Conserve. Reuse. Recycle.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

Three Twenty Five
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He walked unsteadily down the road, blacktop scar healing between two broad shoulders of cornfield. Overhead the New Sky, as unfamiliar as if it held two suns, stretched from side to side, colored waxpaper gray and featureless, promising nothing. A sleek black wasp droned and labored across from field to field with a grasshopper the size of a sparrow chick grasped beneath its jointed body. He remembered Life (his Old Life) the way it used to be -- a dependable disappointment; a cradle-to-grave miserygrind, but easily survived if only Hope could be avoided. Earlier, though (moments ago? or years?) he met Hope on the road -- caught in the open with an armload of distractions, no camouflage and without the sense to look away. She battened on him and kissed his cheek; then scales fell and she smiled and made introductions. "This," she said, prying his fingers from her hand and backing away down the road, "is New Life." And he saw. Hope was already far-off down the way, a tiny doll with her feet lost in oil-black heatshimmer and touching someone else's cheek. New Life, surprising and treacherous with hood lowered and gloves off, met him there by the road. He closed his eyes and watched the yellow-gold motes and paislies spinning against the brown-gray darkness inside his eyelids. "Thirty-one, thirty-two," he said, without knowing what he was counting. "Waterdog-Trickster. Changling." His eyes snapped open and the New World hove into view.
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