In some respects, Myrtle and Davian couldn’t have been more different. They had been born an ocean apart, a river divided their boroughs — but at least they had tea in common.

Myrtle produced a small tome and pushed it across the table.

Davian smiled genially, recognizing the book as one of his own, and took it into his hand, examining it with a softened expression.

“Kemble’s 1833 edition of Beowulf,” he said with affection. “I didn’t realize it was you to whom I’d lent this.”

He looked over his nose at her, a coy glance spreading over his face. “Shall I extort you for the necessary fees?”

Myrtle ignored his banter and blinked laboriously before speaking with the utmost restraint. “I thought it best to return it to you.”

Davian put the book back on the table next to the tea cakes. “Yes; glad to have it back. Unique edition, this one, you know; only a hundred printed, and we’re fortunate to have that: a fire or two be damned.” He pressed a lemon between his fingers, letting the juice drip into the steaming liquid. “Tell me, did you actually read it?”

Myrtle raised an eyebrow at him, likewise raising a porcelain cup to her thin lips. She took hers plain.

“You know, I attended a very interesting lecture concerning the interpretation of said text,” he began. “The year was 1936; British Academy. The speaker addressed the tendency of scholars to dismiss the extranatural elements of the text, intent on trying to distill the fact from betwixt the fantasy. His argument was that the monsters were not present simply to drive the plot, quite to the contrary; they could not be ignored or glossed over—”

“Davian—” she tried to interrupt.

“Fine young man,” Davian said, waxing nostalgic. “I only wish I’d had the opportunity to get to know him better—”

“Davian, I’m taking another student.”

The man put his half-eaten sweet back on the plate. He took a napkin in his hand, but spoke hastily, with a crumb lingering in the corner of his mouth. “Another student? Didn’t you just fetch the little girl from Korea?”

She did not say anything, and he continued to press her.

“How many children have you got tucked away in that house now?” he asked, remembering his seniority. “Do you think it wise to take on yet another?”

Myrtle looked at him, and her gaze was focused. “This one is different.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure they’re all quite different,” he said dismissively. “I daresay if you did not keep feeding all the stray cats that happen to wander into your backyard—”

He stared at her with intensity. “...You might have made progress on your alchemy.”

Myrtle conjured a practiced defense. “This is my immortality,” she said, her confidence dotted with wistful resignation. “When my bones lie still in the ground, the house and the children remain.”

Davian took a small spoon in his hand and stirred the tea, though it did not require it. “Such a pity,” he said ponderously. “—That we even have to consider such a limitation to our existence.”

“What would it be, if we endured forever?” he asked pointedly. “Some among us enjoy such luxury. Isn’t it a tragedy they don’t try to share their privilege?”

“Nothing lasts forever,” she responded curtly. “Not the towering trees, not the carved stone, nor even the nightfolk.”

“Such is true of your legacy, too, then.”

“I would like to request your assistance,” she said, dodging his violence. “The young man has found himself embroiled in a conflict with the Mundanes. He’s contained at a holding facility not too far—”

“Jail?” he asked, incredulous. “Not your usual style. You’ve grown tired of changing diapers?”

“I’ll post his bail. I’ll sign the papers,” she said diplomatically. “All you need to do is drive.”

Davian took a drink and it was sour on his tongue, but he liked it.

“...So,” he said, a smarmy grin igniting asymmetrically across his face. “How’d you find out about this one? Some dark thing lurking beneath your mead hall for a decade, seething at the sound of drunken revelry, unable to contain his rage and envy?”

Myrtle, unamused, raised a singular eyebrow, and refused to engage. After ninety-two years of life, she had a way of letting the patterns swirl and relax and leave behind a quiet serenity in her old heart. “There’s always a bigger dragon.”

He sat back in his chair, satisfied with her response, and let his arms rest.

“Then you did read it.”

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I have an unfortunate birthday.

When I was four, my parents invited a bunch of adults to a park to eat cake. I don’t remember anymore what color the tent was or whether my hot dog was cooked the way I like it. But I do remember my grandmother going up to every adult I didn’t know and telling them that it was the birthday boy’s first birthday.

“I’m four!” I told my mom. “I’m not a one-year-old baby!”

“...Oh Elm—” she said, holding my wooly head against her chest. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. She’s just trying to say how much she loves you.”

By the second time I got my birthday, Mom & Dad had been gone for three years and I lived at the orphanage in Queens.

I hadn’t told any of the other kids what day was coming up. The Matron was gone that month and Eloise was in charge of the house. But that was OK because I liked Eloise and thought she was very nice.

“Elmer—” she said to me quietly. “Do you want to do anything to celebrate this year?” She had bent down to see me, so that her face was in front of mine. “Eight is a special number.”

I was reading a book so I put it down and thought.

“No,” I said after a while. “I don’t think I need a party, but thanks for asking.”

When the Saturday finally arrived, it was the fifth Saturday of the month and it was a little cold outside. But some of the others were in the front room and they were talking loudly so I knew I couldn’t play with the chess board so I put my coat on and went outside.

The Matron kept all the outside-toys in a wooden box with a latch and a lock but she rarely fixed the lock so I opened it and removed a racquet and a soft yellow ball. The ball was a little wet but I didn’t care and went to the side of the house.

There was an area a few feet wide where no plants grew so I went there and threw the ball against the side of the house and hit it back. I liked the (thwack) sound when the ball hit the house and came back. When it hit the netting of the racquet, it made a different sound, and that was OK, but it was a little sharp and I really liked the sound it made when it hit the dark brick and came back to me.

The Sun was up above me but it was covered with grey clouds all across the sky so I didn’t know what time it was. I kept hitting the ball until it did something different and it didn’t make that sound and it zoomed at my face so I had to duck and then the ball went behind me.

I turned around and thought it went underneath the rose bushes so I went there. Those bushes had thorns so I didn’t like to play there, but I wanted to keep playing so I put my racquet on the ground and walked across the grass.

There were feathers on the ground, white like the snow that had left last week, but that was not what I noticed. When I bent down and got on my hands and knees, the dirt underneath the sleeping roses had been moved and pushed into a circle. The dirt was freshly turned and was getting pale where the water had gone.

In the center—was a rabbit.

He was brown on his head and ears and the two little feet that stuck out from beneath him into the dirt. Where he was not brown, he was black, and the black covered him like a tuxedo, except where he had two white spots: one on the chest beneath his chin and another between his eyes closed shut.

I looked at him for a minute or two, and then I ran into the house, where I found Friday. I talked to Friday sometimes—she was only a couple years older than me—she knew lots of things, but she was usually grumpy.

She frowned at me when I entered the kitchen. “It’s a little cold out there, don’tcha think?”

“There’s a bunny outside! Sleeping!” I ran to the refrigerator and pulled it open and continued speaking with my face in the frigid air. “Do we have any carrots? He’s probably hungry!”

Friday walked over to me as I was digging through the drawer at the bottom of the chamber.

“Rabbits don’t eat carrots, stupid.” She said as a matter-of-fact. “That was just a gag on TV.”

“Do they eat cabbage? Or lettuce? What do you think?”

She didn’t respond for a moment, and then said something else. “I think if you feed one rabbit, soon you’ll have four, and they’re going to eat the Matron’s vegetables in the spring and she’s going to be very pissed off at you.”

“I can’t let him go hungry!”

I ran out then, and left what I had found right outside the ring of dirt. I noticed he was just barely submerged in it, like he’d made a mound of the loamy soil and then snuggled into it to get warm so that the dirt was up around his round furry body and he looked very comfortable.

I put most of the food to one side but when I laid down the carrot, I put the green in front of him, and when it touched the dirt, his eyes opened a little and he looked at me. I saw him then, and I knew he was alive and I was glad.

“Hi little bunny...” I whispered. “Here’s a snack for you when you wake up, I hope it’s something you like.”

He closed his eyes then and went back to sleep. I watched him for a while, but, feeling like maybe I was disturbing him, I went back in the house.

“You’re making a big mistake...” Friday chided me in sing-song when I opened the door. I left her in the kitchen then, and went toward the stairway, but she called after me.

“You know what rabbits do, don’t you? Do you have any idea what rabbits do?” I was soon at the top of the stairs, but she stood at the bottom and yelled at me.

“They don’t belong in our garden!”

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Cedric had never drank wine—and now witness to the time it had taken him to recover, he was sure he never wanted to drink it again.

On Monday morning he was bound for a desolate patch of wilderness at the northernmost point of Manhattan. Thirty-five hours remained to satisfy the requirements of his “conditional discharge” and be rid of the mark against his record.

Picking up broken syringes and cigarette butts was decidedly unglamorous. But when he freed bushes from tangled plastic and wire, he hoped their leaves would again get green in the Sun.

Though he presently strode into a new week, his mind wandered. He thought back to Davian’s townhouse in the West Village. With Myrtle as the third, they had dined at Davian’s table last Friday. His stomach had since shrunken; over the weekend he’d managed to choke down only scraps of food, the little he could before his innards begged him to stop.

Myrtle had come to him Saturday, after he’d missed breakfast and lunch. ‘Tannins,’ she’d blamed, as if knowledge could cure nausea. ‘You must drink water.’

But the recollection faded.

Cedric had left the foundling home in the early hours, as he had done every morning he was required to show at Inwood for community service.

Before he’d arrived in New York City, he’d never dreamt that people sold food on the streets. Most of the carts were small and otherwise immobile; they’d been hitched to the backs of pick-up trucks. The men always came to the same place.

A vendor was unloading a box of pastries from the passenger seat of his vehicle. “It’s you,” he said, seeing Cedric. “Hi, g’morning—”

The man was neither fat nor thin, and his white t-shirt suggested he was not yet fully dressed. He made eye contact with Cedric briefly as he passed between the truck and the cart. “Sorry, traffic—late, very late.”

“It’s fine,” Cedric said, spotting cans hidden beneath a fresh blanket of ice.

He’d never heard of tannins, but as he looked backward, he considered Myrtle’s excuse.

Had it been the wine, or the man who’d uncorked the bottle? What business did Cedric have drinking such stuff? Despite Davian’s lecture, he still didn’t know the difference between Burgundy and Bordeaux and he wasn’t sure he gave a damn about which was favored by Napoleon.

Davian’s hospitality had made him feel a stranger. The vegetables hadn’t come diced from the freezer. Napkins of cloth were intended to lie upon the lap. And he didn’t have a clue how he was supposed to eat with a fork on the left.

“What’d you want today?” the man asked, now towering over Cedric by way of the cart.

Cedric clambered back into reality. “Egg sandwich with cheese is fine, thanks.”

“Salt-pepper-ketchup?” He’d donned a black apron.

“Uh...” Cedric said, parsing through the composite word. “No, that’s OK; thank you.”

Davian was not ashamed of his privilege; he flaunted it. The few times Cedric had met the man, he couldn’t escape silken neckties and jeweled cufflinks. He drove a car too bold for Bond: painted gaudy indigo and flecked with quartz. And when he was amused by his own jokes, he flashed a set of impossibly straight, impeccably white teeth.

“Coffee?” the vendor asked while he lifted scrambled egg from the griddle.

“Yeah,” Cedric replied. “I’ll take a small coffee: milk please, no sugar.”

“D’you ever try honey?”

Cedric looked up and through the window, somewhat skeptical. “Honey—in coffee?”

“It’s how we like it,” the man said, placing a lid atop the steaming cup.

Cedric protested mildly. “I don’t usually like it sweet...”

“Maybe you try next time. S’good. Three dollars.”

Cedric slid his crumpled bills over the counter and remembered the decanter of wine like dust and flowers. Davian was a show-off and a braggart and he rarely stopped talking. Maybe it was part habit, and part custom. The wealthy were rarely wise.

Davian had stood to carve the chicken. And he’d raised his glass to offer a toast. But the elevation was a desperate façade: he had been on his knees the entire time.

Davian was trying to win him over.

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“You’re up early.”

Cedric walked through the doorway to find Eloise alone in the kitchen. She had her dark hair in a neat braid that fell down her back, tapering to a delicate end that had been bound into a tassel by a thin blue ribbon.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Bad dream.”

She looked away from her measuring cup, carefully choosing quiet words. “Sorry to hear that.”

The whites of her eyes were bright, and the intensity bore into him.

“Don’t be,” he said quickly, trying to soothe her. “It’s not your fault.”

She stole back her gaze, turning toward a carton printed upon in yellow.

Cedric maintained his distance on the other side of the half-wall, trying to piece together what she’d been doing. Before her sat a whole audience of small items: four eggs, a tiny bottle of tinted glass, a bag of flour, and several other components.

“Myrtle makes you cook breakfast by yourself?” Cedric asked tartly.

He saw Eloise smile in amusement from the side of her face. She had returned her attention to a steel saucepan on a woven insulator. As she moved the wooden spoon in the translucent liquid, Cedric could hear sugar granules scraping against the metal.

“She doesn’t make me,” Eloise replied patiently. “It’s the most important meal of the day.”

Cedric stepped closer, but he still let the half-wall stand between them. He read the carton. “Buttermilk?” he asked, the word familiar but the substance foreign.

She parted her lips and expelled air in a gesture too embarrassed to be called laughter. She looked at him and their eyes caught for a moment, and then she was the one who looked back down.

“Yeah—” she said in a small voice. “The original recipe had both baking powder and baking soda. And with the baking soda, you needed acid to activate it, so you were supposed to use a little vinegar: a teaspoon poured into the milk to sour it.”

“But, I don’t know,” she shrugged. “That just felt wrong to me.”

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That morning, Myrtle had interrupted his dream. The little ‘rap rap rap’ upon his door was not untoward, but it confused him, and in a frenzy he was entirely unsure of where he belonged. Three, he counted, always three, never two, never a single more.

By the time he found himself at the bus stop, he could no longer remember the fine details of what he’d seen behind his eyelids. He was alone, in the dark, standing beneath a sign laminated and stapled together.

The bus route was new, Eloise had relayed several days ago, maps in hand, instructing him where to walk and where to turn.

And yet he was still newer.

He was still caught in the half-dream, trying to catch the sand falling between outstretched fingers. He thought he’d seen an old friend there, or maybe he’d been alone in a grassy field and then jumped up and caught a baseball flying out-of-bounds —

‘Does she know how to drive a car?’

His thoughts were scattered as he looked up at the sign’s tidy lettering. “M” meant Manhattan: that had been obvious enough. But…Sixty?

[Random noise.]

When the Sun was hidden in the Earth’s shadow, early morning was indistinguishable from black night. Without thinking, he tried to approximate the phase.

[what would it mean?]

Cedric looked up, but he could see no stars.

By this time, he’d taken the path a few times and he’d secured it in his memory alongside the things he knew were truly real. Bus into the city, walk from this street to that, and connect to a train; drop a coin here, another would go clink clink there — in the quiet of night, even the cars refrained from talking to each other, and he was grateful.

Cedric thought he was sleepy when he sat on the cold plastic seats, very slightly concave, but then he felt the bus pulling its passengers to labor, to toil they did not deserve, and he did not speak. Some were fat and some were thin, but they were all shriveled and some of them hadn’t eaten for completely different reasons. The old were the only ones awake at this hour, and their skin crumpled around their tired eyes and he could not see what they saw. Their skeletons drew the flesh forward toward the calling, knowing since birth that in sloth, they would starve.

Theirs was not to rest.

He tried to sleep on the bus, begging for the briefest respite, but sleep never came. Sometimes he let his forehead rest upon the dirty glass, but it hurt when the chassis stuttered, so he held his head upright instead. When he crossed the Triborough Bridge, his body was still, but the scene poured into his open pupils and what little he saw, he ate greedily.

The sky was dark as was the water, and yet still points of light were everywhere. Little dots like strange sprinkles decorated a cake he could not eat. Somewhere, many little somewheres, people were still awake.

Or maybe they never let themselves sleep.

‘You got exactly what you wanted, eh, dipshit?’

These precious moments were some of the only silence he would have for the rest of the day. The foundling home — the so-called “Magicademy” — had, in his mind, marked a trade, a curious exchange of one sort of incessant noise for another.

It was true the place lacked televisions. And a few of the rooms had devices with needles and indicators he was sure resembled radios, but he’d not yet witnessed them crackle to life. In the bewildering void, he’d realized how accustomed he’d become to an electric buzzing that was the background noise of his crawling nineteen years of life. But here he was, and the telephone didn’t ring anymore and the microwave didn’t chatter or spin and people had to knock on the door when they came to call.

But he still couldn’t hear himself think.

Friday was the worst. Her voice was a bird’s lilting warble, sing-song and emotive. She did not hide her feelings because she was not ashamed, and they poured from her mouth like chalk scraping across a board. Owen had re-entered the house too, and he had the tendency to let his eyes hang open like empty dinner plates, lined in pink, and he stared at Cedric with such unabashed ire that he might have been trying to set his target ablaze.

So Cedric let his face remain slack.

Those who did not detest him were no less overwhelming. Elmer was so kind and effusive that it felt patronizing, and Cedric struggled to understand why the boy so heedlessly disregarded the years dividing them. When the eyes bright and brown looked at him, he felt seen, and he looked away because it was painful to do anything else.

And Eloise…

In the corners of the house, he hid, and he beat himself, unable to reconcile the difference between what they saw and what he wanted them to see.

“Cigarette?”

At high noon, Cedric’s hands felt strange, and he wondered if the men had sent him into a clutch of poison ivy. He learned quickly that it grew here too, and he knew the only way to kill it was with fire.

“Yeah, sure.”

He had trouble understanding otherwise what the men said. The ones who spoke in English had a peculiar way of speaking, and every third word was a code to which he was not privy and subsequently rendered the whole rest of it unintelligible, so he nodded and pretended he understood. Cedric did not look like they did, and they did not look like Cedric, but none would fight against the chain that bound them in penance.

He hadn’t imagined Manhattan had anything unkempt, but here they were, shrouded by the closest thing the island could boast as a forest. They called it Inwood, and blown in at the bottom of the wind was garbage: unwanted, forgotten in every shape and size, clinging to gnarled bushes. He found scrap metal, he found broken bottles, he found empty syringes. Tangled in brambles were scraps of plastic grocery bags and discarded newspapers and the crinkles of foil that had once held a sandwich or a pretzel or hot dog or something else that had once before cleansed someone’s mind of a dire need, an empty desire —

Cedric put the cigarette in his mouth and realized how cold were his lips. The other man was shorter than him, but not by much, and he raised an orange lighter to the end of the white paper. With an assertive ‘fwick’, the flash of yellow told his eyes to close as his hands cupped the given light. He didn’t wear any gloves, not here, and he welcomed the warmth.

He inhaled and a wave of prickles ricocheted within his lungs and reminded him of his heart’s relentless tick… tick… tick. His body was still, but something within him was moving and banished the chill within his nerves.

They did this instead of eating, at least some of them. And when they went back to work, the layers of insulation beneath their skin withered and they became stronger than they had been at the start of the day. Their coats were leather and linen, and some of their shoelaces were worn thin, but within each man beat the same rhythm of red.

In the foul smell wafting about them, the smoke was invisible against the pollution. With his stomach shrunken and neglected, Cedric kept going, and for a while he forgot all about the shapes he’d seen in his sleep.

When the Sun sank behind the skyscrapers and the sky was heavy with peaches and grenadine, Cedric heard the whistle and knew his day was done. He joined the line and shed his colors and stifled a yawn. In his pocket were several tokens, gold and silver, and he slipped his hand into the right side to make sure they were still there.

Leaving the park, people were walking by a thin woman in an impeccably clean black wool coat. Her sharp chin followed her gaze downward into a leather-bound book that had kept her company for nearly half an hour. Gold lettering had been pressed deep into the spine, but in the low light, it was impossible to make out.

She raised her eyes as he approached, leaving only a sliver of her neck visible above a plush taupe scarf, its delicate tassels touching the edge of the folded collar. At her temples were several fine hairs dancing at the will of the wind.

“Thanks for waiting on me,” Cedric said a little slowly, as if the words were stones in his throat, rounded and refusing to join hands.

She slipped a ribbon between the pages of her text.

“Think nothing of it,” Myrtle replied plainly. “You have until the end of next week?”

“Two, I think.”

They caught each other’s eyes, and then Myrtle looked away, gaze suspended upon a point far in the distance. “We’ve been invited to dinner—”

She raised her hand to present something to him, and he was a mirror, noticing again how straight she stood, not so unlike the woman who stood behind her husband in black and white for a photograph posed all those years ago.

She gave him two tokens for the subway, and he slipped them into his pocket, thinking he already knew what they said:

‘GOOD FOR ONE RIDE’

Davian’s townhouse was almost as far as one could be from the forest uptown without jumping into the river. Here, the grid was a memory; long avenues ended without ceremony and streets sprang forth at odd angles, forming irregular triangles in the space between. They were filled with thinning grasses that became nets for candy wrappers and severed strings.

They were still wrapped in fences.

Cedric was completely disoriented when they stepped out of the station. With the darkened sky overhead, he couldn’t tell downtown from up, so he sank into Myrtle’s shadow and followed her through the streets.

Where she turned, he stepped in turn.

Flower-pots flanked steep flights of stairs and tall windows were transparent, lines of brick above as eyebrows stretched up in haughty faces. The streets were narrow, but still the sky pushed air into the corridor.

Between 10th and 11th Street sat two small roads, one going toward the river, and one away. Before one of these buildings, after a plethora of steps Cedric hadn’t bothered to count, Myrtle stopped and looked up.

In-between two structures each in quiet beige and drab grey was a building pushing against its domain in unspoken defiance. The brick was dark reddish in the early evening’s light, obscured in places by climbing ivy. A lamplight showed the waxy surface of the leaves, yellow-white where it defeated the emerald.

It befit the occupant, but so too did it contain him.

Myrtle had just craned her head to look toward Cedric when the door opened — all before they’d taken a single step.

The door was heavy; deep green like the plants climbing the façade, and it had a doorknocker in tarnished silver, now cast aside as the man stepped out of his house.

Davian was dressed in a dark blue suit, and a white shirt sat beneath. He wore a vest in a complementary blue, and gold chain dangled between his open jacket. It was the tie, in bold indigo, that questioned whether his dress belonged in past or present.

Myrtle began to ascend, making little sound as her shoes hit each step, and Cedric followed her.

“A fine evening to you both, and welcome.”

The steps were high and shallow, and so that it was nearly impossible to lay the foot flat, nor was there a handrail.

“What’s mine is yours.”

The entry was bright, illuminated by electric lights that cast a warm diffuse light through spheres of frosted glass. The wood, medium-brown, was everywhere, protected in places by a royal carpet and a wallpaper in muted blueberry. Trails of white and gold made little patterns that twisted in crossing chains, and Cedric could see the side of a grandfather clock in a slightly darker wood face the wall of a rather wide staircase.

“Myrtle—Cedric—lovely to have you; may I take your coats?”

Myrtle carefully removed her garment and in an instant, the long overcoat hung generously on either side of Davian’s outstretched arm. He extended his hand for Cedric’s: a leather coat shaped something like a varsity jacket lacking a single letter or ornamentation. It fit perfectly, and yet, he sometimes found it constricting.

Without so much as a gesture, as soon as the coat had left Cedric’s hand, both disappeared, and Davian was suddenly unencumbered, left only with a sly grin spreading across his cheeks.

Behind him was a grand set of stairs, in the center of which a dark carpet was affixed.

“I am so glad you were able to make it. Finally, even you could not conjure an excuse, could you my dear?”

Myrtle blinked and let her eyelids draw a weary expression.

“Please come into the drawing room and let me offer you a drink.”

He began to walk upstairs. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it? When was it you last entered my stronghold? I’m trying to remember…”

Cedric looked at Myrtle, her face still, and she waited a moment, the footfall of the ascent the only sound.

Davian pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. “Was it the Fourth?” As they entered, he quickly resumed his duties as host, “I have a lovely sherry I am sure you will enjoy—”

Here the room had a dark red wallpaper, but the woodwork matched the rest of the home.

Davian turned to a silver tray and began pouring a pale amber liquid into two small glasses, each with a thick green rim.

His back was still turned as he noted brightly, “Amontillado. Thirty year, as they say.”

When he turned around, he had a glass in each hand, and his eyes were squinted up in the corners so that the smallest wrinkle broke his skin. “Don’t ask me where I got it.”

He handed one to Cedric, and then turned back to Myrtle, who was silent until he tore his eyes from the youth. She looked at the glass, and then into his eyes. “On second thought—”

After a breath, her voice was resolute. “Whiskey.”

It was said by the old woman as impulse, a word of honed steel, and so too came the condition:

“Neat.”

They were invited to sit, and they did: Cedric first, and then Myrtle, smoothing her dress as she took the arm of the long couch, leaving the cushion in-between completely bare. Davian pulled a chair to sit across from them, and, as if he’d let his eyes fall, Cedric saw Davian’s second-choice sherry simply appear on the polished table dividing them. The overstuffed chair, too, had not been pulled so much as it jumped, making not a sound as Davian sat in it, leaning forward over his knees in a gesture seeming so unlike his fine suit.

Cedric had not realized that the tie, seeming at first plain, had a pattern of diamonds in slightly different hues, some seeming dark and bluish, and others a pale lilac when they reflected the ambiance.

“You did not answer my question—” he said to the woman. “When was it that I last had the pleasure of your company? It has been so difficult to persuade you to step foot outside that drafty old house. You’re always finding one reason or another to insist that you can’t leave your little darlings for even one instant—”

Myrtle had been glad to abandon the question, but again prodded, she released the hold on her tongue.

She spoke with restraint, as if it were her last resort. “…You still had Sam.”

Cedric thought he saw the man’s face change color, first pale, then to blush, and he sat back in his chair and took a sip of the amontillado.

They were quiet for a moment, and then Davian sat forward again, and spoke over his right knee.

“Sam,” he began ponderously, and then clarified. “Sam was my dog, Cedric.”

Cedric did not say anything, but he looked at Davian, who did not look back at him, and instead looked at the liquid in the tinted glass.

“Was it really that long ago?” He asked Myrtle in disbelief, knowing no response would satisfy.

“Yes…” he answered himself quietly, not waiting on her word. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

“Good dog, Sam,” he mused, and raised the glass to his lips to fortify himself. “Stubborn, delightful, candid, brave—”

His vigor had evaporated, and in its place were the sensations of years passed in quiet, floating like balloons from silver ribbons. “…A good friend—”

He stumbled in his recollection and his eyes bounced between unseen dust motes. “Fiercely loyal little blighter. Couldn’t leave him with anyone if I didn’t want to be restoring missing fingers. He wouldn’t have it, not even for a single afternoon.”

Cedric watched as Davian let his sherry tilt, and the edge touched one side of the thickened rim.

“Not a bad bone in his stout little body.”

Davian’s eyes were glassy and wet, but still his face was dry. “Chest like a barrel, that dog. Stout. Strong.”

“Strong…” He repeated, and trailed off, and no one said anything for a long time.

“He loved you,” Myrtle chimed gently, and Davian heard, and quietly agreed.

“Yes…” He said into his memories. “He did.”

Cedric still had a glass half-full when Davian asked the pair to accompany him downstairs to the kitchen. He left it abandoned on the table, as seemed customary, and followed the mage out of the room and back down the staircase.

On the first floor, they rounded a corner and proceeded down a narrow hallway. The smell of food, which had not yet made it upstairs, filled his nostrils and made his stomach lurch.

The door to the kitchen had no knob, rather, it had been set on a spring. Davian pushed it open, let Myrtle and her young student through, and allowed it to oscillate on the hinge and come to a stop, but not before swinging back and forth several times.

The tinkling sound of classical music sat underneath, its origin obscured, with a bubbling pot providing accompaniment.

“Cedric, Myrtle is already quite aware of my mortal weaknesses, but as you are a guest in my home, I will treat you to the best I can offer.”

The kitchen was unexpectedly enormous. Off to one side was set a pair of ovens, each with several large heating elements atop. Covering the pair was a large griddle straddling the middle; off to the left were two large pots, and to the other a wide, shallow skillet with a clear top. Visible beneath the glass was the deep emerald of green vegetables, sitting in waiting; the heat underneath sat idle.

“I’m sure Myrtle has given you her usual diatribe about fine dining, but I’ve developed a number of opinions over the years; proclivities, if you will. I toss a few sovereigns to ConEd for the privilege of cooking with gas. In this avenue, there is no replacement for the old ways.”

Myrtle frowned.

“Yes, some will say it leaves a bit of a odor, a residue. I don’t doubt it. Such is the cost of natural combustion. But there really can be no shortcuts for those in pursuit of perfection.”

While Myrtle and Cedric still collected near the entrance, Davian moved around the kitchen with ease, first inspecting the boiling liquid on the stove and then moving on the other side of the island. Cedric felt as if the room was far wider than the land should have allowed, but he reined in his skepticism in light of the evidence.

“Can I offer you both a glass of wine?” he bent down and continued to speak while shifting bottles that were stored beneath the edge of the counter. “I know white is customary to serve alongside chicken, but for such an occasion, I just can’t help but select something that offers more complexity—”

“I say, ‘to Hell with tradition.’”

He stood straight and placed a bottle of wine next to a decanter. The glass was green, but the liquid inside left the object completely opaque. “Burgundy, and to say that it’s beautiful doesn’t do it the justice it deserves. In this matter, my poetry will falter. I will let you judge for yourself.”

“Davian...” Myrtle began, but her voice was unexpectedly quiet, disappearing in the cavernous room. Davian continued as if she had said nothing, already working at the hinge of a corkscrew to release the vital tool.

“You might be tempted to confuse Burgundy with Pinot Noir—some unfortunately do—but let me elucidate the key distinction, one amongst many, and none that can be neglected or ignored.”

Davian pressed the point of the corkscrew against the cork and forced the metal inward with a careful, practiced repetition. Like a mechanism, he brought his wrist around, grasped the handle, and revolved his forearm until his body would turn no more. He repeated this several times until the pressurized air let loose with a quick pop!

“The important thing to realize,” Davian said, a small flame appearing from the tip of his finger, “is that more must be considered than the mere grape. The matter of parentage is but one piece of the final picture. Two twins separated at birth become quite differentiated from each other, do they not?”

“Vitis vinifera,” he announced, immediately following the false question. “—further distilled into cultivars. But this is where the nomenclature fails to render the truth: where science fails to capture the indelible art within.”

Davian held the flame behind the neck of the bottle and poured into the wide-mouthed glass basin. “Pinot Noir grown in Oregon or California or New Zealand is Pinot Noir. And that’s all well and good.”

He bent down and looked into the red liquid, seeming all-at-once to lecture toward the wine. “Pinot Noir grown in Burgundy is Burgundy.”

He took in a breath, deeply, filling his lungs to their entirety, and then he waved his hands over the island surface. There, in his wake, appeared three wine glasses, shining like crystal.

He took one glass in his hand, the old-fashioned way, and began to pour, watching Cedric as the light rang through the wine.

“Chambertin was Napoleon’s choice, you know.”

The stem of the glass fell to one side of Davian’s forefinger, and he passed the glass to Cedric.

Cedric looked into it and raised it as Davian lifted the decanter.

Davian saw with a sly, knowing smile.

“Wait,” he instructed. “Give it a moment.”

Cedric lowered the glass, noticing how transparent was the red, and how the light betrayed its purity.

As his request was honored, Davian drew his eyes downward. “Let the scent tell you that it’s not gone sour.”

The next glass went to Myrtle, and then he poured for himself, and lowered his voice as his eyes lost their focus, looking into the wine and seeing something only he could see, speaking in a whisper nearly inaudible.

“I daresay it was a good year.”

Cedric had never had wine and he had the sense it was completely wasted upon him. It tasted like wood and pressed flowers and it floated aromatic and bitter through his nostrils and soon he wondered if it was he who had sat for fourteen years in a barrel with the express intention to decay.

He was grateful for the cushioned chair in the dining room that he entered, despite his best intentions, indelicately. Myrtle sat across from him, her black dress harmonious with a dour expression. While Davian clattered in the kitchen, she lifted her wine glass and spun it gently in a circle, letting the drink crash up against the edges. When she sat it down, the red quickly thinned and fell back toward the deep pool in the center.

Cedric blinked his eyes and serving plates appeared, heaping with food far beyond what the three of them could hope to consume. A green vegetable he couldn’t name, a white gravy lumpy within a silver bowl reminiscent of an enchanted lamp, and mashed potatoes adorned with diced herbs.

Over the past several hours, Cedric had heard his stomach complain, but even with the feast laid before them, his appetite was unsteady, and he involuntarily welcomed the wine. Each time he lifted the glass to his lips, he noticed something different. It didn’t seem as sharp as it had in the kitchen, no, it had become smooth, not sweet, but warm and soft and this time he wondered if little pieces of iron drifted amongst the burgundy, not so unlike that which presumably flowed in his own body, a body that had forgotten what had come before and traded it, traded it for—

Davian came in then, and in his hands he held a thick cutting board. Truly, he must have been carrying it, for the weight pulled the thing downward, leaving room for the faint wisp of steam from the bird to dissipate into the air.

Cedric again noticed the tinkling sound of music in the background, and he realized it had always been there, even if he’d failed for a while to remember.

The chicken upon the board was glistening, shining where there had once grown a feather, and salt flakes adorned the skin. The heat had pulled it taut against the breast and the legs were tied, the one nearest to Cedric bright as much as it lay in shadow.

Davian set the thing on the table and remained standing.

“I hope I’ve not overdone the dark,” he said, looking across the table between his guests. “It is so easy to do.”

He raised his hands and they were empty for only a moment, before a large knife appeared in his right, and a steel rod in the left.

He brought them together, methodically scraping the knife against the steel, first the left side, and then the right, and again and again, heedless of the din and continuing to articulate his thoughts.

“I suppose it’s become rather commonplace now, but it was once a rare delicacy. My father—”

Cedric could not remember what was said as Davian began to carve the meat. The sound of metal scraping against metal overtook all other sensation, and he winced in discomfort, but made his best effort to appear unperturbed. He took another sip of the wine—blackberry, he thought—and watched as pressure against the body severed what had once been a joint and candlelight reflected off cartilage and the deep rim at the edge of the wood became filled with juice.

The fat had become molten upon the water, and Cedric heard a cello from nowhere in particular.

The silverware was heavy and felt awkward in Cedric’s hands. The matter of the fork was illuminated by Davian’s effortless demonstration of etiquette, one in which a knife was consistently employed by the right hand. And, unlike Myrtle, once he took it into his grip, he never put it back down.

Cedric could find no comfort in either approach, so he crossed his hands and did the only thing that felt honest.

He hesitated and questioned himself, mired in uncertainty over something that he had once never given a single thought. He felt a spotlight upon him, but perhaps, he hoped in vain, he was the only one paying attention. At one point, he concluded, the masquerade would be over, and he still had to go home.

Davian chewed and swallowed, ensuring his mouth was completely clear before speaking. “So, tell me, my lovely,” he said, directing his charms at Myrtle, “On which subjects have you already lectured upon, so that I might avoid a very dull repetition?”

“What feats have you set before him? In which matters does he show ability, and which still evade him?”

Cedric looked at Davian, and then he lay his eyes upon Myrtle; a fair bit more unpredictable than another helping of potatoes.

She set down her utensil.

“I have made no such demands, Davian. There will be time; there is always time. One who squeezes stone will find there are better ways to extract blood.”

Davian raised his eyebrows in amusement while taking another small piece of chicken into his mouth. He would not speak with his mouth full, so the two waited until his hands were lowered.

“Your allusion does not fail to amuse me—you possess such a keen faculty with words and how and where to place them—and yet I must contend that your assessment does not clearly respond to my concern.”

“My concern,” he said as a matter-of-fact, “is that you’ve brought in a student of considerable Talent to your school, admitted him regardless of his unfavorable age, and let him sit idle for several weeks.”

“Good God, Myrtle! Tell me where this limitless time is to be found, because I for one have been left in the dark!”

Myrtle was unimpressed and refused to yield to his pressure, and the manner in which she forced a lapse in the conversation conveyed her acute displeasure.

“It is precisely one’s potential that forces a very careful approach. If you were to be struck by a baseball, you might raise your hand to deflect the blow. Would you stop a bullet in the same manner?”

Cedric had stopped eating.

“Precisely why you thought to invite me into this venture, was it not? Two heads being what they are?” Davian became more insistent.

“In an effort to maintain good grace, I will gently remind you that I have made it my livelihood to instruct the youth that have no other way to learn the truth of who they are. For decades, nigh fifty years, I have seen—”

“And yet,” Davian interrupted with a newfound ferocity, “too little butter spread over too much bread will—.”

“How many others are willing to do what I do? How many others look at the beggars on the street and even entertain for a moment stepping outside their little fiefdoms to try to make change? We’ve more strength, more capacity, more ability to help those that languish in starvation and yet how many dare step over their desperate moats?”

Davian raised a singular eyebrow in an expressive flourish but spoke with knowing resolve. “You know better than most the danger of stepping outside charted territory.”

Myrtle sidestepped his commentary. “Yes, well, there is always a price to pay.”

There was an observant silence, even if Cedric could not yet know its cause.

“I have made mistakes,” Myrtle continued. “But wisdom is helping others walk a different path.”

Cedric had noticed the wine had gone to his head, and his eyes did not remain still. But observance of what was occurring was not the wherewithal to stop it, and in the quiet, words rose to his mouth that he had seen in no dream.

“What I don’t get,” he said slowly, interrupting their tired banter, “is how the two of you knew where I was, who I was, what I was.”

They looked at him curiously, but said nothing.

“Three, four weeks ago or whatever, I was just sitting behind bars. Played stupid games, won stupid prizes, the usual. Figured—”

He gestured with his hands. “—That was the end of that. That they’d ship me off to Rikers and that was what I deserved. What I should get, judged against the same criteria as everyone else.”

“But, no,” his voice raised, amplified by the toxins running through his veins. “That’s not what happened.”

“You two show up,” he reported with contempt. “Sign on the dotted line, and start babbling about—”

Davian was similarly impaired, and he interjected. “It was she who—”

“So, what is it?” Cedric continued his sloppy interrogation. “Bent spacetime? The sense of everything falling downhill even if you don’t have any clue about your present el—”

“It’s not like that,” Davian stated tartly. “It’s not like that at all. Don’t you dare come into my hall and start quoting some flimsy gospel you received at fifteen years of age.”

“Then what is it?” Cedric demanded with unexpected vitriol. “Because no one wants to take a second to explain to me what the hell is going on.”

“Aurasight,” Davian said, attempting to soothe the young man. “I can see in colors, but more colors than the Mortals have words for, far more.”

He paused for a moment, considering. “I’d like to teach you to notice it,” he negotiated. “Aurasight is a very simple thing, anyone can do it—”

Davian proceeded with caution. “I even think some Mortals are capable, even if they remain ignorant of what they do…”

“It will make the world much more sensible,” he rationalized, “To see in the colors that were once invisible, colors that are there, but colors their eyes aren’t capable of perceiving.”

Cedric was trying to listen, or trying to try to listen, but within him was an oscillation that danced with the current of his emotion, that made the tinny music and the ceaseless babble and the scent of the chicken’s crisped corpse melt into a signal that did not feel so strange and bizarre and—

“So that’s all it is then,” he said, straining to get the words out. “Putting all of the rest of us into categories.”

“This one is red,” Cedric stated, moving his chin where his wrists could not follow. “And this one is blue. That’s all there is, right?”

Confusion and bitterness, years in the making, set his bile aboil.

“And some of them are better than all the rest.”

Cedric, entirely caught in the attempt to make his rhetoric internally consistent, withdrew from the fanciful table. Where his exacting self-control floated away, Davian and Myrtle remained tethered: watching, waiting, observing.

“And that’s just what we are, who we were destined to be, probably since ‘ever, and good fucking luck trying to change the shit you were born into—”

A generous wine glass, set to Cedric’s second hour, began to hover, at first just an inch above the table, and then, freed of its stabilizing force, gained an inch, and soon another.

There were only a few drops of burgundy dormant at the bottom of the glass when it began to audibly vibrate, resonant with a frequency beyond their comprehension.

Cedric, eyes closed in reverie, did not see Myrtle, whose eyes widened in terror. Nor did he see Davian, whose eyes likewise opened to glean the curiosity, but who bore a definitive, irreputable, satisfied grin.

None were prepared when the shaking overcame the music: instantly, the integrity of the glass ruptured, sending tiny immeasurable daggers shattering outward into all corners of the dining room.

Cedric flinched. But Davian was still smiling.

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The house always smelled like birthdays.

How the candle had been lit was not important. Wide and short, they lined the halls and decorated writing desks. Clusters were found suspended above the dining room table and more still at the corners of the bathtub. They reflected a symphony in mirrors and they stood alone at the ends of passageways. The flames were not left to burn unattended when the children went on to a different room so that was always the first thing that needed doing when they moved into the doorways. The little orphans could invoke flame by throwing their wrist or snapping their fingers and Myrtle left a wake in white billowing around her wherever she walked.

The candles burned everywhere, but he was still cold.

The next evening, the headmistress knocked on his door. She told him he’d find new clothes in the dawnrise; his chest of drawers perhaps stuffed full. Things he needed, things for which he would never ask. He could take what suited him, she claimed, and she would find a place for the rest.

“There’s no such thing as bad weather—” she had begun, her tired eyes half-lidded as something went unsaid.

Then she left the room.

Darkness did not relent and neither did the cold. He dabbled in fantasy, feeling as if these walls had been placed in haste too many awkward years after the first cornerstone had been laid. No hundred-year wall could this well keep in the inky silence.

Autumn was falling, more quickly every night, and with the blackness came the wind. But now there was a jacket on the hook, and a bathrobe that was soft and downy and caught on his cheek when he put it on in the mornings. It had a long strap he could tie twice and could keep them all out — so he entered the hallway.

There were pictures on the walls, scores, and their eyes, paired and lone, came down upon him. Where there were no eyes to be found, there were glass-like windows, and clouds, and sunbeams that were choked by the churning dust before they could reach the ground. The oil had long ago caught the little particles in their tarry grasp, and the only way to exorcise the smell was to wipe away the paint.

He didn’t know where the solvent was, knowing it was not his business, so he kept going.

He hadn’t thought much of the little brass bells waiting at the base of the candelabra until Elmer had caught him in reflex using his breath to extinguish the light.

The boy had gasped, gulping oxygen before an unseen guillotine.

“Ceddie, never!”

He seized the frame from Cedric’s hand, who did not flinch.

“Don’t let the Matron catch you doing that. It’s bad luck. She’ll have kittens. Never, never ever—”

His eyes were glossy, and the amber glow covered part of the brown and part of the white.

“You should use the snuffer. Always always use the snuffer.”

So he did. But it still smelled like birthdays.

The matter of the enchanted foundling home did not rise all at once. Rather, it gossiped when the outside whistled in the windowpanes. It skittered as cats’ claws upon the wood floor. It wove through the air like the smell of baking when nothing else could be heard.

Cedric noticed little things at first. Sometimes, feeling listless and underemployed, he spent his time carelessly, staring at wax dripping and falling down hot upon the tablecloth. It would spread for a moment, and then the weave scolded its pride, and it would stop, consider its fate, and turn opaque. When another drop fell in pattern, they might both become translucent together for a brief second, only to soon solidify again in the icy air.

In the morning, the evidence was always gone.

Cedric did not have a clock in his room. By the time he rose, breakfast had been put back in the cupboard for another day. A stolen pastry enabled him to avoid lunch, and sometimes he found a cookie untouched on a plate in the sitting room.

But when the dinner bell rang through the house and the many feet went toward its beckoning —

He found even he, in this state, could not feign as though he had heard nothing.

Myrtle always sat at the far end of the table and Cedric had felt banished from his only source of familiarity in the din. But the old woman was entirely absorbed in the care of Suyon, by far the youngest of the orphans. When he looked down the table to spy the orphan matron, more sinew than flesh, dicing the girl’s vegetables, he felt ridiculous in his need and he kept quiet.

A place had been made for Cedric to sit to the right of Eloise, who functioned as a sort of assistant to the elder. She sat at the end of the table closest to the door. Her face was often quite still and serious when she listened to Myrtle’s distilled wisdoms, but when she looked upon the little ones, her eyes softened and she smiled.

Eloise had dark eyes and dark lashes and she always spoke gently.

“We don’t serve meat on Fridays,” she said that night, leaning over to offer a whispered aside. “But that doesn’t mean you’ll leave the table hungry.”

When bowls were passed to Cedric, he began by taking too much, perhaps thinking himself polite, and perhaps not understanding his own appetite.

It felt a quiet sin to leave things uneaten.

“Matron, can we go out this year?”

Where Suyon sat to the left of the headmistress, Friday Perkins sat to the right. But each night she left an empty seat between.

“I do not think it wise—” Myrtle took a carafe from the center of the table. “—the lot of you impersonating beggars and rapping your little knuckles upon foreign doors.”

Her judgment fell as a blade. “…Behaving as Ordinary children.”

Myrtle poured water into a glass meant for Suyon, eyes cast toward Friday. “What could you possibly want that they could offer to you? Truffles and sweetmeat? A—”

She stopped for a moment, and then her voice was scornful. “Lollypop?”

She set the carafe in its place. “You may have those things at home.”

“Zahra will go with us,” Friday pleaded, looking toward the young woman to her right and then back to the headmistress. “Matron, please; this day only comes once a year.”

Myrtle was unmoved.

“Small mercies.”

Friday looked down, quite deflated, and scraped some lentils around her plate.

Myrtle let the table percolate, a quiet shame seeping in the empty spaces.

They sat in silence for a while, and only Suyon, too young to know better, let her glass clink against the porcelain.

Myrtle grimaced at the ballooning quiet and lifted her head to address Zahra, yielding to the pressure like aged timber.

“You’ll go with them, then?”

Cedric found Zahra rather intense, and he observed the present interaction between the headmistress and her charge through the periphery of his attention. Though he sat across from the sixteen-year-old, their paths rarely crossed over anything but the salt shaker.

Zahra looked at Friday and blinked laconically before turning back to the headmistress and speaking with laborious resignation.

“If that’s your will.”

Mealtime concluded with a cascade of partings by way of paths carved long before Cedric’s arrival.

Friday left first, always leaving a crumpled napkin on her plate while the seat sat ajar. Elmer followed soon after, a methodical boy who took little and asked for less, restoring his chair beneath the edge of the table.

Myrtle took Suyon then, sometimes lifting her from underneath her arms and sometimes holding her hand as she clumsily unfolded her legs. Zahra followed them as a shadow, even if she was bound to part ways.

Eloise always lingered to the last, when the only noise that remained was the wood cracking and falling split upon the glowing embers beneath.

“Cedric—” she said as he rose.

“Can I find you in the library later?” Her eyes reflected an unsteady light. “I wanted to talk to you about something after I clean this up.”

The flickering crashed against the glass and refracted, but it was still orange. The seats were empty and the bowls were not. Cedric spoke without thinking.

“I’ll help.”

Eloise, candelabra in one hand, led the two of them upstairs to the library. Without lessons looming over their heads, the children avoided the library after dark. The fireplace was warm, but the books were cold.

Cedric was afraid to disturb the dust on the shelves. He sat in here alone sometimes and listened to the children’s laughter, effervescent, echoing through the hallways and off the pictures hung on nails.

The books watched him, and often he thought he smelled turpentine, and he was sure the house kept no secrets.

“Do you like puzzles?”

Cedric turned his head toward her.

“When Veronica left, she didn’t take her collection with her. She and I used to work them together. They’re still in here, if I remember correctly.”

Cedric heard the fire snap, and he looked at it, and then back to her.

“Might be a bit dark to work a puzzle, I suppose. But you’re welcome to peel back the curtains and try in the morning.”

His focus was scattered, and he thought his mouth was dry. “Maybe. Thanks.”

“Do you mind if we sit somewhere else?” Her request was delicate, and he was ill-accustomed to questions. They left him naked.

“I’ll get some tea if you want. The fire’s a little much for me right now. I’ll burn up.”

He followed her and they sat on a long couch, backs toward the fire, with a generous emptiness between, and she took in breath. Her inhalation left the air starved.

“On Sunday—” she began cautiously, eyes speaking more than she said. “Owen’s coming back.”

Cedric suspected the place-setting and listened.

“Owen’s a sweet kid, but he needs routine. When things change, he struggles. And when he struggles—”

She took her eyes away.

“Sometimes things get broken.”

Eloise joined her hands and let her fingers touch.

“He wasn’t happy when the Matron told us she was going to take on another student. We thought Suyon would be the last. We thought our class was complete.”

She looked into her memories. “Owen wasn’t well while the Matron was overseas. He was lost for a while, withdrawn; surly and argumentative. He was afraid she would never come back. He was afraid she’d abandon him, like what had happened before.”

Eloise drew Cedric to lend his eyes.

“He minds me when he must, but I’ve never been what he needed.”

She looked away.

“He used to stay in your room. The Matron usually has the little ones keep together until they’re not afraid of the dark, until they’re ready to be on their own, but—”

She didn’t finish her thought.

“He made himself quite clear. He didn’t want another boy in the house; he was happy with the way things were.”

She shifted, and moved her legs.

“So he was sent away until you got settled. He’s one of the few of us who has a little family left.”

Cedric wondered about the rest of them.

“I don’t know how he’s going to be when he gets back. I hope things are going to be okay, but—”

“I just don’t know.”

On Saturday morning, Myrtle was nowhere to be found.

Cedric realized her absence when, after a croissant and a glass of water, he approached the sitting room and ran into Eloise fetching paper for little Suyon. Zahra and Elmer were there too, and the curtain had been drawn back to let the faintest bit of sunshine trickle into the room.

Cedric sat down on the sofa with the lion’s feet and listened to nothing. He sat still for a moment, and then Eloise came back and laid several thick sheets of cream paper on the table. Suyon looked at her and then dumped her crayon box on the paper so that all the crayons rolled and several fell on the floor so she bent over to pick one up and it was purple and she gave it to Cedric.

A sequence of knuckles knocked on the door so Eloise went to answer it while Cedric looked at the paper on the table.

The paper had little bits of speckles throughout so it wasn’t entirely blank. Suyon was picking up the crayons.

“Greetings, greetings,” rang Davian’s voice, spreading through the room from the open doorway.

“I thought I’d pay my respects; wish a very merry and happy Halloween to those who celebrate.”

He stepped forward into the room and deposited a newspaper in front of Zahra, who was still buried in yesterday’s woes.

“I hope I’m not spoiling anything by telling you there’s nothing good to read today,” he said to the young lady behind the screen.

She peered at him from above the folded divide, responding with the acerbic retort, “There never is.”

Davian turned back to Eloise, and Cedric watched him.

“So, you find yourself in charge, Miss Eloise?”

“The Matron has gone to fetch Owen. She’ll return tomorrow.” Eloise and Cedric looked at Suyon, who had pushed her crayons together so that their diverse lengths were clear, launching from an unseen base.

“Ah, yes,” he replied of Myrtle. “I’m sure not until the late afternoon at least.”

Zahra turned a page of the newspaper.

“Cedric, may I steal you for a moment? The Greeks make a fine cup of coffee and when I’m in the neighborhood I never miss an opportunity to partake.”

Once he’d stepped inside the house, Cedric wasn’t entirely sure he’d since left. It had probably been a week. Or more.

Davian insisted, looking at the young man and adding genially, “It’s my treat.”

The Marscapone Foundling Home was set several blocks from any so-called businesses. Although the Sun was hidden behind a thick coat of cloud-cover, the sky was bright grey and Cedric found it alien.

He squinted his eyes and pressed on. Davian walked quickly and he couldn’t afford to get left behind.

“How are you making out? Settling in nicely?”

Davian did not shirk when another passed him on the sidewalk, letting them avoid him. “Myrtle runs a tight ship. It’s a good place for you.”

His timbre changed as he looked diagonally, almost at Cedric, almost not. “You’ll learn a lot there.”

They kept walking.

“Anything goes wrong, you need a breath of fresh air, you’re sick of the smell of Play-Doh, you have my number. And the “N” goes right into Manhattan. Transfer at 42nd Street—”

“I don’t think she has a telephone.”

Davian laughed. “Oh, she has a telephone, I guarantee you that. Catch her in her cups and she may tell you how she still turns letters into the rotary.”

“Someday you won’t need it,” he said warmly. “But for now, you can dial me from anywhere, whenever the need strikes you.”

Cedric kept his eyes open, searching the ground for discarded silver. He felt uneasy at the prospect of making an inquiry to the old crone.

He preferred to have a quarter in his pocket.

Moe’s had a name that was ill-fitting. When it was said, the word simply poured from the mouth, a heavy thing that curled upward at the edges and sunk to the bottom of the bowl as an overstuffed dumpling.

It was the bitter marriage of sweet and sour, rhyme and reason, expectation—

and Chaos.

Davian ordered a coffee with a flourish of Italian, chattering excitedly while Cedric let his eyes wander over the menagerie of bread-stuff behind the glass. Many were glazed or decorated with sliced almonds, and all of them looked too pretty to eat.

“You won’t be disappointed with anything,” Davian insisted over Cedric’s shoulder. “Although I’m quite partial to the chocolate; can’t help myself.”

Cedric tried to read one of the little placards, but his French led him astray and he tripped when the letters didn’t do what he expected. He didn’t know what the man had meant, but he had heard something else entirely.

“Coffee?” Davian asked.

“Sure,” Cedric replied without thinking. “Plain; no sugar.”

At a table by the window, Cedric watched the wind intensify and catch the bottoms of people’s raincoats.

Only a ring of dark brown remained of Davian’s espresso. Cedric had found his own quite strong and quite hot, so he’d removed the lid to release the steam, but it was still near half-full.

He wondered if the children would still go out for trick-or-treating.

“I want to do you a favor, Cedric. I’ve talked it over with Myrtle, and she’s skeptical, but she’ll go along with it if you’re in agreement.”

Cedric took a sip of the liquid in his cup, and it was potable.

“You’re supposed to show in court on Monday.”

He’d let it slip from his mind, just one side of his mind, while on the other it had rumbled as an approaching thundercloud.

“Yeah,” Cedric said, enduring, wondering how the days had slipped away.

“Well, I want you to know,” Davian said with great magnanimity. “I think it’s all a right mistake.”

Cedric looked up.

“The Mortals waste their time crafting rules and regulations to curtail the pleasures they can’t understand, to press their ill-formed moralities upon others. It’s frivolous nonsense. Let them have their libations and small joys, let them make their little lives feel worth the trouble, let them forget the fields in which they toil, if only for a moment.”

Cedric thought he agreed, but he felt scrutinized, so he remained quiet.

“I studied the law for a while,” he continued. “And I know how these things go. There’s a protocol, and so long as one falls in line, one can get out unscathed.”

“You show up, you look dejected and apologetic, and you swear you’ll never do it again. The judge slaps his cutesy little rubber stamp on your plea and you go on your way.”

“Proper waste of an afternoon,” he added dismissively.

Cedric did not know what to say.

“Conditional discharge is what you’re staring down.” Davian explained. “Couple weeks of raking leaves, painting fences, maybe—”

He lightened his tone. “—Erasing graffiti.”

Cedric watched him move, and in the man’s animation, he wondered if the caffeine had hit his blood.

“I told Myrtle: What’s the damn point? Why must he humiliate himself again? We got him out, let’s just be done with this!”

“You deserve better than that, Cedric,” he said, lowering his voice but maintaining his conviction. “I’ll spare you the Latin, but suffice it to say that an unjust law is no law at all.”

Cedric heard and let Davian continue.

“Illusions like these: a lawyer, feather in his cap, striding into the courtroom with his client bent low, heavy with guilt—”

He was smiling a little, letting his imagination get the better of him. “When you simply confirm their expectations, paltry as they may be—”

“That,” he explained, “Is when the magic practically falls from your hands: when you become the shepherd among sheep. They expect to see Cedric there, escorted by his legal counsel, and they expect him to seem glum and repentant. They expect him to sit down and shut up and refrain from speaking lest he’s spoken to.”

“The puppetry will be a trifle—” he claimed, showing his white teeth as he rhapsodized. “—the merest bagatelle for one who knows what he’s about.”

Cedric was uncertain, and he was quiet. He did not want to don a stranger’s tie and present himself downtown, and he had reservations about Davian’s gift, but he wasn’t sure what he stood to gain.

“Tell me what I’ll have you say then,” Davian asked, getting theatrical. “When I have you turn your back to the crowd and face the judge alone. When he says his mercy is conditional, yes, conditional upon your dutiful compliance. Conditional that you’ll never do it again, so long as you shall live. Only then, he’ll say without saying, will I turn you out free.”

Davian left an emptiness that hesitated, and then he asked again.

“What will I have you say?”

Cedric had been listening, but the words were lost for the lines between. He had not remained in the little coffee shop in Astoria. He had let himself drift, and in that drifting he was indeed in front of the desk of the judge, just as Davian had invoked, and behind him bored the unwelcome eyes, seeing and unseeing; hundreds counted by the pair, and they seared his flesh with their looking.

He remembered Davian sitting across from him and the smell of coffee was all around and he recalled where he was supposed to be.

“Yes, your honor.”

“Well, how do I look?”

Friday Perkins was covered head to toe by a stark white sheet. She had apparently roped Elmer in on her scheme, and the two of them stood before Zahra, parading their costumes in the sitting room. They had each cut four holes into their getup, two large ones for their arms, two small ones for their eyes.

“Dreadful.”

Zahra paused, and resumed her studied indifference as they turned around, pulling the cloth to billow and twist around their obscured forms. “You know the Matron’s going to be furious to find that you disfigured the linens.”

She added, wryly, “I hope you know how to sew.”

Friday could not be dislodged from her perch, her enthusiasm forming a suit of armor. “I can fix it, just you watch.”

Zahra folded her arms, unimpressed. “I won’t hold my breath. Besides—”

But even she could not maintain her icy demeanor forever. “Aren’t you missing something?”

Elmer, hidden beneath the sheet, still managed to wear his confusion plain. “What are we missing?”

Friday intercepted the missive and exclaimed, “…Candy!” and the two of them barely made it from the room, scampering haphazardly and only just managing to avoid stepping on their shrouds.

The sound of the girl’s command, “Get your pillowcase!” could just be heard fading from earshot. “That’ll do perfect!”

Zahra sighed dramatically and sat on the far side of the room, picking up the Business section and continuing the farcical pantomime that she was merely part of the woodwork.

Cedric was sitting on the two-seater placed in front of the fireplace, observing within himself a slight weariness that longed to return to sleep. He let his eyes close and he was listening to the logs crack and the fire ripple and lash against the brick—

“Cedric?”

Zahra’s voice broke the silence, and his eyes fluttered open.

“Could you take a look at the fire; throw another on if it needs it?”

Cedric leaned forward. “Sure.”

Eloise came into the room, then, and he knew her by the rhythm of her footsteps without looking.

“You’ve got him in the heat?”

Targeted, Cedric heard Zahra lower her newspaper.

She responded plainly, “It’s a good skill to have. And he’ll need it in this mausoleum.”

Cedric was poking the fire. Some of the logs had split and came apart as he touched them.

Eloise sighed, and turned her face toward Cedric. “Just—”

“Don’t burn yourself, okay?”

He laughed a little.

“I’ll try.”

Cedric stood up then as if he’d just risen from a dream. On the mantel were several pictures he’d not yet noticed. The fireplace was set on its own foundation, and so too the ledge above was just such that he had to look up to see what had caught his eye.

Eloise stepped over.

“Looking at the family photos?”

Zahra threw her commentary through her paper. “Funny we never make it up there.”

“We’re in the yearbook,” Eloise added brightly.

Zahra was not consoled. “You’re in the yearbook.”

Eloise had to come closer, and she stood straight and pointed at a photograph devoid of color.

“That one’s her father—”

“—And her aunt. They came to America just before the turn of the century.”

Myrtle’s father had a frown that would turn stone to gravel.

“She’s never displayed her mother. I don’t think there were ever any pictures of her before she died.”

“Is this—

Cedric heard a door slam upstairs.

“—Myrtle?”

Eloise reached up and took the picture from the mantel and held it so they both could see.

“Yes, just after getting married.”

The resemblance was there, but the picture had faded and the surface was damaged. And still, her black hair was thick and shiny and her cheeks were round and her dress was white and she didn’t look so—

“He’s a cripple,” Friday’s voice rose unexpected from behind them. “That’s why he’s the one sitting.”

“Friday!” Eloise turned and scolded the girl. “That’s not a nice thing to say!”

Friday shrugged. “Sometimes the truth ain’t nice.”

“You still—”

“Marrying the Matron for her money; that’s not nice.”

It was hard to take Friday seriously when she had a white sheet over her head. But from her point-of-view, nothing had changed.

“She should have kept her name.”

Eloise was flustered.

“If you’re going to go, then go!”

Zahra, as if she’d been caught in the flurry, followed the two children from the room, and not a word was said before the sound of the front door, heavy upon its hinges, slapped closed in finality.

Cedric imagined that Eloise breathed a sigh of relief, but he doubted his conviction, knowing she would never show such a sentiment plainly.

“Mister—” she began, returning. “Mr. Marscapone.”

Cedric looked away from her skin to glean the man, quiet and unmoving within the ink.

“Vincent,” she said, carefully. “Though she does not oft speak his name anymore. Not since he passed.”

Out of the corner of his vision, her mouth moved, slowly, impeding on the silence of memory.

“He used to come and take our pictures. In any room of the house we preferred, and all the while, he’d set up his equipment and ask questions about our studies and whether we were being treated well and whether we liked it here—”

Cedric looked at Eloise.

“And I was sure he was truly hearing us.”

The candles burned, but he was still cold.

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Cedric awoke with a start to the sound of rustling porcelain, estranged from his chamber by a thick wooden door.

He clambered into the present clumsily, grasping to discern the real from the fantasy.

He’d been dreaming. And if he’d been dreaming, he must have been asleep, truly emerged in the throes of slumber.

He looked around him, curtains still casting a welcome shadow over the room.

He’d been asleep, but he wasn’t asleep anymore. The dream was done.

He thought for a moment and corrected his assessment:

It had been a nightmare.

Cedric curled his trunk upward and looked toward the door, the place he was certain was closest to the clattering of dishware that had brought him out of sleep.

He never slept deeply in an unfamiliar place.

A small square of white paper had been slid underneath the door.

His body was still tired, and he fell back onto the pillow, not yet ready to begin another day.

After Davian’s lecture at the park by the river, the three of them had reentered the car and Davian had brought them north into the heart of Queens. They had, in their disparate minds, sat in relative silence compared to the energetic banter filling the vehicle before, and Cedric was glad for it, having quite reached his tolerance for world-breaking truths he could endure in one day.

He stared at the window, along for the ride, and let his mind wander to more comfortable habits.

Words escaped him, and maybe he just needed time. Nothing could change what he had seen, and Davian was right. Maybe it did make sense of his disjointed memories.

Trying to fight against previously held convictions had required strength he couldn’t muster. If he could not trust his senses, what could he trust? How could he live if living meant nothing at all?

Cedric had never been to Astoria before so the landmarks and street names washed over his eyes like jibberish. Some of them seemed to count, but every so often they skipped or repeated with some variation or clarification in small print.

He thought maybe he should start paying attention.

None of it yet meant anything to him, but a little bit of faith remained.

‘There must be a pattern…’

Without warning, Davian stopped in front of a building not quite like a house but not large enough to be an apartment building, so he had no word for it. The bricks were dark and Cedric noticed a candle in each window, none of which were lit.

No, that wasn’t right. One room, near the top —

The structure stood four stories tall, shaded on either side by several large trees, trees he had gleaned were a bit of a rarity in the urban landscape.

Trees like what he’d seen at the park, heard at the park, smelled —

The trees had been reaching toward the sky for many seasons. The house was tall, taller than its distant neighbors, and yet the trees were still taller.

Cedric was barely in the world in which he found himself. He tossed and turned between bedsheets that were soft and warm but did not belong to him.

His body lay on feathers and down, but his mind could not rest.

He was not sure which had been dream, and which had been reality.

[ I′ve seen this before. ]

The sounds echoed through his memory, gaining sharp definition the longer they were permitted to ricochet. The sensation persisted, groaning and lumbering as a massive beast of terror. His secondary senses were dulled, hearing again and again the striking of skin against skin, a hand thrown by the ageless sinew of hatred, pitiless against the yielding flesh of youth.

The echo of the nightmare.

Desperately trying to cling to what his senses told him was real, he thought back to last night, to what he thought he’d seen while the philosophers stood placid.

[ Not this… ]

None of it was here, and yet, it was his only reality.

[ Not again. ]

He could see nothing about him, but he heard them and felt them, first the Master, the witness, and then the victims, whose tiny voices rang out as pleas toward Heaven, blending to become one.

It was abundantly clear to Cedric, even in the scant few hours he’d been acquainted with the man, that Davian thrived on pleasure. He did things because he liked to do them, and drudgery was something best left to those best suited to the dull and unimaginative.

Where he did not find fun, he created it from nothing.

“Can you,” Cedric said simply, never terribly gifted with improvisation. “Turn yourself into a cat?”

Davian rolled his eyes. “Batting from third base, are we?”

He looked at Myrtle, uttering a dry aside. “Or maybe he’s been watching too many cartoons.”

He then turned back to Cedric. “I can call a cat, summon the many mongrels to my side—”

And all of a sudden a swarm appeared, wandering toward his feet like moths to flame. The cats, numbering at least twenty, came prancing from beneath bushes or behind trash cans. They came in every color, shape, and size.

Cedric looked around himself and a little one brushed by his pantleg.

The small things gathered at Davian’s feet, looking up at him with their gemstone eyes. They mewed and meowed and begged his favor.

But Davian stood firm, eyes on Cedric. “I can heal them—”

And he bent down to pick one up, a runt covered tip to tail in thick luxurious fur.

The two locked eyes. “I can make them clean.”

Cedric looked toward Myrtle and saw her arms crossed in dubious impatience before his attention was drawn back to the crying animals.

“I can launch a cat into geosynchronous orbit, ring the Earth in a belt of fur—”

He raised his hand, the tiny cat now held aloft, and Cedric held his breath.

“But I won’t.”

He released the tension from his posture and the cats looked away to leave.

He put the little one back on the ground and it skittered away.

“No, Cedric. You can’t be a cat. You might be able to figure out how to trick people into thinking they see something they don’t, and that’s a true joy to behold — but let’s not get it confused. You aren’t a cat. No matter what they see, or think they see, you’ll never be a cat.”

“There are some things, try as we might, that even we cannot do.”

The longer Cedric lingered in the bedroom, the more he dreaded the inevitable. The darkness and quiet had fed him as a feast, but he laid in want.

He would have to leave.

He’d arrived at his new home under the blanket of night. For all Myrtle’s talk of an orphanage, he’d now been in the house for eighteen hours and he hadn’t seen or heard a single child.

The silence was rather eerie.

As he hesitated to leave his room, his mind wandered and he questioned himself.

Was he really going to stay here?

The feats he’d seen Davian work dwelt in his mind uneasily, a movie that left him curious, an ending he’d not yet seen.

Cedric couldn’t do what Davian did. But somehow the stranger, with his easy charm, insisted that this was where he belonged, and it could be his home.

Myrtle had simply stood there, watching without comment, completely unfazed by Davian’s magic, an unblinking witness to each and every violation of the tenets of a predictable universe.

She’d seen it all before.

Cedric felt his heart jump to remember her cold gaze.

He looked down at his bedsheets, rather thick and sumptuous. On the floor lay a pair of jeans, discarded, and a leather belt folded on top.

He thought he should call Betty, get his things back, tell her she didn’t have to worry.

But he paused, his thoughts tangled.

‘…And then what?’

Slipping the note in his pocket, Cedric opened the door.

At his foot was a silver tray. Upon the tray was a tall porcelain server, an empty cup, and several small plates of food. On the center plate an English muffin had been split, and an egg laid upon a piece of ham. A boat bearing yellow sauce, a dish of fruit, and accessories to prepare the coffee formed satellites around the main course.

Cedric heard the rustling of toys and looked up.

Sitting in the hallway upon a deep carpet runner was a small girl behind an array of painted wooden blocks. She’d made a number of towers, some sorted by color, others seeming to have no pattern at all. The corners of the blocks were each offset by about fifteen degrees.

She couldn’t have been older than four.

Cedric waved cautiously as they looked at each other, her intent eyes showing no reservation.

“Hi—” he began, kneeling behind the tray and teapot. “I’m Cedric.”

She said nothing, the chasm between them seeming vast.

Cedric looked to either side, the hallway spreading out generously in both directions. Identical doors in dark wood whispered nothing of what they hid.

“What’s your name? How old are you?”

She didn’t say anything.

Cedric took the silver tray in his hands and stood, placing it behind the door frame and safely in his room.

Unencumbered, he entered the hallway and knelt down before the girl, even on his knee taller than her small height.

“It’s okay,” he said, looking to his right and then back to her. “Could you tell me where the bathroom is?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then raised her hand, extending her arm completely straight at the elbow, pointing above and behind him.

Cedric followed her gaze, twisting his body over his left shoulder and, like whiplash, nearly leapt out of his skin to behold a dour looking face surrounded by a mass of wispy brown hair — an enormous structure of curls nearly as wide as her body, and still not large enough to hide a pair of red eyes glaring at him with unmasked contempt.

“Her name is Suyon.”

Cedric stood up and stepped away. Not only had he been completely unaware of her silent presence, her tone was icy, and he was entirely unnerved by how closely she had chosen to stand behind him.

He looked back toward the little child, who had turned her face again toward her blocks.

“She doesn’t speak much English. The Matron speaks to her in Korean. So unless you’re a surprise polyglot, don’t ask her questions she can’t answer.”

Cedric looked back at the young woman with the red eyes, who blinked slowly before proceeding.

“She was the newest one here—” she paused, and then looked at him with ire.

“Until you arrived.”

Cedric stood his ground, careful to dodge the barbs.

“So, you’re Cedric, if I heard that correctly? You’re, what, eighteen? Nineteen? Twenty?”

She didn’t wait for a response. “You’re old. Bathroom’s behind you. Right behind you.”

Cedric looked toward the door.

“You were next to it the whole time.”

He looked back at her, uncertain of leaving.

The young woman looked him over with disgust and added with vitriol, seeming thirteen going on thirty, “Suyon understands more than you realize. Be sure you keep your foul mouth to yourself.”

He turned and left, entering the door next to his own. In the quiet of the bathroom, Cedric looked into the mirror. He knew the green eyes staring back were his own, but they were tired. He did not recognize the rest of it.

He took the note from his pocket and unfolded it. Inside was a careful and ornate script that could only belong to the old woman.

Please help yourself to breakfast.

A muscle in his face twitched and he felt like crying.

In Socrates Sculpture Park, still east of the East River, the sun had been sinking behind the horizon, a horizon completely obscured by Progress and Prosperity.

“What about spring—” Cedric spoke lightheartedly, not quite seeming himself. “On Jupiter?”

“Damn Mars,” he cursed in resignation, frowning and looking accusatorily at the witch. “For fuck’s sake, Myrtle; you handing the kid cue cards?”

She raised a thin eyebrow.

Finding no evidence of betrayal, Davian returned his focus to Cedric, his voice laden with frustration. “If you were thinking you and I could just zip out of here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail and have afternoon tea on Europa, one lump and a bit of lemon, while waiting for the Great Red Spot to appear from over the unseen edge, well, don’t hold your breath. It doesn’t work that way.”

“It’s all theory, mind you; theory none have been able to prove or disprove, but it seems that our ability derives from the Moon. Many a mage can fling himself into space, and some have been more than happy to do so to prove a point—”

His expression turned grave. “But none have returned to tell the tale.”

“Some think, as the Moon creeps away from us, inch by inch, we’re watching our faculties fade into the night. They think someday there won’t be any magic at all. And you know what? Maybe they’re right.”

“Maybe Merlin could turn himself into a dragon. And maybe he’s taking an extended sabbatical on Triton, unhappy with the drudgery and tedium of modern life; who can say? But none of the rest of us seem to be capable.”

“Hi, can I come in?”

Cedric was staring at the dancing flames in the hearth on the first floor. He’d been sitting here while the others had lunch. He’d heard the alto of the one they called the Matron, but he hadn’t wanted to join them. He thought he heard other voices, voices belonging to people he hadn’t met, but he sat impassive.

“Yeah, sure.”

“…You,” the boy said, slowly walking into the sitting room. “You just got here yesterday, right?”

Cedric wasn’t able to wrest his gaze from the source of heat. “Yeah.”

“First night’s pretty bad,” he said, talking to the side of Cedric’s face. “And it might get worse for a while.”

He paused. “But you look strong. Real strong. You’ll do okay.”

Cedric lifted his eyes and looked at him.

“My name’s Elmer Parcell. I been here at the Magicademy for a couple years now. It was rough at first but it got better after a while. It might get worse before it gets better but it does get better.”

He was young, and Cedric had the instinct to try to put him at ease; his face softened to show a weak smile.

“What’s your name?” Elmer asked.

Cedric blinked and lost focus on that face, cheeks plump and bright. “Cedric.”

The boy smiled back. “That’s a nice name. I can remember that. Hey, you play chess?”

Cedric shrugged. “Not really.”

Elmer lifted his head, urging him to follow. “C’mon, I’ll teach you.”

Cedric had never really played chess. He’d tried to read a book about it once, and he got as far as memorizing the way the pieces were supposed to move.

But he knew there was a great deal beyond that.

He could play checkers, but that was an entirely different game. Checkers, well, you could only go backwards if you had a crown on your head.

Sitting between the two was the finest chess set Cedric had ever beheld. Sixty-four squares in alternating light and dark tones were set into a polished wooden table. The chairs were a perfect complement, done in plush velvet; one in white, and one in black.

“The pieces are under here,” Elmer said, and lifted the table to reveal it had been bound together with a hinge on one side.

He removed a simple box, replaced the surface of the board, and aligned the container between them.

“White or black?”

Cedric thought for a moment, but his mind was sluggish and nothing came to mind. He apparently hesitated too long, because Elmer interjected.

“I’ll be white, you can be black.”

He opened the box and began to remove pieces, the remnants clacking together as gravity pulled them downward to fill the empty spaces left by their comrades.

“White always goes first. That seems like it should be an advantage, and maybe most of the time it is, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Every game is different.”

Cedric knew that the pawns all went in a line before the other pieces, so he arranged them carefully.

“Sometimes you just get caught in a loop thinking about what your opening should be, and you make a bad choice. You have to go in totally blind. You go second, well, then you already know something going in. That can help a lot, letting someone else set the stage.”

Elmer looked at what lay across from him. “The ones that look like castle turrets, those are the rooks and they go on the outside corners.”

Cedric found them and set them upright.

“The funny-shaped ones are the bishops, and they go next. S’posed to be a priest’s hat, I guess.”

Cedric aligned the next two pieces as he was told.

“Wait, no—”

Elmer looked down at his board.

“I’m stupid, that’s not right.” He reached across the board to Cedric’s side and shifted the pieces one space inward.

“The bishops are next to the king and queen; the knight goes next to them, sorry, I always mix that up.”

Cedric’s back row had three pieces to the left and three to the right. He looked at Elmer.

“Now for the big guys,” he handed the final two pieces in black to Cedric, who took them in his hands.

“Queen goes on her own color. Doesn’t matter which side you’re on, she’s always on her own color. King goes next to her. It’s her job to protect him.”

Cedric looked down at the pieces in his hand, and then back at Elmer.

“Which one is the queen?”

He indicated with his finger, a gesture seeming familiar, as if they’d always been friends.

“The king stands beneath the cross.”

“If—” Cedric stumbled, feeling sheepish. “If I am, really, what you say I am, then—”

He hesitated, looking at Myrtle, Davian, then blinking as if to wrest himself from their intensity. Myrtle was old, and lines shot out from the corners of her eyes like cobwebs. Davian, he’d begun to piece together, had accumulated far more years than his smooth face suggested.

“Will magic make you live forever?”

They looked at each other, and then back to him.

“Well, Cedric,” Davian said with resignation.

He looked down, hesitant, and then back up again. “I’m trying. That’s all you can ask.”

It wasn’t until nightfall that Myrtle found Cedric in his room. He had returned there at some point in the afternoon, slinking silently back up the stairs to avoid the children preparing cookies and tea.

He had sat on the bed for a while. The wall opposite was covered with shelves, each hosting a diverse population of tomes.

He then stood, the velvet curtain covering the window to his right. In his hand was, of all things, a candle; a candle he’d managed to light with the aid of a box of matches he’d found in the drawer of the bedside table.

Even here, before words he’d once believed part of his natural language, he could not escape what he had seen.

‘…Incantations…’

‘…Illusions…’

‘…Summoning…’

‘…Cantrips…’

He felt a little sick, and he collapsed, face-down on the bed.

Cedric may very well have fallen asleep, laying there quiet as the minutes crept by, until a knock, rather, three of them, announced the arrival of a visitor.

“Cedric, it’s Myrtle. May I come in?”

Her voice was muffled behind the barrier. He lifted his head to be heard.

“Yes, come in.”

The door seemed incomprehensible, and yet she moved it aside with little objection, the thing emitting little more than a faint squeak upon its hinges when she restored it to its mechanism.

She stood there for a moment, looking at the young man laying face-down, fully dressed, and yet, indelicate, exhausted, and completely weakened upon the dark red blanket.

She had raised a hundred orphans to maturity, and yet, she was at a loss for how to proceed.

“Would you—” she treaded carefully. “Like dinner?”

Cedric was empty.

“No,” he replied. “I’m not very hungry.”

“You haven’t eaten since breakfast,” she reminded him gently. “You should maintain your strength.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then spoke as reflex. “I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

They still had not looked at each other, avoiding the heat.

“May I speak with you?” She asked. “May I sit down?”

Cedric turned his head so that his voice was not so completely muffled by the thick cloth.

“Yes.”

But with the exception of his neck, he did not otherwise move.

“It is never easy,” she began. “To tell the initiates that they cannot trust in what they thought they knew.”

She continued, “To tell them that they should abandon all that came before.”

His neck began to ache, so he turned away from her.

“What Davian showed you last night,” she took a breath and considered her words. “It was sudden. It was a lot. Perhaps—”

She paused.

“Perhaps it was too much.”

Cedric did not want to say anything, but he said the first thing that rose to his mind.

“Was it real?”

She reflected. “It’s quite—”

“Real.”

Cedric, feeling sudden shame at his posture, lifted himself aloft and sat himself on the far side of the bed, far from the old woman in the black dress. He tried first to sit as she did, but, feeling naked, he drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around himself.

He looked at the bookshelf before him.

“Can—” he searched his mind. “Can anyone do it, if they try hard enough?”

Getting the word out required immense effort.

“…Magic?”

She didn’t look at him, but might have been looking at the same distant point on the bookshelf.

“Not everyone. Some easier than others, and maybe more could, if they were taught the right way.”

He listened.

“There’s no certainty. No set rules. In today’s world, more women than men, but maybe it didn’t used to be that way. Or maybe there were other factors at play.”

He closed his eyes and set his cheek against his forearm.

“I try to find the children young. Their minds are the most pliable, most able to accept what the world has forced them to bear. They are the smallest, their muscles soft and new, but they recover.”

She paused, and reframed her rhetoric.

“With the young, there is less that must be broken.”

Cedric did not move.

“I was grown before I met a fellow mage,” she related. “Nearly your age.”

He did not speak.

“I had worked magic for many years before that, but I did not have word for what I did. I did not understand what I had seen, and I excused it with the words I did have, few and bland as they were.”

He thought this was the time when she might have reached forward to touch him, and yet, she refrained.

“This world cannot contain you, Cedric. You have believed it your prison, and you have welcomed that reality, become comfortable in its routine, believing it something you, as an extension of Man’s Sin, deserve—”

“But paper,” she continued, quoting an idea he could not follow. “Cannot wrap fire.”

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“Davian is rather eccentric,” she began, looking down the street expectantly. “A man of birth, now long estranged from his origins. He surrendered his claims and came here after the War.”

“Many did,” she paused, melancholy, and continued. “Perhaps more of an aversion to the smell of the soil—”

Her breath seemed to evaporate, and words passed unsaid. “—than a true passion for the American way.”

She seemed distracted, caught on something unseeable. “He was not the only one who fled.”

Cedric followed her gaze through the cars on the busy street, and she continued lecturing. “He’s provided demonstrations to my students on occasion but otherwise he keeps his own schedule, his own engagements. I was surprised he was interested to meet you, but then perhaps I did not correctly consider the circumstances. The higher one climbs, the less one can win against the bitter cold.”

Cedric was listening with one ear, his other filled with the veritable chaos of the city street. Nagging at the back of his mind were the inexplicable sensations he’d seen today, piling up and threatening to overflow the hegemony of doubt. The city street, despite its plentitude of oddities, was the most normal of it all.

Myrtle was a strange woman, seeming ever more displaced from her proper era the more she spoke, and he was afraid, yes, afraid, but maybe less because his gut was telling him to run (because it wasn’t), and instead perhaps he was more worried that his mind wasn’t registering the fear he thought it should. Maybe he didn’t want to flee, because then his questions would remain unanswered —

What regret would he endure if he left now?

“Ah, yes, there he is,” Myrtle said, eyes collapsing on a point in the distance.

She sighed, seeming exasperated at the sight coming into focus. “Yes, just as I feared. He would. He would drive that… thing. I suppose I should have expected little else.”

Cedric followed her eyes and looked down the cascade of cars. As time crept forward, one spot was becoming larger as it made its way down the street, closing on their position. And what a car it was —

Cedric did not have to know a fender from a flywheel to recognize that this was no ordinary vehicle.

Painted in a deep purple, the car was quite unlike anything else on the road. Four round headlights were curious eyes scintillating upon an elongated nose, a windshield in tinted glass rising as a narrowed portal above a massive body. Its silhouette was something he’d only seen in the movies, a exclusive luxury allowed only to the most forbidden sections of society, allowed to the rest only through the patchwork cascade of a projector.

And the day was only going to continue.

Unable to get flush with the edge of the sidewalk, the car stopped, heedless, in mid-traffic to allow them entrance. Myrtle, in a haste hardly befitting her antiquated dress, quickly wove in-between parked cars to approach the indigo beast, and Cedric followed suit, placing his hand upon the silver handle for the second row of seats.

He saw the paint was flecked with tiny bits of quartz, glinting in the midday light. Cedric swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth and climbed into the back of the car.

Cedric was bombarded by extravagance as soon as he opened the door to the car. The seats were bound in deep grey, seeming almost, but not quite, black. The leather creaked as he crawled into the backseat, a large sandwich wrapped in foil and white paper seeming to dissuade him from going any further. He aligned himself on the side he’d entered, sitting suspended on the seat, feeling somewhat ill-at-ease.

Myrtle, too, sat to the right of the driver and closed the door.

The man in the driver’s seat draped his arm over the top of the seats, turning to greet Cedric as he settled in.

“Nice to meet you Cedric. Name’s Davian; Davian Winchester. I’d offer my hand, but—”

Davian had warm brown hair and eyes the color of thickened espresso, the smell of which had filled the body of the car.

Grinning at Cedric, he gestured down toward the seat with a flick of the chin. “That hero’s for you: roast beef, lettuce, mustard, hold the mayonnaise. Didn’t know what you liked.”

Cedric didn’t give a damn so long as it was food.

“We can make pleasantries later,” Myrtle chirped impatiently. “You’re double-parked.”

Davian didn’t move a muscle. “They can wait.”

Cedric picked up the sandwich and began to unwrap the packaging, the smell of meat soon wafting into the chamber. His stomach made noise. “Thanks—”

He prepared to take a bite and thought better of it, looking up and away from the offering. He was nothing without his manners. “Nice to meet you, Davian. Thanks for the ride.”

He smiled, and his teeth were clean and straight. “Hope you like it, you’ll have to let me know what you prefer next time. I aim to please.”

“Davian,” Myrtle began in restrained exasperation, and then was interrupted by a car horn blaring from behind.

Davian screamed, “YEAH, I’M GOING—!” as if the other cars could hear him.

Cedric, formerly engaged with the sandwich, nearly leapt out of his seat at the sudden burst of volume, and he wasn’t sure exactly how to react.

Davian turned his eyes back to the road, depressed the accelerator and with a squeal of his tires, released the flow of traffic and sped down the street.

He mumbled just audibly, voice lowered back to a tolerable level as the speed of the car met the sudden acceleration. “Assholes!”

Cedric looked at nothing in particular, eyes averted. Davian, sensing the icy reaction, reformed his voice to an amiable tone, presumably addressing his guest in the backseat.

“My apologies.”

He paused before resuming.

“You know, it’s my fault. I keep waiting for them to change, but they never do. I get my hopes up and I get disappointed. Over the years I’ve been here, I would say they’re getting worse.”

But Cedric didn’t take any heed to Davian’s casually thrown pronouns. He continued to eat, and Davian signaled to change lanes. Cedric heard the rustling of icemelt as the car lurched over a pothole.

“It’s not all bad, though. Can I offer you some champagne?”

Myrtle sighed in an attempt to temper his enthusiasm. “Davian, he’s nineteen.”

The man affected jovial generosity. “You say it like it’s a bad thing. We were all nineteen once.”

Cedric swore he could hear a vocalized smile. “You’re of course welcome to a glass yourself, my dear, two if you like; I know you too well to be convinced that you abstain.”

Myrtle said nothing.

“It was their idea to put in the cooler,” Davian said lightly, veering the subject back to the bottle and projecting his voice into the backseat. “It was my idea to move it within reach.”

Davian kept driving, his eyes occasionally reflecting to the backseat by way of the rearview mirror.

“The Mortals have had a few good ideas over the years. Stopped clock and all that.” He looked to his right mirror, then back to the road. “Silver Wraith, 1954.”

Cedric gleaned the necessary context, having little personal experience beyond basic operation. He continued to eat.

“Beautiful little devil,” he said, patting the car above the central display approvingly. “We have a knack for taking what they start and making it better; tweaking this, streamlining that. Improvements they couldn’t see in their wildest dreams.”

“Davian,” Myrtle chided. “I was going to let him get some rest and talk to him in the morning. I think we all need to think about how best to move forward. I’ve told the children—”

“Music OK?” Davian ignored the woman in the passenger seat and inquired to his passenger’s well-being.

Cedric was trying to avoid spilling crumbs on the seat.

“We can change it if you like,” he offered with a certain hint of suggestion. “Just say the word.”

Cedric’s mind was rather blank.

“I know it’s popular right now, I hear it all over the place; figured it was something you’d know,” Davian spoke. “I’m more interested in the classics, but I’m well-aware that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”

He kept talking. “But I can’t say I like this whatever, Nevermind approach to life that’s become so ubiquitous among the young. It troubles me.”

“You may not be interested in politics,” Davian mused. “But politics is interested in you.”

The car was silent for a moment, and he clarified, “Of course, I’m paraphrasing. You’re not like that, are you, Cedric?”

Myrtle looked out the window anxiously, seeming displeased with what she observed. “Davian, I believe he’s been through quite the ordeal today—”

She then spoke with a tone of commanding worry. “You are going uptown, aren’t you?” She asked, looking about uneasily as they went through an intersection. “The 59th Street—”

“I don’t think he’s ready to go home yet,” he voiced wryly. “Are you, Cedric?”

The question entirely rhetorical, Davian then turned back to Myrtle. “I thought I’d show him the sights. Let him see the lesser-seen features of our fantastic city.” Cedric thought he could hear the man smiling. “It is the eighth wonder of the world by at least one reckoning. And who knows it better than you and I?”

“Davian Winchester,” she reprimanded in an acerbic tone. “I’ve been teaching children the way of things for over fifty years, and if there’s anything I’ve learned with certainty, it’s that—”

“Cedric is no child. He’s bright, capable — no shrinking violet — and I’m sure it would make the rest of it all make sense. Why wait? What’s the sense in attaching training wheels to a bike he’s outgrown? You can ride a two-wheeler, can’t you, Cedric?” He said, glancing again into his rearview window.

Myrtle grimaced. “It’s not the way I do things.”

Davian stepped on the brake suddenly, reacting to a cacophony of red lights erupting before him.

“Yes, well,” he commented coyly, and gently reengaged the accelerator. “It appears I’m the one driving.”

Myrtle’s spoke with pointed disdain, baring her teeth. “Don’t make me regret bringing you into this.”

“What were your other options?” Davian remarked caustically. “Was your husband going to drive you?”

Davian and Myrtle continued their stream of banter, albeit somewhat tempered, as Cedric sat in the backseat and finished his sandwich. He had consumed the offering somewhat ravenously, and he wondered if he ought to have eaten just half of what he’d been given.

But it was too late now.

To make matters worse, Cedric was not terribly accustomed to sitting in the backseat anymore. Once he’d learned how to drive, through a haphazard mix of books, couponed classes, and simple experimentation, he’d become the chauffeur in his own home.

He had never much enjoyed the alternative.

He looked out the window. The bridge they drove upon rose high in the air and buildings covered the ground below as an immense carpet. In the distant horizon, ocean had carved flat expanses beneath an endless blue sky.

“We’re crossing into Brooklyn now,” Davian narrated. “But we won’t stay long, I promise.”

He turned to Myrtle with a knowing nod.

“I never intended to leave,” Myrtle stated as a matter-of-fact. “But land was costly. And I needed more than I had. I wanted something that wasn’t quite so developed.”

“Queens was veritable farmland in those days, downright wild. You wouldn’t believe it now, seeing how it’s grown. There were fields with wandering chickens and pigs and mules—”

Myrtle interrupted this time. “Many still keep chickens. You see them from time to time.”

Davian checked in on Cedric. “You can toss the wrapper on the floor. Don’t give it a second thought.”

Cedric did as he was told, eyes glazing over as he stared out the window, fixated on the growing discomfort in the pit of his stomach.

What had begun in Manhattan as energetic chatter faded into a sometimes awkward silence, hanging over their heads like fog. Every so often Davian glanced around, using his mirrors, looking at Myrtle, wondering about the passenger in the backseat.

He reached forward and turned a knob on the radio, sending the quiet tinkling of a piano sonata into the car.

“You like Mozart?”

Cedric said nothing, his nausea protesting against action. Maybe Davian was talking to Myrtle, and saying nothing would be acceptable. So he remained.

Davian lowered the volume so that it just provided the slightest insulation from the road noise.

And then, in desperation, he began to ask questions.

“Cedric, how are you doing back there?”

He didn’t look forward, speaking rather to the window than answering to Davian. “I’m okay. Tired.”

“Yeah,” Davian answered. “I would imagine, what with the day you’ve had.”

Cedric didn’t say anything.

“Do you mind if we take a little detour? I wanted to show you something. Something other than the view of the back of our heads, as lovely as that must be.”

Myrtle broke in gently, almost whispering. “Maybe this isn’t the time, Davian. Remember mercy. We don’t need to rush things.”

But Davian was like a dog with a bone. Once he had it in his mind that he was going to do something, there would be little persuading him otherwise.

He kept looking into the backseat by way of his reflection, gauging the young man’s reaction as he spoke.

“Do you ever feel like you’re—”

He thought. “—Different than everyone else around you? Like you think — feel — a different language than they do?”

He delivered an addendum with conviction, “Trouble making friends because of it?”

Cedric listened, but said nothing.

“And you try and try but you feel like a square peg in a round hole, a stranger in your own home? That you’ve figured out how to walk like them, talk like them, but you still suffer a loneliness in your heart that persists like a sickness?”

Cedric tried to look away from the window, but his gaze was heavy, leaden.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I guess so.”

Cedric did not look into the front seat, rather he kept staring out the ever-darkening glass, and yet he could feel the two ahead of him look between themselves, a spotlight that had caught upon its intended aperture and returned to the source.

The car was silent for some time, and then Davian spoke.

“Let’s get you some air.”

Cedric was completely unsure of how long they’d been driving, although the quiet had made it seem much longer than it might have been in another reference frame.

“Some things—” Davian broke the silence, and then corrected himself.

“Most things start from unspoilt nature, and through human influence, are harvested for their resources, bones picked clean, abandoned, and soon become inundated by filth.”

He turned one eye to the backseat.

“It takes a special sort of attention to reverse the usual path of events.”

They had made so many twists and turns that Cedric had no idea of their orientation within the labyrinthian city streets.

Not that he’d had much to begin with.

The sky was fading to reveal night’s peace, but from the inside of the car, it was difficult to even discern in which direction it was setting. The entire sky was aglow.

“Socrates Sculpture Park is one such exception to the usual trend of urban decay. Named for one of the greats—”

He changed his tone, “—and one of my personal favorites—”

“It implores us to ask what kind of beauty can be found amongst the refuse.”

Davian had a flair for the performative.

“It’s certainly better than what came before,” Myrtle added as a dry aside.

“T’was a veritable dump,” Davian concluded, making reference to the unseen sequence of history. “Saved from despair by several passionate artists and philosophers banding together to recognize the potential of this wild land.”

“And what value can we grant—”

Davian made a turn without signaling. “To the unexamined life?”

But no one was prepared to answer his question.

“Hell’s Gate is a mistranslation, you know,” he continued, with no intention to flick his blinker.

The cars were thinning. Cedric took in oxygen in anticipation, awash in an eager hope of stopping. They couldn’t drive forever.

“The Dutch called it ‘Hellegat’,” he pronounced with articulation. “And the Americans didn’t know any better; few among them spoke Dutch. But it has nothing to do with the damned in the slightest.”

Davian pulled his car over toward the curb and stepped on the brake with ample force. Engaging a mechanism with his thumb, he switched the car into park and lifted his foot from the pedal.

“We’re here.”

The nausea that had swelled over Cedric’s consciousness like a swollen boil released its hold as the clean air filled his lungs and healed his anxiety.

He hadn’t quite realized just how stale the interior of the car had become.

The three of them now spread thin among the walkway, and it seemed they alone observed the garden. Cedric, in his innocence, was none-the-wiser.

A cool October wind sped over the East River and dissipated through the trees, rustling the leaves and dampening the discordant sounds of the city. The sun was setting, and the horizon was lit up with hues of bright amber, the edges tickled with hopeful blue.

Cedric had been caught observant in the glow of Manhattan seeming so bright, gargantuan, monolithic —

And distant.

“Can you imagine—” Davian’s voice erupted, and Cedric jumped, not realizing how close the man had been to his ear.

“Fifty-thousand people, right in this very spot?”

Cedric looked toward him, and then wondered where was the very old woman before looking back toward Davian.

“Fifty—” Cedric stammered, unsure of the context. “Thousand?”

Davian was smiling now. “Yes, well, that’s what I’ve been told. 1885: a few years ago. Two-hundred and fifty pounds of explosives buried in veins beneath the rock, all to open up the channel for the boats.”

He considered himself, and added, “I wasn’t here then. I was—”

He looked away.

“Somewhere else.”

“Davian, please,” Myrtle began, seeming to appear from nowhere. “Just because no one’s here doesn’t mean you should feel free to make a fool of yourself.”

Cedric looked around, curiously confirming what she’d stated.

There really was no one but the three of them.

“It’s not too late, Cedric,” Davian said, seeming almost to whisper. “I’m quite sure the champagne hasn’t yet gone flat. It’s a good year. Sharp and dry. You’ll enjoy it.”

Though he was sure the sky was clear and the moon shone in the sky, the three of them seemed to be suspended in a haze, and it seemed Cedric couldn’t see out of the cloud.

But perhaps no one else could see in.

“You studied the sciences in school, didn’t you, Cedric?”

Witness to an apparent non-sequitur, all of a sudden it became quite plain how strange were the man’s clothes, a bizarre suit, like the woman’s but for the wool, drawn up close about the neck.

“I took chemistry,” Cedric began, feeling all at once quite naked in a threadbare t-shirt, searching for words amongst his scattered thoughts. “Biology—”

He paused for a moment, wondering where was Myrtle, and he felt the wind brush his chin as he was interrogated. “…Physics.”

Abruptly, Davian broke into a cacophony of derisive laughter.

“Physics?! You hear that, Myrtle? Your new student thinks he understands physics!”

Cedric bit his tongue, feeling humiliated.

“Davian, tread carefully,” Myrtle spoke with calm warning. “Humility brings gain.”

Davian ignored her, focused instead on Cedric. “Knowing that something is wrong is not the same as knowing what’s right. Surely you must understand that much from what you’ve learned.”

Cedric felt suddenly present, and yet, completely dispersed, cognizant of the incomprehensible conditions that had led him to this very moment, drowning in the very realization. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was.

“Did you have a chance to think about what I asked you earlier?”

Davian very clearly understood his own reference, and yet, Cedric could hardly single out one question from the seemingly hundreds the man had posed.

“You may not realize it yet,” Davian said. “But we see it, Myrtle and I. We see it quite clearly.”

Cedric looked at the woman, her face slack, and then back to Davian.

“You’ve got an aura, Cedric. You may think us weird, and—”

He looked at Myrtle and smirked. “Maybe we are weird—”

“But it rings out like a silver bell. Just like Myrtle said,” and he looked toward her, and then back to Cedric.

“You’re more like us,” Davian asserted, beaming. “And less like them.”

Cedric could not ignore the categories Davian kept using to shape his rhetoric: they and them, we and you, Mortals and—

Who, exactly?

“I think you know it too, don’t you, Cedric?”

Davian could hardly contain himself, and he spoke with increasing confidence, a ball released to hurtle down an incline. “Have you ever felt things just happen to work out as you want them to? Lights turn green when you’re running late? Dealt a full house and the rest of the table’s got nothing to match? Never draw the short straw in a game of—”

“Not everyone’s Talent manifests in such a manner.”

Again, the old woman with that word.

“Of course, of course,” Davian chattered dismissively. “It could be nothing like that. Everyone’s gift is unique, but there are certain similarities. Patterns.”

His eyes seemed to glimmer, completely focused on Cedric.

“The truth is that some people endure reality,” Davian spoke, seeming to look over his shoulders before he continued. “And others—”

“Make it.”

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After an immeasurable amount of time in confinement, the C.O. escorted Cedric through the hallways. Left, right, left; people in various types of clothing shuffled past: women, men, some in uniform, most without. Cedric said nothing. He let his diaphragm finally draw air deep into his body. The air here was in motion, if still not truly fresh, and oxygen flowed into his blood.

He couldn’t help but wonder who had summoned him, and why. His freedom threatened to be tentative, and his heart fluttered uneasily inside his body. He had resolved to face the flames alone, and then he’d been clutched from the crowd. Who knew he was here? The joy he should have felt after being retrieved from the jaws of an uncertain future was bridled, restrained — pending further investigation.

The C.O. led him to a window of thick plastic and pushed some paperwork beneath the opening. He waited a moment and then backed away and pointed his pen toward the opening, gesturing in silence, as if his charge should know exactly what to do. Cedric felt shaky, and his empty stomach complained. He grasped at his faculties, regaining focus and stepping up to the ledge.

The officer seated behind the barrier was well-practiced. “Says here: Kenyon, Cedric. That you?”

Cedric nodded. “Yeah, that’s me.”

Someone else tossed a dark green bin before him, and the man shuffled through the contents. Cedric recognized his belongings, and his hope was bolstered.

“One wallet containing—” he glanced at the paper and then back into the billfold. “Eighty-two dollars and fifteen cents. Wallet chain. Contents of pockets totaling a dollar and seventy-five cents. Belt and shoelaces. Nail clippers.”

The man pushed a large envelope over the counter and through the arch cut into the thick plastic, adding a piece of paper at the end.

“One folding knife with three-point-five-inch blade retained as evidence. Pending case disposition, you may file for return of your property.” He pointed. “Sign here acknowledging receipt.”

Cedric pursed his lips and pulled the paper to face him. He looked down at the list, words washing over him meaninglessly, and then peered up through the barrier.

“What about my car? My keys?”

The man remained steel-faced.

“Your car was impounded as evidence. I’m sure they told you that already. Doubt you’re ever seeing her again, kid. Maybe talk to your attorney but unless you were driving something nice, it probably isn’t worth what you’d pay to get it back.”

Cedric’s heart dropped, but he picked up the pen chained to the counter. The man continued to talk.

“Goes to auction in sixty days. Or, if it’s anything decent, maybe she’ll get drafted into undercover work.”

Cedric scrawled a sloppy mark one might recognize as a signature and pushed the paper back under the divider.

“So they took my whole keyring?” Cedric protested. “I had more than just keys for my car on there.”

His plea failed to elicit sympathy.

“Don’t do stupid shit.”

Cedric took the bin from the window and the man continued.

“Keys were probably inventoried separately at the precinct. Potential evidence.” Cedric looked into the bin, all too cognizant of how little he had claimed.

“You want ‘em back, you file a form.”

Cedric turned around and a middle-aged man with sun-damaged skin and wiry, unkempt hair spoke to him. “First time?” Catching his eyes, he cracked a rather ominous grin.

“Don’t look so scared. You’re gettin’ out’a here. The paperwork’s the worst part. Well—” He brought his fingers to his hairy chin and looked up, displaying the whites of his eyes.

Cedric stepped back, and the man erupted with a dark laugh. “The second worst.”

“Kenyon!” The officer who had escorted him from the cell drew his attention from the strained exchange.

“No more chatting. You can get dressed over here. Keep the aisle clear. You’re not the only kid going home today.”

“Hey, um—” Cedric fumbled over his words as he clipped his silver chain to a beltloop. He stood to face the officer who’d been leading him around the corridors. “Am I just allowed to leave?”

The officer raised an eyebrow and looked down at the papers clipped to the board in his hand.

“No can do. Says here a—” He looked down to inspect the form. “—Myrtle Marscapone came to post your bail. Looks like she’s from a group home for wayward youth.”

He looked up at Cedric. “Wayward youth like you.”

Cedric felt seen, and was quiet.

“No, you can’t ‘just leave’,” he clarified.

“That’s not the deal. She’s responsible for you and you have to follow the rules: check in every week and do your community service. Respect your curfew. Piss clean. You don’t do what you gotta do then you get in bigger shit. Shit you don’t want.”

The officer saw the fear in Cedric’s eyes, and reconsidered his gruff tone. “You never been in trouble before? You live at this group home?”

Cedric stuttered, apprehensive. The alliterative name echoed through his memories, but he could place his finger on nothing. “N-no, I never lived in a group home. I don’t know this lady.”

The officer peeled up the top few sheets of paper, looking for some information. But he seemed to find nothing of import and turned back to Cedric. “Don’t know what to tell you, kid. Church outfit, maybe. They probably got your file through the city. Usually these places take in runaways and drop outs and make sure they don’t fall into the cracks. Help ‘em get their GEDs and stay off the streets.”

Cedric was nonplussed. “But I’m nineteen. And I already graduated.”

The man was not impressed. “Nineteen ain’t nothing, kid. Get your shit and let’s get going. Don’t got all day.”

Cedric walked down the hallway, technically reassembled, but still ill-at-ease. He was being pushed down the slide regardless of whether he was ready to proceed.

A pane of glass rose to his right, grimy white blinds lowered behind, and he instinctually looked into it. A muted reflection poured into his eyes, so washed out that only the outlines were well-defined. But he looked weary, exhausted.

‘Hair’s all fucked up.’

He kept walking, staring into his image, and raised his hands to try to smooth the stray locks back into place. But some of the hair off to one side was absolutely determined to remain standing.

“Come on kid, your chaperone’s in here.” He had stopped in front of a doorway, eyeing Cedric and waiting for him to proceed.

Cedric followed and entered the room.

It was filled with bodies, many chattering excitedly to their companions, others sitting still in observant silence or hidden behind a newspaper.

The C.O. stopped at a window and pushed his paperwork underneath the barrier.

“I got here Kenyon, Cedric.”

Cedric stood there and amongst the din ricocheting off the tile, he heard the clip snap noisily against the board.

“Room 8. Lady’s waiting. I’ll send someone in a minute.”

The officer turned back to Cedric. “Come on, this way.”

They walked away from the area forming a sort of holding zone and into a corridor branching into numerous presumably small rooms, each with a drab door and a single number.

“Good luck, kid,” and he opened the door, letting Cedric take the first step.

Myrtle had been waiting in this room for over an hour. But truly she’d been waiting for far longer than that. At ninety-two years of age, she’d become quite accustomed to waiting. She had acquired a good many sayings for a moment such as this:

‘Haste makes waste.’

‘All in good time.’

‘Slow and steady wins the race.’

When the boy entered the room, she rose, standing straight and removing fine lace gloves from each of her hands. She struck a rather odd figure in her black gown concealing all but her face. But that was always how she presented herself.

‘The fruit is sweetest when it’s ripe.’

She slipped the gloves into a small pocket on the left side of her dress. Her hands now unhindered, she reached forward in greeting. She erupted into a satisfied smirk as her father’s voice, gone from the world many long decades ago, rose in her mind at the sight of the disheveled young man.

‘Called a thousand times… and finally, here it is.’

Cedric tried to appear impassive as he shook the hand of Myrtle Marscapone. But one thought rang out clear as klaxon.

‘Who the hell is this old broad?!’

He hadn’t had much idea of what to expect when he’d heard the strange name. Perhaps he’d deliberately silenced his predictions, with the knowledge it was often the precursor of fear. But she? Whatever he had thought, or not thought —

She was not what he had expected.

She was tall; perhaps not quite so tall as he, but at his age he’d become accustomed to looking into the foreheads and hair of most women.

But not this one.

Salutations complete, they sat on opposite sides of the small table, and their eyes met. He said nothing, searching her face, until she spoke and he nearly leapt out of his seat.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Cedric. My name is Myrtle Marscapone.”

‘Seventy?’ he thought, distracted. ‘…Eighty?!’

But her eyes were alert and focused, telling a different story. Where his mind was encumbered by the immense weight of his exhaustion, her gaze was clear, and she looked at him without reservation.

When Cedric neglected to provide a response, lost in his tangled thoughts, Myrtle continued to speak, answering questions he hadn’t thought to ask.

“I run a small rehabilitation home in Queens. I sometimes work with the city to reach out to at-risk youth and set them on the path to success, retrieving them from the hounds before they fall into the pit of despair. Your file was sent across my desk and I thought we might be able to help you.”

She blinked and continued to look at him. “Cedric, correct?”

He was slow to react. “Y-yeah. Cedric Kenyon.”

“Cedric Kenyon,” she repeated, considering. “Yes, I do think you would find belonging within my cluster of students. They may lack sufficient parentage, but all are all bright young people with even brighter futures. They are exceptionally gifted, well-spoken, and possess no lack of considerable—”

That smile struck again across her face. “Talent.”

Cedric’s irises constricted, as if a beam of light had been shot point-blank into the back of his eyes. He blinked, looking down, not truly in pain, but flinching as he closed his eyelids and rubbed the sand from its reservoir.

He could not yet see, but he heard.

“We’re in Astoria, a bit over the river, I know you’ll have to come back here weekly to check in, Manhattan feeling itself the hub of all things, but the commute is quite simple once you get used to it—”

The door opened with a squeak while Cedric’s eyes were still adjusting, and the smell of a pastry and its sugary glaze entered the room, clinging to the man’s fingertips, speckled upon his cheeks.

“Kenyon, Cedric?” he spoke, the sound fading into the background like rustling grass.

The boy seeming dazed, he spoke to the woman instead. “Hello, Mrs. Marscapone. We have some things to go over before we complete things here and get you on your way. I am sure you are a busy woman; thank you for your patience. I have here the terms of his release, the conditions of his bail, his court date—”

But Cedric could not listen. Weakened and completely exhausted, he simply nodded, adding verbal confirmation as required, and signing his name right and where he was told. The text melted before his consciousness as salt in boiling water, but none of the men in uniform remembered anything amiss.

Of course they wouldn’t.

Myrtle, informed of the procedures and protocol, crossed her T’s and dotted her I’s, anxious to remove her newest student from his restraints.

She so viciously abhorred the sphere of the Mundane.

Cedric endured, lingering at the precipice of collapse. A mirage lingered in the back of his eyes and he thought he could still see the white beam at the end of the tunnel. He knew something was happening, but he did not know what. So he sat still until he was told he could rise.

And he was still hungry.

“I hope you do not mind; I’ve asked for an associate of mine to lend us his assistance with the transportation back to Queens. If I may be so honest, I tend to loathe driving as a whole, and the fact that parking in the area is such a horror further complicates the matter.”

Cedric followed Myrtle into a new room, where, his tired eyes drawn downward, white marble streaked with pale grey was the first thing he noticed.

“And I think he wanted to meet you.” The changing quality of the sound echoing against the walls suggested he look up, and his nostrils were filled with the smell of cigarette smoke.

His lungs contracted.

‘Here, they can do as they please.’

Bronze railings flanked two staircases leading from the unseen floors above. An enormous clock, a silent watcher, drew his eyes upward.

He felt Myrtle watching him, and he looked toward her, but he could not stand the heat and he quickly glanced away. He recalled what she had said.

“Y-yeah. Guess it’s better than walking.”

They walked through the lobby, past the gilded lighting fixtures, and each pushed open their own door, enormous metal barriers, and strode into the bright afternoon sunshine.

Two granite columns, seeming as massive obelisks, directed them toward the center of the walkway.

Cedric lifted his hand and turned his palm to shield his eyes, realizing how dulled his senses had become in captivity. They entered the throngs of people, and Cedric struggled to stand straight, while Myrtle might have been lost in the sea of needles reaching upward.

He followed her into the crowd, realizing he needed to strain his voice to be heard amongst the formless din.

“How did you know I was there?”

She looked back, ensuring he still kept pace with her, and continued along the sidewalk.

She hardly seemed to be projecting, and yet, he could hear her voice clearly. “As I said, your file was slid across my desk. When there is a vacancy at my school, I seek to fill the spot. No sense in an empty bed. There are too many who need that guiding light.”

She turned her head so that he could see her in profile. “I took interest in your case.”

He felt she had simply rephrased what she’d said in front of the cops.

“You do this often, then?” Cedric felt he was just short of screaming. “Show up downtown and write a check for a random kid you’ve never even met?”

Defying logic, he swore he could hear her clearly chuckle under her breath. “Not often.”

He felt he was racing to maintain her speed, speed she seemed to achieve as effortlessly as skating across an expanse of polished ice.

“I think you’ll enjoy my associate. We’ve worked together for a number of years. He was not initially so fond of my conception of the school, but I think I’ve won him over. It took some time, but as do all things worth doing. Water will pierce stone.”

She stopped, and seemed to tilt her head, aligning her hearing to find a whisper on the wind.

Cedric stopped, and stood next to her, the people dividing themselves to avoid the pair as trees in a meadow.

“Yes, I think he’s on his way. Soon. But not soon enough.” And she looked toward the street, where cars sped along at a glacial pace. “I asked him to bring you a sandwich.”

Cedric was not entirely sure where to turn his splintered attention.

“Mrs. Marscapone—” he began to plead. “I appreciate your assistance, I really do. I made some stupid mistakes, really stupid mistakes, and I didn’t know how I was going to get out of that mess, but—”

She was still gazing into the sky.

“I think I’m too old to go live at an orphanage.”

The sky seemed to darken, and the flow of time thickened as would chilled syrup. Cedric, unaffected, looked about him, bewildered by the shadows from the clouds billowing overhead, all changing too rapidly for him to render sufficient disbelief.

He caught the eyes of the passersby, each of them glassy, distracted, and wholly unaware of anything that was transpiring beyond their gaze.

He strained to move his body, but he was able and persevered, pushing against the pressure to look toward Myrtle.

Incensed by his words, she would not grant him her face, but she spoke all the same — with a carefully restrained hostility, delicately enunciating her words.

“Ginger bites more the older it gets.”

He noticed her body release its tension, the sky turning again a balmy shade of blue, and the people resumed their unhindered pace, the denizens of the street completely ignorant of any interruption.

Cedric looked inward, obeying an instinct toward skepticism, trying to blame his empty stomach for these lapses in his perception, yes, perhaps he’d been blinking too laboriously and it had simulated the darkness of nightfall, and he was hungry and tired and he hadn’t slept in days and he tried to place what he had seen on the shelf of things he thought he knew and thought he understood, things that adhered to the rules with which he was familiar, but —

The order was crumbling.

“Mrs. Marscapone,” he begged, but she only turned a single eye to him. “I’m trying to understand what’s going on. I don’t understand why you singled me out. There have to be a hundred kids just like me, sitting in jail just like me, and today you drop in from nowhere and tell me to follow you. Why me? What do I have that they don’t?”

She presented her face, a solemn expression of quiet resolve, and she closed her eyes to guard from the assault of his questions. Of course she had to have known he would try to grasp at things beyond his understanding, and he would try to comprehend things beyond his comprehension. Of all the things that had been foretold, that facet of his personality had been abundantly clear.

“Cedric, you’re changing. The world around you, it is always in constant motion, sometimes senseless, sometimes without reason, sometimes moving just to move, but you—”

She paused and looked at him, her eyes glossy. “We can try to guide you for as long as we can. Take root, sprout, absorb what we give you and spread your wings. Fallen petals protect the flowers.”

She considered her words, but her gaze continued, intense. “But you must stop running. You’ve been running for far too long.”

At her biting assessment, he felt frail and uncertain. His heart dropped and a phantom pain grasped with shadowy tendrils at his throat. Through the edges of his vision, he searched for an exit and for a fleeting moment he thought he glimpsed escape. But his feet did not move.

For the first time, he looked into her dark eyes and thought he saw what she had seen likewise in him.

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When Cedric finally fell into an uneasy rest, it was only because no other alternative was possible.

He had been awake for hours, maybe even days. Between the fluorescent lights that never once dimmed and the windowless desolation of the crowded cell, he had no way to know how long he had been here. Time stretched on endless, immense. Though he had nothing to hold on to, though he was choking, he would not stop grasping for something to keep him afloat.

Every so often, a little packet was delivered to each of them, the only scrap of mercy permitted in this place. Inside a clear plastic bag would be a clumsily assembled sandwich, a bruised piece of fruit, and sometimes a carton of warm milk. He was always queasy, but he could not relinquish his human weakness. He was tired. He accepted what was offered to him.

When he succumbed to thirst, he stood and walked awkwardly across the small room, his shoes loose and stripped of their laces. He brought his hands together over the sink and drank. In this action, he felt vulnerable, exposed. He imagined the men watching him as he brought the brackish liquid to his mouth. It was tepid, stale, but it was what he had. The less he needed to interface with his biological reality, the better.

Trying to stave off despair, he recoiled from eye contact with the others. Looking at their faces brought their helpless gaze upon him, their weary expressions echoing through his nerves. He could not bear this pain, so he tried to pretend he was as alone as he felt. But the twisting miasma of sweat and bleach made it impossible to pretend they were in solitude.

Two of the people knew each other. Forced to eavesdrop in the intense confinement, Cedric had gleaned that they had previously served sentences together at Rikers Island. From their chatter, it seemed that’s where most everyone ended up.

He supposed that included him.

One guy was named Tommy. It was hard not to learn his name because the other one repeated it as repetitive punctuation every time he addressed the other. Cedric didn’t know the name of the other man. He wasn’t going to ask. He didn’t want to know.

They just kept talking.

And they were probably still talking when Cedric first tried to sleep. He had taken a turn on the steel bench, and he had laid immobile, soaked in terror and vacant of all structured thought. On the bench, without the warmth of a pillow or blanket, disbelief and idle hope took turns clawing at his disordered mind. His only instinct was to endure, and yet that too was being consumed. Reason did not serve him in this place, and it had given way to fear. Adrenaline surged through his body, fighting his desperate need for rest. Sleep was the only comfort he could afford now.

The cold metal seared his skin, forcing his consciousness to remain.

He thought of Betty. When the cops had offered him a call, her face had risen to his mind like reflex.

But that wasn’t the first time he’d failed her.

They had brought him to a desk in a room that smelled of old coffee and body odor, walls absolutely plain. Artificial lights buzzed overhead, one flickering in a frenzied rhythm that seemed organic, pleading. His head ached and he yearned for the sky.

A woman sat behind the desk, middle-aged, dark hair pulled back, reading glasses perched on her nose. She was looking down through the bottom of the lenses when the officer deposited Cedric in the plastic chair across from her.

“Kenyon?” She spoke without looking up. “Cedric Kenyon?”

The officer reached down and unclasped the handcuffs, Cedric’s eyes looked first to him, and then at the woman.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m with CJA. Criminal Justice Agency.” She opened a drawer and pulled a fresh form from within and laid it before herself, uncapping a pen. “I’m going to ask you some questions. I suggest you answer fully and honestly. The answers help the judge decide whether to release you before your trial. You understand?”

Cedric nodded, feeling oddly jittery with his hands unbound.

“I need a verbal answer for the record.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Good.” She dated the form. “Full legal name?”

He fought an instinct to hesitate, and spoke. “Cedric Kenyon.”

Her eyes looked over the dark rim of her glasses. “Middle?”

“No middle.”

Her pen moved forward, leaving a blank. “Any prior names or aliases?”

His stomach plummeted. He knew this would come up. Maybe, if he’d wanted that face to die quietly, he should have done something else. Been someone else. “I — yes. I changed my name. Legally. Last year.”

He looked at the pen, feeling her eyes burn upon him. “Prior name?”

He shivered, quiet as the chill rippled through his body. Knowing he had little choice, he told her his old name, the syllables like stones in his mouth. And when she asked for his date of birth and Social Security number, he recited the digits attached to his new name, the ones that were supposed to be his fresh start.

“Current address?”

Cedric felt cold sweat dampen his clothing. “I — I rent a room in Newburgh.” He recalled the numbers, and gave them. “On Liberty.”

“How long have you lived there?”

“Four months,” he replied, and refined his response. “Almost five.”

“Is there a working telephone at your residence?”

Cedric’s mind drifted into his memories, the smell of roast chicken wafting through the entry. “Y-yes. There’s a telephone.”

She waited, the whites of her eyes framing an impatient stare. “I’ll need that number.”

Cedric’s throat tightened. He thought of Betty answering the phone, her voice going quiet when someone asked if she knew a Cedric Kenyon, if she knew he was in a jail in Manhattan, if she knew what he’d been carrying in his car.

“I’d — rather not give that out.”

The woman blinked and raised her eyebrows, mocking him. “You’d rather not.”

“She’s—” he protested, seeing her face in his mind’s eye. “My landlady is elderly. I don’t want to worry her.”

The woman laid her pen across the form, looking at him with a renewed look nothing short of patronizing. “Mr. Kenyon.”

Cedric brought his teeth together behind tight lips.

“I’m trying to help you here,” she began. “The judge needs to see that you have ties to your community. A place to live. People who know who you are. If I can’t verify your residence—”

“I live there,” he insisted. “I’m telling the truth.”

“I’m sure you are. But if I can’t verify it, it doesn’t count for much.”

She waited. Cedric heard the officer behind him shift, the metal hanging from his belt clanging against itself.

“And before Newburgh? Where did you live?”

“Uh—” he stammered. “Ohio.”

“Ohio.” she repeated. “How long were you in Ohio?”

“My whole life. Until last year.”

“Do you have family in Ohio?”

The question was casual, bureaucratic. She had no way of knowing what it cost him to answer.

“I don’t have contact with my family.”

“Parents living?”

He swallowed, and his mouth was dry. “Mother, yes. Dad — Don’t know.”

She moved on to the next section of the form.

“Are you currently employed?”

“Yes, I am. I work at a grocery store in Newburgh. Started working there in June.”

“Name of the business?”

“Sullivan’s,” he uttered, trying to comprehend what he’d said and what he was about to say.

“Can you give me their phone number?”

Cedric tried to breathe. He’d called the number enough times to know it by heart. He knew who would answer. He hesitated a moment, enough for her to look at him in expectation, and then he recited the sequence.

“Anyone else who can verify your information?” The woman had her pen at the ready. “Family in the area? Friends?”

Cedric went backward.

“Zed can verify everything,” he said, not believing himself. “He’s my supervisor at Sullivan’s. He’s my—”

She brought her pen down on the paper and continued to write.

“Zephyr is his name,” Cedric clarified, watching the pen move. “Zephyr Wildwood. He knows me.”

He’d been denied release on recognizance. So he sat in the cell and waited. His arraignment came and went, his hunger pangs and tired head making it impossible to focus on the details. Bail had been set at an even thousand, but it might as well have been a million for what he had at his disposal.

They offered him a call.

He still had committed to memory a string of digits that would ring in a kitchen several miles from a river in Ohio. A mother or a father would lend their ear, offer to drive out and render whatever support he needed. Yes, they’d pick up the phone, or, even worse —

Diana herself.

Betty would almost certainly have come to his aid, he bargained. Over the months that he’d lived in her home, he’d come to think of her with a certain softness, an affection. He had surmised, behind the pop bottle glasses, that the feeling was mutual. She was there every night, she was there every morning. She cooked the same meals every week and he’d come to look forward to them, appreciating the routine. And if he worked late, she left a plate carefully wrapped in the center of the refrigerator. Something about that life had felt comfortable, correct, ordained, as if this, in contrast to what came before, was exactly how things were supposed to be.

But when he’d rendered in his imagination her voice over the phone and contemplated what he would have to beg, he’d become paralyzed. He didn’t want to utter those words, he didn’t want to tell that story. He didn’t want to admit that shame and give it shape.

If he told her what he’d done, well —

Then it would all be real.

He lingered there on the metal platform for a while, trying to console himself with the disintegrating platitude that he still had options. He heard the other men breathe and cough, shuffle positions, use the toilet. He thought to himself the same things over and over again, trying to invoke sleep, trying to fathom that he still could change his mind and ask for help. He tried to believe that he had not painted himself into a corner.

He soon gave up, left the bench, and sat huddled against the concrete wall for a while. Tommy and his friend were sleeping on the floor when the guard came for someone else in the room. One of the men had begun to snore. The gate clattered open and shut again, the sound reverberating in the tiny chamber, dampened only by the bodies trapped within.

Cedric pushed his back against the poured rock, curled very slightly into himself, and succumbed to exhaustion.

When Cedric dreamt, he saw without looking. This was the way he was accustomed to knowing things. He did not use his eyes alone to realize the world — how could he when they were closed tight?

Though he had been plunged into darkness, he could not be stripped of a persistent sentience that had infected his existence since before he’d become aware of the motion of his mind. Too hot, too cold, too scary — those sensations, long ignored, had become a pestilence he’d learned to suffer in silence. In this pain, nerves had stopped pulsing and he saw with half-truths. Despite his handicap, the rest of him kept the tally. Someday he would remember what he had been forced to forget.

The silhouette stood a step behind, watching, waiting — feeling — until he could join what was severed. Until he was ready to make whole what had long ago been broken.

Cedric was hungry. ‘Starving’ was a strong word, one he could not yet justify for his condition, but it was nevertheless true that his stomach was quite hollow. His gut had given up crying out for attention but it still pulled at his innards, desperate for nourishment. He could think only of food, and the present lack there-of.

It was with this singular focus that he found himself at a very peculiar dinner party. He was alone in a huge room, ceiling and walls stretching off into eternity, staring at an empty plate that reminded him of the tiny pewter tokens he’d clutched during his childhood.

[Not pewter.]

The plate was silver, tarnished, the thick edge risen and carved with inexplicable detail. The crevices of the ornamentation were blackened, lending contrast to the relief. What might have once been crisp definition had worn down with age. The plate was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

But it still could not feed him.

Cedric felt his dire need overwhelm all other sensation, leaving him only capable of staring at the greyish silver, hoping it would give him what he craved.

[No food.]

Desperate, impatient, he looked up. He realized he was sitting at one end of a very long wooden table, weathered, perhaps quite ancient. What stood out to him was how very like this plate was the table — entirely barren: no bowls, no cups, and even to the side of his own oblong silver plate, not a single utensil. Except for his own place-setting, the table was laid plain.

There were no candles, and yet the room was not so dark that he could not see. A fireplace blazed behind a single chair at the other end of the table, obscured, and yet casting diffuse light throughout the room.

He considered that empty chair, facing him, seeing him, black against the crackling orange flames.

He tried to look to either side for escape but his eyes would not obey, seeming leaden and tethered. The dark wooden table instead drew his focus, the rich brown evoking steak, bread, gravy.

And that was when he saw them.

[The hands.]

Alabaster skin covered the pair, emerging from dark folds of cloth. Each finger was adorned with a short nail, the edge rounded and even more brilliant white than the tinted flesh it protected.

He felt sense recede as those hands floated, belonging to no man; skeletal, and yet not dead. In the void left by emotion’s vacancy grew a seed of fear.

[The voice.]

It came from the right side, and, suddenly aware of himself, he looked toward the sound, not even sure what word had been spoken. Cedric raised his eyes, searching, but there was nothing beside him, and here the fire’s light was fading to black.

It spoke again, emitting an utterance more primitive than language, beckoning him to look toward the head of the table.

In the shadow cast by the tall chair, with his own eyes, he saw those white hands.

[The knife.]

One hand bore a steel implement, grey-blue in the darkness, with a smooth wooden handle. Opposite the knife was held a pale block with a matte finish, scattering the muted illumination. The blade cut through the block and a shaving hung for a moment before it fell to the table, its curved shape suggesting the delicacy of the medium, easily yielding to division.

“Such a waste. We tarried too long.”

Cedric was sure there was no one in the room but the two of them.

“Such potential. With a little training—”

He looked down at the silver, begging for food. He was still famished but words would not rise to his throat.

“We have wasted too much time already. But that is my fault, not yours.”

He looked away from the plate. The cloaked man seated upwind now had an audience of several ghostly figurines, each frozen in a unique pose and sporting a variation upon a whitish hue. Lilac, carnation, apricot, they stood gaping, running, cowering, praying to him as he carved another in beige.

“Nothing is your fault.”

Cedric let his eyes fall and he found his plate scattered with the sculptor’s crumpled leavings, a pungent perfume invading his nostrils.

[Soap.]

He looked up again, and where there had been four figures, now scores of them, perhaps a hundred, cluttered the table. But the hands still methodically drew the blade into the tender material, fresh scraps fallen unseen behind the table’s edge.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore. Everything is proceeding precisely according to plan. This is your home. You belong here.”

Cedric looked down to find he could not see the silver. The plate was completely hidden by heaping mounds of soap shavings, billowing about to obscure his end of the table.

“Eat.”

He brought his own hand up, and as he closed his fingers around a slender ribbon of soap, Cedric felt the force of his heartbeat reverberate in his chest, pounding against the pit in his stomach. He brought the sliver toward his mouth and parted his lips over the teeth.

[Lavender?]

Repulsion flooded his veins. This was not food.

He looked up with a flash of indignation to see a spectral face, a bank of snow with coal for pupils, rush toward him with unbridled hunger, the glow of the fire extinguished.

Its mouth was open, coming for him, but all he could see was the blackness above.

When Cedric returned to his reality, harsh light from the buzzing fixtures seeped unwelcome through his eyelids. Before he even need regain his vision, he recalled those bars and the bodies that filled the cage.

He remembered the path that had led him to this place.

His eyes fluttered open and he stretched tension from his muscles — as little he could release without touching a fellow captive.

“You get some sleep, youngblood? You gonna need it.”

Tommy’s friend sat next to him, moved from where he’d been before Cedric had fallen unconscious. He didn’t like it when things happened while he wasn’t watching.

“What’s your name, anyway? Don’t think I got it. Screws gonna call you what they call you. I don’t wanna be like that.”

He realized how dry his mouth was, and that he had nowhere to hide. “Cedric.” He tried to put the thirst out of mind.

“Cedric, eh?” He pondered the information. “I got an old friend named Cedric. He ain’t no wonder bread like you though.”

An awkward silence crept in the space between.

“What they got you on?”

Cedric paused, not wanting to speak, and the man seized on his hesitation.

“Come on fresh meat. You can tell me. We all the same in here.”

Cedric held back, and the man grimaced, broken only by Tommy’s paternal attempt to soothe the escalating pressure. The other men turned their heads and looked away.

“Give it a rest. He’s just a kid.”

But his friend refused to back down. “Yeah, yeah Tommy, we all kids in here.”

He turned back to Cedric. “So what’d you do? They catch you moving weight? Pushing to high schoolers?”

Cedric felt red rise to his cheeks. “It doesn’t matter.”

Tommy spoke before his friend could protest. “He’s scared, Javier. Leave him alone.”

But Javier continued his assault, wearing his frustration like a bright smock. “This pretty-boy thing you got going,” he said, gesticulating over Cedric, “Acting like you too good for us, all mysterious and shit? Thinkin’ you special?”

He spat on the floor. “You ain’t fuckin’ special, kid. Get used to it. In here, you no different than anyone else. We all eat the same slop and piss in the same pot.”

Cedric didn’t say anything.

“You keep this up, you ain’t gonna like what happen to you. We got a name for people like that.”

Tommy kept trying to ameliorate his acquaintance. “Enough, Javier.” But he maintained his position on the other side of the room as if he’d been sworn to non-interference.

“We call ‘em punks,” Javier continued. “Better start practicing your ‘yes, sir,’s and ‘no, sir,’s and ‘whatever you want, sir,’s, ‘cause that’s gonna be your whole vocabulary over there.”

Javier kept moving slowly toward Cedric, incrementally threatening his personal space.

“But maybe I can help you, kid. You don’t deserve that. I’ll give ya something. Me to you.”

His face twisted into a strained smile. “What you need is a little ink. Something to show them that you ain’t no punk.”

He peeled up his sleeve and displayed his elbow, around which had been drawn several radiating spokes of a spider’s web, connected to each other with widely spaced branches of silk.

“That one takes a while. Weeks. You ain’t ready for that yet. It’ll hurt. And of course there’s the classic—”

He raised the opposite forearm, where a wristwatch had been drawn, the lines somewhat crude and childish, fading into his skin.

It had no hands.

“Yeah, I like this one. Did it myself, but you ain’t earned that either. Someday, maybe, if you be good. You ever lost someone?”

The non-sequitur stunned Cedric into silence. But Javier continued unfazed, raising his volume as the sound of the crashing metal gates echoed against the walls.

“I’ll give you a little tear,” he said, reaching forward to bring his fingertip to the corner of Cedric’s cheekbone, beneath his eye. “Right here. To let e’rybody who see it know—”

“No touching!” The C.O. bellowed, and Javier withdrew. For a minute, none dared speak, and they looked on in silence.

“Kenyon!” The man called into the cell. “Your bail’s been posted. Get up here, let’s go.”

Cedric looked around in confusion, and the men looked back at him. He looked toward the C.O., somewhat stuffed into his uniform.

“What?” Cedric asked, perplexed, slowly rising to his feet. “What do you mean?”

“Your bail. Someone’s posted it.” He looked down at his clipboard and back at Cedric. “You are Cedric Kenyon, aren’t you? Time to process out.”

He looked down at himself, catching the disheveled shoes at the bottom of his vision, completely dumbfounded. “Yeah, just—”

Cedric felt the ire of the men around him, but he couldn’t help but protest. “No one knows I’m here.”

“Look, kid, who’d you call? Lawyer? Mom? Ex-girlfriend?”

“I—” Cedric felt sweat leak from his pores. “I didn’t call anyone.”

Javier, still seated, pushed against his calf and whispered something inaudible.

“Look, Kenyon,” the C.O. repeated with impatience. “I don’t care who bailed you out or why the hell you’re playing dumb about it, but you got two choices. In, or out. Don’t got all day.”

Cedric blinked and stepped up to the bars, where he stood still as the cop leaned down and opened the door.

As the mechanism clanged and clattered back into place, the last thing he heard before he stepped into the next chamber was Javier shouting after him.

“See ya on the flip side, Cedric!”

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“Where’s your ticket, little lady?”

A young girl looked up from her wide-ruled notebook and lowered her number two pencil. Between massive curtains of wavy brown hair peered eyes bound in such a vibrant amber that with certain orientations of incident light, they might have seemed iridescent, otherworldly, almost — red.

In the dim ambiance of the train cabin, however, the conductor had other things on his mind.

“You need a ticket to ride, miss. Where is your mother? Did she already make her purchase?”

Friday took in a lung-ful of stale air.

“She’s in the bathroom,” she replied, and added, “I think she drank too much coffee this morning.”

The man broke into a gentle smile. “Happens to the best of us.”

Friday pressed her lips together and said nothing, letting the mustachioed attendant speak first.

“Where are you two headed?”

She had prepared for this. “Times Square. We’re seeing a show today. We went last year.”

“Very nice,” he said, distractedly. “Well, have your mother get the tickets out when she returns. I’ll come back the other way after Woodside.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

The train rattled over the tracks, speeding toward the city, and the conductor disappeared into the chasm dividing the cars, determined to punch the tickets he’d been hired to verify. That was his job, and he did it well. People liked him.

Friday would never see the man again. She hadn’t put any money into the ticket machine at the station. Nor was her mother lurking in the toilet. She had hoped to avoid surrendering her few bills for this purpose, and her button nose had served her well. By this time, now at the age of nine, she considered herself a skillful liar. She kept her face still, not a twitch of the mouth, and the adults would go about their business and walk on past, none the wiser.

They thought this was their world.

Through the cloudy glass, she watched a station go by, and then the next, and she descended the train at the last stop in Queens.

Several weeks prior, Friday’s life as she had known it had been irrevocably shattered. She hadn’t asked for help, she hadn’t sent away for anything in the mail — but the news had arrived just the same. And once the cat was out of the bag, there was no way in hell it was going back in.

Friday was not accustomed to being summoned by the school officials. That was something that happened to other children when they did something they weren’t supposed to have done. She did her homework, she followed directions, and she kept her thoughts and opinions to herself. In all aspects, she effortlessly embodied model behavior for a fourth grade girl; there should have been no reason the authorities would have wished her presence.

It had been a quiet day, a Thursday if she remembered correctly, and nothing much out of the ordinary had precipitated the interruption. Maybe there had been drizzle on the way to school, and perhaps she’d stepped in a puddle, but she couldn’t remember anymore. She’d been enduring her lessons, dutifully performing arithmetic, as she always would have been on any usual weekday morning. Borrow a ten, carry the one, just as they’d told her to do.

Friday found little challenge at school, feeling the experience often rather dull. Even duller, she’d thought, were her teachers, but they were veritable fonts of wisdom compared to the insipid children that filled twenty-five-some-odd squat desks in that classroom. She could not fathom them, neither their inane questions clearly answered in the lecture a minute prior, nor their tendency to bounce up and down in their seats as if driven by motor. They stumbled over their words, tripping upon their myriad meanings like roots above ground. Their minds were in the clouds, Friday concluded, and she was alone in keeping her feet firmly upon the path.

She was not like them, she had realized from a tender age, but she could pretend.

“Would Miss Friday Perkins please present herself at the principal’s office?” A crackling voice echoed over the loudspeaker, sending the girl’s heart sinking into the frigid pool of despair.

Immediately, she was ice.

What could the principal want with her? What had she done? She had made every effort to follow each rule, however irrelevant it had seemed, even if that rule had been intended for someone else —

Her mind searched her history, pouring over possible transgressions. She slipped her hand in her pocket and clasped her fingers around a tube of chapstick, praying it wasn’t the thing she feared. The guilt began to coalesce, but she skipped past.

Had she forgotten a homework assignment? No, that was too minor for this; the principal wouldn’t involve herself. Could someone have blamed her for a crime she hadn’t committed? She hoped not, but —

The children were always in league. They were a unit, all of them together, and she —

“Friday? Were you listening? You heard the announcement, didn’t you?” The teacher had placed her fingers upon the desk. Friday looked up, losing herself in the woman’s flowery blouse and pearl necklace. She closed her notebook and clutched it absently to her breast.

“Go on,” she said, encouraging the child’s obedience. “Don’t make them wait.”

Friday had been at this school for a couple of years. She had liked her old school better, but then maybe that was the rose-tinted glasses talking. She’d been at several before anything had stuck.

She hadn’t always lived on Long Island. Once, what seemed like an eternity ago, she’d lived in a little apartment above a five-and-dime in a small town in a quiet state. She could no longer remember the smell of her mother’s perfume, nor the sound of her father’s laughter, but some other things were still in bright color, the edges crisp from where she wandered often. She’d had many stuffed animals and countless strawberry candies and a wire-frame bed that made her feel like a princess. In her memory, that place was a castle and the windows stretched all the way to the ceiling and her mother and father used to keep them open and the blinds would crackle in the wind and raindrops filtered through the screen and the gusts would blow down the figures she’d left on the sill and she’d later find them bowing on the carpet —

But that was all before the accident.

Friday had stayed at a foster home for several days but she couldn’t remember much of that either. But she did remember how there were eight firm beds in two trim rooms and all the toys had to be picked up once they were done with them and they weren’t allowed to make too much noise and the big lady who lived there kept the refrigerator door locked at every hour and there was no milk and no juice and certainly no candy and one of the children had looked into her eyes and said she looked like a demon.

No one had ever said something like that to her before.

When her grandmother came to fetch her from state-ordered hospitality, all-at-once pounding impatiently upon the door, the girl had been petrified. The old woman had a crazed, haggard look, grey hair going every which way and clothes hanging off her body like robes. She seemed more like an ancient bird than a human, snapping and screeching at Friday’s temporarily appointed guardian as her scant few belongings were gathered.

It was then that she knew her mother and father were truly gone.

She’d pulled the child by the wrist, dragging her out of the foster home, ashamed she’d ever had to step foot in such a forsaken corner of society. The little thing knew to follow as fast as her legs would carry her. Friday crawled into the cream-colored leather of the passenger seat and fastened her belt, shaking the dust from her feet.

Her grandmother ranted and raved intermittently as they drove through the town. Friday didn’t know her grandmother well then, but she knew she was the mother of her father and she learned quickly that she didn’t much approve of the woman he’d married. And maybe, she said halfways, this was all her fault that he was now dead.

Something about a waste of Talent —

Her grandmother had gained a set of keys and would not leave the town until she assessed what she was leaving to the wolves. The place Friday had once known as home was empty and dark, her grandmother first pushing all the windows shut, lowering the shades, and then viciously unplugging anything that took power from the walls, all while muttering beneath her breath, words beyond comprehension. In a frenzied trance, she iterated through the house, eventually lingering several minutes in the bedroom Friday shirked from entering.

Friday stood in the kitchen, red eyes peeled back to see the fish tank on the counter in the shadowed room. Its lone denizen, adopted from a summer’s carnival, floated immobile at the water’s meniscus, a cylinder of flakes sitting just inches away on the other side of the glass.

She realized she had no choice.

“Hello Friday, how are you this morning?”

The woman who sat behind the front desk was always quite talkative when Friday delivered the attendance tallies, and yet, she never could remember the woman’s name. Friday was terrible with names and at this point, it was uncouth to admit her ignorance.

“They called me down. I’m supposed to meet the principal. Do you know what about? I’m not in trouble, am I?”

She smiled, and Friday felt even less secure. “You’re not in trouble, don’t worry your pretty little head. A woman from a very exclusive program in New York City wanted to speak to you. I believe it’s a boarding school.”

Friday frowned. “We don’t have the money for that.”

The woman stood up from her desk and stepped forward, in an attempt to usher the girl down the hallway. “Don’t put the cart before the horse; sometimes these schools have money put away for kids that need it. You never know if you don’t ask.”

As she led Friday past the soulless reproductions hung on the walls, the child was struck by how short she seemed, downright diminutive now that she was removed from her seat at the desk. She stopped at the door and bent at the waist to touch Friday on the shoulder, knocking some of her voluminous hair astray. “Why don’t you just give her a chance?”

The secretary turned the doorknob to open the principal’s office. There the bottle blonde sat, in her usual spot — or at least, what Friday supposed was her usual spot — in a high-back leather chair. The girl hardly had a chance to take in the contents of the small room before feeling as if the breath had been stolen from her throat, eyes pulled as if by magnetism toward the left-most chair of the desk’s audience.

An impossibly thin woman in a dark dress turned her body toward Friday, rising to give her greeting. Her raven hair was spattered with grey, drawn up in a severe bun atop her head. A porcelain brooch bordered with silver adorned her chest, the image in a blue now too faded to resolve. And yet, despite her wrinkled skin and antique accoutrements, the woman seemed anything but elderly; her lithe body radiating an intangible energy she could not yet place. Friday was rather dumbstruck.

“Welcome, Friday,” the principal said. “Good to see you. This is Mrs. Myrtle Marscapone, headmistress of the Marscapone Foundling Home in Astoria, Queens.”

Friday’s eyes had not moved at the principal’s words, her very droll existence seeming to dissolve like ash on the wind. She instead stared at the woman with dark almond eyes, clad in a funereal dress from head to toe, tight about her neck and adorned with a cuff of dense lace. A single dark blemish ornamented the bone framing her cheek, contrasting her pale, unpainted lips. Her gaze was piercing, and Friday felt exposed, wrapped in cellophane, and the spiral-bound notebook fell from her hand.

“Don’t be shy, Friday. Introduce yourself.”

Friday bent down to pick up what she had dropped and then did as she was told, straightening her spine and slowly extending her right hand.

“Good morning Mrs.—” she tried to grasp the unfamiliar name. “Marscapone. I’m—”

She forgot for a moment. “I’m Friday Perkins. I’m in the fourth grade here at—” The girl shook the woman’s hand, and it was warm, and she neglected to utter whatever she had intended to say.

“It’s wonderful to finally make your acquaintance, Miss Perkins. I’ve heard so much about you.” Her voice did not falter, a mahogany amongst pine.

Friday felt her face flush scarlet, and the two of them sat down.

“I hope you can excuse my intrusion on your day. I steal too much of other’s precious time; we each have far too little of it. I’ve been traveling far and wide to find students to fill what will likely be my last class of students before I hang up my hat and rest. For nearly forty years, I’ve run a small school for very special children out of my home in Queens. And I’ve reason to believe you might be one of those very special young people.”

Friday swallowed the spit pooling in her mouth.

“My students go beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. We teach to the heart, the soul, the very lifeblood that binds our constituent parts together. The children I take in are those who lack a guiding hand in the way of the world. Those who might falter without a quality education. Those who, with their deficits addressed, their wounds mended, might someday have the power to change the world.”

Friday looked at the principal sitting idly, and then back to Myrtle.

“It’s… an orphanage.”

Myrtle’s face was placid. “In a manner of speaking, you might say so; however, the term has fallen from favor. Nor have I ever preferred its alternatives.”

She clarified. “And it’s not entirely accurate. Some of my students do very much have living family. And—”

Myrtle’s gaze took on a sudden icy affect. “I daresay even those with the most auspicious start in life—”

Friday felt a chill ripple through her nerves.

“Are orphans in one way or another.”

A momentary pause froze Friday’s mind, thawed only by the voice of the headmistress. “I prioritize recruiting those who have sufficient aptitude. Determination. Need. Every case is unique. Every child—”

Myrtle paused, and enunciated while looking at the girl, “Unique.”

Friday was unnerved. Anxious. Scared.

She’d always felt different than the other children, and her heart stirred when she remembered her parents were dead, but she still could not help but resist the strange woman.

“My g-grandmother would never go for it,” Friday stuttered, her eyes threatening tears. “We can’t afford things like that.”

But Myrtle was not about to be refused. “Money is no object. If you are able to earn admission to my school, we make sure you can attend.”

The woman’s pencil-thin lips betrayed a slight grin. “Getting in; that is the hard part.”

Friday looked away, overwhelmed, feeling more than she had become accustomed to confronting, desperate to return to the comfort of facts and figures. She rose from the chair and glanced at the principal, pleading for an accomplice.

“My grandmother — we tried so many schools before we found this one,” Friday looked at a picture on the wall, barely cognizant of its contents before drawn to look at the blotter on the surface of the desk.

Her voice was quiet, despondent. “I’ve just become comfortable here.”

Friday, staring down and away, began to feel rather dizzy. She laid the blue notebook on the desk, the corners tattered and worn. She traced the black spiral with her eyes as her vision began to blur at the edges, yearning for retreat.

She could no longer look at the strange woman, but even without her eyes, she could feel that presence pouring heat into her nerves by proximity. The dam that held back her soul was bending at the seams.

Myrtle reached a hand across the surface and slid the notebook toward herself. Between fluttering heartbeats, Friday heard the rustling of pens from the principal’s supply, the woman with a weakness for maquillage now little more than ambiance in her compliance.

“I’ll give you our address. You’re welcome to send us a letter if you ever change your mind.”

Friday’s grandmother was a bit of kook.

That was the friendliest word Friday could summon for the woman. She could have rendered many more less polite. But that was the one she chose.

Friday had thought little when the woman had gone tearing through her parents’ apartment in a frenzy, unplugging everything remotely modern, removing every source of voltage from its circuit.

Perhaps she’d had too much to think of in those days.

No, she hadn’t thought much of anything, watching the woman with the mane of whitening hair rummage through the little domicile and enact war upon the very notion of flowing electrons.

She’d simply stood there, dumb and stupid, mourning her deceased fish.

And when she got to the little house on Long Island, more east than west, she threw her suitcase on the bed and unpacked. She hadn’t known what to look for or when to sound the alarm.

She’d simply been concerned with surviving.

When her grandmother forbade her cartoons, she smiled and looked the other way, grateful to have a warm dinner each night. And when her grandmother said she couldn’t listen to the radio, she lowered her head and said okay. And when the sun sank behind the horizon and she was only permitted candlelight until the bell tolled the next hour —

She didn’t know what she was missing.

But she always suspected the old woman. Yes, she couldn’t possibly understand her prejudice, but her inner fire burned and she remembered how things had been in the days when she’d been young.

She possessed a keen eye, a — ‘God-given’ eye — and she rebelled against the limits of her cage. She picked up a stick and rattled the bark against the periphery of her limitations.

Because that was her inheritance and she didn’t know better.

Perhaps she raged in secret because her grandmother had afforded herself an exception to the rule she applied elsewhere, thinking it a secret concealed beyond reach —

And why was this a given to old granny but she, herself, had been forbidden to watch Rocky & Bullwinkle? Was the old hag so ignorant of the hypocrisy?

Friday had gone into the denizen of the old woman and she’d dared —

To touch the rabbit’s ears.

Friday left the train just as she’d planned, exiting the cabin at Woodside. That station, with its urban lack of glamor, had given her the transfer she needed.

While the adults deposited their tokens into the turnstile, the young girl, with her bushy hair, stockings and Mary Janes, leapt over the restriction. Or, rather, she bowed her head and went underneath.

She’d never been on the subway before. But, then, this one didn’t go beneath the ground. So maybe it wasn’t a subway at all.

She could read a map. She could count from one to ten. She could listen to the announcements and read the placards. Maybe that’s all she needed to get where she was going.

At Queensboro, she simply walked across the platform. And maybe, it felt, knowing more than she had learned, that she had to go backwards before she could go forward.

She got on the yellow train, the “N” if anyone asked, headed north. And she thought someone should stop her. She waited for it to happen, held her breath in anticipation, but it never did. She knew someone should ask why a nine-year-old girl was traveling by herself and where were her parents and was she lost and did she need help and did she need a quarter for the pay phone to call someone to come fetch her —

But she passed invisible.

And when she got to Ditmars, she left along with everyone else on the train. The crown of her head barely touched a man’s chin, and yet they let her proceed in mindless acceptance. They had no energy to step out of line, to deviate from their trajectory; that was not their destiny: Not today.

Friday clutched her notebook to her body more out of a need of the pressure than anything, having memorized the address in the days prior. The woman’s handwriting scrawled within seemed antiquated, needlessly formal, and yet, strangely familiar. The young girl had become haunted by that pervasive suspicion that she could have things if she would just dare to speak.

Leaving the station, she walked past a map and entered the flow of bodies disappearing into the streets. She’d never been here before, not once, and yet, she knew she could figure it out. She was no dummy.

This was the end of the line.

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When Cedric got out of bed on Wednesday morning, he had no foresight that he would never again return to this room. He had no idea how this day was destined to end.

He attached his wallet to his beltloop, slipped his knife into his right pocket, keys in his left, and, as the first anomaly, forgot to check himself in the mirror on the way out.

Book in one hand, he used the other to steady himself as he walked down the stairs. He reached the landing and performed a U-turn, bound for the kitchen.

Betty was frying eggs. She had a skilled hand at over-easy.

“Good morning, Cedric. You’re up early,” and, spying his clothing, she gave an addendum. “No work today?”

“I’m off today,” he stated. “Thought I’d do some exploring, see the area. Cross the river, maybe. I’ve never been to Beacon.”

“Can I fix you some breakfast — get some food in you?”

“No, thanks,” he felt some guilt refusing her, but his stomach had still not returned to normal. “I appreciate it, though.”

She nodded down to the book he carried. “What have you got there?”

He raised his hand so that she could look at the cover.

“It’s about some college kids in Vermont who get in over their heads. Librarian recommended it to me. But I’m having trouble getting into it. Read a few chapters, and it’s — I don’t know. Kinda overwrought.”

“I think I heard about that one,” she remarked. “It’s a mystery, right? I used to read a lot of mysteries.”

There was a pause between them, and then Betty spoke.

“You know, you could still go if you wanted to.”

“To Beacon?”

Betty smiled gently. “No, to school.”

Cedric laughed a little. “To… school?”

“You’re young. Why not?” She nudged the egg in the pan. “The ship has hardly set sail.”

“Too expensive. I can’t afford it.”

“I’m sure you could get a scholarship.”

“Or dig myself in a hole with interest.”

Betty frowned. “You’re too smart to work a cash register. You could be doing so much more. No one should have to toil doing things that are replaceable. You’re not a machine.”

Cedric did not say anything at first, and then held the book out to her.

“You want to read it?” he asked, and added, “It’s not really my thing. I want to finish what I was reading before.”

She took the book and looked at him in silence for a moment. When he made motion to leave, they waved farewell, and she realized with a twinge of despair that she’d overdone the toast.

Zed had come over to meet Cedric last night and give him a purple JanSport, inconspicuous — except for the pungent aroma of marijuana penetrating the fabric. Less than twenty-four hours since he’d returned from Eight Ball, Cedric had still been hungover. It had been unpleasant to stand for extended periods of time and he longed for recovery. But he had engaged in the necessary small-talk with his boss, accepted the package, and slipped the cash into his wallet. A minute later, Zed left Cedric holding the bag.

The thing stunk to high heaven and Zed had suggested he stow it in his trunk. Said it would be safer that way in case he ran into any trouble.

Cedric hoped against hope he wouldn’t have to worry about that.

But there was a problem with Zed’s idea. The trunk of the Cavalier had a faulty mechanism; sometimes it was nigh impossible to open the chamber without a fight. Now that the ambient temperature was decreasing with autumn’s onset, the metal was contracting and the issue more persistent. The very last thing Cedric wanted to happen was to have the delivery trapped inside the back of his car once he got to Manhattan. He had enough anxiety about transporting the contraband in the first place. He didn’t need to be seen hanging around on a busy street for fifteen minutes fumbling with the lock.

He had no choice. He ignored Zed’s advice, threw the bag to the foot of the passenger seat, and covered it with an old flannel.

The proposed route was simple enough. He would cross the bridge over the Hudson, drive a short distance to a town called Fishkill, and connect to Route 9 headed south. This highway would eventually turn into Broadway and go right into the city.

But nothing, certainly nothing, was going to be easy. Cedric re-entered I-84 for the first time in months and continued east, seemingly continuing where his journey had paused in June.

He had not gone far when he was again forced to stop.

Cedric peeled up against the tollbooth.

“$1.00.” The attendant, surly and wide-shouldered, projected loudly at the Cavalier, whose window was cracked several inches.

Cedric fully rolled down the glass.

“A dollar to cross a bridge?” He propped his elbow on the top of the car door.

The woman gestured to the sign.

“Yeah. A dollar. You read much?”

Cedric bristled at the question but nevertheless brought his wallet to his hand and removed a bill.

“Are you able to make change for a five?”

She took the money without comment and quickly returned to him what he was due.

She spoke with an emotionless, flat affect. “Four for you. Have a nice day.”

Cedric slipped the singles into his right pocket, depressed the pedal, and restarted the car.

The drive from Fishkill couldn’t have been more different than the drive east in June. The varying degrees of decaying foliage were beautiful, if somewhat wistful, but Cedric hardly noticed the changing season.

He was only minutes removed from the toll bridge over the Hudson, but he felt as if he’d entered another world. Shops and stores and parking lots divided the green and orange trees, nothing terribly striking on its own, but these places were quite different from Newburgh, he saw immediately.

They were clean. They were occupied.

His car, the beige long weathered by wind and rain, and now inexcusably rank with a perfume somewhat reminiscent of diesel — was decidedly unclean.

But he continued to drive.

The Sun was high in the sky at this hour, invoking a calm shadow inside the Cavalier. The roof blocked most of the blaring radiation that might have caused Cedric to squint painfully at another time of the day.

He still had no radio.

He had never wanted to pay to get it fixed in Newburgh. Over the several months he had lived there, he had found himself using the car only very seldom. He walked to the library, he walked to work, he walked back — he had fallen into a quiet life that aspired for little and accomplished even less.

But then, he didn’t want to be so hard on himself.

It was true that standing on the other side of the grocery checkout was not the glittering life he had envisioned before leaving middle America. It was indeed peaceful: he’d been reading again, Betty was a talented cook, and the persistent, aimless worry that had so often plagued him in his youth seemed to be slowly receding as he stopped feeding the pestilence.

He breathed.

Cedric had been forced to close the window when he’d entered the brisk pace of Route 9. The air inside the car was thick with the reminder of the task he hadn’t had the courage to refuse. He wanted the money.

‘Just this once.’

He glanced to verify the package still lay on the floor, in some kind of desperate hope against reality.

Of course it was still there, the violet material peeking out from beneath the grey cotton above; he hadn’t moved it, and the familiar odor choked the scant oxygen present in the sealed car.

His thoughts started to swirl chaotically as he plotted what to do when he completed the drop-off and returned to Newburgh.

He’d take the money from Zed and add it to the little profit he’d been making each week over the summer. With this windfall, he’d have just enough to start again somewhere else. He lamented leaving behind Betty, but he felt the alternative was worse.

The situation with Zed was becoming unbearable. What had begun as a manageable inconvenience had progressed into something much more dangerous.

The closer Zed had pulled Cedric into his web, the more Cedric had begun to pull away. He felt his skin crawl when the man sauntered past him, utter revulsion when he professed his desire to be “friends”, and Cedric realized he was choreographing his motions to avoid being alone with him —

Cedric was disgusted by Zed.

Perhaps some of it was the drugs; the more Cedric had seen of Zed behind the curtain, the more he had realized Zed was never in his right mind. He was always acting, always altered. But that fear of sobriety was not his primary sin, and Cedric, desiring self-consistency, could not ignore within himself the presence of a whispering curiosity at the periphery of the hedonism, something like Eve must have felt in her fatal attraction.

Zed didn’t give a damn about him. Some of what Cedric had initially taken as self-interest and arrogance he’d soon come to realize was the local character: the incessant chatter, the shifty mannerisms, and, his least favorite, a tendency to guillotine the sentences of others. He’d discovered that it was just part of the East Coast mindset to think everyone else spoke far too slowly and that they alone had a dire, inescapable need to insert their precious conclusions immediately into the discourse in order to relieve themselves of the intolerable boredom of listening to other people talk.

Though that all had exasperated Cedric, he had soon come to accept that with his change of locality came a change of flavor, and if he were to learn how to shed his chrysalis and become something new, he would have to adapt. This was what he had wanted. He had to accept the bitter truth that he was not already fully formed.

He considered Zed, feeling some clarity as he gained distance, and concluded that this was all part of the way Zed was fated to be as a consequence of what he had been taught. Though the content was changed from that to which he was accustomed, it was little different from how his own upbringing now formed his unconscious prejudice.

As Cedric continued to make his way south, slowly picking up speed, his conviction became ever more cemented in his mind. He’d done what he had set out to do: he had made his way east and had a little more money in his pocket. His new name felt comfortable when he heard it spoken aloud, where he had once felt an imposter hiding behind another man’s face. And with a few exceptions — a used Walkman, some t-shirts — he hadn’t acquired much new baggage to weigh him down. And that was the way he liked it.

The time had come to leave Newburgh behind.

As Cedric approached the city, the clean brick and spacious luxury gave way to the cluttered intensity of New York City. He had seen many depictions of this place, both modern and historical, long before he ever made his way down Broadway, but nothing had adequately prepared him for what he found.

The most immediate observation, the one from which he could not escape, was of the sheer multitude of human bodies that seemed to fill every square of useable space. They were everywhere: crawling the sidewalks, shading the windows, and even more of them had been created to fill billboards and advertisements.

When he stopped at a red light, the crowd clustering at the corner would pour across the intersection as a dense wave, and Cedric struggled to comprehend each of them as individuals. With so many of them together composing one motion, the details began to blend into a larger trend, and the once countable persons faded into a more easily understood mass. It was the face of the collective, and its expression was one of resolute disinterest.

In contrast to the bobbing oscillations of people, the buildings were still and maternal. The structures loomed high over man, guiding them, protecting them. They were the disguise of the city, if the humans were the heart and soul.

Cedric was bound for a small neighborhood called Sugar Hill. Zed had given him instructions to turn left onto an eastbound cross-street, with one further detail to guide his advance.

‘If you reach the park, you’ve gone too far.’

The larger apartment buildings that had flanked Broadway gave way to four-story brownstones, each set off from the sidewalk by a steep climb of stairs. The house numbers, odd to the left and even to the right, were difficult to read at a glance, but he oriented himself and continued, quickly crossing an avenue. Before he could have possibly absorbed all the details, he realized he had already arrived at his destination.

The narrow street was edged in on either side by a wall of parked cars. He slowed his progress down the street, looking to one side and then the other, trying to glean an opportunity between few simple options. He would have no other alternative than to back up and parallel park —

A car in an apparent rush suddenly appeared in the rear-view mirror. Cedric looked to one side only to jump in his seat as the car let out a blare of its horn, alerting him of his apparent transgression.

He pulled ahead and prepared to back up into the only space that was available. He was unaccustomed to executing the maneuver to the driver’s side, but it looked as if that was the only choice.

Cedric looked to the left and and panic washed over him — the only reason for the vacancy was a camouflaged fire hydrant. He hadn’t noticed it at the onset; it had been coated with paint that matched the muted tone of the pale brick buildings. He noticed a woman wearing a snug sweater-dress walking down the street doing something that stole his attention. She was talking to herself on a cordless phone.

The car behind him honked once more.

In his haste, he brought his attention back to the inside of the car and depressed the clutch. He pulled the gearshift out of first and pulled it toward reverse, except —

It refused him.

Cedric let loose with an obscenity lost to the ether as the car behind him simultaneously voiced its displeasure.

He tried in desperation to revoke his command and return to first gear, but the stick remained completely immobile, frozen between gears.

“Fuck!”

He tried again, but his efforts were completely futile. Behind him, the car let forth with several more honks of its horn, delivered in furious succession.

To add insult to injury, he was so close to the car on his left that he could not open the door.

As Cedric turned off the engine and restarted the car, he hoped something, anything, could alleviate the problem with the gearshift.

But it was no use. He heard a rapping on the window to his right while he continued to struggle.

“Hey, asshole!”

He could barely hear the man yelling at him through the closed windows, but that particular curse was clear as crystal.

Cedric looked up at the passenger window to see a man in a dark grey suit and navy tie craning down to peer inside the car.

“You gonna move your car?”

Cedric gestured to the stick shift. “It’s stalled! What do you expect me to do?”

The man screamed at Cedric through the glass, “Get a real car!” and returned to his vehicle.

Cedric looked down at his controls and tried a few more times to engage a gear, any gear, in an effort to move the car from its location blocking the lane of traffic. He heard tires squeal as the discontented suit successfully put his own car in reverse and backed out of the street.

He had to give up. Cedric turned off the engine, removed the keys, and awkwardly climbed over the center console of the car and made his way to exit the Cavalier on the passenger side, using his foot to push the backpack as far as he could get it from the incident light pouring through the window.

Outside the car was the woman who’d been walking down the street. She had pulled her phone away from her face and placed her opposite hand on top of the mouthpiece.

“Do you want me to call you a tow truck? You can’t fix it, can you?”

Cedric had never seen anyone using such a device in the flesh. He’d seen the brick phone on television, but it, with its bearer, had been as imaginary as a magical ring. And this phone was different: much smaller, and black.

He refused her offer as a reflex.

“No, maybe it just needs time to cool down. I’ll try again in a minute.”

Cedric looked away from her and felt the leaden weight of the contraband lingering in his car. He thought maybe he should just leave the car, take the bag up to the apartment, and deal with this issue once he’d made himself free of this burden. But the Cavalier made it impossible for anyone to drive down the street. He couldn’t leave it here.

The woman looked at Cedric and raised an eyebrow. “You sure you don’t want me to call you a cab?”

He had no chance to respond. He didn’t have to be a native to recognize the unmistakable wail of a police siren as it rounded the corner and made its way toward the helpless Cavalier.

Cedric felt hope drain from his body.

He stood still, completely stricken with terror, as the car drove toward him and stopped. Neither he nor the woman said a word as the doors opened and two members of the NYPD exited their vehicle and approached.

“Afternoon. You having some car trouble?”

Cedric felt sweat dampen his shirt as they walked up, one trailing the other.

“What seems to be the problem?” The officer’s voice was cordial, but Cedric could not help but feel as if he were staring down a lion and its pearly whites.

“I’m stuck between gears. Can’t move the car.”

The woman who’d approached him stepped away to establish her neutrality and he realized he’d been a fool.

The other officer took several long glances at the Cavalier, catching notice of the plates.

“You’re an awful long way from home. What brings you to the city?”

The two cops made eye contact while Cedric quickly searched his thoughts.

“Visiting a friend from college.”

The officers looked at him with skepticism.

“Oh yeah? What college?”

Cedric drew a complete blank, his hesitation tragically betraying his lie.

“I need to see your license and registration, son.”

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

There was nowhere to go.

Cedric eyed the police officer, gleaning not a scrap of pity on that face: just doing his damn job. He slowly made his way to open the passenger side door.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

The cop took several more steps, coming up behind him as he opened the glovebox.

Cedric continued to sweat as he fumbled around with the papers that lay within.

He found what he needed, snapped the thing closed, and —

“I’m detecting the odor of marijuana coming from your vehicle.”

Cedric felt his heart rattle his chest.

Clutching the papers he’d taken from the glovebox, he turned around toward the man.

“My gas tank—”

“That’s not gasoline I’m smelling, sir. I’m going to need to search your vehicle.”

The other officer came over and approached the two of them. He stood over Cedric while the first leaned into the car, tossed the shirt aside, and removed the JanSport.

Cedric averted his eyes as the evidence was exposed to the light.

“Sir, I’m going to need you to place your hands on the vehicle.”

What little pretense of resistance had been in Cedric completely evacuated his body. He kept his gaze down.

He surrendered.

The officer ran his hands over him, emptied his pockets, and confiscated his belongings. When Cedric felt the cold metal snap around his wrists, he knew he had lost.

He did not look up until he was sitting in the backseat of the police cruiser. Outside the window, he saw the woman fold her phone and push the antenna back into its housing.

He watched her until the car turned the corner and veered out of sight.

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Cedric stood alone before a display of hardcover books. Each bore a cropped image of a marble face, eyes averted and hair unkempt. It was all Greek to him.

He picked up a book and skimmed the inside of the jacket. The table from which it had come bore a folded piece of cardstock with large text: “Staff Picks”. The book had just been distributed into the library’s collection.

The voice of a middle-aged woman suddenly rose from behind him as he found himself absorbed by the summary. He leapt in his shoes, caught completely off-guard.

“Secret History? New release; big deal.”

Cedric turned around to face her and nearly dropped the book.

“Oh, I was just having a look,” he said, feeling sheepish.

She smiled disarmingly. “Looks like an interesting read. I saw the review in the Times. Are you going to pick it up?”

Cedric placed the book back on the table. “Maybe next, I dunno. I’m in the middle of one of Dickens’ right now.”

The librarian softened her face, smiling, condescending. “That might take you a while.”

Cedric pursed his lips.

“You know, I see you here a lot. Why don’t you have a library card? You could take the book home with you.”

Cedric felt a little exposed. “I’m just renting a room right now. I don’t have any paperwork.”

“You’ve been coming here for months,” she reasoned. “I see you here near every day.”

Cedric was not entirely comfortable knowing he had been observed.

“Why don’t I sign you up for a temporary card until you get settled? It’s a quick form and ten bucks. You get your money back in thirty days. Maybe you can get your landlord to write you a letter for a real card by then. That’s all we’d need.”

Cedric looked down at the figure on the cover, pale olive on black, and then back to the librarian.

“You can tell me what you think of the book. It’s a thriller. Should leave you on the edge of your seat.”

‘Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five—’

Cedric counted the bills from the register with careful precision. This was the second time he had gone through this pile. He had no intention of making an error in his tally.

Raindrops clattered angrily against the windows. It had not been like this earlier in the day, before the night had fallen. There had been hints of grey in the sky, but he hadn’t made preparations. With no raincoat waiting for him in the back room, he’d gambled, and lost.

His manager walked over with that characteristic swagger and threatened to slash his focus. “Hey Ced, you done yet?”

‘Forty, sixty, eighty—’

“It’s raining cats and dogs out there. You bring an umbrella?”

‘Fifty… One-hundred—’

Cedric finished the count and wrote the totals on a piece of paper. “No, I forgot my coat.”

“Sucks. Me too.” He leaned on the edge of the belt, glimpsing Cedric’s notes beneath the point of sale.

“You wanna shoot some pool at Eight Ball until the rain lets up? I can’t let you walk back in this. Nasty out there.” Zed looked with disdain at dark windows at the front of the store. “I’ll buy you a beer.”

Cedric did not particularly want to go out tonight. He would get rained on no matter which direction he walked, and he had only read a few chapters of his new book, now sitting on the bedside table in his room. He was anxious to continue his progress.

And he didn’t like beer.

But he worked with Zed, and he wasn’t sure there was any getting out of this.

“Yeah, sure.”

Cedric was pretty good at pool. He had only been to the billiard hall on a handful of occasions but the few times he’d played, he had discovered he had a bit of a knack for the game. He liked the simplicity of the strategy, and felt pleased when the geometry of the next shot flashed in his mind like electrons across wire. The only trouble came when his body wouldn’t listen to what he was trying to tell it to do. But he figured with a little practice, he would be able to propel the ball exactly as he intended.

As the alcohol began to flow through his body, Cedric felt the chill he’d gathered from walking through the cold rain begin to dissipate. His nerves deadened just enough to permit the cue to flow more as a veritable extension of his will than a stick shoddily attached to his hand. His opponent was laid plain on the table, and all he had to do was take the next shot.

“You’re a natural, Ced,” his boss admitted, somewhere between truth and abject flattery. “I don’t think I can win this one.”

“Seven ball. Corner pocket.”

Cedric leaned forward and sent the cue ball to ricochet off the rail, striking his called shot, and netting him one more point.

Zed made a gesture to wipe imaginary sweat from his brow. “Phew, kid. Glad we’re only going to thirty. You play a lot where you come from?”

Cedric brought the cue over the table and took aim. “Couple times.”

This time, he missed.

“Couple times my foot,” Zed remarked, and then called out. “Mark, get my buddy another beer!”

Cedric wasn’t sure he wanted another beer. He wanted to win.

“So, Cedric—” Zed moved over toward him. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Cedric was chalking his cue, impatient for play to return to his side.

“Listen, you know you deserve a raise. I know you deserve a raise. And you haven’t said anything ‘cause that’s the kind of guy you are but it hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

Cedric set the blue cube on the edge of the table.

“Problem is bossman doesn’t have the cash flow. Store isn’t doing great and they’re not giving anyone more money right now. You, me, no one. I mean, writing’s on the wall as far as our jobs, but you didn’t hear it from me. We just can’t compete with the big guys.”

The barkeep brought over a new pint, golden-yellow, with a head of white foam inside the rim of the glass. He set it on a table forming a barrier between the pair and the next group over.

Cedric, gaze floating over the offering, thought one of the men in the bar was eyeing Zed anxiously, and he kept him within his peripheral vision.

“You deserve more’n you’re getting, Ced. You work like mad, you pick up everyone’s slack. Someone calls out; you’re there. And you’re a good guy. I like you. I want you to know that.”

Cedric continued to watch the man twitch.

“I wanna help out in any way I can. I know you’re trying to get your own place and I get that. I want to help,” he continued. “I hope you don’t think of me as just some guy you work with. ‘Cause I wanna help. I wanna be your friend. Friends help friends. That’s what friends do.”

Cedric wasn’t completely sure what Zed was going on about, his focus turned toward the somewhat emaciated man approaching the two of them.

Zed, finally noticing that someone was trying to get his attention, rolled his eyes. Forced into action, he turned toward the interloper less in genuine interest than in an attempt to return command of the conversation to himself.

“I’m off-the-clock. Go talk to Bruce,” Zed said, voice lowered, looking toward nowhere in particular. A hint of aggression lay beneath his measured response.

But the man continued to press in. “Butch don’t like me. I just need a twenty. Got it right here. Right here.” He patted his chest.

Cedric had difficulty looking at the man while he stood positioned uncomfortably close to them, scratching his skin.

“Don’t know what the fuck you’re talkin’ about, man.”

“Aw, Zed, don’t be like that. I just need—” he removed a crumpled bill from his pocket.

Zed rose his voice. “You don’t need nothin’. You need to chill the fuck out. I don’t want your fuckin’ money.”

The man hesitated for a moment, hoping Zed would reconsider, and then crushed the bill messily within his fist and slumped back in shame. He turned over his shoulder for a last desperate glance as he shuffled to the other side of the room.

The other men in the room continued to play, the clatter of their shot echoing off the low walls.

As they were soon left alone, Zed turned to Cedric with a look of disgust. “Some people…” he said, trying to elicit sympathy.

“Some people just want to kick a dead horse. Won’t let you change who you are. Just want to keep you living in the past.”

Cedric watched the jittery man slink out the door, dejected in the falling rain, and thoughts surfaced that he would rather have left shelved.

“—Sleeping dogs lie,” he said, the butchered idiom forming the first words that came to mind.

“Exactly,” Zed affirmed. “Anyway.”

Cedric glanced sideways at the green felt and tried to decide upon his next approach, but his brain felt hazy and the colors seemed to swirl, so he blinked and tried to regain a crisp perspective.

“I was wondering if you’d be able to do me a solid. I gotta work next couple days but I know you got Wednesday Thursday off. You wanna run a little package down to the city for me? You can meet my friend. It’s always good to know people, ‘specially when you’re trying to get established. I’ll make it worth your while. You scratch my back, I scratch yours sorta deal.”

Cedric realized Zed had no interest in billiards. He had suspected that all along, but he’d let himself get lost in the game. He’d been enjoying himself. He’d forgotten.

“Two hundred,” Zed bargained, sensing Cedric’s reluctance. “Seventy-five for the road, rest when you get back.”

Adrenaline surged as the numbers hit his consciousness. That was nearly two weeks’ pay — for a day’s work.

Maybe he could finally get his car looked at.

But he hesitated, the interaction between Zed and the hanger-on giving him pause. He had come so far and he knew it could all disintegrate in an instant.

He was standing in a soap bubble, pearlescent and ephemeral. And he didn’t even notice that he was gasping for air.

By the time Cedric left the Eight Ball Billiards & Tap, it had stopped raining, and for that, he was grateful. But he was drunk, very drunk, and though he’d managed for a short time to fly, he was now grounded and unsteady on his feet. He’d stopped having fun at least an hour ago.

The air was cool and pleasant, but it was only background noise as he walked next to the quiet road back to Betty’s house. To make his way under these circumstances was tiring, exhausting. But he knew, despite his muddled thoughts, only time could grant him release from this labor. There was only one way to go.

Cedric had never drank so much alcohol in a single sitting. He’d had a few drinks before he’d left for Newburgh, several times if he’d stopped to recollect. The old guard had been happy to take his money, not giving a damn about what the feds had to say about his age.

‘You can kill a man—’

‘—but you can’t buy a beer.’

Cedric took a left and began walking north in the dim light. He slipped his hand in his pocket and wrapped his fingers around his worn folding knife. The street lamps were dim. He didn’t think anything would happen, but it was what he had. You never knew what people were going to do.

He felt acid well up in his stomach, and he stopped walking for a moment. Bringing his hand off the knife and forming a fist against his breastbone, he struck himself until he felt his innards relent. He did not want to vomit. He brought oxygen into his lungs, and then let out a belch, relieving some of the immediate discomfort in his gut.

He took a breath and continued on.

Sometime after Zed had offered the cash deal to Cedric, the gangly businessman had bought a round of shots for everyone in the bar.

The amber liquid in the tiny glass didn’t fight with daggers of bitter carbonation, and, most importantly, it disappeared just as soon as it had been delivered. Cedric sank a few more balls with ease and for a minute, he was riding high.

He felt good.

This was so unlike how he usually lived. So he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to keep going.

He had another.

The burning taste of booze rose up in his memory, and then it tickled the back of his tongue.

Cedric lurched forward and retched violently onto the sidewalk.

When he stood up, he was able to maintain better posture. But he was still desperate for sleep. But he would not sleep here. He couldn’t.

Cedric raised his eyes as he walked forward, trying to find his balance. Ahead of him, he saw two orbs glowing in the faint moonlight.

They belonged to someone he recognized. But the little thing was standing in harm’s way.

“Nichelle? Why you in the street, you big dummy?” Cedric veered to the right, clumsily squeezed between two parked cars, and ran forward into the roadway, intent on scaring some sense into the cat.

The feline had no fear of Cedric, not since the first day she saw him, but she obeyed and slipped underneath a nearby parked car on the far side, still running away from him.

Cedric walked up against the vehicle and bent over to crane his view beneath the metal body. He tried to find those eyes, but he couldn’t see anything in the shadows.

“Cat?! What are you doing out here? Go home! Get out of here!” Blind, he straightened his spine again, feeling somewhat disoriented from having whipped his head downward.

Over the roof of the car, he saw a bit of fur jet diagonally away from him, again into the road. This road, however, set perpendicular from the one he’d crossed, formed the barrier between he himself and the graveyard.

“Cat?” Cedric thoughtlessly followed. “Cat, you’re gonna get run over, stupid cat!”

He crossed the street and looked around until he saw Nichelle looking back at him.

“What’re you doing, cat?”

Nichelle broke eye contact and darted between the iron fenceposts.

Cedric paused, looking left, then right, and he followed.

He was in the cemetery now, and he felt dizzy. The grass was damp and he felt moisture seep cold through the holes in the bottom of his shoes. His socks had dried in the pool hall, but again they became drenched.

The cat rubbed against a crooked headstone and looked back at him, gaze reflecting a bit of light.

Cedric felt tired, his focus faltered, and he knelt, then sat down in the moist grass. He had reached his limit. Maybe, he wasn’t sure, he closed his eyes and let his mind wander where it would.

It was summer, he thought, late summer. Maybe it was fall now, in the graveyard wet with rain, but it hadn’t been fall then, in the memory that rose before him.

It was summer.

His mother had sent him away to camp. Cedric did not much like this summer camp. He had been before. Yes, it was only fifty dollars, and a bargain at that. For fifty dollars, he would hear the gospel. For fifty bucks, he’d be out of her hair for a couple of days. Fifty bucks? The way he ate, you could hardly feed him for that much.

The divine, turned man, who had died for their sins. Now he knew that name, and had been liberated from ignorance. Now he would know why the people counted the years since the death. And if he chose to refuse the gift, that was on him.

He must have been eight that summer. Or was he nine? He couldn’t have been ten, could he?

Cedric wasn’t sure anymore.

But he was sure it had been a terrible summer. He’d hated camp. The food had been terrible; they’d served — what the fuck kind of food was liver and onions — but worse than that he’d slept terribly every night. Every night he went to bed exhausted and every morning he woke up exhausted. There was no room for dream here. He’d had the top bunk and it was awful with the suspicion that the ceiling would crush him dead. But then, perhaps it was better than to be suffocated by the mattress above.

Something about a rock and hard place.

And he’d had a terrible revelation in the lukewarm shower one morning, something that had struck his mind like lightning and left the smell of pitch —

‘Jesus’ wasn’t real. He couldn’t be real. Something about conflicting timelines, dinosaurs, whatever it was —

The Bible was inconsistent with reality. The words didn’t agree with what he could pull out of the ground. The evidence was there, if they’d only see it. Noah’s boat couldn’t float, much less house the whole kit and kaboodle.

Or maybe he’d thought something like that, he wasn’t even sure.

But he hadn’t wanted to go away to camp that year. He had wanted to stay home. He had begged, he had pleaded, practically on hands and knees —

But Mother hadn’t let him.

And why would she have?

Just several weeks prior, Cedric had discovered a lone kitten underneath his mother’s car.

Little Cedric, as he wasn’t then known, had been playing outside, minding his own business, when he’d heard the little sound. A tiny cry that would have been easy to miss, easy to forget, easy to ignore.

When he’d looked underneath the car, he’d seen the creature. Mottled, with fur missing in spots. Tiny eyes, tiny nose, tiny ears. Mew, mew, mew, it had called to anyone who might hear. Its tongue, pink, and those milk teeth, not yet big enough to find prey. Or maybe it had never been taught.

Cedric had gone, without permission, and retrieved a can of tuna from the cabinet. Yes, perhaps Mother would notice the absence when she went to fix the casserole, she had a knack for counting things, and that knowledge nagged at him, screamed at him, foretelling what was to come…

But Cedric, little Cedric —

He thought of the cat.

He peeled open the can and dumped the contents out on a plate; every last morsel.

He took it out of doors, a flagrant disobedience if he thought to hesitate, and set the offering at the edge of the car’s shadow.

And he waited.

The little cat had not come out immediately. But Cedric had waited.

Cedric opened his eyes and looked at Nichelle. His head spun and he wondered why she was here. He wondered why he was here, and his clothes were seeped with the rain’s leavings.

But he would not move.

He was drunk, he realized, but not nearly drunk enough to wander into these thoughts. These old places were covered in dust so that he could keep his eyes on the road.

‘Let bygones be bygones,’ he remembered someone saying.

But here he was, wet on the grass, digging up things that were meant to stay covered by the sands of time.

But sand will move. Wind, rain, even by fistful if one had patience: the patience to find the thing that had been buried.

The little cat, not Nichelle, no, certainly not Nichelle, but that little grey cat with the fur missing in spots —

He’d called him Bamm-Bamm. This wasn’t the name the mama cat had given him, but it would have to do.

And he’d fed him tuna water, drawing him in until his own human mother thought to notice.

She wasn’t stupid.

She’d been steely about the matter of the cat, doling out words like precious currency, as was her usual demeanor. Sometimes, not realizing his custom, he was entirely happy when nothing was said at all. Perhaps the silence hurt less than the alternative. He could dwell in his imagination, as technicolor as it was, rather than know he’d committed sin.

“The filthy thing stays outside.”

And he had rejoiced. Cedric had never had a gerbil in a cage, nor a turtle, no, and certainly never a dog, they were a fuss, they made a mess, they needed bathing and most importantly —

They all cost money.

The boy he was then was entirely reliant on his mother’s charity for his well-being. For this, he would eternally be in her debt, a debt he could never hope to repay. That was the price he paid for his birthday each year.

Cedric did not often raise complaint. Not only was it untoward, it was simply ineffective. It was a far better thing to, as he had heard them say —

‘Just grin and bear it.’

But something had possessed him the next day. After sorting through what she’d brought back from the store, a fire had been sparked within him and words rose to his mouth as if placed there by the gods.

“Mom, you didn’t buy kitten food. He’s… just a kitten.”

She didn’t look at him. One might think that was damnation, but, to the contrary, they rarely did use their eyes to see each other. That was their habit. And when she did raise her pupils, the blackness between them so plain, it pierced his little soul like ice.

“Kitten food, cat food — it’s all the same shit.”

Despite sitting, Cedric was beginning to feel dizzy again. He’d immediately felt relief after emptying his stomach, but the rest of the poison had long since absorbed into his veins. There was nothing left to do but wait for his body to expel the biproducts.

He eyed Nichelle, sitting beside a worn tombstone, and then the cat slipped away, out of his sight. Cedric, with no energy to follow, stretched his legs out and reclined, laying on his back on the ground. He felt exposed, vulnerable, to lay in such a way, but he was desperate for the whirling to fade.

There was a generous handful of stars sprinkled in the sky now, each getting their moment to scintillate before being obscured by a passing cloud. Cedric had always loved the sky, and yet, he’d be hard-pressed to name a figure beside Orion or Polaris.

But that didn’t keep him from looking.

Cedric was still looking at the stars when he saw something he had never seen before, flashing before his eyes like a film.

He was too old now to be banished to the kennel. In here, the present, he was in the house, watching that woman he had known for nineteen long years.

She opened the door to the house, letting the cat come through the door, luring the little thing by way of its desperate hunger.

But as Cedric watched, a pit grew at the bottom of his stomach. He knew how this one ended.

When he’d come back from camp days later, she’d answered his inquiries about the cat with three small lies:

“It ran away.”

Tears welling up in his eyes, he’d believed her. And after days turned into weeks that his offerings of food went undisturbed, he’d lost hope and believed her all the more, ignorant of any other possibility.

He laid there, some ten years later, sheltered beneath a blanket of stars, drunk upon a damp grassy carpet of the deceased. In his tilted condition, he caught a glimpse of their wisdom, watching his innocence shatter like thrown porcelain.

The woman picked the kitten up off the linoleum floor, digging her nails into the scruff of the cat’s neck. He cried out for her mercy, but she would not grant it.

Their squeals displeased her immensely.

So she shut the door and it never opened again.

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Zephyr “Zed” Wildwood had been a manager at the grocery store on Broadway for nearly six years. While he was initially hired to stock shelves, that hadn’t lasted long. The O’Sullivan heirs had promoted him out of the back when it became apparent that Zed could talk much faster than he would walk. He donned a new uniform and grinned a half-wide grin to see his name on a placard at the front of the establishment.

This was what he deserved.

He took to the position like a duck to water, easily matching name to face and able to quickly regurgitate seemingly extraneous details about the lives of his customers. All the regulars came to know Zed, happy he always had an answer to their inquiries, no matter how inane the question.

Through the compliments and flattery, few cared whether he was right or wrong.

The brother and sister who owned the store, having taken over after the death of their father, were content to finally have a man in charge who could take care of himself, not to mention refrain from bothering them about the trivialities. Zed seemed perfectly suited to the job, and his numbers always lined up. Sometimes the old Newburghers stopped the O’Sullivans on the street and remarked on how well-run the store had become.

Just like the good old days.

The O’Sullivans celebrated their livelihood. The store was practically running itself, and they merrily cashed the checks. They figured Zed was a natural people-person, and they weren’t wrong; with his gift for gab he could schmooze the socks off an eel.

When Cedric came back to Sullivan’s like clockwork the following afternoon, Zed took to him immediately. The whole picture was more than he could have asked for. The boy had bright eyes and a charming demeanor and it was all-too-obvious that he wasn’t from around here. Not at all. Zed smiled slyly to hear him call the stuff “pop” and knew he’d found a sucker.

And better than that, Zed gleaned, he was desperate for work. With a little elbow grease, he just might do anything.

Sure, he had the kid fill out a W-4 and write out his references and phone numbers and all that. Said he could start next week if everything came back okay.

And it would come back okay.

When Zed offered to cash the paychecks “for his convenience”, Cedric went along with it, none the wiser. Perhaps he should have been suspicious. Perhaps he should have thought twice. But when the man with the cards in his hand walked right by the skeleton in the closet, Cedric kept moving forward. He had no idea that his signature was doomed for a dead-end in a dusty manila folder, never again to see the light of day.

Zed took the sign out of the window, satisfied with his good fortune, and the summer went on, week after humid week. He had Cedric run the register, figuring the corn-fed kid wasn’t likely to pocket the spare change. Zed was beaming; his new employee was eager to work nights and weekends, always showed up on time, and looked rather tidy in his navy smock.

Yes, he looked really rather… Nice.

He’d made a valuable acquisition, and Zed was pleased with himself, thinking it just one more thing the world owed him.

And there were a lot of things the world owed him.

The days began to wear thin, and sometimes the nights were cold when the wind swept a course over the river. Zed thought there were still profits to be made. He knew the way of things. People’s habits changed with the seasons. They dried out their swimsuits and put their sweaters on hangers. They called up old friends and organized dinner parties. They bought chickens and gravies and mused about the proper way to stuff a bird.

Zed was not one to leave money on the table.

Cedric heard Betty shuffling in the living room as he came down the stairs, dressed for work.

“Morning,” he said, stepping in to greet her. She had a square album sleeve in each hand. “What’re you listening to?”

Betty held them out, pressing him to come over and have a look.

“I was trying to pick between these two. Some favorites of mine. What do you think?” Whether it was how to best cook an egg or whether people should be allowed to curse on television, Betty had a strong opinion about everything.

Cedric eyed both albums, completely unacquainted with the selections, and pointed to the one done in the blueish fuchsia of daybreak. A woman’s forlorn face adorned the fading color, melancholy in her tired gaze.

“She looks so—” he tried to find a ten-cent word, but settled on the first five-cent thing that came to mind. “Sad.”

Betty placed the other record down on the pile next to the turntable, then looked toward her tenant. “Lady Day had a lot to be sad about. She lived a hard life. The world wasn’t kind to her, not when she was young, and not when she got famous.”

Cedric looked at her and said nothing.

“Maybe things would be better today, but I’m not so sure. The world was different then; rules and expectations were harsh, but maybe it isn’t any different now either.”

She took out the disc, aligned it on the center of the player, and set the needle to play. The metal scratched for a moment and then filled the room with the woman’s rich voice.

“The first song was new at the time,” Betty began, speaking just loud enough to be heard as Cedric stepped closer. “But most of the rest were re-recordings of her original hits. Famous long before you had the Billboard.”

Cedric let the music wash over him, feeling all-at-once transported to another time and place. He was struck by how truly the voice formed the holy centerpiece of the experience, letting the rest of the instruments play subtle as backdrop. The two stood silent for several minutes as the vinyl spun around and before he knew it, the first song finished and another story began.

“It’s—” he looked down at the player, remembering the cassette player in his pocket. The pieces emanating from the record were short, shorter than he was used to, and he felt they were over nearly as soon as they’d begun. “Not bad.”

“’Not bad’?!” Betty laughed, incredulous. “Damn me with faint praise!”

Betty lifted the needle and moved it forward, so that it started playing in the middle of another song. She must have known exactly where to place it. “Listen to this next one. Tell me it’s not bad.”

They watched the needle bob up and down as the sunlight streamed in through the window. No longer in the realm of a lovelorn teenager, Cedric’s breath slowed as Holiday painted a very different picture before his eyes. Betty spoke without looking at him.

“This one’s called Strange Fruit,” she said, lowering her voice. “Song got her in trouble with the government. They didn’t want her singing it. Said it was—”

She paused, and then spoke with sudden scorn. “Un-American.”

Cedric listened quietly as Holiday continued to sing; beautiful, emotive, haunting.

“I saw her once. Small club uptown called the Blue Note.”

He looked up at her, but she was gazing toward the window.

“I was just a pretty young thing then. Little white girl from Newburgh, alone on the train to Harlem; can you imagine? My parents would have locked me in my room and thrown away the key.” Betty might have been suppressing a grin. “I think I told them I was studying for an exam.”

“She was incredible. Changed my life. She was fierce and fragile all at the same time. Gardenia in her hair, just like all the pictures. Voice like velvet.”

Cedric looked down at the record player. “Did she… sing this?”

Betty paused for a moment.

“No,” she replied, taking a somber tone. “Don’t think she could at this point. No one would let her. Not anymore.”

The words soon stopped, and Betty lifted the needle, leaving the small room in silence.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” she continued. “Every generation thinks they invented rebellion. But this has been going on since the world was new.”

The break room in the back of Sullivan’s Market smelled heavily of cigarette smoke. Sometimes, when one of the employees would take their TV dinner out of the freezer and give it a zap, the husky smell of Salisbury steak or macaroni and cheese would fill the air. But without the respite of an open window, it would only take a few ticks of time before the place again reeked of the grey ash and discarded filters at the center of the Formica.

When Cedric was off-the-clock, he came here and sat with his eyes closed in the dim light. With some of the first returns in his pocket, he’d purchased an off-brand Walkman and liberated his collection of tapes from languishing in an old shoe box. This became his daily habit. He’d make nice if someone entered the room, but as soon as they’d leave, he’d turn his eyes to the minute hand and calculate how long he had left before he was required to return to the front. Maybe he’d make it to side B, or maybe he’d start there instead, a little change of pace. But they always seemed to interrupt him at the best part.

Today was no different.

“Hey, Kenyon. How’s it hanging?”

Cedric pressed pause on his cassette player and removed the headphones from his ears, letting them dangle as a torc about his neck.

He looked at Zed. “Nothing much. Do you need me?”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Zed replied. “It’s quiet today. Enjoy your break.”

Cedric watched as the man, tall and lanky, topped with a tangle of medium-brown hair, opened the door to the fridge and bent down to investigate what had been left inside.

“No one buys vegetables so they’re going bad, tomorrow’s shipment’s gonna be half what we need; the usual shit.”

Head still immersed in the cold air, he spoke to Cedric while twisting his neck to the side.

“Just wondering if you’re doing anything tonight.” Zed shoved the door shut and the compressor started with a spasm.

Cedric unconsciously tightened his grip on the Walkman. Usually, if he worked the early shift, he would sit in the library until it closed. The air conditioning was a welcome comfort in the uncertain early autumn. But if he responded to this summons, that wouldn’t be an option. He wasn’t particularly fond of disturbing the habits he’d developed over the past few months. And he wasn’t particularly fond of Zed.

But sometimes, he thought he was lonely. Other times, he thought he enjoyed the silence. But abject refusal was not something he’d yet practiced much.

“No, not really,” he admitted.

“Right on,” Zed replied, shifting his weight over his feet. “Come over to my place and hang out for a bit. Meet my girl. She’s a great cook.”

The other cashier came on the loudspeaker and summoned the manager to the front of the store. Zed uttered a grunt of irritation and made his way toward the door of the breakroom.

But he was not done talking.

“Cool, we’re on. See you in a few.”

Zed’s apartment was not far from Sullivan’s. At the conclusion of their shift, with no one else in the store, Cedric left out the back and followed his boss, glancing from side to side in the near moonlight. By the time Zed had finished his cigarette, the two arrived at a narrow brick house that shared its walls with a whole row of other narrow brick houses. These kind of homes were common in this area of Newburgh, and their close proximity allowed the denizens easy access to downtown. For those whose circumstance precluded them from a mortgage, these buildings filled the gap.

One key on the ring opened the front door, and another opened his private sanctuary. Zed lived on the first floor.

“It’s not glamorous, but it’s home,” he prefaced as the metal door creaked open, seeming downright impersonal in its attempt at ultimate security. “I think Gloria’s making chicken. You like chicken?”

But Cedric knew it was more a statement than a question.

As he entered the trim abode, the first thing he noticed was an enormous piece of exotic glassware towering nearly two feet tall atop a coffee table.

Cedric was reminded of an Erlenmeyer flask.

Inside the reservoir were several inches of murky water, into which a narrow stem was submerged. A gradient of chunky residue rose on the inside of its neck. Looking at the strange thing, Cedric heard Zed engage the deadbolt on the door.

Just beyond the table lay a black leather couch and, to the other side, presumably the intended focal-point of the room, a colossal flat-screen television.

“What do you think? Ain’t she a beaut?” He declared, stepping into the room and removing his apron. “Mitsubishi. Fifty inches. You ever seen anything like it?”

Cedric surveyed his surroundings, cognizant of the fading blueish-green walls, rather bare with few hanging pictures. The carpet was dingy with the filth of ages. “It’s nice.”

A woman strode out of the kitchen cut several yards to the side.

“Hey Zed, who’s your friend?” She had dark blonde hair, long, framing a rather gaunt set of cheeks. Pretty, Cedric thought reflexively, or something like it, but she wore too much makeup and her cheeks shone like painted plastic.

“This is Cedric, my buddy from Sullivan’s. Good kid. Works hard.” Zed noisily flopped his keys upon a table in the entry and covered them with the crumpled apron.

“Nice to meet you, Cedric. You like chicken?”

Cedric was taking off his shoes. “Yeah, I eat chicken.”

“Come have a seat, Ced. Take a load off. What’s mine is yours.” Zed walked over and collapsed into the understuffed leather for a moment, watching his guest, and then sat forward with a sudden rush of energy.

He opened a drawer concealed beneath the surface of the table as Cedric settled down on the couch. He realized, watching silently, that Zed wore the same face at work that he did at home. That irrepressible energy wasn’t an affectation of the apron or the hat. He was always trying to sell something.

Zed removed a rectangular wooden box and a squat silver cylinder from the unseen drawer and placed them on the glass table. He opened the hinged lid of the box to remove several more items, including a red Bic.

“You want some of this?” He pulled a cluster of green buds from a Ziploc and loaded them into the grinder. “My guy got some good skunk this week. Primo homegrown.”

He reassembled the device and twisted the silver lid back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“Uh, I don’t usually…” Cedric watched as the man dumped the crushed flower on a small piece of folded notebook paper, took a pinch between his fingers, and loaded the bowl of the water pipe. Now done packing the hit, he gripped the neck to bring the thing over the edge of the table. It was huge, unwieldy, and impossible to hide.

Zed put his mouth to the opening of the tube, held the lighter to the green, and simultaneously started the fire while inhaling, sending the sound of bubbling water through the room. Cedric tried not to stare as the man brought the vapor into his lungs, moved the glass away from his mouth, and held himself still for several seconds, perhaps the only time Cedric had ever seen the man cease motion.

He soon relented and white smoke poured from his mouth, Zed’s voice somewhat muffled as the remaining exhaust dissolved into the air. “I know bong’s a little dirty; needs a cleaning, but she hits like a truck.”

Zed set the piece down on the table, the interaction between glass and glass almost loud enough to cause alarm. “Let me know if you change your mind. Don’t wanna be a Scrooge.”

He picked up a remote control from the arm of the couch and turned on the television. He flipped channels until he found The Simpsons. Cedric looked at the enormous screen, then back at the wisp of smoke rising from the exhausted bowl, and then to nothing in particular.

Zed’s girlfriend called from the other side of the apartment, “Dinner’s almost ready, boys!”

The two watched the yellow people loom over them, larger than life. Cedric had never seen such a gigantic television set, and certainly not in someone’s house. And at the volume Zed had set, he almost believed he was in a theater.

Except, of course, for a few key differences.

“You like cream corn, Cedric? Rice pilaf? It’s the San Francisco treat!” Gloria yelled from the kitchen.

Cans, boxes, jingles —

“Yeah, thanks, sounds good.”

Zed packed a second sticky payload into the blackened bowl while Cedric felt the pull of the blaring transmission.

“So where’d your mom get a name like ‘Cedric’, huh? Never heard of that one,” he said to the flick of the lighter.

Cedric could hear the flame sizzle as it set the tarry plant matter alight. His heart stuttered. “It’s… uh—”

“A character in a book.” He paused, and clarified. “Little Lor—”

Zed interrupted as soon as thought rose to his mind, coughing as the exhalation spread into the room. “Guess I don’t have much room to talk. My peacenik parents didn’t leave me with much better.”

“What kind of stupid-ass name is ‘Zephyr’?” He asked with derision. “Haven’t seen those fuckin’ phonies for a few years now. Good riddance. Assholes.”

The voices on the television kept droning on.

“Started having people call me ‘Zed’ when I was ten or eleven or whatever. I got the idea when we learned how to say the alphabet in French. You know any French?”

Cedric shrugged. “I took a few years.”

“I liked how they ended it,” Zed replied. With a broken affect, he recited the last three letters of the alphabet. “Eeks, Ee-grekk, Zed.”

“Zed.” He repeated. “Just kinda stuck with me.”

Gloria came out of the kitchen with two plates of food and set them before the men on the low table.

“Hell of a lot better than ‘Zephyr’.”

His girlfriend spoke rapidly to Cedric, ignoring Zed’s chosen topic. “I’ll get you a fork; hey, you’re cool, yeah? I made brownies last night, you want one? They’re alright. Not my best, but they’re alright. Double chocolate.”

Cedric didn’t quite know what to say. Zed interjected, abandoning his personal anecdote.

“Gloria makes good stuff. You know, you can’t just throw the leaf into the box mix and call it a day. That’s a rookie mistake. You gotta cook it in the butter. That’s how you do it. Coconut oil works too ‘cause you can drain it but Gloria says the butter tastes better.”

She smiled and did a little curtsey.

Zed continued to pontificate. “Of course you could use kief, but not everyone can foot that kind of—”

But Cedric was hardly listening. He thought back to what Zed had made of his name, and wondered if he’d made a terrible mistake. Wondered if no one would ever understand. Wondered if they’d always miss the point.

“Yeah, sure,” he stammered at the offer. “I’ll try one.”

Cedric sat there as Gloria brought him a utensil for the food. And as he ate dessert before the main course, he looked about himself in that blue room and wondered how much time needed to pass before he could leave and get the fuck out of here.

When he would finally leave and get himself outside on the darkened street, he’d start his cassette at the beginning, and maybe he’d get through one side before he got back to Betty’s house. Maybe both if he walked slowly. Soon, he’d be back in his room. Back to the quiet. Lock the door.

The TV continued to talk but the room was otherwise silent as they processed the meal.

Gloria, having chosen to eat alone in the kitchen, all but disappeared after their plates were cleared. Zed leaned back against the cushions and Cedric, now acclimated to the pungent odor, wondered when he was. As the boy ahead of him delivered one of his many catchphrases, Cedric was sure he felt nothing, nothing at all.

“Eat my shorts.”

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Cedric found himself in near-total darkness, and yet, everything was known to him. Somewhere, in the most rudimentary of his neural programming, he knew he was in a dream.

But he could not will himself out of this place. That essential function was forbidden to him. He had been in many dreams before, and he was familiar with the law. This realm of senseless sensation formed his prison, a prison that felt anything but temporary or imaginary.

He was on the sidewalk that formed a barrier around the graveyard. Though he had not walked into the enclosure — he had been stopped from doing so — the memory of this place was intense, having been written in his mind just the day before.

There seemed, however, to be things missing, things that had been there yesterday.

There was not a single vehicle parked on the edge of the road. Across the street, he expected to see shops and houses, like the very one he’d entered last night — but his gaze could not penetrate the shadow.

Why was it so dark?

He could not count the things missing any more than one could put measure to the immeasurable. If it were absent, he concluded, it must have been unnecessary to paint. Perhaps there was a reason these things had been omitted. Maybe they weren’t important.

Except—

The Sun. It didn’t appear in the sky, but something somewhere must have been creating this violet-blue haze in the air above, regardless of whether its rays directly pierced his vision. Even the Moon, as white as it appeared in a cloudless night, did not create its own light. Only the stars did that —

But maybe it was the Moon — she who would not smite your eye for looking upon her —

[Noise.]

It rose from all directions, but he knew from whence it came. Here, he knew all. This is what he’d heard before he entered the domain of the slumbering dead.

[Hate.]

Anger swelled within him as he heard the engine shriek, heeding its master’s command. He yearned to shatter each component, vaporize the metal, dash the atoms into chaos.

[Closer.]

The machinery grew louder and the sound rattled his chest. Blood pushed against veins and sweat soaked his skin.

[Pain!]

Cedric remembered himself and looked toward the car but it was too late.

‘Move, stupid!’

Cedric’s eyes opened. The scene was still yellowy-white, but there were no headlights glaring at him. Instead, a demure pattern of pale cornflowers graced the walls and gauzy curtains fluttered on the wind.

‘Betty’s house. My—’

He looked toward the door.

“My room.”

He blinked and raised his hand to remove sand from his eyes.

It had felt strange to lock the door to the bedroom last evening — he had never before been granted such a luxury — but he had slept well. Admittedly it had taken a while for him to fall into slumber, as it always did, but if he’d been dreaming, he reasoned, he must have been asleep, really asleep.

He pressed his fingers to his forehead in an attempt to soothe the tension in his brow. His attachment to reality still felt tenuous.

‘Just a nightmare…’

Cedric looked toward the red numbers on the clock radio. There were four of them and his heart leapt in his chest.

“Shit, it’s late.”

Betty had promised him breakfast, but he wasn’t sure she’d intended to serve so close to lunchtime. Presumably, his moment of opportunity had passed.

‘Snooze, you lose.’

He had showered and shaved after dinner last night, so all he needed to do this morning was change his clothes and maybe brush his teeth, but he figured before he did that, he’d check out the food situation, just in case.

Cedric dug some clothes out of his duffel bag and threw them on. They were deeply wrinkled, but he tried to ignore it; there was little need to dress to the nines to make an appearance at the library.

A small mirror hung on the wall next to the door. He looked into his reflection, disgusted that sleeping on wet hair had exaggerated a cowlick on the right side of his head.

He fluffed his tawny hair with his fingers, and, finding the effort fruitless, he grimaced at himself.

Cedric locked the door and slipped the key into his pocket. The bathroom was unoccupied so he stopped in, splashed some water on his face, and readied himself to face the morning. What little was left of it, he mused.

The stairs were covered with a dark carpet runner, slightly discolored and pressed flat in the center. The fabric dampened his steps but sent the wood creaking as he progressed downward, soon reaching the landing.

He looked into the living room. Dust motes danced luminescent in the still air.

“Betty?”

But there was neither sight nor sound of the woman. In her stead, a patchwork cat slept in one of the overstuffed chairs. Cedric saw that the black fur was dappled here and there with fields of white, something he’d failed to notice yesterday.

“Oh. Hello, cat.”

The cat slowly unfurled itself, stretched its chest luxuriously, and lifted its head to lock a pair of sleepy eyes with Cedric. The feline, too, had bright green orbs, shining like gemstones against the dark fur.

“What’s your name again? Michelle?”

The cat yawned lazily, showing off its bright pink tongue and wicked teeth, but was otherwise silent.

Cedric maintained a courteous distance and the two stared at each other for several long seconds.

“Well, cat, let your mom know I went out. See ya later.”

Cedric had thrown away his old library card before leaving for Newburgh. It had been difficult for him to do; the little white rectangle, messily laminated, had been a dear friend of his since he’d been small. He’d kept it safe through many years, relocating it at some point from its original home in a Velcro billfold to the black leather wallet he now kept on a chain in his back pocket. There it had stayed for some time —

Until the day had come that he needed to be rid of it. For months, he’d been combing through his every day life, tying up loose ends in preparation to head east.

It wasn’t that he thought anyone would misuse the card, hardly — but in a child’s klutzy script, the thing bore his birthname. Having it on his person would be a smoking gun.

He’d paused for a moment, and looked at his embarrassing penmanship immutable beneath the clear plastic.

‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child...’

With scissor in hand, he snipped the card in half and deposited it directly into the outside garbage bin.

Betty had given Cedric directions to the local library last night while he had a mouth half-full of meatloaf.

“This is great, Mrs. Clark—” Cedric tried to maintain proper decorum and what he knew of fine table manners, but he hadn’t realized just how hungry he had let himself become.

“‘Betty’, please,” she reminded him. “Just… ‘Betty’.”

“Sorry—” He swallowed the food he’d been chewing.

“I don’t feel like a ‘Mrs.’ anymore. Not without Mr. Clark around.”

Cedric looked up from his plate and put his fork down. “What happened? Did he—”

He was desperate not to offend the woman. “Did he leave you?”

She paused and then spoke solemnly, her gaze caught on her guest’s dinner plate. “If only it were that way. My husband died. Many years ago.”

No one ever quite knew what to say in these situations, and Cedric was similarly ill-equipped. He stumbled through a response. “Was he… sick?”

Betty took in breath and spoke with purpose, as if she’d said these words a thousand times before. “He was sick off and on for a while, but we didn’t know it was serious. Just thought it was part of getting older. Once the doctors realized what was going on, it was too late. We got to make preparations and say our goodbyes, but…”

Her brown eyes peered into the void. “There wasn’t much time left, at the end. It all happened so suddenly.”

Cedric noticed a tinny scratching coming from the kitchen, and it took him some time to realize it was the cat at the back door.

Betty either didn’t notice, or ignored it. “Medicine has gotten a lot better. Better tests. Lots of treatments for people that we didn’t have back then.”

She tried to brighten the tone. “God rest him. I hope someday no one ever has to suffer like he did.”

Cedric wasn’t even sure exactly why his grandfather had died. Maybe smoking. Lung cancer? No one had ever talked to him about it.

“Yeah, I hope so too.”

Betty looked at him and smiled weakly. “Dear me, look; I’ve gone and spoiled your appetite.”

“Oh, no, not at all.” He picked up his fork. “It’s really very good. I’ve only ever had meatloaf with ketchup. I didn’t know you could make it like this. I like your version.”

“I don’t care for ketchup,” Betty said. “Too sweet.”

There was a lull in the conversation as Cedric continued to eat. The scratching continued to echo quietly through the room. Based on the tone, he surmised that there was a screen door outside the kitchen, maybe aluminum.

Almost finished, with just a spot of potatoes to the side of the plate, Cedric broke the silence.

“Is that, uh, your cat?”

Betty lifted her head, aligning her ears with the doorway. “Might be. I’ll fetch her in a moment.”

When Cedric reached the Newburgh Free Library, the Sun was high above him in a bright blue sky. The short walk had been peaceful, his mind wandering idly toward nothing in particular. He supposed it was pleasant to make his way like this; once he’d purchased the Cavalier, he’d driven near everywhere he needed to be.

The library, in contrast to the properties to either side, had a generous lawn of impeccable grass in front of the building. The structure was enormous — much wider than it was tall — and made of grey concrete. By the look of it, this couldn’t be the town’s original library, but then he estimated that it wasn’t too much younger than himself. A smidgen of shadow — fated to slide away as the day went on — cast a slight chill over the entrance.

Cedric opened the glass doors to the library and was pelted with a front of cold air, a bit more frigid, he thought, than the weather conditions truly demanded. The door fell back into place and in the entry, colorful signs flashed at him from every angle, advertising local events and services. It was, in every way, a typical, even — cheerful — gathering place for the local population.

As he left the hallway and stepped into the main chamber, he could not help but be stunned by the serene beauty of the establishment. There were hundreds of shelves packed with books, many more than any collection he’d ever seen before, but that was not what stuck out to him. The whole room was illuminated by gigantic windows looking out over the Hudson River. These portals provided enough light to read by, and not a single lightbulb could rival the brilliance.

Cedric wove through the tables set in the center of the room and approached the panels of glass. There was nothing quite like this where he’d come from. Yes, his hometown was too situated by a river, but the townsfolk had all but ignored that fact of its geography.

He peered out the windows. The proud river silently divided the land and marched south. Only very seldom did the water mix with air and give rise to a whitecap against the deep blue. Birds, few in number but nevertheless present, floated effortlessly on the calm wind high above the surface of the river. Cedric was very much impressed by the immense grandeur of the view and stood studying the scene for at least a minute.

His stomach growled, his body reminding him that he had needs more pressing than cerebral distraction. He pulled himself away from the window and looked back into the room.

He had just arrived, and perhaps to spite the nagging in his gut, he did not intend to leave just yet.

He looked at the countless rows of books.

What was it he was actually here to do? He was sure they would not grant him borrowing privileges; he had no residence here, no job, no nothing. As far as the librarians would be concerned, they might as well give the books away.

He knew they would not do that; he would have to use the reading room.

But what was he looking for?

Cedric wandered through the aisles, only half cognizant of the categories and topics that flanked his path. The titles washed over him as he noticed the steady progression of the Dewey decimals.

Maybe he was lost. He had no particular book in mind; he wasn’t even sure what he enjoyed anymore. When he had been small, he’d always been absorbed in a book. Sometimes he’d finished several in a week. He’d especially loved the realms of history and make-believe, where he could immerse himself in concerns so removed from the drudgery of modernity. Without directly understanding his prejudice, he assumed hot pockets and easy chairs did not nurture the hero.

But as he’d grown older, he’d found less and less time for the written word. He’d started working at fourteen, and having less time for leisure was part of the change, but it failed to completely explain the shift in his priorities.

Once he’d gotten it in his head that he was going to leave that place, school had seemed completely ancillary. For the first time in his education, he found himself neglecting to do the readings at all. Maybe he would skim the assignment in his car before the first bell, and maybe he wouldn’t. When asked to write responses to passages he hadn’t read, he scribbled whatever nonsense came to mind. Sometimes he felt shame when he realized how plainly ignorance showed through his vague answers, and then, after a while, he stopped caring. None of the accolades they could give would get him anything he actually needed. It just didn’t matter anymore.

Cedric wove through the shelves and out of the library, resolving to think about it while he solved the growing pit at the bottom of his stomach.

When Cedric had shared that he’d been formerly employed at a grocery store, Betty had suggested he head down to Broadway to investigate his prospects. She had mentioned something about the A&P, but then she’d quickly veered into an corollary, and he wasn’t sure what it was that he was looking for. He was sure that it was on Broadway, and it had changed hands at some point somewhat recently, but he had left uncertain about what he’d find, overwhelmed by the details.

He wasn’t exactly dressed to impress in his t-shirt and faded denim, but he figured he might as well make an inquiry; the cash he had on hand would dwindle rapidly without a source of replenishment. His mind churned imagining the hurdles that could lie ahead. He was loath to provide the phone number for his last job as a reference, but if he had no choice, he’d proceed as necessary. He hadn’t informed his last place of work that he’d changed his name, nor did he want his old identity to get mixed up with his new. But he needed a job, and if he needed to prove his credentials, he supposed he’d tell the tale. If they asked why he’d shed his old name, well —

He hoped it would not come to that.

A few clouds, with their cottony confidence, thought to mar the Sun’s dominance over the midday atmosphere. But Cedric continued to walk, admiring the quaint way in which little brick shops lined the wide street. It became apparent to him that these were the streets middle America had sought to emulate. Even now, the peak of prosperity long past, there was a charm here no facsimile could birth.

Every so often, a lofty clump of water vapor cast a shadow over the man with the pale brown hair, but he didn’t think to notice. He kept going forward.

Sullivan’s Market had operated out of its corner property on Broadway since the original O’Sullivan acquired the deed shortly after the Great War. For decades, he fostered a loyal clientele who were drawn in by his fair prices. He kept them coming back for his quality cuts of meat, never excessively oxidized by lingering too long behind the glass. And O’Sullivan, understanding the weight of an ounce of gold, never once put his finger on the scale. On the contrary, he ensured his customers always received a little more than what they paid for.

These days, however, the old man was long dead and the store was run by his descendants. Unlike the supermarket down the street, Sullivan’s had no parking lot. It was difficult to get the trolleys down the aging, narrow aisles and sometimes food sat on the shelves for weeks after the dates stamped on the packaging. On the wrong days of the week, the butchery stunk to high heaven.

But none of that kept people from coming.

Cedric stepped up and into the storefront, the tinkling of a bell announcing his arrival. An elderly couple, the man rather diminutive underneath his hunched posture, were together surveying an array of vegetables. Laid over a faint emission of soft rock was the unmistakable squealing of shopping carts scraping against the tile.

Now sheltered from the bright sunlight, Cedric’s eyes dilated and his pulse slowed. This was something he knew a little about.

The pain in his gut becoming ever more unbearable, he made his way to the deli counter. From a sturdy man in a white apron, he ordered a turkey sandwich, no cheese, and let his eyes wander over the selection of chips at the base of the display.

The Utz girl was printed over and over again in slightly different colorations, but with the same round eyes and red cheeks, always drawn near the first letter of the brand name. Without a nose on her little face, she was nearly swallowed up by her dark hair, cut in a girlish bob about her chin.

By the looks of the display, this was his only choice. He had no objection to trying a little of the local flavor.

Cedric took a bag of pretzels, accepted his sandwich from the butcher, and made his way to the front of the store. He’d skip the drink and save a buck by getting a glass of water from Betty’s sink.

At the front of the store, light creeping in between the advertisements covering the windows, Cedric put his items on the conveyer belt. The cashier tapped the numbers into her register and came up with a total.

“Hey, I noticed you have a ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the window,” Cedric began while removing his wallet. “Are you still hiring?”

The woman working the cash register looked tired, her eyes drooping as she turned her focus to Cedric.

“Yeah, I think so, but the manager’s not in today. Try tomorrow.” She looked back at her display. “That’ll be $3.75.”

Cedric handed her four dollar bills.

When Betty came back to the house that evening, Cedric told her of his prospects. But she seemed unimpressed.

“You didn’t make it to the Grand Union?” She asked, a tone of matriarchal judgment ringing through her voice. “I don’t bother with Sullivan’s. Produce is absolutely terrible.”

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Trees edged in from both sides and the highway seemed to narrow as Cedric continued on I-84. Newburgh had become the goal almost as if he’d thrown a dart at the wall. Weeks ago, in preparation for his journey, he’d poured through the atlases at the library. Though they’d been hopelessly out-of-date, the reference materials had served him well. The town of Newburgh would be right off the highway with easy access to cross the Hudson and approach New York City from the north. And if it didn’t work out, he could always pick up his bags and go somewhere else.

Soon after passing the airport, a roadcut rose on his right, exposing dark grey stone. A careful glance revealed much of the façade had been secured by a chain sheet.

Without fanfare, in the shade of the rocky cliff, he passed underneath the sign he’d been anticipating for months. Cedric followed the arrow, reduced his speed, and took exit 10 for the last city before the toll.

There was not much time to downshift, and he managed to make it to second gear only to have the stick resist settling into first. His eyes came off the road for a moment, and he tried again, this time successfully, and he then fully engaged the brake. With a red light in front of him, Cedric looked around, overpass on his left, and flipped up his turn signal.

As he turned right and entered the town, he was immediately struck by the impressive view of the open sky. The horizon had just begun to fade into pale yellow, foretelling the end of another day. A few trees decorated the periphery of the scene, but most had long ago been felled to make way for the roomy intersection. Black powerlines were suspended over his head, hung on the dead wood corpses.

A grim gas station idled on the left and several morose dwellings dotted the view ahead of him.

His heart thumped anxiously in his chest.

‘Is this it?’

If this were Newburgh, it felt disgustingly familiar. The destination had become so bright in his hopes he hadn’t even prepared for the tarnished reality of what lay beyond. He had yearned so tensely for escape that he hadn’t bothered to make plans for purgatory.

A sign indicated the direction of the library, town center, and an institution of higher learning. In his despair, he tried to focus the aimless fear suffocating his heart. His palms were sweaty upon the steering wheel, so he stretched his fingers and moved his right hand to rest on the gearshift. He waited for the light to turn and then made a wide left.

Mid-sized homes lined the road on either side. Sitting so close to the main road, they hardly possessed a royal easement, but there was still a vast moat between. And maybe, even after this journey, he wasn’t any closer to the drawbridge than he had been.

Driving the car had been the easy part — he’d dragged all his junk along with him.

Now again headed east, he could see the hills that rose over the other side of the river, though the water itself was obscured. As he drove, several streets cut off on the left side, bound for more of suburbia.

He continued, and a brick road appeared off to the right, curving around a central hill.

The road wasn’t yellow at all; this dark red brick was a stark contrast to the grey and black he’d been traveling on for the duration of his journey. He looked to either side. There was no visible signage posted, leaving the street’s name a mystery, but he persisted, thinking maybe this would approach the center of the old city. He remembered the arrows he’d seen in white, and hoped they’d keep their promise.

He proceeded forward. The brick had been redone in places, patched with asphalt, and the uneven edges sent shockwaves through the car.

The patchwork street formed a distinct boundary between two worlds. On the left, squat, modest houses fell into the descent toward the river. The grass was overgrown and speckled with dandelions in a variety of life-states. The right, on the other hand, looked down upon the others unconcerned, their own yards pristine, stone walls carefully mortared into place. Perhaps this was the property of the college the signs had told him to expect.

There was not a single person on the street, student or otherwise. It gave the whole place a deserted, eerie affect. Cedric supposed that classes were out for the summer, and yet, the image seemed incomplete.

He looked left again, and the buildings on the river side started to morph and grow as he progressed down the street. They were increasingly level with the terrain, aging into weathered multi-family homes, some hiding broken glass behind plywood. They had trim porches that might have in their prime shielded a wicker rocking chair from the rain, but today they sat empty, paint peeling to reveal discolored wood.

He turned his head again. The college to the right looked pretty enough, what little he could see from the road: a manicured knoll flanked with mature trees. Tame shrubbery grew here and there, making the whole thing rather picturesque. He had no doubt thousands of young people thought of this place as their home away from home.

Certainly Diana and her family had painted these places as something from a fairy tale. It would be utopia for someone like him, they’d promised: books as far as the eye could see, professors who would understand his plight, students who’d be his companions for the rest of his days. The time he would spend there would enrich him and change him into the man he was always meant to be.

Cedric had thought about it then, and as he drove on this brick road with the hill rising to his side, he remembered how his teachers had suggested the same idea for his future. Their eyes had been practically wet with tears as they reminisced fondly on the camaraderie and belonging they’d felt within those gates, wishing the same bliss for him.

He’d smiled and nodded and said he’d think about it.

He continued to drive down the narrow street. Where the college grounds ended, the right side of the street started to look more similar to the left. Five, six, seven steps made impressive entrances to tired brick townhomes, some painted, some left bare. Most were rather plain, but others had detailed ornamentation around the roof and windows, revealing their ancestry. Life here had once been quite different, he gleaned, before these windows had been boarded up.

Every so often there were clusters of plastic chairs quiet outside the homes. Children’s toys forgotten in the sun were ill-differentiated from the smattering of garbage that littered the grass in spots. Now a ways from the college, the street had taken on somber, neglected tone. He looked down for a moment at his faulty radio, then back to the road, where he progressed at a glacial pace. He glanced at his rearview mirror and found it empty.

‘Where the fuck am I going?’ He thought in doubt.

Feeling suddenly discouraged and frustrated, he peeled over to the right without even bothering to engage his signal. He quickly parked the car and turned it off, leaving the key in the ignition. The engine rumbled for a second and then fluttered into silence.

Cedric let out a sigh and flung his head backward against the seat.

‘What am I even doing here?’ He asked himself, overcome with desperation. ‘Am I going to sleep in the backseat?’

He sat there for a moment, eyes closed, listening to the scant intermittent noise from outside his car — little more than a lonely songbird.

‘Where are all the kids?’ He wondered idly. ‘Watching TV?’

He’d traveled hundreds of miles to wind up in another sad little city by the river. Only this one was called something different.

He opened his eyes and brought his chin back on the level. There was no point in getting waterlogged — He refused to turn back.

He looked to the right. Mismatched townhomes sharing walls made a strange garrison. Small businesses, or at least, what appeared as such, were barricaded with steel rolling grilles. Others had chosen to bar their windows.

First looking down, and then into his Cavalier, his eyes then traveled to the left and out the driver’s side window, toward a black metal fence and the graveyard it contained. Several wizened trees lent shade to those that slumbered agelessly beneath. The tombstones were disordered and mismatched, fashioned into weathered shapes that hearkened back to an age now long estranged. Some of the markers had begun to lean long ago, no modern man daring to correct their orientation.

He remembered to breathe.

‘Things could always be worse.’ He tried to reassure himself.

Cedric removed the key from the ignition and left the car.

Not even bothering to look both ways, Cedric took faith in the silence and crossed the street. Here, on the river’s side of the divide, stood a bastion against the march of time. He stopped on the sidewalk and let his gaze wander.

An iron fence marked the barrier, the bars adorned with some sort of quasi-religious ornamentation —

Every so often, the fence paused and restarted, a simple chasm allowing entry for visitors. Nothing could keep the living from passing through the gateways: no locks, no keys.

A quiet breeze rustled his short, brown hair.

‘Don’t these places usually close at sundown?’ He wondered, attempting to take refuge in the rule of law. He could not help but feel he did not belong here, and still he was tempted. He wanted to gather the courage to walk amongst the stones, to feel the serenity of the stillness, but —

Cedric took notice of the sky’s hue, the core of his attention still not torn from the tranquility of the slumbering dead. The blue threatened to fade into orange, and yet, the scene was still fully illuminated by the light of the Sun.

He’d been to a funeral, once, he supposed nearing a decade ago. The memory slipped from his grasp as he tried to recall the details, but he was sure it had happened: he had been there. There must have been so many words said on that day by the strangers in dark clothes, but all he could remember fully was the fistful of dirt he’d been instructed to hurl into the occupied grave. As Cedric traveled to that place in his mind, he could still feel the grit rough against his palm. He shuddered, remembering the guilt he’d suffered long afterward, ashamed that he’d inadvertently dropped stones upon the resting place of his kin. The clatter of the rocks had echoed noisily against the walls of exposed earth, and he had long searched over that moment, transfixed by the very wrongness of what he’d done.

How long had it taken for grass to grow again over the freshly turned soil? He had no way of knowing. No wreath at Christmas, no daffodils at Easter; he was sure that the funeral had been the final farewell. He wouldn’t even know how to locate the grave except in his fragmented memories. His mother would have had to have thrown him in the car and taken him to the cemetery on some day afterward, and he was sure that had never happened. Cedric recalled one of the only things his mother had ever said of the old man after he’d died:

‘He was better grandparent to you than he ever was a father to me.’

Cedric wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there looking into the graveyard when his thoughts were interrupted.

He could hear music — or at least, the impression of it — rapidly approaching his current position. The car frame surrounding the sound system rattled noisily, muffling what melody might have been recognizable and leaving only the rumbling of the bass to imply the presence of a song.

Irritated at the din smothering his moment of solitude, Cedric stood his ground until the car passed behind him. Turning his sight over his right shoulder, he watched as the car ignored any efforts of traffic control, making a turn without bothering to stop.

‘People think they can do whatever they want…’

But he quickly regretted allowing his anger to spike. Jealousy was a poison best not swallowed.

Even though he could no longer see the car, the soundwaves took several seconds to dissipate. Cedric’s gaze remained facing toward the noise until the air was once again still.

His tan Cavalier sat quiet, waiting patiently across the street. It, too, had been disturbed by the intrusion, but refused to frown. The vehicle had made few complaints despite the demands that he had forced it to bear.

Cedric looked up past the roof of his car and noticed a plain sign hanging in the window of one of the townhomes on the other side of the street.

Cedric looked up at the townhome. The brick was so faded the uninitiated might have said it ceased to be red. Next to the door, three windows jutted out from the façade, forming a bay window to allow light to filter into the house. Ivory curtains hung gossamer inside the glass and a craftsman’s sticker had been left forgotten in the corner of the pane.

He propelled himself up the steps, five or so, and rose until he was level with the front entrance, a double door in dark wood.

He knocked — and waited.

In his uncertainty, he looked again at the sign in the window. Although it was now set at an oblique angle, it confirmed what he had been promised. He only hoped someone else hadn’t arrived first.

The distinct scraping of metal on metal echoed through the door, and from the center, it opened.

Cedric looked toward the door but his attention was immediately drawn downward as a dark shadow rushed from the chasm, sweeping dangerously close to his ankle, down the steps, and then sharp to the left.

“Nichelle…!” The woman at the door called after the cat.

Cedric looked away from the bolt of fur, up and toward the voice. The one to whom it belonged bore a weathered face, wrinkles creasing her forehead and the corners of her mouth. The mass of soft curls atop her head suggested a woman who had escaped the frenetic insecurity of youth, but was hardly ancient. She was sturdy, well-fed, and perhaps somewhat sedentary. Her eyes were slightly distorted through large, clumsy eyeglasses, the frame partially transparent and pale pink.

“Can I help you?” She might have raised an eyebrow to intensify her query, but the truth was obscured by the enormous spectacles.

Cedric tried to correct his posture, all of a sudden present for an interview. “Yeah, um—”

He spied the window in his peripheral vision, regaining his focus. “I’m here about the room.”

He felt her scrutinizing gaze wash over his scruffy face and threadbare clothing.

“That is—” he tried to negotiate, “If it’s still available.”

She looked at him with intensity, leaving several seconds of quiet air between them. Then, her mouth twitched to signal the end of her preliminary consideration and she stepped back from the entrance.

“Come on in.”

The house had the overwhelming scent of dinner, but it wasn’t at all unpleasant. The smell of roasting meat dominated the profile, but he also noticed bright accents of herbs and spices. He realized, his stomach reacting to the aroma without his consent, that he needed food.

“Take your sneakers off in the house, if you would. Carpets don’t clean themselves.”

Cedric noticed she already wore a pair of light brown slippers. He obliged and removed his old tennis shoes, leaving them next to a pile of assorted footwear in the hallway. All of them, some three or four pair, were in women’s styles.

He was still in the foyer when she spoke from the first room off the entrance to the right.

“So, what’s your name? What brings you to Newburgh?”

He poked his head in the doorway, finding a small but tidy room somewhat out of time. In the amber glow of incandescent bulbs, the modern essentials were all present; a large television, a modern stereo system — but so too were several wing-back chairs, a record player next to a heavy shelf, and a polished curio cabinet filled with knick-knacks.

“I’m—”

He felt a little sheepish, the past year’s events all flooding back to him.

“I’m Cedric.” He tried to pick his words carefully. “I’m looking for a new job for the summer.”

Her face flashed in skepticism.

“In Newburgh? Who told you to come here?”

Cedric felt shame rising to his face.

“No one, uh — told me to come here. I —”

He struggled to maintain eye contact.

“I found it on a map.”

She laughed a little. “I don’t know what map you were using, but Newburgh isn’t exactly the best place to find work. You’re a couple decades too late.”

Cedric didn’t say anything.

“Are you a college student? Are you hoping to make your way into the city?”

He opened his mouth but fumbled for words.

“You know what,” she retreated. “It really doesn’t matter.”

She moved to the other side of the room and sat down at an antique desk. She pulled a sheaf of paper from a drawer and began to speak while shuffling through the packet.

“Listen, room’s eighty a week. Cash. Today’s Tuesday, so rent will be due up front every Tuesday.”

She took out a pen and began to scrawl on the paper.

“Not too many rules, but what’s there I expect you to hold to. No smoking, no loud music. I don’t care if you have a drink or two but don’t get rowdy. Laundry — I’ll do your laundry if you want, or there’s a laundromat down the street. Just let me know. Keep your bed clean. No shoes in the house.”

She turned to him.

“Can I see your I.D.?”

Cedric looked at her and placed his hand on his wallet, all too cognizant how suspicious his reticence must have appeared.

“I don’t intend to keep it,” she reasoned with him, “I just want to make sure you are who you say you are.”

“Oh, uh — yeah, sure.” Cedric took the wallet from his pocket and removed his driver’s license, looking at it for a moment before handing it to her.

She set the card on the desk and began to copy numbers on an index card.

“This address any good?”

Cedric swallowed the spit pooling in his mouth. “…Any good?”

She turned back to him, adjusting her glasses. “I’m not going to send you the National Geographic or anything, I just want to know who to contact if anything happens to you. Address, phone number—”

“Oh.” Cedric uttered anxiously. “Y-yeah, that address is fine. It’s my aunt’s place. I moved there after my mom died.”

She turned back to her paperwork and wrote the address on the card.

“I suppose I never introduced myself.” She finished writing and put the pen on the tabletop. She turned back to him, still sitting, and handed the card to him.

“I’m Betty. Betty Clark. ‘Betty’ is fine.”

Cedric tried to seem normal, slipping the card into his pocket. “Nice to meet you Betty.”

Her face softened, her eyes seeming to have a little gleam behind the thick lenses. “Nice to meet you too, Cedric.”

She turned back to her papers, shuffling through them and showing him what they contained. “This is a copy of the rules and your responsibilities. Pay your rent on Tuesdays and don’t make a nuisance of yourself. But you’ll have a copy you can read over at your leisure.”

She flipped the page.

“If you’ll just give me your John Hancock here, we’ll be done with the formalities. Well, that, and the eighty dollars of course.”

Cedric looked at the sheet of paper, toward the blank space intended for his signature. Absentmindedly, he moved his hand to his wallet, moving his gaze back to Betty for a moment, and then back into the void as he opened the billfold.

“Yeah, of course.” He peered into his wallet and removed four twenty-dollar bills, each in varying degrees of degradation.

Betty took the bills and slipped them into the right side of her housecoat. She looked at him.

“You want to sit down?”

Without waiting for his response, she vacated the seat and handed him the pen, a Bic in blue.

He took the pen and sat on the plain, wooden chair. He looked at the Xerox before him, somewhat speckled from successive iterations of copying.

Cedric steadied himself, his pulse relaxing as the signature unfolded beneath the pen’s nib. He thought of Diana on the tree swing outside her house as he drew the letters.

‘Cedric…’

’…Kenyon.’

And like that, the name lay before him in ink. He looked at it a moment before Betty picked up the paper, ripped off the front sheet, and handed it to him.

“Feel free to take your stuff upstairs. Door’s unlocked right now but I’ll get you your keys. Room’s the first door on the right as you go up the stairs, across from the bathroom.”

He didn’t know what to say, but she filled the cold silence.

“D’you have dinner yet? Would you like me to fix you a plate?”

Cedric looked at Betty.

“Yeah Mrs. Clark — Betty — Thank you. That would be great.”

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“Fuck this fucking piece of shit!” Cedric cursed, slamming his fist on the dash.

The radio had never worked well. In a Wal-Mart parking lot, some year, year-and-a-half ago, the car’s previous owner had hesitated a moment before tuning the knobs, hoping to avoid the inevitable demonstration.

Static. More of it. And then, success — shortly before it again emitted fuzz.

The man had turned back and offered a greasy smile. “Look at the clouds! Can’t help that. Kid like you’se gonna put in an after-market anyway, right? Whatd’ya need the radio for?”

He brought down his price and Cedric forked over $900.

The subsequent degradation had been gradual, the audio system eventually getting so fussy and inconsistent that even in the best of weather he didn’t bother with FM. Talk was good enough; better than silence.

Cedric eyed a passing mile-marker. He was over halfway now, and he wanted to be in Newburgh by sundown. He had been in Pennsylvania since last night and despite his impatience, he knew it would not last forever. He just had to keep going.

He’d spent the night in a roadside motel. It had been modest at best, but it had given him a chance to rest and catch his breath. Once he had room keys, he’d fallen, exhausted, on the too-firm mattress, and put up his feet. For a half-hour he’d flipped around the television, and, finding nothing of interest, eventually took a lukewarm shower.

He’d slept well, all things considered, and continued on his way early the next morning. The complimentary coffee offered at the desk had been sour. But by the time lunch rolled around, his mind was elsewhere.

The needle on the dash shook and rotated to the right as the engine rumbled audibly, struggling to maintain speed. But he hadn’t touched the shifter.

The radio was whispering, so he struck the dash.

“—WHP 580 AM, Harrisburg’s news, talk, and sports leader. It’s 3:31 PM on Tuesday, June 23rd—”

Cedric returned his right hand to the steering wheel, cautious of a neighboring car deviating rather dangerously from its lane. Driving had become old hat, but he wasn’t used to such long stretches of time, and the voice began to chatter in fragments —

“—mob boss— (…) —day in federal court— (…) —51-year-old Gambino family crime leader, once dubbed—”

The static made the report nigh unintelligible. Cedric veered away from the offending car but attempted to stay carefully within the lines.

“—racketeering, extortion, jury tampering, obstruction of—”

He gently steered the car to avoid the intrusion and continued on, depressing the accelerator.

“—tax evasion, murder—”

Cedric flipped up the sunshade.

“—wore a proud face as he stared down the end of—”

The radio transmission struggled for a few seconds, threatening to fade, and then the voice was completely drowned by crackling nonsense.

Cedric shook his head, exasperated, and returned his eyes to the road.

The weather was clear and the progression had been steady. His old atlas and several free maps he’d picked up along the way cluttered the passenger seat. His bags, numbering just two, had been banished to the back seat. He’d stowed a few small boxes in the trunk, still skeptical they had been worth the effort.

He had a decent idea of where he was going, having researched the route. The signs consistently reassured him that he was proceeding in the right direction. And yet, he found himself checking and re-checking the map every time he made a pit stop. Something in him compelled him to step back, to think again, to — doubt. This all had been too easy. Just one misplaced step and it could blow up in his face.

Last night, as he tried to collapse into a borrowed pillow, he’d been convinced someone was going to burst through the barrier and end this little excursion. They’d kick the door open, clamp the cuffs on his wrists, and take him back to where he’d come from. Maybe they’d deliver some pithy one liner to really seal the deal.

‘This ends here.’

But he hadn’t broken a single law, …had he?

The two lanes were congested. Despite the Cavalier occasionally rebelling against his commands, he tried to get in front of the trucks, hating to be stuck in their shadow. But it was futile; where there was one, there would be another. And though he hadn’t counted many cops or troopers, he didn’t want to get caught speeding, not now when he needed so desperately to pass unnoticed. Some daredevils would tempt their fate, but that was their decision. He would not.

Without the radio, his thoughts raced. He wondered what was going on back home. He knew these anxieties served him no purpose and yet he could not resist their siren song. Had his mother yet realized that he hadn’t come home last night? When day had broken and he had not come to her beck and call, perhaps she would have assumed he was at work for the day. She shouldn’t have any reason to think otherwise; he had long since ceased sharing with her the specifics of his engagements. But when he would not return for a second night in a row —

It was only a matter of time until she would go looking for him.

She would have to tidy up, make herself presentable, if she were to leave the house. She would procrastinate about doing that, telling herself she was making a big deal about nothing, and that the boy would return home soon enough. He was a flighty, disobedient teenager and that’s just the way they were — No respect. His clothes were here, his bed was here, and his beloved boom box still sat on the dresser. He wouldn’t leave home without that.

…Would he?

After several days, she might get antsy and confused. She might even get —

Lonely.

Cedric felt his heart sink. He could not ease the tension in his legs; he had to keep driving. He knew these projections and models did not serve him, and yet nothing else that presently floated at the periphery of his consciousness was loud enough to distract him from trying to predict the future. Old habits die hard.

He kept on, anxiously keeping a safe berth from the tractor-trailers.

Her laziness and disbelief would only last so long. He knew there would come a day when she would do something. Something over which he would no longer have any control or influence. And by then, she would be angry — very angry.

She would not like to go to Diana’s house but perhaps she would start there. She did not like their new cars or their smarmy attitudes or their fancy bottles of red wine or their ironed napkins. She did not like the pretty little photographs on the mantel or the stench of their flowery name-brand candles. She did not like how they always smiled with their pretty little teeth and asked how she was doing and mentioned the stupid weather and wasted time with saying she had such a pleasant son who always volunteered to cut the grass or take out the garbage or shovel the snow or salt the walk or whatever other stupid shit he offered to do.

But most of all, she did not like the way they made her feel.

She might wait a while, hating even the mere thought of those wretched people. If she avoided it long enough, she might think, maybe it would go away.

But it wouldn’t go away.

Eventually, that anger would drive her to their house.

They would say they had no knowledge of her son’s whereabouts, that they hadn’t heard a word, didn’t know a thing. Perhaps Diana would be there too, home for the summer, hiding behind her parents in the wood-trimmed foyer and looking guilty as sin, hoping that the woman who burned red-hot in fury would not see into her telling eyes. Diana’s mother would attempt to shield her daughter from that rage, offering platitudes and sympathy to the woman on the welcome mat.

To no avail.

His mother would notice quickly that they made no offer to assist in locating the boy. Have you called his work, they might ask. Perhaps his car broke down, have you driven around town; did he leave a note?

Bullshit.

It would be all too obvious: they knew something she did not. Something he had concealed from her. But not from them.

Cedric adjusted his acceleration and straightened his left leg, trying to quiet the thoughts and keep fear at bay. But just the thought of his mother — her snarling face leering over his mind’s eye — the knowledge that humiliation would consume her, cause her to stampede about in a berserk frenzy, in turn consumed him, becoming his curse.

She would have to let herself sober up before she could present herself downtown to file a missing person’s report. And then she’d be in withdrawal. She wouldn’t feel at all herself. She would fear running into that fat pig with whom she’d had an altercation several years back, so she wouldn’t go right away to the station. Maybe she would have a cigarette or two or three to try to calm down before going out, but she would overdo it and get shaky and irritable.

That would make her even more angry.

Cedric hoped she wouldn’t even bother. Maybe she would just give up.

He hadn’t brought much with him. Packing his belongings had been a task he’d dreaded for months, and yet, when the time came to actually do it, as if propelled by force, it had simply happened. His old t-shirts, a couple pairs of jeans, underwear, socks, all of that. Just enough to get him through. He’d have to find a laundromat eventually; he’d dug some of these things out of the pile. But he didn’t need to wash the stuff just yet. Who gave a damn whether he smelt like roses and fresh linen?

On that day, his mother had been watching a talk show. It had droned on with the sound bites and theme songs he’d heard a hundred times, now imprinted in his mind against his will. Awash in that panacea, she probably hadn’t heard the sounds from the other side of the house: zippers noisily announcing themselves, dresser drawers scraping open and closed, clothes fluttering into place. He’d left the stereo muted — somewhat suspicious if she’d thought to notice — so he would be aware of the commercial breaks in the living room. That would be the only time she might rise from the chair. If her footsteps came thump thump thump down the hallway, then he could quickly stuff the bags underneath the bed before she opened the door. It wasn’t a glamorous plan, but it was a plan.

But it hadn’t happened that way.

No, she’d been just as engrossed in the television as she usually was, one of her few sources of comfort in an increasingly uncomfortable world. She’d left him completely alone yesterday afternoon while he prepared to leave. She had instead kept company with her beloved boob tube, oblivious to what transpired beyond her walls.

The absolute essentials had been simple enough. After the clothes, he packed a few razors, shaving cream, soap, a toothbrush, toothpaste — these auxiliary things fit into the side pockets and left room to spare.

He looked about his room.

He had a few posters that had long been friends in his solitude, but they seemed so safe and secure in their current positions, tacked up with mismatching pins. It would take effort to remove them from the walls and he expected they wouldn’t make it to their destination intact; even rolled up, they would likely get crushed or bent amidst the jostling contents of the Cavalier. And if his mother came wandering down the hallway toward his room, well — he could stuff the bags in the closet, but the bare walls would be a dead giveaway.

Maybe it was just an excuse. And yet, he felt a refusal to remove these images. He mourned the prospect of leaving them behind, feeling a bit of an ingrate to their years of service, but all-the-same he could not bear the thought of their fate once untacked. He would have to leave them.

The books he owned outright were few and nothing special; their text could be retrieved again from any library in the country. He’d read and reread them many times before but he did not want to read them now. No, it all seemed distant, esoteric, fantastic. Stuffing these tomes into his bag would just make weight and bulk he could do without. Several comic books he’d been holding on to for more than a decade begged attention, and yet, they too seemed childish and irrelevant. He hadn’t opened them in years. The art was exaggerated and the dialogue was cheesy. They had meant something to him once, taken him to places he hadn’t been able to imagine on his own, but those memories seemed to dissolve into dust as soon as he tried to grasp at the tendrils.

He’d never had many toys, and even fewer of them remained here on display as he neared the end of adolescence. A Rubik’s cube, a hand-me-down G.I. Joe, some Matchbox cars — surely there had been more than just those things — where had the green army men got to?

Maybe it was all packed away in the garage or hidden in the crawlspace. Maybe the stuff had been sold or given away to some other little child while he’d been tucked away at school. He didn’t know any more. He just knew he’d never have another moment in this room. What he left behind today was gone for good.

He heard the television blare on the other side of the house.

Looking around his sparsely decorated bedroom, iterating over every detail, he desperately wanted to be done with this. The empty space at the top of the open duffel nagged at him, hinting at his future regrets. It would be cruel to leave them to this bleak fate. He could always chuck them out later if he took too much. But he wouldn’t have that luxury if he didn’t take the opportunity right now.

He’d put his mixtapes in the car days ago. That was done. The rest of his music collection, as paltry as it was, would come with him too, stowed away for the day when he acquired a device that could play them. If he had no option, he could always sell the cassettes.

The whole process was becoming unbearable. He knew he would miss something and lament having surrendered what he could never get back. But what was it? His heart pounded, sweat dampened his shirt. He listened for any cause for alarm. He didn’t even know what she was watching. Something bright, something loud. It must be Monday, so maybe it was Oprah, or maybe Roseanne, and he realized he wasn’t even sure what time it was—

Listening to a voice that ignored these fears, Cedric reached into the bookshelf, past the weathered paperbacks he had already abandoned, and retrieved a small plastic man with blond hair standing about four inches tall. Something about that black uniform had spoken to him on the big screen all those years ago. That man, that quest: Perhaps it was not so far, far away as it seemed.

Cedric slipped a fistful of marbles and a couple of dice into his pocket and considered the task complete.

Crossing the Delaware was not as glorious as it might have been for others in the past. Cedric drove steadily over the bridge, trying to keep his eyes from straying too far to the right. There was a wall there, a protective barrier, and as long as he kept his hands on the wheel, he’d keep going on this trajectory, straight and narrow, east as far as the eye could see. Yes, it was possible for him to lose focus and careen off into the open air, and the fear taunted him, as it always did. But he tried to remember:

‘Not today.’

He passed safely over the river and read a plain sign.

The sun was behind him and the sky was still bright. He could keep going, he thought, and certainly it followed his usual inclination to keep hurtling on, barely breathing and completely spent by the time he crossed the finish line. He looked down at an indicator on the dashboard.

‘Half a tank.’

He didn’t have to stop, he could keep going. He could get gas later. He didn’t need it now. Purely optional.

But his right ankle was stiff. Or maybe it was his knee, he could barely tell. Too long on the gas. Up down up down faster slower faster. He thought maybe he should stand up and stretch and get a little fresh air. Fill up. Take a piss.

Maybe get a new map.

Still proceeding at a good clip, Cedric drove for only a moment before Exit 1 for Port Jervis forked off to the right. He let off the accelerator, switched into a lower gear, and left the highway.

Driving through town always highlighted the issues with his old Cavalier. Getting into first gear was a persistent difficulty and required him to fiddle with the mechanism to jimmy it into just the right position before it would lock into place. The car often resisted this process and he’d have to reengage the clutch and try again. Sometimes the vehicle seemed to have a mind of its own. What worked once was never guaranteed to work again; the only constant was inconsistency.

He looked left, and then right, intending to follow the suggested direction for the closest gas station. The light turned green and he followed traffic, thankful that the engine had decided to stay awake.

‘It didn’t always.’

Down the road rose a modest fueling station branded in some well-known name. Approaching the establishment, Cedric failed to avoid a large divot in the road and the jolt stuttered through the car, troubling the suspension. He winced inwardly, having violated his commitment to take care of the vehicle. He couldn’t afford to make stupid mistakes like that.

The first pump on the right was open so he recovered his composure and slid the car into place. In front of him, an old woman stood refueling a white Cadillac. She dug into her purse, festooned with fixings in false gold, shining in the sun. She locked the door and went inside to pay.

Cedric turned off the engine and left the car. He looked at the signage. Regular was noted at $1.11/gallon. A brisk wind brushed his cheek as the numbers entered his consciousness.

‘…All ones.’

He opened the little hatch on the side of the car, unscrewed the gas cap, removed the dispenser from the pump and engaged the mechanism.

The gasoline gurgled through the tubing for a minute or so and he stewed in the silence of his own mind, hand on the contents of his pocket, until the trigger kicked back. He jiggled the nozzle for a moment, removed the spout from the car, and placed it back on the pump. He secured his car by locking the door and crossed the valley to pay the bill.

The woman who had fed the Cadillac exited just as he entered, clutching her handbag. She avoided eye contact with him, seemingly oblivious, or worse — offended — by his existence.

Maybe it was the tattered jeans.

A bell on the door announced his entrance. Cedric looked around the shop, his body now surrounded by bright wrappers and neon. Hunger pangs clawed at his innards. He supposed it had been a while since he’d eaten. He hadn’t really been thinking about food. Had he eaten breakfast?

Of course he had, but it all seemed so estranged to him now. The very thought of the gritty coffee sickened him.

He grabbed a Slim Jim and wandered over to the refrigerated case. Colorful names and saccharine promises leapt out at him. Coke, Diet Coke, Snapple — It was all the same crap.

But he needed something. Yes, he supposed, he was parched. His eyes wandered from row to row, spying nothing he wanted, until —

He opened the glass door and removed a YooHoo. He knew it would be just as sweet as the rest of the trash littering the selection, but this one, with the clear glass and yellow paper, made him think of places and times long past.

‘Maybe this won’t be so bad.’

He thought of his grandfather, the man who gave him the old Buck knife he kept in his right pocket. There hadn’t been much time to get to know him before he had died, but those times felt good in the recollection. Sweet, but not too sweet — chocolatey, not yet bitter.

Cedric walked up to the counter and pushed his choices underneath the plastic barrier.

“I’m on pump number four.”

The man looked at his display and keyed into the register. He spoke with a gruff tone. “Anything else?”

Cedric looked around, revolted by the candy and gum, and then back to the cashier. “I’m headed east, around the airport. Do you have any of the free maps?”

He grumbled. “Out of those. They’re gone as soon as I put ‘em on the shelf. I got Rand McNally.”

That brand was expensive, but what choice did he have?

“I’m going to Newburgh.”

The man raised an eyebrow. “You got a flight outta Stewart or something? Seein’ a friend?”

He paused for a moment, then spoke before Cedric could respond. “You headed to the city?”

Cedric moved his hand toward his back pocket, the cold chain providing some solace as he lied. “Yeah, visiting a friend.”

But the man didn’t believe him. He pushed a paper map across the counter.

“Stay at the airport. Nothin’ in Newburgh, not for you. Hasn’t been for years.”

Cedric looked up at the man, ruddy and unshaven. He wasn’t sure what to say. He had little intention to alter his plan; no kernels of local wisdom were going to dash his house of cards.

Sensing the young man’s defiance, the cashier changed the subject. He didn’t even glance at the merchandise while pushing it forward across the counter. “Bag?”

Cedric waved his hand in refusal. “No, thanks. That’s it.”

“$12.40.”

Cedric frowned at the total and opened his wallet to remove several wrinkled bills, unhappy about the parting.

‘He rounded up.’

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Diana sat at the kitchen table, gripping the envelope in her hands. Her throat constricted as the name crashed like surf upon rock, bringing back the words of the night before. None of this could possibly be true.

That name — the name none of their classmates had ever known — still felt foreign to her. That name, paired with her own familiar address beneath, was nothing new to the young woman; for the past year she’d received scores of letters like it — but this was the first one she wouldn’t be able to give to him.

She recoiled from the very thought of slicing into the seal.

Her mother had left the article, like she had all the others, in a pile next to the phone on the desk. This little stack at the corner of the old desk, once populated by Stone Soup and Cat Fancy, had been Diana’s first taste of the outside world. But as she’d grown taller, the rest of the desk’s contents had multiplied in size and significance, and letters from her grandmother went unanswered.

Upon a worn wooden chair and cushion fading from red to pink, her parents opened bills, signed checks, and leafed through the yellow pages. At sixteen years old, she was still quite insulated from the barbs of facts and figures, but that is not to say she had no notice of the shadow looming over her shoulder.

“He left this morning?” her mother asked, noticing her daughter’s pained gaze. The coffee had long been cold, and she contemplated pouring another cup.

Diana faltered in her reply, wordless emotion hanging heavy over her mind. “Y-yes—” but she quickly rescinded her response.

“Er, no, he left late last night.” Diana could feel her face strain against the torrent of tangled feeling.

Her mother, the lynchpin that kept the family in ceaseless motion, had always been one for procedure and protocol. She dutifully dabbed at the bacon, removing the excess grease with a paper towel. “Did he take everything with him? The new birth certificate, his paystubs, the social security card? He’ll need—”

Diana’s attention lingered upon the bright emptiness around the greyish-black text. “Yeah, Mom.” She tried to find solace in the house number, then the zip code.

“I gave him everything we had.”

She looked again at the name printed on the envelope, iterating over each arcane symbol. He had not been known by this name, not then, nearly two years ago when she’d met him in the hallway of their high school. Had the stars not aligned as they did, none of it might have happened.

On that day in late August, she’d had her head buried in her schedule, trying to ingest the too-faint lettering when she’d lost her footing, tripping on her own clothing. The papers and books she’d been clutching to her chest scattered spectacularly, fluttering on turbulent air — while time seemed to slow like dripping syrup. As her knees painfully connected to the tile, something inside her suggested that this was precisely what she deserved.

This was her just deserts.

Everyone had walked on by with no concern for a careless little girl; they were all gossiping with their dear friends, perhaps laughing about something they’d recalled seeing on television the night before. It had been months since they’d walked these halls, and there wasn’t a second to spare. Shoes clomped past, discordant chatter crowded her ears. No one seemed to pay any mind to the freshman who’d pridefully refused the petite inseam. She clumsily crawled about on all fours, trying to balance while clawing for her possessions. None would dare lower their eyes to her station.

No one—

Except him.

He seemed to simply appear as if from the painted cinderblock, making no noise as he knelt and joined her in gathering the loose-leaf. She grabbed at the paper and diverted her eyes, instead noticing his pile of books sitting neatly next to hers. Among them, the blue tome for English that was assigned in the third year.

Her cheeks grew hot, feeling entirely out of her element. Who had stopped, in her unfortunate moment of vulnerability, to aim their gun at her head?

He took the last piece and she glanced at his shoes, scuffed and well-worn.

She stood and slung her purse over her shoulder and desperately tried to regain her cool. She tried to find his face, but the pain of embarrassment kept her restrained, chin bridled. She’d always had an instinctual aversion to people’s eyes, an apprehension of the weight that she would bear seeing past the iris and into the darkness between.

He handed her the schedule that had gone flying, and she accepted it, finally gaining the strength to look up.

He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his face was bright and attentive. Green, she’d noticed right away, and piercing, his pupils were almost consumed with color, gaze seeming to focus on a point somewhere far behind her. His short hair was sandy brown, perhaps bleached over the vacation; the same shade as his intense eyebrows. What had once been neatly combed had been swept astray.

“Thanks—” she’d whispered, completely lost in those eyes, for a moment forgetting the chaos and din of the hallway, not to mention the rules of genteel interaction. She thought she’d revealed her teeth in an unconscious gesture, remembering that the metal had been removed last month—

And then the bell rang, shattering her reverie.

“No problem,” he’d said as time resumed its tireless march. “See you ‘round. Good luck out there.” and turned away, walking forward and fading into the crowd.

By the end of the day, she hadn’t forgotten those little words, instead playing them over and over again in her memory, trying to carve the event into permanency. In stark contrast, the introductions delivered by her instructors washed over her like a falling tide, her remaining faculties of reason resolving to read over the syllabi at some later time. There would be many more days like these, she found herself bargaining—

But she regretted her arrogance, knowing the grim truth.

She ambled through the course boilerplate in a daze, barely cognizant of the reason she was present. By her fourteenth year, this job had become muscle memory; she needed no redirection to comply with exactly what was expected of her. She went on without thought, without resistance, as she had always done, as she felt she had been born to do.

And then, like something she’d read in a book, he inexplicably showed up last period in the math class she’d been dreading, seated third from the front on the far side.

She feigned nonchalance and scooted between the rows, trying to glimpse him through her peripheral vision as she walked. She tried to grasp at an approach, a strategy, anything to comprehend this reality.

‘He’s in here — with me?’

Against her usual pattern, she sat in the back of the classroom. She prayed no one would attempt small talk or ask her name, perhaps noticing she hadn’t sat for the prerequisite last year.

She was a freshman where none were supposed to be found.

Soon after the toll of the bell, the teacher stood at the front and began giving her spiel. But Diana’s mind bounded about as a dust bunny among clouds. She watched the tawny-haired upperclassman dutifully scrawl in a spiral notebook, never deviating from the quiet determination she had seen in those eyes — verdant, glossy, endless.

For the first time in her life, an existence that had been dominated by docility, obedience, and going with the flow, she felt compelled to make an effort. Perhaps there was little virtue in making oneself invisible. And maybe a fleeting embarrassment would sting less than the ageless ache of being forgotten.

In the days that followed, she went out of her way to wave at him when they passed in the hallway. Every afternoon, she tried to arrange herself in the ideal seat so that she might get a glance at his worksheet passed down the row. She sat up with rapt attention when he was called to demonstrate a solution on the chalkboard. But none of that was enough. She could not let him just walk on by.

When the first exam approached, propelled by instinct and heady with the advice of the sages, she asked if the two of them could get together in the evening to study. They had several times before shared short conversations, always focused on school, but this? This would be something different. She repeated in her mind yet another trite idiom — something about the supposed fortune of the bold.

He had looked upon her again with those infinite eyes. But this time, his face otherwise still, he’d blinked in ponderous uncertainty, obscuring the color.

“Your place?” he asked, his voice quavering just perceptibly.

‘Yes,’ Diana remembered. ‘My place.’

Those months afterward seemed to scatter away as sand on the wind. Despite the two years between them, they became friends. More afternoons slipped into memory and she moved her seat to sit behind him, banishing her shame. Their conversations became habit rather than privilege. They used to trade notes when they thought the teacher wasn’t looking. He had tidy, careful handwriting that reflected his pensive nature and she, for her part, used to focus intently on her responses, putting forth her best penmanship and trying to affect wisdom beyond her years. He was always kind and patient; polite, she observed, but with a distance she could never quite place.

She supposed early on that he didn’t share the same fluttering feeling of infatuation that she felt for him. His eyes didn’t travel down her body or linger on the hallmarks of her female form. He never made crude comments when a classmate violated the dress code. And not once did he ever mimic the slurs or hateful speech carelessly thrown about by their peers. He had no aspiration to earn praise from the jocks or to blend into their lackeys, and Diana respected this as evidence of his sense of self.

But she secretly despaired: the very things that kindled her affection seemed to also indicate that despite her heart being so hopelessly fixed upon him, his mind was somewhere else entirely.

By the end of that year, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall in place. What little she witnessed suggested that the true picture was far more tragic than she ever could have imagined.

In May, the school held an awards ceremony with the intention to honor those who had done notable work throughout the year. Diana’s stellar performance in Algebra II had earned her the esteem of the math department, while the upperclassman had earned the favor of the French teacher. They, along with the other honorees, were expected at the auditorium in the evening, where the school’s officials would give a short speech about each award recipient and present a certificate.

Each student was to sit with their family. Most brought their mother, father, or both, some had their siblings, some came with their aunts, uncles, or grandparents—

The upperclassman arrived alone.

Diana saw him seated near the front, with a space to his right adjacent to the aisle. She had, at this point, rarely allowed the matter of his parentage to enter her mind.

She quickly felt quite small, realizing like drowning how often she’d babbled about her own family and how little he’d spoken of his. And she had not thought to ask. Perhaps, if she’d stitched together the details she’d gleaned sideways, she supposed he lived with his mother. She wasn’t sure there had ever been anyone else.

Diana asked her family to sit near him and her parents cheerfully made small talk to make a play at normalcy, pretending they could provide in this moment what he lacked. Her mother and father were gentle people, and she didn’t mind them. Maybe, she even liked them. She didn’t know any other way.

The lights lowered and the show began.

It was quiet and monotonous, as these things always were, an essential mockery of pomp and circumstance. The microphones were poorly tuned, and some of the verbose details were lost in the ether. But everyone knew when they were supposed to clap, and they all did so dutifully. Going along with expectations made the whole thing seem to pass more easily through the needle’s eye.

Few had much in mind but tame observance when, about twenty minutes later, just as the impatient succumbed to the temptation to eye their wristwatches, the doors to the auditorium opened with a clatter. Disturbed by the interruption, many looked back, but none truly understood what their eyes beheld.

A lone woman stumbled in, her gait difficult and irregular, as if she were intoxicated. Though the lights ignored the interruption and remained fixed toward the front, a number of those in the audience noticed their attention drift from the ceremony. No one recognized her, and, even if they had, none had the bravery to admit their knowledge. Her clothes were wrinkled and disheveled, defiant of any customary dress-code, and it looked as if she’d neglected to brush her hair. And the audacity of her late arrival — the gossip spoke for itself.

Diana, in her shining youth, had momentarily forgotten herself, eyes widened to observe she who entered. Darkness obscured the woman’s identity, and yet something about her seemed familiar.

Without hesitation, and uttering no word to beg excuse, the upperclassman rose to his feet and entered the aisle, held out his hands and helped her to an empty seat.

Diana felt the pain of revelation.

‘His… m-mom?’

The woman clad in the poison armor had barely sat down when the French teacher called the young man to the stage. First seeming to wordlessly ask his mother’s permission, newly-arrived as she was, he moments later stood placid in the spotlight as the instructor spoiled him with garish anecdotes, complimenting his dedication to learning the language.

Diana looked at him, thumbs hidden inside the pockets of pale khakis. On either side, his fingers curled in a loose fist, and he shifted every so often, enduring, rather than absorbing, the praise. Despite no fourth year program offered at their school, the teacher implored him to continue practicing on his own and presented him a textbook for him to keep. They exchanged canned smiles, shook hands, and he returned to the crowd.

Before he could even sit down, the next student was called to the stage, the inertia of the event desperate to hurtle onward. His mother turned her head, looking neither at the stage nor even at him, choosing instead the diagonal space between. She spoke without restraint, her harsh whisper not masking a tone caustic and derisive.

“You done?”

He paused.

The upperclassman looked at Diana for a moment, eyes obscured in the shadow.

He turned back to his mother.

“Yeah. We can go.”

Uncomfortable with the recollection, Diana’s mind returned to the present day, and, amidst the racket of her own mother washing dishes, back to the name typed on the letter.

He had concocted the idea. As he had approached his final year of high school, Diana had begged him to consider a path through university to elevate his prospects. A degree would give him a career, a livelihood, a way out. But he had refused, insisting that the loans necessary to fund higher education would tie him even more firmly to that which he must shed: his home, his origin, and even—

His name.

She had balked at the concept at first, plainly ignorant of why anyone would risk a blank slate. To rid oneself of the negatives, that she had begun to grasp. But to cut off the nose to spite the face? She could not understand what it was to embrace the abyss.

But his resigned silence at her protestations spoke more than any argument could attempt. With quiet determination, he insisted that this is what he had wanted since the very beginning.

It was not easy or simple. Diana, with the help of her compassionate family, volunteered to provide assistance. In their pity, they allowed him to use their address as if it were his own, even vouching for him as he constructed a new identity — a man that had never yet existed — and prepared to slip into his shoes.

Diana, too, became so involved with the plotting and planning that she thought only to keep moving forward. It felt good to be helpful, and she fixated on what needed to be done and ignored the oxygen leaking from her lungs.

Months disappeared as her parents escorted him to government offices. There, Diana had no business, and she stared in vain at her coursework alone in the house. When verb conjugations and conic surfaces could not keep her attention, she wondered what else it was that she didn’t know.

What did he say when an official invariably asked why he was here and for what purpose? She shuddered to think what kind of crime could cause a child to forsake his own mother. Her mother had always packed her lunches, mended her clothes, tended to her needs when she succumbed to illness. Father was gone early each morning and returned late, but he never shirked from kissing her forehead or beaming with pride when she claimed checkmate.

To imagine an alternate reality made her blood run cold.

She had thought all of their plans would be dashed when they learned that name changes had to be publicized in the local newspaper. A little notice would be printed for several weeks leading up to the court date, clearly identifying him and revealing his intentions, allowing the public time to consider an objection.

But he had laughed, the bleak dismissal startling her.

“You think my mom reads the paper?”

While Diana worried about the PSAT, he was calling lawyers and researching legal procedures, trying to make sure that when he was finally ready to leave, he would never have to turn back. He spent any free moment he had working, throwing every penny into a bank account he soon intended to empty.

Attention turned elsewhere, his grades suffered and he often came to school haggard from lack of sleep. He took shifts late into the night, stocking shelves for minimum wage. He fell from his rank at the top of the class, but, Diana supposed, where he was going, none of that would matter anymore.

Winter soon faded, spring disappeared into early summer and he graduated, not even bothering to attend the celebration. The long sun passed overhead and the nights seemed to fade into nothingness. He quit his job, cashed out his savings, and spent much of his last week with her. They drove around town, saw a couple movies, shared moments they knew they’d never share again.

The school, his employer, everyone who knew him called him by that old name. Even Diana, despite letter after letter bombarding her with the truth of his future, could not bring herself to call him something else. So, instead, she took to calling him nothing at all.

She thought about telling him how she felt. In all this time, the butterflies had never gone away; if anything, they had multiplied and viciously beat against their cage. She had long become accustomed to their persistent pleas, and yet, she too yearned to be seen: no longer a clumsy freshman upon the floor, but a woman who would stand strong upon her own two feet.

As she anticipated their last meeting — he had promised to come see her at home and say goodbye on his way out — she knew this was her last chance. Her last chance to stop hiding and admit her vain hope. Her last chance to know whether he had ever felt anything tender for her beyond the scope of friendship.

Those anxieties buzzed in her mind as she waited on the old tree swing outside her house. It had long been too small for her, but she refused to give it up just yet. Maybe she would sit here until the thing gave out.

His car sputtered and rolled up the driveway, the gravel crinkling in a wave beneath the weight. It stopped, the driver’s door opened and closed again, and he walked up to her in the fading light. She could hardly stand to look at him, anticipating so acutely the pain of leaving. She noticed two hardcover books in his hand, each shiny with the library’s protective measures.

He stood before her for a minute while she sat in silence, now looking down at her knees.

“Hey, I—” he began, but paused.

The seconds of quiet made her nerves ache. Her hands wrapped tight around the coarse rope.

Gathering her courage, she straightened her neck and looked up at him. She needed to hear his voice, something, anything, but she was frozen with the fear of what he would say. Or, more likely — not say.

She smiled weakly. In his pale t-shirt and faded jeans, he seemed transcendent, otherworldly. His tennis shoes bore old dinge, and yet, they too seemed to repel the dirt in which he stood.

“I wanted to say thank you. It’s not enough, it never will be, but… Thank you, for everything.”

She struggled against the threat of tears, unable to find words. She was absorbed in the sight of him, even as water crowded her vision.

His face was calm, relaxed; something in him warm like she had never before witnessed. His eyes shone in the setting sun.

“Could—”

“Could I ask you one last thing?”

Her face softened, a tear falling unbidden upon her cheek.

She realized, gravity pulling an icy stream down her face, that in spite of the myriad feelings swimming in her heart, in spite of what she’d rehearsed, and in spite of all that had happened since she’d met him two years ago — there was nothing left for her to say.

He had given her those nine short words in the hallway on that day now seeming to fade into eternity. And though he stood before her in the present, the blanket of night threatening to consume their sight, she found herself returning to that place. That was where she had seen what he could be. The rest of it didn’t matter anymore.

He held out the books, but her eyes would not move from his.

As the tension in her eyes relented, feeling the promise of those little words he had given so freely, she found the only two that she could return to him.

“Of course.”

For years she would return to this sunset in her mind and try to feel again that peace she had felt awash in his presence amidst the Sun’s farewell. But she knew that when the Earth would spin ‘round again and the stars would fade into the cerulean sky, she would never see the same light again. This goodbye would dissipate and become memory, and like memory, someday fade into entropy. But she held tight to those words, the very act of grasping remaining as the scant impression that perhaps, just… maybe — she was more than a vibrating speck of dust in the uncaring vacuum of space.

‘They were all I had.’

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