She was laying on the edge of the road with her head a good foot past the white line. At first, Tennessee thought that she must’ve been a large dog; a second later he saw that it was a human body, covered in something.

His reactions just barely saved her. He veered left and banked hard, but not hard enough to throw his car into a spin.

He stopped some hundred feet down the road and left the car idling on the shoulder. It was dusk, and if he hadn’t known it was a body he might’ve mistaken it for a pile of leaves, or a trash bag someone had dumped.

He thought about searching through his back seat for his flashlight, but didn’t. There was still just enough light to see by without one.

Walking down the road he noted how silent this stretch of country was. All that bordered this minor highway were some old brittle fence posts held together by rusted barbwire. The fence was so worn away that he wondered if this land was used for ranching anymore.

When he reached her body it took him a few seconds to tell which way around she was lying. She was curled up naked with a pile of some sort of hair or fabric covering most of her body and half of her face. Leaves and small pieces of bark adorned her hair.

At first, he thought that she must’ve been wearing an old fur coat, the sort that they used to make back in the ’70s which looked more like dog hair than anything else.

He reached down and brushed some of the twigs and leaves off of her face and saw that it was a young girl, no older than nineteen or twenty.

She was attractive, but she didn’t have a perfect face. Her nose was a little too long, her lips a little too mellow, her cheeks too supple. He noticed all of these minor imperfections in just one moment.

There was something around her neck, a black leather string and a piece of metal, engraved with what appeared to be a tree.

Yggdrasil.

When she moved Tennessee jumped back a good foot. He hadn’t even thought to check if she was breathing.

He looked down as she turned herself onto her side and looked up.

“Hola,” she said, and he noticed that her hair was long and dark and straight as could be.

“You alright? Estas Buena?”

“Yeah, sure. Hey, can you give me a lift outta here?”

She said softly as she rose up onto her feet. Whatever had covered her turned out to be no more solid than dust. It fell softly apart into a cloud of fur, leaves and twigs as she got to her feet.

She looked at Tennessee and smiled. It didn’t seem to bother her that she was naked.

He looked away.

“I can get you some clothes — my car’s just right down here.”

He glanced back once to check that she had followed.

“Here’s some pants.” Tennessee handed her a pair of his worn out Wrangler jeans from out of his trunk.

“Oh groovy, boot cut. Didn’t know Wrangler was still in business.”

“Had these four maybe five years. They’ll fit you. Just have to roll the pant legs up a bit.”

Tennessee felt her take the jeans. He then pulled out a t-shirt, white cotton Fruit of the Loom, and held it out to her with his head diverted. He listened to her pull the jeans up, then he felt her take the shirt.

When he was sure she was clothed he looked at her. She stared back, but he couldn’t see her eyes. It had gotten too dark.

“You alright?”

“Yeah, fine as can be.”

“What you doing lying on the side of the road? You know I near about took your head off.”

“Can you take me south, along this road?”

“You in trouble?”

“No, not really.”

“‘Not really,’” He repeated.

“So, can I get a ride with you or not?”

Tennessee thought on this for a second. “I’m going as far as Alamogordo tonight, you headed that’a way?”

“That way’s good enough for me.”

He smiled in the darkness. “Well, get in then.”

Tennessee wasted no time getting back on the road. He didn’t want some big eighteen wheeler to come barreling along and knock them into the middle of next week.

“I got a few cans of Pepsi in the back. Got ‘em chilled if you want one.”

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

“Will do, partner.”

“By the way, name’s Tennessee.”

She gave the dashboard and the seat beside her a quick look-over.

“Hey, man, you got any tapes?”

“Tapes?”

“Cassette tapes. To play.”

“No, I sure don’t.”

“You don’t have any tapes?”

“My tape player’s broke. Plays everything at twice the normal speed.”

“Oh.”

She opened the glove compartment, which Tennessee was sure was had been locked.

“Hey, close that up.” His voice was agitated.

Inside the glove compartment was a revolver.

“Is that a Colt Peacemaker?”

“You know something about guns?”

“A little.”

“Well, then you ought to know to close that glove compartment back on up.”

She looked at him, then put the gun away.

“So, what you called?”

“Isi.”

“Isi?”

“Kohana.”

“Isi Kohana?”

“Moki, Ahawi, Hexaka.”

Tennessee glanced over at her.

“All those yours, huh?” He waited a few seconds for an answer. “Well, which one you want me to call you by?”

“Since there’s only two of us, we don’t really need designations, do we?”

“Were any of those your real name? Some of them sounded Indian.”

She propped her legs up on the dashboard in front of her.

“You know, I didn’t have to take you anywhere. Could’ve just left you back there. So your might try being a bit friendlier.”

“OK.”

“Well, what’s your real name?”

“Why you need to know?”

“Why don’t you want me to know?”

“No reason to.”

“Other than the fact that you and I are here in this car together, and if I’m gonna talk to you I’d like to know what to call you.”

“You could just say, ‘hey,’ and I’d know you were speaking to me. Names are superfluous in this situation.”

“Maybe, but names make people feel more familiar with one another.”

“Do they? What about when you’re at the bank and the bank clerk uses your name because it’s store policy. They do that to make you feel more like an individual, like the bank really knows you and cares about you, but I don’t like it.”

“Well, I’m not a bank clerk.” Tennessee replied, and he immediately felt like it wasn’t the wittiest thing he could have come back with.

“It used to be that you only told your name to a handful of people who were really close to you. Names used to be very important. They weren’t just designations.”

“Names’ still are important.”

“Do you feel like a Tennessee?”

“Never gave it any thought.”

She leaned back in her seat, and the two drove in silence for a few minutes.

“So, what’s the gun for?”

Tennessee glanced over at the girl. “What do you mean what’s the gun for? What do you think it’s for?”

“So, you believe in guns, huh?”

“I believe in covering my ass.”

“And it takes a gun to do it.”

“Sometimes.”

She looked over at Tennessee and studied him for a moment. He felt a bit uncomfortable knowing that she was quietly looking at him.

“So, what do you do?”

“As little as possible,” he replied.

“What’s as little as possible?”

“More than I’d like to be doing.”

“Your job involve using a gun?”

“You always ask so many questions?”

“I figured we might as well get familiar with one another. We got time to kill.”

Tennessee tried not to smile, but he did.

“What do you do?” He shot her a glance.

“I do a lot of traveling. And eating. And sleeping.”

“I meant job-wise.”

“Don’t really got a job.”

“You just hitching across the country?”

“I hadn’t hitched until now.”

“What were you doing back there with no clothes on? Someone leave you like that? You on any drugs?”

“What’s on this radio?” She spoke more to herself than him as she tried to turn it on.

There was loud static and Tennessee quickly reached across and turned the volume down.

“You ain’t gonna find much out here,” he said.

“There’s got to be something.”

The first station she came across was playing salsa. The girl listened to it for a few seconds then continued to turn the knob.

The next station was a Christian station.

” … and you got to know that the Word is the same today as it was in Paul’s time, as it was in Abraham’s time, as it was in the beginning of time, and it’ll be the same tomorrow and the next day on until the end of time, it doesn’t change, mankind changes, our laws and societies and all that change, but the Word is constant … ”

“You gonna keep listening to that?”

The girl looked over at Tennessee and changed the channel until it came back around to the Salsa music. She left it there and began to nod her head and tap her feet to the rhythm of the tuba.

“Think I may have liked the preaching better.”

She smiled and kept right on tapping her feet.

Ten minutes later Tennessee pulled off at a truck stop in Vaughn.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“I’ll buy you a meal.”

“OK.”

“So, you are hungry?”

“A little.”

Tennessee picked out a booth next to one of the front windows.

“Get as much as you’d like.” He watched her look over the menu. “Hell, get the t-bone special if you like.”

“I don’t eat t-bone.”

“Well, get what you like.”

Tennessee began to look over his menu and wonder what the soup of the day would be. The waitress came over and took a longer-than-usual look at the girl. Her name tag read “Nancy.”

“Well, what can I get for you two?”

“Howdy, Nancy.” The girl bounced up and down and smiled like Nancy was an old friend that she hadn’t seen in years.

Nancy didn’t know quite how to take the girl’s enthusiasm.

They both ordered and waited in silence for the food to come out. Tennessee thought about asking her again how she ended up on the side of that road but then thought against it.

In pretty much every booth there was a small jukebox; for a quarter you could play a song or for a dollar you could play five.

The girl flipped though the available music options and stopped at the Rolling Stones greatest hits album.

“Hey, can I have a quarter?” She smiled over at Tennessee, and he was once again struck by how attractive she looked, even in a men’s large white t-shirt that hid any vestige of her womanhood.

“Sure.”

He handed her a quarter and she immediately popped it into the jukebox. Ten seconds later “Sympathy for the Devil” started to play.

“Here’s your coffee and your water. You take milk with yours?” The waitress placed his mug in front of him.

“I take milk, but I don’t take that stuff that comes in those little plastic packages.”

“That’s all we got, sir.”

“Then I’ll pass on the milk.”

The waitress left, but not before taking another disapproving look at the girl. She thought about saying something about her bare feet, but then decided not to.

The girl looked at Tennessee suddenly. “Does something about my appearance bother you?”

“What? No. Why would you ask that?”

“You never look at me, and when you do you only do so for a split second.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well, you don’t want me staring at you do you?”

“I wouldn’t mind, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

“Yes, you would. You don’t want some man like me staring at you.”

“What if I stared at you?”

“Stare all you like. Don’t know why you’d want to, but it wouldn’t bother me none.”

The waitress arrived with the food and put down Tennessee’s and then the girl’s.

Tennessee immediately began to cut into his pork chop. He found his grits to be piping hot but his eggs were cold, so he mixed the two together.

“So, Tennessee, what kind of work you involved in?”

He looked up at her and slowly chewed his bite of egg and toast.

“Well, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you what I do if you tell me what you were doing laying on the side of the road up there.”

The girl was silent for a few seconds. “I was sleeping.”

Tennessee stared at her as he cut off another piece of his pork chop.

“Sleeping?”

“Yeah, now it’s your turn.”

“You think that’s supposed to be an answer? Sleeping?”

“That’s what I was doing.”

“OK, well, why were you sleeping on the road, and what happened to your clothes?”

“I didn’t have any.”

Tennessee took a swig of his coffee.

“Well, damn if that ain’t some sorry shit.” He took another swig. “And it don’t get no better either.”

The girl leaned forward and for the first time Tennessee’s baggy t-shirt revealed the outline of her breasts.

“Do you use that gun in your work?”

“You ain’t answered my question yet.”

“Yes I have. Both of them.”

“How’d you come to be there, a dozen miles from anywhere?”

“I ran.”

“With no clothes on?”

She looked away.

Tennessee finished his meal and pushed it to one side. He then proceeded to chug his coffee.

“You hardly touched your plate.”

“I don’t normally eat food like this.”

“Food like what?”

She was silent.

“You don’t know when you gonna get a chance to eat again, so you should try to eat some of what you got in front of you.”

She looked out the window. Tennessee gazed at her and pondered his best course of action. He didn’t know if he could just drive her around, sit her down somewhere else and let her go off on her own.

“Look,” he said slowly. “I’m leaving this restaurant, and leaving you here, unless you tell me who you are and what you were doing out there all by yourself in the state you were in.”

“Leave me here?” She suddenly appeared frightened. “You’re gonna leave me?”

“I said if you don’t … ”

“Why would you leave me here? Don’t leave me, not now. I need to make it further south.”

“You in trouble?”

“Are you gonna leave me here?”

She appeared smaller, paler, her hands seem to shake. She looked out the window again. A new moon was out. Everything was dark but the parking lot.

“If you need help then you need to tell me what trouble you’re in, and maybe I can figure something out.”

“We need to get out of here.”

“Well, just let me go pay.”

He went to the till and paid as he kept his eyes on the girl. He had seen people on all types of crazy drugs do all types of crazy things. He’d also seen people who were just plain crazy doing crazy things, and when this girl’s mood shifted he began to wonder was it a drug thing or was she just a little bit off balance mentally.

He looked at her sitting still in her seat and for a moment he felt a great sense of pity — that and a bit of love.

When they got back on the road they barely spoke. She turned on the radio again and found a station that didn’t play salsa or preachers. It played Jimi Hendrix.

“How far south you going?”

“Not sure. All the way maybe.”

“All the way? What, you mean Mexico?”

“Or Patagonia.”

Tennessee smiled. He was glad to see some of the spunk return to her voice. Her getting scared back in the dinner had troubled something in him.

It didn’t seem to him like she was on drugs or had recently been on drugs, and she didn’t seem crazy either, so he thought there might just be someone after her.

“I can help you, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I mean, it don’t matter what type of trouble you’re in, the law, an old boyfriend, someone you owe money to, whatever, I can help.”

“Is that what you do, you help people?”

“Sometimes.”

“When’s sometimes?”

“Not as often as I’d like it to be.”

“See, you’re just as shit at answering questions as I am.”

Tennessee laughed.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So, what do you do when you’re not helping people?”

Tennessee glanced over at her and then back at the night road. Everything was still as could be.

“I help people recover things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as their property.”

“I thought the police did that.”

Tennessee was quiet for a moment.

“I specialize in things the police don’t recover.”

“Were you in the army?”

Tennessee glanced over at the girl.

“What makes you think I was in the army?”

“You were, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“What do you think of war?”

“I think it don’t pay enough.”

“If it didn’t pay enough there wouldn’t be any war, would there?”

“I suppose you’re right about that. But it didn’t pay me enough.”

“You don’t have any problems with it other than the pay scale?”

Tennessee looked over at the girl then back at the road.

“Well, that and the fact that I didn’t really have any stake in the whole thing.”

“Other than your life.”

“Well, I was pretty sure I wasn’t gonna die or I wouldn’t have been there.”

“So, what about the current job? You got a stake in it?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe you should find a different job.”

“What do you know about jobs? You ever worked one?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“What, while you were in college?”

“I never went to college.”

“So, what’d you do?”

“I was a guide.”

“A guide? Like a white water rafting guide?”

“No.”

“A tour guide?”

The girl was quiet for a few seconds.

“I guided people. Helped them along. Got them to where they needed to be going.”

Tennessee thought this answer over.

“You mean you took people places, or you mean you helped them through tough times?”

“Both.”

“So, you were a social worker or something?”

“No, I was a guide.”

“Sounds like you were a social worker.”

“Social workers don’t help you to find your soul’s purpose. At most they stop you from abusing your children.”

“Your soul’s purpose, huh? Sounds like some of that new age stuff.”

“It’s not new.”

“So why’d you quit?”

“I didn’t really quit.”

“You said earlier that you didn’t have a job.”

“I didn’t quit. It just got to the point where I wasn’t much use anymore.”

“What you mean?”

“Times change. I didn’t keep up.”

Tennessee laughed at this. It wasn’t because what she said was funny. It was because it didn’t make much sense to him.

“Times ain’t changed that much, not in your lifetime. In my lifetime, yeah, but not so much as you’d think.”

The girl didn’t respond. She pushed her seat back, reclined it as far as it would go, and laid back in it.

The two were quiet for some time as the station they were listening to turned to static. The girl leaned forward and turned the knob around three or four times, but the radio couldn’t pick up anything. She turned it off and laid back in her seat.

They passed a sign which warned them of deer crossing, and a few minutes past this sign they came across one for the town of Oscuro, New Mexico, “Population 9.”

A mile past this tiny hamlet, they came across a car accident. Two cars appeared to have collided in the middle of the road. Tennessee slowed down as he approached the wreck.

“What’s happened here?” he whispered to himself.

The girl jerked awake and sat upright. She pulled her seatback forward.

“I think we got a head-on collision,” Tennessee said and glanced over at the girl.

She was staring out the window.

Tennessee stopped the car about forty feet from the accident. He took a few seconds to take it all in.

The first car was turned perpendicular to the road, and all he could make out of the second car was its front bumper and grill which were slightly crumbled. Steam was still rising up from underneath the hood.

“I don’t see nobody.”

“I don’t either.” She said.

Tennessee looked again for any movement or any bodies in the first car, but there was nothing moving and no one visible.

Something about the accident didn’t set right with Tennessee.

“I’ll go take a look.” He said as he reached over and took his Colt Peacemaker from the glove compartment.

He looked at the girl. “Don’t say nothing.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“And stay in here.”

The girl nodded. She looked very worried, as worried as she had been at the dinner.

Tennessee left his lights on, and when he stepped out of his car he was amazed by the darkness. There was no moon, only starlight.

He waited for his eyes to adjust and placed his Colt loosely in his belt.

He could hear an owl call out and one of the car’s engine steam, but there were no other sounds.

There was no one visible in either car.

Tennessee stepped out from behind his car door and began to walk slowly towards the wreck. The whole thing looked odd to him. Something wasn’t right.

As he neared the accident he got a better view of the second vehicle and saw something he should’ve noticed before he stepped out of his car. Both of the automobiles that he was looking at were the same make and model. They were both black, late-’90s BMWs.

He glanced to his left and noticed that there was a steep ditch on either side of the road.

Tennessee stopped and raised his pistol. “You need to just back your ass up out of this one. You might be good as dead already, but you might get lucky.”

His instincts told him to run, and he always trusted his instincts.

He was half a second away from bolting when he noticed something pass in front of the headlights.

He turned and pointed his pistol into the blinding lights.

In front of his car where four figures, one of which he knew was the girl. She was being held by one of the other figures, the one in the middle.

“Hold your fire, Mr. McClain.” A voice called out. “We ain’t got no business with you.”

“Who’re you?” Tennessee asked as he held his hand up against the light.

“No one in particular. Now if you’d just place your gun on the ground and step back, then we can be on our way, and so can you.”

Tennessee couldn’t tell if they were pointing anything his way, but he figured they were.

He figured he could take out two of them before they shot him, but that’s the best he could do.

Even worse, he didn’t know how many more were out of sight, off to either side or right behind him.

“What you want with that girl?”

“We don’t want her, Mr. McClain, we’re just escorts.”

“Who are these men? You know ‘em?” he called to the girl and tried to make out her face.

He could hear her try to respond, but her voice was muffled.

“Hey, let the girl talk.”

“You really ain’t in a position to make any demands, Mr. McClain.”

“Call me Tennessee would you?”

“I really do suggest that you lower your gun and place it on the ground.”

“And what if I don’t feel like it?”

“Then you know what will happen.”

“Yeah, but do you know what will happen?”

Tennessee heard a hammer cock.

“Last chance, lower your gun and place it on the ground.”

“Fine. Alright.” Tennessee made like he was about to give his gun up, and then he took a flying leap towards the ditch to his right.

There was a shotgun blast and he felt some of the shot pelt his rear and his left thigh.

As soon as he landed in the ditch he began running towards the light, trying to stay as low as he could.

There was another shot and Tennessee felt something sting his back.

He leapt forward and landed face up with his gun pointed out in front of him. One of the men was already coming over the edge of the ditch and Tennessee fired and hit him in the face. The man fell forward and landed at Tennessee’s feet.

A second man fired at him, and Tennessee fired back and hit him in the arm. The man retreated. Tennessee got up and backed further away from the glow of his car headlights.

He took a second to feel his hip and thigh. He pulled his hand back and it was wet with blood.

Tennessee kept moving until he was sure he was behind his car, and then he looked up and took a peek. He saw one figure, the one holding the girl.

Tennessee hunkered down.

He heard something fly over head and land beside him. The metal on rock sound was unmistakable.

“Grenades?”

He picked himself up and bolted out of the ditch. He ran for the back of his car as someone fired a shot. He stopped just short of his vehicle, got down on his stomach and looked under it.

Tennessee could see the shadows of someone’s feet. He fired, heard a man scream and then saw him hit the pavement.

Tennessee shot him two more times; the man stopped screaming.

He got up and stood with his gun aimed at the head of the last man.

“Not bad,” the man said.

“You got anyone left?”

“No, but I got a knife up against this girl’s jugular.”

“That wasn’t no damn grenade was it?”

“No, but it got you out of that ditch, didn’t it?”

“Back away from the girl.”

“You still don’t understand the situation you’re in, do you?”

“I understand enough.”

“If you did, then you’d lower your gun and run like hell back the way you came.”

“I’ve had about enough of your mouth. Let the girl go, or by God I’ll shoot you dead.”

“Try it.”

Tennessee fired and hit the man in his face. The man fell backwards.

He took a look around, and rushed forward towards the girl.

“Get out of those headlights.” He said as he pulled her towards him. Just then he noticed the man he had just shot stand up as casual as anything.

Tennessee looked at the man and could see blood leaking out of a hole in his cheek. In the head lights the blood looked black.

“Must’ve just clipped him.” Tennessee thought as he raised his gun and shot the man in the chest. The man jerked slightly, but kept standing. He moved forward as quick as anything and knocked Tennessee’s gun out of his hand and grabbed his throat.

Tennessee tried to wrestle the man’s hand off his throat, but it was like trying to bend a piece of steel.

“I told you that you don’t understand the situation you’re in.”

The man lifted Tennessee off the ground and then dropped him.

Tennessee pulled the bowie knife out of his boot and came back at the man, who deflected his attack and threw him back to the ground.

In the next second the man was on top of Tennessee. He hissed and went for Tennessee’s throat with his teeth. Tennessee grabbed his face, tried to push it back, but it was no use.

Then the man stopped. The girl was on his back pulling at his hair and hitting at his head. The man growled and swiped at the girl.

Tennessee took this opportunity to stick his knife into the side of the man’s neck. The man stood up and howled. The girl was tossed to the ground.

Tennessee picked himself up and watched as the man pulled the knife out of his neck which immediately began to spew blood. The man pressed his other hand against the wound and stared at Tennessee.

He smiled and his teeth glowed like burning white florescent bulbs.

Tennessee looked down to see the first man’s shotgun lying by the edge of the road. It was only ten feet from where he was standing.

Tennessee ran over and picked the shotgun up. He turned around in time to see the man limping towards him. The man was still holding his neck with one hand and brandishing the knife with the other.

Tennessee cocked the shotgun and aimed it.

His first shot took off most of the man’s face. The man continued blindly forward. Tennessee walked closer and fired again. The second shot hit him in the neck. The man paused and then his head flopped to one side. It was held on by a bit of bone and muscle.

Tennessee walked up to him and kicked him over. He proceeded to unload two more shots into the man’s face and began to reload.

“I think he’s dead.” The girl said.

“He sure as shit oughta be.”

“How are you?”

Tennessee could feel his left leg stiffening up on him. He could also feel a sharp pain in his back, and his shirt felt wet and was matted to his skin.

“I’ve seen men on drugs get shot two or three times and not notice, and I’ve seen ‘em appear to have superhuman strength, but I sure as hell ain’t ever seen anything like what I just witnessed.”

Tennessee slumped down against the hood of his car. He was getting light headed, and he realized that he must be loosing more blood than he thought.

“I got a first aid kit in the back,” Tennessee said as he got himself seated on the road next to his car. He leaned back against his wheel and took a look around. “If anyone else was hiding they’d a come out long before now.”

“Here,” the girl said and Tennessee looked over to see that the girl had the kit open. She was cutting his jeans open and using a bottle of water to wash the blood away.

“Check my back.”

She did.

“How’s it look?”

“Not much better than your leg.”

“See if you can get some of the bleeding stopped. We’re gonna have to backtrack up to Vaughn.”

The girl nodded.

“It’s funny,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I was the one that was supposed to be helping you. Showing you the way. Getting you through danger.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“That’s my job. Course you never tried to find me. Didn’t know you were supposed to. Didn’t think you needed a guide. And maybe you were right.”

“I’m having a hard time paying attention to what you’re saying. Can you say it all later?”

“Yeah. How’s that. Is it too tight?”

“No, chaffing’s alright, bleeding to death ain’t.”

“Let’s get you into the car.”

“Open me up some of them pain killers first. Get me out four, no five of ‘em.”

She put five of the pills into his hand and then helped lift him up and place him in the passenger seat. She reclined it for him and then got into the driver’s seat.

It took a little doing, but she got the car turned around and headed back for Vaughn.

“We might as well keep going for Santa Rosa,” Tennessee said. “Ain’t nothing in Vaughn.”

“Alright, well you just keep talking to me.”

Tennessee nodded.

“I said keep talking.”

“Oh, right.”

“Well?”

“I’m thinking.” Tennessee was quiet for a moment. “So, why don’t you tell me who the hell those men were?”

“I don’t really know ‘em. I just know who they work for.”

“And who do they work for?”

“Someone named Mr. Horrorshow.”

“Mr. Horrorshow?”

“But he works for Mr. Anxiety, and even Mr. Anxiety is just middle management.”

“Mr. Horrorshow and Mr. Anxiety? You got to be joking me, kid.”

“They have other names. But that’s what they go by these days.”

“You run drugs for them? Owe ‘em money? Date one of ‘em?”

“No, no and no.”

“Why they after you then?”

The girl was quiet.

“I think they think that I can be of service to them.”

Tennessee wanted to laugh. He felt a bit delirious and figured the pain killers must’ve been kicking in.

The girl grabbed one of his hands.

“When I squeeze, you squeeze back, OK?”

“Whatever you say, ma’am.”

Everything was quiet for a long while, but the girl pressed on his hand every minute or so and he pressed back.

“You know, I don’t think it’s really your fault,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“You were talking about not being able to do your job no more. Well, I think maybe it ain’t your fault.” Tennessee paused. “I mean, nowadays I think most people, especially young people, are so far from the path they were meant to be on, that I don’t know if it’s even possible for anyone to offer ‘em any guidance or get ‘em back on track.”

The girl squeezed his hand hard and he squeezed back.

They arrived in Santa Rosa an hour later, and the girl didn’t seem to have any trouble finding the hospital. She parked outside the emergency room.

“Don’t tell ‘em anything about what happened,” Tennessee instructed; she nodded and went inside.

A few seconds later some orderlies came out with a stretcher and placed Tennessee on it.

“Where’d the girl go?”

“What girl?”

“The one who drove me here and told you I was outside bleeding to death.”

“If she ain’t still in the waiting room then I don’t know, sir.”

“You didn’t see some thin Indian looking girl when you came out?”

“She your wife?”

“No, she wasn’t any relation, but she should be here.”

“We can page her after we get you to surgery.”

The doctor on duty this night asked Tennessee some questions about how he managed to get so much gunshot in him.

“Freak hunting accident.”

“Hunting accident, at night?”

“Yep. Makes me think of an old joke. Well, it’s more of a comment a friend of mine made once. He said he didn’t know if hunting was meant to keep the deer population in check or the redneck population. Going by me you might think the latter.”

The doctor forced a smile.

“I’ll be back in a minute.”

The doctor got the head nurse on duty to call the sheriff’s office, and the state highway patrol, to find out if there were any reported shootings or robberies in the area this evening.

One of the sheriff’s deputies called back five minutes later and said that all was quiet in northwestern New Mexico.

The doctor took an hour removing buck shot and debris from Tennessee’s wounds and stitching them back up.

“You know, Mr. uh,” The Doctor glanced down at Tennessee’s ID. “Mr. McClain? I don’t think this was a hunting accident,”

“Well, you think what you want,” Tennessee replied as he pulled his blood encrusted jeans back on. He didn’t bother with his shirt.

He was surprised that he wasn’t already surrounded by policemen. The bodies should have been discovered by now, and no doubt the sheriff would be calling hospitals around the state looking for any survivors.

“We think you should stay over night for observation.”

“If you think I’m gonna stay overnight here then you got another thing coming.”

“Who shot you?”

“If I told you that then you’d take their hunting license away and I don’t want that.”

The doctor sighed and shook his head.

He gave Tennessee some instructions on how to care for the wounds, things Tennessee already knew, and then handed him a prescription for pain killers that he already had.

“Well, thanks for everything, doc.”

Tennessee went to the lobby hoping to see the girl, but she wasn’t there and no one remembered seeing a girl of that description.

Tennessee exited the hospital walked to his car opened the trunk and got out another shirt. He drove to the nearest all-night service station that had a pay phone.

He stood at the phone for a few minutes thinking things over in his head, then popped in a quarter and dialed a number that he had memorized.

“Yeah’lo.”

“Hey, Tom.”

“Hey, where the fuck are you, man? You were supposed to be here five hours ago.”

“Yeah, I ran into some trouble.”

“Some trouble. What? Someone follow you?”

“Well, I guess you could say that I ran into someone else’s trouble.”

“How bad?”

“Got some lead shot into my back side.”

“And them?”

“They got a lot worse.”

“Anyone trailing you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You able to drive?”

“Yeah.”

“How far away are you?”

“Four hours.”

“Well, come on as soon as you can. You can hole up here, and we’ll push this thing off a few weeks until you get healed some.”

“Naw, I don’t think I’ll be taking part in this one.”

“You hurt that bad, huh? Well, we got another job coming up.”

“I don’t want that one neither.”

“How long you plan on taking off?”

“A long while.” Tennessee paused. “In fact, I’d say I’m taking just about the rest of my life off.”

“The rest of your life? What are you taking about, man?”

“I’m talking about doing something else.”

There was silence.

“What’s caused this change of mind?”

“I guess I just realized that I ain’t got no stake in this business.”

“No stake? Well, what do you have a stake in?”

“Don’t know for sure. It’s what I aim to find out.”

“Well, you call me when you change your mind.”

“I don’t plan on changing my mind.”

“Well, call me later on, and we’ll talk more then.”

“Goodbye, Tom. Sorry to let you down.”

Tennessee hung up the phone and walked back to his car.

He looked south along the highway in front of the service station.

He got in his car and sat there behind the driver’s wheel, and for the first time in a long time he didn’t know where he was headed.

That night he had a dream about her.

She was running through a field of wild grains, and she looked happy and free. She was sleek and elegant. The sky was bright and sunny, but over behind her there were dark clouds gathering on the horizon.

She kept on running, and found her way into an old, run-down trailer park. It was full of people who looked like they were wearing animal masks.

They had seen the storm cloud and they were all afraid.

He ran after the girl, and followed her into a junk yard full of broken down cars. Inside the cars Tennessee could see dark threatening shapes.

He tried to reach for his gun, to protect her, but he couldn’t find it.

He heard a shot and knew for sure that someone had shot the girl.

He turned to find her, and the dream ended.

Steve Moore currently lives in Carrboro, NC with his wife and daughter. He holds degrees in mathematics and physics, but has spent the last four years working as a researcher in the areas of parapsychology and cognitive science. He spends most of his free time writing short works of speculative fiction and prose. He also manages to knock out the occasional abstract painting or folk song.

In the land of Nod . . .

Tweedledee threw three knives, one after the other; they sailed through the air, spinning in a blur of gray metal and brown leather.

Each knife buried itself into the trunk of an old sycamore tree with a satisfying thump. He nodded, pleased with the results, went to the tree, pulled out the knives, and went back to his mark.

It was a beautiful summer morning. In the trees, birds warbled nonsense to one another. A squirrel waited patiently for his tree back (he had a cache of nuts hidden in a hollowed out branch). Tweedledee always liked this time of year, the sun seemed to rise at just the right time as to balance light and temperature — a fleeting condition that only lasted for an unnamed season that bridged summer and spring.

He let the knives fly again, this time pausing a few seconds between each. When the last knife hit the wood, a voice behind him spoke.

“Nice throw, ‘Dee.”

Tweedledee turned to see Tweedledum grinning oafishly; two sacks were slung over his shoulder.

“Good morning, how are you doing?” Tweedledee said.

“Been digging, digging, digging,” Tweedledum said, and shook the bags with a rattle. “A dead man’s bones.”

“Which reminds me,” Tweedledee said. “How’s the love potion coming?”

“Just finished last night, the final ingredient is–” Tweedledum looked around, and lowered his voice to a whisper, and put his face next to Tweedledee’s ear: “The secret ingredient is the hearts of wild roses–” then even more softly, “–still beating.”

Tweedledee stepped back with a grimace, and turned to retrieve his knives from the tree.

“And of course, just pinch of the ground up gizzard of a spring pullet to thicken it all up,” Tweedledum said in his normal voice. “What is the scowl for?”

“One would think that a man who claims to have touched the philosopher’s stone would have discovered the mystical and ancient secret of good oral hygiene.”

Tweedledum breathed into his hand and sniffed.

“You’re smelling the bones,” Tweedledum said, digging in his pocket, until he produced a tiny vial of purple liquid.

“And yes, I have the potion,” he added. “But you can’t have it until you apologize.”

“For?” Tweedledee said while reaching for the vial.

“There is nothing wrong with my breath,” Tweedledum said, whipping his hand back and pocketing the potion.

“Instead, my amends will be to buy you a toothbrush for our birthday,” Tweedledee said. “It’s not the bones, unless you’ve been chewing them.”

Tweedledum’s cheeks and ears turned a muted crimson.

“I certainly have not been chewing them, don’t be absurd.”

Tweedledee let the three knives fly again, this time, to his dismay one bounced off the tree trunk and embedded itself in the dirt.

“You missed,” Tweedledum said. “Who is the potion for? Not that I should have to ask, love always ends the same for the groom: hen-pecked and far too many unexpected visits from the in-laws.”

“It’s for Lady Boo-Boo, and it certainly will not end that way,” Tweedledee said. “So hand it over.”

“What will you be paying with?”

“You’d charge your own brother? Your twin brother?”

“Even alchemists have to eat,” Tweedledum said.

Tweedledee looked at the sack of bones, but didn’t say anything.

“Bad choice of words,” Tweedledum said.

Tweedledee searched his pockets, and finally dug out an egg-shaped stone that fit nicely into his palm. He shook it gently next to his ear, and then carefully broke it in two, and held the halves by his fingertips. From the center of the stone, a two headed green snake rose up, tongue flickering, eyes like tiny blackberry drupelets in the creature’s heads. The heads turned in opposite directions.

“The Seeing Snake watches to the east and the west,” Tweedledee said. “If an enemy approaches it hisses in warning.”

“What if they come from the north or south?” Tweedledum asked.

“You’d need another snake.”

Tweedledum held out the vial, and Tweedledee carefully pushed Seeing Snake back into his stone egg and closed it tight. The exchange was made; Tweedledee held the vial up to the light.

“You are wondering, my boorish brother, how one uses it?” Tweedledum said.

Tweedledee nodded.

“One drop on her tongue will make her blood boil in uncontrollable lust for the first man she sees.”

“I’d hardly call that a love potion, but it is an excellent substitute.”

“If it is broody you want, then two drops on her tongue will make her fall deeply and madly in love.”

“And, what pray tell, would three drops bring?”

Tweedledee laughed, shaking the bags of bones.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that. I would say the results would be . . . undefined.”

Tweedledee put the love potion away, then retrieved his knives and after cleaning a bit of dirt off the misfire, he carefully wrapped them in thin leather.

“I must be off,” Tweedledum said, “these bones won’t render themselves, now will they?”

“Certainly not. And I, dear brother, I’m off to pay a visit to the lovely Lady Boo-Boo.”

Tweedledum grinned, showing suspiciously dark teeth, perhaps mussed with bits of bone and marrow.

Tweedledee strolled up the side of the Ojo Loco Mountain. The path was still muddy and damp from melting snow that had all but disappeared only last week. If he cocked his head just right, he could hear the burbling of the underground stream that ran next to the path.

And even more faintly, he strongly suspected, he could hear the off-key singing of the beautiful Lady Boo-Boo. As he walked further and further up the path, it became steeper and steeper. His suspicions were confirmed, he came around pile of boulders, rounded from a slow roll down the mountain.

She sang:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

“Hmmph,” Tweedledee said, and followed the singing until he came around another bend. She repeated the verse with more enthusiasm than euphony. Up through a series of trees, where the path became smaller and more lightly used, up to a hidden little alcove of rocks where a hot spring filled a basin. A pink dress and a towel hung over a tree branch. Tweedledee hid behind a tree and watched as the ginger-haired Lady Boo-Boo bathed in the steaming water. Soap suds covered her most interesting parts, to Tweedledee’s disappointment.

“I see you Tweedle-y-dee,” she said. “And I thought you were a gentleman.”

Tweedledee came out from the tree.

“Whatever gave you that impression?”

She continued washing, careful not to flatten the suds with the hot spring water; her song nothing more than a soft hum.

“I am smitten though, and when a man is smitten he does things he normally would not do. Remember that muggy midsummer’s eve? I brought you heat lightening in a crystal decanter.”

“You brought me a lightening bug in a mead jug,” Lady Boo-Boo said, and slipped under the water so just her head could be seen. “And when you promised me the stars wrapped in spider’s silk, it was only sand and darning thread. Now shoo, Tweedle-y-dee.”

“But,” Tweedledee said, not easily thwarted, “I’ve brought you sweet nectar of tangerine blossoms harvested by wild honeybees from the Otherwhere Underneath. Where the men walk upside down, and it snows in summer. They have man-sized jumping mice that keep their babies in a hide-pocket.”

“There is no such place, and no such thing. The world is flat as everyone knows,” Lady Boo-Boo said. “Over by my dress is a towel, get it please, and do stay away from my underthings.”

Tweedledee pulled out the vial.

“One drop,” he said, “is like eating a meadow of flowers, the gods themselves spread it on their toast.”

Lady Boo-Boo rolled her eyes in her peculiar way, as if she were glancing to the earth, and then to the sky. She batted her eyelashes and made a soft clucking noise.

“One drop on the tongue, or perhaps two,” he said.

She stuck out her tongue, a shade lighter than a fig, but retracted it just as quickly.

“What if it were poison?” she said.

“I’d never–”

“What if it was a potion … ” she continued.

“Certainly not!”

“What if it was a potion that made me sleep, and then you took advantage of my state?”

“I’m cut to the quick, Boo-Boo, I would never resort to glamour.”

“Of course not.”

She closed her eyes, leaned back, so it appeared her face floated in the steaming spring water. The faint smell of minerals wafted in the air. While she rinsed soap from her hair. Tweedledee in a gesture of good servitude fetched her towel. He dog-grinned as the pink buds of her interesting bits became almost visible amongst the burble and the bubbles.

“Turn around, and leave the towel where I can reach it. No funny business, or I’ll call for my big brother.”

Tweedledee dropped the towel and turned around; he could hear the splish-splash of Lady Boo-Boo exiting the hot spring.

“Your big brother is off on a fool’s quest.”

“He owns seven-league boots and a silver horn that he puts on his ear. He can hear for a thousand miles. I’ll bet he’s listening now.”

Tweedledee was silent, and listened to the soft rubbing of the towel on her skin.

“He’d be here in a second, if I yelled,” she said. “–no looking until I’m dressed. I see you turning your head, trying to peek. Cover up your eyes.”

Tweedledee obliged, but he could see through his fingers that she had wrapped the towel round herself. She was short, almost ample, perhaps a little gaunt from a long winter of living off preserved meats and fruits. Somehow, she managed to get dressed without revealing anything but flash of her freckled thigh.

“To be honest,” she said as she combed her hair with a wide-tooth ivory comb, “I am a bit peckish, maybe just a little taste to hold me over until I get home.”

Tweedledee removed a throwing knife from the leather wrapping, polished the end clean with the leather, and poured a drop of the potion on the very tip, where it glistened. Lady Boo-Boo finished combing her hair, and wedged the comb into her thick curls, pinning them away from her eyes. She stuck out her tongue, tucked her hands under her armpits, and leaned forward. Tweedledee shook the drop off onto her tongue.

“Oh my,” Lady Boo-Boo said as her cheeks flushed. “There certainly is a tang to it,” she continued, “I do feel a bit of sudden heat.” She fanned herself with her hand. “A most peculiar heat, and it is so cool this time of year.”

Tweedledee met her eyes, capped the potion, then folded the knife into its leather sheath.

“My, oh my, I never noticed you are a very handsome man, Tweedle-y-dee, very handsome indeed.”

She dropped the towel she’d just folded up, and put her arms around Tweedledee’s neck and gave him a big wet kiss on the lips.

Tweedledum stirred his kettle with a big wooden stick. The noxious brew of bones and liquid boiled, dark as tar. He whistled while he worked, stopping only once to lick a splatter off his knuckle. Behind him, two identical cabins stood, covered in kudzu like vines. Tweedledee came up through the forest path, limping slightly.

“Would you, dear brother, happen to have a cunning salve?”

“Whatever for?” he asked.

“Chaffing down below, if you catch my meaning,” Tweedledee said.

“So the potion worked then?”

“‘Worked’ would be an understatement.”

“Hold your ground, and I will return,” Tweedledum said, set his stirring paddle on the side of the pot, and went into the door of his cabin. He came back only minutes later with a little round tin with a lid. He handed it to Tweedledee.

“Oh ‘Deeeeeeee!”

Lady Boo-Boo’s voice carried across the air from somewhere between the trees.

“Oh, I really must apply this salve,” Tweedledee said. “Keep Lady Boo-Boo company, just for a minute?”

“Certainly,” Tweedledum said with a chuckle and an unnaturally suggestive wag of his eyebrows. Tweedledee opened the door to his cabin, slammed it, then loudly bolted it. Only seconds later Lady Boo-Boo broke through the trees.

“Tweedley-y-dee, oh there you are. That was a dirty trick, but I forgive you.”

She brought herself close enough to put her arms up around Tweedledum’s neck.

“Something strange, I think … ” she said. “But I can’t help but forgive you … something very strange.”

“What dirty trick? What manner of dirty?” Tweedledum wagged his eyebrows again.

“The first taste of the honey brought a fever to my blood.”

“Yes!”

“But now, after the second taste—”

“The second taste?”

“–you said to me, ‘Lady Boo-Boo, close your eyes and stick out your tongue and I will give you a surprise, don’t open them until I tell you.’, naturally I thought it might be something a little more substantial due to our . . . well, you know, our recent understanding, but it was just another taste of that honey. Then I waited and waited for you say ‘Open your eyes Lady Boo-Boo.’ but you never did, and when I finally looked, you were gone. But I found you now. And that fever has passed–I just feel–oh do you want children? I’d like less than fifteen, my mother had twenty, but I felt that was a little much.”

“I am Tweedledum. Tweedledum! You are looking for Tweedledee. He’s in there,” Tweedledum used his thumb to point over his shoulder. Then pulled down his shirt to show a tattoo just over his left breast. ‘Dum’ it said in baroque runes.

“Oh,” Lady Boo-Boo said and wrinkled up her nose. “All the better really. Tweedledee and I, we had our fun, but now, I’m really ready for something a little more … stable.”

Tweedledum gently took Lady Boo-Boo’s arms off his neck; he was certain he could hear Tweedledee snickering from behind the door of his cabin.

“But … but,” Tweedledum said.

“It’s really settled,” Lady Boo-Boo said. “I’ll start looking for a new dress this very day.”

“Dress?”

“I won’t be getting married in this old thing. We’ll need rings. I don’t mind a simple gold band for you, but I really must insist on diamonds in mine.”

“Marriage?!” howled Tweedledum — more snickering from Tweedledee’s cabin. “But — but–”

“You’ll have to brush those teeth. What do bachelors eat? Don’t answer that, home cooked meals from now on. Mainly vegetarian is best, meat on special occasions only.”

“Vegetarian?”

Tweedledum followed the instinct of many a man before him.

“Look!” he said, and pointed to the woods, “What it the world is that?” And when Lady Boo-Boo turned to look, he ran off to his cabin, shut the door very quickly and engaged the lock.

Inside the house Tweedledum, pulled up a rug, took hold of the ring to his cellar door and pulled it up.

Below, lit by foxfire, and glowing mushrooms that sprouted from the walls, were racks of wine, wheels of cheese and cobwebbed covered canning jars of Tweedledum’s special preserves, but none of this was what he was interested in.

He could easily stand once he was inside, and he made his way past the shelves into the long hallway that joined Tweedledee’s cellar. Minutes later he popped his head up into Tweedledee’s house.

Tweedledee was bent over, peeping through a crack in the log walls, and without a word Tweedledum joined him. Outside Lady Boo-Boo was knocking on Tweedledum’s door with her little fist, not much bigger than an apple, and almost as red.

“Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” Tweedledee said.

“What? ME?”

“You made the potion.”

“Yes, but, you gave it to her … twice.”

Through the chink they saw Lady Boo-Boo abandon her efforts on Tweedledum’s door and came to Tweedledee’s and started pounding.

“Open up in there!” she yelled. “I know you’re in there.”

“We’ll split the difference,” Tweedledee said, “We’ll both marry her, I’ll support her wifely needs in the bedroom, and you, of course, can support the children.”

Tweedledum pinched his brother on the arm; Tweedledee yelped like dog. They both stood, Tweedledee rubbing his arm, Tweedledum scowling.

“Only one thing to do,” Tweedledum said, after a wrinkled forehead, and several seconds of thought.

“Run away to Otherwhere Underneath? Become sailors?”

“A third drop,” Tweedledum said.

“You said the results would be undefined,” Tweedledee said.

“They are, but could it get any worse?”

“Oh yes, I’m not sure how, but I think it could.”

“I’m calling for my big brother!” Lady Boo-Boo yelled, and then howled out her brother’s name.

“Let her in,” Tweedledum said. “We’ll give her the last drop.”

Tweedledee groaned and opened up the door.

“Lady Boo-Boo,” he said with a bow, “welcome to my simple home.”

She pushed by him with a snort.

“You had your chance, Tweedle-y-dee. Now Tweedle-y-dum, why did you run away?”

“I–I … was looking for a present for you!”

“Oh? I should hope so, my big brother is coming, seven leagues in each step.”

He searched his pockets, found the Seeing Snake in his egg-shaped rock.

“Yes, yes — Tweedledee, dear brother, where ever are you going?” Tweedledum said.

Tweedledee stopped as he was slipping out the door; his grin collapsing from clever to something almost equine.

“Checking on your rendering pot … ”

“–you see,” Tweedledum said, opening the egg to reveal the two-headed snake. It rose up and started hissing and striking at Lady Boo-Boo, “You see, it’s a, umm, a magic snake, it finds the most beautiful woman in the world, it and, umm, of courses hisses, and tries to bite her.”

Tweedledum handed it to her, and she held it in her palm for a moment watched it, a dissatisfied sneer hanging on the corner of her mouth.

“I don’t like it, it smells of a slue,” she said finally, and handed it back.

“Perhaps you’d like another taste of nectar then?” Tweedledee said, unconvincingly.

She wrinkled her nose.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But this time I’m going to keep my eyes open.”

Tweedledum tried to get Seeing Snake back in the egg as Tweedledee trembled ever so slightly as he put the third drop of the potion on the tip of his knife.

“Here you go then,” he said, and held it out, the purple droplet seemed to hang on the tip forever, and Lady Boo-Boo’s little fig colored tongue was poking out . . . the drop seemed to fall for an eternity, and finally it met her tongue and was absorbed. She smacked her lips.

Tweedledum still fumbled with the Seeing Snake, it was now crawling up his arm, slithering up around his shoulders.

“How do you feel?” Tweedledee asked.

She considered, “I feel, I feel–” she hiccuped, and then belched in a most unladylike baritone. “I feel–”

“Yes?” Tweedledee and Tweedledum said in a hopeful unison.

Tweedledee was now trying to catch the Seeing Snake in his cupped hands as it slithered down Tweedledum’s back, but it moved too quickly and in a moment of panic flung itself to the floor.

“I feel like–”

Her flesh seemed to be twisting and writhing on bones as she shrunk. The soft bits of flesh became leather, and then finally separated into delicate feathery constructs as she became smaller and smaller. Her pink dress went up in a puff of sparkles and dust. Finally, after some amazing contortions, she stood, not a foot off the ground.

The Seeing Snake rose up on its tail and hissed, one head staring at the hen, the other out the front door.

The hen looked up to the brothers, scolding them with a natter of clucks and cackles.

Outside a man bounded into the clearing, landing quite close to the pot of stewing bones. He knelt and pulled tight the laces of his boots.

“Sister Boo-Boo!” he bellowed.

The hen continued her chiding, but now made her way to where the Seeing Snake stood. She scratched at the floor, pecked one of the snakes heads, then the other, beating it down, gruesomely tearing the raw pink flesh.

“By all that is dear,” Tweedledee said, as the hen pecked again this time taking away one head’s eye, then grabbed the snake by the end of the tail, tossed it up into the air and choked it down. She voiced a satisfied cluck, cluck, cluck, cluckawwwk!

The brothers stood eyes wide, aghast. All that remained of Seeing Snake was a smear of blood and a few scales, which the hen finished off with a bob of her head.

“What did I say?” Tweedledum said calmly. “That’s how it always ends, now isn’t it?”

“No time for I told you so, her brother will be asking a lot of uncomfortable questions, I’m afraid.”

“Then we’ll distract him with our hospitably, and have him stay for supper.”

The man sniffed the pot of boiling bones, then swept the area with his eyes, finally he saw Tweedledee and Tweedledum. The hen flapped her wings and looked to brothers, and then to the man approaching.

“And what will we serve? Bones and fat from your pot? I won’t even eat that.”

“No,” Tweedledum said, “I was thinking of a chicken dinner.”

The hen scratched at the floor, looked at them with bright eyes, and scolded them for the very idea.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack writer, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico. He writes in a variety of genres. His fiction focuses on the absurdly tragic, and the tragically absurd. He likes good black coffee, nightmares, Billie Holiday, and that hour just before the sun comes up. Coming soon: his debut literary novel “The Movie” from BeWrite Books (for pre-Christmas Release).

I never thought I’d find comfort this way, but no one told me I couldn’t. I just gave it a go, and the ducks are following me down the road now. As they follow me, whenever I look back, the road is being filled with more and more ducks, though there were only two of them following me.

It was the distance traveled that seemed to create the multiplication, and the more curves I follow, the more slight hills I climb, and dips I ease down, the more of them there are, walking along behind us, quacking.

It is nice, and reminds me of my grandmother. She was a darling, and her eyes were like the ducks, and her voice when she spoke about wanting to pack me a cake with those carrots she put on top of them like forests, was something like a quack. We had ducks when I was young, and it is when I meet men who remind me of ducks, or my grandmother, that I feel safe. I feel I can perhaps love them, and let them touch me once I get to know them.

The ducks were my friends, and my grandmother was my friend, when my father and my uncle were not.

When my father and my uncle would come home, they would turn into stovepipes, black, hollow, hard, impermeable, and on fire. I would bang on them, but become blacked by it. They would chase me, pounding their cylindrical selves along bang after bang over the floor, over the ground, even over the water, when I would swim to get away from them. They could float. They could even float into my tears and go into the tear ducts, cylindrical as they were, and go inside my body in ways I could never explain to anyone.

They would only come out when they were ready, and I never knew when that would be. Mostly, when it was time to eat. I would eat under the table, but the table legs were often on their side.

The table legs tended to start banging as well, vibrating, coming closer to me. I was an only child. I could fit easily under the table. But as I grew larger, and older, I would start sticking out from the table, and whenever I did, whatever was sticking out would be naked. I would try to pull back in under the table to hide, but something was always exposed, my skin so pale and soft. I tried to be as thin as possible, and I never wanted to eat anyway.

But I was happy to see the food arrive on the table, as it meant my uncle or my father would be hungry and leave my tear ducts. Once they left my tear ducts, they were no longer stove pipes.

The ducks were soft and our grandmother was soft, nothing like stovepipes at all. They loved me, and now, I make my lovers quack. I ask them to come fly down on my lap, and they will pretend to flap their wings, and waddle. It makes me safe. I pet them and fluff their feathers and run water for them in the living room to play in. The whole living room is water filled now, waiting for them. Sometimes we swim in it together.

One day, I came home and there was a duck that had fallen through the chimney, because the flue was left open. I couldn’t believe it. Somehow, the two didn’t go together. I carried the duck outside to the creek to let it go where it knew it was, where it could find the water. It grew in my arms as I walked, and the trail became longer. It was four hours before we got to the creek, and by that time, the duck was the size of a collie dog. I could barely carry it, and it looked at me with those duck eyes, being so patient, and I didn’t really want to let it go. But I wanted it to be happy and free.

When I got to the water’s edge, I stooped down to put it down and it fell. It fell so hard that it bruised itself, and started bleeding, and I was horrified. I reached down to wipe the blood from its legs with my dress and it became angry, and flew up at my face, becoming larger, going right through my skin, right through my eyes. It was horrible. I never cried so hard even when my uncle was in my tear ducts and I was trying to wash him out. I turned my head to see it pass through my head, but when I did, it was going back the other way. Each time I turned my head to watch it go, it was going the other way. It flew back and forth through my head and I couldn’t stand it any longer. I knew someone else would want to help me, so I called my grandmother.

She was there in a minute, though I had walked so far from the house. She was quick that way. She said the duck just wanted to be free, and I said that’s what I wanted too. I wanted the duck to be free. She put out her hand to keep the duck from flying back the other way. But she put it out too soon, before the duck was all the way through.

That’s when it became stuck in my head. That’s why it is there. And that’s why the ducks are following me. It’s kind of nice. It reminds me of her, and my childhood. I know they are more interested in the duck sticking out of my head than in me. But I don’t mind. Who else is going to follow me so devotedly that they multiply like that? And they quack more resonantly than my lovers I have to train. They come by it naturally. And I like that.

Tantra Bensko publishes her writing widely, in magazines such as The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fiction International, Evergreen Review, Mad Hatters Review, Bewildering Stories, Rose and Thorn, Cezanne’s Carrot, and many more. She lives in San Francisco.

The humerus bone has ‘humor’ of a malignant kind, that which shows no restraint.

It went jerking in another direction, that is, the direction of a no-no, towards the man with the blond hair. And then it tousled the hair up a bit even as I pulled myself away.

I wended my way out of the train, squeezing past all others and thought about it.

It was good I was a few inches taller than him so it was an easy reach, his blond hair I mean, but it could not at all pass for unintended behaviour, or a ‘excuse-me-as-I-pass- you-by- in-this-squeezed-like-hell-space.

There was enough room for me to maneuver without touching him at all. My arm and hand followed the impulse even as my mind said, “No, don’t do it”. But it happened.

And while it happened I tried to stop myself from reddening and then my face also lit up like a lantern that suddenly catches fire and I blinked my blue eyes to shake the sweat droplets that were forming on the gaps between my drop-dead dreadlocks and front fringe and he must have been wondering what a peculiar looking man.

I knew that his blond hair was calling out to be tousled.

I am out of the train but he is behind me, I can smell him because I have more than my sixth sense, I have my seventh sense as well which I got when I visited my Seventh Heaven of Delight (yes, I have completed that part of my life) and its been there with me since that time and stands me in good stead in moments like this.

Sometimes it works against me as well, as when I don’t want to smell something, like in something-fishy-going-on, but have to do so because of the existence of this sense.

And I think of how I wanted to scrape my hands down his face and taste the blood thereafter to see how he tasted but that was for later and would not happen now.

He is close behind me and then he steps right there, in front of me and I have no choice but to dead-stop in my tracks.

He is looking at me and suddenly I find the gashes forming on his face just where I would have clawed him in my desire to taste him. He touches his face and licks his fingers as he looks at me and then I want to run before I see any more and all around us the crowd mills as he continues to do what he is doing. I want to join him in that.

He put his hand on my arm, my formerly deceptive arm, and my arm again deceives me and snakes across his body to feel his waist and then we are walking step to step and it is as if he can read my thoughts because he snuggles his face into my chest and says, “ I missed you,” and I look at this face and the red gashes are bleeding holes now, waiting to be closed and consumed by me and I cannot not believe my eyes and then I feel I should tell him to go away but my body clings to his like a peach, sorry, leech, and I just want to be his blood and that he be mine and then we will be one once more.

The world whizzes past us and does not see his droplets fall on the ground or that I begin to run with him home so that I can save him before he dies.

I had not wanted to recognize him, my own flesh and blood, but my body betrayed me.

I did not want him to become a part of me, but I could not let him die. I mean, he had been a part of me, I had removed him from me because he was getting too heavy to carry, his wants, his demands, his desires an extra load that took so much from me.

He sucked and sucked till I felt faint because of his need. He would not grow away. He just continued to be a part of me, this tousled haired blond boy that refused to grow up, refused to leave my side long after Hera had left me.

Hera had decided to separate from the two of us a long time ago, and I remember how dismembered I had felt, because I depended on her for sustenance. I would milk her dry and then she would point at her breasts and say, have you not had enough? Have you not grown enough?

I would look at her with eyes that beseeched her and she said no, I will grow old like this just feeding you and taking care of you. Its about time you fended for yourself and look at the boy who clings to you like a limpet sucking all the energy from you, my energy she said, and she just sat up one night and cut me away from her nipples, and they remained with her but I had separated.

And I was no longer in her, a part of her, she just went away to survive on her own and she would because she was filled with the milk of humanity and when the gods have given you that and there is no one taking it from you anymore, you can do a lot for yourself.

I did not have her, but my tousled boy still put out all his suckers and clung to all parts of me and sucked. And I knew that now I would have to remove him.

It had not been easy, the removal.

He had screamed and shouted and resisted and I had removed each suction point one by one and held it off to make sure that none remained with me for he could grow back onto me again then, from that one contact.

And when the last one was removed I had seen him shrivel and crumple up into some kind of jelly fish but I had moved away because I had to fend for myself.

It is not easy to do that when all your life you only survive because you have lived off your mother who went away and then your wife who went away and then you look for someone else but after a time you have to find your own means of survival.

So I had. I had attached myself to another man and it was a give and take relationship, and though I felt quite starved, it was alright.

He did not become a part of me and I did not become apart of him, our blood was not allowed to mix because we did not want each other enough. If we had allowed that to happen we would have become a part of each other and sucked on each other for survival and then it would have been whoever was stronger would be the person in charge of the body.

You know what I mean, if his name is Richard, then if Richard sucked more out of me so that he became the greater part of us, then the body would be called Richard. Otherwise it would be called Llelewyn, which is my name.

As for the blond boy, my son, Neville, who had returned to me, I had no choice but to accept him now as a part of me. I needed him as much as he needed me, for I had not felt so wanted for a long time.

Hera was not there for me, Richard was just there, a kind of a ‘will do’ arrangement where neither of us was satisfied, but my son, he was there with me now.

Though I know that he would make me die in the end for he would suck up all of me and make the body his, Neville’s body, but I could not resist it any more.

So I was rushing him home so that I could plug all the leaking holes with myself and then he could be happy and I could be happy. I could not help myself now that he had reappeared in my life.

Hera would laugh at me if I told her, she would say that I would never learn, that I always needed someone, either to support me or be dependent on me, that I could never exist by myself, as myself.

Well, she can laugh, and she may be right, but as my son sucks onto me, I feel at peace.

The world will carry on as it wants. This is my bliss. My mind may say no, this will destroy you, this stupid wanting of yours to be devoured and that too by your own son, it is not good, this mixing of the same blood, but my body has never felt happier.

All I can see now is the blondness of my boy and how beautiful he is as he grows stronger with me. I need this dependency. I only wish Hera was here for then we would be complete. Her independent spirit is difficult to hold on to. I dream of her breasts as Neville sticks onto me and I feel the milk filling up within me.

I do keep in touch with Hera through my deep connection with her but she blocks me out of her system most times. Tonight she may have realized that I had a special need so she allowed me to access her and then when she found out what I had done, and that I would also be trying to access her from a distance for sustenance once again, she ws furious with me.

I felt her milk drying up as I dreamt, she was blocking me out completely, and I cried out in anguish, there is no other word for it.

I asked her if she had forgotten our times together in the Seventh Heaven of Delight which we had visited and the promises we had made each other and she said that these promises are not binding on anyone and are often made in moments of happiness and passion but the real world is different and I should realize that.

And now I had Neville once again in my life, and she thought that was the stupidest thing to have done when I was carrying on fine with Richard.

Richard had not appeared after I came home with Neville. He knew his time with me was over. He would find someone else, since he was used to surface living and that is not so difficult a thing if that is all you want.

For me, passion was everything and that is why I suffered the way I did. I felt incomplete most times if I was not attached to someone enough.

The Government advocated ‘surface- living’ and ‘free-floating’, and ‘non-attachment’ — this was the new mantra and society followed it.

The Government held that in this way people could be individuals in their own right and function separately and become attached only to the greater issues and not get involved into personal entanglements. People were surviving on this basis.

Hera was doing very well for herself, the only thing was of course she was bloating a bit with all the milk filling up within her and no takers for it.

When I asked her about it she said that the Government was making arrangements to release it from her and bottle it up for marketing because people needed this milk of humanity for survival at times.

I told her that I needed it and she could do me a favour by allowing me to get at it but she had laughed and said there is no profit in you. This way I sell to the government. Her laugh had made me cringe.

Yet I wanted her so badly that I would have done anything to have her back in my life and I said so and she disconnected her thoughts from mine. She did not want to deal with me all over again.

Neville is fast asleep, over and around me. I try not to think of fate and all those kind of things because if my arm had not gone out to tousle my blond son’s hair in the train then perhaps I could have continued to survive.

I knew that he had been searching for me and wanted me to become his again and that is why he had shone his blondness like a beacon in the train.

He knew that I am unable to resist this part of him, and that I would succumb if he was near enough again.

I allow myself to drift off since there is no point in thinking too much about things. I have to accept that I will grow no more since I have no sustenance and have stopped looking for it now, there is no one else who will fill me up the way Hera did.

Neville will take from me all that I am and soon I will be no more, it will be Neville and then he will be on the prowl for someone else. I will just be a small part of him and maybe I can guide him in his quest, but that is about it.

I stroke Neville’s hair and my eyes close.

Abha Iyengar has her work published internationally in print and on the net — poems, articles, essays, fiction, non-fiction. She has a poem film, “Parwaaz” (flight) to her credit. She loves to write “literature of the fantastic.” She lives in New Delhi, India, from where her thoughts travel everywhere.

© ABHA IYENGAR 2007

He’s seen her before, coming out of the church as he was walking inside. He’d only wanted a place to sit, where it was dark and cool and quiet.

He had looked down with shock to see the small figure on all fours on the ground.

She had leather pouches to protect her hands as she crawled, and, this was another shock, high heels attached to the ends of her stumps.

Now here she is climbing step by step onto the bus. He realizes suddenly that she will have to take the closest seat, next to him.

He curses himself for sitting in the first row, knowing as he does that this row attracts all the old ladies needing help with their sacks, women with babies and other annoyances.

Too late to get up and move, it would look too obvious. She’s already at his feet, and now she’s pointing to the seat and saying something, but her Spanish is all distorted. He sees that her mouth is disfigured as well, the teeth jutting every which way.

He’s afraid that she’s asking him to pick her up. Instead, he pats the seat next to him and nods as if to say, “please sit.”

Then he looks out the window.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees that she’s hoisted herself onto the seat. She smells warm, salty and dusty. He looks out the window again and inches himself as far away from her as possible.

At the final stop in town, he sits back and waits as she clambers down. He wonders whether the bus man will help her, as he’d done with the little children who got on with their mothers, picking them up and swinging them easily over the steps.

She starts to head down face first, and someone below grabs her like a sack of potatoes and deposits her on the pavement.

Khoa is relieved, and gets off the bus. Before going back to his room, he stops at the corner comedor with its outdoor table and benches. He orders his usual three carne de res tacos and a cerveza.

When money is low, he resorts to heating a can of soup or a package of instant noodles on his hot plate, but business has picked up lately.

He has two television sets waiting to be repaired, and he just finished the radio for Señora Gomez across the courtyard.

His room is behind a small gate between two buildings. The gate opens onto a crumbling courtyard with a jacaranda tree and a padlocked outdoor toilet in the center.

In his room is a mosquito-netted wooden bed, a desk he’d fashioned from plywood and cement blocks, and a corner alcove with his hotplate, sink and a small patch of tile with a showerhead over it.

Pliers, screwdrivers and wires cover the desk. His pencil drawings are taped to the wall. The television sets, one with a wooden frame and the other with bent antennae, sit in a corner. He’ll have to start working on them in the morning.

The night here is cool, deeply dark and silent save for the occasional howling of stray dogs. Khoa washes his feet and gets into bed. Inside the mosquito net, he switches on the reading lamp set next to his pillow.

He takes out the letter he started last night. It contains only two lines:

Bac dang o Me. Dung co lo. Your uncle is in Mexico. Don’t worry.

He looks at it again, and then folds it up and seals it in the envelope. He flips through his notebook and finds the address for his nephew in San Jose, California.

The next morning, before starting work, Khoa walks to the post office to deliver the letter and then decides to stop in the small plaza nearby.

He looks to see if the easels have been set up under a shade tree, and sure enough Ruben is there unpacking his paintings from a small dolly.

“Hola Vietnamito!” Ruben has greeted him this way since the first time they met, when he discovered Khoa’s nationality and declared him the first Vietnamese he has ever known.

He’d been introduced to the other vendors in the plaza, and they’d all nodded admiringly at the Vietnamitos who’d beat the Yanquis en la guerra inútil.

“What does this mean?” Khoa had asked. His Spanish was still dictionary-based, though he could understand enough to get by.

“Guerra inútil,” Ruben translated, “the nonsense war.”

“Ah,” Khoa said, “this I can agree with you about.” He didn’t say more, letting them clap his back and congratulate him on Vietnam’s victory.

It was true, he’d always thought the war was senseless and mad. Brother against brother, Americans against all of us. But Quang had never thought that way, and they argued about it as law students long ago in Saigon.

“So what should we do, lie down and let the Viet Cong take over the country?” Quang asked.

“I don’t want Communism anymore than you do, but we can’t kill each other like this. We’re one people after all. There has to be a way to negotiate a peace.”

They were in a downtown café, drinking Johnny Walker Black because Quang was paying. He always paid on their outings, since he was the son of a well-off publisher while Khoa was a scholarship student with an impoverished, widowed mother.

“You’re a dreamer,” Quang scoffed, tossing back his whiskey. “Ma thoi, minh la anh em. But never mind, we’re brothers anyway.”

Later on, in America, Quang still hadn’t given up. They’d lost the war but the consolation prize was worth it, after all, to become residents of the richest, most powerful country in the world.

It seemed amazing to Khoa, how someone so fired up to save the Republic of South Vietnam was then able to embrace living as an exile in the country that had let them down.

He himself, never much of a patriot, couldn’t get used to the idea that this was now his home and that Vietnam was gone.

Quang still called him every once in a while on Sundays. They addressed each other as moi et toi, like in their schooldays.

Khoa envied Quang the certainty with which he seemed to be leading his life.

“Well, there’s no going back. Those that think so are fooling themselves. Minh phai di cay, thoi. We just have to work, take care of our families, phai khong?”

Quang did most of the talking on these calls, while Khoa mainly listened. He liked hearing his friend expound, like in the old days, though now they were men nearing fifty.

He’d gone once to visit Quang and his family in Los Angeles. It shocked him then, to see their dingy one-bedroom apartment, though he himself was faring no better having only recently arrived in San Jose.

Quang always sounded so sure of himself, so strong on the phone, and Khoa had imagined him somehow unchanged from their student days. His wife, whom Khoa always thought so lovely and genteel, was working in a nail salon. “Sister, you’re as beautiful as ever,” he complimented her shyly.

And the children, three girls who hovered awkwardly in the doorway when he was introduced, he felt sorry for them being stuck in this hot apartment on a summer day.

“Let me invite your family to Disneyland,” he said impulsively to Quang. “I want to see it myself on my vacation, eh?”

The children brightened immediately, forgetting their embarrassment at the stranger and running off to put on their best clothes. Khoa marveled how little it took to make them so happy.

At Disneyland they stood in line for the rides, the spinning teacups, the trains and carousels that delighted the children. Khoa paid for all their tickets, and for their hamburgers and French fries as well.

“Thoi di, thoi di,” he waved off Quang’s objections. As the children and their mother got into one of the hanging suspended cars in TomorrowLand, Khoa and Quang climbed into another. Two middle-aged Vietnamese men riding the “people-mover,” their white dress shirts and slacks hanging limply from their gaunt bodies.

He wondered, without Quang’s family nearby, whether they looked even more out of place at this American theme park.

That was the last time he saw Quang.

He’d returned to his nephew’s apartment in San Jose, ready to look for work. It had been two years since Duc was able to sponsor him from Vietnam. They were living in the one-bedroom off Tully Road, together with Duc’s new wife Chau.

During this time, Khoa was still taking English classes at the community college. His welfare checks were enough to contribute his modest share of the household’s expenses, with something left over to pay for his cigarettes and the occasional coffee at the Vietnamese café.

But Khoa wanted to move out. His room was the living room, which they’d turned into a bedroom with a fold-out couch. The dining room was the communal area where Chau left food for him when he came home late from the café. They never ate together anymore.

At first, Chau and Duc argued in their bedroom loud enough for him to hear.

Then, as tensions mounted in the tiny space, she took to muttering under her breath when he was around, “Why can’t this old man pay part of the rent? He’s not a refugee anymore.”

He’d gone to Duc one morning, after she left for her factory job, with his last two hundred dollars. He could tell his nephew wanted to take the money, but out of respect, wouldn’t let himself.

“You’re my uncle, and I can never repay you for helping me get out of Vietnam,” he’d said.

“Alright, but ask your wife about any jobs at the factory,” Khoa said. He decided to save the money for his own apartment instead. That would make them happier anyway, he reasoned.

Eventually, through Chau’s friends, he did find a job at another factory assembling circuit boards. And some time after that, he moved into his own studio apartment.

Ruben taps out a cigarette and offers one to Khoa. They sit together on the bench next to the easels of Ruben’s paintings — brightly plumed parrots, peasant women with brown skin and colorful skirts.

Khoa doesn’t care for this type of painting, but then he realizes that his own drawings of guitars, hammocks strung between coconut trees and a moon framed by bamboo leaves, are not much more than a kind of quintessentially Vietnamese romanticism that he used to sketch as a foolish young schoolboy.

“We’re old fools,” he says to his friend.

“Speak for yourself, Vietnamito,” Ruben answers. “I returned to my country eventually. I knew when it was time to stop wandering in the wilderness.”

Ruben had learned English while studying art in Germany as a foreign student. They spoke in English, which gave Khoa a break from his rudimentary Spanish, though he sometimes wished that his friend had learned French instead.

After the first month had passed, when Khoa returned to the plaza every afternoon to smoke his cigarettes, Ruben asked him, “Are you homesick, my friend?”

Khoa, surprised at the question, searched his body for the feeling and could come up with nothing.

“I’ve forgotten what it is to be homesick,” he answered.

“When I was in Germany, every night I went to sleep dreaming that I was home, and I woke up sobbing to realize that I was not,” Ruben continued.

Khoa laughed. “What would I miss? The traffic on the freeway to get to the factory, nothing to look at but the billboards and the McDonalds sign, working and working just to afford to live?”

“No, Vietnamito, I’m talking about your country. You are homesick for Vietnam, yes? Why else would you leave the land everyone else tries to get into, to come here with us?”

“That’s all in the past,” he said. “My country is gone. It’s a different country now. So what is there to be homesick for?”

“Okay, Vietnamito. The first Vietnamito in Chiapas! I take your word for it,” Ruben had laughed.

His own grandmother had been the first Chinese, escaped from a camp of laborers brought here to build the railroad, or so the story went.

Because of this bit of shared Asian blood, Ruben would flash the pale underside of his arm and joke, “See? Yellow, just like you.”

Before he leaves the plaza, he casually asks Ruben, “Have you seen a crippled woman around town? Has no hands and legs?”

Ruben looks up quizzically. “Yes, why do you ask?”

“Just curious. I saw her on the bus.”

“That’s Flor, pobrecita. She was born that way, though she’s not a beggar for it. She sells her fans in the market and manages to earn a living for herself.”

“Okay, I will see you here another day, amigo. We all have to earn a living, don’t we,” Khoa says as he walks away from the bench.

At noon, he stops in the middle of dismantling the first television and takes another break. Instead of going to the comedor, he walks to a tiny store around the corner and buys a package of instant noodles and some eggs. He puts a small pot of water on his hot plate, empties the packet of seasoning and cracks an egg into the boiling water.

All those years in San Jose, surrounded by Vietnamese food, and he hardly remembers eating anything. Now he longs for the chewiness of rice noodles whenever he bites into a dry tortilla, and for a broth flavored with fish sauce.

He never cooks rice anymore.

That night, he tears a page from his notebook, lays it flat on the desk, and begins to draw.

It didn’t rain much in San Jose, except during the winter when the rain blew in gusts of cold wind. But he could never smell the rain on the air, about to fall, or the wet earth letting its steam rise, every living thing heaving a great exhalation each afternoon as the monsoon downpour began.

He’d started his job at the circuit board factory in winter, driving his used car in the early morning before traffic got bad. Sometimes he arrived before the doors opened, and he would sit on a concrete embankment watching the sky lose its dusky softness and become bleakly bright.

There were no restaurants nearby — nothing was within walking distance in this place where mile after mile was taken up by office parks and warehouses — so most of the workers either brought their lunch or went outside to line up at the taco truck that faithfully waited for them every day in the parking lot.

Some of the Vietnamese would occasionally get tacos or a sandwich at the truck, though most of them brought rice from home. Khoa, never remembering to prepare food for himself, ended up in line almost every day with the Mexican and Central American women who worked as janitors at the factory.

“Chicken burrito,” he said to the mustached man in the window. The woman visible through the other window briefly looked up before looking down again at her hands preparing his food.

Khoa stepped to the side of the line to wait.

It took another five minutes of waiting before a foil-wrapped cylinder appeared on the counter. The woman’s eyes flickered toward him, indicating that it was his.

The next few days, Khoa began to notice those eyes, how she seldom said anything but would glance up at her husband or at the customer, acknowledge the person and the order, and concentrate her gaze on the small quick movements of her hands.

Then, placing the paper plate or foil wrapped package on the counter, and another flash of the bright dark eyes. He couldn’t decide if it was more of a summons or an offering.

He was at the lunch truck every day, and soon there was a flicker of recognition as well in the glance she gave him. After getting his burrito, instead of going back inside to the lunch room, he sat on the embankment nearby and watched as the Mexican woman worked with her husband.

Though he couldn’t be sure — was the mustached man her husband? She didn’t look too young to be his wife, but rather too different.

The man — pudgy-faced and common, taking orders and making change without a glimmer of interest. But even with her downcast gaze and no-less efficient and routine gestures, Khoa imagined a silent coil of sorrows and secrets, deep pools of feeling behind those heavy straight brows and long-lashed eyes.

She had inky black hair, coarser and thicker than that of Vietnamese women. It was always tied into a high ponytail, the ends of which waved into a soft curve.

At first, it was the eyes that he wanted to capture, the slanting, slightly prominent shape of them and the shine of the pupils. He began sitting down after dinner with a sketch pad and pencil, a cigarette and can of beer on the table.

He taped up several drafts of these, and with her eyes looking at him from the wall, he began to trace the outline of the face, the broad high shape of the nose and the long lines of the mouth.

He was drawing again for the first time since leaving Vietnam, since the war and the prison camp.

After the rough sketch of the head was done, Khoa realized he couldn’t remember enough just from what he managed to glimpse of her during the half hour at lunch. He would have to buy a small disposable camera, he decided.

If he could take a few photos and make prints, he would be able to work with more accuracy. He would be able to study what it was that gave the eyes their subtle and powerful expressiveness.

Khoa found that if he stood diagonally just behind the taco truck, as the lunch crowd gathered in line, he could aim his camera without being noticed.

When the prints came back, there she was, framed in the window. Bending her head in profile, turning to look at her husband, sometimes even gazing off into the distance, almost expectantly.

Khoa rides the bus to the Sunday market, wondering if Flor will be there. At first, he walks through the length of the market without seeing her. He goes inside the old Dominican church but she isn’t there.

He starts to look at the mounds of tomatoes and avocados, thinking he might as well do his grocery shopping. He picks out a few limes and a bunch of cilantro, Vietnamese flavors that he’d been happy to discover were also loved by Mexicans.

He is wending his way past the meat stall and grilling stand when he spots her in the middle of the path ahead.

She’s planted herself in the center of the narrow dirt thoroughfare, and people jostle their way around her carrying bags of groceries, live turkeys and chickens. On her back is strapped a long basket filled with woven fans. She’s got one in her lap, and is clutching a plastic cup of juice to her chest with her other arm.

Khoa slows down as he approaches her. He walks past and looks back. Her black hair is braided into two long plaits, with a bright red satin ribbon twined into each braid.

He wonders about those ribbons — who braids her hair, taking the time to weave in the satin ribbon that all the indigenous women wear? Where does she get her fans, strapped sturdily to her back before crawling her way to the market?

He had thought about buying a fan from her, but had lacked the nerve once he approached. He doesn’t need a fan, and a few coins are nothing more than empty pity anyway, he says to himself.

He had seen much worse among beggars in Saigon, especially in the years after the war. Maimings, bloody bandaged wounds, children with birth defects from Agent Orange.

And she wasn’t a beggar, this Flor. She did her hair and wore high heels even without feet, and somehow this touched him most of all.

Khoa goes straight back to his room, though it is still only midday. He thinks about getting busy with those televisions, but they are easy jobs and won’t take him long to repair.

He takes out a book and considers walking to the plaza to read. Instead, he stands in front of the small mirror above his sink. He can’t remember looking at himself except in cursory inspection each morning to see that his hair was brushed and his face clean after shaving.

His hair is thinning on top, though full and wiry on the sides. His big, square-shaped eyeglasses. The large knob in his skinny throat. He’s 57 now. Nguyen Minh Khoa.

Except that no had called him that for years, neither in America where he was “Bac Khoa” to his nephew and coworkers, nor here, where he is Chino or Vietnamito. He hasn’t been Nguyen Minh Khoa, it seems to him now, since those days as a young man in Saigon, studying to become a lawyer, perched on the edge of everything about to disintegrate yet so sure of his place in the drama.

Instead, more than twenty years had passed, during which it felt to him like he had drifted from one bewildering circumstance to the next. The four years in the prison camp. After that living with his mother in their old Saigon house, hoarding rations and subsisting on broken rice before she died.

Then his nephew leaving, the secret planning, the selling of his mother’s gold to buy a spot on a boat. Duc was only 19, all his energy and daring burning for a chance to try his luck at sea, sure that he would make it — rescued and taken to America, Australia, or Canada, anywhere.

Khoa could not imagine leaving like that, cramming onto a boat and casting himself on the mercy of fishermen or pirates out on the open sea. He thought it fitting that his nephew, his only immediate relative, be given the chance to carry the family name into a hopeful future.

For himself, he could live alone, eat little, smoke much, and hug the shadows of Saigon’s streets, now Ho Chi Minh City.

When Duc wrote to him, many years later, about the possibility of sponsorship and that the United States government was willing to help South Vietnamese veterans with a special visa program, and wouldn’t he want to join his remaining family so that they could help each other make a new life?

It hadn’t taken him much to say yes, to submit the paperwork and wait another two years for the exit and entry visas and money to arrive for a plane ticket. By then, Saigon had become a ghost to him and he along with it.

Families survived on care packages from their relatives abroad, hoarding and jealous and vicious toward each other; whispering and spying, afraid of being denounced to the cadre.

He managed to fade into the background of it all, passing by unnoticed more or less. He bothered no one, asked for nothing and needed little. He’d expected to be carried through life this way in Vietnam, numbed but also buoyed by the ocean of suffering around him. What else but to survive together?

He hadn’t counted on the pain that seeped through him once in America. He remembers something Ruben said the first time they talked about being homesick: “The worst loneliness is not knowing who you are.”

It didn’t occur to Khoa to expect anything, not even the barest acknowledgement, from the Mexican Maiden, as he’d begun to call her to himself. Co Gai Me.

So the day that she smiled suddenly, almost involuntarily, when she saw him appear at the front of the line, quickly looking down again, he was stunned. He abruptly turned away, forgetting to order, and wandered back to the embankment to sit.

By this time, he had dozens of drawings of her. In his notebook, the Maiden had taken on an entire life of her own. He had framed her face, exquisitely detailed from the lowered thick lashes to the mole on her cheek, with two slender hands holding a porcelain cup of tea to her lips.

Perched at the taco truck window, leaning on her elbows, he’d transported her view to that of the Song Huong River, wide and meandering with the sun shimmering on its surface and tropical fronds on its banks.

After the smile, he couldn’t bring himself to face her in line again. Just to utter the brusque order, “chicken burrito,” and have her serve his food seemed all wrong somehow.

She didn’t belong in the lunch truck of his factory day, but in the beautiful drawings where her eyes were free to fill with every emotion he could think of.

He longed to see her outside of the truck, beyond the narrow formica counter and sliding-glass window that enclosed her. How did the rest of her move — like the graceful, quick gestures of her upper body or swaying and sensual as she walked? Was she tall or short? Thick-waisted or willowy?

He found himself waiting until the end of the lunch hour, wondering why he had never noticed when the truck arrived and when it left the parking lot. As it turned out, as soon as the last trickle of customers disappeared, the Maiden and her husband began cleaning up to go.

The husband climbed into the driver’s seat, and the Maiden stepped outside to shut and secure the metal awning propped over the display case. She had on a colorful skirt and ruffled apron, cheap black sandals on her feet.

Khoa rushed toward his own car, parked in the employee spaces a few feet away. He hurriedly turned on the ignition and backed out quickly. The truck was already pulling onto the street, which way would it turn at the light? When he got to the light and could see it lumbering along Stevenson, his breath began to slow. His heart, however, kept pounding.

The truck was headed toward the freeway. He followed up the ramp and stayed in the right lane a few cars behind. It was exiting on Tully — his street! He was breathless again as he drove cautiously after the truck through several turns off Tully.

Finally it pulled to the curb on a short street taken up by beige stucco, two-story buildings. He watched as they climbed out of the truck and headed toward the apartment complex, disappearing down a path on the far side of it.

He pulled over and parked. So they were going home, and this was where she lived, a setting not unlike that of the drab boxy buildings of his neighborhood a few streets away.

He got out of the car and walked slowly toward where he had seen them disappear. Unconsciously, he fingered the Kodak tucked in the pocket of his windbreaker.

Which apartment was it? He walked along the side path that ran next to the first floor units, listening for sounds within. A few of the window blinds were open. He stepped up to one screen to peer inside, then another.

Then he heard a screen door slam, he leaned against the edge of the wall and peeked around the corner. There was a wide sliding glass window next to the door, shaded by some bushes. He ran to one side of that window and, shielded by the bush, looked inside.

There she is, walking quickly across the living room and through a door which she closes behind her. The husband is nowhere in sight. Khoa takes in the sofa upholstered in flowery fabric, a formica card table in front of it.

An altar with the Virgin, and a calendar from Dong’s Supermarket hanging next to it. He hears water running, and walks around the other side of the wall. There’s a small screened window high up, just two narrow oblongs with the sliding door open.

Khoa hurries back to the side alley where he’d seen a small dumpster, lifts the lid and looks inside for anything that will hold his weight. There’s nothing but smelly plastic bags overflowing with garbage. He wonders for a feverish second if the dumpster itself can be rolled over with a minimum of noise, but realizes that’s impossible.

He crosses back to the front screen door, checks quickly inside and around, and without even having to think, he’s opening the door, in two strides he’s in the living room, picks up the card table and is out the door again.

When he is up and balancing on the table, gripping the bumpy wall with both palms, his eyes try to adjust to the dimness inside the black net screen. It takes him a moment, then his breath stops. The sound of rushing water fills his ears, blocking out everything else.

He is looking down at the glistening top of her head, the hair flattened and streaming down her back. A pulse of desire, warm and immediate in spite of himself, flashes through him. His breath comes shallow in anticipation of what he will see.

She turns below him, letting the water reach her body. He sees a wet brown shape of curves, his pulse beating a steady drum. Then as his gaze begins to clear, he notices the breasts sagging, the large brown nipples mottled.

There are long striations on her curving belly and hips, the marks of childbearing. He sees other details, the blunt broad toes and roughened heels of her feet, her hardworking feet that stand all day in the taco truck.

Her eyes are closed, she runs her hands down each side of her head and over her face, holding them there as her shoulders hunch and her head bends down.

Mesmerized now and awed by the pureness of this intimacy, he reaches in his pocket for the camera and lifts it. He has to manually rewind the film before each shot, and his thumb automatically pushes back the ridged black dial.

All the way back, near the end of the roll. The sound of the dial turning, click, click, click, doesn’t even register with him. But she stops moving, looks around, then up.

Her eyes meet his, through the window screen she is staring directly at him. There is that split second of instant recognition — she knows who he is, the man from the lunch line.

And in between the moment of recognition and the moment her face contorts and then breaks apart into pure terror, he is falling, falling and the screams falling with him as he stumbles up from the ground and crashes through the alley.

Night after night, Khoa looks at her face and body. He doesn’t have to see the real woman anymore to remember the likeness. On his desk he grows familiar again with her features, and they are more beautiful to him with each rendering.

When his notepaper and pencil become too limiting, the sketches mastered, he goes to Ruben and asks to trade his smallest canvas and the use of some paints in return for a clock radio that someone has left behind.

With the utmost care on a tiny brush, Khoa mixes the colors bringing her to life. It is only the color and the light of her he sees now as he paints.

He is painting this portrait for himself, yet when it is done, he knows he will not keep it.

He will take it to the marketplace, and there he will ask Flor to give him a fan in return.

Tram Nguyen is the former Executive Editor of ColorLines Magazine, and a former reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Amerasia Journal, New California Media, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere. Her coverage of civil liberties earned her a New California Media Award in 2003; her book, “We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories From Immigrant Communities After 9/11″ (Beacon), was published in September 2005.

SCENE 1

A vast Western exterior. The kind of enormous landscape you see in Japanese or Chinese art, not for its Asian qualities, but rather in that the sole human figure is dwarfed by it.

Colors:

• Sunset/sunrise
• High towering clouds tinted by the sunlight
• Dun/sere earth
• Red rocks, mesas, buttes, arches
• Spring blooms and blossoms

Details — all of the human and his artifacts:

• A hand holding reins
• A horse’s hoof breaking the soil
• A shadow on a rock w/ a petroglyph inscribed on it

SCENE 2

Interior. Clearly a frontier cabin. Details abound: Silverware and cracked china, a lit candle in a glass flute, a fireplace w/ a fire, a rocking chair, a gingham dress, a collection of foreign coins, a collection of letters tied up in a ribbon, a Bible, a stack of magazines and books.

Two characters: A mother and a child. They are both silent.

• The mother is writing a letter. She is concentrated, considering words, crossing things out, writing new lines, deeply focused.
• The child is doodling and drawing happily. Five or six years old. One of the images looks almost exactly like the petroglyph we saw in Scene 1.

SCENE 3

This is another splash of the epic landscape, but combined with the intimate details of the domestic interior. It is the desert in its splendor; in the distance one can make out dwellings, people, constructions and activities. It is hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The landscape is more verdant. The details are of a thriving Anasazi cliff-dweller community. There are rivers and creeks, with gallery forests along the canyon floors, and crops.

Three characters — they will require some references and lots of inference to depict relatively accurately:

• A woman working with her friends/family/community. She is grinding maize and making flour. She is smiling and speaking easily. No word balloons are necessary.
• A child, playing nearby. She is making a tower of stones.
• A man — the father — in the distant desert. We see his sandaled foot, and a familiar clump of boulders… the same ones we saw in the first scene, but from a different angle, so you can’t see the petroglyph.

SCENE 4

A split sequence of action and images between the Anasazi and Frontier-era deserts.

• A pair of prospectors in the badlands — our first hero and one other. The pair are leading a horse laden with packs. They are grizzled and weary.
• A pair of Anasazi crossing the desert, traders or ambassadors bearing gifts. They are weary and seem overburdened.
• A rattlesnake
• The dry cracked lips of the Anasazi
• The snake’s buzzing tail
• A sandaled Anasazi foot stumbling
• The snake leaping forward and connecting with the lower leg of the other prospector
• The Anasazi stumbling further, onto one knee
• The prospector lurching forward
• A scattering of dust …
• … and confusion …
• The first Anasazi standing wearily by his fallen companion, who he has lain against a rock, open to the desert. His hand is just coming away from the petroglyph, freshly inscribed. He water jug is empty.
• The lone prospector riding away from a cairn built over his dead companion. It looks exactly like a scaled-up version of the rock tower the Anasazi child had made in Scene 3.
• The last image is of the surviving prospector, a close-up of his face; his lips are cracked and dry.

END

You often ask, child, about the fog that rolls in thick on the heels of the day, and clings like a shroud through highest summer. Any student of atmospheres and temperature will tell you how the hot breath of the great Valle do Meio passes through the Golden Doors, the Portal Dourado, to kiss the cool, moist air of the wide Ocean, and bring forth the City’s famed, silvery tongues of cloud and vapor.

They will tell you that the fog is a cloud brought close to the soil, a byproduct of heat and condensation. But I say that “tongues” is far more apt.

All this the Sea-King saw, and all of it was encompassed within the span of his arms: the ebbing currents and tides, the sighing waves and forests of kelp, and even too the craggy rocks, with their crowds of barking seals, and circling gulls, and cormorants with outstretched wings.

These he knew like you know the hair when it rises on the back of your neck, like you know the lines on your knuckles, the dimples on your knees or the contours of your teeth.

But there was more to this world. Sounds and bright light, up there, away from his cold depths. Voices bright and singing, and glimpses stolen from the tops of his highest waves — great expanses of trees, and glorious constructions rising above the water and the land, stretching away and up the slopes of those damnable hilltops and ridges!

He strove and he grasped — but the Sea-King was a slave to the moon. She drew him out like silk, pulled up the billowing tides and let them collapse again, and never did she let his reach exceed the lowest sloping dunes, or whelm the broad, ancient sea wall.

Still, the Sea-King dreamed of the City, his visions half-complete, or less, all veils and dazzling sun upon his waters.

He sought after the little creatures who raised up its arches and towers, hoping to glean from them its secrets. They would play and splash at his shores, and tease the waves with their ships and skiffs. He’d pick one of the many, and rob them from the surface, bear them down with sucking currents. But they never would hear his words, would heave and quickly perish, and their shades were bitter, frightened, wailing things that he left with their skulls to dissolve in the brine.

And still the Sea-King dreamed of the City’s brightness, and lush follies, and sought to bring it all down into his cool, quiet depths.

So he called to the winds and cursed at them, and they lashed his waters into huge, frothing surges.

And he whispered to the moon, and flattered her, and she laughed and reached to him, and drew up the heaving tide.

And his waves found consummation. They deluged the long beach and the seawall, and lapped at the windmills on the edge of the park, the green expanse raised through artifice and craft from the dunes and drifting sands.

Now, I should note that this was altogether another time and epoch of the City, in the unknowable past, when it was home to all manner of conjurer and thaumaturge — including a number of the world’s leading oromancers.

And among the many saints and wizards, and diverse witches and priestesses of the temple, were also beings more of air and vapor, of smoke and flame, than our dull mud and dust.
The waters surged and roared, and leapt against the gates and steps of the most westward residential districts, till at last the wisest of the City’s peoples gathered upon the high cliffs to the north, overlooking all the shores and beaches under seige.

“See how his waters curl above the seawall.”

“So high … ”

“And snatch at the children and their parents.”

“He will claim them all.”

“And all of us.”

“He may not!”

They turned to regard the speaker, a great afrit of storms, clad in red and black.

“The old sea-father seeks that which is not his,” the afrit said, and his voice was rushing and cold, and crackled with ozone. “He has tempted his mistress from her gracious station, and maddens my peers with hateful talk. He goes against his nature, and so nature shall turn him back!”

The prince of spirits leapt upwards then, gathered himself into a whirlwind and hovered above. He spoke, and his voice was thunder and gales, and his sisters and brothers gathered, and listened, in frightening ranks of wind and lightning they nodded and bobbed, blue-white wreathed, and at last they cried out as one, a thousand roaring tigers of the storm, and hurled themselves upwards and against the water, and sought to drive the waves back into the open ocean.

And at last the waters retreated from the sea wall, and left the shoreline streets and byways slick with kelp.

The Sea-King grunted, stirred down to his most blind and empty depths. But he was crafty, and patient, and he whispered anew to the moon, and appealed to her vanity, and she sighed and smiled, and stroked him, and drew up the swelling tide, which he gathered into a broad, rolling blue-gray mountain that surged toward the shore.

“Wind and fire first beat him back.”

“And now the Earth.”

“And now the Earth!”

The oromancers gathered, their robes dark brown and black, and dug into the soil. Nachiam Preleg, the eldest, built up a cairn of rock. Black-Eyed Jarmouh, the fattest, laid around it a sloping base of gravel and mud. Erian of Downy Market, the fairest, danced then with the swarthy Burgenveld twins, and they whispered to the rocks and soil to remind them of how they grew, of lustful serpentine and granite heaved up into the sky, and their forms writhed and tangled and entwined, till they were submerged in the mud and soil.

The ground itself trembled with their gasps, and rose with their shuddering flanks. Below, ever further below, the water receded, and even the mighty wave drawn forth by the amorous moon crashed, monstrous but hopeless, against the bottommost rocks of the new-risen cliffs.

The Sea-King was beaten, then. The moon called to him, but saw at last his heart was false, and grew angry, for she had allowed herself to be drawn astray from the great order of things. Her light and yearning turned pale and chill, and never again did the waves stir from their helpless observation of her passage.

The fickle winds and storms whispered through the promenades and courtyards, now lifted up so high above the water, and swiftly forgot the insults and the battle.

The whole City was hushed, the towers and arches fallen, the paving stones upturned and cracked. The wizards and saints and mistresses of the temple were broken and lost, the spirits dispersed. Even the oromancers were buried, smothered by the turbulence they teased out of the Earth.

But birds and foxes flitted among the ruins, and clustered orange poppies grew in abundance. In time new peoples came to the place of the City, and wondered at the waters and broad grassy slopes, the bracing, chilly peaks, twins cloven by a deep, high, fertile canyon.

And still the gulls cried as humans built new homes and reared their children, and made great works of art and terror, and lived their dreary, thrilling lives, for countless generations, to this very day.

And still the Sea-King dreams, of his long-fingered limbs and thick, uncurling tongue flooding through the avenues, surging over the rooftops and bringing the light and voices into cold and silent depths.

It will never be, as the great afrit has promised. We are too far upwards now, beyond his briny grasp.

But still he dreams. And the fog then is thick, and swirls about us like tongues and breath, and we can imagine a different world than the one we live in, lost beneath the cresting waves, the light of the sun just a rumor far above.

(New York City, 2022)

Brawley gazed at the package. It was in a Nordstrom’s shopping bag — a large box wrapped with plain butcher paper, meticulously taped. No logos, no bar code or curl of ribbon.

“There’s a bag over there,” the young woman had said, a mother with a pouting toddler in tow. “It looks heavy.”

She was frowning, uncertain.

“You’re thinking fast,” he told her. “Thanks for being alert.”

He pulled out his walkie-talkie, motioning her to back away, and for a few moments the air was filled with electronic squawks and crackling voices. Then he looked up and called out, calm but loud:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to apologize but we have to ask that you all clear the room immediately. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to clear the room.”

There was a murmur of protest and confusion. People looked up from the exhibits, absorbed, brows wrinkled.

Brawley opened his mouth again, but before he could speak the alarm went off. An attendant’s voice echoed out from the vaulted ceiling, asking people to evacuate the museum in an orderly manner.

“Guess they aren’t taking any chances,” he said to the woman, turning. But she was already making for the door, her kid bubbling up into a fit of contrarian wailing.

Guess nobody is.

He watched the room empty out, positioning himself by the entrance to keep an eye on the package. As he did there were heavy running footsteps: the bomb squad, arriving in their airtight safety suits and carrying boxes of equipment.

The foremost came up: “Thanks,” he said. “You better clear out now. You made the right call.”

He clapped Brawley on the shoulder and then turned and moved into the room. The team had already set up a perimeter, and was sealing the doors, windows and ducts against gas and germs.

The security guard walked away, towards the stairwell. The alarm was still ringing, and patrons rushed past, panicked, emerging from darkened rooms filled with gems and crystals, and glowing models of the sun, and dioramas of woolly mammoths and other extinct, fabulous monsters.

He wasn’t a well-read man, Brawley. But he understood the majesty and revelatory power of the dusty bones and peculiar artifacts: charms and fetishes that could beat back the darkness, and set a child’s eyes alight with a glimpse of some greater knowing.

He trudged down the stairs, sullen, and suddenly wracked by a fit of trembling. Teeth chattering. Mind gripped by visions of shrapnel and flame, flesh seared and torn to ribbons.

I fucking need a god-damned drink.

But the liquor only gave leave to his insurgent mind. All night long he felt the scorch marks on his face, the fragments of glass and metal and bone dragging through his gut.

“A fucking bomb!” he roared at the mute faces around him. He thought of the young mother and her child, lifted, borne back by the red-orange blossom, and pounded his fist on the bar. “This isn’t fucking normal!”

The bartender finally mustered a smile. “Here’s to makin’ it one more day, big guy. On the house.”

She poured a double. Brawley knocked it back in one heroic gulp, put his head on the scarred, varnished wood, and wept.

* * * * *

“Security officers found a bomb by the big T-Rex in the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon,” said the bright-eyed anchor on the evening news. “The device, which police described as ‘amateurish but powerful,’ was quickly defused and removed from the scene. Police briefly pursued a suspect through the crowd outside the museum, but there have been no arrests. Officials commended a security guard, Kendall Brawley, for identifying the bomb after a museum visitor expressed concern. Authorities have not made a link between this incident and the catastrophic explosion last month in Fossil Flats, Colorado. That blast destroyed the richest bed of dinosaur footprints in the world, and took the lives of 13 researchers. In an anonymous fax Christian fundamentalists claimed responsibility, saying they believed the tracks were ‘the footprints of Satan and Beelzebub,’ and that God had ordered them to act.”

The TV droned on: Drought, floods and fish kills … tac-nukes gone off in Bosnia, intercepted in Syria, believed under construction in the Horn of Africa … plague rats ‘liberated’ from an Oregon lab won’t survive the winter, experts say … police and pickets clash in the streets of Kansas and New Hampshire … In the Southwest there are rumors of militias trading shots: Mexicans and Indians and paleface border patrols … “Tropical Palau, swamped by the latest cycle of megastorms and monster surges, is now considered 85 percent uninhabitable” …

They snagged the bomb in the museum, however. Saved a great cathedral of science from the forces of ignorance and hate. That’s what the anchor said, and segued from that point to another feelgood item:

“Mother Nature makes a comeback in the Adirondacks. A team of biologists believe they have evidence that frog populations upstate are on the rebound. Cornell University scientist Dr. David Mannerling says the species is adapting to acid rain, thinning ozone and warming climates, and that new emissions controls would therefore be an expensive over-reaction. We’ll be right back.”