Horns of Dilemma

There are going to be a lot of people at the concert who will claim they know what happened tonight. But they're wrong. They didn't see all there was to see. I know this, because I'm the only one who did, the only one who could. I only wish I could have understood in enough time to stop Neal.

Oh, I'm sure they'll telling the truth when they swear up and down they saw it all, but that's just their heads piecing together all their impressions after the fact. The brain tries to make sense of stuff that doesn't even make sense, you know. It fills in pieces, links things that had nothing to do with each other. And that's what most people's stories are going to be. All they did was hear the sound, see the blood, feel the panic, and then start to run as Gary just never got up.

I can say that I know the truth of what really happened because the horn section is the invisible eyes and ears of every band. We see all, but no one sees us. Think about it; when was the last time you were at a show, watching a great live band, and ever noticed the three-man horn section? Oh, one of them will step out and do a solo once in a while, if they're lucky, but the rest of the time we're just part of the wash of background, as engaging as a light pattern on the backdrop.

And that's the thing -- we're *supposed* to be unobtrusive. We hit the stings, punch the buttons, and stay out of the way the rest of the time. It's not that I'm knocking the gig... After all, I wouldn't want to be the one out in front, getting the full force of all that energy pouring in from a live audience. Sometimes I wonder how, when things are really cooking and hitting on all cylinders, that Gary's head didn't just pop right off.

Of course, that was until the night it basically did. Look, none of us going into that night's show had any illusions about things between Gary and Neal being okay. Gary, that's our singer and bassist, and Neal was lead guitar. He was also the main songwriter, which actually started out as a great dynamic. Gary would stand at the front mic every night, soaking up the love and catching the inevitable pair(s) of panties, and Neal would hang back, tearing it up with his electric axe in ways that mostly went over everyone's heads.

Honestly, when I first latched onto the tour, I thought that was how Neal wanted it. I thought he was one of those geniuses who's happy to prop up a front man who can bear the brunt of all the vibes pouring in from two to three thousand souls loving you all at once. And the main story in the music media was just that... Gary was the flash, Neal the substance. Ever since Lennon and McCartney, the world loves dichotomies like that, two synergistic souls who balance each other perfectly. Together, they were Lifeblood, destined to go down in history as one of the late great Eighties best glam-metal bands... but I guess that's not going to happen now. Or if it does happen, it will be for the wrong reasons.

Because, like most things are in the entertainment biz, everything was great until it wasn't. It's surprising what folks are able to overlook when there's money raining down, but the tour was winding down, and Gary had started publicly grumbling about the fact that Neal had come to him with *zero* song ideas for the next album, and Neal... well, he was just Neal. He started retreating even more than usual. We all just assumed he was spending all his time in his tour bus (the two of them hadn't shared one since the early days) doubling down on his musical geniusness and cranking out his next masterpiece.

After what seemed like a perfectly gimcrack show two days ago, Telly seemed particularly tense. Telly is our trumpet player, always standing on my left, trying to avoid the occasional exuberant side-whip of my trombone slide. I sat down with him near the craft table, both of us coming down off the second encore's typical adrenaline high, but he seemed like he was more jazzed than usual. So I asked him what was up.

"Didn't you see that look?" he asked, and I had to admit that I had no idea what he was talking about. "Neal... when Gary was announcing 'Or Someone Like You', he was just standing there outside of the spotlight. I could just tell that he was staring at the back of Gary's head, and then he turned around our way, and there was this hateful *look* on his face..."

"Hold on," I started. I knew our current livelihood was based on the tour finishing, and wanted to make sure that Telly wasn't just imagining things. "What makes you say hateful?"

The question seemed to take Telly by surprise. "I don't know, I just... it was there, plain as day."

That was when Maria leaned in, her sax still slung around her neck, and yelped, "It's the drugs, I tells ya! The druuuugs!" This was typical of when she decided to interject herself into a conversation she hadn't yet been a part of. This instance actually happened to make a little more conversational sense than most.

She drew back a little when Telly shot back at her, barely holding back fury, "I'm *trying* to talk to Barrett! Do you mind!" I have to admit, I jumped a little too. I hadn't seen Telly lose his cool, ever.

"Sorry! Jeez!" Maria said, throwing up her hands, trying to turn her apology into a joke. Then she put her mouth on her reed and played a descending chromatic scale as she backed away. Soon it was just me and the coronet player again.

Telly was looking at the floor a little ways ahead of us, his brow furrowed, thinking hard. "They're going to break up, I can tell. Sooner instead of later. Just make sure you keep enough of your walking money socked away so you can get a bus ticket home if you have to."

After that, I thought the best way to get to the bottom of the situation was to talk to Neal. We spent that night en route to the next city, but in a rare scheduling occurrence, the guys had no press to do during the day. We all ended up with a free afternoon, so I took it as a chance to reach out. Not that I was totally on board with Telly's paranoia, but I did want to see if I could suss out some unrest. If nothing else, I could then put my fellow hornsman's mind at ease. (Although I did do what he said and resolved not to spend any more of my per diem money than I needed to, in case the tour went bust... can't blame a guy for being cautious).

Neal had taken to staying pretty much on his tour bus until right before sound check, and then ducking back in as soon as the applause died. No one knew what he was doing in there, but only because no one seemed to want to be the one to go check. I suppose they were afraid of what they might find, or didn't want to be the one to interrupt the genius if he happened to be at work on the next hit song that would keep us all flush for another year.

I had been on Neal's bus before, and while I might have been under the influence of something or other on all those occasions, I certainly didn't remember it being like *this*. It was like the guy had scooped up the rubble of a bombed-out guitar store and dumped all over the inside. It was all disembodied strings, frets and pickups strewn across every horizontal surface. I wasn't even entirely sure where the guy could have slept.

"Hey, Neal," I said, gingerly pushing aside a pair of guitar necks that were hung from the ceiling close to the door. I felt like I was entering some kind of madman's lab, or sacrificial temple, here to see the crazed genius at work.

"Hm? Oh, hey. Come on in, Barrett." The voice came from somewhere near the back, from what appeared to be a melting pile of electronics. Fortunately, he turned out to be right behind it, although it appeared that he was actively burning things with a small soldering iron, trying to Frankenstein some unrelated musical instrument parts together.

I had my spiel all planned out. "There were a bunch of us going to go out and hang at this place nearby that we heard about," I said. "I knew that you-- " (not "you and Gary", just "you") -- "didn't have any press to do, so I thought I'd see if you wanted to join us."

Instead of looking up, Neal merely shifted his head up a little from what he was doing. "I appreciate that, man, I really do," he said, sounding perfectly rational, and immediately followed it with, "Here, come and take a look at this." He very well might not have heard what I was saying to him.

I skirted around the pile of mechanical parts he had surrounded himself with and tried to get as close as I could. If he thought I would be able to understand what he was doing from just looking, he was mistaken. Something to do with circuit boards and chips and those little candy-looking things with tiny multicolored bands around them. "What you working on there?" I asked, wondering how much of the soldering fumes he was breathing in. They were starting to make my eyes tear up.

"Did you know," he said, never stopping his work, "that music is the oldest form of communication? Older than written language, older even than spoken language?"

I'd never heard that before, and had been hoping for more emotionally revealing small talk, but it seemed like it would be best to play along for now. "Sure," I said. "That makes sense. It must go all the way back to the first time someone bashed rocks together just because they liked the sound of it."

Neal still didn't look at me, kept at the electronic abomination he was working on, but seemed to perk up. "Do you ever wonder when the first time was that music made someone... feel something?"

He was losing me, but fortunately he didn't seem to expect me to say anything, because he barreled right on. "When did someone first make someone sad with a musical sound they had made? Or the first time they made someone angry? Or turned on? Or did it to hurt them?"

I was about to ask what he meant by that, but then I had a mental flash of someone dragging their nails down a chalkboard, and understood. "There was always a first time," he said. "And I think if there's anything the world is missing right now, it's firsts. Sometimes I have to ask if there's anything left out there that hasn't been done. Maybe music has run out of things it can do. I hate to think it, but maybe it's true."

I tried to square what Neal was babbling about with what he was doing on the workbench -- by this time, I had figured out that he had laid his instruments across some kind of tray table across a bunk, which he was currently sitting on. Being a hornsman myself, I can't say that I really know what's going on inside the electric doodads that professional guitarists are endlessly tweaking and stomping on, but I knew enough to tell that Neal was working on some kind of pedal contraption. You know, the kind that makes the guitar play some kind of effect once they're depressed? He had it upside down and with its guts out, but at least that much I could tell. He was trying to jimmy some kind of circuit board inside the plastic housing, but it was a little too big to fit. What he seemed to be attempting was to soften the housing with the heat of the soldering iron, enough so that he could bend it and gain that extra eighth of an inch that he needed.

He was talking all the while, too. "The only thing music can't do, as far as I know, is take on a physical form. Like a force, something that can move real objects around. Imagine that, right? Like a symphony that could assemble a building as it was played... but you have to start small. Maybe just a few atoms at a time, at first. Just enough to put a thought in someone's head. Or take one out, maybe. Like a transplant. Of course, you'd have to be careful not to change *too* much... But who knows what else you could do? What do you think?"

To be honest, I had been so fascinated by watching Neal actually succeeding in the physical process he was undertaking that I absorbed the words he was saying, without understanding them. To show empathy, I parroted some of them back: "Start small, sure. Build up to the big stuff... Say, Neal, what's that thing actually going to do?"

He stopped working, as if realizing for the first time that he wasn't working in complete privacy. I watched the tattoos on his upper back stiffen along with the muscles, their lines turning suddenly rigidly geometric. He paused for a while, and when his voice returned, it was notably cagey. "New effect for an upcoming show. Keep an ear out for it, it'll... be really impressive. I think. You'll have to stop by after the show and tell me what you thought."

The plasticky smoke in the bus suddenly seemed thicker than it had before, and I felt sudden pressure in my bladder. "So, how about coming out with us?" I asked again, barely managing to remember my pretense for coming in here.

"Nah, thanks," Neal said, his voice back to normal. "I want to make sure this device gets tested. But bring me back an order of onion rings from wherever, okay?"

I left the bus not knowing that Neal's next gig would be his last. But I did bring him the onion rings; a burly security guard had been posted outside his tour bus by then, and said he'd pass them on. Could have sworn I heard him crunching on one as I walked away, though.

---

"Thankth for the thuthenanth, thuckers!" Maria crowed as she snatched up a bottled smoothie off the end of the craft table and sped away, legs flailing like a Muppet.

Telly and I just looked at each other. We were long past thinking that Maria's nonstop antics were funny, but he did manage to acknowledge it by nodding at me and intoning like a game show host, "That word was 'sustenance'... 'sustenance'."

I had only just managed to breach the subject of talking to Neal when Maria had interrupted us, so I picked up from the same spot. "So Neal's in his bus, building some new kind of gear. He didn't seem angry," I said, "just very... intent. Is that maybe what you saw?"

Telly looked up from the table, from which he was assembling what promised to be a truly epic deli sandwich. "Not exactly. Look, maybe you're right, it was probably nothing at all."

Maybe it says more about my state of mind than anything else, but that statement reminded me of what Neal had said amid his ramblings, about the possibility that music could move physical objects. Because I felt like all of Telly's interest had been transferred to me. Or maybe I had siphoned it off without realizing. But then again, he hadn't seen the pedal contraption the guitarist was working on.

"No," I insisted, "I think you're on to something. He seemed kind of obsessed with that tech project."

While apparently contemplating which of the three mustards to slather on the monstrosity he had built, Telly muttered, "If the guy wants to build a new rig for himself, what do I care? As long as he doesn't stop writing horn figures into his songs..."

It was no use. Telly had led me down the path, and was now refusing to follow where it led. That was fine. I'd figure it out on my own. I was mulling over what my next move should be through that afternoon's sound check, with my eyes firmly rooted on the back of Neal's head. But he made no unusual moves, which is why I didn't feel a burning need to say anything to him before the show. I was so intent on watching him that I didn't see the oversized pedal until we were into the concert's third song.

Just like everyone else, I'd love to say that what happened next was an accident. And like I said at the start of my admittedly long-winded and rambling tale, anyone who saw it rearranged the deck chairs in their own minds enough so that they believe it. Except for me, and I can't really blame it all on the fact that I was seeing it from my unique angle back on the horn dais. It was because I had seen what Neal was working on in his bus that afternoon, and the fact that the contraption was now sitting right next to his foot, and probably had been from the very start of the show.

I don't know what caused the bad blood between Gary and Neal, I honestly don't. But I think even the most clueless person there that night, jacked up on the glam-rock testosterone, could have sensed it. It seemed like every time Gary headed over to Neal's part of the stage, to lean on him during a guitar solo, or to playfully run circles around him to the delight of the crowd, Neal wouldn't have it. He would back away, wedge himself into a tight space between the taller amps, so that Gary physically couldn't get to him. Was he trying to silently warn Gary, I sometimes have to wonder? Or was he trying to keep his distance?

And then there's the darkest part of me that considers this: perhaps distance was a crucial part of what Neal planned to do. Or maybe he wasn't entirely sure of what he had prepped. Maybe, just maybe, this was all an experiment to him, and he wanted to see just how far his pedal effect could reach. Because, you see, I had been mulling over his incoherencies for hours, and one little bit of it had stuck in my craw. "Start small..." he had said. "Just enough to put a thought in someone's head..."

I started watching Neal like a hawk at that point, from my spot between Telly and Maria, as we stood on our raised dais near the back of the stage. By that point in the tour, my muscle memory was so ingrained that my hands probably could have been chopped off and they'd still come in on time every time, so I could pay close attention. And what I saw was very different from what the official story came to be that night.

First of all, Neal set that water bottle down there. Yes, it was Gary's, and Gary did kick it over early on in "Or Someone Like You", but only because Neal had swigged from it between songs, and set it there. It was clearly outside the circular holder near the monitor that kept it out of the way and in a generally not-knocked-over state. But I think the timing for that was to make sure that water on the stage would be noticed afterward. And it kind of locked Neal in to his plan too; if he had waited until the next song, roadies would have had time to notice, come out and clean it up.

Second of all, there was the sound that infernal pedal actually made when Neal activated it. I was watching his foot the entire time, and he stepped on it right in the brief interval between the last note of the second guitar solo, and the triumphant power chord that signaled the reprise of the chorus. Until this point, Gary had been doing the shtick he always did during the instrumental parts of the concert, dashing around interacting with the other musicians before he had to come back in. He would unfailing wait until the very last second, when he had to barrel back to the microphone stand to start belting his part again.

This was usually his m.o., and this night was not a notable exception. Except this time, when Gary grabbed the mic stand at the end of his dramatic slide back into lead vocal mode, I saw Neal's foot press -- lightly, almost daintily -- on the pedal I had seen him constructing. At the same moment, his plectrum went slamming across all six strings, while he casually swung the neck of the guitar in Gary's direction.

Immediately, Gary's vocals cut out, swinging up through the notes into the ultrasonic range as his vocal chords clamped together, his head cocked to one side, and he slumped to the floor, as if all his bones had instantly been vaporized.

It took a few seconds, and there was time enough for me to see Neal lift his foot off his new effect pedal, before people realized that Gary hadn't slipped, or thrown himself to the floor in a theatrical pratfall. Halfway through the second line of the chorus, Neal stopped playing. He didn't rush over to his compatriot's side, just stopped strumming and turned to look at where his partner had fallen.

Brandy and Tanya, the backup singers, were the first to rush to Gary's side. By this time the rest of the band had abandoned the song, and an excited, frantic hush had fallen over the audience. Tanya was the first to scream, after having reached Gary first, rolled him onto his back, and seen the blood streaming from every part of his face.

That scream spread like the sound waves it was made of, rolling out over the crowd, picking up new notes as the audience joined in, and bouncing back at us until the stage was awash in horrified tones of anguish. Telly and Maria jumped down off our little dais, and rushed forward to see if they could help. Neal hadn't moved, and neither had I. I wanted to see what he was going to do next.

He did nothing, so I did nothing. But everyone else in the place was in motion: security guards were rushing in from the sides of the stage, knocking aside band members who were coming forward to see what had happened to their singer; the auditorium crowd was backing away from the stage like a single, screaming amoeboid mass, so quickly that the empty first row of seats became exposed like bared teeth within instants; the doors at the back burst open and let in searing points of outer-world light before the house lights were suddenly cranked to ten as someone hit the emergency alarm. Through all this I stood stock still and looked down at Neal, who seemed to be the only person not jostled by security and emergency teams as they piled onto to the stage. All the security people had parted around him like an inrushing sea.

He looked down at his guitar, as if puzzled, but made no move to get over to Gary. Not that he would have made it because of the growing crowd, but I was still confused as to why he wasn't trying. Then a surprisingly conscientious guard hooked him by the arm and whisked him off stage, which made no sense to me until after I realized that only Neal and I knew what had just happened...

The official cause of death was deemed electrocution, the combination of spilled water and poorly grounded mic stand. We weren't even fully evacuated from the venue when the word came down; I suspect that so many people had burst out into the auditorium's surrounding streets in the mad panic that followed Gary's sudden, tragic death that it was safer for us to stay indoors, for the time being. So I ended up sitting in a back hallway, one so narrow that I could prop both my back and feet up on opposing walls, with Telly and Maria simiarly slumped nearby.

Maria, of course, was the one to break the silence, delivering her bon mot quietly, barely above a whisper: "Well, *that* didn't go very well." The clacking of her sax keys was the only sound, as her fingers compulsively ran through scales just for something to do.

Now that he wasn't the first to, Telly could speak up. "What the hell just happened?" he asked, to no one in particular. I certainly wasn't going to be the one to tell him, so the silence drew out, the echo of his voice caroming around in the tiny hallway. Then, as if it were news, "I had a feeling something was going to happen."

My head sprang up, seeing an opportunity to get an answer from him. "Didn't you say something about that the other day?" I asked. "A look you saw on Neal's face or something?"

"Huh," Telly said, and then his face turning to confusion. "There was something I thought I saw... but now I can't remember what it was."

"A look," I said. "You said you saw a weird look on Neal's face."

When Telly turned his eyes to me, there was absolutely no recognition in his eyes at all.

"When did I say that?" he asked.

"Just the day before yesterday. We were coming off stage..." My voice trailed off, because the look on his face told me that the particular memory had totally escaped him. And fast on the heels of that, I thought: did it escape, or was it removed?

"Start small," Neal had said. "Just enough to put a thought in someone's head. Or take one out, maybe." And for the first time, I considered that maybe I hadn't seen Neal putting his pedal together for the first time. Maybe he had already done that, and tested it to make someone forget something. What I saw was him taking something that had been proven to work, and juicing it up. Turning it up to eleven, you might say.

("Of course, you'd have to be careful not to change *too* much. But who knows what else you could do?")

That's when I got up and walked away. I must have been moving a little faster than usual, because I heard Maria's muted, halfhearted solo strains of "Yakety Sax" following me.

If all these mental skeins were getting properly woven together, I was starting to see one hella thick rope forming. And it boiled down to this: Neal had killed Gary, with music. The very thing that supposedly brought them together in the first place. And while the world will continue to think it was some kind of accident, I believe I know better.

Which is why I've gone into the communal dressing room and am talking into this portable cassette recorder. I want a record of it, just in case. Because I realize that I'm again in a unique place, but this time a moral one: Gary asked me to come see him after the show, and I think I know what that means. I think he has realized that he said too much about what his new sound can do, and figures he can wipe my memory so that I'm just in the dark as anyone else.

He's already done it to Telly, so he clearly knows how to do it. I think what he did to Gary was a matter of scale, or volume, or whatever the hell you want to call it. Gary and I have always been cool, and I doubt even he wouldn't be able to explain his way out of a second musician that dropped dead in his presence in one night. So it really just boils down to me and what I want...

Do I want to know what I know? If you knew something this terrible, and someone gave you an off-ramp, a way to *un-know*, would you take it? All I have to do is throw this tape in the trash, or stomp it under a heel, and I have that opportunity. For real. So now... I'm just going to sit here until I decide...

[Seventy-three seconds of tape hiss follows, then a click]

Northern Dark

The luminous green curtains were waving softly, fading into reds and purples near the bottom. They drifted, wide as entire continents, with a slight restlessness, buffeted by an enormous wind that Olya couldn't feel. She imagined she could actually hear them rustling, but even as her ear perceived this, she knew it was an illusion. The sound was in actuality coming from all around her, bubbles endlessly fizzing all around the edges of the thin, flat chunk of wood that she floated on.

She had already recognized it as the gangplank she had walked up three days ago while boarding the ship. She and all the other passengers already knew that the passage would be treacherous. It was too late to try the crossing, she had been warned. Enemy patrols had been increasing, the number of ships making it through to the vast safety of the Atlantic too few.

She had little choice, however; she had promised to stay with her grandmother until the end, regardless of the risk, and to that pledge she had remained faithful. Now that she had seen her only remaining relative laid to rest in home soil, Olya had packed a small bundle of her most valuable possessions and gone to the port. Those possessions were widely scattered now, either floating like her, or sinking in the dark.

Olya lay back, felt the creak of the rocking flotsam against the back of her head. The wind blew across her supine form, unbearably chill. Even if she hadn't gotten far from her homeland, she at least had gotten away. She had left her home because it was no longer hers -- Stalin's army had seen to that. Her intention had merely been to get out, into the world, where she could choose any place to be her home. It was mere luck that it ended up being here, floating on the surprisingly placid surface of the ocean. Perhaps the waves had been momentarily hushed by the remnants of her passage ship sliding deep into the water. She could almost feel it far below, continuing on without her.

She did not panic. She was too wet, cold and exhausted to do so. While she was aware that this sense of calm was most likely an illusion, the body exerting its feeble powers over the mind to keep it from thrashing itself into madness, she accepted it anyway. It didn't take a nautical expert to realize that the combination of freezing wind and wet clothing would challenge even the strongest of constitutions, and might even become a losing battle if help didn't come soon. The only comfort she had was currently wrapped around her neck, fur that held the last soothing patch of warmth in a world where everything was stubbornly refused to turn to ice, but merely grew colder and colder.

She reached up, and with nearly-numb gloved fingers tugged its long loops a little tighter around her throat, tilting her head so that she could rub her cheek against its softness. It had been her grandmother's, and the lovely old woman had made a ceremony of it when handing it over to her granddaughter. "To keep your heart warm," she had told Olya, her voice creaking like the rocking chair she had vacated to retrieve it, "to be a part of me in whatever new country you come to." Then, having completed her final task, she used the fact that she was already on her feet as an excuse to cross the room and climb into the last bed she would ever lie down in.

Olya had stood there, as moved as she would be if her grandmother had reached into her own chest and produced her slowly beating heart for Olya to take on her journey. Now she pulled the fur tightly around her neck, and found that when she opened her eyes again to look at the aurorae overhead, the head of the fox lay upon her chest. For a moment she stared back into its glass eyes, wondering if its taxidermied smile was friendly, or predatory.

Then, without moving, it barked at her. A shivery bark, one that trembled with the same cold she was feeling. Strange, that the warmest thing around should be complaining so. After everything else that had happened, Olya was only slightly surprised that the stole her grandmother had kept in a hat box, and only brought out on special occasions, had chosen now to come back to life.

The bark came again. This time, its utter lack of movement made her realize that the sound wasn't coming from the fox around her neck. Something else had made the noise, something nearby. For a moment, Olya considered not even raising her head. She didn't want to turn away from the brilliant lights elegantly pirouetting above her. To do so would be to have them go entirely unwitnessed by anyone on Earth, which at the moment she found unbearably sad.

The barking persisted. A note of panic seemed to be creeping into it, and Olya finally couldn't help but try to determine where it was coming from. She slid her elbows back and under herself, propping her upper body so that she could see over the edge of the vaguely boat-shaped piece of wreckage she lay across. Soon the waves would regain enough height to start washing over the shallow sides and chill her anew, but for now raising her eyes only a few inches was enough to take a look around.

She turned her head from side to side, and while the ethereal lights didn't fully illuminate her surroundings, they did manage to outline objects nearby. And there was, surprisingly, something moving on the face of the otherwise still ocean, a smallish something that from her low vantage point was the tallest thing in an landscape strewn with charred, irrelevant pieces of everyday life -- chair cushions, pieces of wood, strips of canvas, human bodies.

It was a small dog, wet and shivering, standing on what might have been a child's suitcase. It must have been a well-groomed lapdog before, but now its fur clung heavily around it, as if trying to warm itself against the little thing's speeding heart.

Had she possibly seen it being carried around on deck in the sunset hours before the attack, a pampered pet snuggled close to the bosom of some well-dressed matron? Regardless of what it had been before, it had lost all its pretensions now, yipping desperately over and over at her. She could tell that the dog wasn't barking out of malice or anger, but only fear and the novelty of another living thing marking this vast flat horizon of death.

"Shh, shh," Olya whispered at it, even though there was no one else around but her to be annoyed. She found that, after all the explosions, screams and splashes, she merely wanted things to be reverently quiet. It wasn't until she timed her shushing to occur between the thing's fervent barks that it actually heard her and got the message. The dog calmed down and fell silent, dedicating its energy to shifting its balance agitatedly back and forth on its little floating platform, as if it were trying to figure out the best angle to jump over to her.

Olya sighed, watching the forlorn way its tail wagged, weighed down with sodden fur, which formerly must have been upright and poofy. It whined a little, realizing that the distance between them was too far to jump, growing with every second. In fact, the pieces of wreckage all seemed to be growing farther and farther apart, a devious fact that the ocean's level surface seemed keen to hide. Soon it became clear that there was no way the little dog could swim to her, no matter how far it could leap, not without being dragged to the bottom by its already waterlogged coat.

For a moment, Olya and the dog just looked at each other, the only two survivors of this catastrophe as far as they could tell. Olya took a long, slow breath, and tugged the fox fur tighter about her neck, trying to savor the little warmth still held in its feathery fibers. She took hold of the fox's snout and threw her arm out to the side, unfurling the long stole out in the dog's direction, wincing in emotional discomfort as the tail and hind legs slapped down on the surface of the water. She could feel the weight of the water begin soaking into it immediately, and hoped that the dog would understand.

It did. It jumped off the little valise, its back paws pushing it hopelessly away, and splashed into the frigid water almost on top of the long fox's tail. It snapped at the fur immediately, and dug its teeth in as if knowing exactly what Olya had planned.

She pulled hand over hand, dragging the fur, now heavy with salt water and living animal freight, back onto the floating wreckage with her. The dog threw its front paws up on the wood as soon as it was close enough to do so, and scrambled its back legs out of the nearly-frozen water to join her.

Olya actually laughed when the little animal ran over and began licking her face, its tongue and breath feeling blessedly tropical with warmth. The dog spun around excitedly, came back again to lick her face some more, and she ran a gloved hand over its fur, scratching behind its ears. It nuzzled her neck, and even if it were merely for her body heat, she didn't care. It felt close enough to true gratitude and affection for her to accept it as such.

Eventually, the dog calmed and settled, curling into a tight ball as close to her head as it could get. The wet smell of it finally became the one thing that overpowered the gut-turning stench of smoke that still lay across the water. This olfactory evidence remained even though the air had visibly cleared enough for her to see the shimmering lights overhead. Now that her grandmother's stole had no more warming properties, she wadded it into a wet lump and rested her head on it like a pillow, tilting up so she could see more of the aurorae that gracefully burned the sky.

"Look, doggie," she murmured to it in her native tongue, "look at the show we're being treated to tonight." She pointed, and the dog actually raised its head, following her finger momentarily before attempting to snuggle even closer to her. It didn't really seem to notice the vast multicolored beauty playing out above them, but Olya realized that the little dog already had everything that it needed, lying there with her. She was happy to give it companionship, and happy to have it in return.

For, she now realized, no help was coming. The horizon was empty in every direction, and any rescue would come too late for either of them. She lay back, allowing herself to despair for just a moment, but then relaxing. It was out of her hands now. She just needed to be more like her little travel mate, content with what she had. She was being gently rocked by cool waves, and the sky above her blazed with immense curtains that constantly teased that they were about to part, about to reveal a show unlike any the world had ever seen. For the two of them, it was not such a bad ending, better in fact than those of the souls that numbly bobbed in the water around them.

She took off her gloves, tossed them over the side, and pet the little dog that nuzzled against her with her bare, trembling fingers, watching the lights overhead as the still water bore them both away.

Dreaming Wage

Tayla desperately wanted to tell someone about her dreams. As she walked down the street, she silently searched the eyes of everyone who passed her, scanning for a kindred spark of awareness. Are you having them, too? she would silently plead with each of them. Can you tell that there's something different about me today? So far, she had received only the reaction she would from meeting the gaze of cows grazing in a field; empty but benign stares.

As she mounted the stairs to her apartment, she started to feel a faint but noticeable burning in her chest. It grew stronger the closer she got to her door, and it wasn't until she was turning the key it the lock that she recognized what it was: she had missed Hugh and Cammy. She wanted to see them, to talk to them; it was weird how the feeling was so acute that it seemed to be sending tiny hot threads soaring through her body.

She stormed in, and was disappointed to see that they were gaming together, sitting cross-legged on the floor on yoga pillows, facing each other. They had their goggles and glovetips on.

"On our ten," Cammy barked. She could get really aggressive in these daily, city-wide competitions.

"I can't quite draw a bead..." Hugh growled. "Can you get us any lower? There's just too much damn debris."

A moment of tense silence followed, and then Cammy yelped in what Tayla hoped was triumph.

"Got 'em," Hugh intoned. "How you like that, Jack?"

Tayla sighed. They might as well not have been home when they were gaming. The burning sensation in her chest wasn't going away soon. She didn't know how long it was until the end of the round, so she shot them both a text saying she was home. She couldn't hear the blinky sound that meant it had sprung up on their respective HUDs simultaneously, but she knew it had been delivered when Jenny nodded and smiled. "Hi, honey," she said. "We've almost cleared the perim. Just a sec, ok?"

Knowing their built-in headphones made them deaf, Tayla sent them both a "K" in response. It took another four minutes before they were done, and the whole time Tayla was sitting on the couch next to them with one leg crossed over the other, bouncing her knee impatiently. She still only had a vague notion of what was going to happen once she could see her roommates' faces again, but the need to find out was inescapable.

Finally, both Cammy and Hugh's spines relaxed in unison. Cammy carefully lifted her headpiece off, and had to refocus her gaze on Tayla after being screenbound for so long. "Hey, girl," she said, her voice as sunny as always.

Tayla couldn't help it. She slid off the couch and knelt next to her lifelong friend, crushing her in a fierce hug. She felt Cammy resist for a few seconds, then relaxed. "What's wrong?" she asked. Tayla could feel the angular edges of Cammy's glovetipped fingers tentatively coming to rest on her back. "What is it?"

Tayla pulled back. "Sorry," she said, frowning a little. "I'm not sure why I did that. I just... really missed you today."

By this time, Hugh had fully re-engaged with the real world as well, and was eyeing her warily. Tayla looked over at him. "You too." His mouth tilted up at the corners, but his eyes remained dully neutral. After all, he had been putting in overtime, hoping to make enough money to take Cammy on a vacation package later that summer.

"Well, we missed you too, Tayla," he said, looking more at Cammy in curiosity than her. "It's good that you're home."

Tayla pulled back from her friend's embrace. Their hug had eased that burning in her core a little, but there was still enough left to keep her from being comfortable. "So, what have you been doing today?"

Jenny shifted a little on her yoga pillow, and Tayla sat on the floor too, leaning back against the couch she had been fidgeting in while the couple gamed. "Getting to the seventh level of today's Citywide, of course," she said, clearly pleased with herself. "We strove."

The phrase caught Tayla off guard, mostly because that thought hadn't run through her mind at all that day. That was strange; over the last few months, it had propagated through pretty much everyone she knew, shorthand for "We strive to do our best". She didn't know where it had come from, only knew that people were parroting it everywhere now. Until today, its intent had seemed to be fostering a sense of uniform purpose, like the whole country was working together toward some common end. Although at the moment she couldn't quite recall what that was.

Leaving the women to their discussion, Hugh was getting up and stretching the muscles he hadn't used while gaming. He wandered over to the wall console and dialed in some music. The vaguely danceable thump filled the apartment at a non-intrusive volume. For a moment, Cammy closed her eyes and nodded to it dreamily before speaking again. "And what have you been doing, Tayla?"

All of a sudden, Tayla realized that she didn't know how to answer. It would be highly irregular for her to talk about what she had been doing, and might make her roommates suspicious. It wasn't that her activities had been so unusual, it was just that they had *felt* so different, and she had spent wildly inappropriate amounts of time doing them.

"Well, I went to the gym first..." (She didn't add, "and stopped before the timer went off, simply because I felt like it. Then I took an extra-long shower, just because the warm rushing water felt so good.")

"... and then did some shopping for lunch." ("I stood there hovering over the produce for about twenty minutes because I couldn't remember them smelling so amazing. No one else seemed to notice.")

"That reminds me," Cammy said, "On the lunch break, Hugh and I had some really good noodles with edamame. Weren't they good, Hugh?"

Her boyfriend was still perusing the music lists, but tipped his head up long enough to answer, "Oh yeah. They were really... good."

Tayla frowned a little. Whatever it was that she had wanted to get from this conversation, she wasn't getting it. She desperately wanted to talk about her dreams, but she knew they wouldn't understand. They were dedicated workers, and it would never cross their minds to miss a shift on purpose.

The music was starting to bug her, too. She had never really considered it before, but Hugh had set the shuffle to fifteen-second increments, which barely gave you enough time to register what song it was before moving on to the next one. Granted, the recent roster of hit songs were one-minute loops that would go on endlessly if you let them, but Hugh seemed to think that he didn't need even that long to enjoy it. And now that she could compare them in quick succession, Tayla could tell how each song was really similar to the one that came before it, not to mention the one after.

Maybe there was a way to talk about her dreams, because Cammy was still looking at her expectantly, wanting to hear how Tayla had filled the time between lunch and this moment. "After that, it was kind of strange," Tayla said. She took a deep breath and bent the truth. "I saw my dad."

Cammy smiled and gave a wistful "Aww..." But then something connected for her and her brow furrowed. "Tayla, I thought your dad died when you were little."

Uh oh, she remembered, and scrambled. "Well, that's the strange part. it turned out not to be my dad. It just looked like him. But I stopped to talk to him anyway."

"That's so great," Cammy said. "Where did you see him?"

"On top of..." Tayla said, before making up something more plausible, "the park. On top of that hill, the one that overlooks the pond." It had really been on the roof of an impossibly high building that was also her childhood home, and she could see literally forever in all directions. "We sat and talked for a long time. I told him everything that had happened in my life since he -- um, my dad -- died, you know."

Cammy's face took on a serious caste that almost doused the fire in Tayla's stomach with cold fear. "Wait..." she began, "... was he okay with pretending to be your dad?"

Tayla nodded. "Sure. I explained it to him, and he was fine. We sat and talked for a long time, actually." It had been so long, in fact, that she and her father had watched the sun set. They had been up so high that they were able to witness what happened below the horizon, where huge doors opened in the sky and the sun was pulled back, as if into some giant hangar, before the doors swung closed and night fell. It had made Tayla feel like her heart was going to shatter, seeing something she had always thought was true being revealed as a shallow trick, and that her father had no choice but to disappear from her life for a second time.

"That was nice of him," Cammy said, "to spend that time with someone he didn't even know."

"It really was," Tayla responded, leaving out the way she had awakened with tear stains on her pillowcase, and how she had rushed to throw it into the wash before the morning alarm went off.

"Hey," Hugh said from across the room. He had lost interest in the music and had been flipping through his life apps. "Income's here, on time for once... wait a minute." He looked down, puzzled, at his handscreen. "It's kind of low."

The hair on the back of Tayla's neck stood up, something she hadn't known it could do. She hadn't considered this consequence. She had missed three shifts, so of course the weekly house income was going to reflect that. Her mind raced to come up with a plausible explanation for why three out their twenty-one collective wage portions were missing.

She popped up to her feet, looked at the screen over Hugh's shoulder. "Hm," she said. "Oh, that's right! I jumped on a few gaming tourneys last week. While you both were out. I meant to mention that... I guess for some reason they didn't subtract the fees out until this week. Sorry, guys."

The couple seemed far from upset. In fact, Cammy jumped up and ran over for an enthusiastic hug. "That's so great! You know, I could have sworn my visor was loose the last time I put it on. You must have adjusted it... Oh, I knew you'd be hooked if you gave it a chance!"

Tayla leaned into yet another lie. "I just know how good you guys are, and didn't want to say anything until I got some practice."

"This is great!" Hugh said, more excited than he had been in a long time. "We can help you train, and then look out triad competition! We have to get you a rig!"

Tayla tried not to roll her eyes. The last thing she wanted to do at this point was to wall herself off from the real world behind a visor and glovetips. Not when she was starting to truly appreciate the sights, sounds and smells of the living world. It had to be the dreams that were doing this to her, heightening her senses and emotions.

The three of them went out for dinner that night, spending more than they should have on drinks and dessert. Hugh insisted they were simply spending against the profits they were sure to make once Tayla joined their gaming team. Tayla just grinned and tried to act the part.

He and Cammy were tipsy and already starting to grope each other on the ride back to the apartment. Tayla knew what that meant. She retired to her room, clapping her headphones on and struggling to find some tolerable music to drown out the passionate sounds coming from the other side of the wall. Fortunately, by the time they got home there were only fifteen minutes left before lights out, so she didn't have to wait long.

The night alarm went off, and she lifted her sleep mask off where it was looped around her bedpost. She clicked it on, fully intending to use it, and then found herself stalling again. She tried to talk herself out of it. After all, how much longer could she be able to keep her secret? Her clumsy cover-up had already managed to get her roped into a triad tournament that she had absolutely no aptitude for. She should just give in and put the mask on, then she wouldn't need further explanations for lost wages. She pulled the band back, with every intention of slipping it on over her head... and then just didn't. She left it turned on, and gingerly returned it to its spot.

She lay back on her bed, pulled up the cover, and closed her eyes, looking forward to the feeling she thought she had completely forgotten about until three nights ago, that of slipping into natural sleep. What would she dream tonight? Would she see her father again? Maybe she would return to that mansion-ified version of their old house, and would run through the rooms laughing, smelling every Thanksgiving dinner her grandmother had ever made, playing hide and seek with all her old stuffed animals...

The feeling didn't come, though. At first she thought she was too excited to go to sleep to actually get there, but after a half hour she wasn't sure anymore. She knew that she could just put on the mask and let its flashing patterns bring her almost immediately down into a delta-wave state, but her thoughts of possible dreams was almost too strong to resist. Maybe she just had to wait a little bit longer...

Another half hour, and she sat up. Clearly, it wasn't going to happen. She found herself wondering what would happen if she were to walk around in the apartment in the dark. The idea seemed so devilish that she couldn't resist, and she swung her feet out from under the cover. She was immediately amazed at how different her bare feet felt on the carpet, merely because it was night. She took a few experimental steps away from her bed, and smiled in the dark at her own silliness. Was she thinking some kind of alarm was going to sound? She hesitated only a moment with her hand on the doorknob of her bedroom, before opening it and walking out into the short hallway.

She leaned an ear against Cammy and Hugh's door, just long enough to make sure that she could hear their slow, tandem breathing. She didn't have to open the door to imagine them lying there, side by side, sleep masks slowly pulsing as their mental energies were siphoned away and banked somewhere deep in the pulsing core of the city.

She walked into the living room, enjoying the way the soft material of her pajamas shifted across her skin with each step. She crossed over to the window, looked out across the square to the tower blocks, identical to hers, on the other side. Or, to be more specific, the dark outlines of the tower blocks. There was only enough starlight to limn the edges of the darkened city, another new context for Tayla to view her world in.

There were places, however, where it looked like there were stars below the horizon, here and there, fleeting twinkles that lasted only long enough for her to turn their direction, but were gone before she could fix on them. She pressed her cheek to first one edge of the kitchen window, then the other, trying to catch one in action, but soon realized she needed a better vantage point. As quietly as possible, she opened the front door of the apartment and stepped out onto the long balcony.

It was breathtaking how quiet the city was. During day, the hum and whir of its vast machines -- which, she realized, she was not doing a thing to contribute to at the moment -- overlay everything, numbing the ear until they were absent. But now they were utterly silent. Tayla could actually hear the breeze blowing through the trees down in the plaza below, the motion sensors on the ends of their branches adding their miniscule kinetic motion to the power load that the city's living creatures conspired to give back every night...

A flicker of motion caught the corner of her eye, and she jumped a little, enough so that the sound of her feet reconnecting with the balcony concrete made a little slapping sound. She turned toward the movement, and saw a low, light-colored shape, slumped against the iron railing three doors down from her apartment. Even with the breeze blowing, it moved in a way that betrayed it as something alive.

It was Mr. Cheong. He was sitting on the edge of the balcony, sticking his legs and head through the bars like a child, so that all Tayla could see from her shallow angle was his torso. But now he drew his head back through so that his spectacles, tightly wired to his graying temples, caught some of the starlight.

He had seen her. There was no running away, which was Tayla's first instinct. It took her a moment longer before she realized that he was being just as rebellious as she, sitting out on the balcony while everyone else slumbered.

For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Mr. Cheong raised a hand and motioned her over. Out of sheer habit, Tayla actually looked around to see if maybe he was beckoning someone else, causing his shoulders silently shift with silent laughter. Then she walked over. She knew who this neighbor was, but had never actually talked to him as an individual. They had only ever met at block meetings or community events, and always with either Cammy or Hugh by her side. Talking one-to-one was something Tayla never felt particularly good at.

"Hello, Mr. Cheong," she whispered, and sat down next to him. He had made no indication that was what he wanted; it just seemed like the polite thing to do, to bring herself to his level. She stuck her legs through the railing, and let them join his in dangling over the sixty-foot drop to the plaza.

"Lovely night," he said, in his lightly accented voice. "You couldn't sleep either?"

"Mm-hm," Tayla noncommittally answered. Of course, she knew that it was an archaic phrase; being unable to sleep was hardly an option in the modern world. She didn't know what else to say, because she was a little intimidated by the man. He was older than her by at least thirty years, his hair still full but almost entirely gray, spiked up in a way that looked very natural. He had the thin muscularity of some bookish people, whose exercise regimen overcompensated for the way they spent so much time in study.

"I have never seen you out here, Tayla," he said. "And I come out often."

Tayla shrugged. "Well, I never... stayed up this late before." She hoped that her actions didn't sound as illegal to him as they felt as they came out of her mouth.

He nodded, and took a long look out over the city, considering, before replying, "We're not the only ones. You see?"

He was clearly indicating the infrequent flashes of light below. "Yes," Tayla said. "Are all of those people like us? Others who.... can't sleep?"

"Yes," he said, a cautious tone creeping into his voice. "Although some of them, I believe, put aside their sleeping duties... on purpose." The way he said it made a guilty chill creep up Tayla's spine. "They are up and engaging in some activity best left for night time, when there are less eyes watching."

In the night's stillness, she imagined she could hear the goose bumps rising on her skin. "Why would they do that?" she asked, trying not to sound judgmental, as if they were truly talking about other, hypothetical people.

"Various reasons," he said, not looking at her. "Perhaps they feel a need to revolt. I myself sometimes like to listen to old, long symphonies. Or perhaps the dreams have too much of an allure."

Her spine stiffened. Now it felt like he was pointedly *not* looking in her direction. She had to know more, but wasn't sure how to ask, without doing so directly. "I remember dreams," she said.

"Do you?" he asked. He looked hopeful for just a moment, but then turned back to the city's black tableaux. "You are young. Surely you mean from your childhood."

Tayla took a deep breath, and said, "No. This was just a little while ago. I... I think I must have put the sleep mask on incorrectly, or maybe it had come loose, because..."

"You dreamed," Mr. Cheong said, in a whisper so quiet it would have been utterly lost in the ambient noise of the day. "And tonight you were hoping to do it again."

"Of course not," she replied, giggling as if shocked that he could suggest such a ridiculous thing, but Tayla hoped the way the laugh quickly faded gave him a more truthful answer.

They sat side by side in their pajamas, looking out over the dark blocks between them and the dimly glittering harbor, for a long while. Several times she felt him gather himself together next to her, as if he were about to say something, but then backed away from it, until one time, without warning, he whispered, "Tayla, may I show you something?"

She turned to him, and there was something in the way his eyebrows raised behind his wire-frame glasses that reminded her of the way she had felt earlier, bounding her way up the stairs to Cammy and Hugh because there was something she felt she had to say, something she needed from others, a connection they ultimately could not give her. The yearning arch of those gray caterpillars told her he was feeling much the same thing.

"Okay," she whispered back.

Mr. Cheong stood and extended his hand to her. She took it with surprisingly little hesitation. He drew her up to her feet, and they walked together to the door of his apartment, just a few feet away. For a moment, he stood before it, as if in indecision.

"Tayla," he finally said, still facing the door, so she was looking at that massive upsweep of silver hair from behind, "do you know why we are supposed to give our sleeping minds over to the city?"

It would have been very easy for her to recite the answer she had been told since childhood -- "Because our harvested mental energy is what makes our city machine run. It is our way of giving back to the society that gives us freedom from unwanted toil, so that each may follow their unique hearts and creative passions." Instead, she said what she had been thinking about since she had been unable to fall asleep, "Because it keeps us from dreaming."

Mr. Cheong let out a long, slow breath of relief. "I think so too," he said, finally turning his head back over his shoulder to look at her.

Then she asked something that she didn't even knew she had been afraid to ask until that moment. "Did they do it on purpose? I mean... did they know what it would do to us?"

Mr. Cheong sighed. "I don't have an answer for that. It must have seemed like the perfect solution when this form of energy was discovered. There are too few ways for too many of us to make money in order to survive and keep the city machine turning. Everything difficult is taken care of for us, and so this must have looked like the easiest way for us all to live comfortably, without us being too idle or causing too much trouble. The only price to be paid was that of our dreams. But with them went our ability to feel more, to yearn for more. It may not have been the original intention, but in any event it is the truth."

Tayla thought about all the aimless wandering she had done in her life, before these last few days. She had not been unhappy, but she also couldn't remember the last time she had wanted anything the way she wanted to dream again. She thought of Hugh and Cammy, and their endless cycle of waking, eating, gaming, and having sex until it was time to sleep again. They would plug into brainwave harvesters that siphoned off their dreams -- and their deepest selves along with them -- for mere profit. The day ended, and they would wake again not remembering it, because another day just like it was already lying ahead.

Mr. Cheong had been silent for several seconds, and he seemed to be waiting for Tayla to say something more. So she did. "I just forgot about the beauty of things until I started dreaming again. I'm starting to think that dreaming is just as important as living. Maybe, some of the time, it's more important."

Mr. Cheong lifted a hand, and lightly slid three of his fingers down the wood, three times in succession. A miniscule click came from the doorknob, and it swung open, revealing darkness.

A soft, pleasant female face arose on the other side, a slight bemusement playing about her lips when she saw Tayla. "Off break so soon?" she whispered to Mr. Cheong, and eased the door open.

At first, Tayla could not make out anything inside the front room. Her eyes had fully adjusted to being outdoors at midnight, but there was an even deeper dark where she was following.

As soon as she was far enough into the room for the woman to shut the door behind her, Tayla stopped. She turned her head from side to side, trying to contextualize the low, pulsing lights she was seeing, and she found to be in a large room with perhaps two dozen of the ubiquitous sleep masks ranged about, their edges throbbing with the deep blue resonance of human mental activity. As soon as she imagined where the people connected to them should be, they materialized. They were barely above the level of the floor, in loose groups surrounding central pockets of darkness. She squinted, trying to figure out they were huddled around...

Mr. Cheong was whispering almost directly into her ear. Strangely, the sudden sound of his voice didn't make her jump. "We gather here to give each other turns dreaming. We link our sleep masks to help cover the fact that one of us is not contributing." Tayla could just barely see his arm, extending past her shoulder, pointing to the center of the group closest to her.

Her eyes finally resolved what was before her, almost as clearly as if someone had introduced a new light source. Each group consisted of five people, lying on low cots around a center one, on which there was a sleeping person, face uncovered and beatific.

"So the person in the center...?" she began to ask.

"Is allowed a full night of dreaming. Their attending group pools their energy, each contributing a little more deeply, so the team makes up the slack."

Now Tayla could see it, barely visible lines of thin blue light extending from the surrounding sleep masks. They converged on the unused mask on the dreamer's chest. Tayla checked the rest of the room, and there were four such arrangements in total. It was crowded but pleasantly peaceful, the only sound the ocean-hiss sound of breathing sleepers rolling in and out.

Tayla stepped closer, looked into the face of the person dreaming closest to her. She could see his eyes rolling ceaselessly under their lids, and found that burning ache returning to her chest, wanting to know what he was seeing, and to have a chance to see it for herself.

She turned around to the shape of Mr. Cheong. In the dimness, she could only see the rims of his spectacles and his white, upswept hair. "You'll be caught," she whispered. "I can write off a few nights of inactivity as a mechanical problem, but no matter how well you disguise it, someone will eventually catch on to what you're doing. You'll be arrested."

His shape of his hair and glasses nodded, and a faint, gleaming curve of a smile joined them underneath. "But until then... we dream."

She smiled back at him. "I'll go get my mask."

Sunday Night Radio

Eventually, Donna just put Jimmy's hand directly on her knee. But he was still distracted, and she watched, disappointed, as it slipped off again. "Jimmy," she said, "are you going to keep fidgeting with that contraption, or pay attention to the girl who is sitting here with you?"

His face turned back in her direction, that adorable goofy grin back on it, but she could tell his ears were still turned toward the radio. Other than the starlight, its dial was the only thing casting light over the porch: pale orange, spreading out like firelight. It was actually rather romantic, if only he would realize that.

"Sorry," he said. "It's just... it's some kind of astronomy report. Which is kind of a hobby for me. Have you ever looked through a telescope? Like, a really good one?"

She bit her lip and shook her head no, trying to embody the word "coquettish", which she only dimly understood from Mother's French romances, sometimes left lying around where Donna could sneak glances at the dogeared pages.

"Oh, you oughta sometime. I've seen the rings around Saturn, the moons of Jupiter..."

Donna sighed. The radio had been playing nice dance music for a while; why did they keep interrupting it with news reports? "Look, Jimmy," she said, shifting toward him, causing the porch swing to rock a little, "we don't have long to sit here, you know, alone. My dad's going to get tired of trying to listen to Edgar Bergen on the little set inside, and then he's going to want to come listen on this one. Mother said she can keep him distracted in there for a while, but he's going to storm out the front door soon. Now, isn't there anything you'd like to talk to me about before he does that?" Which, in Donna's mind was equally as brazen as asking, "Am I going to get kissed tonight or what?"

That seemed to bring the focus back into Jimmy's eyes. While the sounds of an orchestra playing "Stardust" drifted out of the speaker, he turned fully toward her. He had been trying to keep the swing still and quiet so he could hear what the newsmen were saying, but now he picked up his feet and let it sway. Donna felt the movement, a subtle pull, deep in her stomach.

Jimmy seemed to be reaching for something to say. "Why did your Pa bring the radio out on the porch anyway? Mine has his next to his chair and guards it with his life."

Finally, he was making an attempt at conversation. That was progress, anyway. "Well," Donna began, "he brought it out here back at the beginning of summer so he and his buddies could listen to Joe Louis knock out 'some Kraut' at Yankee Stadium -- that's what Father said. But after that, the evening news started getting filled with stories about that Hitler guy, who I suppose wants to take over all of Europe. Mother found it all too upsetting, and didn't want to listen to it herself, so she talked him into keeping it out here for a while. They listen on the little set inside most nights. She says that one's easier to ignore."

"Uh-huh," he said. He was only half-listening again, wasn't he? What was she going to have to do to get him to pay attention, flick up her skirt and flash her legs? The newsmen were back again, and she thought she heard someone mention Grover's Mill, which actually wasn't all that far away. Clearly, this competition for Jimmy's mental attention was "escalating" -- another term she heard used a lot on Father's news programs.

She shifted the slightest bit closer to the boy next to her, making the swing sway a little more. "I know you've got quite a walk home, Jimmy," she said, "and can't stay too long. But I'm really glad you did. How long will it take you, you reckon?" She hoped this sounded like a reminder of how short their time was as well as a vague threat.

He considered this a little longer than she thought he should have to. "Half hour or so. Your house is almost exactly halfway between my house and church. But it's okay. Long walks don't bother me none, even at night."

Finally, something that made her smile. She knew he didn't appreciate how hard it had been for her to get him here, alone on the porch with her. Father said that people who lived as far out from town as Jimmy's folks did were all "low-class", but Mother understood. She had been the one who had talked both Father and Jimmy's parents into letting him stop by for a little while after church. She had even volunteered to drive Jimmy the rest of the way home, knowing full well the courtesy would be refused. But it was okay. Walking two miles home in the dark was just the right amount of trouble for himto go to, if he really liked Donna the way she thought she liked him.

She reached up and put a hand on his cheek, rubbing her palm across the light down that was just starting to turn into stubble. "You know, I was looking at your hair all through evening service tonight."

"My... my hair?" he asked, a little stupefied that she was touching him.

"Mm-hm," she said, marveling at the way its white-straw color seemed to emanate its own faint light in the darkness. "I like the way you cut it. It really suits you... My family always sits a few pews behind yours, and I was actually imagining what it would be like to... run my fingers through it." Her fingers slid under his ear and around toward the back of his head, moving from the close crop on the sides and back, up toward the longer, floppier part on top...

She felt his body stiffen, but realized it was not because of her hand; the music had fallen away again. Now the news guys were in some field where a meteorite had crashed down. And just like that, she had lost him again. Without removing her fingers from the softness of his hair, she began to half-jokingly scold, "You know, Jimmy, it's one thing to have a hobby--"

The look of concern that was spreading across his face made her stop. Even though the light on the porch was dim, she was sure that she could see his skin turning pale. The voices in the news report had faded away, and a strange grinding noise had taken its place.

Jimmy whispered two words, and their sincerity and heaviness made Donna's blood run cold. "They're here."

For the first time, Donna took a moment to listen to what the men on the radio were saying. They weren't looking at a meteorite, they claimed, but some kind of metal cylinder. As they took turns describing what was happening, she caught something familiar in one of their voices.

There were men down in the pit that the thing had gouged into the ground when it fell, and one of them had a microphone that he was using to listen to the hissing, scraping sound of the thing. One of them said it might be because the thing was cooling off after its burning plunge from the sky. Why did his voice sound so familiar? Was he some local newsman, who she had maybe heard hundreds of times on Father's news shows without realizing it?

There was a loud thunk from the radio speaker. Someone yelped that an end had fallen off the metal cylinder, and that it was hollow inside. She realized that the porch swing had slowed to a stop, because she and Jimmy were sitting frozen still, holding hands. Just as Donna's brain was wondering how she had missed that happening, her body was registering it too, a warm flush that was creeping up her neck to her face. This was followed by a very different, plummeting feeling in her stomach as the man on the radio described what was coming out -- no, not just that, it was *crawling* out -- of the hollow thing in the pit. His words were fast and breathless, describing its rubbery appearance, some kind of heavy, tentacled brown horror...

Jimmy suddenly jammed his feet down on the porch's boards and bolted to his feet. His fingers remained entwined with Donna's, jerking her forward a little bit. "It's them!" he whisper-shouted. "They've finally come!"

The harsh sound of his voice, so astonishingly present, brought Donna out of her radio trance. She was suddenly back on the porch with him, and perilously close to losing what should have been the romantic high point of her life so far. She stood up next to him, so the tangle of their fingers could mesh properly. "Who, Jimmy?" she asked, wanting to hear that passionate tone of voice again, even if he wasn't talking about her.

"The Martians!" he said. "They shot these things out of some kind of space gun on their planet, and now they're landing all over the place!"

A sudden, piercing whine came from the radio, followed by a sound Donna had never heard in real life before... men screaming in terror, and then in pain as whatever ray the Martians were using set them all on fire. She suddenly felt lightheaded, and started to wobble on her feet. Even after the broadcast was abruptly cut off, she felt like that rising heat Jimmy had stirred in her was zipping up her spine and over the top of her head, making her muscles lose all their strength. She was slumping against Jimmy's skinny form...

And then she found herself wondering when they had started dancing. There was music playing again, and Jimmy's arms were around her, and she was leaning against him. When had that happened? Then, after a blissful second, her body went to ice and she remembered what was happening. She tilted her head back, and looked up into Jimmy's face. He was looking down at her with concern, as well as a new resolve she had never seen before.

In that moment, he suddenly wasn't just the gawky boy she had a crush on anymore. She felt she was glimpsing the man he would become, someone strong and decisive, someone who would be able to "protect her". Sometimes Mother would describe Father in this way, and told Donna that this was a quality she should look for.

"Are you all right?" Jimmy asked her, and Donna couldn't keep a comforted smile from spreading across her face.

The man on the radio was talking again. One of them, at least, had escaped the decimating fire, and was being interviewed about this new, horrific weapon the Martians were using on people less than twenty miles away.

Then, without warning, the timbre of the speaker's voice dropped into place. She knew exactly who it was. It was The Shadow. The one Father sometimes listened to on his police shows, the one who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

"Jimmy..." she said, trying to get her feet back under herself.

Jimmy continued to hold her tightly, and stroked her shoulder in a way he probably thought was reassuring. "It's okay," he was telling her. "We'll fight them. They're going be sorry they messed with us."

"I know who it is," she said. She was trying to straighten up fully, but he wasn't giving her balance back to her. "He's an *actor*. I don't think this is--"

"Listen!" Jimmy hissed through gritted teeth. More breathless reports were flowing from the radio, now describing other falling meteors, and the giant mechanical tripods that came from within them. The Martians were using these to march across the land in huge strides, destroying power lines and returning fire on the Army, which had apparently arrived in record time. For almost two full minutes, Donna allowed herself to be held fast in Jimmy's arms, and the more she listened, the funnier it became.

What made it worse was that she could tell Jimmy believed every bit of it. She could feel his hands tightening on her as the radio play became more and more harrowing. She didn't know why she wasn't prying herself away from him -- was it because this was almost exactly the scenario she had hoped to be in this evening, just without the alien invasion?

She could feel the muscles of Jimmy's chest tighten, hear his jaw creak as his teeth gritted in resolve. "I'm going to get my father's gun," he said, low and meaningful, and Donna had to fight to stifle a giggle. "Then I'll come back, and we'll barricade your house... in case they decide to come this way." He sounded like he was ready to run off to war.

She gathered her composure, and then breathed, trying to sound as small as possible, "But what about your own house? Don't your parents need you?"

Jimmy's eyes turned up, scanned the horizon intently. "My brothers are there. They'll do what they have to. But tonight, your family needs me more."

Donna was biting the insides of her cheeks so hard that she thought she was beginning to taste blood. Part of her kept expecting Jimmy to break up and reveal that he was in on the joke, but the longer she looked up at him, the more she became that it wasn't going to happen. Her amusement began to slide into concern.

"I've got to go, Donna," Jimmy said -- was he intentionally trying to sound like some movie serial hero? "But I'll return with protection for you and your family. We'll make our stand here... when the Martians come."

Then she was pressing her hands against his chest, feeling how hard his heart was beating under her palms. It hurt a bit to know that it wasn't acting that way because of her, but it wasn't all that bad either.

As sonic Armageddon continued to play out in the air around them, the couple turned away from the house, facing the rough farmland on the other side of Donna's street. They had been outside for long enough now that the moonless night's stars seemed particularly numerous, and she could even see their shadows dimly fanning out across the entire length of the lawn, cast by the radio set's light.

The sound of artillery reverberated around them, and Donna suddenly knew what she wanted. She allowed herself to believe that they really were in the middle of an attack, that the world as they knew it was about to end. The adrenaline of coming battle thundered through her, and the beat of Jimmy's heart was matching hers, hot and fast.

"Jimmy," she said, and had to physically take his chin in her hand and turn it toward her, away from the fearful sounds of battle. There was an intensity in his eyes that she had never seen before. "I think you're one of the bravest men I've ever met. I want you to go now, do what you have to do. Then come back to me. Please don't let them hurt my family. I'll be waiting here for you."

She was gazing deeply into his eyes, and he into hers, his face huge, so unbearably close. They were coming together amid the crash and boom of the huge guns... Their lips touched, pressed tightly, and Donna felt her knees wobble again as that internal heat set her entirely alight. For a moment she was acutely aware of everything around her, the light breeze that wafted the scent of imaginary Martian smoke, the firmness/softness of Jimmy's lips, the warmth of the orange-yellow radio light washing over them. It was perfect.

After a timeless moment, Donna pushed her hands against his chest, breaking off their kiss, long before she wanted it to be over. "Now go," she said, summoning all the drama she could. "Then hurry back, and save me."

Jimmy's features hardened in resolve, his pale cheeks flushed, and he broke off from her at a dead run. His church shoes slammed down on the boards, then launched him down to the ground without touching a single porch step. He thumped away at full speed.

Donna watched him go, the air around her suddenly feeling colder. By the time he got home, she figured, the truth would be revealed. He'd probably get swatted by the his older brothers for falling for such an obvious trick so close to Halloween. Oh, well. Her lips still burned from his kiss, and she licked them to attempt to preserve his heat, to keep the memory fresh for as long as she could.

A long pause came from the radio behind her, as poison gas finally engulfed New York and the gunners succumbed. Then a voice: "You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air, in an original dramatization of 'The War of the Worlds' by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission."

Donna switched the set off and wandered inside, a big grin on her face.

The Drive Home

They should have been able to make it home by midnight. Connor was just as tired as the rest of his family, but he had assured everyone that he was fine to drive the rest of the way. And he honestly felt that he was; there was a part of him that wanted to hold onto the relaxed-adrenalized vacation feeling the weekend had given him, for as long as he could. So, as the sun started its downward dive off to their right, he threw back the rest of his caffeinated iced tea and settled in behind the wheel.

The kids were fine in the back; he hadn't heard a sound from them since just after dinner. Through glances in the rear-view mirror, he watched them settle in, noting the stages: from talking to each other, to gravitating toward their phones, then only listening via earbuds, finally falling asleep with their heads resting on propped-up pillows. The final step was the phones darkening to sleep as well.

Connor and his Miranda had talked in the front seats all through this time, taking advantage of the hissing white noise of the highway, and the fact that they didn't have to look at each other as they spoke. It always seemed that conversation with a spouse was easier and more truthful when you didn't have to look them in the eyes when you did it. But a little while ago she too had reclined her seat a little, and nodded off. Connor kept stealing glances over at her. The sun was coming closer and closer to setting in the window just beyond her, and it was kind of mesmerizing the way the angled light made her hair and blouse glow around the edges, as if she were an astral projection being beamed in from somewhere far away.

It made him smile to see her so relaxed and peaceful. The camping trip had made her less tense than he had seen her in a long while. Even though this alone would be enough to make him feel triumphant, it was sweetened by this fact: he had pushed the idea of the trip saying that it would help her unwind, and here was proof he was proven right. It was petty, he knew, but he couldn't deny that it was there.

As the sunlight deepened through the rainbow and eventually disappeared, leaving twilight behind it, the reddish-gold nimbus around Miranda's form dissipated too, although he found he was just as content to have the ungilded, real live woman nestled in the car's bucket seat next to him. He reckoned they must be about halfway home, and turned his full attention back to the winking yellow line at the center of the two-lane highway as it wound through the lightly wooden northern stretches of the state. That line was the brightest thing in the world now, the moon nowhere to be seen, and the lights of passing towns still infrequent and fleeting.

He wasn't quite sure when the fog started. By the time he noticed that he could see the edges of the cones of light emanating from the car's headlights, they were already well into it. It wasn't that he hadn't been paying attention; in fact, he chalked it up to the fact that he was paying too much careful attention to that center line. He had never actually felt distracted, but its near-hypnotic winking had certainly chased all other thoughts out of his head. He took a new look around, realizing that he and his family were now cruising through full dark, with a fair percentage of their forward-pointing lights being thrown back at them as they sped down an illusory tunnel bounded by mist.

Connor found that he wanted to turn on the radio, to hear something other than his own thoughts as they continued to slide forward through the dark. Any sign of the world beyond the grayness would have been a comfort. But the volume needed to ease his gently-jingling nerves (thanks, iced tea) would have woken up at least one member of his family, which would be followed by questions about how far they were from home, what's the deal with all this fog, and why didn't he slow down a little bit... all of which were questions he didn't have answers to. He just wanted to push through and get clear of the obscurity as soon as possible. It felt imperative that his family not lose their relaxed vacation-glow, and if he had to go through some tense minutes alone as they slumbered, he would.

There was a flash of light off to to his left, a tiny glint that hit the corner of his vision. At first he wasn't even sure that it was real. It could have been a dashboard light momentarily refracting off the inside of his window, or any number of other things. He shifted his head around experimentally, to see if he could replicate it, but it wasn't until he stopped trying that it happened again. Not only that, but this time it had some kind of movement that Connor's mind somehow attached *swivel* the word to, as if the beam of a tiny lighthouse had swung across him. Again, it disappeared before he could find where it came from.

The air in the car suddenly felt stuffy, heavy with warm, exhaled sleep-breaths. They had rolled up the windows after the sun stopped adding heat to the car's interior, but he hadn't yet turned on the fans to bring in outside air. Now he felt tiny beads of sweat erupting on his forehead, and wanted cool air. He flicked the switch to the lowest setting, and heard the reassuring whoosh of fresh air entering the car. His hand froze halfway back to its spot on the steering wheel.

Smoke, he thought immediately. This isn't fog. It's smoke. The smell was unmistakable. It wasn't a cultured smell, either. Connor had learned long ago that the only smoke that smells good is the kind created by controlled fires. Bonfires, fireplaces, and barbecue smokers all were cautious and pleasant compared to this. Within the few seconds of outside he had breathed before he flicked the fan back off, Connor had smelled raw nature in the smoke: leaves, scorched earth, and what he imagined might have been animal hair. It was caustic and dangerously wild, stirring some primal fear deep inside his bones.

His eyes flicked to Miranda, and then the rear-view to check on the kids. Was their sleep being turned over by the smell of smoke? None of them stirred, and even as Connor vowed to get them through this undisturbed, he found he was relieving his foot's pressure on the accelerator. Was it possible that he was driving his family right into a forest fire? His eyes tried to scan everything before him at once. There was no reddish light coming from anywhere (although he had to admit he didn't know just how much he should expect to see through the encroaching smoke), nor had there been any kind of roadblock to warn him. Again, he barely resisted the urge to turn on the radio to see if there was any kind of news being broadcast.

Another flash of light, this time off to the right, just above Miranda's shoulder. This time his nerves were enough on edge that he could whip his head around and catch a glimpse of what caused it... and immediately wished he hadn't. He now could tell that what appeared to be a single flash was, in actuality, two. And below and between the pair of tiny, perfect circles, was a lean triangular nose.

It was a face, perched only about twenty feet away from the car.

As soon as Connor saw it, it was gone, obscured by Miranda's shoulder, and then the body of the car. Connor almost jerked sideways in his seat trying to look back and get another glimpse. It looked like whatever it was had been just off to the side of the road, but even as close as the face had appeared, it was just too dark and foggy (smoky, he corrected himself) to see.

When he sat back in his seat and firmly reestablished his hands on the wheel, Connor realized that the craning of his neck had turned the car slightly as well. The headlights were now angled just off the side of the road, but even before he straightened the car out, he saw four more of the little white lights, almost directly ahead of his skewed headlights.

This new pair of faces were turned toward him, their hunched bodies beside them. Connor blinked when he recognized the shapes. Gray wolves. There were wolves standing by the side of the road. Not moving, just standing there. Watching.

He kept a close eye on them as the car drifted past, going barely over twenty miles an hour now. Their heads turned to follow, their perfect circles of their eyes casting unwavering light directly into his.

Connor tipped the wheel so the car was heading straight again, and as he did he saw several more of those glowing eyes up ahead. At least five sets of them, randomly placed on either side of the street. His fingers audibly tightened around the wheel. Weren't animals supposed to run from a forest fire? So why were they just standing there, watching him drive by? They made no threatening moves, in fact had no menace in their features at all. He seemed to be drawing attention only because he was the only moving object in the still, smoky night.

Connor heard a barely-stifled gasp from the back seat. Julie. He instinctively held his finger up to his lips, making a silent shh, turning his head slightly to the side, hoping she could see the gesture from directly behind him. He looked in the rear view mirror to see her, and his heart dropped into his stomach. While he saw his daughter, her eyes wide as she looked forward out of the windshield, he also saw what was behind her.

In the middle of the road behind the car stood a pair of wolves, their eyes glowing red from the tail lights. They hadn't been there a mere second before, when the car had passed through the space they now occupied.

"Dad?" Julie whispered, her voice just on the near side of panic. "What are those?"

She clearly knew what they were. Connor knew she was asking the same thing he had been asking himself: *why* were they there? "I don't know," he whispered back in as even a tone as he could. "I'm going to just keep going, and pass them by."

"Should we wake them?" Julie asked, looking over at her brother, still asleep and leaning against a pillow stood on end and wedged against the duffel of future laundry.

Connor shook his head. "It's okay," he said. "Let them sleep. Nothing's going to happen." And he neglected to add, just don't look behind you, honey, and definitely don't think about how fast those things must have moved.

The ground was subtly rising on either side of the road. Connor kept looking ahead, continually hoping that the each tiny pair of bright eyes that appeared at the boundary where the road was lost in smoke would be the last, but there was always another pair beyond, and sometimes there were two. As the car drove deeper into a gulley that was slowly transforming into a ravine, the number of wolves visible by the side of the road continued to grow. And as much as he wanted to look in the rear view mirror to comfort his daughter, Connor couldn't. He could only imagine how many of the red-eyed things were behind them now, motionless and staring. The only safe place he could look was the flickering center line of the road, the only bit of color in this world of gray smoke, asphalt, and wolves.

He kept driving forward. There had to be an end to this, he kept thinking. They would have to come out the other side at some point. There was no major fire, no unnatural explanation for any of this. His family had only chosen the road home where a wolf pack had found the road as an easy means of escape from a smoldering lightning strike somewhere nearby. That's all. If he just kept following the yellow line, they would come out of it.

"I don't like this," Julie whispered from behind him. "Why are they just standing there?"

"It's okay," Connor replied, surprised at how calm and level his voice sounded. "It'll be over in a minute."

"Are you sure?" she asked, her voice starting to tremble. Nearly half the rising ground on either side of the car was now occupied by clusters of stoic, placid wolves, whose only movement was the turning of their heads as the family went by.

At some point, a rumbling had started underneath the car. It had started so subtly that Connor had missed it. The sound and feel was as if the ground were slowly turning to cobblestone underneath them. At the same time, he was noticing that the road itself was changing, too. The yellow line was become less distinct, the sudden new texture of the asphalt making its solid, predictable lines waver out of focus. There was more color creeping in too, a pinkish red that gave the edges of the road a disquieting meaty tone. On the shoulders of the road, in front of the ever-growing press of creatures, there now were low, yellow-white stones at periodic intervals, like markers. Where they appeared, it looked as if they were pushing up the pinkish, softer edges of the asphalt.

"What the hell are those?" he murmured to himself. He felt Julie's hand on his shoulder, gripping progressively tighter. And now he could see a general lightening, something far ahead through the smoke that was casting a strong, hellish light. Was that what was causing the pinkish appearance of--

Julie drew a sharp intake of breath and her fingernails dug deeply into Connor's shoulder, as if she had just figured out something. The road ahead had now taken on a full, undulating pinkness, the center line entirely lost. The stones poking up through the soil by the sides of the road, which formed a boundary the wolves seemed to not dare cross, grew taller and more triangular. The light ahead was starting to take form, a hazy, swirling ball that was always just a bit beyond the point where the smoke made it lose coherence, constantly threatening to rush forward and resolve its true form.

"Dad," Julie hissed, the words clearly requiring great effort not to be screamed. "We don't want to go there. You can turn us around."

Connor didn't respond, but kept the car moving forward. At some point he understood what she was seeing, too. The wolves with the glowing eyes continued to accumulate on the raised banks beside the road, the bumpy road vibrating the car growing more pink and more alive, the rows of sharp white rocks becoming taller and closer together, and a awareness was growing of the ridged red ceiling that was lowering down from above them... It would all close in on them when they reached that burning light, still straight ahead of them and rendering him powerless to turn his eyes away from it...

"Dad," he heard Julie's voice, very close and strained, speaking almost directly into his ear, "You. Don't. Have. To."

Her words made his eyes blink, and in that moment the spell was broken. He was no longer hypnotized by the fire lying ahead, did not feel compelled to drive directly down the burning throat of the biggest wolf that could ever exist. Connor wrenched the wheel to the right, aiming the driver's side of the car at edge of the narrow gap between the two nearest teeth, praying that there was enough of a gap for the car to slip through. He took one last, fleeting look over at Miranda, whose head had rolled to the side with the change of direction but still had not awakened, and then into the blazing eyes of the wolves that lay on the other side of the gap--

The car was wrenched upward on the right side, throwing him back in his seat, Julie's hand yanked from his shoulder, taking more of his strength than he expected with it. Then the car was bumping and rocking every direction at once, thumping and shuddering, the wheels spinning in air one instant, and churning through dirt and rock the next. The view through the windshield yielded nothing but gray smoke and gray fur.

After a few seconds they came to a stop, and Miranda was awake, yelling, "Jesus Christ, Conn, what the *hell*?" and Bryan was yelping incoherently from the backseat. It was a glorious, welcome sound, until he realized that Julie was silent.

There was less smoke ahead of them. Instead he could see trees, the tops of some of them, because the ground dropped away sharply before them. His headlights threw the leaves and needles into sharp relief, as well as the way the smoke drifted in front of them in pulsing waves. He called out his daughter's name and tried to turn around within his seat belt, painfully wrenching his shoulder as he did. But there was a familiar long-haired shape there, the eyes as wide and deep as her mother's, looking back at him.

Connor turned to his wife. "There's a fire ahead," he said, trying to soothe her continued shouts of incredulity. "I was just now able to see. We've got to turn around."

"And you had to run us off the road--?" Miranda began at the top of her voice, but stopped. She was now fully awake, looking at him clearly, and seeing the subtle way the burning forest beyond him was turning his silhouette into a frightening, wavering thing. She quieted.

Connor looked around, trying to determine where the wolves were. His eyes scanned the ground around the car, found nothing. Whether they had taken advantage of their speed, or had never existed at all, there was not a single glowing eye to be seen now. He checked the rearview, and there was the road behind them, solid and flat as it had always been. A broken wooden mile marker, which the car had hit as it left the road, was snapped off about a foot off the ground, pulsing red like a broken fang in the tail lights.

Connor took one more look at his family, noting the safety and preciousness of each and every one, Julie last of all. There seemed to be something that passed in a long look between the two of them, an understanding and a secret that they tacitly agreed to carry the rest of their lives. Connor put the car in reverse, backed onto the road, and headed back the way they had come. They would have to find another way home.

The smoke and light lessened the farther away they got, until the air was once again clear, but Connor did not turn the fan on.

Black Stairs

The stairs are made of black glass, thick and sturdy, but clear enough to reveal what lies beyond, which is more stairs. Flight after flight crisscross each other ad infinitum, stretching out in myriad profusion toward every horizon, and an unknown distance above and below. There are no railings to protect her from the empty spaces that lie between them, however they are so densely packed together that there really is no need. All that exists in this dim world are the stairs.

Lorianne walks up and down these frequently, after almost every day she spends deep in her research. She knows the dream is her mind's way of reconciling the rafts of information she has gathered, assembling all the abstract facts into some construct she can more easily process and contextualize. This doesn't stop the experience from being entirely bewildering, but it at least tries. There is no wind, and no sound. She is neither hot nor cold, but she does occupy a body. There is a simultaneous sense of vast space and near-claustrophobic closeness as she glides up and down flight after flight, exploring the many platforms that are the only other structures in this world, and what the stairs connect.

On each of these stand a pair of figures, facing each other. They are the male and female halves of a dynasty's beginning. Surrounding them, playing around their legs and chasing each other like little orbiting solar systems, are the children that resulted from their union. Sometimes there is only one, sometimes as many as twenty. And whether the parents loved each other, or even knew each other, is irrelevant; the children are theirs only biologically, and Lorianne is very aware that there are stories going untold here, other loves and other arrangements left out by the cold impartiality of genetics.

More often than one would expect, there are multiple spouses and intersecting clouds of progeny from different parental pairs, all of which occupy the same platform. It can make things pretty crowded, and hard for Lorianne to pick her way across to get to the stairs that will lead higher into the spreading tangle of black glass. This is almost always her goal, because the parents at the bottom of the stairs also are represented as children at the top of their own particular set, being displayed also as part of the generation that came before.

This mental representation of her family has been growing for years, ever since her interest in genealogy was first piqued by her grandmother. The woman had already been very elderly when Lorianne was a small child, and claimed that their family was descended from "the bluest of bloods". Nan was always the one who could point at old photos made of thick cardboard and easily recognize old relatives regardless of the point in their lives, and she often would pull a then child-sized Lorianne up into her lap and turn the heavy yellowing page and introduce her to everyone. When the pictures devolved further back in the books, turning into little rectangles of metal, Nan would go on to describe the parents and grandparents of each increasingly distant, fading relative, going back centuries to when they all lived in castles -- or so Nan would have her believe. Nan to wanted to make sure that Lorianne never forget that was the product of multiple long processions of kings and queens. And ever since then, Lorianne's slow, incremental studies had shown that this was true.

So, on these nights, she walks the stairs of her heritage. She has found that, if she walks up to a particular ancestor -- which more often than not shares at least one facial feature the what she will see in the mirror upon waking -- they will notice her, turn toward her and smile. Then the stairway that leads up to their parents' platform will become illuminated. Not brightly, but strong enough so that it is made visible even if there are multiple black stairways blocking it from view. Then the parents' ancestral stairs will light as well, and the grandparents', the branches multiplying in a dizzying fashion as they spread ever upward and outward, from two to four to eight to sixteen to thirty-two to sixty-four, off into the increasingly hazy distance of nothing but stairways upon stairways. This gives Lorianne comfort.

More unpredictable is what happens when she bends down and touches one of the unceasingly dashing children. The child will stop for a moment, distracted from his or her play, and look up into Lorianne's face with the same beatific smile, and stairways below -- those of their direct descendants -- will begin to illuminate. Sometimes the light will explode downward like a burning cataract, because while every person has exactly two biological parents -- no more, no less -- they might have dozens of children. Or, again more often than one might think, no stairways light up at all, and Lorianne realizes she is interacting with the last of a genetic line never to be replicated. It may be a child who didn't reach maturity, dying of plague, or battle, or possibly became a nun or monk. She has tried to spot differences between tumbling children who go on to be parents and those who do not, but can find no easy pattern.

This gets her thinking. If Lorianne were to follow the right stairways all the way down to the bottom, she would find her own platform, and the Lorianne that stands there alone. She has not yet done this in her dreams, mainly because of what she might learn... Will there be stairs beyond hers, or will there be a dead end? And what would either possibility even mean? Maybe there will be nothing but endless void below her spot, and she doesn't particularly want to witness that either. She consciously knows she walks through a dream, a construct her mind has invented, but she also realizes that there many more stairs, far in the distance above and to the sides, that represent people she doesn't consciously know exist yet. And if they are already there, then maybe this knowledge isn't exclusively hers... perhaps she's tapping into some kind of ultimate accumulation of genetic memory. In any event, she always puts off finding out anything that might lead her toward an answer. Maybe the next time I dream this, she thinks, even as she understands that she will always be better off not knowing.

While she spends a lot of time along the thin (as in, mildly-incestuous) upward spiral of her royal ancestry, she's aware that it is because her inner vision is clearest there. She knows enough about these people, their histories fleshed out enough, to appear as what are probably fairly accurate portraits of themselves. They wear fine clothing that softly runs under her fingers when she makes contact with them, and their rougher features have been smoothed by painter's brushes to appear just as they do on castle walls and in art galleries. In other, less verified lines, features become hazier, less distinct. In some obscure places they all but fade out, until they are transparent, faceless shades, mere placeholders for people and lives that she does not know.

Sometimes this is not the fault of the ancestors themselves. Beyond one particular set of grandparents there is a particularly dark and amorphous section, and Lorianne is forced to acknowledge it will always remain that way. That particular pair came from a country horribly ravaged in war, all findable evidence of their heritage erased. Not only this, but they have themselves passed away, so any other information they might have been able to tell her in waking life is forever beyond reach. This is when the inability to interact with the specters on the stairs is most infuriating. Her grandparents seem perfectly real and clear, and she can approach them as easily as she did when she was a child. But all she can do is put her hand on their shoulders and accept their mute smiles. When she does this, the branching lightning that outlines their ancestry appears, but every flight of stairs is vague and barely existent. They are only there because of logic -- after all, her grandparents had to descend from *someone*.

Sometimes it strikes Lorianne that, although her stairs are full of people both present and past, and the whole experience feels intensely personal, it isn't uniquely hers. As time goes on, she becomes intensely aware that everyone is part of their own vast web of relations, and not only this, but all these disparately vast networks are ultimately the same one. She always awakes from the dream with the sense that she could pick out the person she has least in common with in the world -- ideologically, ethically, ethnically, physically-- and whether she knows how or not, that person is somewhere on her stairs, and she on theirs. Inside this titanic web of black glass, the idea that anyone in the world could *not* be related to every other person is revealed as utterly ridiculous. She imagines that, somewhere up near the top, the widening web narrows to the very beginning of human existence, and she's almost as reluctant to see what lies at the very top as she is about the very bottom.

Part of Loiranne's protective melancholy about this place is because what comes next. Just as a person wakes up convinced that they will be able to recall the details of the dream they've just left, she always wakes with the thought that if only she could share this vision with others, so much could be solved: wars ended, families mended and reunited, misunderstandings resolved. But just as dreams unfailingly evaporate, this conviction disappears as well. How can the vividness, the importance, the sheer *size* of what she has experienced be transferred to anyone else? In wakefulness, the impossibilities of the real world inevitably drag these lofty thoughts to the ground.

And so, Lorianne invariably spends the next day walking in and among countless family members she does not -- and probably cannot -- know. She watches them being cruel and indifferent to each other, actively alienating themselves from each other when they could be helping. They fight over trivialities, never knowing what they truly mean to each other. And so she trudges on, passing through a perpetual family reunion that its participants do not even realize they're attending.