But it does not last...

- Sit on a stage. The patrons are around you, with their coffee and their books. They open their books and they open their ears and they await your performance with the stiffness of those words. Be a little nimble with your chatter and your wit; extol the virtue of this gay and profane little world of ours—so flippantly grave, so exuberantly serious. Do it with a little craft. They are listening, after all. And then, good-bye! —She is gone to the street with the cold and the rush and sting of the traffic going by. Try to remember the warmth of red booths, of the coffee and the patrons and the chatter. Red can be warm but it does not last. The last warm things in life can all be found, abandoned at the bottom of empty cups. You hum a little; it gives you strength. Strength can be real but it does not last. You walk out into the rain and make something out of nothing. Nothing is what there is until you’ve poured some something into it. The universe is closed. In from where; out from what? You walk into the rain. You wonder about nothing. - Selected writings of Amelie Andrezel

[aoibhincollins]

“Word went out across the land,” Evie began, picking up where she had left off with the tale of the three apostles, “That the teacher had fallen ill.” There was no need to backtrack for the Sisters. In her own way, each of them would have already pieced together the details.

“The apostles...

[aoibhincollins]

“You are not a wolf,” the tall man said, sitting on the Murphy bed and clutching his stomach where Evie had elbowed him.

“Neither are you,” Evie observed.

They eyed one another suspiciously.

“Do you have a name?” the tall man asked at length.

“Aoibhin Collins,” Evie said stiffly.

“Well,...

[redcanbewarm]

The hangar bay was empty, except for Odile Rogers, who sat in the bare shell of her suit and looked out the windows onto the plains outside. In her mind, her hands still reached for that non-existent cigarette in her still-imaginary pocket. The motion was what haunted her, something her fingers had done so many times that it was like tying her shoes or running her fingers through her hair. That was what mattered: the ghost of a sensation. The rustle of the wind was gone now, and with it had been taken the familiar movements of her own hands. Harriet had hands that once had moved so beautifully, but they too, were as still now as the rocks out on the Planitia. How many millions of years would it be before an explorer overturned that stone? No, maybe some things were better left alone.

Michael opened the sliding door from the interior corridor and walked up to where Rogers was sitting looking blankly out of the window. “Anything worth seeing?” he asked her impertinently.

“I don’t suppose it’s anything different from yesterday,” Odile answered flatly. “Or the day before yesterday or the day before that.”

She tossed back her hair. It needed to be cut. “There’s no reason why things have to change, Captain Jones,” she added.

“I’m not sure that I follow you, Rogers,” the young man answered.

“Well, that’s the lie, isn’t it?” Odile said, her limbs still itching for a cigarette. “Everything has a season, and all of that bullshit.”

Still Michael Jones remained silent, only moving closer to the glass to signal he was a part of the conversation, a peripheral but integral part. “Nothing really ever changes in the Universe,” Odile Rogers said to fill in the void where Jones should have been. “At least not really. It may look like it does, but that’s only because we flail so uselessly about in time. All of our posturing and grand designs, cancelling each other out from generation to generation, so that every time that rock out there has cause to look around, it all looks the same as the time before.”

The stillness that followed had grown familiar to the occupants of Base 11, almost as much as the empty fluttering of cigarette-less hands had become a second nature to Odile’s tired brain. “The self-fulfilling reinforcement of prejudice,” Rogers laughed finally. “Walled off from everything around us, and for no better reason than the incompatible rhythms of a beating heart and a creeping rock.”

“Don’t you wish that we had some music?” Michael Jones finally said.

“That would be nice,” Odile replied. “What would you have us play?”

“I’d like to dance some jazz with you,” Michael told her. “Share a bottle of full-bodied red wine. How about it?”

“Even if you were the last man on Earth,” Odile Rogers began, but Michael Jones cut her off.

“And if I were the last man on Mars?” he asked.

“Well, perhaps you’re in luck,” grinned Odile. “In that case I just might consider filling the last space on that dance card of yours.”

-Amelie Andrezel, "I Dreamt of Africa"

[aandrezel]

[redcanbewarm]

Episode 1

(by Amelie Andrezel)

The Parson Street wolves weren’t much like the others, Evie reminded herself as she rounded the corner into the dark alleyway.  The night was cold and clear.  Blackout curtains were drawn in the apartments above, and only the moon bled a little light on the pavement.  It kept watch carelessly overhead, overtly following her movements, tumbling across the sky like a clumsy policeman.   A glance at her watch confirmed it was a half-hour past curfew, but the district wardens were the least of her concerns.  Not with a door to open.  Not with the wolves between her and the door.

Keeping close to the wall, Evie walked silently to the other end of the alley.  Parson Street lay beyond, open as a field.  By day, it was a grey stretch of nothing connecting two equally dismal blocks of council estates.  The signs above the shops, now dark for the blackout, advertised what you might expect: a corner market, a bookmaker's, an electronics emporium.  A 24-hour counseling service with a red “To Let” sign in the window.  Only by night came the transformation.   By night, this was a hunting ground.

The wolves who worked the transit station by the bridge wore cheap leather jackets.  They had studs in their eyebrows and they cut their hair close to their heads in slashes, like scratch marks.  To stand out.  The wolves who worked the bridge wanted to be noticed.  They liked you to see them coming, because what they liked most of all was your fear.  Evie felt in her pocket for the knife she carried there.  Bridge wolves were easy that way. 

The Parson Street wolves were a different breed.  They wore t-shirts and dirty sneakers and every manner of urban camouflage.  Their hair was short or it was long; they wore hats or no hats or sometimes a scarf, like everybody else.  They blended in.  In their territory, everybody was a wolf, or nobody was.  At the very least, everybody was a suspect.  And that was what they liked most of all: your suspicion.  To them, it was a game, played out of boredom; the sport was in your reaction.                

As she waited in the darkness, mapping a mental route to the blue bins on the opposite side of the road, two young men came up the center of Parson Street.  They were laughing loudly and stumbling a little, as if drunk.  Ideally, their drunkenness would be an assurance that these were not wolves.  But the wolves would know that.  Your confidence would intoxicate them.  That alone would get them pissed.  Alternatively, it would be helpful to think that their brazenness—shouting arm-in-arm in the street after dark—was a sure sign these must be wolves.  This, too, would be false logic.  Wolves needed civilians in their territory, or any man out at night would be a wolf as certainly as if he wore a stud in his eyebrow.  So they welcomed a few outsiders in, like minnows to the jaws of sharks, picking clean the remnants of flesh between razor teeth, engaging in dark symbiosis.

The moon was creeping higher in the sky.  Evie did not need to look back at her watch to know the window during which the door could be opened was rapidly closing.  The young men were very close to her now, so that she could make out their eyes in the dim light.  She was studied at making these kinds of distinctions, she reminded herself, but this did not change the fact that tonight she was running late, or that the blackout seemed blacker than usual.  It did not change the fact that she had no time to decide.  In that moment of action, when the muscles in her limbs sprung into motion of their own accord, it seemed to Evie that it had been a lifetime since she had visited Parson Street.  Surely, though, that must have been an exaggeration.

She pushed out into the street and three things happened almost instantly.  First, the taller of the young men swiveled expertly to face her, his glazed eyes suddenly bright and gleaming with intelligence.  Second, a warden came around the corner from the adjacent block.  Third, he began to blast his whistle and run in the direction of the lawbreakers loitering in the dark street.  These things pressed home three related truths in Evie’s mind, sounding off in order of importance.  One: any moment, the door would be gone.  Two: she would not be strong enough to take the tall wolf in a fight.  Three: she had no intention of spending an evening at His Majesty’s pleasure.  So she acted on instinct.  She opted for surprise.

Evie made a beeline for the tall wolf, grabbing his arm with a look of intense concern.

“Where have you been?” she chided loudly, pulling him in the direction of the blue bins while he was caught off his guard.

“Sorry officer,” she shouted over her shoulder.  “I know not to be out so late, but I was worried about my brother.”

She elbowed the wolf hard in the stomach from an angle the warden couldn’t see through their heavy coats.  The wolf doubled over.  Evie pulled him closer, pretending to steady his drunken stumbling.

“We’re headed straight home,” she assured the dumbfounded officer.  The second wolf had taken advantage of the confusion to make his getaway. 

“No need to worry about us!” Evie added, practically dragging the wolf around the blue bins.  The warden would never believe it, but she didn’t need him to believe it.  She only needed a little time.  Leaning the wolf against the wall, she felt around for the tingling nearness of the door.  Good.  It would still open.  At last, Evie let a smile form across her lips.  If only she could see the look on the warden’s face when he rounded the bins, ready for an arrest, to find the alley deserted.  Like the curfew breakers had been figments of his imagination.  Evie laughed and opened the door.

[redcanbewarm]

Company

…Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

-T. S. Eliot

  Carl Sturic wiped the sweat from his brow and watched as the car wound up the switch-backed drive, kicking up yellow earth from the road in a billowing cloud.  He set down his shovel by the exposed pipes of the irrigation system and walked from the rows of dry, rustling vines toward the house.  The afternoon sun pierced the patchwork building, reflecting off the tin roof of the porch and casting shadows in the chinks between the whitewashed planks of the bungalow that jutted from the main brick building like an afterthought.  His wife emerged from the low door of the wooden structure, turning uneasily toward the approaching automobile and shoving her hands down deep in the pockets of her white coat.

She walked to his side.  They waited in silence as the unexpected visitor grew closer to the house.

Sturic’s wife raised one of her hands to her brow and squinted into the bright horizon.  The car came to a stop at the base of the drive and the driver stepped out.  He waved his hand in a neutral greeting.  The Sturics returned the gesture cautiously.  The stranger walked to where they were waiting in front of the house and offered his hand.

“Afternoon,” he said plainly.  “Matthias Kepler.”

“Carl Sturic,” the farmer replied.  “My wife, Sylvia.”

Kepler nodded.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

“If you’re here from the Ag Council,” Sturic said, “I won’t be ready for you until next week.”

“No,” Kepler replied.  He shook Sylvia Sturic’s hand.

“Mrs. Sturic doesn’t see patients without appointments,” Sturic continued.  “Unless there’s an emergency?”

“No,” Kepler said again.

“What brings you all the way out here?” Sylvia asked.

“I thought I might borrow a book,” the visitor admitted.  “I heard in town that you have something of a lending library.”

Sturic’s face softened a little.

“Of course,” he said.  “Inside.”

Mr. and Mrs. Sturic led Kepler into the house, through the cool, pale front parlor to the sunbathed room at the back of the main building.  It was sparsely decorated, with bald red brick exposed on the kitchen walls and only a plain wooden table and chairs in the dining room.  But the back wall was made of thick glass sliding panes that led out into the garden and on the left stood a shelf of floor-to-ceiling books, blazing in colors as varied as wildflowers.  Indeed, the stacks seemed almost to grow from the shelf, reaching out in tendrils to the table.  A man who rested too long there over a meal might almost have been swallowed by them, like an overgrown statue, in an abandoned temple somewhere far to the north.

Sturic pulled out a chair and motioned for Kepler to sit.  He obliged, taking his hat from his head.  He let his gaze turn outside, into the bright day beyond the open windows.

“You have a lovely piece of land,” he observed.

  Sturic stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.  Sylvia brought a cup of tea through from the kitchen for their guest.

“Thank you, Mr. Kepler,” she said, wiping her hands on her coat, “That’s very nice of you to say.” 

“Did you have anything particular in mind?” Sturic asked, turning suddenly to face the stranger at the table.

“I’m sorry?” Kepler asked.

“Books, Mr. Kepler,” Sylvia clarified.  “Did you have any particular books in mind?”

“No,” Kepler said shyly, “Nothing in particular.  My wife and I are in town on holiday.  A man in a shop told me about your books.  He said sometimes you lend them.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said.  “If you know what you want.”

“I’ll have a look,” Kepler offered, “Once I’ve finished my tea, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” Sylvia said.  “There’s no rush.”

Kepler nodded again.  Sturic turned back toward the garden.

“Where did you travel from?” Sylvia asked, trying to be friendly.  “Is it quite far?”

“Yes,” Kepler said.  “A little town in the north, called Greifswald.  Seems like nobody’s ever heard of it.”

He smiled hopefully but Sylvia only shook her head.  Sturic folded his hands behind his back.

“No,” Kepler said.  “I thought not.”

“We don’t know much about the Border,” Sylvia explained patiently.  “We only moved out here a few years ago, and haven’t done much travelling.  I suppose you could say that we keep to ourselves.”

“Most people do, in these parts,” Kepler agreed.  “Still,” he added, sipping thoughtfully at his tea, “With a name like Sturic, I would have guessed your people had been living in these parts for centuries.”

“Carl’s grandfather moved into the City as a young man,” Sylvia explained, “To teach music.  We lived in Kambrücke until the Troubles started.  At least out here, we thought, we might get a little peace—if not much company.”

“I should hope so, Mrs. Sturic,” Kepler agreed.  “I should certainly hope so.”

(Amelie Andrezel, Mementos of the Fall)

[redcanbewarm]

A dream, a kinship, a confession

Collier ran his hand along the wall of a dark corridor.  It felt cold and smooth beneath his fingertips, clean like rain on his face as a boy on holiday by the sea.  There was a light in the distance, like the moon rising through clouds on a foggy night.  He had seen a moon like that, once, in a painting—the work of some ancient Englishman—that hung in the drawing room of his grandmother’s house on the coast.  Perhaps he was there, by the beach; he could hear the roar of the ocean in the distance.

Jan walked toward the bright orb on the horizon and saw it was no heavenly body.  It wasn’t even in the sky.  As he drew nearer, it seemed more like a cleft, or a gash—a broken seam at which the warm, dark universe had been torn in two.  He felt a chill. 

The noise he had thought was the ocean came, instead, from the light itself.  It was a tearing sound, stretching the space inside his head with its pulsing rhythm.  It was anguished: unnatural, mangled, wrong.  He didn’t want to walk any further toward it.  He wanted to turn around into the safety of the darkness and fall asleep.  But he found he couldn’t turn away.  It was pulling him in, like falling, and Jan was powerless to stop it.  He reached his hand into the rift and was deafened by screaming—the blood and the fire.  His heart felt as though it were about to explode in his chest.  He knew too well what lay on the other side: Death.

Collier woke shaking and whimpering on the floor in the solarium.  He was soaked in sweat and naked from the waist up.  To his surprise, someone was sitting beside him, kneeling very quietly in the darkness.  Jan’s first reaction was to lash out, but before he could strike, the stranger had gotten hold of his wrists.   

“It’s Jordan,” she said firmly.  “It’s Jordan.”  She repeated it over and over.  “You were having a dream.  Everything is alright.”

Jan thrashed, but she held him firm.  After a few minutes, he began to settle down.  His breathing slowed and the trembling in his limbs began to subside.  He sat up.  Jordan brought him a glass of water.

“Drink this,” she said.  “Slowly.”

Collier did as he was told.  His lips were surprisingly dry.  Jordan turned a lamp on low and sat down in the red divan across the room.  Her robe was soaked in sweat from the struggle to pin him down; her pale face was drawn and haggard. 

Jan sipped his water and leaned in exhaustion against a stack of sturdy, leather-bound books.

“Are you feeling better now?”  Jordan asked, watching him drink.

“Yes,” Jan said, still breathing heavily.  “Thank you.”

Jordan nodded.

“You shouldn’t have done that, you know,” Collier added, licking his dry lips.  “I could have hurt you.”

“You’re not so bad,” Jordan told him.

“I’m serious,” Jan insisted.  “I’m sick,” he explained, “I mean, I’ve seen things—when I’m like that I couldn’t promise…”

“I know the signs,” Jordan reassured him.  “I’ve seen some things myself.”

Collier raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing like you, you poor man,” Jordan said.  “But enough to have made a little girl sleepwalk.”

“Your mother?” Jan asked.

Jordan nodded.  They said no more about it.

“I heard you up and wandering a few nights ago,” she explained.  “I’ve been watching out for you ever since.”

Jordan sighed.   “I don’t sleep that well myself, these days,” she added, gesturing toward a syringe on the side table near where Collier was resting.

“Would you be a dear?” she asked.  Her voice was thin and tired.

Jan handed it to her and politely turned away as she administered the injection.  It was a strange thing to be modest about, Collier reflected, considering how brazen he could be about other things.  Still, this seemed so private, and her eyes so proud.  At that moment, he knew he would have done absolutely anything to spare her embarrassment.  He thought of the unkind things he had said about her over breakfast and his face flushed red with shame.  Never again.

“I very much like your books,” he said instead, lifting one of the books and examining its binding.

“Thank you,” Jordan replied.

“You have so many of them,” he observed.

“Yes,” she replied thoughtfully. “Once, there were so many people to read them.”  She sighed.  “Look at us now.”

“So,” Jan added carefully, “It’s true—what they say.”

“What is that?” Jordan asked.

“That you are delightfully eccentric,” he admitted.  They laughed.

“This is the part,” Jordan said, folding her hands on her outstretched legs, “Where I tip my head and ask, ‘Am I?’—eyelids aflutter, and all that.   Then we laugh and jab in double entendre until long past sunup.”  Her eyes looked very far away, red rimmed and blood shot, as if perhaps earlier she had been crying.  “Everybody has a good time,” she said slowly.  “Everybody falls a little bit in love.”

She smiled in a way she had intended to be tragic, but fell short.  It was only simple.  It was only sad.  In that shortcoming, she was more heroic than yet she had been, more pitiable even than she had dared intend.  The thin smile blazed brightly and was extinguished.  The room felt hollow in its absence.

“But not, I think,” she confessed at last, “Tonight.  Tonight, I am tired."

(Amelie Andrezel, Mementos of the Fall)

[redcanbewarm]

Who You Are

Downstairs, in the courtyard, Wittberg, Joberg, and Collier ate their breakfast in silence.  Joberg flipped through the morning’s freshly printed Times; Collier scribbled occasionally on a pad of paper; Wittberg deliberately buttered his toast.  The noise of the unseen crowd rumbled like thunder over the townhouse walls.  Jan Collier beat back the shrieks that echoed through his head by sipping very slowly at his saucer of coffee.  He hoped that the others would not see his hands were shaking.

Rainer Joberg set down his newspaper and shook his head.  “I don’t think I’ll ever grow accustomed to this,” he said, gently smoothing the expensive paper: “A gilded cage if ever there was one.”

Collier smiled thinly and drank more coffee.  Almost without thinking, his fingers remembered the Turkish cigarettes buried down in his breast pocket.  He lit one gratefully and slid the pack across the table to Rainer.

“At long last,” Jan said, “You and I—united in a common world.”

Joberg nodded in thanks and tapped the filter end of one of the scarlet-colored cigarettes against the edge of the table.

“Men are united,” he replied, his gaze lost somewhere over the wall, “Only in death.”

Collier laughed and blew out a long stream of smoke.  Konrad Wittberg only shuddered.

“Please,” Wittberg said, “You’ll make me lose my appetite.”

He pushed his toast toward the center of the table.  The crowd continued to shuffle and chant on the other side of the wall.

“Aren’t you the slightest bit worried?” the former Ambassador asked suddenly.  “They’re fifteen yards away.  God knows what would happen if they knew we were in here.”

“The Chairman knows we’re here,” Collier said.  “He would have sent in the darkcoats already, if that were his intention.”

“So we sit here patiently?” Konrad asked.  He looked pale.  “We hold our breath and wait for grey men in grey overcoats to send us invitations to our own grey executions?”

“Calm yourself, Wittberg,” Rainer said.  “Pay no attention to Jan.  The lady regent is doing what she can for us, but even she must work slowly.  These are dangerous times for everyone.”

Konrad shook his head with embarrassment.  “Yes, of course,” he stammered.  “I suppose the confinement has agitated me.”

“Good man,” Rainer said with a thin smile.

Collier chuckled, and he wished he felt it in good humor rather than spite.  He had not been sleeping.  At night, he wandered the dark halls of their luxurious prison, parting the heavy curtains and looking down on the darkcoats’ cigarettes, burning like red eyes under cover of midnight.  Try as he might to drown it out with the wireless, Jan’s head swam with the sounds of the terrified prisoners from that fateful night at Zaretan, the echo of bullets ricocheting off the walls and the bitter smell of gunshot residue in his nostrils.  Some evenings, he washed his face three times in the basin Jordan had provided for them in the basement, and still he could smell it.  He could not linger much longer behind these walls, not if he wanted to emerge from them with any remnant of his sanity.

“If you’re feeling nervous, Wittberg,” he said to take his mind from it, “You could always seek a little comfort in our hostess’s bed.  It’s not as if you’re stranger there.  I’m beginning to think I’m the only member of our esteemed company who is.”

It was a stupid, callous thing to say and he knew it.

“Damn you, Collier,” Wittberg said, rising from the table.  “You always were a bastard.”

Konrad straightened his shirt and turned briskly to Joberg.  “I’m going in,” he said hotly.  “At least in there I can enjoy a little quiet.”

He stormed away.  Rainer looked disapprovingly across the table.

“Must you be cruel?” he asked.

“He’s always going on,” Collier said, throwing up a hand and puffing angrily on his cigarette.  “I think sometimes I’d rather take a running jump from Lady Cole’s balcony than spend another day in here with him.”

“That’s a little immature for a man of your experience,” Joberg observed patiently.  “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Quite childish,” Collier said with bitter sarcasm, “For a man of my experience.”

“You know I don’t mean it like that,” Rainer said kindly.

Jan pulled the cigarette from his lips and rested his opposite hand across his temple.  “I know, damn it,” he said with exasperation.

He sighed and his expression softened slightly.  “You know,” he said honestly, “I used to feel so smug about fooling people into believing I was shallow, self-indulgent little rich boy.  It honestly made me proud.  What a marvelous actor I thought I was: keeping up the lie, running the perfect long con.”

“And now?” Joberg asked.

“And now…” Collier mused, breathing deeply from the cigarette.  “Now I get confused.  Who’s in the audience and who’s on the stage?  Flattery and illusion, deception and vanity, faces and masks—what’s the difference between them, in the end?”

Joberg chuckled.

“I couldn’t say,” he replied.  “But I do know the morning is exceptionally fine.  God knows when we’ll see another one.  It would be a shame for Konrad to miss it on your account.”

Collier smiled.  He could always count on Joberg to set him straight.  He nodded and got up from his chair. 

“Jan,” Rainer interrupted as he walked to the door.

“Yes?” Collier replied, turning over his shoulder.

“Don’t let what you’ve seen be who you are.”

Jan nodded.  He slipped inside in search of Wittberg.

(Amelie Andrezel, Mementos of the Fall)

[redcanbewarm]

In the meantime...

In the house at Greifswald, Jordan was pruning the trees in the solarium.  It was early morning, and the fugitives were downstairs in the courtyard, taking their breakfast in the fresh air.  Bending the branches aside, she could see the three of them together: Konrad with his teacup at his lips, Joberg with a paper and his usual cigarette, Collier in a white straw hat and matching jacket.  How peaceful they looked.

She moved from the interior window, setting the shears on a pile of books and making her way toward the noise coming from outside of the open balcony.  The protesters milled about on the avenue like colorful eddies on a swirling current.  Their signs bobbed on the tide; the scuffing of their boots on the pavement made the sound of water over stepping stones.  Some of them rested against the stoops of houses on the opposite side of the street, sharing stubs of cigarettes between them and passing newspaper articles back and forth on the wireless.   She recognized a few of the youngest, barely more than boys.  Only months before, she had smuggled them into Greifswald.  How changeable, she thought sadly, we could be.  Then again, she knew that one body often harbored two people, diametric opposites sharing lungs and veins and ventricles—but not lives.  It was our nature.  How could she begrudge them that?

As she was looking down and thinking, Wohlhändler came into the room, bringing with him a telegram.  She spun around in surprise as he touched her shoulder.  Regaining her composure, she took the slip of paper from him with a deft flick of her index and middle fingers.  She kissed him casually on the cheek and pulled softly away.   She put her weight back on her heels and waited, for what she wasn’t sure.  Marcus only turned up the corners of his mouth in a worried smile.

“Good morning, dear Marcus,” she said, breaking the silence.  “Any news of Constanz?” she asked, flipping open the folded paper.

Wohlhändler shook his head.  “Helena has been doing what she can,” he said, “But we have fewer friends than we remember.”

Jordan nodded silently and read the telegram:

  Mademoiselle Strauss.  Little Max spends afternoons digging for father’s letterbox in garden.  Very dirty hands but not yet any treasure.  Missing our time in Greifswald.  Loving regards.  X. –H. 

  “She’s clever,” Jordan said, raising her eyes to Marcus.  Then she walked to the secretary desk, tucking the telegram away in the top left-hand drawer before rolling down the cover. 

Dig 8924; Lot 85, she noted without thinking, Correspondence concerning children.

Outside the window, a darkcoat smoked patiently against the lamppost.  Jordan pretended not to notice.

“In the end,” she added with resolve, “She’ll outsmart them all.”

“You know,” Marcus agreed, “I think you may be right.”

Wohlhändler sat down on the divan and chuckled sadly in spite of himself.  Jordan flung herself carelessly beside him, her expression sparkling with expertly mustered levity.  As she leaned affectionately against him, her gaze fell on a collection of empty syringes scattered on a stack of books.  She pushed them out of sight with a nudge of her foot.

“What in the world,” she asked, leaning over her shoulder and kissing Marcus slowly on the mouth, tenderly but without passion, “Will they do with us in the meantime?”

(Amelie Andrezel, Mementos of the Fall)

[redcanbewarm]

Peter Walker

Jamie lay on her back and dug her fingers into the cool ground, listening as Peter explained the dynamics of his prized possession, a working cloth and aluminum model airplane.  As a rule, Peter Walker was a quiet boy, too invested in his actions to spend much energy on words.  But sometimes, with Jamie, the silence fell away like a poorly reinforced dam, burst loose by the force of the ideas which had built up behind it.  His voice rose and fell with pure enthusiasm, so that Jamie knew first-hand how it felt to be those waxed wings, buffeted up and down on a fresh and gentle breeze.

Jamie let her eyes defocus somewhere in the evergreen canopy, pouring all of her consciousness into the base of her ears.  There was a wild quality to the sound of Peter’s voice that Jamie treasured beyond all her possessions, due in no small part to the fact that it belonged to her alone.  It was a fearsome yet fragile undertone, hidden by a clear tenor that would have made him an asset to the local boy’s choir—but then, his fingernails were too dirty to be seen in any respectable church.

Not that people would have been surprised to hear it, had anyone but Jamie taken the time to listen.  Everything about Peter Walker was wild.  He was tall for their age, with pale, thin arms that he moved with the awkward grace of a fawn on unsteady legs.  

His hair was unruly and dark, and he never sat still long enough for his mother to cut it.  As a result, it cascaded over his shoulders in long, straight locks.  His fairy countenance was crowned by fine cheeks, a pair of limpid eyes, and lips curled delicately in a perfect cupid’s bow.  Sometimes, on the playground at school, the other boys said he looked like a girl.  Jamie herself felt dowdy beside him, with her short legs, freckled arms, and dirty knees.  Once, she had told him so.  He had laughed in surprise.

“You’re the fastest girl in the second grade,” he’d told her, “With perfect hands for skipping stones and perfect feet for climbing trees.  What am I compared to that?”    

Magic, Jamie had told herself. 

She dug her fingers deeper into the dirt and was glad he belonged to her.

[redcanbewarm]

Salidas

When I was eighteen years old, I went into the jungle and I noticed—for the first time I can remember—my moon-shadow.

I was walking down the winding asphalt path from the visiting scientist quarters at Arecibo Observatory to the gatehouse.  It is a familiar walk now, but not then.  Only a few nights before, I had driven in with John on the dark, winding roads from San Juan.  It was early December and the pastel houses that nestled into the foothills were wreathed in white Christmas lights.  They were so beautiful, sparkling in the heavy tropical night, but I hadn’t had time to appreciate them: my head had been in my hands in the back seat of the rental car, trying very determinedly not to be ill.  The mountain roads from the coast to the telescope meandered in sharp bends and oxbow loops, but the locals drove them like they were the endless, straight highways of Nebraska.  When it came to driving, the mainlanders who had manned the dish in the early days were as good as locals.

Perhaps it was a mark of pride, or maybe a simple rite of passage.  Maybe they careened fearlessly around the blind curves to signal a sense of belonging.  “I’ve arrived,” bleated their horns: “Take notice of me.”

If not a struggle for acceptance, then at least the excessive speed was a force of habit.  That was certainly the case with George.  By the time I drove with him, years later, he had made the trip in from the coast so many times that his body steered the car, I think, without direct communication from his brain. Muscle memory is like that.  He told stories and pointed out cottages in which resided the ghosts of old friends, leaving the steering and the management of the rev counter to his own ghost, that younger self who had first let this place seep into his bones.  I knew none of this that first night, hurtling past the little houses.  They put me in mind of tropical fruit, lime green and guava pink, dangling from the branches of the hillsides.  I concentrated hard on not being sick.

A mile or so east of the Grande grocery store where we would turn south and head up into the hills, we were stopped at a police barricade.  A horse had gotten loose from a nearby farm and was galloping joyfully back and forth across the moonlit highway.  We waited in the dark, watching the flashlights weave this way and that in the distance, listening to the muffled shouts in Spanish as the farmer and officers did their best to corral the horse.  I breathed deep breaths in the back seat, calming my stomach and letting my mind wander.   At length, one of the officers walked back to our car and waved us on into the night.  We turned left at the cross-roads, the empty parking lot of the grocery store our last glimpse of the urban coast.

The Grande is closed now, consolidated to another chain and moved closer to town.  I never knew what happened to the horse.

The next morning I sat up in the bed of the small, rectangular room I’d been assigned in the North Visiting Scientists Quarters--VSQs, for short.  It was a spare, clean room, with just enough space for a bed, a desk, a dresser, and a coffee maker.  At the Grande, they kept the coffee locked in a glass case at the front of the store with the cigarettes and the rum and the baby formula.  These are, I think, very good priorities.  

The VSQ bathroom was small, painted in the same cheerful colors as the hillside houses.  It was the right kind of space for its purpose: a place to rinse long, flat grains of limestone sand from your bathing suit; a place where geckos crawled up the tile work and eavesdropped on you in the shower.  Like the roads and the houses and the horse, the importance of these details was obscured from me then.  Their meaning has crept up on me over time, but the full force of their sensation fell on me like a wave that first morning, lifting me from the bed to the window, where the sun was breaking gloriously over the verdant hillsides.

Heat was radiating off of the patio.  I could feel it through the window, which I had left ajar the night before to hear the chirping of the Coqui over the noise of the air conditioner.  At the edge of the grassy lawn, a flaming pink variety of tropical flower was welcoming the morning, its scent wafting in on the warm currents of rising air.

I opened the sliding door and walked barefoot over the cement patio onto the grass.  It was wet and cool with morning dew.  I snapped a few clichéd photographs of the flowers and the mountains with the waterproof, disposable camera I had excavated from my suitcase.  There is a better place to have taken such pictures, on the slope walking down from the family VSQs to the Operations Center, where the ocean is just visible between the hills looking north.  But I didn’t know about it then, and even if I had, I was barefoot and it was a few minutes’ walk.  Instead, I stood with my toes in the grass, luxuriating in the fullness of the humid air, swollen as it was with an explosion of life that pressed pleasantly against my skin.

After a few minutes’ indulgence, I turned to go inside, only to find the door shut and automatically locked behind me.

(...to be continued)

[redcanbewarm]

The Lovesong of the Selenologist

My darling moon

   do we forget how we love each other?

Here in the stacks of yellowed paper,

   the collated corpses 

   of past affairs,

   entombed in grey

   magnetic data tape

   like dust on bowing shelves:

   How cluttered we are; how vast.

Do we forget our long nights of conversation

   shouting coded messages, waiting

   for dampened echoes in reply?

Yes, we forget;

   we’re impatient:

   You grow weary of my impulsiveness.

   I delude myself you’ll change.

But I see you, wanton,

   over foreign streets

   on your back or your side,

   suggestively,

   and I know that you’ll follow,

   all my short-lived days:

Be promiscuous, love, when I’ve gone.

-Amelie Andrezel

[redcanbewarm]

The Eocene Bones

Forgive me Father, for

I have not

           sinned.

  (It has been

ten thousand times

a thousand

          thousand

nights

and more

since the hour of my last

                   confession)

  I was a child

when they were children, we

played together penny

          games

and terrorized the hallowed green

—kicking new

red rubber balls

    through all the

          old church windows.

  But when that green

was shadowed blue, when

          the dove sighed, sleeping

         and the rooster too

when eternity sputtered, stars stalled

                            under glass

          when the comet’s hot tresses

                  fell cold

      on the grass

when the

                        night

cloaked our playground

      when my

                   playmates

ran to bed

I lay sleeping

          in

              the

                     churchyard

with a stone

    to mark my head.

  O! Sweet afternoons I lay

in

sheets of rock

           (that once were clay)

and hummed cicadas’

hot ripe hums,

         bows

scraping the strings

of August.

  And long I’ve walked among the dry

levees of the swollen earth

these

       eocene bones

                   on the lonely ground

resolutely keeping time, resolving

to make

         music.

  I’ve stood upon

the graves and wept

for

    giant races come and gone, for

           rivers dead that once did run,

                               for

           bathers lovely

and long-necked swans

  (those currents did deliver)

  to habitation

                        on

the western shores, beyond the dip

                              of reddened suns

clothed in clothes of red love run

                    aground in shallow waters.

  I’ve rolled before me

at

   my

       feet

history, bundled

                          (organized, neat)

in a ball red as ox blood, red

as

  the priest

whose savior was shattered

by a kick from the green:

   as holy,

         as lowly,

as the stable was mean.

  These things

I saw

(to great dismay)

but ne’er once

did shatter

            the

holy clay

nor pierce the skin

of the rubber

                   beast

which daily rises

in the east

          and sets

in the blood of

                 a blood red moon

(of children who

                       would wane too soon)

No

I, the dead

did not impugn

  Your holy plan

            nor perfect writ

with more than a muffled

Hosanna!

-Amelie Andrezel

[redcanbewarm]

The Crossing

(by Amelie Andrezel)

The river was frozen. It was the last bitter grasp of winter, late in March, and the ice was beginning to crack and calve where the fastest hidden currents ate at it from below with hot, ravenous tongues. Soon it would break into a cacophony of fragments, hurtling with abandon down a river swollen with spring rain. Now the black, brackish water languished silently, prisoner to a thin mantle of pallid, blue-grey ice.

I looked down on it. People were everywhere, wailing and pawing at the shore, desperate for a way across. Above, on the empty bridge, the rusted iron gates swung with a sound like sharp nails across the human chalkboard struggling on the banks. To either side of the gate, the rifles blocked the way, clutched tightly by the scarlet-capped men, ears covered so that they might hear nothing of the roar.

The signs on the crest of the hill suggested that the crossing was to be permanently closed on the following morning, but it had grown difficult to put faith in the dull, conformist font that had, of late, issued warnings from the televisions and wrapped the walls of abandoned storefronts in hollow propaganda. The people by the river put their trust in other things: namely, the dynamite that lay in piles at the center of the bridge. That was something to believe in.

I tried to drown out the cries, the occasional sound of the rifles discharging and the fear and the anger; the swelling of the people and the rising water. It bulged and it crescendoed until the howling was greater than the sum of its parts. But I knew that that sound, with all its bitter harmony, was nothing so desperate as the silence that would follow. When the gunpowder said its piece and the crossing lay in ruins, the last splinters of the last bridge across the last open border would fall into the river, coursing with the ice to the sluggish waters of the far-away sea. Hopelessness was a sound that I did not care to hear.

I looked up at the opposite bank and I saw it waver there: a figure I could not quite make out, picking its way along the red-tainted snow, waving its hand as if to beckon me on. I knew what I had to do. I put my head down and joined the push, crawling with the masses to find a way across the river.

[redcanbewarm]

Dirt and Sunshine

David shook his head and began to cough.  Kyle poured him a little water from the pitcher by the bedside. When the cough subsided, he found the courage to voice his concern.

“Are you very ill?” the lawyer asked.

“I’m dying,” David said plainly. “Surely Lilly has told you that.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Kyle continued. “Are you in much pain?”

David considered the question a moment.

“I think,” he said at last, “That the pain is just beginning. Every now and again, I feel a suggestion of it in my palms or at the soles of my feet, below the heel. It’s like the swelling of molten rock deep in the ground during the years preceding an eruption. I can feel it moving down below, shifting in the dark, waiting to explode.”

“You speak as though you have some experience,” Kyle observed, looking pale.

“I remember Kate’s face,” David admitted, “During her episodes.” He shuddered. “That must be how I seem to you now.”

“She was never very sick when I knew her well,” Kyle said.

“Nonsense,” David told him. “You knew her well until the very end.”

“Still,” Kyle replied, “You were brave to sit by her side.”

“You would have done the same,” David insisted, “If she had let you.”

“I hope so,” Kyle speculated. “But I can’t be certain. Not now.”

“The great champion of love, in doubt?” asked David.

“Is that what I am?” Kyle wondered. His eyes looked raw and limpid, as though he were fighting back tears. “Things will be better when I get back home to the Border,” he continued, struggling to compose himself. “I’m so tired of everything here,” he confessed: “Of the grey streets and the sterile shops and the efficient little houses. Even the brothel has polished white floors. Is this really the way the people of the Republic live, in a world without dirt or color or sunshine? Even the Wildmen have the beauty of the Wastland. Surely we haven’t sacrificed it all for this.”

[redcanbewarm]

Windows

In the time between the doctor’s visits, David lay in the grey bed and considered the ceiling. The tiles of it were sleek and regular, in a sickly sort of beige-grey that reminded him of his billeting years earlier at the military academy. It wasn’t a physical resemblance, exactly, but a likeness of spirit which put him in mind of those long days in the artificial sunshine. They would march for hours at drill on the reflective pavement and in the evening he would fall, exhausted, into his bed, where he would stare into that equally unremarkable ceiling in the little barracks outside of Prague. Outside of the window, the man-made darkness had laid down over the provincial town, built atop the ruins of the ancient city. Crags of rubble humped in menacing shadows beyond the Barrier, looming like the mounds of the giants’ graves on Rugen. In the daylight, they had been ordinary enough, but at night they took on a mystical foreboding. They were elemental; stark against the thin human darkness of the town.  David had wondered if darkness could be artificial. An absence of light was surely the same regardless of the cause of the obstruction. Yet it had seemed so flat, the darkness of the Barrier, with its pale electric stars and waxy luster. How he longed now, in his hospital bed, for a window to open onto the darkness of Calais. It would be wild and fathomless, like the night far away on the Baltic. It would open its arms to him. He would fall up into it and leave this grey prison behind. Perhaps, if he were lucky, dying would be like that. But for now, there was no window.

[redcanbewarm]

Magnetism

“We’ll open a library,” Kyle answered truthfully, “With the books Kate managed to save from the fire. Something on the Perimeter, above the Farm. Maybe a reading room that looks down over the valley. She would have liked that.”

“She would indeed,” David said. It seemed like a lifetime away now, the days they had spent on the upper third. It was strange that, in some future time he would not know, there would be a building there, in the very spot they had spread out, as naked as the Wasteland. He felt, at that moment, so far from the world of the living. He was closer to Kate, to the dirt--above all to the magnetism of the grave.

[redcanbewarm]

The Cabeus Plains

(by Amelie Andrezel)

In the City, it was common knowledge that the shadow zones between the Barriers were dead spaces, barren even by the standards of the Wasteland.  The domes devoured their sunlight, siphoning its warmth and energy to the settlements within.  The shadow zones were humanity’s graveyard and her altar: there, burnt offerings of earth were left to stand as their own monuments.

Despite the reputation, Ferdinand was profoundly shaken by the desolation of the Cabeus Plains.

At such latitudes, the sun never rose more than fifty degrees above the horizon.  Even at noon, the shadow of the Greifswald Barrier stretched six miles north, and some three hundred square miles of terrain were shrouded in perpetual darkness.  Vegetation did not grow there, and the poor conductivity of the dry gypsum sands prevented ground temperatures from rising much above freezing year-round.

 Beyond the Plains, the Company had introduced scrub plants and primitive firs to the coastal ecosystems, the first step in the reclamation process that would one day bring the Barrier to the doorstep of the Baltic.  But here there was no life.  So long as the Barrier stood, there never would be. 

Desolation, desiccation, abandonment. These were the hallmarks of the Cabeus.  But also beauty.

In desert places, one experiences a peculiar enchantment of the senses.  In the absence of vibrant colors, a tonal palate seeps from the landscape like groundwater, quivering on the backs of rocks and grasses thirsty for succulent rains.  So it was on the Cabeus.

In place of the yellows, sages, and violets which drape the sun-scorched deserts, the Cabeus’ mantle was stitched with indigo and rose.  Imperial purples and midnight blues nested in the plunging valleys; petal-pinks and crimsons bled through the dark washes on the dune crests and gently-sloping plains.  As a boy, Ferdinand had often admired Monet’s impressions of Rouen Cathedral, several of which hung in the hallway between the conservatory and his mother’s rooms at the Summer Palace.  He had marveled at the way the color seemed to rest atop the paint’s topography, less an expression of the pigment than a miraculous alchemy between the swirling brush-strokes and the impinging air.  Cabeus, too, wore its color like a skin, a mercurial veil to shroud its cold interior.

Above it all arched the early sky, clothed in the purest shade of china blue.  The saturated firmament diluted near zenith, opening at the crest of Heaven’s dome to the black maw of space.  In that most elegant of frames, a pair of morning stars surveyed the plain below.