From: Jesemie's Evil Twin Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2000 11:30:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: xfc: NEW: wire sprint by JET (1 of 2) Source: xfc wire sprint by Jesemie's Evil Twin jesemie@hotmail.com or eviljesemie@yahoo.com Summary: "How can I see the future if it didn't already exist?" - Clyde Bruckman Disclaimer: Alas, not mine. Category: S, A, M/S. Horror. Extreme Oddness. Alt-u. Strange narrator. Slightly post-col in places, though maybe not. NC-17. Author's Notes at end. Spoilers: Small specific ones through "Amor Fati" and no further, but there are general variations on seventh season themes too. Thank You: [in The Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" style] to lycanthropic Liza and shapeshifting Shari, for the most ghoulish betas and zombierific brane eating (BRANES. UGGH); to rotting Renee, for the spooky-ooky commentary; to cannibalistic Carrie, for early encouragement (from beyond the grave?); and to clattering-bones cofax, for the hellacious stalkings. Feedback: Nicer than razor-free apples. Please and thanks. jesemie@hotmail.com or eviljesemie@yahoo.com Happy Halloween! October 2000 For Penumbra, and for Miss Halliday. - - - The boy is key. You think I didn't see him? At the edge of Buehner's property. He walked his bike slowly, easing the wheels over the crumbling curve on the corner of 2nd and Main, and waited for the yellow pick-up to clatter past. The sadness in his movements. It was only a moment. I open my door to the man and woman tonight with the rain behind them like a wall. The boy's eyes were a shade unclear in tree-shadow but I see them now. And the mouth, jaw, nose. Taller than his younger self and no bike. "Thought it'd be you," I say. "Come in, then. Come in." - - - In his head, make no mistake, he thinks this might not be a good idea. He wants to keep her safe. It isn't disrespect towards her, a lack of trust or admiration on his part - no, ma'am. No, sir. He plain doesn't want her hurt. It's very simple. I'm a stranger, someone he has turned to for help, and he isn't sure how wise that is. She feels the same way about me, and him. What she truly feels for him is in her breath now, in her spine, under her skin. She used to be able to tamp it down, but now she's ripe with it, that protectiveness. She never had any idea she could be so tied to another. They look at each other while I close the door. The things they don't say have such weight and sweetness, ache and dream. Sometimes, I confess, I almost don't unlock the door to some folk. Sometimes, I think there're few reasons to change the course of nature and fate. And such big words those are, all fancy-sounding. As though it doesn't come down to a few souls, and a few moments of warmth. I look at these two; I feel the intensity of their focus. Some things you fight for. Some things deserve every chance they can get. - - - "We don't mean to intrude," he says. "Nonsense," I say cheerfully. "Miserable weather. Miserable. You having trouble?" "Our car," she says, sheepish. With affection, he adds, "It may never walk again." You'll ask how I knew they were coming, the way they'll ask. There was the bush down by the road, with the empty brown eggs delicate as blown glass ornaments adorning its short, thin branches. I woke from a dark dream this morning, you understand: there was a house with the windows cracking, and the sound of a harmed forest. I went down to check the bush as soon as light slipped over the hill. One of the eggs had tumbled onto the concrete someone poured over fifty years ago, when there was a brief push for sidewalks in a town with two churches, one dime store, and fourteen houses. I'm the one who's always been here, the one left. The egg was my first warning today. The shell had spilled its crimson yolk, and I walked back up to the house to wait. Second, there was the boy, yes, his mouth still red like a child's, his body almost ready to burst its skin. He knew some sort of pain, something vicious and raw. The man he became did not shed that hunger. It hasn't been soothed down yet. This is what I sense as he and she stand in my living room, dripping on the dusty wood floor and shaking their heads in unconvincing refusal. They will spend the night here, out of the rain, and go back for the rental car at dawn. He's a little bit angry at something unnamed. He's perhaps a little bit unnerved. The boy wore a similar sort of dejection, but the boy too was hopeful of love. The man he is now knows happiness, as well; he knows how it feels, leaked inside him like a secret. The woman stands very close and holds him with her eyes. You ask me, how could I see love or hurt in the boy just from the way he shuffled his feet through the leaves, from the way he swiped at his irritable cowlick? And why did I not see the woman too? Some things I think I was meant to know. I know this man in my parlor, enough to recognize him because of who he was, and who he may yet be. Some things I think I was not meant to know. Who the woman was does not define her the same way, I'd guess. It is more important who she will become, and who she is. I changed the sheets on the guest bed after I saw the boy, but like the egg he wasn't the only reason. Third was the worm, smooth green, inching its way along the spine of the lettuce leaf I threw into the yard for the rabbits. Worms are like cut arteries. Can I erase what will happen to the man and woman? No. But I might be able to alter the outcome. Act as a tourniquet. I picked the worm off and pinched it dead. "Glad you found me up here," I say. "Sometimes people don't notice the house behind all the sassafras and pin oak." The man looks at his friend with a small smile. "I-- I just took a guess that someone might still live here," she begins. "There's this bush down by the road and I just thought, well, I didn't think an animal did that." "Right," I grin. "Wolves and deer aren't known for their decorating skills. You take off your shoes and stay awhile. I've two beds and a clawfoot tub." She raises a hand. "Really, it's such an imposition--" "Not an imposition, not at all. I promise." - - - After the pleasantries of introduction, the agents run back out into the elements to gather their bags. They return more drenched than I thought humans could be, and the floor shines under their feet. I busy myself with an old pan of mostly-eaten roast from the icebox, skimming off a layer of congealed fat to reveal the greasy thin broth beneath. It has the smell of sickness, swirled through with a sooty black I've never seen before. I did not burn the meat. This is certainly a clue, but my interpretations of future events have always been hesitant at best; I am better at giving my sight to others, for a time, and letting them do with it as they will. I hope these travelers have some idea-- A sneeze by the front door. "Mulder," the woman, Scully, says. Her concern is immediate, rising with her lowered voice. "You need to get out of those wet clothes." "So do you," he replies, moving closer to her. I close my eyes and all my other senses triple. I clap my hands over my ears and refuse to take a breath. Amazing. Everything I can sense of them is... Separation would kill them, eventually. How do I keep the wire from being severed? Perhaps this time I don't. The effort will be all theirs. - - - "You say you were expecting us. Or him, at least." She speaks without hostility, in a voice I doubt she uses much on the job. He's cleaning up in the small bathroom. I suspect when he's done he will stretch out on the lumpy bed, strictly from habit, the way he would in a motel room. Exhaustion will claim him and he'll be asleep before he can undress. She remains at my dinner table, face soft with a curiosity that she thinks is unseemly to show. I feel that in her - the struggle - but she's tired and she'll let it go 'til morning. "I don't know him, Miss Scully." She nods. "But you knew we would arrive tonight?" I put another log in the kitchen hearth, and the cold blue flames of the old fire twitch and huff. "I knew he would appear eventually. They always do." "They who?" Her hair hasn't been brushed in hours and there's a smudge of mud on her temple. Her irises have a bruised look to them. She wants to believe something that won't hurt her now. I wonder what she was like as a child. I have not answered her and she starts to repeat the question. "Someone always knocks on the door on nights like these," I say quickly. "The highway is in rotten shape, you probably noticed. Flat tires, stall-outs, plunges into ditches. The shoulder rail's never been replaced from last spring's big wreck. A semi going 60 up the hill couldn't brake fast enough coming down the other side. I get a lot of stragglers, people wanting to use my phone at 3am." She looks around, a small smile on her face. "Do you even have a phone?" I chuckle. "No. Never could see the point." I have a calling, Miss Scully, you see. It isn't just a not-terribly-clever pun. You may not realize this presently, but by morning you will. I will show you, and you will make up your mind in silence. You have strung the wire between yourself and him, and I will make you prove its strength. Tell him, I think. She has closed her eyes but is still listening. "I have a spare room though. Plenty have slept in it. In the morning, they hike through the Buehner forest, over towards Caroling Hole. This is what used to be Pathfork, and I'm the only thing here. There's a gas station there." She yawns and rubs one eye, so sleepy she can barely think of a response. "Go on to bed now," I say, quiet, trying not to startle her. "Get some rest." She turns her face from mine and there's anxiousness in her expression. I don't think she's ever slept in his bed before and I want to tell her this is not a problem - it's technically my bed, after all, not his. But maybe I should delay her a while. We have all night to change their lives. - - - Water boils in the kettle like an angry spirit conjured awake. Two pots hot and four pots cold, and the tub's full. She's unpacked a bar of white soap and a tiny bottle of lotion. I hurry to find her a towel and rush out of the room so she will not think I am waiting around to spy on her bath. He comes into the kitchen as I pour myself a mug of sweet milk. He bends to squint through the half-opened curtains at the wind-lifted rain. The back of his hair sticks up, and I notice that a spot of it is much shorter than the rest, the cicatrix beneath it still dark from stitches. "Where were you headed?" I ask. He pulls out a chair and sits before answering. "Home. We went-- I thought it might be nice to take a weekend trip somewhere pretty. Check out the autumn trees, eat a few fancy meals. Nothing very exciting, just..." "Different?" I offer. "Yes. I start working full-time again next week." "Were you ill?" "In a manner of speaking." He smiles, suddenly more fragile than he seemed earlier. I pity him the upcoming hours, but not doing what I can would only make things worse. I decide to focus on keeping the mood light. "And did you have a nice time?" The fragility turns wry. "Our flight out was cancelled, Budget lost our car reservation, the hotel cost twice what we were quoted and the food was decidedly sub-par." A room over, water sloshes in the ceramic tub. "And then," I say in my deepest voice, "it started to rain." His eyes spark with humor. "That stupid rental car never stood a chance." "Tomorrow will be better." I sip my milk and he sighs. "Thank you for letting us stay the night. We appreciate it more than you'll ever know." "As though I would turn away the FBI," I say jokingly. We sit unspeaking while I take a few more swallows from the mug. We hear the rain, but he listens for her. Tell me about your partner, Mr. Mulder. You have learned something recently and are unsure how to exist with this new awareness. I know what you want most, what you have heard. Step out onto the wire - she'll catch you. "She's probably crawled into bed by now," I prod. Someone needs to set this in motion. He looks towards the guest room, bracing himself. - - - This will not change anything. This is preliminary. The walls are barely as dense as paper, and they conceal nothing. I stay perched on my own bed and watch the scene in my mind's eye with practiced detachment. He enters my guest bedroom without paying attention, too deep in thought for the sort of fussy manners they stopped using with each other years ago. The sash on her robe has loosened as she rearranges the contents of her travel bag. She steps away from the bed absently as he looks up and her robe bares her. Between this embarrassing situation and the strictly conventional only-one-bed-left routine, it's surprising how they react, though it shouldn't be. I know, in basic terms, how they must play this, but it's still awkward for me. I suppose I'm glad my abilities cannot be easily detected, that they don't know I must moderate these events for their sakes. I feel the wire tighten... Their gazes lock and he walks to her. She does not move to tie her robe, and her skin has hints of moonlight in it when he finally barely touches her, two fingertips on her stomach. She runs her thumb over his lower lip. The motion has quickly become ritual. The house quivers around us. The shutters rattle on their hinges. The rain thickens, dark against the low sky. It begins. - - - What he's thinking is, If I lose her... He thinks he could let her go if he had to, if it would mean she'd live through the possible future. Behind his eyes he still sees flashes of the world dying in exploding orange and black blood. He screws his eyes shut. He knows he is not the brave one. She secures herself against him to trap their combined heat. He presses a kiss in her palm, as if for safe-keeping. "Please don't leave me," she whispers, and he knows it is not a request of present circumstances. The wire tightens, hums. It will be cold soon, and the chill is spilling in. - - - (end part 1 of 2) - - - The snow on the porch is specter ash. Last winter, snow flakes on a daily basis were storybook imaginings, something that only happened in cliché seasons, and now it's like living near active volcanoes, piles of torched musk leaves or bonfires of books burning after a new plague, a pack of pyros, this end-time with matches and no broom. The sky is a suspended stretched tarp of unbleached cotton. Ice puckers its belly with ruddy nubs. She turns away from it, and wastes the afternoon rereading the messages until her eyes ache with the strain of finding nothing and feeling less. Night crackles. She removes her remaining sweater, folding it away in a wooden box with bandages and a pocket of coins. Bare-breasted, she washes her face with peppermint soap, a luxury lifted from another house. She does not look at her reflection. A plain lamp sits on the tiled floor in the corner between closet and door. Reignited electricity won't last long and she's taking advantage of the weak fake light. The kindled yellow is a wet illusion, hallucinogenic reflection tripped sideways across her pale face. She searches the luminous smoothness of her arms' undersides, the barely perceptible seams, healed grafts pricking at the shallow surface nerves -- a spidery sensation of holding snow with ungloved hands. Because things seem simpler in this present, she cannot think of her situation in the old tangled metaphors of conspiracy and deception. These muddled things have yielded a kind of stunned clarity. To think beyond it is to scratch off the scab, a crusty rust which blossoms beneath with incarnadine liquidity. She wonders where he is, if it's cold, or dark. If the hills have hidden him, tangled him in their branches. She remembers trailing her fingertips up his throat to his chin, his slight beard as splintery as bark before the velumen warmth of his mouth. Someone on the street wails after skidding down surprised on the sidewalk. The window is brittle sugar, panes too thin to keep from cracking, like the high-gloss ice pasting the pavement. She's a little hungry, for no good reason thinking about the old shrieks of kids at the pool, wet quarters plunked on the snack shack countertop in exchange for inflatable raft rentals and orange sherbet push-ups. A gust penetrates a slit in the silvery glass. A single drop of water engraves an icicle path as it drips from hairline around the swell of her left breast, teasing a shiver from her. The unrinsed fingertips that graze briefly over her are slippery; she feels stabbed in ten places, dappled with arousal and grief. The lamp's switch is sulfur metal, as hot as past sunshine. She blacks out the small room and turns on the faucet. In the dark, she immerses her hands in the frigid sink water. She remembers the tin tincture taste of blood, of rolling the bodies into pits powered with lime. She never looked at the faces of the corpses. She did not want to die there too. The narrow hallway creaks when she crosses to the bedroom. Peeling back the sheets at night is reminiscent of skinning fruit -- those oval marble white grapes with kidney stone seeds, or tangelos circuited with zest-vines -- while sitting on white-layered school benches at recess, feeling crystal slivers in the pulp while the wind growled for lunch. (The cafeteria was never large enough for an entire school of displaced mismatched military children.) This is a better memory than the ones she first preferred, where skin scorched the blankets with the dim indentations of limbs. His body and hers impressed on the mattress and pillow-- She gasps, closes off those thoughts. She takes off her slacks and panties. The musty blankets scrape her legs. Tonight she will not rest and cannot pretend this is an evolving sharpening or strengthening of her survival skills. She is weary beyond apparitions, but his ghost or his doppelganger or his mythic shadow stains her stomach with a molecular flush; he boils her beneath epithelial pleasure; her bones recognize him. It's what's inside that counts. The covers corkscrew away from her. She arches into his hands again, and an untangled part of her wonders where or how he is experiencing this, if underneath his body there is an equally indifferent mattress clotted with encounters he did not participate in and was not concerned with. She wonders if he realizes the strength left in his body, pliant and hard and crushing and right. She has fought long to stay lost and frozen. The bedroom frost is stippled with flesh tints and his breath in her ear, on her throat. She locks her ankles and pulls him inside her body. The slick melt of their meshing is static-shocking, and he whispers her name just once before dissipating to mist. The hotness left in her body hisses. She misses him like breathing deeply, like being held in sleep. She curls onto her side and trembles with frightening cold. She forces her eyes open in the spirit darkness and reaches for him, his stubborn shoulders, coaxes him back inside her, whispers against his lips, clutches and comforts and strokes their blended bodies, betrays her hard-won freeze, worships his heat, his heart. It is only a moment. He drifts away finally, fear-heavy, kissing his fingerprints on her hips, her split thighs. She lies quietly. She wraps up in the blankets again, unblinking. She sits, her back to the wall. Her arms glow in the snow light. He rubbed his wrists to hers the last time they were together, pinning her with a sting she never wanted to forget or forfeit. He loved her like a scar, like a sacred wound. Their cadences counter-pulsed in traces of identical blue flame, a discovery of filaments and flares. When glass shatters in the front of the house, she doesn't move until the footsteps come closer. Some things are too late to stop. - - - Are we dreaming? is the first question out of every guest's mouth. No, I answer, and neither am I. Where's your crystal ball? is always the second. At times I wish I had one, an iridescent bauble to run my hands over. I never had much reason to keen in my life, but those gypsy fortune tellers on the TV - not that I've ever seen TV directly, but you'd be amazed what people retain in their minds - are always putting on a good show. In comparison, I bet I'm as dull and simple as a pile of sticks. How do you know what we will feel? Ah, my dears. This is more important than whatever causes those feelings. What you feel is all that may rescue you. Be still, I tell them. There's more. - - - On the other side of the woods, the outlet waits. Night as blindfold, a sightless stripe of flood water and overturned trees - he staggers away from the undreamed horror of heat, of her. He falls with his raw wrists still tied behind his back. Caught on a low thorny growth, the ragged rope is at last loosened. He does not move to free himself. Rain seals him to the mucky earth, the partly-frozen mud. He compresses himself into the smallest possible position. He waits, and refuses to sleep. If he closes his eyes, they will find him. Morning is sunlight gashed through monstrous cloud. He untangles his hands from the bush behind him. He looks at his body, grimy and bruised where not covered by the rent khakis, the thin navy blue sweater with moth holes and an unraveling collar. The flesh on his wrists seems as frayed as the ends of his sweater sleeves. He shudders and moves to rise. He can feel her, blood-hot on his skin. He stalls in a half-bent stance. He reaches out, falters. He pants with fear; he must leave her, he knows that. He has to start running again. She cannot follow. The forest, once silent with its death, now clacks and creaks. Ice along the rim of a hemorrhaged stream cracks open like a split lip. Someone will be coming soon. Nature has supplied the alarm clock. The damaged world wakes. He must escape. He must find her. No. No. He cannot go back until he reaches the other side, until he knows positively that there is a defense. She is safe, hidden. She will be fine. She will live. He runs because she is the only thing he can protect, because she is the only reason to try. He runs down, down, into the valley, and finds the markings for the trail. His breath clings to the heavy air in vapor clumps. He arrives at the day's destination as the cloud-faint sun skims the tree tops. His horrified gaze turns over the stretch of bank, the twisted corpses. The ground is sinew and cartilage, stringy muscle and burning hair. He trips over a man whose chest is a cavity of worms and needles. He distantly recalls that there is a word for the vomiting of strange and foreign objects as caused by or associated with demonic possession - allotriophagy - that there is a word for almost everything, but he cannot think of a word for this sight before him. Someone has stacked skulls into a long wall against a remnant log. The craggy mineral faces gape at him, voiceless and damning. He can barely feel her. There is a shovel leaning against a crippled oak. He has a job to do before he may go. The day is dirt and snow, ice fossilizing blood and the chipped bones piled like branches. The coworker arrives early, laughing and growling and flailing half-drunk. The gun is cocked, an echoing noise in the calm beside the frozen pond. A pause as the assassin sighs. "Fuck it. Stupid formalities. Utterly futile in your case." The woman tosses the weapon in a hole and grins at the thud. "I tried. You don't look healthy enough to make it to the exit edge of Silverbridge. If anyone asks, you saw my carcass clogging a ditch around the center basin." He blinks but the thug continues her speech. "Mostly clear on the outside. Not too many people alive, but whatta ya expect? There's a cease fire for the time being. Something about renegotiations. I dunno." The woman's boots crunch snow and deadwood when she kicks her heels. "I hear they raided her house yesterday. Couple of my informants were impressed with her combat skills. And yet how easily they could pin her limbs to the bed and have themselves a nice little party. Hell, at least someone's getting laid." Another smile. "Well, good luck, Agent." His chest hitches. He tried to deny her before. The believer, lying. He runs. Miles. Frightened, not numb, not anything but sharp nerves and fatigue, he lets himself ask. Where are you? Where are you, he whispers. Here. It's okay. He stumbles. The sleet cloaks everything in its premature stormy dusk. He collapses, and after a few minutes crawls to the crook of a cavern, wraps his arms around his knees, and rocks slightly. She is so thankfully near, flame in this lightless hollow, suddenly-heightened fear slashing the dark silk between them. He does not want to remember. She thrashes softly and moans. His fingers skim the dip of her navel. She parts her thighs as solace, as invitation. Her fingertips brush his jaw. They are both crying. It is nothing but joy. This is revelation, this is reverence. It is all he has ever wanted. Then his mouth is on her, his tongue discovering the soft opening of her body. She tastes like warm bittersweet chocolate and sea and spice. He rubs and licks and drinks. Her hands are gentle on his head, and when he finally pulls up, finally sinks into her, he realizes it is a new encounter, it is now and real and inviolable and she is kissing him as though he can save her, is saving her, her strong mind and unbreakable body and this sacrosanct union, this lonely, necessary ecstasy. Rite and sacrament: he prays for her, with her, her mouth on his stomach and lower. When he can, he folds her into his embrace. It is only a moment. Her body unwinds from his as slowly as he first memorized her, and he can feel her drifting near. The noisy sleet lacquers the trees, creates pools of ice that are splintered like dropped mirrors, but she soothes him to sleep, returning quietly to encircle him. This is their handfasting, as though they have been bound together in gold. - - - The wire loosens, begins to uncoil. - - - A man opens the door to Agent Scully's house. He has been searching for her for months. He heard Agent Mulder walked into a trap so she'd be spared. That alone probably pissed her off enough to stay alive. The man has heard that Scully was hiding here, camouflaged by snow and woods, culling resources to search for Mulder, and indeed, he sees, she was. He enters the pillaged bedroom. Looters ransacked this place with real exuberance, and left nothing salvageable. Her stripped body is a tight ball, and the tide of blood around her has dried dark, dark brown. There is no sound in the room. The man drapes the sheet over her, and leaves. - - - The assassin coughs, cheap whiskey vomit slurring in the back of her throat. God, it's cold. Her head hurts, and she fell asleep next to a naked guy without a head. "Just like in college," she quips aloud to the forest. She fumbles her gun out of her coat pocket, looking for a pack of cigarettes. The paper sleeve holds only crumbles of tobacco. She curses and throws it down. "Shit, fuck, damn." Coughs. Beats on her chest with a fist and spits. Keeps walking. The big rock ahead looks like as good a place as any to take a seat and hack up a lung. She hits her head on the overhang of the cave's mouth as she sinks to her knees. She can't get a breath for coughing. When her bronchial tubes stop misbehaving, she wipes her eyes and looks around. "Mulder," she says, shaking her head at the body. "Fuck." Before starting away, she performs the only sort of kindness she's capable of. His lashes are frozen crisp under her fingers as she presses them to the very tops of his chapped cheeks. - - - The wire stretches too tautly, suddenly, and snaps. - - - There is no rap on my door - it is flung back, knob hitting the wall with a loud whack. She marches into the room, eyes wide and scared. "Who are you?" she demands, gun steady in her hands. "I am... I'm only telling you what you need to know." "How?" he asks, hovering behind her, his own gun a comforting weight. "I can't answer that." "Can't or won't?" she asks angrily. "You're free to leave at any time," I say from my rocking chair. "Why--" She lowers her arms and her eyes, and takes a deep breath. "Why would you--" "I cannot answer that," I enunciate. "This is what I do." "But, but--" he stammers. I sigh, tired now and wishing to sleep. "I am the sole resident of the former town of Pathfork. I have always been here, Agents. I have...to keep track of things." I smile. He looks very cynical. She looks like she may cry. I sense she's incredibly sick of having reasons to. "That wasn't," Agent Mulder begins. "That wasn't the future I saw." No, I want to tell him. Not exactly. But there is more than one way to kill a world. More than one place to die. All that righteous anger levels out inside me quickly, but for a minute I remember what it was like to see my own life unrolled in front of me. I could've changed. Couldn't I? "We can change what happens when we leave here?" Agent Scully whispers. A tear plops to the floor at her feet. I know then that she believes, and it hurts me that this is the truth she had to know. My smile fades. It will be so hard for them to escape these things. "I think you should try." She turns to him and grabs his hand. "Don't let her go," I say to him. He nods, taking her hand between both of his. "I won't." This is the last thing said in my presence, the first promise. My senses start to withdraw from me. My eyelids flutter, and distantly, distantly, I hear them exit the room, gather their bags and walk out of my home. In my mind's eye, I see the wire webbed gossamer and gold between them. "You are not a coward," she whispers to him fiercely, her hand in his again, and he smiles. The rain has finished. They hike through Buehner's forest towards Caroling Hole, through the shimmering green. The girl is key. She is small and strong, very young, with auburn hair and delicate bones. She will be tall someday. She has hazel eyes and waves goodbye, stands at the mouth of the woods and protectively watches them lead each other carefully to the other side of the trees. It is only a moment. - - - An end. - - - Author's Notes - The first draft of this, o-so-many months ago, was a direct response to Penumbra's dazzling, astounding "Contact High". This story has little obvious connection to that one, but "CH" was the inspiration. If you haven't read it, why not? Go. Do that now. http://urw.simplenet.com/u.penumbra/contact.html - The other, later, inspiration for this bizarre story was this bit of poetry. . . . Before I set the supper out, good friend, I saw Blood on the egg. While I heard you draw The curtains to deceive the too-red sky, Holding the dripping leaf, most thoughtful, I Removed the naked worm. Look. Blood is here And sound of gnawing. Listen. Coming near. -- Jeremy Ingalls Does this mean "wire sprint" is really poetry-fic? Have I created a new category? Hmm. As usual, no infringement was intended. http://alanna.net/JET (end part 2 of 2)