He was going to collect the wind. He would trap it in jars on his roof. He didn´t tell his parents about the idea. He kept the carefully chosen jars ready and hidden under his bed. To do it, he would go up into the tree that was outside his window and climb from it to the roof with a rucksack strapped on his back. He would have to be cautious not to jostle too violently the jars nestled inside the rucksack as he made his way up through the tree´s branches. For protection, each jar would be gently wrapped in swaths of old cloth. The cloth he´d selected was as special as the jars. It came from the shirts his great grandfather Leo had once worn when he spent time as a logger in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Even though they had never met, his grandfather meant a lot to him. He knew the man would have approved of his plan for the wind. He would sometimes seek out the fabric of the old torn shirts when he was feeling most weak and alone. In touching the ragged cloth he thought he sensed some of his grandfather´s often praised strength and humor. These things he so very much desired in his own life, but could not find. He knew the people in his neighborhood thought him strange. His clothes. His hair. His face. He didn´t want to be strange. He wanted to fit in and be like everybody else, but somehow it never quite worked. But he knew having the wind would help. It would lift him up. If he could get it inside him, it wouldn´t matter what others thought. He would have the wind. He got the idea of the wind from an old documentary he´d seen the previous summer. It was on late one long hot night when he couldn´t sleep. The show had been about a man trying to decipher the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The man claimed daVinci´s unusual creative power had come from his ability to pull the wind of life itself into his being and harness its energies. Even though the boy´s whole family had been long asleep andhe had wanted to be as well, when he heard these words, something galvanized inside him. And in looking at the image of da Vinci on the screen, he was struck even more by the uncanny resemblance between da Vinci and his own grandfather. They could have been twins. Almost. He did not decide right away to embrace the wind. Many months went by with the memory of the TV program becoming almost entirely lost in shadow. But then, seemingly out of the blue, the narrator´s voice would fire up again in his head and he would once more feel the lucid charge in his veins he´d felt that night he first heard about da Vinci´s secret. The feeling was so strong that it made him slink down to the dank, dark closet in the basement, where his grandfather´s old, ragged logging clothes were stored. When he was sure no one knew was there, he would open the cardboard box and run his fingers gently over the fabric, imagining them on his grandfather high up in a tree in the middle of the Canadian wind. In such special moments he felt his soul grow a little larger and a little more vibrant. And he knew then that soon he too would live in the wind. But not only that, he would also be a kind of home where it could find shelter.

Originally it had been his boat. Originally it had been something that went through the water on missions from one place to another. Now it belonged to her and now it went nowhere. Now it stayed absolutely still in the middle of the room where most people would have put their television set. She had candles set up along the rims of the outside and at night would light them all and sit within them, listening. He was out there somewhere. He was going to come back to her. She knew it the same way she always knew, to the day, months ahead, when snow would first fall. He was not dead. Just lost. He was lost like a cat in a tree—except that he was somewhere out there in that wide water trying to find her. Her family had helped her bring the boat up the stairs and taken apart the doorway of her apartment to get it in. Her brother had done most of this work. Lucky for her abut his skills at carpentry. Unlucky for her about his sarcasms and sense of dark fun about her lover´s return. Her brother had tried to apologise afterward, but it was too late. Some things cannot be undone. And besides she hadn´t really been that angry at him. Really she just wanted to be alone with the boat. To run her hands along ist soft surface and hold it close against her chest. She missed him so much. In the wooden frame she could feel his breathing, sense his passion for life and even hear faintly that song he once sang to her after they´d made love and were cuddling, while outside the wind knocked the tree against the wall like Armaggedon was about to unfold. His voice had been so soft, so sweet. She felt in the words of the song like she was finally free from all fear—like that song was a home she could live in and be safe. When he finished she had wanted him to keep singing, but didn´t know how to tell him so. Instead she had looked into his eyes and seen the tears there. Such a man could get lost. That was possible. Certainly. But a man like that die? She knew better. She knew it was just a matter now of being ready in his boat for when he came back into view, waving to her, sending her his song of love and renewal and return. In the light of the candles she felt the words of his song rise up from within her. His words became hers just as his boat had become hers. She was standing in its hull with her arms outstretched to him, offering him the safety of her heart to rest on as she had rested on his.

Everybody was sure he could be a movie star. He had that kind of look. His was the easy, languid grace of a river at sunset. You liked him even before you met him. It was impossible not to. Something in his eyes drew you toward him. There was a slowness in them. A gentle thunder. You always wanted him to walk by on his way to the torpedo factory where he worked. And whenever he did, you always enjoyed seeing his footprints glitter wet on the pavement under the red marquee of the pizza place. He didn´t seem to notice your burgundy lipstick of the tiny black dress which you wore especially for him. But then again, you couldn´t be sure. With him you couldn´t be sure of anything. He was so full of surprises and tiny kindnesses. Plus, he was so different from everyone else. The thing that bothered you the most about the place where you lived was the sameness of it all and the sameness of the people. You only had to look at them once to know their whole story and what they named their cat—if they had a cat, that is, which many of them did, even though it was against the apartment complex´s rules. With him you didn´t know anything really, except how he made you feel. He could be thinking anything and you´d never know it from his little smiles and nicely polished shoes. You couldn´t really help yourself from wanting to know more about him. Sneaking into his apartment when he was at work wasn´t really an invasion, it seemed to be what he wanted you to do. He was just to shy to ask. Okay, so you broke that little window. Yes, that was probably not the nicest thing to do, but he would understand. You knew he would. Just like he would understand why you stood so long in his shower looking up at the spigot imagining him there waiting for the water to fall on him, how his skin would feel under your palms, wet, strong, alive with excitement and passion. How could it be wrong to get into his bed and lay there awhile and look up at the same ceiling he looked up at as he drifted off to sleep? This was not criminal behavior, you were getting to know him. That´s why you took all those photos of the pretty girl out of the album on his night stand, tore them up into tiny, tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. You were protecting him from her. She did not live anywhere around here and had never taken the trouble to visit him so she was obviously bad news and toying with his gentle heart. That´s why you kept searching for signs of her and everywhere you came across anything related to her, you destroyed it and erased all signs of your act. You knew he would be happy in the long run that you had done this. But it would take awhile and a lot of tender talking between the two of you, which you were more than ready to begin until you saw him standing behind you and no words came out of your mouth.

He was a puppet. It´s what he said to people. But then, he thought everyone was a puppet. Most just didn´t know it. Knowledge was important to him. He thought he knew more than most. Maybe he did, it´s hard to say. But what´s beyond all doubt is that he knew a lot about his own disease, where his soft spots were. At night they lit up his room. It´s why he lived alone. He had to. He feared sometimes they would get so bright and so hot they would ignite the room while he slept, catching the bed linen in flames first, then spreading to the curtains and beyond. It was easy for him to imagine the whole apartment complex consumed by flames that were born from his sleeping flesh. He was that kind of puppet with that kind of disease. But as much as he might talk openly and often about his theories on the vicissitudes of puppetness and puppetry, he rarely, if ever, overtly spoke of his disease. He collected data about the disease anywhere he could find it that would not leave a recognizable link back to him. The public library and the internet were taboo. He suspected most doctors also reported directly to the government about the topic as well, even if they swore the opposite and promised on scout´s honor to throw their own mother off a cliff if it was true. They were puppets just as much as he was, so how could he believe a word they said? He had enough trouble believing his own words. He knew he lied sometimes. He wasn´t sure why. It sometimes happened when he least expected. He would be telling someone about how to get to the nearest butcher shop and suddenly would lie and tell them directions that were completely false. He did not know if this was a result of him simply being a puppet or something related to his disease. He thought about such things for hours sometimes, pushing various possible justifications for either side of the argument. He knew the disease was spreading inside him more quickly than in most of the case studies he had examined. Why this was he wasn´t sure, but he was keeping careful track of his soft spots. They were the most dangerous areas. In such realms it seemed almost anything was possible, given the particular nature of the disease. The bright light that emanated from his body while he slept was among the more innocuous dangers presented by the ailment. He tried not to think about the more devastating repurcussions it could involve. Better to keep his mind occupied with the world of puppetry. As a child he had a whole set of puppets. Nice puppets Circus puppets. He took them with him everywhere he went. His adventures in the world were always shared by the puppets. But then the puppets got jealous when he left them home once. They set fire to his house and his family and everything he knew. It was after the fire that he discovered that he, too, was a puppet. A little boy puppet running in the street with a pack of matches and a smile as big as the North Pole.

He made the garden slowly. He could see it more or less complete in his head long before he had broken the ground to plant the first seed. He knew growing things took time and patience. He was not worried about the plants not surviving. He had worked with many plants over the course of his life and knew which ones would flourish in the environment he had at hand. He enjoyed helping the plants reach their potential and bloom into full beauty. He talked to them a lot, telling them how nicely they were doing and that they had nothing to worry about. That he would bring them fresh water every day and make sure they had enough nutrients in their soil. For them he would journey with his old frail body on his bicycle several miles to a coffee shop where his good friend Charlie was a janitor and get from Charlie the ground remnants from the previous day´s brewing of coffee beans. He would sprinkle these coffee grounds among his little friends when they were sleeping at night. He knew these coffee remnants contained just the right kind of nitrogen for his plants and that when they woke up in the morning, their roots would feed on what he had given them and this would make them strong and vital and able to reach u toward the sun. Seeing them succeed and grow lush made him smile inside. He was a simple man. He did not need much in life to feel satisfied, but he needed his garden. It was a place for him to put his love now that his children were grown and gone to other places far away. He enjoyed seeing his family when they returned on holidays with the grandchildren, of course he did. But spoiling the grandchildren with all his affections and presents and hugs on those few days out of the year was not enough for him. Every day he was able to spoil his plants and tell them how lovely and beautiful they were, even as seedlings when all anyone else could see was a stub of green. To him this stub of green was a small miracle. He knew how brief life was and had not only lost his wife but so many of his dearest friends over the span of his years. He knew these stubs of green were a way the world had of trying again. He liked life but knew he would not have so many years to enjoy his garden. That is why he was so very careful with each living thing he encountered and smiled at them all. He felt as if they all held some of him within them somehow, especially his own plants and flowers. When he saw them healthy and happy and green with their colorful flowers, he knew he could face his own death. He could feel his body growing weaker with the passage of days and years and knew that before long some of the plants he had helped bring into the fullness of their life would go on without him. This could have made him sad, but it did not. He was a kind man and kind also to himself. He was happy for all that he had experienced and certainly wanted more time with his plants and grandchildren, but also he knew there were limits. In time he would become coffee grinds. He and his plants would give way to the next generation and their kind. He tried to tell his plants this to give them some peace when he saw them reaching the end of their life cycle. He would kiss them after he said it and tell them once more how very beautiful they were. And rare.

She had built herself up out of spare parts, old things she´d found around in the junkyard or on the street. Nothing was original. She had a man´s voice that came from a 1950´s educational movie designed to teach school children the proper way to dance. Her cheeks were stolen off a billboard that once featured a tough cowboy smoking a long thin cigarette. Her ankles had been a boxer´s. Nobody famous, unfortunately—not that she cared. The whole thing of who she was wasn´t supposed to last or even impress—it was just the getting by that counted, the getting through another day somehow. The war had given her some of her toes in the form of bullet casings. She liked them, how they jingled a little when she walked. Because her breasts had been replaced with hubcaps and her vagina with a Hoover vacuum engine, she wasn´t really sure she should be calling herself a “her” anymore. But she did anyway. It was more out of habit than some kind of political statement. Her belief in politics had been lost long before her teeth. She poked at the silicone microchips which now passed as her teeth. They needed cleaning. But then, in her world, what didn´t? Everything that wasn´t dirty or falling apart was already dead and sealed up waiting for Armageddon to roll around so it could unthawed and given a second chance. Personally she didn´t want another roll of those dice. She´d landed in this slim slice of history and was making do and getting by. Not well, maybe, compared to the uber-rich who came by her place every once in awhile on one of their sightseeing excursions, but not as bad as the scabrous unmentionables who still tried to have jobs and keep the military machinery up and running. Having replaced all semblance of the “her” that had once been human, she no longer qualified as being able to fight and also was not really detectable by their recruitment equipment. To their machines she no longer read as a biological entity and appeared more like a mobilized advertisement out harvesting data—more like what they themselves were, if the truth be told. But truth was another of those old conventions she'd jettisoned long before giving up her teeth. Truth was whatever it needed to be for those who could afford it. And, simply put, she couldn´t. Not that she minded. Her world was not about victory, honor, or honesty. It was about trying to keep her body, such as it was, together and functioning enough, just enough to get through to the next day. There wasn´t going to be another generation after her. She knew that much. She felt lucky to even be able to say there was going to be another day. She smiled at the thought of anyone wanting a child, given the what of the way things were. She smiled and then did a little bit of a jig, her bullet casing toes jingling along in an almost dainty and pretty way as she did.

He lived in the past—not his own past, not even a real past that had ever happened, but a movie past. Purely imaginary. Purely a dream. It had gotten so he could no longer speak his own words, but had to use phrases and lines from the dreamworld of the black and white movies he was almost continuously watching. His body was more and more not his own either; its gestures and movements were being taken over by what he saw on the screen. He seemed unable to stop it and not even aware it was happening—that he was being erased and replaced. He would smile the smile of a long dead actor and speak words which had once been written down for the dead actor to say, and when his lips moved and the words came out—it was impossible to tell that he did not think the words were his own. If challenged on the matter, he would get upset, outraged and switch to a different film and use those words of wild-eyed condemnation against his accuser. His family took it in stride. What else could they do? He was part of them. Even if he could no longer admit this to himself or possibly even believe it—he was still their flesh, their blood and so they took care of him as best they could. His movies always came first, but after they were over—and that was the good thing for his family, there was always an ending to his movies—after they were over, his family would try and get him to go outside. Even for a little while. Just to get some air and maybe see some real people and have a little bit of a life. But this he wanted less and less. He didn´t see the point of it. Why would he want to go out there into that desert? His family didn´t know what he was talking about. Desert? They lived in a city. It worried them when he talked this way, acted so dramatic. Why did he have to be so difficult? Of course they couldn´t say this directly to him, they didn´t think they could say anything directly to him anymore. For them it was like they had to figure out what movie was maybe happening in his head and what parts might be available for them for the purpose of getting through to him. It was more and more as if they were invisible or imaginary beings flitting around the periphery of his vision, unless they spoke in words or had gestures he recognised from one of his movies. If they were careful, they could hold long conversations with hi this way. But it was tricky. It was not easy. He knew the films so much better than they ever could and would get impatient if they kept messing up their lines. Once his sister had more of it than she could take. She broke out of the character she was trying to play and started shouting at him that he was driving them all crazy with this nonsense and he had to stop it. He had to stop it. He did not respond. He turned his back on her. He went over and turned on the movie which she had been playing in and began watching it from where she had broken down. His smile showed how much more satisfied he was to be again experiencing the real thing.

He believed in flow. He believed in goodness. He believed if he rode in a balloon above the city he would be able to see the goodness from there like you could see flowers on a sunny day in the field where he sometimes went running. Goodness was like a flower to him. It was not something permanent, but fleeting. His goal was to try and capture it on a map as it occurred, at least as much of it as he could from his balloon above the city. He had acquired a powerful telescope for just this purpose and found a “How to” book on the use of telescopes to help him use it as it was meant to be. Or sort of how it was meant to be. He knew he would be looking in the wrong direction for the goodness and that usually telescopes tried to find it in the stars. But he didn´t let this trouble him. He was not the sort to be troubled by what other people thought of him or what he did. It´s why he didn´t get bothered when his neighbors in the apartment complex all signed a petition against him for his late night noise antics of building the large gondola for his balloon. He used vestiges of things that they had thrown away and which he had squirreled away out of the large trash containers in the courtyard. His place was filled with castoffs: old bicycle tires, pieces of a broken gas stove, several smashed lamps, a torn hammock, some mildewed luggage that seemed to have been half eaten by rats, an ancient stereo system with speakers bigger than his entire closet. All of this and more he was using to fashion the gondola for his balloon. Soon he would have it ready for the launch. He calculated that the best day to track goodness would be in the middle of the week and so he´d chosen Wednesday as the day for his first journey. The problem was he could not get off from his job at the noodle factory on Wednesdays because that was always the day they sent heir biggest shipment off to Spain. He didn´t know what to do. He was afraid of his boss finding out about his mapping plans. He didn´t think his boss would really understand the concept. He knew not everyone was able to think as abstractly about life as he could. But he didn´t want his mapping of goodness to itself somehow involve an act of non-goodness with him lying to his boss and so he decided the only way to make it work out well was to for everyone was to bring his boss along on the journey. Of course for this he would have to reconfigure some aspects of his gondola design and the weight variables of extra ballast he´d need to bring along. But the ballast wouldn´t be too hard to work out, he had the two kitchen sinks he´d saved for just such an unplanned turn of events. He tied them to the side of the big unwieldy odd basket in his kitchen and smiled how nicely surprised his boss would be when he woke up after the sedative wore off and could look down through the telescope and see all the goodness blossoming so far below them.

The ones inside her were black. They were the reason she did so well in school and was always so well spoken of. They were the reason she did so many things—including going to Antarctica to study climate changes from ten thousand years ago. Or winning the state spelling bee when she was ten years old. The tickets had reasons for existing, of course they did. She knew all about them. She knew they had names and dates on them. She knew they were evidence. And she knew she could do anything she liked, go to the bottom of the ocean floor in a diving bell with walls three feet thick to hold up to the intense pressure of the water outside, or sail up into the atmosphere where the membrane between sky and stars was thin as an eyelash. She´d done both and it didn´t matter. The tickets remained inside her. Solid. Safe. Unfettered. Waiting. Over the years friends had tried to help, especially boyfriends. And lord knows, she´d wanted help. Wanted to be free of the terrible weight of the tickets. One boy in particular had gotten in close to them. He almost seemed able to touch them. This had never happened before and she was astonished he had somehow been able to do so—gotten so near. She´d felt a mix of fear and excitement about it. Then she´d closed her eyes. She could hear it raining outside. It had been raining a long time. She could hear failure in the sound of the rain and knew when she opened her eyes that the boy would be gone. He would have gone away and left her alone in the apartment. In his place would be another tiny black ticket inside her. A new one. His name would be on it. And it would not go away even if years from now she might not be able to remember his face or his name. That wouldn´t matter. His ticket would still be inside with the others. When younger she had cut her legs in small places where no one would see, to try and let the tickets out. She had used a special knife for this that she purchased in a shop on the other side of the city. The same knife had purportedly been used by a magic healer in some part of Central America to cure women who had problems like hers. In his healing the man had used the knife to sever the heads of live chickens. She did not want to cut the heads off of chickens and so instead had cut into herself. But apparently she had not been able to cut deep enough to get to where the tickets were. It scared her to cut that deep. She had not wanted people to know what was happening. She never told anyone about the tickets. None of her friends. Not even the boy who by chance had gotten so near to them. She felt people wouldn´t understand and that it would backfire, and instead end up producing more of the tickets. And so she did what she always did and pretended not to know they were there, and to have more and more success in her life. She found that more than anything else, success worked for awhile to keep the tickets quiet.

He was from a different place. He had not been here long and still had many of the ways of doing things from where he had been before. Even his clothes were different. They had many extra buttons on them and in places people from here would never put buttons. He also spoke louder than people were used to speaking and made gestures with his arms that frightened them. Their words were new to him as well, and came out of his mouth all lopsided and broken sounding. Sometimes he seemed not to have any idea what he was saying or even how to do the simplest of things. Because of this, people were often puzzled by his behavior and became nervous if he came near them. If they saw him out walking on the street, they would often try to avoid him by crossing to the other side or by quickly entering a store as refuge. It was not that they did not like him or wished him ill, it was just that his clothes had all those extra buttons and in such strange places. Someone said all the extra buttons sewn into his clothes must mean something. Perhaps he was hiding something. Could be something dangerous. They ended up discussing the possibilities of what was behind the buttons for many days. During this time none of them spoke to him or dared to look at the buttons on his clothes. They grew ever more afraid of him and what his intentions might be. It had become quite apparent to them that he was anything but a positive presence in their lives and that he was making it more and more difficult for them to get through their daily routines. Something had to be done about him. They had to think of the children. They had to think about a lot of things. But what they tried not to think about was how different he was with his buttons, because they had already agreed among themselves that thinking about him and the buttons was bad. Better to think about a nice sunny day and walking in the park and looking at the trees and enjoying the sounds of the birds. But of course when they tried to do this, they could not. Him and the buttons were ruining everything! Someone proposed the idea that they grab hold of him by force, the lot of them, and pluck the buttons off the extra places on his clothes where the buttons served no obvious purpose except to cause trouble. This course of action seemed radical and extreme at first, but when considered seriously came to be seen as the only realistic alternative. In the process of achieving their goal, things went differently than they had expected. They did not anticipate that they would lose control and begin to beat and kick him once they had him subdued on the ground. After it was over, they held his buttons in their hands while his body lay there motionless. Inert. They did not know whether to be happy to have the buttons or not. Some kept their button as a trophy and pinned it on the wall, others burned their button. His body was not touched.

He came from a small village where everyone was blind. Over the years several teams of doctors, scientists, and health officials had been to the village to explore why everyone in it was unable to see. No answers were found. It wasn´t the water and there was no record of unusual amounts of radiation or cancer or any of the known transmittable eye ailments. Nonetheless, as far back as anyone in his village could remember, no one born there had ever been able to see. He was no exception. What made him different was that he left the place. His journey to the city was strange and long. A doctor who had studied the village had found him the job and place to stay and had brought him to it, shutting the door with a click after saying so long and goodbye. There was a storm the first night in the new apartment. He stood there in the thunder. He could feel it all around him. He had been in storms before, but never had been this high up inside of one. None of the homes in his village was taller than one or two floors. His apartment was on the fifteenth level of the complex. He was out on the terrace, face being ripped by the wind, the curtains flying around madly behind him, rain pelting his hair. He held fast to the iron grating of the rail. The doctor had told him to be careful about the rail, very careful, and to not go out on the terrace if alone. He had nodded agreement and said yes to the doctor´s words. He was good at saying yes to what people wanted and doing the opposite later. His parents had not wanted him to leave the village. His grandmother had cried and cried and taken hold of his sweater sleeve earlier that day when the family had helped him load his things into the doctor´s jeep. “Don´t leave us. Come back to us. Stay,” she pleaded. He said he would come back, but he knew he could not. He could not stay there in the land of scarecrows. That´s what he called the people of the town. The doctor had asked him why and he hadn´t been able to explain. It had bothered him that he could not. In the end he told the doctor it wasn´t the word itself but the feeling of the word. “They are so full of fear all the time, always worried someone will forget to put away a rake and they will trip over it. I´m so tired of this fear always everywhere under everything like an underground river they all pretend is not there. I can´t take it any more.” When he had told the doctor these words, he had not known they would be the words to free him from that world, but it was that same day the doctor began working to help him begin a new life in the city, the life he was now about to begin. And standing there where he was, at the rail, he was in the very center, in the throbbing heart of what the people from his village feared most. He could feel the storm rampaging all around him huge and terrifying and magnificent. He didn´t remember ever feeling anything more beautiful or frightening. It was like the world was being born all over again.

He was an old man. His arms were long and thin and trembled a lot—especially if he didn't get his morning tea, which seemed to those who knew him to be the main reason he went on living, just so he could have another morning's tea. He loved tea the way some men loved hunting or beautiful women. He'd had enough of both and would tell anybody so. “Forget your dead carcass or that beautiful girl spread across a bed, give me a cup of tea instead any day of the week. Or EVERY day. Yes, yes, much rather have it every day, if you don't mind.” That was what he would say to people and laugh and laugh at how shocked they looked. He liked making his tea drinking seem a bit risqué. Or naughty. Himself, he preferred that word risqué, but a lot of the other old people who lived in his building didn't know what the word meant. They seemed to think he was asking them if they wanted to play the game “risk,” which he most certainly did not! For some reason the game was hugely popular and always there were all these old people, many of them much older than he was, playing it and trying to take over the world. He didn't want to take over the world, thank you very much. All he wanted was his tea. He had been in a real war a long ago against someone who wanted to take over the world. That had been no game for him. All his friends getting blown up here and blown up there. Many coming home without some part of them. An arm or a leg. Or maybe some part of their brain. He had been lucky and he knew it. Every time he drank his tea, he would not forget his friends who hadn't been as lucky. He would hoist a freshly steeped cup toward the heavens and say, “Here's to you, boys!” Recently when was doing so, his long thin arm had trembled more than it should have and sent the tea cup loose from his grip, launched it skyward just enough to land on the gassy lady who lived next door to him and who it seemed was always trying to get close enough to him at breakfast time on the deck to sit in his lap. He got into a bit of trouble for the incident. The nurse who tended after his neighbor threatened to revoke his tea privileges. As if it were possible to do such a thing! Here he was a decorated soldier, a hero if it needed to be known with a medal of honor and they were going to take away his God given right to his morning tea? Well, not if he had any say in the matter. You could take away the dead carcass from him and the girl on the bed, but you better watch yourself if you come anywhere the least little bit near his tea cup. And that's exactly what he told the nurse. She had just sighed, rolled her eyes, and returned to cleaning up the mess on her patient from the spilled tea. He had laughed quietly to himself, proud of his little victory. He didn't get many anymore, but they were sure fun when they happened.

She was a happy child. But she was also full of beans and enjoyed pulling jokes on her friends when they were outside playing games in the street or drawing chalk monsters on the sidewalk. Her mother told her to be nice and not to clown around and laugh in church, but she couldn´t help herself. She saw funny things everywhere she went and was always whispering about them to one of her many girlfriends and making them also crack up with laughter. She had never thought her humor special, but always it seemed she was the one who did the best silly imitations of the teachers or whatever authority figure might have visited their classroom recently. Last week it was a fat policeman and during the lunch break she pretended to be him eating ten donuts at once and then trying to kiss his wife, but not being able to because of his big stomach. She put a cushion from the lunch room under her school uniform for the stomach and made her best friend, Karen, be the wife. Everyone laughed and laughed from where they sat watching on top of the monkey bars. Nobody expected she would miss her step when she stood up after her bow to the audience. They also didn't expect her to fall backward and smack her head on the pavement. They were still laughing at how silly the fake fat belly cushion looked coming out of her uniform. They didn't know at first she was in trouble. It was a nice sunny day. The smell of freshly cooked hotdogs from lunch still hung in the air and the trees overhead were newly green with spring leaves. And all the children were pointing at her and laughing. It was a moment that seemed to last a lot longer than most moments do or should ever last—because what they expected to happen next was not happening. After pretending to fall like that, she should have been bounding up and dancing around like a clown. She was the funniest kid, why wasn´t she jumping up? The ambulance came within twenty minutes, but many of the children later told their parents it took several hours to arrive. It had seemed like that to them. Each of those minutes with her there on the ground with her eyes shut had been an eternity. And an impossibility. This kind of thing simply did not happen. Her best friend and temporary wife rode with her to the hospital in the back of the ambulance. When she woke up, her wife told her everyone was praying for her. She asked why and said that she didn´t owe any of them any money. Then she smiled and giggled at her own joke and her friend did, too. After that she closed her eyes and never opened them again. Her friend and wife kept the fake belly cushion even though it was school property. She knew her friend would laugh at her for being so sentimental. But she didn't care. Some things were worth doing--even if it meant being laughed at.

She wore a fireman´s raincoat. She liked the way it felt, that was all. And that was all it took. Soon everyone was wearing them. Now everywhere you go, that´s what women wear. She was like that with things. When she first moved in above the torpedo factory, only rats, bats, and opossums lived there. Next thing you knew, all the young darlings with perfect hair, neon white teeth, and triple platinum credit cards were her neighbors up there. And it happened like that. Almost overnight. Others liked taking the spotlight for her discoveries and often got their faces in the newspaper for this reason. But their fame didn´t last. It couldn´t. She knew this. It´s why she never got upset about such things and just kept moving on to whatever next captured her fancy. Today it was George. He worked the late shift at the coffee place behind the rodeo bar. He´d been awake for two days straight when she walked in wearing her fireman´s raincoat. She knew she liked him straight away, even before he spoke. It was something about his face, the way his eyes moved. There was a lot more going on inside him than most people. She was sure of this. Before he even had a chance to ask what she wanted to order, she asked why he wasn´t sleeping. He was taken aback, but not too much. Not more or less than she´d expected. He was good at the game, just as she´d hoped. He kept his nonchalance. In fact, instead of answering or asking what she wanted, he told her. And he was right all the way down to the sprinkles on top of the frozen half mocha with a raw egg inside. She wasn´t used to people playing at her level and so graced him with a brief, coy smile, and said simply “Yes.” Not much on the surface of that word, but within it were also the keys to her flat and a thousand unexpected longings of finally finding someone who did not in some way want to be who she already was. She sat in the back in the shadows where her face would not be seen. There was a bit too much of a following of her in this area of town. Lately she´d almost considered adding the accoutrement of a veil to her look. Just to get some distance. But she knew this, too, would backfire, drawing even more attention—at least at first, until it caught on and everyone and their dog were also wearing veils. But with him she didn´t want a veil. She wanted open access. Something raw and new and brave. It had been too long since she´d let herself feel the deep slices of intimacy you could only get when you had something big to lose. She watched him walking through the tables toward her. She liked it how he wasn´t and wouldn´t look at her. He´d understood her “yes” and was giving it back to her with his well crafted indifference. She would be his completely if he set her tray down and walked away without a word. How could he know her so well when nobody else did? She wasn´t even sure she knew herself as well as he seemed to and yet they´d not even met. The tray with her drink was placed on the table. He bowed his head ever so slightly, turned and departed. Her heart stopped.

On his wall he has a tote bag from Saviorland. It´s one of the first things he shows to people who visit. He took his girlfriend there last fall. She had not seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. It may have been part of why they were no longer seeing each other. He wasn´t sure. He did not understand why she had wanted to leave the Biblical theme park so soon. It made no sense to journey all those thousands of miles to be there at the replica of where Jesus first broke bread with the Apostles and then suddenly want to go back home. He had looked into her eyes searching for an answer. She was usually a very logical and loyal person who made sense in all her decisions. But not now. Now her arms were crossed and she kept turning away from him. Now all he could see were her shoulder blades. He liked seeing her shoulder blades. He had to admit this. He had never yet touched them, but he knew it would be nice to feel their round curves. He felt strange thinking about these curvings of her bones in the way that he was while being under the curious eyes of the big plastic Jesus hunched over on the mound surrounded by the gang of life-sized apostles. He thought maybe he should take her somewhere else a little more private so they could talk. But she said no, she didn´t want to talk. She wanted to leave. It troubled him she was speaking so loudly, almost yelling. There was no reason for her to be acting this way. Other visitors were starting to look over at them instead of being enthralled by the magnificent spectacles of the park. He began to worry that if she kept shouting one of the Saviorland officials might come over to escort them out through the beautiful pearly gates. He didn´t understand what he had done wrong. Only a few moments earlier everything was so perfect, so ideal. They were walking around harmoniously through the simulated Holyland with him almost ready to hold her hand—he hadn´t ever dared yet, but was just about to when out of the blue she grew so distant and cold and said she didn´t understand why they had come here in the first place. He hadn´t known what to say. What do you possibly say to such a thing? He felt dazed inside. It was as if Jesus had waved to him from the side of the road and, when he stopped the car and rolled down his window to say hello, Jesus had pulled out a gun and asked him for his wallet. It was impossible. And yet it had happened. He doesn´t remember much of t he Saviorland trip after that. It is a blur. He has the bag on the wall not so much to remind him of what did happen so much as what he wanted to happen. He doesn´t completely blame Jesus for things turning out wrong, but he does think Jesus could have given him some sign of what to do to make things go better and less violently. He didn´t think his girlfriend needed to break off the arm of John the Baptist and swing it at the guard. That hadn´t been necessary. None of it had. He knew he was partly to blame for saying the things he did about the coldness of his girlfriend and her family (especially her mother!), but he was upset. And saying the thing about her being like Mary Magdalen before the conversion may have only escalated the tension. But what was he supposed to say? She´d said he dragged her screaming and kicking to Saviorland and had lied about what was there, which... well, to be honest, was partially true. He had maybe made the place sound a bit more like Disneyland than it actually was, but he´d wanted her to go and knew once she was there she would be mesmerised. There was no screaming, no kicking. At least not until he pushed her a little—purely by accident—after she´d said he was an uptight church freak. And Jesus wasn´t helping—just standing there like a dummy while things got worse and worse. But he really didn´t like to think about all of it and how he would never be able to return to Saviorland because of the police involvement toward the end. He wanted to stay positive. Optimistic. At least the Saviorland bag was a nice color and matched his couch. That was one good thing. He always liked to see the good in things no matter what happened.