“Did you bring these in the house?”

Cedric was tired, and his head was hung low and he was looking at the surface of the island in the center of the kitchen. Several of the children were rummaging through the cabinets looking for sweets after dinner, but he was not interested. He was sitting on one of the stools wondering when it would be appropriate to go back to his room. He had been waking up very early in the morning for several days in a row, unable to get back to sleep, so by the time the sun had set, he was very tired and he did not feel at all himself.

“Cedric?”

“Huh?” Cedric snapped to attention when it was apparent that Friday had been directing her question to him. Only half her face was visible, but he did see her roll her eyes.

“Was it you who brought these into the house?” she asked again.

In her right hand, she held a bag that was printed upon in several blocks of bright color. Through transparent windows of plastic, he recognized the contents.

It was a bag of marshmallows.

“Davian bought those,” Cedric said wearily, and lowered his head again.

“…Disgusting,” she said, and turned and threw the bag back into the cupboard and said again, “Absolutely disgusting.”

“Hey, gimme those!” Elmer called out. Cedric was looking down again and settled a little further into the cushion of his chair, exhausted.

“I like them! They’re tasty!” Elmer said.

Friday removed the bag from the shelf and Cedric could hear the material wrinkle as she squeezed it. She tossed it toward Elmer. “Yuck. Not even food,” she said with disdain. “All yours.”

Elmer opened the bag and put one in his mouth and bit down on the soft, sugary sweet. His mouth was closed, but Cedric could hear him chew.

“Hey, can I have one?” Owen asked, walking behind Cedric and toward Elmer. “They’re alright.”

Myrtle came in too, and Cedric knew because she did not walk at all like the others. Cedric was thinking about sleep and he did not immediately look up. She probably stood there for a moment, watching the children make a fuss, but Cedric had begun to doze and was paying little attention to the passage of time.

“Cedric?” she asked him.

He raised his neck a little, but mostly just turned his face toward the sound of her voice. “Yeah…?”

“You received a letter,” she said, and laid it on the countertop and pushed it into his field of view.

“Hey, they’re actually pretty good,” Owen said with a mouth half-full with the fluffy treat.

Cedric read the letter again, this time lingering on certain words. It was undoubtedly English, and he could read it, but as for the rest of it—

Suyon came in and reached her open hands up toward Elmer and he handed her one of the marshmallows. It was too big for her mouth, so she took a bite to divide the thing in two. It was lightly shiny where it had been severed and she held the second half in her hands while she chewed.

He looked down at the Mage’s ornamented handwriting in blue and the lines were uneven in places, and he wondered idly about the writing implement that had been used to pen the letter, and whether he’d been drinking more of that fancy wine. But it made him faintly dizzy to trace the ink and so his mind wandered.

Cedric looked up from the note to search for Myrtle, but she must have slipped out of the kitchen while he’d been reading. Zahra entered instead.

“What’re you all eating?” she asked with her customary affect. It was dry, but there was a subtle warmth that Cedric wondered if he had imagined.

“Maws-meh-woes,” Elmer said with his mouth full.

It occurred to him how very strange was the scene, and part of him was drifting and floating above it. Cedric could smell the thickened sugar that had become white, and he could hear them mashing the things in their mouths and he thought he could smell the syrup becoming moistened by their eating. He looked at Suyon, who had just popped the second half into her mouth.

He thought he should go to bed, but at the same time, he saw them through the corner of his eye and tried to ground himself—

“Y’know,” Cedric said with effort. “They’re even better if you toast them.”

The yard behind and around the Magicademy was simultaneously kept while also being lost to time. The story told was that over the years, parcels of the original land had been sold off when money had been tight, and where structures and flower beds were now found were not necessarily where they had originally sat. But there was no clear marker where decades became a century, so the orphans donned their coats and strode upon the mud and hibernating grass.

Zahra led Cedric to a shed partially done in panes of glass. Where the glass had apparently broken, it had been patched with large slabs of wood, but the door was still intact and it creaked on its rusted hinges when they opened it. The whole thing had a musty warmth that was unexpected for the month of December and it felt to Cedric one of the most ordinary things he’d encountered on the plot since he’d arrived two months ago. He saw that the Mages did not spend much time where they could be spied upon by the rest of the world.

“I really don’t know what’s in here,” Zahra said. “So I hope I’m not sending you on a fool’s errand.”

Cedric took to his self-appointed task with unexpected vigor, moving aside pieces of cut timber and gardening supplies that felt as aged as the old woman herself. His response to Zahra was a little muffled amongst the bric-a-brac.

“We need a big steel bowl or something, I don’t know,” Cedric said, disturbing the dust of decades as he rifled through the shed. “Something we can use to make a big bonfire; a firepit. I know it’s winter but I still don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do this on the ground.”

Zahra was just standing there watching, arms folded against the chill, and then she remarked with a dubious tone, “We can’t just do this inside?”

He let her skepticism sit for a beat and then responded with a quip, “Now where’s the fun in that?”

She let him continue digging in the fading light, and soon he located an enormous basin, round and deep such that it formed a near-half sphere with a lip around the top. There wasn’t a seam that indicated it had ever been welded, and the process by which it had been made remained a mystery. It did, however, have two large handles on either side that had been wrapped in wood.

“This’ll do great,” he declared, and put the thing outside the shed.

Cedric continued to search around the backyard and he found several spare bricks, seven if he’d been counting, and laid them in a regular shape to hold the enormous bowl in place. He wiggled it back and forth to test the structure and then filled it with wood: some that had come from the grocery store, and some that had been stored beneath a small shelter outside. Zahra, Owen, Suyon, and Elmer had all crowded around the thing while Cedric was bringing down chairs from the back porch. He realized that there were only four, so he gave one to each of them and took the largest log to be a seat for himself.

He sent Owen and Suyon to find sticks fallen from the tree on the second lot and he sent Elmer back inside to fetch the bag of marshmallows. Zahra had sat on one of the chairs, and when Cedric sat down on the log, he was almost on the ground looking up at her, and his knees were pointing up at the grey sky so she raised her eyebrows and looked at him curiously.

“You sure you’re okay with that?” she asked with one eyebrow arched. “That can’t be comfortable.”

Cedric shrugged and his face was relaxed.

“Doesn’t bother me.”

The sticks Owen and Suyon offered were a little wet from the snowmelt, and if he’d still had his buck knife, he’d have used it to clean off the wet bark and expose the smooth part beneath. But his buck knife was long gone so he used his nails to scrape off what he could and then gave to the other four their implement.

Suyon saw what he had done and started to pick at her own.

They each took one of the large marshmallows, and, following Cedric, pierced it at one end and made to hold it toward the fire Owen had lit. The fire was getting larger as it ate the wood, and the wood cracked noisily when it found a vein of water in the fuel that had been stored near the snow.

Cedric was last to puncture his sweet, but he was the first to hold it into the fire. He held it just where the flames licked the air and were so disperse they were yellowish and almost transparent.

“You catch the thing on fire,” Cedric instructed, watching the fire caress the white treat, “and it quickly cooks the marshmallow.” His feet were on the ground, and he was cold where his jacket did not cover him — except for where the fire was throwing heated air on his face.

“It will get seared on the outside,” he said when the sugar finally caught. He pulled it out and watched it for a while. “And it’ll get molten on the inside.”

When it was warm and toasty, pale brown with tiny bubbles erupting, he breathed on it and put it out. “Everyone likes it different, and it’s all about getting it just the way you like it.”

He looked at the steam coming out of the surface, and remarked, “If you let it go too long, you could burn your mouth, but some people like it when it’s all melty like that. It’s up to you.”

It was not long for the marshmallow to cool in the winter air, and after a moment, he put it in his mouth and ate it and it made him warmer than he was before. They were watching him like a curiosity, but he was inside a memory that was new and bright. He was still clearing his mouth when Owen spoke.

“Can I light it myself?”

Cedric paused for a moment, looking at Owen until he could say something.

“I don’t see why not.”

The central fire was throwing off generous heat and the five of them forgot for a while that the solstice was only days away.

Cedric watched each of them as they looked at their marshmallows and lit them one right after the other. Owen, Zahra, and then Elmer lit their sweets ablaze and doused the flame with the power of their thought. And when it was done to their liking, they ate it and it was gone.

Cedric watched Suyon, too, because he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her work this feat, and in the cold air he forgot to blink and when the fire rose on her stick just as he expected, he found his eyeballs had become a little chilled, so he had to close and reopen them several times.

And then they looked at him. And he looked away, glancing first at the fire, and then at the second marshmallow of the night, on the dark grey stick that was a little crooked in the middle and he knew what they wanted him to do. And he thought he should just give up and not even try because he was done being the fool and the invalid and he was tired of people watching him fall. And he thought back to the house and the magic and about all the tools behind the doors and realized nothing there could help him.

In the deep recesses of his mind, in a place he did not wander often, was a small voice, and when it spoke, it spoke without words and he did not know what he was hearing, much less understand whatever it was trying to say.

[ be brave ]

[ be tough ]

And he was looking at the marshmallow then, while they all were looking at him.

[ be you ]

And when he opened his eyes again, they were all clapping for him.

Cedric found himself in the Cavalier. And it was a good homecoming, and it felt good and warm and happy and all the things he associated with the car that had been his first real taste of freedom.

He did not think about whether it was real or not because somewhere he knew if he inspected it too closely, the whole thing would fall apart. Yes, he knew that the Cavalier had been drafted into service, or perhaps she’d been stripped to her components, and her muffler and catalytic converter and whatever else were strewn against a fence in a bodyshop in Brooklyn or wherever else. Or maybe even… melted.

Somewhere in his mind he knew that, so he tried to look elsewhere so what he had now that felt nice and pleasant didn’t collapse while he had it in his hands.

The steering wheel was what he had now, and it felt good to have his left hand on the top of it, and he had a loose hold on it, letting his fingers grip the leather while the thumb went flat and out or in or whichever way it was going.

And it felt good to put his right hand on the gearshift, and he pressed on the clutch with the other side of his body and everything was balanced and he was going at an easy speed and the engine wasn’t making that sound it did sometimes so he knew he was driving it well and right and just the way he was supposed to.

And it all went like that for a while, and he was very aware of that tan interior and how it felt warm and brown and —

[ toasty ]

Then he looked, because he couldn’t make any other choice, and then he was worried and the path broke.

On the passenger seat were blocks, blocks, blocks he recognized and knew belonging to the little girl with the black hair and big eyes who was sweet and friendly but never said anything. And she didn’t say anything but she also never said anything that hurt either.

[ her name her name what is her name lost her name ]

The blocks were falling on the seat and sometimes they were falling on the floor but he must stop them from falling on the floor so he leaned over the center of the car to stop them from falling but when he did that he knew he wasn’t watching the road and he knew he absolutely needed to watch the road because if he didn’t watch the road, if he neglected to hold the wheel and watch the road—

[ CAR ]

And when he didn’t catch the blocks and he didn’t watch the road either, he blinked and the Cavalier was gone.

He thought he woke up, because he didn’t have the car anymore and it was gone, but when he looked around he knew he hadn’t woken up because he was flying.

[ flying? ]

Cedric was not used to flying or even imagining that he was flying because he knew he couldn’t so it was easier just not to think about it because if you don’t think about the things you can’t do or the things you don’t have then you don’t have to think about the things you don’t have,

So it was strange for him to find himself flying, but something, too, was not so strange at all and he very much felt like he knew what he was doing but that was probably just imagination too but he let himself keep going because it was a simple thing to do and he found he very much enjoyed the view from above and he did not find it difficult to do so he kept doing it and he was alone until he very much realized that he was not.

That was when he looked at the ground and saw the thing he did not expect to see because he was not used to seeing things that were not real.

When he dreamt things, he saw places that he had been to and people he had known and sometimes they were backwards or diagonal or criss-cross but still the little pieces that made them them were laid in an order such that he always knew what he was looking at even if the colors were inverted. But when he looked at the ground and saw what was chasing him, he did not know where it had come from.

[ zombie ]

Shambling, scrambling, lumbering were the corpses and where he had once felt he was flying perfectly, suddenly it was not fast enough because he was afraid. And he had not realized before that he was in a jungle but he was in a jungle and there were tens of the corpses coming out from amongst the ferns and leaves and trees. And the further Cedric went and the faster he tried to go, the more of them appeared as he realized he didn’t know how to go any faster than he was already going and maybe there were a hundred but he couldn’t look back to know.

They were a mass of tangled bodies that covered every exposed inch of the ground and he kept going because he thought if he kept going and flying then he could eventually get away but then one of the rotting corpses did something different than just running through the path and like a thing made of rubber instead of flesh, it flung itself into the air and hurled itself at Cedric.

And Cedric dodged the first, and the second, but then more of them got the idea that they could do that so they were launching themselves into the air and when Cedric moved in one direction, it was like sliding on ice and his flying was hard to stop and he moved closer to one as he moved away from another and it became ever more difficult to evade them until he failed altogether.

The skeleton from which the flesh was suspended wrapped itself around Cedric’s leg and when it did this, he was heavier than he had been before and he found he could not fly like he had been doing before easily or easily enough so he became afraid and he tried to pry the body away from his own and become free again but the more he struggled, the more difficult it became and his desperation became rage.

He was encumbered, and his anger made it hard for him to focus and he hated them and he hated their grasping and in his singular thought to wrest himself back from the clutching undead, he let another, and another mass of flesh catch him in the air and scrape at his body. And those fingers were like claws and they dug into him and something inside faltered because he thought this was the end and he had lost and the dead things that walked and crawled and would not stop and tore into his body and tried to take it from him had won and when he thought they had won, the voice spoke because the despair had become rage and when the rage made his insides quake, the nails they were using to crawl on him had not severed the throat and he knew the throat was all he had left and then he heard

[ “Faggot!” ]

And when he heard it he wasn’t sure where it had come from because he could not notice the direction so much as he felt that word like glass he had swallowed that had become lodged in his throat and then the rage disappeared because the bodies did too and Cedric was completely alone in the darkness. The jungle was gone and the zombies were gone and the air was silent and he wanted to feel relief but he could still hear the echo of that shattering and even if the air had stopped and become still and black he could still hear that word.

And he knew the shard was his own.

He only saw darkness but he knew he was still flying and when he looked around he did not know why but he felt there was something in the darkness that he could not see but he knew that he had been heard and he had not been alone because he had been seen and the darkness that was not nothing but was something and very much something had heard the word just like he had.

He was afraid. But the darkness was reflecting, and pleased.

Light in furious packets struck the surface of his eye and the pupils became constricted in an effort to reduce the incident pain but still photons of every color went through and hit the retina and he knew he was up.

Cedric knew he was up, and so, he was awake.

He was becoming not so ill-adjusted to rising before the winter Sun. It had been days that he’d been waking like this in the early hours, and where at first he had felt disoriented and uncertain of the time, curious of the hours and the minutes like reflex, slowly the routine was becoming him, and he was becoming it.

When he was no longer tired, he rose, and when that happened, he rose into a quiet house with doors shut where even the mice did not expect his footfall. And when the children were asleep in their beds and he was not, he felt warm and glad and satisfied behind a curtain that had fallen on the last show of the evening.

‘Fire,’ he thought, remembering the night before and what had transpired outside.

When he’d needed the act, the act had risen, and they had seen what he had seen and he had shaped the real.

What had once been impossible was no longer that.

As he stirred from slumber and considered the day ahead, he looked at the candle on his bedside table. And the glimmer of something he was not used to feeling stuttered in his heart and he wasn’t sure what it was at first, but then he realized what it was and he let himself feel it.

‘…Hope.’

And he tried to stay in it for a moment longer, but he was still not accustomed to standing still, so his mind changed and he thought he should try to set the wick to flame. And still again he was not used to sitting with his own thoughts, so then he stepped back and resolved that he wasn’t ready to try again because he knew what could happen.

‘Not yet.’

Cedric’s hair was still wet when he left the third floor. And because his hair was still wet, he could smell the shampoo that had left some of its fragrance behind. He had found that he liked to use the bathroom in the early morning because he never found a child in the hallway waiting their turn while draped in a towel. And when he knew there was no one waiting for him to finish up and get out, he could wash himself at a pace that suited him instead of someone else.

The first time he’d taken a shower here, he’d found the scent sharp and flowery and overwhelming. And he thought for a while that he had no other options, so he’d assumed it was just something he had to get used to. Free is free, he had told himself. But then, one moment where, for whatever reason, he hadn’t been rushed, he’d looked around and found a container of another soap that wasn’t already on the shelf and it smelled round and it did not slap him in the face because the shape was full and deep and a little quiet, sort of like wood or pine and yet still unlike any tree he’d ever smelt, and he liked it, so he took it out of the cabinet and used that instead.

Cedric needed a haircut and whenever he passed by a mirror in the old house, he thought he looked rather disheveled and even younger than whatever age he could usually pass for. The summer in Newburgh had been oppressive and when he went to the barber he wanted to save a few bucks so he had them cut his hair shorter than he actually liked it because he wanted to get an extra week or two out of it. And that had served him well, because now it had been months that he’d been in Astoria and he didn’t know where to get a haircut and he didn’t have a dollar to throw at it and he knew he was going to have to ask eventually but it always seemed that if he had waited this long, one more day wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

So when he went downstairs, his hair still smelled like old trees and crushed grass and it hung lower over his forehead than he would have preferred.

Eloise was in the kitchen, and by the looks of it, she had just poured sugar into her tea because he could hear the spoon clinking gently against the sides of the cup and when he came in, she was leaning over the liquid and looking into it and she didn’t look up until he spoke.

“Hey,” he said plainly. “Morning.”

Her head whipped up, seized away from whatever it was that she’d been thinking about, but she seemed to have spent too much energy on that involuntary gesture, and the gaze she returned was foggy, like she was looking through him rather than at him.

“Good morning,” she replied with her best effort, eyes changing somewhat curiously as she considered him.

“…This is getting to be a habit for you, isn’t it?” She smiled when she asked, and her teeth were shiny, but she could only manage to gesture with part of her face and she looked rather tired.

“Yeah…” he said, and brought his hand to the back of his head to seek the safety of his hair, but when he found it was cold and wet and damp, he realized how stupid he looked and he put his hand back down and into his empty pocket. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”

“Oh,” she said, forlorn; voice dropping a little. “Every night?” she asked, looking at him again.

He didn’t like it when she was sad because of him, so he tried to return that half-smile. “Not every night,” he said, shrinking. “Most nights, I guess—”

“Yeah,” Cedric said then, truth leaking out. “More nights than not, but I don’t know; it could be worse.”

He moved fully into the kitchen and made like he was going to sit across from her. “I know they’re not real,” he said. “So even when I have a bad dream, I wake up, and I know it was just a dream, you know?”

He was asking, but she didn’t respond because she was trying to figure out the state of her tea. And when she was stirring the tea to see if the sugar had finally dissolved, he thought he should just keep talking because the silence made him wince.

“Last night was a bit of a doozy though,” he said. “Kind of just…”

He struggled to find words, and she looked at him while he thought, which made him feel cold and he found it more difficult to say whatever it was he wanted to say.

“Just came out of left field. Nightmare, sure, but…”

Her eyes were dark and dilate and looking right at him.

“Worse than that,” he said. “Something… different.”

She blinked, and again she was looking toward him, but he felt her two eyes were converging on a point that was somewhere beyond wherever he was standing. “I—” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Cedric was remembering, and he didn’t like what he was thinking about, so he didn’t say anything.

“You’re right that what we see there isn’t real,” Eloise said soothingly. “But the fear—”

She paused for a moment, and then continued her claim when Cedric caught her eye. “The fear we feel when we see those things: that is real.”

Cedric finally sat down.

“Those feelings,” she said, “Our reactions… Just because no one else can see what we see doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

Cedric’s thoughts were a little muddled and he could not look at her, so he averted his eyes and started talking.

“I don’t normally have dreams like that,” he said. “I know lots of people have dreams with monsters or whatever; y’know, dreams that they’re Superman and stuff like that. But that’s not usually my thing.”

“Usually it’s places I’ve been or people I know,” Cedric explained. “Like I’m walking through my memories, and little details might be changed, but I don’t usually find that I completely make stuff up.”

He was trying to figure out what to say, and when something from the past rose into his mind, he chuckled a little, because he did not expect it, and because there were a lot of things adjacent to that memory that were heavy to hold.

He looked toward her, and maybe they saw each other, and maybe they didn’t.

“D’you ever seen Return of the Living Dead?”

She looked at him and searched, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she asked with an awkward smile, “Is that… a movie?”

Cedric looked away and he had the instinct to bring his hand to his hair again, but he tried to resist and instead laughed a little as he descended into his memory.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a movie.” He took in air, and his tone changed. “Came out a while ago now I guess; I was a kid at the time.”

She was watching him, but he found it difficult to see her at the same time he was remembering.

“Sixth grade was tough for me,” he said. “New school. I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

She nodded.

“I had one friend, but he was in the eighth grade, so after that year was over, we weren’t going to be going to the same building anymore.”

Her eyes were dark and open in the dim light of the kitchen.

“His dad owned a little movie theater downtown,” Cedric said, and then veered off, raising his hands in defense. “Now, downtown there wasn’t like downtown here, but… anyway—”

“His dad had him work in the theater, y’know, nothing major: taking tickets, sweeping the carpet, shit like that.”

She looked like she was enjoying herself to listen.

“So I used to hang out there and talk to him; guess I was probably a bit of a hanger-on but I thought he was really cool, y’know… part of being twelve, I guess.”

“He used to get me into movies for free,” Cedric said. “I saw a movie or two a week that whole summer.”

“This one, though—” he said, “Scared the living daylights outta me.”

“I dunno what it was, exactly. I’d seen a lot of horror flicks, blood and guts; it wasn’t that exactly. There was just something about that movie, not the gore, but the kids, and the ending—”

He trailed off then, because when he looked at her, he saw that her eyes were glassy like she had no idea what he was talking about and was just humoring him by listening. So he didn’t say anything else and put the memory back on the shelf.

When the air was quiet for a minute, she changed the topic.

“I don’t want to seem like a gossip,” she said, warming to him. “But a little birdie told me about yesterday with the marshmallows.”

His cheeks became a little less pale than they had been before, and he was blushing.

“Yeah, uh, about that—” he started.

“I think it’s great,” she said, beaming. “You don’t have to be modest. I was hoping I could see, because I missed it.”

His heart dropped because he thought of the candle from his room and he wished he’d made a different choice, because the universe was forcing his hand and she was looking at him and her face was bright and cheerful and he couldn’t say no, so he just took a breath and said, “…Sure.”

“Zahra told me,” Eloise said when they were outside. She had taken the bag of marshmallows from the cabinet and they were very nearly gone, but a few still remained behind the plastic.

And then Eloise addressed another matter entirely. “The Matron knows what she’s doing,” she said. “She doesn’t bring anyone here who doesn’t belong.”

Cedric could feel that he was cold on his face, his hands. But beneath his jacket, sweat was leaving his shirt damp, and he hoped that she couldn’t smell his nerves.

The four chairs from yesterday were still there, but they only needed two, and they each sat in a chair, and the chairs shared a side.

“I had a marshmallow the other day,” she relayed. “I’ve had them before, I suppose. But it’s probably been years. We don’t usually have those kinds of things in the house.”

“Davian bought them,” Cedric said, defensively.

“…Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

The wood was burning and Eloise opened the bag of marshmallows but she stopped for a moment and put her nose in the bag and scrunched up her face.

“They smell funny, don’t they?”

Cedric felt strange and he was afraid and his mind was blank just watching her and he forgot to react, so she just shrugged and took one from the bag to give to him.

Her lips parted and she smiled when she was presenting it but when he put his fingers up, she let go because she thought he had it when he didn’t, and the white cylindrical thing fell to the ground.

“Fu—” he said as his gaze fell, stopping himself just short of the thing he didn’t want to say in her company.

He was quick, so he’d already grabbed it from the ground when she said, softly, “No.”

And he looked at her.

“Don’t eat that. Don’t eat things that have been on the ground.”

And it was something new, and something he hadn’t heard before, and though it seemed miles away, the fire was crackling and splitting the wood through the center.

“I’ll give you another one.”

And he was sure for a moment that he didn’t even breathe.

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Cedric was in the sitting room reading a book in front of the fireplace when there came a knock upon the front door. He brought his head up from the lines on the page and looked about himself.

The others were deeply engaged, so he took the liberty to answer the call. The door had no way to look through it, so he took the knob and pulled.

“Cedric, my dear fellow!”

Davian came into the foyer, announcing, “Just the lad I wanted to see!” as Cedric closed the door behind him. He shrugged off his long woolen coat and hung it on the rack.

Still sporting a bright blue necktie, Davian stepped toward the sitting room, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden frame and leaning forward to let his head into the room to observe the ones within. Cedric lingered behind.

Davian found three orphans there, but they were not what he was looking for, so he addressed them. “Afternoon, children; I do hope you’re keeping warm. Is Miss Eloise around?”

Elmer and Owen looked up from the painted marbles on the six-pointed star to spy the guest, but Friday kept her nose in her book. She spoke for them, peering over her nose:

“She’s upstairs.”

“Pity,” he said, and then realized Cedric was still in the entry. He waved his hand in an attempt to usher him inside. “Come, come, Cedric, have a seat.”

Cedric stepped past him into the room where the curtain was peeled back and despite the white-grey clouds, light poured through the window. He stood with his hands on the back of the sofa, but he did not sit.

Davian took a breath and his chest rose, and so too did the silken splash with which he’d adorned himself.

“Gird yourselves and batten down the hatches, children,” he sounded. “There’s a fair bit of snowy weather headed your way.”

“Joy of joys,” Zahra said, having slid down the stairs into the entry without so much as a peep. She moved closer, but took a place inside the doorway, where she leaned against the frame.

“I’m sure it will be no trouble at all, and you have a few hours to be ready,” he said. “But you should be ready.”

Suyon ran in then, scooting around Zahra and running toward the window, where she placed her hands on the sill and stood on her tip-toes to look up at the sky expectantly.

Davian saw her and smiled, and then looked back toward the others. “A roaring nor’easter; and she promises to be a grand one. A foot or more, perhaps two if my senses do not fool me.”

Cedric was a bit puzzled, and he asked, “…A northeaster?”

The mage had a smug look on his face. “My dear boy, this isn’t simply a contraction from the Old Kingdom or a Britishism, if you will.”

“A nor’easter,” he repeated and raised his arms, weaving them around while looking up. “—Is quite the meteorological predicament.”

He looked at Cedric sideways. “I suppose you don’t have these where you come from.”

Cedric looked at Davian, and then saw that the light in the room was becoming dim, and above their heads were clouds laden with water. Davian was looking at his magic. And the air was cold.

“When the wind comes in from the North, it’s acquired a dastardly chill.”

When Davian moved his hands through the air, the breeze surged past them and moved their hair.

He was getting theatrical, and he was enjoying himself. “But when the polar jet stream meets the warm ocean; that is to say: our warm ocean,” he said as the winds began to mix and swirl, “that is when a sort of a cyclone appears, a twisting thing full of ice and snow—”

He raised his hands to intensify the scene, and Cedric looked down at Suyon, who was watching with rapt attention as white flakes began to dance around the room.

“Sleet and hail—”

The girl’s eyes were taking it all in and her mouth was open in a sweet and unsuspecting awe, completely unfazed by the cold. She raised her arms to mimic his gesture, reaching out and toward the ceiling.

Davian, not seeing her, delivered his thesis with dramatic pause, “—And rage.”

And in an instant, the entire storm vanished. The candles returned to normal and the orange blazed in the fireplace, and the temperature returned to what it had been.

“Yes, well,” Davian said. It took a moment, but his face soon wore his usual brightness, and he turned toward the one who’d been watching.

“Can I take you for a drive, Cedric? We can go into town and procure the necessary supplies; make sure you’ve got everything you need should you become snow-bound.”

“Uh…” Cedric said.

He looked at the pile of wood on the floor and said, “Sure,” before turning back to Davian.

“Capital. Let’s get going, then. No time to waste.”

Cedric followed Davian back into the foyer. He stretched the laces and slipped his feet into his shoes, and when he was done, he saw that Davian was holding the door open and the heat was leaking away. Beyond him the antique idled at the curb, and Cedric noticed he’d left it running.

“Is that all you’re wearing?”

But Davian’s suggestion went unheard as Cedric gave another look into the house.

The last thing he saw were the worn soles of Friday’s socks as she ran up the stairs.

When Cedric opened the door of the car, Davian was walking around the elongated nose of the front and approaching the other side. There was a pair of gloves on the seat, and when Davian entered, he picked them up and slipped them on his hands before sitting down.

The gloves bore cloth on the back, off-white: woven so that holes let the skin breathe. And when Davian pulled them over his hands, there was brown leather that covered the palm and the part where his fingers would touch the wheel. It was a curious thing, and it gave Cedric pause, and he just watched the man’s hands for a while, and was quiet.

Davian engaged the motor and threw a glance through the center, and then turned his eyes back to the road.

“Fuel for the fire,” he said, composing a grocery list. “That one’s not so trivial to render from thought.”

Davian looked over again, seeking the boy in the passenger seat and inviting him to join the exercise. “…Anything else you can think of?”

Cedric’s mind was blank for a moment, and he imagined being back in the foundling home, and then the desire solidified and he spat it out before he could hesitate.

“Matches.”

But he quickly realized he’d admitted his handicap, and he looked out the window and wished he’d said nothing.

“Right,” Davian said. He was concentrating on the road, or, at least, pretending. Then he added dreamily, “Be prepared.”

Cedric’s mind was condensing like the darkening clouds above, heavy with the fear of what was to come, and the purring engine was the only noise between them.

“…If these storms are so destructive,” Cedric began after a silence, “Why don’t you make it so it doesn’t form? Or—” he thought, and hypothesized, “You could just make it go somewhere else.”

He wasn’t sure if he liked what he said, but he had to endure it.

“What, a sprightly young man such as yourself doesn’t enjoy a snow day?” Davian asked. “Are you already too old to construct a man in a cap and a carrot nose on Christmas?”

Cedric looked at the road because he didn’t want to respond.

“We can, and do, change what our corner of paradise presents us with,” Davian said. “But when you stack the deck in your favor, the victory is awfully hollow, wouldn’t you say?”

“Isn’t it better when the storm arrives on the day you hadn’t planned on leaving the house? When you get the thing you wanted wrapped with a ribbon beneath the tree without having to say a word?”

Cedric blinked, seeing that Davian’s mood had changed quickly; as if he had completely forgotten the somber moment that came before.

“My brother was home from Eton that month,” he began, and veered into backstory. “Tell me: have you ever heard the phrase ‘the heir and a spare’?”

Davian looked away from the road, and Cedric looked back.

“Yes, that’s the way it was at the Winchester estate. An heir and a spare. And I was the spare.”

Cedric looked at him again, but Davian was watching the road.

“My brother had received a dog from my father that year. Lovely little spaniel: liver and white like all the prettiest ones were. And my father handed it to him and said something about it being the biggest and best bitch in the litter.”

Cedric was still looking at Davian, as he had both hands on the wheel.

“But my brother. My brother. You know, he put up a nice face as we all knew to do, had to do. But I knew what was going on. He smiled at my father and told him ‘thank you father’ as he should have, as he’d been trained to do since we were little children.”

“He was going to call the dog Captain, he told me. He’d told me this years ago, long before he went away to school. He had dreamt of the dog for so long, and when father dropped the little red bitch in his hands—”

Davian sighed and turned left.

“I would have been happy to have a dog at all. But he wanted a boy dog. Nothing else would do.”

He paused. “I didn’t give a damn whether it was a girl dog or a boy dog. I just wanted a dog.”

The light was red, so Davian stopped, and Cedric thought he should have changed the shifter, but there was no shifter to be found.

“The dog ended up getting called Nell. And Nell was a good dog, damn good dog if I do say so myself. And she sat when she was told to sit, and she came to heel whenever my brother said come.”

“It didn’t snow much in England anymore, you see,” Davian said, derailing a bit. “You might be tempted to think, after reading too much about Ebenezer, that winters in England were always covered in a foot of powder.”

Davian used his rearview mirror.

“But that hadn’t been the case for decades. The cold times were long done, and they were the stuff of legend by the time I was a child.”

“Winters in the old houses weren’t like they are now. Fires were in the hearth in each room, and the hallways were cold. We ran from one warmth shuddering, hoping to find another beyond a frigid expanse. When we went to bed, we shut the doors and crawled beneath our blankets and hoped the coal wouldn’t go black before our eyes were closed.”

“I woke on Christmas morning, and I was cold. I opened my eyes and saw the door was open — damn! — the door was open! So I opened my mouth to call for the help, and when I stretched out my legs to get a good position—”

Cedric looked at him, then.

“I felt something pressing at my feet.”

Davian looked at him briefly, but then turned back to the road.

“It was the dog, Cedric. It was Nell, the dog, my brother’s dog.”

Cedric kept watching.

“My brother’s dog had opened the door, pulled the latch; my brother’s dog had refused him and come to me and crawled in my bed. My brother’s spaniel, trained to root out the pheasant from the grass and fetch the weasel from the hole — that was the dog I found curled up at the end of my bed to keep my foot warm.”

Davian used his mirror and moved into the left lane to the sound of the clicker.

“That was when I knew it was going to be a good day, Cedric. Sometimes, you let the weather come to you, and wisdom isn’t to refuse your good fortune.”

Cedric didn’t know quite what to say, but he said something.

“She sounds like a nice dog.”

Davian laughed a little.

“Nell was a good girl, obedient and tame. Loyal and well-bred. Quite ordinary in the best way, if a bit beautiful and easy on the eyes. That’s rather the point of them.”

Davian cut a very peculiar figure at the little grocery store in Queens. Cedric followed him, feeling ill-at-ease, feeling as if everyone there were watching them, and he thought if he turned his back they might point at them and snicker and comment that they did not belong.

But that did not happen.

Davian took a steel shopping cart and, this time still wearing the gloves, pushed it around the store while Cedric followed feeling oddly idle.

He took two bundles of firewood that had been shrink-wrapped in plastic, and the display was left bare behind him. He took items from the bakery, he took lettuces and potatoes and vegetables of several types. He ordered a large pot roast from the butcher and had it wrapped in paper, and several pounds of boneless chicken breast. When he was done filling the cart with foodstuff, they walked down the aisle that didn’t smell like the rest of them. And when he found what he wanted, he took the largest box off the shelf and gave Cedric what he had asked for.

Cedric looked down and saw they read, ‘Waterproof’.

When they got to the register, Cedric watched the man scan the items through the red light and listened to the beep… beep… beep… beep… as each passed through the laser. And the man weighed the greens and counted the onions and did not turn his attention from the task at hand.

He did not say anything until he read out the total, and Cedric held his breath at the strangeness of it all, as if this was where the circus would finally end.

“Nice to see you again, Baron; you look well. That’ll be $444.44.”

Davian smiled and removed a leather wallet from within his coat pocket. He took the gloves from his hands and licked his fingertips so that he could sort through the bills within.

And he paid with perfect change.

After a while, Cedric was left to his own devices. Owen was still in the front room but he was laying on a sofa taking a nap. His face was relaxed and his lips were askew and slightly shiny where the saliva was falling from his mouth.

Cedric took care to make little noise and sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace. The flames were low and just holding on, but even they were subject to whip to either side when the wind came over the vent.

Sometimes, when there was a particularly strong burst, a whistling could be heard from afar.

Cedric had the box he’d been given still in his hands and he turned it over and read the words printed on the label. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, being well-versed in the technique, but he looked at it anyway because he did not know what else he wanted to do.

Suyon ran in and approached the window, so Cedric raised his eyes and watched her. She looked at the white flakes falling from the sky and emphatically pointed at them and turned back to seek reaction from Eloise, who had trailed her into the room.

Eloise smiled at the girl and nodded. She added gently, “Yes, it’s snowing! Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Suyon went back to observing the weather and Eloise sat on the other end of Cedric’s couch.

“Hi,” she said with an open expression. “How are you doing?”

Cedric looked up at her. “Doing alright.”

“What do you have there?” she asked plainly.

He blushed a little and had the instinct to withdraw. “Oh,” he said, shifting his glance. “Just some… matches.”

He looked at Suyon, but it was not easy, and he felt he could not.

Eloise looked at his hands, and then at him. “Here,” she said. “May I see them? I want to show you a trick.”

He looked at her and tried to put on a good face while reluctantly handing her the large box. The contents jostled and chattered when he released his grip and gave them to her.

“It wasn’t so easy for me either—” she said. “When I first learned.”

She took her thumb and pushed the box open so that visible inside were a hundred or so thick matchsticks. She took one out and he saw that it was covered about halfway with an orange coating, and the top was dipped in black where it was intended to be used.

She used her four fingers to push the cavity closed and then she lowered the end to the side of the box with delicate care until she suddenly struck the match against the rough strip. There was a spark and a fizzing, and the thing was quickly set ablaze.

“Here,” she said, handing him the wood now alight. He accepted it and she removed another from the box.

“One of the things that helped me when I was just starting,” she said, looking at the fire he held, “Was to look at the thing I wanted, and to imagine that I was trying to capture it.”

“I looked at it, and I took it into my mind’s eye, and I really tried to understand the thing I wanted. I felt it, and watched it, and knew it, and—”

She held her new match up, but kept it distanced from his. “Once I understood what the fire was,” she said, “That was the first step to move it somewhere else.”

And Cedric watched as a small flame appeared on her stick. It made no noise; it was not violent; it was a small tiny thing that grew and grew until it was the size it should have been.

There was a shadow cast beneath her eyes by her nose, and she appeared very sweet in the low light and her lips were soft and pink and reassuring.

She closed her eyes and looked down while she shook the stick to douse the flame. “Here, I’ll get another,” she said, and started to fish in the box.

Cedric was watching her, but not the match in his hand, and there was a sudden influx of heat where the fire ate through the wood and started to burn his fingers.

“Ow!” he said, involuntarily throwing the thing from the pain. It fell on the floor, completely blackened.

“Oh, never mind,” she said, looking at the spent match. “We can try again.”

Owen was stirring, and behind him, Cedric could hear the boy bring his mouth closed to remoisten his tongue.

Eloise gave Cedric a dry match, and then she lit another, but this time she held it.

“Just quiet your mind,” she instructed. “Think of nothing but the fire. Watch how it moves, think about the shape it takes, and how sometimes it makes little crackles in the things it burns and—”

Cedric did as he was told and he watched the fire before him. He stared at it and concentrated and saw how it was round where it consumed the chemical, and sharp where the color became pale and he thought sometimes he saw it dance. But he did not understand what exactly she had meant by ‘mind’s eye’ and his thoughts flickered and he realized that if he had been asked to explain how the fire worked, he—

There was a sudden poof of breath and the match went grey and a trail of smoke drifted up into the air.

“Su!” Eloise chided. “That wasn’t very nice!”

Suyon looked at them with a simple expression; she seemed altogether quite satisfied with herself, and then she ran away, and Eloise chased her, calling into the hallway, “We were doing something! You don’t just interrupt people—”

Cedric’s eyes refocused on the room, because they had become a bit crossed from staring at the matches.

“C’mere,” Owen said, evidently having observed what had transpired. He took the box of matches and removed another. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

He sat down where Eloise had been. “It’s not really about the fire,” he said, holding the new match between the two of them. “It’s about you.”

“You look at the match, and you stare real hard,” he said, eyes intent. “And you think about everything that’s ever really pissed you off.”

There was a sizzle, and the thing lit.

“You don’t have to know anything about fire to know what it feels like inside.”

Owen’s hair was astray from where he’d been laying on the pillow. His blue eyes were wild, seeing his miracle.

He turned from Cedric then. “And when you get real good,” he said, toward the fireplace, “You can make the world feel the way you do.”

He made no gesture and the flames that had been quietly licking at the surface of the logs rose and manifested, casting a new wave of yellow and orange into the room.

He was still watching the fire, and said with resolution, “It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it.”

Eloise had Suyon gripped on her ribcage, carrying her beneath her armpits when she reentered the room. She plopped the girl on the floor and released her, and Suyon looked at the freshly dancing flames.

“I wouldn’t worry too much, Cedric,” Eloise said, turning to look at the two on the couch. “It just takes time. You’ll get it.”

But Cedric was watching Suyon, who extended her arms and straightened her elbows in a single motion. Her hands were splayed and her fingers extended and her palms turned toward the fire.

An assertive whump was sent into the room as a thick pile of snow fell from the chimney and muffled the fire. The wood was completely covered in snow as the blaze was instantly snuffed.

“Suyon!!”

Soon, the Sun was falling, and so was the snow. Cedric was not sure he wanted to eat, but he also knew he could not completely abstain, so he took one of the cranberry scones Eloise had made the day before. When he bit into the bread, the pastry was sweet because she’d coated the outside with coarse sugar granules and when the soft yellow bread collapsed in his mouth, there was a little crunch to remind him of what he was eating. The berries had taken in moisture from the dough and become round in the baking, and there were little bits of sour contrast strewn inside the treat.

And when he was done, he didn’t feel much like dinner, so he went upstairs.

The only bedroom on the second floor was Myrtle’s. Aside from that, there was a library, a study, a music room.

The music room was a curious thing, because he was not so sure that any of the orphans played instruments or sang songs. And the room was often dark and because Cedric found himself shirking from having to use the matches, he usually walked right past it.

But tonight, he saw Myrtle at the piano.

She had only one candle there, sitting atop the black instrument, a shining grand piano. And the candle, of black wax, was a squat thing, and if he did not already know it was magical, he might have thought it would extinguish and wink out before he got too close.

Cautiously, he entered the room, and Myrtle’s eyes were drooping and her neck was low and she very much looked like she might have been falling asleep.

“Myrtle?” he said, quietly. “…Are you awake?”

She opened her eyes slowly, but otherwise hardly reacted to the sound of his voice. She was not caught flat-footed; she had not been asleep at all.

“Yes, hello Cedric,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying the snow.”

It was a strange pleasantry, and he didn’t want to say something untrue, so he looked at her and asked a question instead. “You play piano?”

She looked up at him and her eyes were weary and the candle cast a shadow that made her look very old.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t play anymore.”

Her face changed, like she was trying to smile, but also like she was thinking of something that made her terribly sad. “I used to play when I was younger, many years ago.”

Cedric looked at her, and she was mournful, and old.

“Let’s not sit in here,” she said. “It’s very dark and my eyes can’t see well in the dark.”

“Let’s recollect in the library.”

Myrtle took a seat at one end of a generous couch, and Cedric took the other. In the library, there was more light, and it was warm from a fire that lingered but would not go out.

“What was all that fuss downstairs? There was quite a lot of noise for a little while. I hope the children were being kind to you.”

Cedric thought for a moment, but what he wanted to say rang out like a bell. “Yes, everything was fine. Everyone’s very nice, just—”

He paused. “…They were trying to teach me how to make fire.”

Her eyes moved, and saw him, and let him speak.

“Well, move it, I guess, not exactly make it. I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. Seems all the rest of them can, and can do it easily. And they showed me how and said—”

“What did they say, Cedric?” she asked, and her words were simple, but direct.

Cedric went the other way. “I—” and he looked away in shame. “Myrtle, you’ve been very kind to me, and I like it here and the kids are nice, and I don’t want to go away, but—”

She listened.

“I’m not really sure I’m a mage at all. They can all do it, and they make it look so easy. And when I see what they can do, I feel somewhere, somehow, that I should be able to do it too. It doesn’t feel strange to me, it feels familiar, and I look at the fire and think I could do it if I tried hard enough, but when they put the match in my hand—”

He trailed off, and became despondent.

“Maybe you made a mistake about me,” he said. “Maybe I’m not really a mage at all.”

Myrtle did something strange then, stranger than all the magic he’d seen that day. And it made him a little warmer than the breeze rising off the ocean, or the friction that had lit a spark in the sulfur, or the color that made embers in the hearth.

She touched him on the shoulder.

“Cedric, I don’t think I’m wrong about you. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but this is one thing that I am quite sure about.”

He looked up at her.

“Be patient, Cedric. If you try to go too fast, you’re liable to miss landing right where you need to be.”

She sat back and took her hand and put it on her lap, and he saw that her face had softened, as if she was drifting somewhere else, where the smell of grass was in the air and the wind was making the green leaves rustle against themselves.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you about how we started the school.”

“No,” Cedric said. “I don’t know.”

She closed her eyes, as if she needed to shut out this world to remember where it was that she had been.

“I was a young thing when I married for love,” she began. “Just a step out of girlhood. People will marry for all sorts of reasons. And maybe it works for them, and maybe it doesn’t. And when we’re young, we don’t always know what we’re doing. We think we’re doing one thing, and we’re actually doing another thing entirely. But I married—”

And she took a breath, “Because I knew he was the death I wanted.”

Cedric felt quite small to hear this.

“My husband had worked as a lawyer for a long time when I met him. One might say he had a silver tongue, but I wouldn’t, because sometimes things don’t sound right on the other side, and I don’t want you to think the wrong thing about him. But my husband had an effortless faculty with words and how to wield them as sword or salve as he saw fit.”

“But the years had not been easy, and he was falling ill. He couldn’t work as much as he had, and he had very little money.”

There was a little glimmer in her eye, then. “But the early times were more than worth their weight in gold.”

Cedric smiled a little bit, because she was too.

“When my father died, I decided to sell the silk business,” she said. “It was hard to get rid everything of he’d tried so hard to create, and it had sustained him since he’d come to America. But I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“I didn’t have my mother’s hand with the needle,” she lamented. “And I didn’t have my father’s gift.”

“When my mother was alive, she made the dresses. And when she died, we sold the silks. My father had a tongue that bloomed lotus flowers. He sold to the East and I sold to the Westerners who spoke in English. As soon as the supply came in, we’d bring it out and put it in the window, and when the people came in, they wanted to touch it with their hands. So when they came in, they felt it folded on the bolt, and if they liked it, they wrapped it around their bodies and admired themselves in the mirror and asked how many dollars it took to bring it home.”

“He was one of the richest men in Chinatown. And when he died, I was one of the richest women in Brooklyn and I wanted for nothing.”

Then she stopped. “Well—” she said. “Almost nothing.”

“My husband and I wanted to help the children who didn’t have a way in the world. In those days,” she recalled, “when your parents died and your aunt couldn’t or wouldn’t take you, you moved into an orphanage and you stayed there and you got fed and washed and learned your letters. And when you came of age, perhaps you became a governess, or perhaps you stayed back to take care of the little children like the older ones had taken care of you.”

“But—” she said, becoming cloudy. “Then the war happened, and I went to help those in need.”

“And when I came back, I was changed, and I wasn’t ready to take care of the children yet.”

“But I waited, and the children came to me,” she said, smiling weakly.

She placed a hand on his that had been curled on his lap. “Just you wait, Cedric. Just be patient.”

And then she withdrew, but her face was calm. “Your magic will come to you.”

“And when it does, you will be glad you waited.”

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When Cedric woke the next morning, he could feel his pulse beating in his head. He turned from one side to the other, and, in the motion, he discovered his stomach was also ill.

He pushed his head into his pillow, but light had begun to leak into his room at the edges of the curtains.

His memories of the night before were fractured. He remembered listening to Myrtle and Davian throw barbs at each other, and he remembered how uncomfortable their discourse had left him. But the scene’s details had become fuzzy, and he had the overwhelming fear that he’d said — or done — something incredibly stupid. As he tried to find the damning lines, they slipped like oil from his fingers.

He rolled over again, putting his back to the wall. When his eyes opened, the shelves looked down upon him: scores of ancient books, their topics bringing new meaning to the incomprehensible arcane. The tension in his mind raged, and he could not settle and he closed his eyes.

Against his better judgement, the images in his mind flickered and he thought back to Newburgh. It had now been several long weeks, perhaps even months, since he’d been handcuffed and stored in the cell downtown. The time since was dissolving like vapor in the wind. Here, in a dusty old brownstone in New York City, he was hungover on hundred-dollar wine, and it was Mrs. Clark with her TV tray and Star Trek re-runs that seemed like fantasy. He thought back to the library book he’d handed to Betty, inadvertently forming his last testament, and his cheeks grew hot with shame and for a while he was awash in faceless regret.

“Cedric—?” came Myrtle’s voice, muted from the other side of the door, followed by several knocks of her knuckles. “Are you awake? May I come in?”

He sat up in bed, too quickly, and his body protested, his stomach reminding him of his past transgressions.

He feigned energy and vigor where he had none. “Yeah, come on in,” he said, pressing his fingers to the side of his head.

She opened the door slowly, nothing in her hands. She was covered, as usual, in a dark dress, something seeming black even if it might have been navy or dark brown. Her jewelry, a sepia brooch, was different than she’d worn yesterday.

She stepped inside and pushed the door nearly closed, but not quite. She stood, cautious, and spoke across the room to him. “How are you this morning?”

Cedric felt small, and seen. “Tired, I guess.” He could not look at her. “Didn’t sleep well,” he clarified. “At all.”

She didn’t respond quickly, but when she did, her voice was soft and slow; the one she used for Suyon. “Red wine has tannins: from the grape skin and seeds, from the barrels in which it’s aged. They take time to be filtered from the blood,” she explained carefully. “You’re not accustomed to it. Many get terrible headaches until they’ve recovered. You should rest and drink plenty of water—”

“Why do you defend him?” Cedric demanded with intensity, the throbbing in his temples becoming unbearable. “Who the hell does he think he is? He’s always showing off, bragging, preaching…” Cedric tried to hold his tongue, but he couldn’t try very hard and his contempt boiled over. “He’s just an—”

“Davian’s methods are somewhat unorthodox,” she interrupted. “And he can be caustic and… difficult at times. He has not had a student in quite some time—”

He bit back. “Yeah, well, that’s not my problem.”

“Cedric…” Myrtle said quietly. “I understand your reservations. He’s not an easy man to get along with. And, I admit, he’s become increasingly strange over the past several years—”

The boy scoffed.

“But I do think the two of you stand to gain much from each other. You need that experience. His mind can enter doors long closed to me.”

She lowered her voice. “Others that I probably will never know.”

Cedric was quiet.

“This is your home,” she continued, attempting to soothe her newest student. “And you are always welcome here. But the ways in which I instruct the children will not be enough. You need more.”

He looked at her, but it was awkward.

“I am not turning you out,” she reassured him. “Far from it.”

She considered her words, and spoke deliberately. “But a man’s Talent is different from a woman’s. You will suffer if you take only one viewpoint.”

“Then why did you bring me here?” He turned toward her forcefully, and then withdrew, the light making his head throb in pain.

He let his eyes look at something dark while he descended into hopelessness. “Why did you bring me here if you were just going to ship me off to someone else?”

She responded in turn: quiet, resolute, the truth shaping words until they were smooth.

“I brought you here to protect you,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean the path is going to be easy. Or simple.”

“What about Elmer?” Cedric asked. “And Owen?”

“They are young, yet,” she said. “But I have no intention to hinder their progress, either, when the time comes.”

Cedric did not say anything.

“I am fortunate to count Davian as one of my friends. It is an advantage I wish to pass on,” Myrtle said patiently. “He has much to teach, yet few associates anymore.”

“I wonder why.” Cedric spat with dismissive sarcasm.

“He has good intentions behind the showmanship,” Myrtle negotiated. “He is often trying to guard himself, and he is afraid of getting hurt. You must see through that. He genuinely wants to win your affection. I realize it can be—”

She caught his eye. “—Uncomfortable for you. And he would do well to take a moment to consider where you are coming from.”

“More money than sense,” Cedric retorted of the man.

Myrtle did not respond quickly.

“Your feelings are yours, and I am careful not to suggest you dismiss them,” she said. “But you would be likewise mired in pride to rebuke a man because you do not appreciate the way he dresses or talks. To judge him based upon the same criteria for which you do not wish others to forsake you.”

Cedric looked at her, and heard her concluding argument.

“You’re a fool to stop eating because you once choked.”

When Myrtle left the room, Cedric was glad for it. Not because he wanted to be alone, but because he could not stand to endure the contrary opinion. He was in no mood to entertain her plea that he should treat the man with mercy.

He could not.

Mercy required something of himself that he could not yet muster. Wherever that strength lay within his tangled heart, it had become submerged by sand in the changing tide. Though he thought he should try to grasp at it, it had become worn through the years and it lacked an edge to hold. Davian’s hospitality — or attempt at something like it — had made him feel a stranger.

He was angry and he was resentful. Disdain melted into disgust and he was dangerously close to suffocating in the toxic cloud. In his weakened state, bodily motion was nearly impossible and the rage could not be vented, so he laid on the bed and it echoed back and forth until the original waveforms had become unintelligible noise.

There was a point at which it didn’t matter how much gold had been woven into the tablecloths. If Davian was the kind of person who thought friends were won with favors and finery, then there wasn’t going to be a single damn thing they had in common.

But the thought didn’t resonate like he thought it should. A tiny kernel in the back of his thoughts suggested maybe, too, he was confused.

Perhaps, he was lost.

Cedric had slept through breakfast because his body had demanded respite. But by the time lunch swept around, the choice was real, and he avoided it because he could not bear to have those faces look upon him.

There were seven of them: seven people around that table, with the fourteen eyes that seemed always to be looking into him, between him, and within the seams that spoke of his vulnerability. And he thought of the knives scraping against the plates and the spoons dropping into the food and the clanging and chewing and swallowing and the incessant questions and chatter and casual commentary that blended together into word soup —

When he thought they were all entertained at lunch, he slipped into the hallway bathroom. He swallowed his nausea and bent his neck such that his head fell beneath the faucet, and, in an inelegant gesture, he took in water from the sink.

Between the burbling, he wondered what business a bunch of mages had with having city water pumped into their houses. Couldn’t they have anything they wanted without cost? Isn’t that what it meant to summon? Was this all just to keep up appearances with the others?

What was it Davian had called them with flippant disregard?

‘Mortals.’

The water was cold and made him forget about the ripened decay leeching onto his tongue.

He drank, and four-letter words peppered his memory, each stranger than the last.

‘Mage.’

‘Home.’

‘Wine.’

‘…Fuck!’

He sputtered and coughed and tried to keep from choking. His thirst could not overcome his sickness, so he slumped back in defeat to his room. He thought he ought to try to have some simple meal: bread, maybe. Something to dilute and absorb the poison. But he rejected the thought.

Despite it all, he had the overwhelming feeling that he had eaten enough.

The curtain hiding the window in his room had a hook and a thick cord that accompanied it, so he drew the cloth back and secured it as best he was able so that a little light trickled into the room. He could see little particles reflect back at him, and they floated and danced as if they had no comprehension that they were caged.

He thought about opening the window, but felt unsure.

It had been weeks he’d been coming back to this chamber and in the time that had passed, he’d disturbed only the barest essentials. The chest of drawers had some things he’d slowly accepted as his own, and Myrtle had presented him with a pair of slippers to which he still felt estranged. They were soft and warm, and yet to accept them supposed some agreement beneath which he was not ready to pen his name.

He thought about lying back down, but his head was uneasy and the water collecting at the bottom of his gut was still dangerously rebellious at even the mere suggestion that it should be jostled against his esophagus. Instead, he held his head aloft and turned his neck.

The shelf’s books were arranged carefully, each an inch or two from the edge, forming a threshold like bricks lacking mortar. They were distinct, though most wore demure color. They had no paper jackets and their crosshatched skin made no pretenses.

Several tomes of astronomical interest were seated together, silvers and blues dominating the visual.

‘Beyond Celestial Mechanics.’

‘Elementary Stellar Divinations.’

‘Projecting the Planets.’

He moved on. Another shelf was equally forbidding, although here stood a preference for red and gold.

‘Fire, Flame, and Fear: Releasing Ultimate Potential from Within.’

‘Mort & Kainen’s Discourse on Force.’

The temple on the right side of his face seized painfully, so he turned away.

‘Heathens and Horticulture: My Year With Squanto.’

‘A Treatise on pre-Columbian Mysticism of the Lenape Peoples.’

He felt nameless discomfort, so he went on and took the book to the right of all the rest. He sat on his bed and read it for twenty minutes or so before he took note of the page he was on and closed the cover, a grey so deep it might have been something else. He wasn’t sure what he had learned, but he left the rest for another day.

‘The Long Memory.’

Cedric saw himself shaving, then. But it was a curious thing, and time seemed entirely to be stretched too thin.

Each time he brought the blade to his face, he made fall another column of cream. And beneath where the foam had been, was his face, clean in the exercise. And the hair fell away, cut.

But something did not look right, even though he could not see. The tile was white and the mirror was silver and the light made his pupils contract until they were small and they were green all around the black and if he’d been quiet enough, he might have noticed the pain.

[ ‘Bet—’ ]

It was Betty’s bathroom, on the second floor, left as you went up the stairs. Set above the kitchen, if you thought about it, so that the pipes ran up and down in neat little lines, gravity helping the plumbing, but never deviated — never went diagonally.

[ ‘I don’t live here, do—’ ]

No, he didn’t live here, he realized. That time and place had passed, and now…

[ ‘You’re wrong, it was right, not left. Now…?’ ]

He was shaving. But an inordinate time had seemed to stretch ponderous past his cognition, pulled tight so that the light passed through it, and still he remained on the right cheek. It wasn’t right, and he thought he’d made a mistake. In five strokes, he should be done; in five strokes, sometimes six, he could move to the other side, or at least into the middle.

Why was he in Betty’s bathroom, he thought lazily. His mind was viscous and tired, and when he tried to direct his thoughts and questions, they were a tethered ball that went in a circle but did not fly.

He went underneath his nose then, and his razor touched the division, slicing in tiny iterations, the scraping silent in the white cream—starting from the left, he went right until he reached the naked skin.

He bent against the counter to get a better look, but he hated to see himself and the way his flesh looked pink when he got too close. His eyes, too, streaked with tiny reddish vessels. The pressure of the—

[ Wait. ]

Betty didn’t have a square counter. There was no marble there, no cold corners, that wasn’t how he’d seen it. That wasn’t how it had been. This was all wrong. It was round, it had been round, yes: round; and there had been a little glass shelf and sometimes he put the razor on there and then he saw how it left a residue, and then he—

[ Look. ]

In the mirror, was his face. And he’d moved to the left now, and one swipe had left a swath glowing where the pores were open. He felt the air flood into the empty follicles and it was cold as it was burning and then he was looking at himself and he was seeing into the empty space outside the color of his eyes when his face twisted into a smile.

[ Smile? ]

Yes, it was a smile, though it was cockeyed. He still had shaving cream on one side, so the whole thing was tilted while it was straight.

And he stared for some time, thinking he saw a smile, but was not himself making it and though he wanted desperately to raise his hands and touch his fingers to his face to test the orientation of his muscles, they would not go and refused him because he was holding a razor.

[ Razor. ]

But where was the razor?

His eyes peered, but they could not see. Two bright lights had been born upon the mirror and as his eyes were open, they grew and grew and grew until they flashed white overload into the back of his retina.

[ Wheel. ]

He was driving the Cavalier—but?

He was still in the bathroom.

Cedric hated when they followed so close behind him. He hated when the lights flashed bright in the rearview, up and down, intense from askew when they came out of the divots in the road. The anger rose again so he threw his head backward to look at them, to show his face, to let them know they could not hide in his—

[ Shadow? ]

When he looked, there was nothing there. He was sure he hadn’t moved (his feet) but the walls were gone and the tile wasn’t there and the car was nowhere to be seen.

What remained was the water. It came up around his ankles and it was cold and where it seeped into his jeans, it made the clothing heavy. The faucet was running; he could hear it and he needed to make it stop. He stumbled around and looked for the sink but the weight of the denim made it hard to walk and where he stepped, the icy water splashed back and got more of him wet.

[ “Betty?” ]

He was calling out for her now. If he couldn’t turn off the sink, the noise would keep going and the level would rise and soon the whole house would flood with water everywhere.

[ “Betty…?” ]

He kept yelling into the darkness for help. It was her house, he thought, her bathroom, her sink. She would know how to fix it. She would have the tools: a wrench, the pliers or whatever she needed…

[ “…Betty!” ]

A bucket, maybe.

[ “Help! Betty, I—!” ]

Cedric had the sudden feeling he was falling, and he seized back into consciousness.

His eyes flung open, and he found himself still in the bedroom.

Still — in the bedroom.

He blinked and shifted underneath the plush covers: a sheet, supple and impossibly soft, and a thick blanket in a deep blue. It was dark in the room and he thought he felt better: less hungover, more alive, and then he remembered the water running and how it sloshed and splashed and made it hard to run around and his clothes had stuck to him and his socks were cold and wet but then a question arose —

If there had been water all over, how did he fall in the open air?

The clock in the hallway rang out. He counted the tolling of the bell, because the darkness gave no other clues, and when it was done he knew it was five o’clock in the morning.

He’d made it through the night.

When Cedric’s bare feet touched the floor, there was a carpet between his skin and the cold wood. The pile was short, but it was firm and dense and it kept the chill from seeping into the room.

He stood and stepped forward, and then to the left. He saw the slippers on the floor, and noticed them, but kept going.

When he opened the door and stepped into the hallway, it creaked on the hinges, but the aching groan did not keep Eloise from leaping in surprise as the two of them nearly collided forehead-to-forehead in front of the bathroom.

The young woman was fully dressed, but Cedric, in the faded t-shirt he’d brought with him, was less so.

“Cedric!” she exclaimed in an excited whisper, stammering over strange words. “W-we missed you yesterday.”

Now it was his turn to be bashful, and his mind went blank.

“Are you—” she softened her face a bit in the dim light, trying to put him at ease with a gentle query. “…Are you feeling any better?” Her eyes were deep and warm, like polished wood.

Cedric put his hands in his pockets. “Yeah,” he said, ashamed. “I’m feeling a little better. Just… needed some sleep.”

“Cold?” she asked simply.

Cedric felt stupid. “No, not really,” he admitted, and remembered where he had been, not last night, but the night before. “…Davian—”

But where he began, he stopped abruptly when he looked again into her eyes, gleaming in the candlelight. Her gaze consumed him and he quickly realized the folly of whatever it was that he had been about to say. It was a weak thing to make excuses.

“Are you usually up this early?” he asked instead.

She smiled weakly, but in a manner she could not suppress, and looked away, avoiding his question.

“D’you want some breakfast?” she asked quickly. “I’ll fix you anything you want. You name it.”

He considered his stomach, his heart, and his head, and he noticed the wracking pain between his temples had gone in the night, and he felt a little different than he had before.

“You don’t have to make anything for me. I think I just want some water.”

In the kitchen, by the time the clock tolled the half-hour, Eloise had brewed tea. She poured a cup for herself and offered it to him again. He saw the grey steam waft lazily and disappear into the air, and he thought for a moment, considering his manners, but refused again, knowing he could not withstand that heat.

“The Matron has been attending Mass on Sundays,” she said, her attention drifting as she spoke. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon as she’s ready to leave. She prefers the early service, and it takes her some time to get to where she’s going.”

Cedric looked toward the hallway but said nothing.

“I’m sure she won’t eat anything,” Eloise said. “She rarely does.”

By chance, the two of them raised their drinks and they took in water nearly in turn. When their cups were again set on the table, Cedric looked up and thought Eloise was blinking a little too frequently, and he wondered if she had rested well.

They let the silence percolate for a moment, but they both felt a quiet strain. Eloise had struck a nerve and Cedric stewed for a brief moment before erupting like a cracked dam.

“Doesn’t magic—” he said, still stumbling haphazardly over those syllables, “—and religion…”

He knew what he wanted to say, suddenly ashamed, but he tried again. “Doesn’t magic make religion—”

The word put spikes on his tongue, but he said it anyway. “…Obsolete?”

Eloise had a restrained look: curious, and patient. She let the question gather dust, and then spoke. “Why do you say that?”

Cedric had not prepared, and he tried to render words upon an abstract suspicion. “Well, y’know—”

He ran his fingers idly through his light brown hair, wandering forward as he feared her response. “If—”

That name gave him pause, and he hated himself, but turned the rage outward. “If Jesus is just another mage; just another man capable of conjuring food and walking on water and all that,” he parsed awkwardly, “then why would you worship him as a god?”

Eloise looked down, embarrassed, and let air escape her lungs through a small, knowing smile. “Son of a god,” she corrected.

Cedric’s eyebrow twitched.

“As with all things,” she explained, “it’s best not to take anything completely literally. The Matron—”

And then she stopped speaking when the creaking of footfall could be heard from the central staircase toward the front of the house. It came as slow rhythm, one step after another descending in perfect time. Eloise’s eyes shot open then, and she fled from the kitchen and dashed into the entry, leaving Cedric lingering behind his glass half-full of tap water.

In front of the door, the two women spoke to each other. Noise muffled by the walls between, Cedric found their words unintelligible, but he listened as instinct. Eloise had a voice that went up and down on the tide of her irrepressible emotions and he heard her; sometimes cheerful, sometimes embarrassed, but Myrtle’s contralto was almost inaudible, the burnished tones extinguished by the old rooms around them.

Cedric felt separate and strange. He found, too, that beneath a veneer of normalcy, he was still jittery and he realized the poison had not completely left his body. He looked at the water on the table and it felt alien to him.

Louder than their voices was the opening door, the sound when it soon closed, and the reengagement of the lock. Cedric sat still then, something in his spine remembering something no word could approximate.

It was only a second or two until Eloise came back in, and she alone looked upon him. Cedric looked up at her, and she was quiet as her lungs pulled air into her chest.

Her face softened, and she smiled, but it was a false expression, an untrue thing she deployed in an exhausted effort to put him at ease: a veil over the cracking confidence within. He wanted to make her stop, so he waited for her to speak so that the corners of her lips would twist the other way.

She sat down across from him.

“She’ll be gone for a bit; couple hours or so...” Eloise didn’t look at him, but she seemed as if she might have been trying. There was something bearing down upon them, but Cedric couldn’t point to it.

“I was wondering, if it’s not too much to ask of you,” she said after a breathy pause. She finally found his eyes. “Could I ask you to keep watch over the little ones for a little while?”

Cedric opened his mouth to say something, but he was dumbfounded by her request, and wasn’t sure exactly what to say. He couldn’t refuse her, and yet—his recent inebriation reminded him that he had earned no scrap of authority.

And he saw a quiet security in that space.

“I’ll only be gone—hopefully—an hour or two,” she said, preempting his resistance. “Probably two, most likely, but I want to get back before the Matron returns from her service.”

Cedric felt the weight, though she was making deliberate effort to mask anxiety.

“Most of them can mind themselves more or less,” she said. “Zahra can make breakfast; she usually does if I ask her…”

Again, she continued to speak before Cedric could find anything to say.

“It’s Suyon—” she said, almost out of breath. “Zahra will get her when she wakes and bring her downstairs,” Eloise continued. “But she doesn’t find it easy to spend time with her.”

“She’s too young, I guess. Zahra...” she lingered on something unseen, and instead changed trajectory. “Suyon doesn’t talk yet, and I think that’s hard for Zahra. She doesn’t really know how to play with her.”

“And where Suyon came from, I’m not sure she had any toys at all, so…” she trailed off.

Cedric was watching Eloise now, and seeing that while she was sitting, she was pulled tight like a rubber band, ready to leap from her seat. “I think she’ll talk eventually…”

His curiosity got the better of him. “Are you also going to church?” he asked simply.

Her cheeks reddened and her eyes dropped. “N-no—” she said, her tone lowered in shame. “I’m not going to church. I don’t mind it, but—”

The space between thickened, and she stumbled on an utterance she would have rather never required. “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

Cedric accepted the fact at first, but then resisted on a second glance.

“You have a doctor’s appointment on Sunday?”

The burgeoning color on her face intensified and she could not look at him.

“I... I ought to get going,” she said, sheepish. “I’ll get my purse. I’ll be right back.”

“See me out?” she asked quickly, looking toward, but not at him.

He, for his part, saw the dark eyebrows beneath her forehead. They were furled as they were soft, and he thought they were just as pretty as the rest of her.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Of course.”

Outside on the front steps, the Sun was lazily rising over the horizon. The sky was painted blue, streaked in parts with yellow.

It was not unlike the other mornings he’d left for Inwood. Later, perhaps. But in those instances he’d been alone.

He’d made that journey now on several quiet days, and he’d noticed some things while others washed away from his memory without soil in which to take root. He was still a stranger, an outsider, a kid from the Midwest, and he didn’t often know what was worth a double take.

“I ought to show you around sometime,” Eloise said, wind sweeping hair into her face even as she tried to restrain it behind her ear. “It’s a nice neighborhood. You probably haven’t seen much of it yet.”

“We’ve got a little treehouse on the other lot.”

Cedric looked at her. She wore a denim dress, a thin blue made delicate especially for such an application to a lady’s frame. It seemed different than that which she might wear on days that she did not leave the house. Around her neck was the collar of a linen shirt that sat underneath; a yellow not so unlike the sky, dotted with little flowers scattered in a regular pattern. The collar was rounded, and she’d arranged it so that the edge sat just above a grey sweater, her only protection from the cold.

“Maybe I should go inside and get something else to wear. It’s—” she said, but the last words were drowned when a jet came out of the west and roared overhead.

Somewhere in Cedric’s mind he thought he should look up, but he did not. He was watching Eloise, who had sealed her lips and stood in silent rebellion against the engine noise filling the air.

They did not say anything for a while because they could not. Cedric thought he had not noticed any of this sort of din when he was inside the house, and he had the realization that out here, standing on the last hill in Astoria, there was nothing shielding him from empty space above, not from wind, nor from rain, and certainly not the sound of airplanes making their rapid descent.

Eloise clutched a small handbag in black and looked at him. When she blinked, her eyes were gone for a moment, and when they appeared again, they were turned to the side, and she was smiling again, a pained small thing, and the bottom of her eyes were glossy.

He thought his eyes were wet too, and the smell of sulfur was in the air. It clung to them in the changed wind and it made their eyes water, but they said nothing and did not cry.

“Where’s Eloise?” Friday asked at breakfast, throwing her eyes down the table like a dart. With Myrtle also absent, the six of them filled the long sides of the table, but at either end was a chair that had never been pulled out.

Cedric looked at Zahra, thinking she should respond to the girl to her left, but she kept her head buried in a bowl of rice porridge.

Cedric spoke when it was apparent only he knew the answer. “She—” he said, remembering how her hair had been falling out of her braid in places. “She had to run an errand.”

Friday raised a singular eyebrow.

“She had to run an errand?” she repeated with an irritable flourish at the end.

Cedric looked at her and saw that she was dark and stormy.

“Yeah. That’s what told me.”

Friday just looked at him for a moment, and then she frowned in disgust, her head and shoulders pulsing in disdain while her eyes flickered toward the table’s edge.

She scoffed. “Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, I’m going out.”

Friday stood, pushing the chair out from beneath her with her legs alone. She looked at Cedric, and her eyes were coals red with fury. “I don’t take orders from you.”

“Owen?” she said brightly.

He brought his chin up to look at her.

Friday spoke to no one in particular, while making sure everyone heard her proclamation.

“We won’t be back for lunch.”

Cedric was scraping food into a basin when Elmer came in with another stack of plates. He sat them down on the counter next to the sink to the sound of metal striking porcelain.

“I’m sorry she’s like that,” Elmer said quietly. “I don’t know what her problem is.”

Cedric kept cleaning plates, but before he reached for another, he thought he should respond.

“It’s fine,” he said, and then added something else. “Whatever.”

The kitchen was quiet then, except when Cedric put one plate on top of another and the collision echoed against the marble.

“Listen,” he said. “D’you think you could find me some writing supplies? Pen and paper or whatever?”

He moved his head a little, toward Elmer, but eyes cast over the sink.

“I think I want to write to someone.”

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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.”

← previous  ||  Table of Contents  ||  next →

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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