Rick Yancey

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.

I walked until the water lapped against my chest, and then I kept walking until it kissed the underside of my jaw. I was surprised how cold it was. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. Thee was the wind and the clouds and the pure pool and the boy beneath its unsettled surface, and the blood, the boy's and monster's, defiling the pool.

For a being more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships--especially your your relationships.

You__e the mayfly,' he murmurs. And then Evan Walker kisses me. Holding my hand across his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I__ looking back at him.

I, um, I thought you might want this back.__ pull out the battered old teddy bear and hold it toward him. He frowns and shakes his head and doesn__ reach for it, and I feel like he__ punched me in the gut.Then my baby brother slaps that damned bear out of my hand and crushes his face against my chest, and beneath the odors of sweat and strong soap I can smell it, his smell, Sammy__, my brother__.

I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man.

We'd stared into Death's eyes and Death blinked first.

Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all__elf-centeredness in its purest form.

You're safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it's always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it's still a lie. You're never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. Otherwise, you're just a walking corpse. You're a zombie.

I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.

Understand their hatred is beyond human comprehension. They abhor the Creator and so also the creation. Whatever brings joy, whatever brings peace, whatever redeems the dark deed or relieves the terrors of the night and their enemies.

I prefer not to call them demons. It demeans their nature. "But isn't that what they are?""We should pity them more than fear them Alfred. They were angels once.""Yea, but didn't you say they rebelled against God? They got what they deserved.""Perhaps." He sighed. "Yet do we not all hope and pray that we ourselves escape that we truly deserve? None have fallen as far or as irrevocably as the outcasts of heaven. Did you not find them beautiful." "...They have gazed upon the very face of God, the face they will see no more for all eternity-and so I pity them. Even as I envy them for having seen it.

People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's on to the next 'true love.' My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love?

If you leave without me, I__l just follow you. You can__ stop me, Cassie. How are you going to stop me?__ shrug helplessly, fighting back tears. __hoot you, I guess.___ike you shot the Crucifix Soldier?__he words hit me like a bullet between the shoulder blades. I whirl around and fling open the door. He flinches, but stands his ground.__ow do you know about him?_ Of course, there__ only one way he could know. __ou read my diary.___ didn__ think you were going to live.___orry to disappoint you.___ guess I wanted to know what happened____ou__e lucky I left the gun downstairs or I would shoot you right now. Do you know how creepy that makes me feel, knowing you read that? How much did you read?__e lowers his eyes. A warm red blush spreads across his cheeks.__ou read all of it, didn__ you?_ I__ totally embarrassed. I feel violated and ashamed. It__ ten times worse than when I first woke up in Val__ bed and realized he had seen me naked. That was just my body. This was my soul.I punch him in the stomach. There__ no give at all; it__ like I hit a slab of concrete.__ can__ believe you,_ I shout. __ou sat there__ust sat there__hile I lied about Ben Parish. You knew the truth and you just sat there and let me lie!

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father__ study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

I would just have to find a hog, slaughter it, butcher it, cure the meat, then fry it up. Thinking about the bacon__he potential of bacon__ives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn't. Seriously.