Esmerelda Jackson picked up the phone. Since it was Saturday, Susan would be pottering around her apartment. She’d probably have a small breakfast of granola and yogurt, with an apple on the side. The Saturday Times read in the left hand while she eats with her right. Esmerelda had to call right now and catch her at home, however, or else Susan would be off running errands. That would require a cell phone call and Susan hated talking on the phone in public.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Hello?” The voice at the other end was tired. Sleepy.
“Susan?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me honey, Esmerelda.”
“Esm- oh, hey! Esmerelda…”
“Suze! It’s been forever. All my fault.”
“Yeah… I mean, it’s my fault too. But it has been forever.” The voice was waking up and Esmerelda could hear the bed sheets rustling around. “So… what’s up?”
“Well, hon, I just came into some money. Not a lot, not compared to your millions, ha ha, but I thought maybe I could come out and see you sometime.”
Susan was now fully awake, defenses ready.
“Oh, Esmerelda, I’m not sure if that’d be the best idea. I’ve been in this mood lately. I just… Oh shit. I don’t know. I just stay in bed all day.”
“You depressed, Suze? I’ll come out and we’ll have a ball. Get you back on your feet.” (And off of hers).
“I’m just sorting out a lot right now. Harry, well, Harry just hasn’t been himself lately. And it’s taking everything I have to not just throw this all away and tell him to go shove it-”
“Hey, hey, Suze, why didn’t you call? What are friends for?”
“Friends? Is that why you haven’t called until now, when you need a favor? A place to crash?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry.” Susan did not sound sorry in the least. Now she jumped into her telephonic escape route. “That came out wrong. I’ve been under a lot of stress. I’ll write you, OK? Can we just write?”
“Sure, sure.” Esmerelda wanted to just undo the last three minutes of her life. Like the time she just gave a customer a free meal. Just ripped up the check. She was going to pay for it out of her own pocket (the poor guy was really down on his luck) but her boss hadn’t noticed and so it was truly on the house, lost in the flow. She wanted Susan to rip up their conversation so that she could go back to believing that people stayed the same when they left, like a toy in its box, ready to be taken out and taken up where things left off.
The phone clicked dead in her ear and she calmly put it down on the base.
So, she wasn’t going on a trip. The hundred on the dresser looked like a longing puppy, waiting to be used for the betterment of its master. The scene with Susan reminded her of something right out of a movie. She wanted this to be an event, something that would mean something more than just finding out a friend was false, no, this should motivate her change her life for the better. Up until now, the hundred had been that thing. But that was crap.
Money is a means to an end. It’s no good as a motivator, because it is such a versatile means. What did Esmerelda want out of life, beyond getting out of her waitressing gig, getting the respect of her sister and the rest of the folks who’d taken one look at her and seen nothing but white trash? Those were pretty good goals. How to get there?
“I’ll tell you all how it feels to be me,” said Esmerelda.
Louie listened to the priest. The man was talking about how he’d met Rosemary Stern a great many years ago, when he was first installed at the parish. He told the congregation about God’s love and his plan for the dead, and tried to connect her death to everyone’s life as an opportunity to make a life change (or just donate to the church).
Then came the eulogies. The congregation wanted stories of how she’d changed lives, donated time and money, all while epitomizing class and breeding. Louie’s father gave one as the oldest Stern son. He walked stiffly to podium and delivered it to his notes. In his own way, this was more dignified than treating the whole thing as an opportunity to show off public speaking skills.
Louie teared up but did not cry. During one of the switching sessions, he glanced around and saw an entire church with the same composed expression, eyes brimming but in control. He almost wanted to laugh. “You are all so phony,” he wanted to say. For he felt fairly fake too. He wished that they all had cards from his grandmother in their desks at home.
The service ended and the mourners filed out to get into the funeral procession. For many, their somber faces lit up at the prospect of running red lights legally and so they walked on light feet, grabbing the red flags for the roof like a relay runner grabbing for a baton.
Rand opened the car door. They were letting him go after a night in a cell that he’d asked for since he didn’t want to get a motel. Being in the police station made him feel a little justified for some reason. But now they were releasing him to the wolves, and perhaps to a new segment on Leno: Crazy Trooper Who Loses Partners In Inexplicable Fashions. He got into the car and cranked the key. It started up with a familiar rumble (familiar after 400 miles).
He pulled out of the motor pool and started towards I75 North. The light governing the onramp turned red as he neared it. Masterson’s body was being flown up to his family, the organs intact. The casket would be open. The body had no marks on it. The onramp light turned green and Rand lurched the car forward when all of a sudden he felt his pocket twitch.
The marble. The cats eye. It twitched again and then he knew that Masterson hadn’t been insane.
Decisions can be made in a split second. The one that had brought him down here was a protracted one that he kept second guessing the entire way. Faced with a life threatening situation, he was still off in should’ve-beens. And look at how it had all turned out. Be impulsive, Rand told himself.
He swung the car out of the left turning lane, cutting off a pickup truck, the driver of which was about to blare the horn when he saw that it was a police car. Rand flicked on his siren and light bar and followed the pull of the orb, down I75 South.
Brad and Callie said their goodbyes to the Maddings (Brad said “Au revoir” and Callie said, “Adieu.”) They set off for Miami quite early. Morning conversation was subdued. Brad’s head buzzed from too many early mornings. Callie’s mind was set on her list of things to do, which was almost fully checked off. She wondered who Fearson was, and if it would be OK just to leave earth without ever poking too hard at the subject, like a teenager hoping that his wisdom teeth would be OK right where they were. But from the power of the artifacts that the Bard was carrying around, she knew that this would be a monster of an impacted tooth she was dealing with.
This was all Erato’s fault. She had claimed that she needed the Inspiros to gift an especially promising new singer, and so Callie had let her take it to earth. The scatter brained muse had lost track of it. Somehow it surfaced in Greece (probably to be appraised by an expert there, Callie was too upset to find out exactly who) and when it was on its return trip, Callie arrived to take matters into her own hands.
When she got to Miami, she found Erato in distress. “I lost my lyre,” the muse of music sobbed. “First things first,” Callie said. She put feelers out among some of the ragged network of believers the Greeks still held in America. And then came the message.
Louie watched the casket slide down the straps. The coffin lowering apparatus was actually very interesting. He knew that the rest of his family watching it was looking at the coffin and here he was staring at the mechanism. Trying to figure out who made it, and how they’d invented it. Trying to think of a better way of doing it. Trying to keep the mask of sad on his face as his brain attached gears to straps to poles in a mental model of the device.
Cousin Steve was next to him. The family was arranged in terms of seniority, closeness to Grandma Stern, and height (for the news photographer who tried to stay surreptitious). The gravediggers started covering up the coffin and the sound of dirt hitting the lacquered wood six feet down seemed to be the cue for quiet conversation to begin among the mourners.
“Hello Louis.”
“Hey, Steve.”
Steve called Louie “Louis” and Louie called Stephen “Steve” since Louie hated the formal version of his name and his cousin hated the normal version of his.
“Are you leaving today?” Steve asked Louie.
“No, we’ll be here tonight. Tomorrow morning.”
“Maybe we can do something tonight.”
Louie was stunned.
“Like what?” Perhaps Steve had a root canal that he just thought would be too much fun and he wanted something just a tinch bit worse for his Saturday night.
“I dunno. My parents just stuck me in my own room-”
“Me too.” Louie said. It had just slipped out. Wow. He thought his anti Steve defenses would have fought against any response that would prompt further conversation. Maybe he just didn’t want to look like a dope, sharing a room with his parents.
“I was pretty bored last night.”
“Me too.” Louie said. He had to think of a better response or else the way Steve looked down on him would be completely justified. Except… Steve wasn’t talking down to him like usual. Steve was acting pretty normal. Nice, even. Louie was the one freaking out.
When was the last time he’d seen Steve? Why did he remember it as being so horrible?
He had grown up a lot since fourteen. Steve had too. Lives weren’t vectors. You can’t just see two points and extrapolate a third. You can’t grow up with someone and see where he is going. And if Steve was fine now, what of the rest of his family? Perhaps they weren’t the money grubbing bluebloods he thought they were. He’d give them a chance. Starting with Steve.
Louie saw an image of Steve and him in a restaurant, eating and talking about something important, some subject they never had touched before but were getting into now because they could finally be with one another without trying to ingratiate themselves with the other’s parents or trying to fill the same niche in the family.
His grandmother would be happy.
Mr. Gong couldn’t go play at his club since the tournament was still going on (the ever tense final rounds). Instead, he drove in the other direction, towards the minigolf and driving range. There were few cars in the parking lot in the morning. Serious golfers were already on their real greens and the afternoon kids parties had not yet arrived. He had the place to himself, really.
Mr. Gong purchased a bucket of balls and declined the generic driver the kid at the desk offered him. He had his Big Bertha under his arm, a samurai sword waiting for cleave some heads in a battle for honor. Bucket in the other hand, he walked to the middle of the stalls. Number six.
He tipped a few of the balls onto the mat and then assumed the position. He pulled a ball, marked with a red stripe to deter theft, onto the nub tee. Mr. Gong lifted the club back, keeping his left arm straight, and then swung. The club face hit the ball with a sharp twack and but it didn’t go nearly as far as he wanted it to. Just like the day before on hole seven, while Bancroft smirked at the holes appearing in his game.
He looked around to see if anyone else had seen the poor drive. No one was there.
Setting another ball on the tee, he again ran over the steps of the swing in his head and mentally rehearsed every movement. Saw it happen. Then he put the swing into action and the ball wobbled through the air. Again he checked to see who was watching.
Mad now, he grabbed a red striped ball with his hand and set it on the tee with enough force to bend it and drop the ball. He didn’t care. He reared back with the driver and nailed the ball. He felt more than saw the ball go flying into the air, a magnificent drive. It was beautiful. He started to look around for anyone who might have seen it, but as he felt his head turn, he didn’t hear so much as see an image in his head, the ball flying again but at him looking, it would fall from the air.
He raked another ball over and drew back and hit it with the joy of smacking things with a stick and watching range balls lazily loft through the air to land hundreds of yards away.
Esmerelda Jackson leaned back in the break room. Three hours left on her shift, and fifteen minutes left in her rest. She wished that she could power nap like Dottie did. Didn’t matter what kind of commotion was going on outside, when that girl closed her eyes and put her head down, she was going to get her ten minutes.
“How can that little sleep satisfy you?” Esmerelda asked her once.
“Dunno, just does,” Dottie said. “Got good at it when I was working in Ft. Wayne at the truck plant. Line stops, you got to take your rest when you can get it. They go slow when parts of the line aren’t running so well but they stop the damn thing to keep us there for the whole shift. So you do a truck or two then you got to wait. I figured pretty quick that it was ten minutes between start and stop. They planned them, regular. Heh, if you can sleep in a plant, you can sleep anywhere.”
Well, Esmerelda had never learned that trick and she didn’t want to work on trucks to get the hang of it. So she sat with her head on her forearms at the break table. There was a notebook on the table. She wouldn’t have looked at it, except she was so bored, and if it was something private like a journal, it was the person’s own fault for leaving it out. This was her break room for the next 12 minutes.
She opened it up. Must’ve been left by a customer. The book was filled with an angular scribble. She stared at it, trying to identify it as that Russian writing she’d seen or what but it looked unrelated to anything in her past. And yet, the lines and shapes seemed to unlock something in her head. A story of Dottie, although she had only talked to the girl a few times and never about anything of great import.
But she saw a possible version of Dottie, saw the young girl in a high school classroom staring bored at the chalkboard but really thinking of those brief ten minutes after school when she could talk to the captain of the football team as he brushed by her locker on the way to his own. As she stared at the angles, she heard a voice telling the tale in her head. Dottie dropping her books. The hunk picking them up. A quick “Hello.” A phone call later. She saw the two dancing the night away at the prom.
Esmerelda closed the book. It was time to go back to work. And she finally knew what she was going to spend the big man’s bill on.
Callie pointed this way and that, and Brad followed her directions through downtown Miami. She seemed quiet, content to let the music of the Stone Roses fill the car. Brad was lost in his own not-so-private thoughts, but she didn’t even seem to be paying attention to his crazy schemes to keep her with him, or to go with her, or to continue driving forever in some kind of Love In The Time Of Cholera finale.
“There,” she said. “The apartment my sisters are sharing is on the corner.”
“Let me see if I got their names. Erato, um, Clio, Poly-something. I’m pretty good at this when I meet a girl’s family, but eight sisters is a bit much. Although the names are unique. Euterpe! How many is that?”
“Four. You have four left,” she smiled. “But you only need to know Erato. The rest are not exactly in human form.”
“Why is that? Why did you and Erato have to, you know, lower yourself to this level?”
She didn’t reach for the door handle and pitch herself out, so Brad felt that he had gained a little ground with her in the past two days.
“Mortals are the only ones in this universe allowed to be themselves. While I am Calliope, I must be the muse of epic poetry. That is all I can be. But here, in this form, I can do what I want. Can you imagine the freedom? The joy? It is like changing one’s fate.”
She closed her eyes. “’And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it / neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- / it's born with us the day that we are born.’” Brad remembered those lines from before, in the diner. Callie looked at him. “It is funny to me that you humans worry about how fate controls you. You control yourselves. Fate just lays some suggestions along the way. I put that line in, but it’s a lie for you. But it is true for gods, unless we take on true mortal form and all the associated shortcomings. Like insatiable curiosity.” She grinned.
Then she opened the door and stepped into the humid air. Brad got down and tried to stretch his calves as he walked behind her to the door of the tiny apartment building. She had the lyre in one hand and her backpack over her shoulder and she looked every inch a small goddess, ready to join her peers once again.
Louie’s family drew back around the grave now that the digger was finished undigging the hole. No one wanted to be the first to leave, it seemed. His mother held her arms around him and he stood up straight, trying to be like his father who was a few paces to their right. The priest said the final blessings over the gravestone. Now family members got back into their haphazardly parked cars and drove slowly out of the cemetery.
Louie sat in the back of the rental car and thought about how his family was pretty much Christmas-Easter Christian and yet they seemed to know all the right religious things to do. Funeral services almost transcended petty denominational differences to create a feeling of spiritualism even in the most die hard atheists in the crowd. For who doesn’t want to be reassured that the deceased are in a better place?
Louie had never seriously cranked his mental process through death. He guessed that the idea of his grandmother dressed in robes and a harp in one hand was pretty believable, even to him.
Still he wanted to hear it from someone else. Feeling like he was eight, he spoke into the front seat. “Mom, where is Grandma now?”
Felt his mother cringe at the question. Felt her poking through what she really believed (that her mother in law was just pushing up daisies) and what she thought she should say (“Grandma’s an angel now, honey!”).
He dropped her a lifeline. “Is she in Heaven, Ma?”
“Yes Louie, she is.”
“Can we go to service this Sunday?”
“Maybe that would be a good idea,” his mother said.
His father kept driving towards Boston proper, a small smile on his face as he remembered his mother’s final words to him before he left her at Glen Oaks.
“You’re a good son, Craig, and I understand what you’re doing.”
He’d tried to say, “No, Mom! I want to take you home!” right then and there but she made a small kind gesture, waving him off.
“Go.”
Callie knocked on the door of the flat. “Erato! It’s me,” she called.
The door opened and Brad saw a girl whose beauty hit him like a brick to the stomach. His heart hurt, watching her make the most insignificant movement, like pulling the chain off the latch and opening the door.
“You have it?” she asked Callie in a voice that was a warm knitting needle pushed slowly through Brad’s brain, poking away the strands of his running conscience and exposing the lustful thoughts underneath.
“You can turn the sex appeal down a bit,” Callie frowned. “I have your lyre.” There was a feeling that someone had placed glasses over her eyes. A blur.
“Ah, let me have it, dear sister,” Erato said. Brad was about to take the lyre from Callie and hand it to the muse of love poetry himself when Callie raised a hand and spit into it. She smeared her hand over Erato’s face and a strip of it smeared away. Underneath was the dealer.
“Thamyris!” she gasped, clutching the lyre to herself.
The old man cocked his head, savoring the name. “Thamyris, ah yes, that is my name. I’d forgotten.” He reached a hand out quickly and pulled Callie towards him, and slammed a manacle over her wrist. Brad surged forward to try and knock the man’s hands away but from behind the door came the Bard with his arm in clothesline position. He caught Brad it and Brad couldn’t move. The dealer swung the muse around in a practiced motion and clipped her hands together. He closed the door on them and it locked itself.
“Thamyris, mmm, that sounds good. And who was I, dear muse? A bard, that I know, no thanks to you. You took it all from me. My songs. My sight. But I’ve gotten some of those songs back. And thanks to these darlings, I can see, after a fashion.” He pawed through her backpack. “But I want it all back. All I need is you and this.” He pulled the Inspiros from the bag.
The Bard looked up from holding Brad down. “Hey, that’s you, boss.” Indeed ,the bronze figurine looking like the dealer, only with robes on instead of his tweed pants and green vest. Thamyris gazed at the statue, stroked the nine scratches along the top of the head.
“Here it was, they took my memory. Bound it up inside. Set it away from me. Used my imagination for their own ends.”
Brad yelled from under the Bard’s arm, “Let us go, you crazy! She never did anything to you!”
Thamyris gave him an evil glare. “Oh no, my clueless young friend? Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“Callie, who is this asshole?” Brad asked.
“Where are my sisters?!?” she yelled at the dealer, not really answering Brad’s question.
“I have them and they are waiting on you, my dear. You are the leader, after all. But I think they would very much like to restore me to my normal state,” Thamyris breathed. “But do tell your young driver what exactly I am so upset about. Truly, I would like to know myself.”
Callie stared holes into her captor’s eyes. “This man thought himself to be the equal of the muses in the arts. So he challenged us to a duel.”
“And then!?!” the dealer screamed.
“He lost and had to pay what he offered up.”
“Offered, nothing! You stole my sight, my songs!”
“And yet you seem to have regained them.”
“Few, very few,” he said. “Some small charms and baubles. With them you can lull to sleep, suggest certain courses of action, nothing more.”
“You gained powers no mortal should have, through shifty means. We did right to deprive you of your incantations.”
“And yet I found them,” the old man said, yanking the manacle chain backwards sharply. Callie gave out a cry of pain. “Soon the Inspiros will be drained, and my power returned,” the dealer continued.
“What?” the Bard cried. “You said that I could use it to compose songs that would make me the greatest singer in this age!”
“Well, I will be the greatest singer, my dear boy. You can join me. We’ll be like Simon and Garfunkel. You’re Garfunkel. I may want some solo work that actually goes somewhere.”
“I don’t know how you’re still alive, madman,” Callie said.
“Me neither, bitch.” He spat at her. “You and your sisters must have stolen my fate from me when you took everything else.”
“We took too much then,” she said. “Show me my sisters.”
The Bard finished taping Brad’s legs and arms with duct tape. He was hogtied, inexpertly, but effectively. He went to the back of the room and returned with a row of bronze statues.
“Can’t really be apart for very long, can you?” the dealer said to Callie. “They have all have given their consent to restore my gifts to me. All that is needed is you.” He pulled his ray gun from a pocket and aimed it at her face.
Sure enough, the scratches on the Inspiros faded until there was only one left, the longest one, which bisected the top of the head longitudinally. It seemed to pulse, as if it were a Band Aid holding blood in.
Callie stared at the old man and the statue in his hand. For once she looked completely unsure of what to do.
From his duct tape prison, Brad thought about all the new stuff he’d just learned in the past half hour. The purpose of the Inspiros. The forgotten name. Mortality. Fate. He hoped that she was listening. He formed an image in his head. A contrary one flooded in. He fought back with his. The mental argument took all his strength, but the dealer was not focused on him but Callie, who seemed to be considering the possibilities.
“If it helps your decision, I could kill you right now and be no worse off,” Thamyris said. “Wouldn’t it be much nicer to let me go free on my own to make my songs and poems? You delayed my stardom a couple thousand years.”
Brad refined his image.
Esmerelda Jackson picked up the phone and dialed a well worn number.
“Hello? Trebollini residence.”
“Markie, it’s your sister.”
“Hi Esmerelda, what’s up? Wait, hold on.” Esmerelda could hear a mixer or a food processor in the background. Her sister turned it off. “Sorry. Just making some cake for Rob. What’s up?”
“Markie, I need to borrow some money.”
Esmerelda’s sister’s face took on an I-told-you-so cast, though Esmerelda was denied the benefit. “How much, four hundred, five? Is rent coming due?”
“Yeah, Markie, it is. But I only need a hundred.”
“You sure? You might as well just take it all now.” All too happy to help. A small price to pay for moral superiority.
“Well, Markie, I just need a word processor.”
“A word processor? Are you going back to school?” Markie wondered how she’d look at her older sister with a degree.
“No, Markie, see, I got this hundred the other day, at work. Don’t ask how, I did, it was all legal, don’t you worry. Anyway, I’ve been having problems deciding what to do with it. But I think I got it.”
“A word processor.”
“Yeah. I want to be a writer. See, I was thinking today that I’ve seen a lot come through the restaurant over the years and I think I could put them all in a book. Make ‘em famous.” (Me too, she thought).
“You’s just going to write a book? What makes you think that without any experience or connections any publisher is going to do anything with your manuscript except use it to prop up other stacks of unsolicited submitted stuff?”
“I dunno, Markie. I just had a feeling” (vision) “that this would be a good idea.”
Her sister was not convinced, but willing to give rope for hanging. “Sure you can have a hundred. That must be a fancy word processor for two hundred dollars. You can pick up a whole computer for a couple hundred more.”
“Aw, well you can get a machine for under a hundred. I just want to keep mine. Tape it up over my writing desk. And have it keep me motivated.”
It was already put up on the desk’s upper shelf, underneath her old Webster’s and Roget’s. The Ben Franklin no longer looked like a leering winking thing, but a patient grandparent who has just seen a descendent choose to take him home to live rather than sticking him in a nursing home for the rest of his life.
Callie shut her eyes tight and the scratch on the top of the Inspiros slowly closed. Thamyris reared back. The statue was whole and then it began to close in on itself, forming into a sphere. The old man staggered back, still holding the ray gun. He bgean to sing, tunelessly and then more strongly. A jig. He laughed. “I’m back!” He continued his singing, twirling in place, faster and faster until he had to stop, dizzy. In his song, Brad had the sudden urge to dance, to clap, to sing along. But the tape held him down. Then the dealer staggered happily. He swayed left and right, remembering experiences from thousands of years before flash into his head. Thamyris’ face was happy sad happy sad sad happy sad sad sad. He stabilized in the sad expression. And then “You screwed me!” he yelled, aiming the gun at Callie.
As he pulled the trigger, the Bard launched himself at the dealer’s arm, moving much faster than a man his size should be able. The shot went wide and the green fire went through the wall, leaving a diagonal slash mark extending from the top of the generic painting to the ceiling.
Thamyris spasmed on the floor and then was still. He looked even older than before, a dried husk rather than a person. The Bard went over and sifted through the dead man’s pockets for the key to Callie’s manacles. Bard worked his feet loose and set to work on getting his hands free of the tape.
“What did you do to him?” the Bard asked Callie when he freed her.
“I didn’t think it would work when Brad told me,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly, but he was right. By restoring his memory, I restored his fate. And that was to die a long time ago.”
The Bard looked at Brad appreciatively. “Very smart, boy.”
Brad was a bit surprised to not be getting hit by the big bearded man. “I guess you gave up your dreams of being famous,” he said.
“I didn’t realize how crazy it all seemed until him. The thought of that crazy old coot crooning some love ballads to a stadium full of teenagers cracked me up and I realized that I had better things to do. I’ll make my music for myself. And if it’s bad, that’s OK.”
Brad looked at Callie who was shaking her head. “I think you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose to do, big guy,” he told the Bard.
“I guess it’s back to Cleveland for me,” the Bard said.
“If you hang on a bit, I can give you a ride,” Brad said.
“I’ll be outside.” He left through the door, leaving Brad and Callie and all the statues in the room.
They breathed for a bit. Thamyris’ lifeless husk and the statues of the muses looked at them, one gaze accusing and the other eight hopeful.
‘So what happens now?” Brad asked. “Bad guys gone, other bad guy repented. Although he still could kill me on the way up.”
“He will not.”
“I know.” They stared at each other, an arms length apart.
“What happens is, I go back,” Callie said.
“Mt. Helicon?”
“You continue to impress me, Brad.”
“I picked up a book or two at the Maddings.”
“I saw.”
“So, are we going to have a tearful goodbye? A tearful hello? I haven’t read many of your stories, but it seems that they always end in sadness.”
“Yes, many times epics are tragedies.”
“Since you have a lot pages to deal with grief. Got anything for a shorter work?’
“Shorter?”
“Yeah, since we’ve only known each other two days and all.”
“I have this,” she said as she drew closer and kissed him. He put his arms around her, feeling the stress leak out of her body. She clasped him to her.
“Sorry I’m not an epic hero with a strong jaw and bulging pecs,” he said.
“After a thousand years, those get boring,” she replied. They kissed again. And he knew that she was kissing him goodbye.
“You know, no one’s writing epics anymore. You could desert your position for a little, stay here with me. No one would know the difference,” he cajoled.
“What makes you think that I am ready to go?”
“Um the kiss goodbye, your quiet manner, the way you haven’t been reading my thoughts lately…”
“I have not been reading your thoughts today.”
“Yes, you have.”
“Sorry. I have been phasing out my deity powers. Ever since you saved me. I have been becoming more and more mortal.”
“But the Inspiros thing,” he started.
“That was the last of it to go,” she said.
“But the image you sent to the Bard of all those kids in the stadium watching the dealer…” he said.
“Wasn’t me. Must’ve been just a stray one going through his head.”
“Holy shit, you used a contraction. Two!”
“I’m no longer the muse of epic poetry,” she said. “I can talk however I want.”
“You’ve escaped your fate.”
“Yeah,” she said, hugging him to her. “But old habits die hard.”
Quietly, the statues faded and disappeared from sight. Last to go was the curviest one, and it dropped its eyelid in a lascivious wink at the kissing couple.
The three of them were sitting in a Waffle House on the way back up north to Ocala and then to Cleveland filling in backstory and telling each other tales when the door opened and a trooper walked in. They froze.
Rand approached the table. He was stiff from driving. Their eyes locked on him and they wondered how they were going to get out of this.
“Can I eat with you?” he said.
“Sure,” Callie answered. She and Brad squished together, as the Bard took up one end of the booth by himself. Rand took a menu from the stand on the table and began looking it over for something familiar.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“We all are,” Brad said.
“I’m sorry-” the Bard began, but Rand waved him off.
“I just want to know what happened and then I want to go home,” the trooper said.
“Here,” Brad said, and handed the man his journal.