A path less straight (pt. 2)

The Wikipedia kid rides again

We had taken Egg’s five year old niece for a walk in the park. She lived mostly with his parents, although care was shared between various relations when they were available. Everyone seemed to travel quite a lot. I asked him why his sister could not look after the child.

“Aphelia? She swings around when she can, but she and Kuiper have important careers and it would not be fair on Vesta to have her live with them” he explained. “She’d probably grow up all weird.”

Vesta ran on ahead, a pair of dress-up feathered wings on her back and a plastic sword in her hand. She had explained to me that angels carried flaming swords to smite down their enemies. I had asked her if she wanted to be an angel when she grew up.

“No,” she had replied. “I want to be a corporate accountant.”

With the ducks fed, the swings swung, the slide slid and some imaginary, but fairly insidious, evil smote into small, charred pieces we headed back to Egg’s house.

Egg shared a fifties semi with his older brother, which he had explained meant that he mainly had the place to himself except for a couple of weeks every year when Bracken breezed into town, rearranged the furniture, enraged the neighbours and then disappeared again to wherever the family firm required him to be. The gardens were neat, the pebble-dash well-painted and while the car on the drive was a couple of decades out, it looked much as it might have done when it was first built. Inside it had been modernised, was decorated conservatively and only a few touches showed any of Egg’s usual disregard for convention.

He set out glasses of iced mint tea and a plate of beetroot and dark chocolate brownies and then paused as though he had heard a strange noise in an adjoining, but empty room.

“Sorry, I’ll have to take this in private,” he said. Then his phone rang.

Vesta and I had brushed away the crumbs and adjourned to the back garden to keep the dinosaurs away as we rounded up cattle on the ranch before he rejoined us. I had thought he looked a little under the weather all day, but something in the phone call had turned his face ashen and sucked all life from his usually under-animated features. He sat heavily on the low wall that guarded the central flower bed from the lawn.

“That was my uncle Fez,” he explained. “My dad’s in hospital, its his heart.”

“Is it serious?” I asked, not knowing what to say. I had met Egg’s dad, Rob, a small, bald, quiet sort of man, he and Egg conversed in partial sentences and long pauses, but seemed to understand each other perfectly. Fez was quite the opposite, overtly expressive about everything, spouting forth endlessly without actually saying anything.

“Yes,” he replied. “The doctor says he has myocarditis of some sort.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Myocarditis or inflammatory cardiomypathy is inflammation of the heart muscle (myocardium). Myocarditis is most often due to infection by common viruses, such as...” stated Vesta.

“Cheers, Vesta.” He took stock of my expression. “That’s just Wikipedia. I usually remember to turn my wi-fi off before she comes round here. It doesn’t look good, I’m going to have to get in contact with Mother.”

“Is that difficult?” I made a mental note to stop asking little questions.

“She was working with Bracken in Vladivostok last month, but left him to finish off. We don’t know where she went after that, usually she’ll get back in contact within a couple of months, but...” He swallowed.

“I understand, and does Bracken know where she might have gone?” I asked.

“He’s split up with Huggy again, which means he’ll be sulking with his phone off,” he said. “He could be anywhere, probably a cabin in the woods somewhere.” He paused. “But I know someone who might be able to point us in the right direction.”

We followed him back into the kitchen. He turned on the radio and played with the tuner until he found what he wanted. I vaguely recognised the intro, but when the voice joined the beat it was the voice of an old gent from the home counties and not some American rap star.

“You’ve got some dilemma, running through your life,

Causing you troubles, giving you strife.

You need to go searching, looking for your bro.

Sucker’s hiding where? You just don’t know.

Need to find that sucker, don't know where to go?

He's hiding in the forest, eating kalakukko.

That girl beside you, if I were you

I’d tap that ass

Touch it, stroke it, slow grind all night

Play it...”

Egg quickly snapped the radio off. The colour had returned to his cheeks in a rush.

“That was...” I began.

“...awful,” he finished. “He should have stuck to yodelling.”

“And that was supposed to help?” I raised an eyebrow. “What's that Kali-something?”

“Kalakukko is a traditional dish from the Finnish region of Savonia made from fish baked inside a loaf of bread.” Vesta answered.

“Cheers, Vesta,” Egg said. He turned to me. “Do you fancy a trip abroad? I can't promise there'll be much time for sightseeing, but the firm's credit card will be paying.”

“Well...” I considered my options. I was between temporary contracts and my passport had been gathering dust, but I could never remember when on the relationship calendar you were supposed to vanish off into the wilderness with a guy.

“Separate rooms, if that's what you want,” he added. “I could just do with some company and an independent, sober viewpoint when it comes to family stuff. Steve's useless at that sort of thing.”

“Okay,” I replied. “I'll get my mum to water the plants.”

“C'mon, Vesta,” Egg said. “Let's go visit your granddad in hospital, and then Cass and I have to go to Finland to find your Uncle Bracken.”

“Uncle Egg, is Granddad going to be alright?” she asked.

“Of course,” he answered in that way adults say things to children when they are trying to convince themselves. “We'll find Granny and she'll know exactly how to make him better.”

“Citation needed,” Vesta stated.

A path less straight (pt. 1)

Egg and Chips

I met Egg through friends. We were gooseberries to the romance of the century. While they entwined on a bench on the seafront, we leaned against a railing and scowled at the seagulls. He had a kind of distant look, as though he was listening for very faint sounds from very far away.

He suggested that we find somewhere out of the wind, rather than rely on the radiated glow of other people’s love for warmth, so we sat in a café and ate greasy chips and drank over-stewed tea. Trying not to keep up both sides of the conversation or mention my recent ex-, Jason, I had asked him to tell me about his family.

“They’re odd.” He said.

“Everyone thinks their family are odd,” I told him. “No-one wants to be normal.”

“When I was twelve, I was listening to the radio with my Granddad,” he replied, adding more ketchup to the remaining chips. “ Suddenly, he stood up straight and saluted. He stayed rigid like that until the end of the song and then keeled over dead, still stiff as a board.”

“You must have been devastated.” I took another gulp of lukewarm tea.

“Not really, we had a sweepstake on who would be closest when he passed away, I won big-time.” He patted me on the back as I tried not to choke on my tea. “It was his idea, he hadn’t been well since he left the army and it was his way of preparing everyone for the inevitable.”

“What was playing? Was it the national anthem?” I asked.

“It was ‘Baby Got Back’, he hated all that patriotic stuff.” He replied. “Ever since then, if I ever want any advice, all I have to do is tune the radio into some hip-hop station and I hear his voice, rapping the answers to my problems.”

“That’s kind of nifty.” I gave a laugh, but he was not smiling, not in his distant blue eyes.

“It is handy,” he said. “But it makes MTV thoroughly embarrassing.”

Two weeks later Egg arrived unexpected at my door. The romance of the century was on the rocks, Janet had been on the phone wailing and cursing about what Steve had done. I was looking for an excuse not to go around to her place with a bottle of wine and try to hold back the flood of tears with a dam of platitudes.

“Have you heard about Janet and Steve?” I asked, somewhat taken aback because I had never told him where I lived or discussed the possibility of meeting again.

“I surmised something was up, but the battery ran out on my phone,” he replied. “Fancy a drive out in the country?”

Just then the opening bars of some cringe-inducing pop song trilled out from my phone. I noted Janet’s name on the screen, but the battery indicator was flashing and the device went black before I could hit accept.

“Oh.” I said. “Looks like its catching.”

“If it becomes an epidemic, how will people cope?” He gestured towards where an old Ford sat at the kerbside. “Perhaps we should escape before civilisation collapses.”

The car, he explained as we passed fields at a leisurely pace, had been his granddad's. It had never suffered any kind of mechanical breakdown, unless you counted the radio, which had ceased working properly six months after the car was bought and so would not play anything other than eighties tunes.

“That must be annoying.” I said.

“Granddad said it was novel in the seventies, but got old real soon after then,” he deadpanned.

He parked the car on the verge of a seldom travelled road, lifted a rucksack from the boot and led me through an over-grown stile into a field. I followed him along a meandering path, snaking around bushes and then taking a route through a small copse as though it had been laid by a drunk with nowhere in particular to go.

“They could have made this straighter,” I remarked.

“Its easier to follow where the path wants to go,” he replied. “That’s the problem with modern roads, they build them straight and it takes so much effort to follow them.”

I spent the next few minutes trying to digest this as the path zigzagged through a grassy meadow, but I guess he could have been right because we found ourselves at the top of a ridge, the car visible far below us, there had been no sense of climbing. He pulled a blanket out of his bag and set up a picnic as I surveyed the kind of view that people call idyllic but rarely actually go out of their way to find.

We ate a spread of off-beat food, brie and beetroot sandwiches, quail eggs wrapped in bacon, parsnip and sweet potato crisps, cheese scones spread with quince jelly and a cake that he said was made with pineapple and courgette. He told me that it was mostly what he had found in the fridge.

We spent a couple of hours sat, chatting about nothing, drinking gooseberry cordial and enjoying the one nearly perfect day of Spring, until a chill wind rose up and he suggested heading back. He left the rest of the cake, telling me it was a present for the pixies, so that they might let us use this spot again some other day.

As we drove back, Wham and Duran Duran playing on the radio, I realised that I had just broken all of my rules and spent the day with a bloke I hardly knew, leaving my phone at home. But there had been none of the pressing for a drunken Friday night tumble that marked my usual relations with the opposite sex. It was more like a date from the fifties as I imagined them, all jolly good fun and none of that hanky panky, but with less smoking and fewer quiffs. It was certainly better than spending the day agreeing with Janet on what pigs men are.

A fortnight after that I managed to get Egg’s number from Steve, who had sealed the rift with Janet by single handedly keeping the local florist solvent. He apologised for not getting in touch, work had managed to get on top of him. I suggested that we go out to see a film and then I would cook us a meal, he agreed and arrived five minutes early with a bunch of pelargoniums and a bottle of rioja.

I had not heard of the film, but it turned out to be a quirky and intelligent thriller. We laughed at several inappropriate moments and he did not hog the popcorn. The cinema was virtually empty, it was not until a couple of weeks later that I saw it advertised on television so I assumed it was some sort of advanced preview screening.

Back at my house we dined in style on my vegetable lasagne served with over-done oven chips. He told me a story about the layers of lasagne representing the social strata of medieval Italy, proving that to survive at the top you have to tolerate slightly burnt cheese. I drank most of the wine as he had to drive home and had to work in the morning.

“I work for the family consultancy firm,” he explained. “Mostly communication and forecasting.”

“Sounds complicated,” I said.

“Not really,” he replied. “Its mainly answering the phone and making guesses.”

He kissed me sweetly as he left. Not a huge romantic snog, but a gentle peck on the cheek. Some of the distance had gone from his eyes and there was something in his wave as the old Ford pulled away from the kerb. My lasagne never fails.

I was a teen-aged cyborg

“Its completely experimental, quite on the bleeding edge,” Nina had told me, beaming the words and associated data straight to my mind. “Although, of course, its a very long time since either of us had any real blood.”

The image she sent of a girl laughing was an old one, a reminder of our long friendship. I had captured it myself with my first set of artificial eyes just after we had both recovered from the surgery. It had been the first step on both of our journeys into becoming post-human.

“I don't know,” I replied. “Its such a big step and you know how I like to take things slower.”

I sent her my memories of recovering from that plane crash and the painful choice of deciding which parts of my body to replace with machinery, which to regrow as before. Part of me still wonders how my life would have turned out if I had kept as much flesh as possible.

“But don't you think things have become a trifle staid and boring?” She asked me.

I received and perused her delight at her first transformation into something truly non-human. The winged, four-armed form was designed for working in a reduced gravity environment, Nina had turned it into a beautiful artistic gesture.

“You have always moved faster than I have.” I responded.

I dredged up a memory of us in our old bio-mechanical glory and transmitted it to her. Racing through clouds on jets of fire, I had been unable to keep up, only tracking her through my radar sense.

“Have you lost that sense of adventure, of discovery?” She demanded.

She sent me a recording of two vessels leaving the docks and heading for the open vastness of deep space. We had travelled between the stars for centuries as living ships, revelling in far-flung stellar oddities.

“There is no shame relaxing and taking pleasure in a myriad of little joys.” I told her.

I connected her to my live feeds, monitoring the lives, loves and losses of my million inhabitants, each as individual and different as we had been. As a space-borne mining and processing station I was their home, their employer and their carer, they were my obsession and my entertainment.

“Think of it, inserted into the informational fabric of the Universe at the most basic quantum level, you'd be a god, the creator of your own reality.” She insisted.

“Then you go first, create a reality for both of us and I'll follow when I'm ready.”

I watched her go through the procedure, watched the energies build and flow and watched her disappear from my life. I considered taking the same procedure for many years, but eventually turned my back and joined the rehumanist movement. I was tired of following Nina from pillar to post-human.

Between the Streetlights (part 3)

The only movement was a single droplet of water. It formed itself slowly on the exposed pipes and then cast itself free, experienced a brief flash of freedom and then was dashed upon the unyielding concrete floor. The whole scene was lit by the dispassionate glow of a single bare, dim bulb. My world held, caught in a limbo of circumstance.

Burnt out by the predations of the night, my mind was a dilapidated room; minimal furniture, damp walls, an unpleasant and lingering odor and one occupant who desperately wanted to get out. I wondered why I had ever thought I could do this thing and where had I misplaced the conviction I had started evening with.

After an age or a moment the lock grated and the door swung open. Fuller was all swagger and confidence, suit unwrinkled and hat still straight, every inch the conquering hero. He unbuttoned his jacket and sat in the other of the two chairs, the survivors of hard times and ill-treatment, they were as battered, hard and unforgiving as their usual occupants.

“Tell me, Winterton, why?” He fixed me with his blue eyes and let their stare pummel me.

“Why? Because he was my friend.” My fingers traced the filigree of scratches the marked the surface of the room's only table, anxious for the comfort holding a cigarette or whiskey tumbler.

“That makes the kind of sense only a whiskey-sodden deadbeat would understand,” he snarled, slapping his hand flat on the table and forcing me to recoil involuntarily.

“Ever had the kind of friend who you could read at a glance and could do the same to you? The sort of person who you could not see for months at a time, but when you finally met up again the beats still matched up perfectly?” His blank gaze answered me. “No, I don't suppose you ever have. Well, last month Clancy asked me how I was feeling.”

“You killed him because he asked how you were feeling? That's madness, Donald.” He shook his head, another drip launched itself from the pipe.

“It wasn't him. It wasn't the guy who sat on the park bench and sketched the passing girls in his notebook. Gone was the man who stirred his coffee once only, in case the spoon tainted the taste. There was no sign of the friend who took in a dirty, shattered person and made him whole and clean again. Something had come and destroyed my pal, put on his body like a new suit and was parading about in his place.” I laid myself open upon that table and saw only cold, hard logic in his eyes.

“You're all kinds of crazy, Winterton. People change, they get tired of drunken old sots sponging off them, they lose faith in those who fail them time and time again, sometimes they just kick out the trash and get on with their lives!” His raised voice bounced back at me from the walls.

“Am I? And what happened to young Hank , looking so proud in that uniform that was too big for the scrawny little guy? What happened to the man who swept Doreen off her feet on a starlit June night? What happened to you, Fuller?” The light flickered momentarily and I was suddenly afraid.

“I am still me! Stronger, smarter and better, Winterton, and you just don't like it.” He was on the verge of shouting and I knew then that I was right.

“Hank Fuller is dead, you took his place but you will never be half the man he ever was! Just face it, you're just a parasite, living in a corpse!” I spat the words at him. The light flickered again as I watched the scales of his temper tip dangerously towards anger.

He leaped across the table at my throat, his fingers suddenly elongated and wickedly pointed. I lifted the front legs of my chair and let his momentum push it off balance as I attempted to fend his hands off my face. As we fell I managed to get my knee between us and pushed him off as we hit the ground.

We both rolled away and lurched to our feet. He was quick, but he was not ready for instincts honed on the dirtiest streets of this insalubrious city. I fended him away with the hastily grabbed chair and then swung it with what strength I had left. The first impact knocked him back against the wall, the second hit hard enough to nearly jar my weapon from my grasp, the third never connected, he caught the chair and ripped it from my hand. He growled at me, completely unhurt.

A night of no sleep and several whiskeys meant his lunge caught me before I had decided which way to dodge. Again we toppled to the floor, the strobing light illuminating his face is brief flashes of ugly hate and determination. He pinned me down, his sharpened digits dug painfully into my arms. From somewhere I found the energy to laugh.

“What's so funny, Winterton?” He asked, a shadow of confusion passed over his face. “You can't hurt me, all you do is prolong your fate. If I kill you here, no-one will ever find out and if I don't you're going away for so long they might as well bury you now.”

“You'll never be as good a detective as the real Henry Fuller,” I tell him with nothing left to lose. “You asked me why, but you already knew the answer to that, what you should have asked is how.”

“Then how, Winterton, how did you do it?” His face pressed close to mine contorted in a leer.

“I didn't.” I grinned back at him. “And I lied, Henry Fuller isn't dead, he's somewhere deep inside of you but only something with real power can draw him out, that's your weakness.” That was all I had, my last mote of defiance, I closed my eyes and waited for death or worse.

Death was noisy. It kicked at the door, desperate to claim me for its own, the impacts filled the room. On the forth kick I heard the door splinter and the sounds of its remains being yanked from the hinges.

“Get away from him, brute!” I was wrong, it was an angel with Phyllis's voice.

“Hank? Is there still any of you in that creature?” A host of angels, this one sounded like Doreen. Fullers weight lifted from me slowly.

“Don't do anything foolish, woman, put the gun down.” Fuller growled.

“Oh Hank, I should have said yes and we could have run away like we planned, but I just wasn't ready for it. We could have left the city, bought a small farm and none of this would never have happened. Hank...” Doreen's voice broke and petered out.

“Doreen, I'm sorry,” The voice was Fuller's, but all the pride and surety were gone. “Do it, for me, for us...”

The gunshot was shockingly loud in the enclosed space, it assaulted my ears and Fuller's weight again pressed me against the unyielding floor. I opened my eyes to see Phyllis's sweet visage framed by her perfect hair in the harsh light from the solitary bulb. She gently prised her revolver from Doreen's shaking grasp and slid it back into her purse.

“I blabbed everything out to Doreen in the car,” Phyllis explained. “She filled in the blanks and convinced Billy to turn the car around. That was a hell of a gamble you pulled, Donald.”

“I knew I could count on you.” Billy Johnson, the man-mountain helped me out from under the former body of Henry Fuller. “There was no way I could have convinced Doreen myself.”

“What do we do now?” Asked Billy, the tremble in his voice a contrast to his imposing physique. “We have to tell the chief.”

“I think we should talk to his wife first.” I sighed. “First we get out of here, then we find somewhere that serves breakfast and see how many refills of coffee we can spring before we get thrown out.”

We made our way onto the street through a back exit. Phyllis and I leaned heavily against each other as we walked, Billy supported Doreen's sobbing form. The world was just waking up, getting itself ready for another ordinary day, completely unaware of the dark places that you find between the streetlights.

“Oh, and one thing, Donald.” Phyllis spoke to me between puffs on her cigarette. “Stop looking at me like that. Its been a long, hard night and I don't think I can deal with that on top of everything else.”

Between the Streetlights (part 2)

The smoke from my cigarette climbed lazily to join the haze that lingered in the room, hanging over the tables like a promise unfulfilled. I swallowed the last remnants of my drink, maybe the forth or fifth empty glass of the evening, maybe more. My world paused, tension building.

Phyllis was curled on the seat opposite me, I had draped my coat over her when finally her fatigue had overtaken her. She murmured something in her troubled sleep and I longed to stroke her sleek hair and offer her comfort, but I could not lie to her, things were not about to get better.

I tried to tune out the soporific jazz, but in MacAddam's the music inhabited the walls, the building moved to the vibrations of the quartet on the stage. Armageddon could come and they would play on, the bar's back room was its own universe, no windows, no clocks, forever three o'clock on a Sunday morning.

Doreen brought me another, sensing my need and ignoring Jim behind the bar; he looked on with a scowl, calculating my tab and the likelihood of payment. She placed a well-manicured hand on my shoulder and followed my gaze. The dim light left most of Phyllis's face in tantalizing shadow.

“Oh, Donny, she's far too fine for the likes of you, certainly too fine for a dump like this.” Nature had graced Doreen with a face that would forever be lost in the background of the scene, but her voice could lift you away from the dusty tables and haphazard jazz.

“Places fine enough for a girl like Phyllis don't take my credit any more.” We had nearly been an item once, Doreen and I, but she had ended up in the arms of a policeman. It had not ended up all that well, Doreen and I were both unlucky that way.

“Still waiting for things to turn around, eh?” She placed my empty glass on her tray. “Does she know that, or are you running up a tab with her, too?”

“She's had a rough night and I didn't want to leave her alone.” I considered the truth of my statement, I did not want to leave her.

“Talking of rough nights, look what's hauled its sorry ass onto my doorstep.” Doreen straightened herself and glared towards the door. A missed note from the band signalled a change in the atmosphere, a breath held collectively by the bar's denizens. It did not take a frosted glass office door embossed with my name followed by the letters P and I to work out what kind of person had just entered the room.

A shadow loomed over me, reducing the poor quality of the light even further. A hand was placed on the table, the nails clean and neatly trimmed. A throat was cleared. Unperturbed, I took a sip of my drink.

“Winterton.” The voice was clear and had the polished mahogany of education but the dirt of the city had taken the sheen off. Henry Fuller had been a good man once, but his job had taken him into the dark, seedy corners of the city and a certain corrosion had set in.

“Detective Fuller, I did not know you were a jazz lover.” Phyllis's eyes opened, she appraised the situation in a flash of verdant green and sat up demurely.

“If I were then I would give this place a wide birth.” I glanced around, Doreen's face was set in stone, but her eyes held the far away look of summer meadows and a missed opportunity. By the door a mound of muscle poured into a suit was Fuller's back-up. Fuller himself was cast in iron, hard, unbending and bereft of sympathy “I'm here to ask you about Clancy Burton.”

“Clancy is an old friend, we go back a long way, he'll tell you that.” I could not risk looking at Phyllis, did not dare suffer accusation in her gaze.

“You still have friends, Donald? Word is you pawned those long ago.” My cigarette burnt its last and I ground the remains in the already full ashtray. “Someone put three point thirty-eight rounds in him at close range tonight, know anything about that?” Phyllis twitched, but Fuller's attention was on me and it went unnoticed.

“Clancy? He...” I withered, suddenly feeling the weight of a grief the drink was supposed to have lifted.

“Yes, you met with him earlier and now you can answer some questions for me down at the station.” There was no way of saving myself, but I could spare Phyllis.

“Doreen, would you mind being an absolute doll and take Phyllis home? I don't think she wants to be left alone.” I put the surety and suave nonchalance borrowed from another day into my voice, that day was long ago.

“Johnson,” Fuller called across to his man-gorilla. “Take the car and escort the ladies home, maybe the walk to the station will sober mister Winterton up a little.”

Jim the barman did not even look in my direction as I was hustled out. The other customers kept their heads down and their hands on their glasses. The band played on, another mangled jazz favorite. Another night at MacAddam's, another of the bar's rats caught in the trap, they had seen it all before. Pour me another, Jim.

Between the Streelights (part1)

She leant against the wall, head back, staring into the night sky. The stream of tears had forged its way down her face, its banks littered with the debris of her make-up. Her mouth hung slightly open, the bottom lip still quivering. My world hung, waiting for her.

The city was still, as if in shock. The streetlights shone against the night, same as ever, somewhere traffic and a freight train rumbled their perpetual background noise, but there was something vital missing. It was as though nothing could not believe what had just transpired and everything feared moving, lest worse was to come. Maybe it was just me.

Eventually she exhaled, breathing a gout of smoke into the cold, unfriendly air. She sobbed again, but the tears had all been used up. Something harder crossed her face, an eggshell of firmer resolve. A hand slipped into the deep pocket of her scarlet coat to reassure herself of the compact revolver, now three shots lighter, that lay within. Ash dripped unnoticed from her cigarette.

“Tell me, Donald,” she said, her usually honey-tinged voice raw and splintered. “Tell me, did you ever think it would come to this?”

“I hoped it wouldn’t,” her eyes meet mine and I could see her adrift on a raft of unhappiness, lost on a sea of horrible circumstance. “I sincerely hoped it would all just go away, but deep down I could feel there was only one way it could go.”

“But, Clancy, he...” She choked back another sob. I longed to grab her in my arms and hug her until I crushed the misery out of her, but if I did that I would break the fragile scaffolding still holding her together, so I held myself back until she could rebuild her framework.

“Clancy was my friend, too, Phyllis.” I told her, needing her to know I shared in her sadness. “He helped me out of a very dark place once, but that wasn’t Clancy any more, not the Clancy I respected, not the Clancy you knew.”

“How can you be so calm?” It was almost an accusation, as though I had shrugged my shoulders and turned my back while everything played out.

“Have you ever watched a really good waiter?” She needed a distraction, something else to think about. “Someone who has made a career out of it, not some about-to-hit-it-big screen-writer or actor down on his luck. No matter how uneven the floor is, how many people try to trip him up or how many flights of stairs he has to climb, when he brings you your drink there’s barely a ripple in it. Right now I’m running over the most rutted track you’ve ever seen, but I’ll be damned if I’m spilling good whisky on the ground.”

“So what do we do now?” She gave me a look as though the world had fallen apart and I was the only solid ground left.

“We find some place where there people and there is music, and somewhere for you to fix your make-up. Then I buy us both a brandy and a coffee because I won’t be sleeping tonight and I don’t think you will either.” The lights of a passing car slid across her features, an unflattering hard portrait of moving shadows. The car’s engine broke the stillness in a not unwelcome fashion.

She dropped her cigarette to the pavement, still wet from the afternoon’s rain, and crushed it under a boot heel. As she pushed herself away from the wall there was a new look in her eyes, not the steel-hard gaze of the veteran, but the wavering glance of one unsure yet determined. She would hold together, for now. I straightened my tie, adjusted my hat and offered her my arm.

We made our way through the cracked concrete maze of the streets, two people maybe not fine, but not falling apart for now. She put her weight on my arm and I took comfort in the warmth of her body. The city sensed the turn of mood and responded in kind; sirens in the distance, a trashcan being overturned in an alley and the sound of an argument spilling from a tenement window somewhere above us. Nothing pretty, but life nonetheless.  

Blossom

Doug's car was where we had left it, pulled off the side of the road when the engine had finally died from whatever malaise it had picked up three hundred miles before. Doug had loved that '72 Chevy Nova, but his mechanical aptitude and finances had never lived up to his dreams and so it had remained dented and unreliable.

Three years on and it had lost what remained of its paint to windblown grit, the tires were deflated and part of the exhaust had finally won its battle against the piece of wire holding it on. Peering through the windows it looked like something had made its home inside, although that could have just been the detritus from our panic-stricken flight. A romantic part of me considered salvaging the vehicle, but that felt uncomfortably like stealing from a grave.

Doug had been very sick as I let the car roll itself off the highway with the last of its momentum; they had both reach their limits at the same time. Had I been less distracted by my own plight I might noticed Doug's pallor and the unhealthy sounds from under the hood before we were out in the desert, miles from everywhere. The results would have been the same, more public, messier, but the guilt was still there.

At the side of the road lay a rock the size of a house, a sun-beaten, uncaring monolith older than man and all his follies. As the air in the car became unbearable I had dragged Doug's unresponsive weight around into the scant shade, my desperation lending me strength. I retraced my steps as though in a dream, drawn towards the spot where I had left him by an invisible thread.

We had managed to escape the city before the worst erupted and the crackdown hit. Fleeing towards his parent's old cabin in the mountains, an isolated retreat where he had proposed to me in the spring, we had stuck mainly to the back roads, scared of attracting unwanted attention. We had got this far before our bad luck overtook us.

I had left Doug with a supply of water promising to bring help as soon as I could. Two days down the road, delirious and dehydrated I was picked up by a quarantine patrol. Two years trying to explain my strange immunity and then a year of my own guilt and fear had prevented me from coming back before.

Any tracks I had made had long faded away. I fanned the regret from my mind and replaced my hat. Trailing my hand on the rough stone, warming as the sun began to climb to its zenith, I reversed those steps that had taken me out of my old life. The desert, straggly shrubs, baked rocks, ceaseless wind and the wide, parched ground regarded me with disinterest, waiting for me to pay my respects and move on.

The blight tree growing in the spot I had last seen Doug was not a surprise. These plants had become increasingly common since the outbreak of the plague, they attracted hate and destruction as no-one understood their significance. This example was ten feet high, a fleshy, multicolored trunk topped with a spray of frond-like leaves. A cloud of tiny iridescent purple bees issued from a hole just above head level, but did not bother me, content to buzz around the tree.

I placed my hand against the smooth rainbow of the trunk, cool and vital under my fingers. Above my head a bud opened into a lily the color of the desert sky, it waved in the wind for a moment and then the stalk snapped. I caught it and smiled for the first time in years.

“Oh, Doug, you do remember me.”