A Pocket Is No Place

... a pocket is no place, for a smile anyways...

Blues Traveler: The Mountains Win Again - Bobby Sheehan, songwriter

Survivors

Cat Rambo asks a fun question: What are your survivors?

Those books that have lived through all the moves. Apartment to apartment to college to apartment to... wherever you call home now.

I've lost and found many books over the years, but here's a picture of my survivors, the ones that have made it wherever I have:

Shakespeare, Zelazny, Kurtz, Bradbury, Lee, McKiernan, and the coverless on the end is Magician's Gambit by David Eddings. The Shakespeare's binding has made it almost impossible to read, the others you can feel the paper dry and crumbly under your fingers.

Sunrise On The Bricks by M. K. Dreysen

The nights are getting longer now; soon, fall will vanish into the next rotation.

I ask you, dear reader, to stay with me a little longer, here in the fall country. Where the monsters dwell.

Lucas Little is about to meet one. Or is it two?

Either way, first let's look to where Lucas finds himself, kneeling before the...

Sunrise On The Bricks by M. K. Dreysen

And the rumble of jets coming in overhead. They're headed in for wheels down and the ding and rattle of a plane full of cell phones reconnecting to the world.

While Lucas Little falls to his knees in the building shadow and vomits up three days worth of bile.

"Momma, what's that man doing?" he hears. From somewhere in the sunlight, Lucas hopes.

"You don't worry about that man," Momma tells the kid. And then Lucas hears only the traffic, and the rumbling in his gut. Threatening to throw out what's left. If there is anything to throw out and up.

****

When Lucas Little planned himself, he did it in pieces. Sanskrit "hope" on the back of his left elbow. Hebrew "heart" on the back of the left calf. Ra on the right and the winged serpent around his belly. Ink for these calls to a world forgotten.

Burns, brands, tracing alpha and omega on the inner right forearm. Lucas didn't know why he'd reserved that. Maybe he'd wanted to join a fraternity. Maybe he'd just enjoyed the way the ink looked, and then the way his own skin illustrated itself.

Blisters in brown and brown, shades of life. The way the scars felt under his fingers, when the blisters had set. Not like the tattoos, hell he'd never really have known they were there except for mirrors. The tattoos had no texture. But the brand, it called old nightmares and new into something that rested roped between his fingers if he pulled the skin just right.

The car had shown up last week. Just sitting there one afternoon; Lucas had had the morning part run. Figured he'd treat himself, so he stopped and actually sat at Rita's for a good lunch. One that didn't taste of grease and grit.

The Jag, XJ12, late series III... echoes of the TV show, Lucas couldn't remember the name of it but Denzel had done the movie later. Either way, Lucas grinned. The car wasn't black, instead that deep blue four doors and a rumble ready to fire up looking pretty damned good sitting in front of the shop.

"Who left their pride and joy for us to play with?" Lucas asked the shop.

Well, Gary. White kid from Pasadena, barely knew his elbow from a socket wrench when he started but Gary showed up early and stayed late. Lucas had hopes for Gary.

"Keys were in the slot this morning, with a note." Gary searched around the counter, held the note out when he found it.

Lucas took it, read the cursive request for help with Tara Washington's pride and joy. Lucas walked over to the window, to gauge the car against the writing.

Clean writing, old fashioned. But Lucas felt something strange about it. Almost like the note had come from a laser printer, a modern fake of the real thing. Lucas held the paper up to the light, wondering where the watermark hid.

When he found it, Lucas folded the note and walked back to the counter. "Why's it still sitting at the curb, then?"

Gary, grinning, held out the key. "You'll see."

Lucas took the key; he chalked the way his stomach dropped, and took a little of his balance and light with it, to Gary's grin. That had to be it, he told himself, nothing funny there just a V12 that didn't want to cooperate. And a joke at the old man's expense.

Either way, Lucas reminded himself, he still had to get the car off the street. Lucas had worked his tail off, building an old grocery warehouse one lift at a time into something. Leaving the old odd beauties to the street wouldn't do at all.

All the cars came in behind the brick and the metal doors because he had room for them. And because Lucas didn't want the neighbors, the ones with too much time and too big eyes, too interested in his something.

Lucas opened the big heavy door of the Jag, climbed into leather like a tomb's embrace, and wondered at his reaction. At the car's reaction, like it welcomed him to six foot under and a face full of dirt.

'Oh come on, fool. It's a sedan, not a hearse.' Lucas stared at the key, put it in and turned it over, and listened to the heavy chug of cylinders getting no spark at all. 'Shit.'

Lucas spent half an hour under the hood, fiddling with wires and the throttle body, before he convinced half the twelve cylinders to do as the Jaguar engineers had drawn it up and fire. And then he limped the big blue machine through the garage door and to an open work bay in the back of the garage.

Then, satisfied he'd at least taken casual vandalism out of the picture, Lucas hung the keys on the peg board and returned to the rest of his morning's work, getting his ancient Volkswagen half-truck unloaded. And fighting off the way his mind wanted to convince him he'd just stepped out of his own casket.

"What'd they load you down with this time?" Gary asked when Lucas dragged him out to shift boxes.

"Bunch of damned emergency kits. Flares, jumper cables."

"Everyone gets a free roadside kit for a while?"

Lucas snorted. Some hotshot had loaded the parts house up with freebies; every garage owner in Houston would be handing out emergency kits for a while. Lucas wouldn't have minded so much, except for all the unloading they meant just to get down to the XJ40 brake rotors and BMW 700 exhaust manifold that had caused the parts run in the first place.

When they'd shifted all the little red cases into a pile in the office, Lucas, Gary, and Pedro, Lucas's quiet second, spent the rest of the afternoon getting the rotors and the manifold where they needed to be.

Lucas figured he'd end up forgetting about the new addition, the blue beast slumbering in the back bay. Sure, he'd see the keys the next morning, on the peg board, but this afternoon he and Pedro had the parts and the work, and Gary to teach brakes to.

The big blue XJ should have hidden in the late winter shadows. Except somehow the sedan's weight lingered, in the air. Rolled out, an almost memory tugging at the back of Lucas's head.

Every time he walked past it. Lucas remembered the feel of the car, how the front seat, the leather itself had somehow adjusted to his body. How quiet it had been, how the leather had wrapped him in luxury, then called him down. Held him, in place, waiting for the first shovel full of dirt that would always come.

It didn't help that, once Pedro closed the big doors against the wind, what sun infiltrated the big open garage came in only from the high second story windows. The harsh interior lights when they came on helped the mechanics find the parts when they hit the floor. But they held precious little comfort.

After Gary and Pedro clocked out, Lucas found himself fighting the feeling that the car waited for him. All the way from the big panel where he threw the switches on the garage lights, while he closed the door between office and tool-pulling world. As he made ready to escape to the house.

Sunset had gone already, just before six and the light had found another part of the world to be in when Tara Washington made her appearance.

Lucas fought off an urge to get up and howl. And the grin, she'd have misread it, Lucas wanted to grin because he'd have had to scoop Gary off the floor. Even Pedro would have found reason to wander into the office.

Tara Washington brought that kind of feeling with her. She moved in a dancer's strut, the world tilted so that Lucas could do nothing but focus on the woman walking through the door.

"Miss Washington?"

She nodded. "I hope you can fix my baby, Mister?"

"Lucas, I mean Little. Hell," and he reached hands smelling of GoJo but with the grease remnants forever embedded in the lines of palm and knuckles, "I'm Lucas Little."

She shook his hand, and Lucas felt his stomach drop again. And not in the good way, not at all how a smiling hot lady holding his hand should have made Lucas Little feel.

More like the way he'd fuzzed out, when Gary had first handed him the keys to her car this afternoon. 'That's where that came from,' Lucas told himself.

And he had no question at all that Tara generated that feeling. Had passed it on, to car and key, and then to Lucas himself.

Lucas passed that thought from his mind. 'Focus, Dub,' he told himself.

"It's been giving me trouble for a few weeks now," Tara was saying.

'Weeks, months,' Lucas translated in his head, the mechanic's habit. "I had to work with it a bit to get it started and into the garage," Lucas answered. "How often has it stalled on you?"

"That's the first time it's completely failed, Mister Little."

Lucas had plenty of practice keeping his face straight. Older cars of the type Lucas specialized in, especially for the owners who'd found their way to him on three cylinders and a prayer, those folks knew what they'd got themselves into. They didn't often feel the need to lie about the expense and the trouble.

Owning an antique European car for any longer than a minute had, in Lucas's experience, a way of stripping away the illusions.

Folks with the newer cars, on the other hand, or those who'd only recently taken custody of their problem children... twenty years in business and Lucas had become just as well familiar with folks looking mostly for some kind of deal over their brand dealer's prices.

"Call me Lucas, please, Miss Washington." Give her a little comfort, Lucas told himself. Because it was all about to get very expensive.

****

"Why you want to do that to yourself, Dub?" Denetta had asked him once.

'Why you want to tie yourself to something out of your reach?' That's the way his sister's words had sounded to Lucas. Like she'd come down out of her clouds and her books, just to find her little brother covered in ink and self-inflicted injury.

To go along with the grease, and the way his palms had gone calloused and smooth from the work.

To himself, the tattoos connected to a piece, a part of himself that spent nights and weekends reaching for something Lucas could never quite explain, even to himself. To Denetta, well. "Maybe you just go on and worry about yourself, 'netta," he'd responded, to her question and his own.

Not that Denetta had ever really taken the hint. But she had at least stopped asking about the tattoos.

The rest of his life, on the other hand, Denetta kind of had to ask about. She did the books on Lucas's garage.

And carried around all the big sister stuff. The big sister who went to college, the big sister who went all the way and got her CPA.

Momma passed and big sister wanted to keep her promise to Momma that little knuckleheaded brother wouldn't bankrupt himself because he'd been using his tax account to pay for parts. Or vacations or a girl or...

Lucas let all that pass one ear and keep on running to wherever nonsense went. Lucas had made himself into probably the best Jaguar and BMW mechanic in the area, and certainly the only black garage owner that worked on the finicky beasts. That he knew of, but it's not like there was a directory or anything.

He had to fight every year to make Denetta teach him what she did, instead of just doing the work and handing him a paper to sign. So Lucas also had to put up with her questions, well meant yeah but just a little too close to prying at him.

The second day, the second morning Lucas woke up parched, drawn, and waiting for the monster that had found him to return, Lucas stumbled out of his little house, to the half truck, and then down the road to his big sister's place.

He never knew whether the old Volkswagen drove him, or whether it happened the other way around. Blood loss had caught up with him.

Lucas woke up again to find himself sitting in Denetta's driveway. No memory of how, or why he'd come. "She's not even home, fool. Tax season. 'netta's off at work, earning the big bucks."

A whisper came then, of energy and sounds, up from and through his tattoos and the brand and then to his mind. "You should be at home, Lucas." And so he should.

Lucas drove back home, fresher somehow but still drained. He climbed the stairs to his room, energy barely enough to ignore the uncased emergency kit, the one he'd brought home to dig through because that sales hotshot had had the balls to put a little sign that said "Advertise your garage here!" on the case.

Lucas sat on the bed, head in his hands. Waiting.

****

She'd come into the house, invited that first night, because... when he'd presented her with the keys that night, Friday just after the sun went to sleep. Just after Lucas had sent Gary and Pedro off for the long weekend, Miss Washington that's when she came through the door again.

"I got your message. She's back, you fixed her, right?"

Lucas held up the keys. "You're all set, Miss Washington."

The blue beast sat in the ready line, waiting for Lucas to raise the rolling metal and free the car to the road. Lucas walked his client down the big yellow line painted on the concrete, the only space in the garage proper the insurance company allowed for showing the paying customers the state of their babies.

Tara Washington walked around the big Jag, hand gliding just over the metal and the glass.

'Like she's communing with it,' Lucas told himself. And then he fought off a shudder coming with a static buzz on the back of his neck.

The car answered its owner's unspoken questions.

"Do me a favor?" Washington asked.

"What's that?"

"Ride with me, just for a while. I know you've done good work, but..."

"It is Friday night, and you don't want to call a tow truck if we missed something? I can do that." Lucas would have loved to have blown her off, told the lady that he'd driven the car, no way would she be spending her evening in the breakdown lane waiting and cursing his name.

Only, he'd had to work up his own courage just to fire the car up. And then drive it around the block. Under the hood, that much had been just right as rain. Chasing spark plug wires, throttle and injectors, the mechanicals of the beast whispered to Lucas in the song of gasoline and oil, spark and air.

Sitting in that seat, on the other hand...

Lucas waited for Miss Washington to pull the Jag out of the garage, then he closed the bay door and locked up the office. He knew he was playing for time, dragging out the moment.

Until he opened the passenger door and sank down, half into memory of a box on his and five other shoulders, half through a projection of a pine board over his face and the murmur and tears of his mourners echoing in the darkness.

"Do you ever get tired of that feeling?" Washington asked him, as she pulled away from the curb. "Doesn't it feel like you've come home at last?"

The question burned in Lucas's mind. Tugged the idea of death right up to the front where he didn't want it to be. "What do you mean?" Lucas managed to answer.

"You spend all day with these cars, don't you?" she continued, as if she'd of course never meant anything at all by the other question.

'But she really did mean that other feeling, didn't she?' Lucas thought. He rode in silence for a time, letting the lights roll across him as Miss Washington made her way to the freeway.

"We spend most of our time under the hood, Miss Washington," he finally answered. "We want you to be the one to enjoy the driving part. That's why we're here."

She laughed, a sound that thrilled him and scratched a burning needle across his eardrums at the same time. "Oh, come on now, like you don't jump in and take off down the highway once in a while?." But then Miss Washington buried the throttle pedal, drowning whatever thought and answer Lucas might have had in the roar of the Jag's engine.

Later, after, when his mind answered his own questions again, Lucas figured that that particular moment was, probably, the one.

Thrown back in the leather, back into the embrace of the car that his mind insisted felt like a hearse, his tattoos burned fierce and hot under the scrutiny of Tara Washington and the blue sedan that did her bidding.

In that endless moment, the one that extended miles down the interstate toward the coast, then back around through traffic lights and back road turns, to the garage where Lucas climbed back into his half truck and headed for the house, shaking his head at himself, and then all the way home... throughout that long instant, in that forever, Lucas figured he had it all under control.

Check in hand and just a memory of a blue XJ with bad plugs, some salesperson's free shit riding in his other arm and up to the house to get a pizza in the oven and the Rockets on the screen, yeah baby Mister Little is in a good way, man.

And it all went away when those round headlights burned their way into Lucas Little's driveway.

****

Sunday morning, the third day, Lucas rose from an empty bed with the first hint of daylight.

Unlike the day before, he didn't feel hungover. He felt light. Not rejuvenated. Just, weightless.

If he'd had more of his memory under his own access at that moment, he'd have put the feeling with what he'd learned of fasting. When he'd been the younger Lucas, and working on the part of himself that the tattoos and the brand connected to.

That Lucas slept; she'd taken him away. A fingernail had traced the hope on his arm.

A claw had replaced the nail. But that memory drifted away as lightly as a summer breeze.

Lucas stood up from the bed, put on jeans, a t-shirt. Work boots. Threw on a long-sleeved denim shirt.

He kept a coat in the Volkswagen, buried in with the rest of the tools and accumulation in the passenger seat. Lucas kept as well an open mind, free of thought, absent of intention, while he pulled keys and wallet and headed out for the jacket.

And then eased himself into the Jag's driver seat. He'd lied, just a little, to Miss Washington. About whether a mechanic ever took a client's car out on the road and opened it up.

The car didn't mind that at all. Sunday morning, early, when the only traffic came from grandpa's out to get donuts and a newspaper, Sundays made good driving weather.

Lucas tried to crack the window, to let just a little cold air onto his face, the back of his neck. But the arm wouldn't turn. The car didn't mind the drive, he told himself. 'Elsewise, keep your hands to yourself,' Lucas thought.

The miles drifted by in the soft rumble from the front end and daylight coming on from the back, the sun chased Lucas and the Jag all the way to the garage.

Lucas felt in the pocket of his jacket, pressed the button that told the garage door to open. Drove into the working space and thumbed the button again to send the door back down. 'Just a few errands, that's all. A little Sunday morning work so Monday can start off right.'

He held that thought, magic, talisman, strength. While he turned the Jag off. Pulled the keys. Climbed out of the leather and the grasp of death, never so very far away even while he strode over to the plasma cutter.

Daylight streamed in through the windows high, way up at the roof line. Late winter, this early, the light pooled just into a ribbon, down the back wall and out a little ways onto the concrete floor.

Where Lucas had pulled the Jag to. Next to the corner where he stored the cutter and the torches.

He made sure the cutter's box hummed, that the leads weren't tangled up, before he pulled himself to the back of the Jag.

And set the key in the trunk latch. 'Boot,' a part of himself translated.

The part of himself that smiled at the way things worked out.

She'd become... no. She'd dropped the illusion. In the gesture. There in his kitchen, standing in moon light, she'd traced the Sanskrit word on his arm with a fingernail.

His skin, that tattoo and the other ones, lit up the vaults of Lucas Little's mind in response to the nail. And when the nail became a claw, a horned and twisted talon burying itself in the flesh of his neck, Tara Washington disappeared.

Leaving a grey twisted ancient being where she had stood. "You prepared yourself," that being whispered to Lucas.

He had to listen to it. The talon held him. And so did the being, the vampire's mind. With its eyes, and with the burning light of its voice within Lucas's mind.

"But you prepared yourself for a day that will never come," it told him.

And then it dragged him, by no more effort than the tip of a nail and the whisper of a thought, into the teeth of its maw.

That night, and the night after, Lucas had fought. That's what he told himself.

Only, his own arms and legs had betrayed him. He tried to command them, but while the vampire held sway, when it set its double jointed knee on his chest and bore down to feed, Lucas's arms and legs ignored his shrieking panicked mind.

And only flared burning pain in the shape of words and images he'd put there.

Door closed, the car's influence couldn't reach him. Lucas remembered that, that he'd worked on the car, the mechanicals of it, without that death feeling coming into his mind.

So it was his own fear that weighed on each step as Lucas made his way to the Jag's trunk. Heavy gloves and dark goggles, key in one hand and the plasma cutter in the other. Three steps and a little work and he'd open the door to the only place she, it, the ancient thing that had held and fed on him, it had to be in the trunk.

And the only thing preventing Lucas from opening the trunk and doing what needed doing was his own fear.

'The car will come into it,' his mind whispered. 'That's really why she was worried. The car protects her during the day.'

Flashes of old memories, sitting with 'netta at two in the morning while Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing chased each other around whichever Hammer Films set had been tuned up for the creature feature that week.

'And she'll react to the light and the cutter,' his mind added in response to the memory.

Lucas had risen from his bed, and made the drive to the garage, absent of intention. So that the car wouldn't react.

And so his own fears wouldn't drown him. Lucas twisted the key and opened the trunk.

He had to fight the weight, almost forty years and the springs had just about given up whatever lifting help they'd started out with. There, across the black carpet and hiding in the deepest shadows, nestled a wooden box.

Not quite a true coffin, but close enough for Lucas's mind. The car seized on the intrusion, then, and forced that memory-projection, its only defense, into Lucas's head.

Death. The long walk from the hearse to the pit, surrounded by fresh-turned earth and astro-turf to hide it and a handful of mourners keening to the skies and Whoever would listen.

Lucas fell, half into the trunk. His belly caught before he collapsed to his knees. He gasped against the coffin lid closing in his face, yanked on the plasma cutter's lead, pulled for his life.

The rubber of the lead caught hard against the metal of the trunk deck, for an instant. Long enough for the thud of dirt against the pine box lid to echo in Lucas's ears.

And then the lead came free.

Lucas closed his eyes and twisted the cutter's grip until the crackle in his ears drowned out the car's intrusion into his mind. Then he clapped the goggles down over his eyes.

And turned the plasma on the box, and the terrible ancient being sleeping within.

****

Lucas Little knelt in front of the old grocery depot that he'd used twenty years of overtime, sweat, tears... and burns to turn into something. A piece of himself.

He knelt there on the sidewalk, in front of God and everybody, and then Lucas vomited up three days worth of bile and terror.

He emptied himself of that fear, and probably a little of the exhilaration that coursed in to replace it, until he heard the little kid ask his momma, "What's that man doing?"

Lucas smiled, wiping his face, as the lady sped up her Sunday walk home from church, kid's hand grasped just a little tighter in her protective grip.

He'd need to make up a lie about doing body work and getting caught by fumes from the filler. For sure, he wouldn't be telling the neighborhood church ladies how Lucas had really spent his Sunday morning.

The vampire had carried no illusion around itself, there in its box. When Lucas reached out with fire and anger, the wood had parted from the plasma as if grateful. As if ready at last to betray its dread master.

And behind it lay the true beast, gray, wrinkled, human only by suggestion. And yeah, just like those old Hammer films, the vampire twisted itself away from the light of sun and plasma.

But Lucas could, and did, chase it with the plasma. And it did not truly awake, even under this final threat.

He reached in, grasped the arms against this reflex action, and torched the vampire back to whatever hell had spawned it.

With every pass of the torch, the car's intrusion on Lucas's mind faded a little more. And the tattoos and brand ceased to burn, closed and became no more a path into Lucas's mind.

Lucas let the memory and the fear fade away. Then, he pressed himself to his feet and stumbled back into the garage, to turn the cutter on the car itself.

Though, he almost didn't have to bother. Like every old car owner's worst nightmare, the Jag rusted itself to decay faster than Lucas could chase it with the plasma. By the time dark found him, passed out on the old futon he kept in his tiny little office space, decay and his torch had rendered the Jag into a pile of unrecognizable parts.

With a black smear of oil and gasoline, and maybe something else, spreading out across the concrete floor. As though something in the old car had tried, with one last fruitless effort, to run away from the torch and the sunlight.

Highly Functional Forms by M. K. Dreysen

Go away and come back home. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Until you can't. Home has its ways. You know them, don't you? All those little things.

Talisa Denove knows them well. She understands how the Field operates; it's where she grew up. Once upon a time. Only, the Field let one of their own get away with murder. And Talisa's the only one with the sack to do something about it.

For this week's story, dear reader, I invite you to contemplate what and how you'd tackle trouble in the family. And, if you had to, just what you'd do to pry apart those...

Highly Functional Forms by M. K. Dreysen

Talisa Denove rotated the solar system and its rocks around her.

She liked it that way. Rotate the universe, rotate the ship, it all came to the same thing. The algebra and the view of it, such a magic combination. Star map interrupted by window bracing.

And whichever way the coordinate system twisted, there came Ward Theriot's rock into view. Dead center of the window. She'd pass underneath, a gentle arc of semi-orbit some thousand kilometers in radius away from Theriot's stake.

Just another piece of what might have been. That's all her ship would be to Theriot's sensors. At this distance, Talisa reminded herself. Don't go, girl.

Don't go any closer. She checked her engine systems, all good.

And then Talisa double checked the tight-focus radar beam she allowed to query her arc. What good would it do her, all tucked in nice and tight and quiet in this here surveillance pass, and then fire the engines and give herself away because she'd gone and missed a piece of rock dancing into her way?

There were no such pieces of rock. Talisa patted herself on the back, well ok she smiled and considered it the same, for measuring twice and only having to cut the once.

The mouths and the wanna-be's would be sitting at the bar, telling themselves and anyone who'd listen, especially the cheapjack novel writer with a penchant for stretching, that a real hunter would be lighting onto Theriot's rock, suiting up and blasting him where he lived. Laser cut the doors off, vent that sucker's habitat and take him in fire and ice and the stars to witness.

In Talisa's experience, the mouths had never pulled the job anywhere without gravity. And the wanna-be's had never pulled a job. Theriot, just like any other miner, had armored pressure suits and armed and armored habitats.

Had to. Micro-rubble at kilometers per second walked the walk in the field. That's why the armor on the suits. And the bigger rubble pieces explained the cannons and the rockets. Theriot's little piece of heaven carried plenty of firepower to sweep the volume free of anything big and nasty.

Both his own and random bits floating free. Requirement of his claim. The miners all carried an obligation, if they wanted their millions, to protect anyone and everyone from their activity.

Ward Theriot hadn't kept up with his end of the agreement. A hundred tons of his rock had come free and found its way to traffic.

Three hundred and twenty-nine souls, outbound from Bangalore, Earth to their sister city of Bangalore, Mars, had come out on the bad end of Theriot's hundred tons of rock.

The Worlds Union's TSA investigation had quickly nailed Ward's little operation as the source of the rock bundle that destroyed the Indian transport. Radar, and the ballistics equations weren't in any danger of being jawboned away.

Only, the Worlds Union didn't have a proper enforcement arm. Not yet, too few centuries into the experiment, and the planetary signatories yet too mistrusting of each other.

So the asteroid field continued its ancient tradition: hiding away trouble. Ward Theriot had lost a little property, here and there, on Mars and Luna mostly.

And formally, his claim had come under "review". Enjoined from selling material. Supposedly, and Talisa snorted at that one. Because the ballistics might not lie, but not even the best chemist could determine the difference between Ward Theriot's asteroid and a handful of the others.

And no one paid a chemist to do that level of investigation, anyway. Too many other questions to answer ahead of tracking assholes.

A lot of horse trading went into hiding rock sources. Another of the asteroid field's ancient traditions. Because your neighbor's trouble might find her in a similar boat someday. And she too would like to keep the lights on and the life support running when the time came.

Talisa remembered it well. Her momma'd had her reasons for bringing three kids into the field, taking over an old claim and making a go of it.

A dead body leaking blood into the Luna apartment's air return being real high up on that list. Talisa and her brothers didn't ask about their father. They didn't have to.

Talisa knew the way the asteroid field worked. She and her family had benefited from that world.

And here she was, come home at last. But hunting was different. The flip side of the coin.

The field folks protected you like they would themselves. Up to a certain point. If someone had the brass to come out here and get you, well. Especially if, like Ward Theriot, all you'd ever done was manage to piss everyone else right off. From day one.

"Biggest asshole this side of a house full of representatives," Cherry O'Brien had said to Talisa. "Jackass can't stir himself out to help you replace an engine or change out an air handler. Only reason anyone's sticking up for the big sonofabitch is because they want the same consideration..."

"When it's their turn," Talisa supplied.

"Yes ma'am. And your turn will come too, little miss, you know it. You grew up here. Your momma sat your brothers right here in this habitat while you and she went to check out your claim that first trip, remember?"

Talisa had smiled, smiled now at the memory. She'd spent the whole way out from Luna, thirteen years old and just a little too fast with the calculator, estimating what a hundred tons of gold recovered would look like in a bank account.

Couple million of iron, call it half that each of aluminum, titanium, chromium. And a real assay, one that had been done after the original claimant had already made his way back to gravity and a beach in the sun. Someplace, old Dick Campbell had told Momma, where the money went a long way, and he didn't have to screw around with measuring his air supply and counting water droplets for fun.

So the ore concentrations were real. It all came down to working the smelters properly.

Raw rock didn't do anyone any good at all. Momma knew that. You deliver ore you get cheap-shit prices. Deliver real metal, on the other hand, and you've got yourself a going concern.

One nobody was going to take away from you. But Talisa'd learned the different between gross and net receipts, there in the field, along with the way a stranger, a new in town, could good and proper make friends and relations in the field.

Chemistry and finances. Momma'd been a scientist who'd gone on to an MBA. She'd made folks like Cherry O'Brien enough more money that she'd become family fast and easy.

And, Momma'd been the one who'd figured out that laser sintered bricks made from the tailings could also make the miners money. Material already in orbit having a certain advantage.

Especially where someone wanted to contact the brickmakers for custom jobs. Either way and half the solar system, it seemed, had a brick or twelve with Momma's, and now Talisa's brothers, bricks folded into construction.

And Ward Theriot couldn't bother his happy ass to pick up a nickle a brick in extra profits. Some people ain't worth shooting, Talisa reminded herself.

Unless someone like the Bangalore Co-op puts up the money to make him worth shooting. Only, nailing an asteroid miner was harder than pulling a hermit crab loose of the shell.

Habitats proof against radiation and built to recover every erg of waste energy meant habitats proof against thermal sensors. Meaning, she couldn't just annihilate Theriot's claim, since she couldn't guarantee he was there. Besides, Theriot's cannons and rockets would make short work of any rock she might throw his way. Or Talisa and her ship, if she messed up and got too close.

A conundrum. Which required strategy, it did. Talisa pondered this as the Tailchaser passed through Theriot's neighborhood.

She didn't get very far. And the flood of network traffic coming in when the Tailchaser drifted far enough away that Talisa felt comfortable turning the electronics and transmitters back to life drowned out whatever focus Talisa had found.

Her little reconnaissance mission netted Talisa a few terabytes worth of pictures, and other completely passive EM measurements. None of which told her whether Ward Theriot was actually home.

Talisa sighed in disgust. The Worlds Union wouldn't accept Theriot's death on remote, unverified and unprovoked. She needed to winkle the man out of his hole. Capture him alive, that was best, and paid twice the bounty.

She pointed the Tailchaser at Orion's Bar. Where else?

Orion's Bar, number eight of twelve, floated above the asteroid field proper. For some value of above and Talisa smiled at that one the way she smiled at rotational algebra. Half a dozen below, half a dozen above, the bars had come along because miners throughout time and space needed a drink, companionship, a place to get someone else's cooking for once, and most of all a place to sell the metal.

Electronic communications having negated much reason at all for the place to sell, granted, but the little human touches still had it. Never more than a few days worth of travel from someone's claim.

Orion's being the closest to Theriot's place. The home place floated closer to Andromeda's Spread, so Talisa didn't have any visits home marked on the calendar.

The first time Talisa had seen some of the old drawings, what the first dirt-bound dreamers had come up with when they'd imagined the far future and spacers living there, she'd giggled. Huge structures, those folks had drawn and painted, donuts rotating within donuts, massive cylinders.

And Orion's looked like a bunch of teenagers at a drive-in movie on a summer night. If Talisa had known what that was, but the disparity between imaginings and what the Bar had accumulated itself into couldn't have been more apparent.

Orion's, and the others of the Twelve, had started out as a dozen little stations, NASA's last fully independent hurrah.

The asteroid fielders had added on, but not directly. Nobody had bothered with welding. Why? All you had to do was to park your old hulk in the general vicinity. Everyone had their own ships, anyway, right? So long as you didn't park your new addition close enough to shadow someone else's solar panels...

Something followed Talisa all the way to Orion's. A drone, she figured. Something small and light, just enough of a signature for the Tailchaser's sensors to pick it out of the noise.

Not enough to bet on the little obnoxious tail being anything larger than a remote. Theriot hadn't chased her himself, Talisa decided. No, he'd just put a bird dog on her trail.

She smiled. And sailed the Tailchaser straight and clear for the Bar.

She'd already spent six weeks scouting the field.

A little drone unit of her own let Talisa know when Theriot came out of his hole. She'd laid a chain of them. A relay team. Each with a passive sensor package.

And a tight focused laser to communicate with the next link in the relay. No sideband emissions to give them away, either. Just cameras and a few other passive devices, to pick up the wash of the rockets.

Theriot's path to the Bar tracked Talisa's almost exactly. His ship passed close enough for three of her sensor units to pick him up along the way.

She sat in Orion's Bar, the main one, three nights running until Ward Theriot made his entrance. The big man, graying, bearded, carried a belly and a soft fat look, but moved through the old-style swinging wood doors as easy and clean as a nervous rattler.

And he'd worn his inner armor layer, Talisa noted. The miners favored a multi-layer approach. The hard suit itself, and an inner layer, skin-tight, climate controlled to keep thermal levels even. Self-healing polymer gels layered with titanium-carbon weaves and thin-sheathed plates.

Talisa wore the same, with linen tunic and pants thrown over for decoration. As had Theriot, she wore her hood thrown back, one of the customs of the Bar. A face to be identified.

And, in theory, shot at. The only real vulnerability for anything another miner might carry inside a habitat.

Theriot surveyed the place, still standing at the doors. The bartender, Talisa, and close on twenty others early of an evening watched, in their fashion, the new entry to the place make his acquaintance with civilization again.

Then they all turned back to their beer and their conversations, or card games, with whatever degree of contemplation they gave the new arrival hidden as much or little as they cared to.

"Another one?" the waiter asked. The kid had made his way around the room, stacking empties and handing out refills in almost equal measure.

Talisa gauged her beer. Half full of Something Resembling A Stout, her choice for comfort food of the Bar's own make. "Yeah, one more I think."

One more would give her a chance to gauge Theriot's nerves. Not with a confrontation; Talisa pulled a roll of coins from her pocket and, when the kid set the next mug down, carried it to the pinball machine.

She wanted to know how much the target would push the limits.

Theriot ordered his drink from the bar. Something on the order of a gin and tonic, from what Talisa could see. At least, it came in that kind of glass. Then the miner made his way around the room.

Listening. Talisa nodded to herself in the pinball machine's reflection. She'd played most of the half dozen roller tables these past three days.

She'd chosen this one because the reflection showed most of the room behind her. She'd thrown a few rolls of quarters at it to learn the table's ways. Which bumpers did and didn't respond as cleanly as she'd have liked.

How twitchy the table was, if she bumped it with her hand a little too hard. Not that Talisa needed to vent any feelings. She had quarters to burn, and a good view of Theriot's walk.

The big man made his way around the room. The miners in the place talked mostly of this year's shitty ore prices.

The buyers talked of the Betelguese Broadway Revue and Whorehouse. The other types, mostly spacers, didn't have any interest in ore prices, and always had plenty of urge to find something besides a video screen to stare at, so their conversations tended to follow the ore buyers.

The faces had rotated, at least on the spacer and miner side of things, over the past three days, but Talisa had already heard enough of the general run of conversations to tune it out. Theriot seemed to have other things on his mind, as well.

"He won't come up to you while you're at the table," the waiter said.

Talisa flipped the buttons, watched her current ball fall through. "Yeah?" She figured, if the kid knew the room well enough to tell she'd been watching Theriot in the reflection, then she'd pay attention to what he had to say.

"He comes in often enough. Way we figure it, he seems to think someone who comes all this way just to play an arcade game ain't interesting enough to matter."

Talisa measured that. If he thought that way on normal business, Theriot, from Talisa's perspective, would probably have the same opinion of a pinball wizard now.

Not the kind of person Theriot had to worry about. A real hunter wouldn't be fooling around with paddles, chasing a steel ball around an incline. Talisa hummed to herself, as though she was talking to the ball.

Better than a grin. Grin at the wrong time and both the kid and Theriot might spook. No need for that, Talisa told herself.

She nursed the stout through most of the roll of quarters, and Theriot getting himself three refills on the clear and fizzy drink, before she called it a night.

Whether Theriot was trying to find her, or just hunting for an insider's view of the ore market, she'd be better off hiding somewhere along his backtrail.

Besides, she figured she owed him for the drone that had followed her to the Bar.

Which she left shadowing the Tailchaser. Which in turn had been programmed to trail Theriot when he left for his claim, just far enough behind to make the miner nervous.

Orion's, like the rest of the asteroid field's floating commercial district, always had plenty of ships for rent. Talisa had nosed it around that she might be interested in buying. Which had opened a few more possibilities than otherwise.

She let the Redhead's Lament show her what it could do; there really was only one place a miner felt safe.

Talisa's surveillance drones had also recorded the only wideband signal most miners ever used. The coded radio beacon that told his claim rock that he was coming home. The code wasn't complicated enough to matter.

And the ship's bay signal amounted to a step up from an old style garage door opener. Talisa slid into Theriot's garage, through the doors that opened to greet her, programmed the life support computer to a new setting, and drifted away into the asteroid field's cover with more than time to spare.

Theriot spent three days at the Bar. Shadowing the ore buyers, Talisa figured. Or maybe just spending the profits he couldn't use on Luna and Mars on shows and bedwarmers. Either way, Talisa got to know the Lament's berthing arrangements a great deal more intimately than she'd have preferred.

She also spent the time in her own head, fighting her conscience. She'd left the asteroid field, chasing dreams and ideas, and she'd swore to herself she'd never come back. Not for more than a holiday visit with the twins, anyway. And yet her she was.

Breaking the taboo. Or close enough, anyway. The field had sheltered her, held her too damned close Talisa had thought. A closed circle, and more than a few of that circle with secrets they'd run away from.

The little town, and Talisa grinned at little, but just more than twenty thousand souls called the field home, so what else would you call it but little? An extended family. They'd professionalized, to a certain extent, but the field crew still came at ya with a smile and a nervous look over your shoulder for what you might be bringing behind you.

Someone came hunting you, and everyone turned stone cold quiet. Mouth shut. If the hunter found you, in spite of the field doing what it could, ok fair enough. But you didn't go after your field neighbors, did you?

Talisa remembered the few times it had happened, when she was still a kid. Tracy Dickers had brought the hunt on herself when she'd threatened to nova the Tracker inside Taverna Sirius's central ore trading nexus. Zem Losha had taken and sold kids, to somewhere nobody had ever been able to nail down. Old Bald Charles had set himself up as a pirate inside the field.

Was Theriot not cleaning up his trash enough to call the hunt? It hadn't been, Talisa reminded herself.

Maybe she'd taken a little too much on her own hands; maybe she should have done more than talk to Cherry O'Brien about why she'd come home. Maybe maybe maybe.

Ward Theriot came home to his claim before Talisa could finish her wrestling match with herself. The life support trap she'd rigged set itself off. She drifted the Lament in behind Theriot's ride.

Waited for Theriot's computer to complete its new program and signal to her that it had cleared the nitrous mixture. Talisa restrained Theriot in one of the Lament's bunks, with an IV drip full of night-night juice, and made her way back to her own ship.

Still questioning, but she fought the questions through transferring Theriot to the cold sleep bay she'd installed on the Tailchaser, and then all the long way back to Luna.

The pay helped, and so did the various tracks she'd left suggesting Ward Theriot had managed to get himself blown out of his own airlock. But while the rigged computer and its tale would cover Talisa's tracks with the fielders. And the big pay day in her bank account went a long way toward making those dreams and ideas closer to reality.

Neither helped her sleep at night.

a little note to self and readers 11/13/2020

This post is a little marker for myself as a writer. And ok, a tease for you my readers...

You see, a little more than 8 years ago, I sat down with a question in my mind. That question was, "What makes a haunted house haunted, anyway? How does it get that way?"

This little bit of poetry was the very first thing I wrote as I grappled with the question:

When Open Wounds Weep,

and Passing Fancies Dance;

A Train Tows the Line

to That Place Where

All Dreams go to Die.

I think I found my answer in Open Wounds, Passing Fancies, and A Train In Tow. To the "how did it get haunted?" question.

And in All Dreams, coming soon to this here space dear reader, I think I found at least *an* answer to some of the questions that follow. I know I had a hell of a lot of fun with every line of these books. I'm kind of excited to close the story (at least the "formal" arc of the story, anyway).

I hope you'll join me, dear reader, to find out how it all works out.

Oh, just one thing?

Don't forget your matches...

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5

And now Collected: Volume 5 is available for your enjoyment, dear reader.

They lurk there, do you feel them? Hungering. Hiding. Reaching out.

From where they feel so safe, so powerful. Would you seek them out, dear reader?

Come with me and enjoy six stories of the monsters, the darkness...

And those who would face both.

(base cover image courtesy of Pexels user Simon Matzinger)

M. K. Dreysen Collected: Volume 5, is now available in electronic and print versions.

For ebook editions, follow these links for Collected: Volume 5 at Smashwords, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Books2Read, and Amazon. Also, if you like your ebooks from the library, ask your favorite librarian or library app for a copy, it should be available that way, as well.

For a print edition, follow this link to Amazon.

Let The Red Dust Flow by M. K. Dreysen

Come the weekend, here and there throughout the world, there are little dirt tracks with screaming engines and grinning fools climbing aboard for a hard fast race.

Come the weekends on the next planet over, I kind of suspect that, given time and a little extra energy, racing will follow along. This week's story, dear reader, takes us to one of those nights. The kind where you and a few hundred of your closest gather to sit and scream and grin and...

Let The Red Dust Flow

Lacy fought to see over the crowd; she could hear well enough. They piped the sound into her helmet feed, you had to pay extra for that.

The sound, the roar of the crowd and the engines when the cars passed the stands. Well, whine more like. Lacy had heard that, in the old days, back on Earth, the engines actually did roar.

"It hurt your ears, it did," one of the old guys yelled. "Those big combustion engines, nothing on earth sounded like 'em."

The electric engines here, all four wheels turning scrabbling at the red dust, they had to add sound, Lacy knew. Otherwise the forty-five cars in the race would just have passed the stands by in a red-orange haze and a back-of-the-teeth hum.

Everybody still would have stood and screamed, though. Like they were doing, which was the reason Lacy couldn't see. Nothing but a sea of backs and air maintenance equipment.

Lacy considered jumping. Low gravity... but the crowd had started the wave again.

Which meant everyone jumped in time, an accordion whip into the sky, most of them clearing three meters and then settling back down to the stands. Lacy felt the thrum of the stands through her boots.

A great, quiet, murmur.

"Number eighteen's still in the lead folks..." the commentator informed her. "That's Sylvia Rey, driving for the Rambling Wrecks of..."

Lacy lost track of the commentary in fascination with the dust plume. Each of the cars vanishing into the far turn lifted a rooster's tail behind them.

She thrilled at what the drivers had to be seeing. The cars up front, they wouldn't be catching the gravel that the cars behind them did. But they'd still only just be able to see past the end of the hood.

The heavy stuff had time to come down, but the pack were three laps into the eighty lap race. The haze of finer particles they'd generated for the three laps, and the earlier races, clung now above the track, steady-state material fog all the way up into the darkness where the grandstand lights didn't reach.

The cars carried their own lights into the haze and the darkness where the majority of the race happened, but Lacy could still see the sparkles of reflected light as the pack of cars snaked through the far side turns, left and right and left and right again. From the stands, it almost looked like the cars had just slowed down to nothing.

On her helmet, green dots showed their place on the map, forty-five cars winding and grinding through s-curves, switchbacks, then the final bank onto the long backside straight.

Lacy looked back now to real life, and the glow in the distance across the midfield. When the lead cars exited the banked turn, sped away, the glow stretched with them. Through the silica and quartz backscattering of the headlamps, the lead cars raced up to their best speed through a glitter storm.

She synced computer and naked eye views now; a scattering of green dots sped away, and then there he was, the red dot joining the rest of the pack.

Not last, Lacy breathed. Her brother wasn't last, at least. She thumbed buttons until Greg's speed showed on her display, hanging over the white glow in the distance that went along with it. Two hundred kilometers per hour and rising.

Lacy compared the leader's speed, two-forty. Greg's kept going, he hit two-forty just as the lead cars turned into the back turn entry. A high, steep bank, made to bleed off speed because the half-dozen turns before the final bank and the homestretch were brutal.

Greg, and the rest of the pack, bunched up behind the leaders in the twists; the final turn fed everyone onto the homestretch as a wheels-spinning unit. And then the gravel flew as the mob passed the stands again.

Lacy had to stop herself halfway through the next lap; she'd been holding her breath. At the turns, through the back and the homestretch. "Stop it," Lacy told herself. Easier said than done.

Time for a drink and a snack. Five laps in and many more to go, Lacy reminded herself. Get to the concessions now, while you can.

She kept her helmet on in the climate-controlled concession tent, raised the face shield enough to partake of the drink and the chili dog. While still watching the green dots and the red one chase themselves around the track.

Dad called her as she ditched the empty dog container. "You have a good view?"

"Hard to do, I'm in the concession tent."

"Get up to the top, when you're finished. We need as good a view as you can get."

Lacy swallowed the question along with the last of the soda. She knew, mostly: every team had a drone hanging over the midfield. But even the best camera suite only did so well. Dad wanted a naked eyeball view of Greg's car.

Last night, he'd made Greg do the same thing for her run. Brother and sister traded effort, especially since Dad didn't want either of them in the pit during a race. "You're the drivers, you don't need to get hurt doing something others can do."

Lacy didn't know any better. Born under one-third gravity; only ever one trip to "home", as Dad still insisted on calling it. So the climb up to the highest riser of the stands was very much still a trudge to the teenaged mind. A trudge of long steps, half jumps, and an occasional panic over whether she'd grab the rail or twist her ankle first.

Halfway there and the drudgery fell away; she almost forgot why she was doing it, bouncing and jumping higher into the sky, closer to the lights perched so high up the poles. When Dad had raced and she and Greg had come, they'd kept Momma company in the stands.

And raced bottom to top, and back down again, as flat out close to flying as the two of them could get without carbon fiber wings and a jet motor for company. Greg's old kid's helmet held a deep scar across the top; she'd been winning coming down, ten and the eleven year old just had to win. Greg had dived and gone head first helmet first into the last rail above Mom's seat.

That memory, others, hiding behind a riser while Greg hunted for her; the stands had been empty of all but the families more often than not. Dad had paid for his hobby, the few times it had paid at all, out of the challenge pots the drivers put together.

Throw in a couple hundred bucks to the winner. The entry fees had only covered the track maintenance for a very long time.

The gate had come in well this weekend, though. Lacy had seen the results when she'd won her junior race the night before. A couple thousand split between Dad and the crew, another thousand from the winner's share for her college fund.

And enough more for Derrisa and Trini, second and third, to put a few hundred in their own pockets. A lot better, Dad had told his kids, than nothing but a smile and beer money.

Enough "a lot better", rumor was, for real money sponsors to be sniffing around. Not that any of them had approached Lacy or Greg. Yet.

Back "home", the top of the stands would have been full of bugs, big moths and tiny mosquitoes in the early fall air fighting for primacy beneath the pressure of the lights. For Lacy and the red planet the silica-quartz dust haze filled the niche. She slowed, caught up again, fascinated on her last few steps as little turbulent twists of the material chased itself up to the heat of the lights.

Efficient as they were, the LED's still threw far more heat than Martian night, enough to generate thermals that lofted and spun the dust.

Lacy followed the punchless dust devils, watched them form and writhe and blow apart again. She remembered going through the turns, the night before, especially the handful before the final turn into the homestretch.

The grand turns, the whole complex from backstretch to homestretch, had been carved one switchback at a time into the face of the crater. On the opposite end, start to backstretch, that big left complex of turns stretched across an empty salt bed, flat and featureless. So the track's designers had filled the turning detail themselves, while leaving straights enough to tempt the desperate to pass.

Green and red dots were coming in now, so she turned and sat and watched. The pack, bunched to stampede by the wall turn's geometry, spilled out onto the homestretch.

Lacy caught her breath. Greg had moved up to twentieth; he'd caught the trick of it, the turns into the backstretch offered the chance if you wanted to take it. He'd accepted now, fifteen laps in, the track's constraints.

She called up the drone's camera, projected it onto her helmet display alongside her eye's view as Greg's car passed the grandstand, flat out and gravel from the leaders scattering across the windshield. When Greg and the rest of the cars passed into the backstretch turn, Lacy patched the video, scant few seconds as it had been, to her father.

"Thanks, kid. You ok up there for a bit?"

"Yeah I'm good." She'd have to be. The last thirty laps or so, the end, Greg would be in or out of it all on his own.

The next forty laps or so, though, that's why she and her camera sat where they did.

All-electric cars, dirt surface, Greg didn't need to pit for the race. In principle. Most of the pack would anyway. They'd lose steering on the bumps, catch too much dust somewhere. Three-quarters or so of the pack would find themselves down a lap or more and out of the running.

Finishing well meant not pitting. Which meant all eyes on the car.

The big stretches back and home meant Greg could tune the car, a little, if he needed to. So Lacy and her father watched each lap. For vibration Greg didn't see or didn't acknowledge. For wheels out of alignment, back end just that little bit out of track of the front end.

"Trim the back end a bit," Lacy reported on lap twenty-three. "To Greg's left, call it half a degree." And then, "Yep, he's clean," on lap twenty-four.

Lap thirty-eight, she called a shock on the rear end. They were electro-mechanical, physical force translating to a little more power to the batteries on the good side; all Greg had to do was dial a little more "firmness" and the computer did the translation to calm down the bad side bounce. Enough so that the bounce that had lifted the passenger rear tire clear more often than not in the ruts smoothed out on lap thirty-nine.

Forty-one laps down and Lacy started to let her mind wander. Little things and... but no. "Dad, the front wheels... driver's front is out both ways, pointing top and turn to midfield." Toe and camber.

Forty-five. "Dad, camber's closer but toe's still..."

"Give him another shot at it," Dad called.

Forty-nine. "Still out at toe, Dad. And there's a little vibration." She'd called the shocks, as well, but they'd taken up only a little of whatever jounce and jiggle had come into play. Only so much they could do without taking power from the engine.

And Greg had come up to fifteenth.

Lacy's race had paid the podium, the top three. Greg's paid one through ten, the difference between junior racers and unrestricted adults and the far larger Saturday night crowd. One more year and who'd Dad find to sit in the stands when the two of them raced against each other?

Summer races, anyway, she reminded herself. Semester break and time and races enough to earn the fall and spring tuition. Greg could, just about, pay for next year's worth of pilot certifications with two in the money finishes.

He'd finished number eight his first weekend back. A little bit, or a lot, of luck, as it turned out. No finish, no finish, twenty-fourth, twelfth.

Tonight was the last weekend race before Greg had to head back to the land of oxy-methane ratios and turbo props and gauzy landers hunting across kilometers of "asteroid" flagged into Martian red dirt for a decent shot at landing.

"Lacy, call it." Lap fifty coming up, Greg called directly to his sister for the first time.

"Yep, you've got the view, sweetie," Dad echoed.

"How's it feel?" she asked.

"Loose and hot," Greg answered. Which, thanks brother, two-thirds home on a dirt track and the four-wheel grasping beast he sat in the belly of always felt loose, like she wanted nothing more than to throw you for the sky and bury herself in the next available dust mound.

"Go for it, Greg."

She almost felt the grin coming back to her over the line. Grins, 'cause Dad was just as caught up now as the kids were.

Twenty laps to go, ten, and now the vibration was no question jarring the front end of the car on every ridge and hole. Even on the straights, Greg fought the wheel, hard left and right, back and forth and nothing but corrections now, no nice easy center the car didn't have it.

It held together. Fifteenth fourteenth all the way to tenth and the money on the last lap. Greg buried the throttle open, the eleventh place car tried to catch him but spun out at the last turn and took half a dozen close packed followers with him.

Greg left it wide open across the finish line. And the front end came apart just a hundred meters later.

Lacy got there first, as Greg pulled himself free of the egg, the titanium-carbon-fiber life-support cage that had rolled free as the rest of the car tore itself apart. "Well, you paid for next semester," she told the grinning maniac she'd been born a year after.

Then she pointed at the car, the one Lacy had been set to inherit for her unrestricted races next year.

What was left of it, anyway. "Next year? You're splitting your winnings with me."

Greg nodded sheepish agreement as Dad pulled up in the pit truck.

Stuff I've Been Enjoying Lately - Mental Health Break edition November 8, 2020

A few of the little joys I've discovered while stumbling through the past few weeks. With much love and thank you to all the artists out there navigating the rough surf.

Chan Chau takes a look at what it means, and who's reading. (and thanks to Charlie Stross for sharing this)

Cassandra Khaw's short fiction, and Ali Trotta's poetry. (and thanks to Uncanny Magazine and Strange Horizons for finding these stories a home, respectively)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch shows what a lifetime of work in art means; and that re-discovering joy in the work is an ongoing part of the job.

N. K. Jemisin reminded that sometimes you just need to throw it all aside and go play some video games; I spent some time with EA Sports Real Racing 3, Knights of the Old Republic, and Air Combat Pilot: WW2 Pacific. I had to break in a new tablet, you see, and wanted to find out which games made for good time spent... KOTOR holds up on a tablet really well, if anybody reading has any pull...

I read Michael Moorcock's first The Eternal Champion novel, which took something like thirty five years to happen. Mostly because U.S. bookstores only had the Elric books when I was a kid, and I've just never been all that successful at going back to dig up the rest of the stories.

There are others, surely, but these are the ones I can remember at the moment.

...I been a lady up 'til now...

Gettin' In The Way - Jill Scott, Jill Scott and Vidal Davis, songwriters

An Hour Awaiting by M. K. Dreysen

Dear reader: when you get done with this one, some of you might want to yell at me.

...yeah, it's more properly the opening to a longer work, isn't it? Than a short story, I mean. Still, beginnings have power. Especially in this little corner of the world of story, that first step is always a great portent of magic.

Come, for a little while this week, join me in remembering when you were 12. And when you just knew you had...

An Hour Awaiting by M. K. Dreysen

The spring day came sunny, sticky, too warm. As though last week's north breeze had decided it just wasn't worth the effort.

The older folks didn't mind. Winter had done her duty, she had, yeah, and those whose joints and backs and bladders kept company with nightmares and night-time trips to the outhouse didn't mind younger sister's early appearance.

Their children, the adults had a different view. They worried they'd missed a trick; plants should have been in the ground, maybe. The good ones, the kind they'd feed everyone with come late spring.

The kind that should bring a little cash money come fall. You knew, looking out the window at your man kicking the dirt, you knew that if you'd talked him into putting some of those tender mercies out last week, sure as hell the frost would have come instead. That was the way of it, most years.

And a week or two mightn't make a difference. Shouldn't, anyways, unless it was one of those summers. And if that case, well. He'd be out there watching the leaves die and the earth crack under the sun. And so will you, but there's no use borrowing trouble. Just a wish or two and get on with it.

The kids celebrated the warmth. They'd no mind yet for possibilities, only the agony of the indoors instead of the out of last week, and the glories of the reverse, this. It was a fine thing indeed to be on the green under the sun. Where the screams of the game of tag filled their ears. Where the day promised hours and hours with no parents calling for chores to be done.

Where the kid could spot the musician an hour before she made the final walk into town.

The kid sat under the willow; the tree had been an interloper when the green's walls had gone up. Now, it had given a spot for the inquisitive and the lazy for so long that all the town's living memories held at least a few hours beneath the tree's shade. He'd come to it today, had Mel, because he wasn't yet up to company. An in betweener, Mel. Two years to the next oldest, two years to the next youngest and that was his sister.

He spent more than enough time with Gri at home, thank you very much. She was old enough this year to mind her own business; even if Mom had told him to take care of her Gri would do just as well with the Miner sisters. And, since the Roberts twins had decided Mel was better a target than a friend, well. The willow's shade would make as good a spot as any to stay out of their path, until Mel found somewhere else to be. Fishing, maybe.

The lone figure making her way up the road gave Mel a different option. She came up out of the valley; the road drifted around down that way, where the hill and the cleared fields and the little river all shared some responsibility for the thing.

Mel wasn't exactly sure where the road went. He didn't think it went down into the valley, though. Maybe the person walking this way had gone into the shade, where some of the willow's sisters guarded the riverbank, for a cool drink? Or a piss? Mel giggled a little at himself. "Piss," he whispered.

Mom would have had something to say; Gri would have made sure Mom knew Mel was saying grownup words again. But Gri wasn't here, was she?

Mel watched the stranger make the walk; Papa called it a couple miles to where the forest took over. On the other side of the little valley. The road meandered around the fields between, so damned fools and drunks didn't walk through the oats and the wheat. Which is what they'd rotated into the town's western common fields this year.

Mel giggled again. Papa's phrase, damned fools and drunks. Papa said it sometimes like a prayer, something that came to his lips because he'd had so much practice voicing it. "Damned fools and drunks," Mel practiced. "Damned fools. Drunks."

When he'd wrung as much pleasure from the cursing rhythms as he could, Mel looked for the walker again. He shifted to do so from watching the birds. Grackles had started winging in from somewhere north. Masses of them, ten, twenty at a time. Headed somewhere south.

Mel was watching the birds because he didn't want the walker to disappear on him. Mel held a superstition. And that being: if you wanted something bad, real bad, the world had a way of taking it away from you. Long before you ever got a chance to decide for yourself whether that something was for you or not. Puppies. Horses; real horses not that old plow horse Becky. Swords and pistols.

At one time or another, Mel had conceived a hankering, a real desire, for each of these. A keep Mel up at night, dreaming of a puppy to share the bed with him, need. A horse to ride to the dawn, pistol and sword to greet what might wait there with, want. Mel had made himself into a boy of well-formed dreams.

Papa and Mom hadn't so much as dashed these dreams as they'd pointed out that a farmer's kid didn't have need of a riding horse. Nor pistols and swords.

"And if you can't be bothered to get up and milk Butter," the family cow, "How'm I to trust you with training a puppy to piddle outside?" Mom's phrase.

"Or not to shit on your pillow?" Papa's phrase. Mel thought his dad didn't have much business getting in the middle of that argument. Grandpop had given him a puppy. Granny said, "That boy was half dog. If your mother hadn't come along when she did, Tally," Mel's dad, "would have taken to sleeping in the woods and bringing home rabbits in his teeth."

But Papa had come down on Mom's side, which meant, like the other things, there was no use arguing about it now. Mel had taken himself a desire, and the town, family, the world had said, "No. This you shall not have."

So. He watched the walker for a few minutes. Then he looked at the birds. Or the few butterflies daring to believe today wasn't false warmth but the real thing. Or a lizard, winding its way through the roots a few feet to Mel's left, hunting sugar ants.

Anything but the walker. Which he returned to watching. He couldn't help it.

A stranger was interesting. And it had been a boring winter.

A few more minutes of watching, and Mel couldn't stand it anymore. So he took himself for the half mile or so between the willow and the stranger. "You're taking your own time about it," Mel told the musician, when he'd come close enough.

Musician she was. Well, she carried a lute on her back, anyway.

She didn't bother explaining the difference between guitar and lute to the boy. "It's warm enough, and I've time enough. What's your rush?" Then, she stopped, turned around, and held her hands out. "You have this view every day. Me, I might never come this way again. So, if you're wondering why on earth I'm taking so long to get to your village, well. There's your answer."

So saying, the musician put her hands on her hips and took the view in. Then she turned back to Mel.

He had meant to pass the time examining her. Not the view. That view, he'd had plenty of. Hadn't he just spent the last hour observing it himself, from the willow's embrace? Only, given the way the musician had pushed the idea at him, Mel wondered now... well. Since he was standing right there.

Not paying attention to her. Or the grackles or the lizard or the butterfly... Now that Mel gave it a chance, he found himself looking at the valley. The road to it. Where it turned, the road didn't really meander, did it? The hill gave that road something to do. A path to follow. One that didn't require climbing a steep grade to get anywhere.

"Huh," Mel said. His mind worked, absorbing a new idea.

The musician, having turned to her interlocutor, smiled. Just a little. And then, when the faraway look on Mel's face faded, she said, "Are you here to accompany me back to town? I'm not often given an escort."

The boy's face went blank. "Oh, well, I guess so." And now he took the chance to more fully examine the musician.

He noticed the sword, first. And a dagger on the other hip. Boots, pants, a heavy leather coat she'd opened against the warm day. Heavy gloves folded into the belt. And the instrument, sharing space on her back with a leather pack.

"Do I measure up?" she asked.

Now, Mel blushed. "I'm just a kid."

She let his words settle; then she started walking. "Let's see whether there's a place in your village for me. For a few nights, anyway."

That was the second time the musician had referred to the town as a village. Normally, and by normally Mel meant the two other occasions where he'd talked directly to someone who wasn't from his town, he'd have objected to this description.

They may have a habit of taking some dreams from him, but the town was a town, by Mel's lights, not a village, and he was sort of proud of that. At least they weren't like the crofts, the real villages. "Two houses and a barn, Mel, that's about all you'll see there," Papa had told him. When Mel had asked to go and see the villages for himself, the next time his Papa went trading. "No need to worry about going there just yet. You'll see enough of them when you're older."

Mel didn't have time to argue, with himself or the stranger, over mixed feelings and denied dreams. He'd become taken with curiosity. The musician's sword, and the dagger, those made sense. She wore clothes meant for the highway; she bore supplies in the pack on her back, all of her and these things were carried by good sturdy boots and protected by a coat warm against the weather.

Where there were miles there were bandits to rove them. Mel knew his stories. The ones his Mom had told him when he'd started asking whether he could go on the next wagon trading trip, and the ones he'd sought out for himself. Which were much more entertaining. Mel had a taste for bloody adventure.

So the sword, Mel could understand. But, if there was a sword. Then, "Shouldn't you have a pistol, too?" he asked.

The musician gave the other half of her smile. On the left side of her face; Mel walked at her right shoulder, so he didn't see this. "Are you and I buddies, young one? Are we friends?"

Mel considered it. Strangers were not supposed to be friends. Not that anyone had really told him this. The knowledge, or at least the habit, had come to him the same way air or water did.

As part of the pulse of the village. Town, Mel absently reminded himself. That said, kind of like when he'd taken himself to the edge of the village, and found an observation he hadn't quite known he was ready for, here and now when he dragged that habit out under examination, Mel found that he wasn't quite ready to go down the automatic route his family had prepared for him.

"I hope we might become friends," he murmured. If it had been one of the villagers, family members, they'd have misunderstood him. Mel had recently begun to mumble; when a thought came to mind that he understood would probably get him in trouble, Mel had found that voicing it, quietly, gave him some of what he needed without the backlash.

The musician wouldn't have been who she was if she had not learned to listen. The murmurs of a child finding himself were not out of her reach. She turned, so that Mel could see the half-smile. "Well, I find that a wonderful thing to discover, here at the end of my walk and the end of a fine spring morning. Still, at the moment, you are a child of the village, and I am a stranger."

She stopped. So Mel stopped to listen to the musician finish. "And, for now, you should simply wonder about the following. If I did have a pistol, speaking purely hypothetically, would it be safe for me to discuss it with a stranger?"

Given that view of things, Mel had to admit she was right. Thinking it all the way through, he had further to admit that, were he to be surrounded by strangers, then having some means they knew not just might be a saving grace. "Well, then how about I ask your name?"

"And what's yours then?" she returned.

He told her. And in exchange, "Alex. My name is Alex."

The adults monopolized Alex, from almost the moment she and Mel entered the village. "Run along, Mel," they told him. "Find a moment here in the spring sun."

He'd had a moment, he mumbled. But he said it where the town adults didn't hear him. If the musician did, she gave no sign. So Mel went to find a moment, something of his own to substitute for what had been taken from him.

The warm day turned to cool, still muggy, night. Mel had spent the afternoon in his fishing spot. This was on the other side of the village, the northwest side. Where the small river came close behind his house. Later in the spring, as the work became more pressing, that Mel's favorite fishing hole lay within his mother's call would become a problem.

Today, she didn't call. When she started to, she walked out into her dooryard and found her son already closing the gate. "Dinner's ready. Go help Gri pull out the dishes."

Mom and Papa discussed the musician over dinner. Among other topics; while it wasn't quite yet time for a spring festival, the adults had decided that a little fling made some sense. "Since she's here, and all. And you never do know if we'll get another passing through before summer."

Mel didn't tell his parents of his morning. And Gri, who, if she'd have known of it, would have been happy to tell them of Mel's encounter, instead had spent the day at the Miner home. So that was the topic she interjected, whenever their parents ran quiet.

Mel picked up his plate and utensils. And his mother's, so she wouldn't scowl at him. Since he was doing work, neither of the adults bugged him about whether he should have asked to be excused. To make sure of that, once he'd filled the dish pan and cleaned his share, he kissed his mother on the side of her head as he went up to his room.

A little nest, basically, up in the rafters and tucked beneath the eaves. He wondered, climbing up the ladder, whether he'd stare at the ceiling, listening for something, maybe the faint hint of music on the wind. Maybe his parents' voices as they whispered to each other in their bed below.

Whatever it was he listened after, Mel fell asleep before he heard it. Head hit pillow, and the next things Mel was sure of was that the sun was peeking over the horizon and his mother was stirring up the fire.

Notice of the little spring fling burned through the town that morning. The wind carried it, from farm to farm, down the paths between each and back up the one main road. The green would host a cookout; the Roberts family gave a lamb and the Miners a piglet.

Mom and Papa gave three chickens, and a basket full of root vegetables. "We'd just end up throwing them away, otherwise. And that rooster's a little ahead of his game this spring, we've got the extra hens." Other families gave salad greens, or bread or jam or whatever there was. Much of it, Mel thought, like their potatoes and carrots, a way to use something they'd otherwise have fed to the pigs.

But all of it would be used and eaten in good health and good cheer. They set the tables for the food just inside the entrance to the green, an opening in the low wall surround that only the adults respected.

Alex, the musician, set herself beneath the willow, on the other side of the green. "I'll play to entertain while everyone eats. And then when they're finished, I'll play so that everyone can dance."

Quiet, instrumental music for the feast. Some of it fast, some of it slow, all of it quiet background for the town and the munching. After folks had begun bringing their plates to scrape and clean, Alex set aside her guitar in favor of the full plate Mel's mom had set aside.

Sunset came. The chairs were set aside, the plates and dishes cleared away in favor of beer and a small bonfire. Not the larger one that would come in May, but a fair sight yet, with sparks reaching for the stars. Alex's songs, voice, music raised the spirits and sent them chasing along after the fire's ghosts.

Mel didn't partake of the beer or the dancing. "Not yet," Mom said to the beer; she'd allowed him watered beer for dinner, same as the rest of the kids, but that had been the end of it.

And dancing would definitely have to wait. Especially since Alex's stories, the ones she sung and the ones she told when her hands needed a break, caught him as surely as he caught perch in the river.

Noble, romantic stories, of Arthur, Percival, Guinevere and Lancelot. Horrific stories, the Green Knight and his head; Beowulf. Sea stories and dragons in caves, Seelie folk. Robin Hood.

There were others. Alex played the sun down, and the full moon, too. She sung for the kids, first, and then when they'd all been sent to bed she played for the adults. Here before moonset were the darker tunes, the ones that sang of old rebellions and the gallows, of what happened when the Bishop lost his head and the actress her hands.

Mel listened to these songs and stories as well. When Papa laid Gri in her bed, Mel waved at his father from his loft. Waited until the older man had had time to walk most of the way back to the green.

And then Mel climbed down and snuck back to where he could hear Alex's voice. Just; Mel wanted to make sure he had plenty of time to make it back to the house before his parents did. Alex's voice was clear and loud, this wouldn't be a problem, Mel told himself, as long he didn't fall asleep.

There was no fear of that. Alex wove the tales and Mel chased the threads, from Guy and Othello through to the Lady Macbeth and her bloody daggers. And when Alex at last threw her guitar over her shoulder, stood, stretched, and said "We've lost the light," Mel took himself at last to bed.

Faint woodsmoke and the muffled noises from his parents coming home accompanied Mel's dreams. He pulled sword and ran the pirate through. The pirate fired the pistol, retaliation in hot smoke hotter flame and the whiff of burnt powder.

Mel let sleep drag him down finally; he might have had a couple hours of real sleep before the sun and his parents dragged him from bed again. Sunday morning, so the quiet of breakfast and doings were limited to what prep could be done before Mom went to the services.

She came back with news. "The musician shot Jeff Roberts last night." The twins' older brother, he was sixteen. And if the twins were aiming for growing into brutes, Mel figured it was because Jeff had cut the trail they would follow. "He might lose his leg."

"Why'd she shoot him, then?" Papa asked.

Mom went white. Glanced from Gri to Mel. "You two. Gri, run yesterday's butter over to Gran, and then you can go to the Miner's if you want. Mel..."

"I'll clear the chicken coop."

"And then you're free 'til dinner. Don't make me come calling for you."

Mel gave some thought to it. But the coop wasn't close enough to the kitchen window to listen. And Mom was right there, watching. So he took rake and shovel and bucket and set to. He'd hear, eventually. Whether it was the truth or not, the story would burn through the village soon enough.

When the chickens leavings were deposited on the compost heap, fresh straw thrown in to catch the next round, and Mel had cleaned his hands, he lifted fishing pole and basket for the creek. The sun seemed bent on driving the day toward summer, even more than yesterday, so Mel greeted the shade around his favorite pool with relief.

Followed by shock. "What are you still doing here?" he asked Alex.

She'd come to his pool because she'd paid attention to the boy's coming and going. She'd stayed because the willows and brambles had built a thicket well grown enough for hiding in. "How much work did you do to make this space?" she returned. "I'm impressed."

Mel blushed. He'd cut and hacked for days, making a path and clearing the pool's bank enough to reach all around. Crossings, up and down creek from the pool, so he could reach each bank. All while still leaving more than enough of the undergrowth to hide away in. Where the other kids, and the adults, couldn't find him.

He was proud of the work he'd done. "Why'd you shoot him? And why haven't you run?" But he wasn't distracted by her compliment.

Alex shifted; she'd set herself and her gear at the base of an ancient crabapple that was battling for sun and life with a blackberry. Mel had cleared enough of the blackberry's canes for this to be possible.

Just. If you were a kid. Or a small adult. Alex waited until Mel found a spot to sit, close enough to reason with, but not so close he'd feel threatened. "He came for me after everyone else had settled to sleep."

Alex had taken a spot in the Roberts' hayloft. The Roberts kept the village's plow horse, old Becky, and the barn's second level for the old maid's winter forage. There being no inn, and no offers of a bed, Alex had taken the hay as the most comfortable option. "If I'd known what kind of son those folks have raised, I'd have come to your place," she told Mel.

Mel considered what "Came for me" meant. Could mean. The physical act, that much was no secret to a farm kid raised in what wasn't much more than a one room house. And if she'd shot Jeff, that meant he wasn't taking no for an answer. "Why not just kill him?" he said, once he'd absorbed what Alex hinted at. "You had the right of it."

She pointed over his shoulder. Mel turned to look. But there was just the village there. People going about their business of a Sunday afternoon. Farming, gossiping. Napping, too, probably. "How'd they react to it? Are they chasing me? Or what?"

They'd send a man to the sheriff, Mel knew. Tomorrow, probably. The village knew what Jeff had done to get shot. But they'd still do what they felt was the right thing. Let the sheriff know who needed to stand trial, Alex's description. Maybe not in a big hurry. It was enough to let the sheriff post a warrant.

"And if I'd killed him?"

The dogs would be leashed and they'd be hunting for her. Mel could see it in his mind's theater; not that he'd ever seen it in real life. But he'd heard the stories, and could place familiar faces in the roles.

"Maybe they'd even let me live long enough to find out the truth..." Alex said. "There's no guarantees, once people get that kind of set to their minds."

"You've seen it?"

"I've lived it, Mel. You learn a thing or two when the torches burn and the hounds bay."

"So why are you still here?"

She chuckled. "I've a thing or two discuss with you, young man." She reached, slowly, to her belt, and plucked something from it. Whatever it was, she didn't show it to him. Yet. "In a couple years, maybe three or four, you're going to find yourself questioning your position here, young Mel."

He considered her statement. Not the whole of it, that was too big yet. But he'd glimpsed enough of where life was taking him to understand what she meant. "Papa doesn't like it when I ask about the future." About an apprenticeship, the army. Space with that trader, the one Papa sold their wheat crop to, when the years were kind. Trader Ryan had asked, just last year, whether Papa had found a place for Mel, yet.

"He's with me for a while," Papa had replied. "There's good work here for him." And there was, Mel admitted. They'd space enough for Mel to work as long he wanted. "The farm yields well enough."

"Will it, when the girl and the boy want to start families of their own?" the trader had replied.

That stuck with Mel. And more: the thought of getting up, every day for the rest of his life, to do nothing but wait for the two, maybe three times a year when Alex or one of her colleagues came to town, to pass on the same stories and songs over and over again? It weighed on him, that thought.

Alex waited, until Mel stopped looking at his shoes, and met her gaze again. Not steady, yet, but Mel made a good effort. "When you reach that point, you'll have this in your pocket." And she opened her hand now to show Mel what she'd hidden there.

A pennny. "A Roman penny, an old one," Alex told him. "They used to be common. But the crown stopped accepting them, years and years ago. So now they're hiding in the bottoms of drawers."

She let the coin rest for a moment. Then she pinched it up between thumb and finger, and then set it to tumbling between her knuckles.

Mel watched, rapt. The coin's motion, tumbling between the musician's fingers, soothed him.

Alex let the coin dance for a few moments without comment. Then, she climbed it up so that it balanced, on edge, on the tip of her forefinger. Where it stood, balanced on a breath.

And then, without movement from the musician, the coin began to spin. "Oh..." Mel breathed.

Alex reached for Mel's right hand, gently pulled his fingers straight and tall, and then transferred the coin to the tip of Mel's middle finger. "Ah..." Mel responded.

"Just watch. Good. Now, flatten your hand."

Mel let his hand settle, expecting at any time for what should have happened. What should have, but didn't. Instead of falling to the dirt, as he flattened his hand, the coin spun its way to the middle of his palm. Then, when he'd held it there long enough to prove a point to itself, the coin quit its spinning and settled flat. Old Caesar looked across Mel's hand to something, maybe Hadrian's wall, maybe the ocean beyond the horizon. Maybe just time itself.

Alex closed Mel's hand on the coin. "Hide it away. And if, when, you reach the point where you just can't stand the idea of staying here any longer, walk to your little pool here. Take the coin out again."

"And then?"

"Follow wherever it takes you." She stood, then, settled her gear around her, and made her way to the edge of the copse.

"Where? You have to know."

She smiled her peculiar half-smile. "I know a girl who chased her penny around the world and back. In her case, the path lead to a little school in Edinburgh. These days, assuming nothing else changes, your penny should lead you to a place in the City."

London, Mel told himself.

"When you get there, show the person at the door your penny. Let them see how you make it dance."

"And then?"

"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to discover what happens then, Mel. Good fortune." And then she was gone.

****

Alex made her way from Mel's village to the City, and the building she'd set Mel's foot on the path to finding. Unlike what the prospective apprentices went through when they arrived, Alex entered without challenge.

Her purposes were twofold. To divest herself of the Alex persona, in favor of a new position. One that wouldn't attract the attention of any sheriff's warrants.

And to replace the penny she'd given to Mel. "If I'd stumbled onto him a year or two from now, I'd have just taken him with me."

"He's that close?" her colleague, the treasurer, asked.

"Very much so. As is, this way, he'll be much less disruptive when the discontent sets in."

"Good," the treasurer replied, before handing Alex a new old penny. "All of our future apprentices should be so lucky."

****

Just as Alex foretold, two years and three days after she left him with the penny, Mel made his way to his favorite fishing spot. This time, on a blustery spring day. Winter wasn't having it this year. Snowflakes and the north wind fought Mel as he crossed the field; he almost began to regret the weight of his gear.

Coat, wool shirt and pants, gloves, scarf and hat. The heavy boots he'd saved his pennies to buy just this year. A bedroll, an old knife, his few extra clothes. Mel had prepared himself for it.

Because the geese flying overhead this fall had dragged a piece of him to the sky. Because Papa and Mom, God love them both, refused still to allow him to breathe a dream of his own to life.

He'd hidden the penny away in his loft. Every time he'd thought of it, burned to take it out and hold the promise of it again, he'd held back. "Don't wish too hard, yet," he'd told himself. "That way, when I need it..."

Mel pinched the penny from his belt. Held it up between thumb and forefinger. Unlike Alex, he didn't trust himself to tumble the penny between his knuckles. But he didn't need to.

All he needed to do was hold it aloft. On edge, the penny balanced itself on the tip of Mel's finger. And then...

The penny began to spin.

...you'll never see me wear a suit of white...

Man In Black by Johnny Cash, songwriter.

A Face Viewed In Autumn - 11/1/2020 by M. K. Dreysen