. “I do.”

Standing on her toes, she managed to plant the star. Afterward, they plugged in the lights and shared a prayer of thanksgiving.

Christmastide: Feast of the Epiphany

Although Raphael left the parishioners of St. Mary of the Angels Parish to ponder their mysterious impersonator–a tale that, like most, would grow in the telling, his thoughts did not stray far from Lillian. He continued to listen, still bemused by her missing prayer, and on the last day of Christmas, he heard an unfamiliar plea coming from that familiar place.

He arrived in the evening hours to find Lillian had made a Magi cake, a sweet dessert with a touch of sour cream and cinnamon. Music played and a decorated tree twinkled nearby, and though Raphael lacked any ability to indulge in the sensuality around him, he was nonetheless aware of the heated affections arising from Charles and Lillian as they embraced on the couch.

With their food finished, they shared wine and a discussion that inflamed their hearts and their bodies, and later, Lillian writhed in ecstatic union with Charles. As they raced toward bliss, becoming as one flesh, Raphael finally heard it–a tiny voice speaking from Lillian’s heart, the sound of hope, a prayer.

Raphael felt great relief. He was no longer needed, but he paused to share the moment of grace.

Though bonds of love and desire held Charles and Lillian together, they still faced a difficult future, but Raphael knew they would soon have another reason and even more love with which to meet that future.

In a few months, after they were married and living in Kansas City, Lillian would contemplate a change in her career from composing collections of romantic poetry to creating enchanting children’s stories, and Charles would contemplate becoming a “father” in a way he had never imagined.

END

Magical realism, erotic romance. Copyright © 2006 Teresa Wymore. All Rights Reserved.

What would give light must endure the burning. –Viktor Frankl

Cassie was still awake when Watts returned. She tightened her robe against the memory of his last visit and stepped away from the door. “You said you didn’t believe me.”

Watts walked into the apartment, hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets. He studied her face and the blood on the floor before he sat down at the table.

Her body began to tremble. She touched her lips, still bruised and swollen. She told herself she wasn’t afraid. After a few deep breaths and a moment to think, she decided she didn’t want to think. She wanted to believe everything would be all right. Only Watts allowed her that. That’s why she had opened her door to him when she was alive. He seemed to have all the answers. Sociopaths were like that.

She sat down across from him and willed her body to stop its fearful shiver. She straightened and gave him a hard look.

A moment of silence followed before he said, “I’m a practical man.”

“Here’s practical: when the nation adopts the Integrid, they’ll know right where you are.”

He shrugged, amusement replacing his probing gaze. “That’s progress.”

“We’ve gotten used to it.” Cassie brushed a trickle of sweat from her forehead and discovered it was blood still oozing from the fatal gash. “A doctor prescribes medication and internal microarrays manufacture it using our own chemistry. You do it for your patients all the time, don’t you? Doctors love it. Taxpayers, too. The only ones who objected to the MediGrid were pharmaceutical companies having to explain losses to their shareholders.”

“Sure. Universal healthcare.”

“You can generate medicine, even cure a disease, but imagine that same command initiated from a subgrid. You see? If the nation funds the Integrid, it’ll make things even cheaper. That’s because a doctor won’t need to access my microarrays through a local clinic. No trail, no log files. Anyone with authority can issue commands from anywhere. A backroom in Washington. Hell, a toilet in Raleigh! Rumor has it that’s where an agent comm-axed the Ripper. Can’t you see that those decisions will always serve security, not law?”

Watts stared at her forehead, marveling at his handiwork. “Does it hurt?”

She glanced away. “With the MediGrid they know where you aren’t, but once they put quantaprocessors in you, they’ll always know where you are. Geography won’t matter. Time won’t matter. Backtrack through decoherence and pinpoint anyone’s internal network. Issue a chemical release. Heart attack. And one day, not long from now, the new alchemy will find a way to brew insanity from a body’s own chemistry. Discredit the whistleblowers.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means there are bigger things to worry about than a few hundred murders.” She knew he didn’t understand, but she had made it possible for him to believe anyway. Dead people were like that.

He squeezed his lower lip with two fingers. “Quantum technology isn’t so robust in a biological environment. Besides, the miracle of the Integrid may be that it can access my network from anywhere, but it can’t prove what I’ve done. It takes men for that.”

“The Berlin Bomber was never tried, was he? No witnesses. No charges. No trial. But he was axed.”

“The man suspected of those bombings died of a heart attack.”

“Oh hell, Watts! The press hasn’t been guilty of an act of journalism since they started publishing white papers as ‘news.’ They’re sightseers, tour guides distracting us while their corporate masters pursue dominion. A twenty-five-year old terrorist just up and dies from a heart attack and you nod because the ‘paper of record’ says it’s so?”

“No one would allow it.”

“They already have. A trial run.”

“The Berlin Bomber? How’d they get quantaprocessors in him?”

“Flu shot.” She waited, but his curiosity turned back to her forehead. “Money, power, sex? What would you sell your soul for? The techwizards in informatics and pharmacy sold theirs for a game. Little Napoleons coveting pieces of synthetic worlds, burning ants in the sun.”

“Someone has to give access, check credentials.”

“Oversight? My, but we’re all too busy feeling safe to bother with courts. And it’s so cheap! The G.N.P. used to count us as economic units. Now we’re nodes in a network. When authorities axe the violent nodes, we’ll be so grateful we’ll trust even the pimply techwizards who see as much need for ethics as for sunlight. So they remove the nodes corrupting our children — drug dealers, traffickers. The A.C.L.U. complains. So what? Next, get rid of the leeches on society, the ones on the dole and the homeless. The U.N. complains. So what? Sterilize the poor and stupid.” She paused to remember and shrugged. “No one complains, but it was too late by that time, anyway.” She leaned forward over the table. “So we had to find another time.” She stretched. “My back hurts.”

Watts considered her complaint. “I can command a painkiller …or would you prefer scotch?” He pulled a flask from his jacket pocket.

She raised an eager eyebrow. Contrary to the theological rumor, being dead didn’t preclude comforts of the flesh. She felt an unreasonable sense of relief. Unreasonable because of the man sitting across from her.

Later, she sat with the flask resting between her hands on the table and closed her eyes. When he asked how she felt, she opened her eyes to see his lewd smile.

“Nasty contusion there.” He touched the air in front of her forehead and licked his dry lips. “I can fix it. Order up more clotting agent.” His body was so tight with arousal that his attempt at an easy smile appeared like a grimace of pain.

“Death makes fictions of us all, Watts. Do you think you’re different?”

“Oh, but I make a difference in so many lives.” He gestured at her head.

Laughter erupted from her with a derisive grunt. “Shit, you’re real pulp fiction stuff, aren’t you? Blurb for the century’s grisly tale of eroticized violence, a footnote to the masculine malfeasance that circles priests around reptilian impulses and calls it ‘morality.’ Delivering death only makes you an arbiter of fictions, a phantom editor for the adventure of nonexistence.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It takes time to digest the truth, like a pig passing through a boa, and often you wonder what that bloated lump really is and if the discomfort is worth it. Quantum information has a techcreep your techwizards don’t understand. It doesn’t rely on geography, after all. If they accidentally axe the Parousia with an aneurysm, they abort their future. How will they manage the conscience of a world without a promised retribution?”

He reached into his pocket and drew out a woman’s pinky ring. Although he set it on the table, he kept a finger on it, and she saw it wasn’t hers to take back. “You knew about this.”

Recalling the day her mother gave her the delicate band shaped like a butterfly, her grip tightened on the flask. “It’s a problem,” she said. “You have a number of them.”

He scooped the ring into his palm. “You’ve accused me of things you can’t possibly know.”

“Because I’m telling you the truth.”

“You haven’t told me how you know the future.”

“I know the past.” She studied the deep lines that swept over each cheekbone from his eyes to his mouth. In shadow, his swarthy features were diabolical; in soft light, seductive. She knew many years later, when time and bitterness had taken their toll, the sensual face would become merely fierce, reflecting the tragedy of a life lived too long. “You’re a rapist.”

The accusation hit him like a blow, forcing him to turn away again. She knew he had never said the word to himself. “The fetish started as a child.” She nodded at his hand. “The rapes in residency. Drugged patients and prostitutes. When you escalated, you lost control of yourself, hunted the rich and famous and got yourself wanted by a lot of people with a lot of money. We had the Integrid by then, but the rest of the world was leery. Despite the terrorists on everyone’s lists, it was stopping the most wanted serial murderer in two centuries that finally sold it to the world.”

“I’m not a killer.”

She spread her arms. “And yet, here I am.”

“How can you be dead?” He watched her carefully. “You opened your door to me.” He grinned. “Again.”

She wiggled her fingers. “You nicked my only ring.”

A dark light passed through his eyes. He squeezed the ring. “So, you’re dead but your past is also my future? Tell me what happens next.”

She took a moment to think. “South America. Then Singapore. You made mistakes.” She closed her eyes and felt as if the floor were falling away. “Let’s see, bleach, or they’ll have your DNA. No scalpels, or they’ll know you’re a surgeon. You’ll have to stick with the poor and prostitutes, or senators will start caring.”

“I told you. I’m not a killer.”

“Oh they taught you well. They taught you with those pre-emptory notions of entitlement that destroyed any chance at resurrecting the soul your incestuous father smothered. Their strict teleology may refuse to accept the voodoo of libidinal impulses, but they’re damn effective in providing clear definitions for your hazy logic. Cracking my skull was only an opportunity, really, followed by compulsion. Why do you think you came back? It excited you. You’ll never get over that. Showing the world how powerful you are with every thrust. A victim’s manifesto: retribution.”

He stood and dropped the ring into his pocket.

“You believe me?”

“Only because you should be dead.”

“Did the ‘Grid tell you that?” She laughed at the irony.

His eyes narrowed. “Then I guess you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

She continued to laugh until long after he had gone. She wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid of the people who were afraid of him. So afraid, in fact, that she would help him murder hundreds of women, rather than the seventy her own history knew about.

Like all agents, she found herself a tiny cog in a great machine. She had drawn the short straw at the departmental meeting, and her oath wouldn’t allow her to refuse an assignment, even one so vulgar as to reanimate her raped and beaten body in some other timestream.

The techwizards at headquarters had rallied their contemptuous genius and convinced the department that if the Integrid failed to find the most elusive butcher since White Chapel, the world wouldn’t tolerate its trespass. As long as the Gold Ring Ripper was killing, the technology embraced by so many other worlds as a savior would leave room for another here. This Earth, at least, would remain free.

Speculative fiction. Copyright © 2008 Teresa Wymore. All Rights Reserved.

In the lulling hours of late afternoon, when my sons are with their tutor and my husband is at his office, I usually take tea and sit with my daughter watching the birds along the lake shore. But not today. Today, my daughter is dancing with other well-groomed girls at the Haverton Society, and a woman lies naked in my bed.

She kisses me with deliberation, her lips rubbing across mine, as if trying to pleasure every nerve. After she accustoms my mouth to her caresses, she moves down my neck, and her lawless touches speed my heart. I live for these secret afternoons, when an infidelity to reality becomes my only freedom, for I can imagine a better world than this perfect one.

The satin comforter slides from the bed into a burgundy pile. We snuggle under a sheet, and my adoring hands knead her powder-white flesh as it pulses warmly. Damp skin offers up its feminine musk, and when I reach lower, moisture allows an easy glide. As my fingers plunge into her, she moans and rolls onto her back. Her face slackens and strains as I stroke her wet walls.

I can imagine her wading through the foamy Mediterranean, her lithe limbs beading with water, as we love each other among the waves. I can imagine our intimate talk as we huddle close in a roof garden at sunset, seduced by the sea’s moody hues and sipping wine at a café table. I can imagine many pleasures that we’ll never know because our only choice is an afternoon in a country villa, drapes drawn against discovery as we love each other on sheets that smell of a man.

We roll among gold and white pillows until the annulling beauty of her eyes startles me, but I remain vigilant, appraising her like a sailor evaluating a perilous current. Men aren’t the only dangerous things. Her husband manages her well, so she questions herself far more than she questions him. I worry that she may one day assume a settled indifference, as so many have, or that she may confess and be sent away. Love like ours doesn’t exist, at least not on its own terms, because a century ago, science showed that desire lies beyond choice, and when gene therapies found the means to make us all desire alike, no one wanted it any other way.

When her kiss again breathes heat into my mouth, a new hunger takes hold of me. Sliding down, I brush my nose through the pillow of hair and nuzzle her tender flesh. Salt and sweat stir my blood with a scent I crave but can never truly remember. Content to lick and tease her clitoris, I lay between her legs for almost an hour before she comes in my mouth, slowly, like honey spreading. Her back arches, and she cries my name. Her legs and hips tense with each convulsive wave. Later, as I watch sweat trickle down her cheek, I wonder just how science could claim what was so obviously untrue.

Fresh from their success at demystifying desire, men of the twenty-first century began to praise unbelief as a virtue, as if science had liberated their minds, when it had merely unburdened their consciences. Science made other classes of outsiders vanish, too, like the darker races and the poor. Their utopian moment was brief, however, because the world that remained after the last ghettos disappeared disintegrated rapidly into chaos. After men had no outcasts left to unite against, no victims to certify their victory, everyone became a potential enemy, and competition became deadly. Violence erupted everywhere.

Decades of war followed, and savagery nearly eclipsed civilization altogether before men found a way to bond again. They resurrected a common enemy, an ancient group whose exclusion could transfigure their radical violence into righteousness and give them back their religion. They took away our economic freedom and our reproductive freedom and our physical freedom because they needed their vitality to build personal futures with our bodies. Lawless violence was a less appealing prospect than organized violence.

The afternoon ends too quickly. Our love must make way again for husbands and children. Feeling torn open, I shut my eyes against the sting of tears. She holds me against her chest, comforting me with her steady heartbeat. My heart aches because my faith is a woman’s faith, one that doesn’t translate the words of men but scenes of grace lived out by those tossed from heaven into a dark and empty sky. I know God doesn’t require a victim. Only men do, because they don’t realize the one sacrifice that counts is their own.

She chastises my attempt at romantic penitence and calls me decadent, and she’s right, but I tell her that those who refuse healing remain blind. Her psychomachy seems like an artifact from another age, when people could legitimize their desire only by denying it was a choice. I have no such conflict, for my body and soul blissfully embrace each other, if only in her presence, for she is blessed among women. She is benediction.

Copyright © 2005 Teresa Wymore. All Rights Reserved. Originally published in Cream: Best of the Erotica Readers and Writers Association (Running Press, 2006).