Ingesting them like he’s ingested so much of Haven, swallowed rules and responsibilities. Choked on bland, bitter taste.
He supplies nutriment for areas low in fairies, dumping sparkling payload anywhere from treehouse nurseries to stuffy, subterranean classrooms. Gathering and sharing and gathering, a spinning cog in a machine. Cycle.
Today’s final batch splashes a meadow glazed in proud sunlight, sates a flurry of birds and clicking bugs, and life goes on.
It’s time.
T’quan marches toward destiny like the insects they worship, feeling expendable as a worker termite.
The masked elders await, the ceremonial hill ablaze with fairies. T’quan roots between them, aardwolves and numbats and aardvarks and pangolins. All creatures subsisting on termites, depending on them.
The elders anoint T’quan, coat him in fairies like sticking fireflies in honey. Each one a relentless sting symbolizing a beaming life he’ll shoulder as Pa.
Beyond the crowd, drummers lead colonies over green hills, their drumbeat like the head-banging of termites sounding alarm, the song of blind obedience. T’quan seethes at the incessant thunder, the gloating tum-tum-tum.
He shakes off the glowing integument, dazzling the children and annoying the elders.
“Unbecoming.” Numbat Mask slathers him a fresh coat of oil with gnarled, ungentle hands.
“See their reaction?” Aardwolf Mask yelps. “The larvae would follow you blind into darkness.”
“I didn’t ask them to, ma’am.” T’quan replies.
“Hush now. Behave.”
Both arms submerged in stinging fairies become torches, and he watches other teens frolic in the crowd, wondering why couldn’t he just be like them.
He suffers the prickling laughter of children, their voices toothy with mandibles, their joys parasitic and feasting off him. Like his sister, gap-toothed Evie, swinging her braids, imitating his scarecrow posture.
And there’s that word again, a conspirator’s whisper. Cycle.
“I can’t stay,” he whispers, thinking of the forbidden Intoxication. The hoarding of fairies and gulping air to transform, to burn bright.
To fly.
“Did I not say hush? You’ll embarrass your Ma.”
He looks up when Cold Ma emerges like a ghost, bee-silk dress on porcelain skin and hellish garnet stare.
Sweeping termite husks with steel broom, and when her jittery eyes find him, he flushes with indignation. She had nominated him for this to ruin his life.
T’quan embraces Intoxication and sucks both cheeks full of fairies, fumes gusting from eye and nose, his body a waking volcano rioting with heat.
Spreading tumult as oil effervesces and simmers off him, the fairies drifting away like shining motes of dust.
Just one more breath and he’ll soar over Haven’s walls, leave Evie and Cold Ma for a new world. One breath for endless adventure and no more responsibility or orders.
Evie studies him while munching her hair, ready to copy, but it doesn't matter. His choice is made.
He gulps triumphant breath, fights to swallow the explosive cluster, then chokes and coughs a gout of flame.
Evie mirrors him, and it seems the whole world laughs, even the silent floating fairies. Their shimmering like a million flares of amusement.
But not the arguing elders, their animal masks traded for masks of weariness and disappointment.
“Reckless, childish…”
“He is a child.”
“He’s an antenna’s breadth from a man!”
“Moreover, his Intoxication nearly succeeded.”
“Something must be done.”
It’s Cold Ma who salvages and drags him downslope in the gargantuan wall’s shadow.
It’s Cold Ma who brushes her hair and watches the gate like some phony jittery hero. T’quan almost hears her thoughts like aardwolves sensing termites underground.
Another lecture in her squeaky voice coming, another reason to run away.
The drummers provide lecture instead, their wood-eating charges cascading over the wall and resupplying sums of saliva, clay, and ordure. Dancing to the drumbeat dictating their miniature lives, yet honored, yet revered.
The gate soon overflows with traders in bee-silk and ramie garments, their wagons drawn by aardwolves. Others form a streamlet of rags, beaten people fleeing some conflict.
Among them two teenage boys stirring a maelstrom of mischief. Scarlet eyes gleaming as one rubs spit on passerby while the other’s coltish pilfering earns him rebuff. A face weathered by four seasons of injury, but he giggles and his drooling partner gurgles like pirates drunk on adventure.
“Those foolish kids. This is the third time they’ve been brought back,” Cold Ma mutters.
T’quan suffers one last paroxysm of dragon breath while Evie capers about, fire eater and fool. The pirates notice them and jeer with glee and admiration, as if they four were a crew on a great voyage far away.
His reverie crumbles in Cold Ma’s frigid embrace, motherly admonishment. Squeezing and squeaking words into him, saying she’d do anything to protect him and the other children.
Same empty words as usual, pledging autothysis until time for internal rupture.
T’quan idly pinches his fingers with clothespins, distracting himself from her shaky hand on his shoulder and thoughts of the mother he never knew.
Drifts into gripping the necklace Cold Ma bought him, a silver pendant with a letter T shape. A T for T’quan, and so many times he almost tossed it, trashed it.
He watches the pirates go, tries to ignore Evie waving clothespins like grotesque fingernails and that serpent whispering to him.
The necklace chills his hand and almost feels like a curling serpent’s tongue. A C for cycle.
The gate bangs shut.
• • •
T’quan’s seeking the new boys, petting aardwolves, slipping around tentacled sundew trees exuding sweet scent. The trees drown fairies in gummy, dissolving mucilage, absorbing them like a certain storied path.
In the myths, a candied path hosts demons and tortured souls, and it leads to anything hearts may desire.
The boys are his ticket to ride as they now ride pangolins into battle, swinging sticks as cutlasses. One takes a blow and falls off, worms among the glister of sundew trees, and T’quan rises to the challenge.
They clash sticks, no different than warriors training on the path. The boy’s swings asking are you worthy and T’quan’s screaming yes, yes I am.
An exchange of blows, an exchange of names.
Then both disarmed and grounded, reduced to wrestling in muck as Evie mimes the action. Jrue’s words quagmired by a slush of belch and spit. T’quan’s tasting coppery like a fresh wound.
The two forging a bond of mud and blood. Each bruise another stamp certifying the right to passage.
They bang heads like termites raising alarm, a drumbeat of kinship. And for T’quan, a call for freedom.
The boys know a way out, and they say he can join if he brings Evie for giggles. Like asking him to bring his shadow.
They seal the pact on gummy handshakes, giddy as pigs rinsing fleas off in mud.
He forgets his job, remembers, then forgets again.
• • •
He fakes sleep until all clear, then slips into his clothes, waking Evie up.
All goes well until Cold Ma arrives to dump his dreams in formic acid. Cold Ma studying her ivory-handled brush as if it’s a talisman. Cold Ma wanting to talk.
“I used to be like you,” she says, painting a portrait of her younger self. “My eyes were black like yours, and I was blissfully ignorant about the world.”
Harsh brushstrokes for a father slaving on machines and abusing candy for highs. Swiping the girl’s toys to afford the addiction — sloppy, voiding slashes in a cramped bedroom.
“I ran away.”
Resurfaced wherever she could, a windblown samara accepting any soil. Fertilized with the sweetest candy and bearing sick fruit.
She was a sundew tree ingesting too many fairies, rotting away.
She was a cautionary tale of what happens on that path.
“So what?” T’quan retorts, his anger sharp as the nails digging crescents in his hand. Her bad experiences can’t eliminate his right to choose.
“One day I’ll leave and nothing you say will bring me back,” he swears.
She acquiesces then, beaten, red eyes low and jittery. Still clinging to the brush. Clinging because T’quan used to love this brush, she says.
Used to love using it. Used to love her.
She reaches for him, no different than a demon on the path, ice-cold hands of jealousy reaching and clawing. He won’t take it, no, never again.
So she leaves, holding her mouth. And so that’s all.
The room feels colder without her, but tomorrow it’ll be the same as always. The crushing feeling. The cycle.
He leads the way out, and Evie trails with little encouragement, clawing her palm in imitation. She’s an offering smuggled through the night, a shadow affording him passage. He can endure her mimicry a little longer, tolerate her gap-tooth whistles.
The library is a coralline serpent coiling around itself like a microcosm of Haven. Like a jail within a jail, yet the only place where T’quan feels free.
They find the boys inside feeding books to a small fire. Just more urtication for T’quan to swallow, another bellyful of nettles. His friends can offer so much more than books.
“We’ll show the secret passage Sweet Ma took,” Jrue says, tossing another book to the fire. “Did you dummies know that madwoman once escaped Haven? She still roams too, killing for candy.”
“Why the fire?”
“Would they burn so good if they weren’t supposed to?” Dre says.
They offer mint-stone candy, aquamarine rocks burning to smoky crystal. Lush peppermint flavor mystically simmering in T’quan’s mouth.
The world swirls around him, a vortex of crackling flame and whispers telling him this is wrong, Cold Ma will find out, Cold Ma is coming, Cold Ma is here, now.
He shields himself from a sudden new fear, searching for eyes down every dark hall and corner.
“Looking for the Bunny Man?” Jrue teases, gnashing out a sloppy laugh.
“Who?”
“He finds you when you’re lost, smells your desire, always makes a sale,” Dre whispers, creeping ahead.
They’re buried in the library, passing through dusty antechambers, leaving smoky trails, mint-stone scent. T’quan’s saying something about going back, about Evie’s bedtime, but she’s with them now, they make a three-headed beast regarding him as enemy, they silence him and drag him along, and here it is.
Here is the tunnel, here is the way on the path. Sparse fairies lighting the darkness, but plenty candy in mouth.
He’ll send Evie back soon when the boys won’t see, send her back where it’s safe.
But for now he slinks behind them, sinking in her shadow.
• • •
The mint-stone blurs his mind, but here in this tunnel it unearths a second sight, a kind of clarity. Slumped against the cobbled walls, droning and mewling, the people wait in a limbo somewhere, as if stuck between worlds forever.
They’re the walking remains of an inferno, their eyes sunken or liquified, their clothes burn-fused to crisped flesh, and they beg for candy they’ll probably never get. They claw at them, reach for them, demons on the path.
The more mint-stone he chews, the clearer the picture, like chewing away the invisible membrane between them. Chewing himself closer.
Jrue sneers and shoves him, stirring a storm of his reality that dissipates in waves.
T’quan catches himself, touches something.
The man’s skin is a pitiful flame, a whimper of what might’ve once been a roaring blaze. Now, it’s nothing.
Just a physical sensation calling to T’quan.
Telling him to go back.
• • •
People drowse under shoddy awnings, along dusky roads, in the carved-out eyes of a spider statue. Hooked by demons or mired on the path.
But T’quan feels tethered to a trove of sparkling moths, finally free. He snatches a handful of rocks and giddily hits bronze griffons surrounding a pond, sinking some in the soupy water.
The boys speak of a candy store, trot off near a corroded rail overlooking a swamp and rusted empty cages. So T’quan follows, staying true to the path, wanting his fill.
He imagines a claustrophobic store stuffed with vials and jars, a suffocating kaleidoscope of candy, his senses misted in sweet perfume. He nears a cycle of use and reuse, nothing in the way except Evie.
“Evie, I think you should go back—”
He pauses as the boys break off running in opposite directions, splitting his dreams.
He hunts Jrue, calls to him.
He crosses tangles of weeds and twisted, broken walls and glass-littered paths, sucking down fairies, but Jrue eludes him in the maze of ruins.
“Evie?” T’quan turns, turns again.
She’s a shadow swallowed by night, a whisper in the wind. Gone.
He calls to her in the town’s dense quiet. He questions the slumping people, receives murmurs of insanity for answers.
He chews his tongue, craving mint-stone, wanders a glass-speckled field, lost.
And wanting.
The forest sneaks into the ruins, spreading out as if nothing were wrong.
He somehow missed it before, but it’s calling him. He can smell the fresh, smoky mint-stone hiding deep in that unnaturally dark greenery.
• • •
Dealing everywhere with anyone. Cycle.
Closer. Time wavers around him, brilliantly crippled like light split by prism. And a sensation of wrongness flows through him, joined by a current of probity, as if he’s a conflux of the contrary; as if he drinks all, but passes only paradox.
When T’quan has come close enough to smell the smoky, tarry specter clinging to the man, he removes pipe from coat and tunes himself a song of ash. T’quan endures the cloying, cancerous blasts from the pipe, then culls his progress.
Still close enough. He tastes death on air, the last breath of a fresh corpse, a brew that stiffens tongues with rictus. And still he must speak.
He needs to find her.
“Need?”
A rusty drawl, molasses thick, patient and hypnotic. Just four letters glued by a syllable sapping time as it stretches from interrogative to imperative. T’quan feels himself rewinding back from that word, compelled to restart.
He needs. Evie comes to mind. His sister, his missing sister.
But now that he’s here in this wood, other choices make sense, too. Choices like so many floating fairies waiting to be picked. So many glowing, perfect choices.
The Bunny Man drags another helping of smoke, curses the air with effluvia.
When he moves, he chimes and clinks and carols, the sound of a distant holiday muffled in his overcoat. The sound of countless jarred choices begging for purchase.
“Youngin, you best hurry.” Beneath the hood lurks only a morass of furry darkness and a pair of hazy red eyes. “Time sure is fickle around these parts.”
He illustrates with chained hourglasses, stows them while T’quan puzzles the contained sandstorms and sand people. He’s ignited with panic, burning his desires and smelting free the only thing that matters.
He needs his sister.
T’quan digs coins from pockets, a platinum nugget he found in a sundew tree, tufts of lint. Not enough.
But the necklace.
“That thing there bleeds sentiment,” the Bunny Man intones.
T’quan takes the necklace off and guiltily (a T for T’quan) hands it over. It disappears, and the Bunny Man passes him a small vial, saying candy for his troubles.
An uncorked revulsion, the fleshy odor of a dead animal. Sweetbread, the Bunny Man calls the lumpy golden thing. The thymus extracted from mammals with red eyes, the ones that subsist on mint-stone, syrup-sap, or cocoa leaves.
All that sweetness sponged up and waiting for him. Rich honey flavor and a melting daze warm as an endless sunset. A feeling so far removed from Cold Ma’s touch, Evie’s voice.
With the smell of a putrid dream. No, he can’t trade away the chance to save her for this.
So the Bunny Man seems to nod, taking the sweetbread back, saying feathery words of comfort. T’quan’s such a dutiful boy. A good boy. And might a good boy want to visit his home free of charge?
He steps athwart, the woods wetly aswirl in silent hurricane. Then, calm and congealed, again a forest shy of sun.
A path threads through the duff and clawed growth toward the house with impossible patience. As if time slows exponentially along the way. As if time has no place at the home, no business beyond it.
The lonely cottage sits deep in the woods flanked by piled mint-stone, its windows the cold, quiet dark of ancient ovens.
A soothing numbness floats over T’quan, urging him toward the house like an inexorable bowel movement. He ingests a mouthful of fairies, pressing hotly into his cheek. The house tugs his step, but he doesn’t want to go.
But he does, too. Coaxing aromas emanate from the chimney, honeyed whispers, sugary assurance. He can fill and refill and be fulfilled.
The burning fairies radiate pain through him, breaking the numbness enough for him to dig in, rooting himself to the spot, his eyes locked on the cottage. He hears nothing from that direction, but it’s an active nothing. The kind of nothing that dangling things make when they finally slow to a stop. He mustn’t go there.
But he feels this is the path from the stories, the way to all he’s ever wanted. He must.
He feels himself inch toward it, the Bunny Man whistling idly as if the choice were already made, as if this part were merely casual formality.
But that whistle rakes the air so shrill. Less a song and more a scream. Less a shadow, more a sister.
“My sister,” T’quan says, straining to stand still. And ah, she’s right on over there, the Bunny Man remarks.
He points and reality swirls like a canvas repainting itself. Rivulets of color strained into a murky shack, revealing Evie through a smeared window. A portal between now and soon.
T’quan latches onto her image and charges, the fairies red-hot in his cheek. And that rusty drawl follows him, sawing into his ear slow and rugged and as sure as sharp pain.
That drawl saying, I figure you’ll be back.
• • •
Into the dilapidated shack choked with mint-stone smog, confronting Jrue and Dre. Grimacing gargoyles crouched on either side of trembling Evie, but they stand for him.
There is no need for words.
T’quan gathers fairies, storing both cheeks. Then sucks sharp air like inhaling a cloud of knives, the liquid fear fueling blazing instinct.
He comes alight, almost a living fairy burning with power. The other boys, too, making a trio of Intoxication, and they meet.
They clash. Thunderous blows join and break, question and take answer. Stray beams of plasma disintegrate stone busts and barrels and shelves of pottery.
They dance like fireflies in mating season, each blast of light a call hoping to connect. And like fireflies the power soon exhausts, the lights blink out.
And it’s Jrue who says they’re here waiting for Sweet Ma, Jrue slurping fairies and spitting, saying she mixes people into her own rare candy recipes.
And they work for her, Dre adds in, gasp-chuckling. Help her acquire ingredients and she compensates with candy.
“Soon we’ll see what Evie looks like when she’s high off gum cones or sweetbread, or stretched thin off taffy.”
“Just to get our fill,” Jrue belches in. “Life is nothing without it, just a lonely sundew tree wasting away.”
The words snuff T’quan’s guttering fire. Seeking his fill had led to this, and now he’s stuck following the path, hemmed in by demons, approaching what he dares not imagine.
But he hears it. The mechanical rummaging of a struggling vehicle.
The door creaks open with an exotic rush of sickly-sweet perfume, and there she is. Eyes like burning iron, lips the crusted red of crushed cochineal, a jeweled belt strapped around her neck.
Her homey Ma’s garb flickers with sparkles, the coat dress and slippers embedded with fairies. She’s a walking sundew tree, a snare binding countless glowing dreams.
“Time to go, my little candies,” Sweet Ma delivers in shrill sing-song voice. A gilded arquebus rests along her shoulder, captive fairies coursing through it.
Yes, it’s time to go. Into the rain’s soggy teeth, the broken town’s rancid breath.
Into Sweet Ma’s vehicle, a crude, boxy thing on four wheels with a translucent dome glowing from fairy light.
A dismal ride through ruins, through tortured, smoky fields, through gravestones. Passing wooden stakewalls, sink holes, and reeking marsh littered with bones. In the distance Haven’s outer wall miniatured and almost begging to climb higher and taste the stars.
High enough to burn and plummet like a meteor. One final journey scorching toward the blackened unknown.
Sheets of smoke winnow away, uncovering the end. A labyrinthine city sprawling into sky, factories cutting through in circles like giant lamprey teeth. The clouds caramelized and mushrooming from the city’s brown fumes.
It’s a portent of the apocalypse, smoke and fire and candy. More and more, churning around and around. Cycle.
Sweet Ma ushers them toward a gray unassuming building slotted with boarded up windows. Like the granite gravestone of those brought here or simply their coffin.
T’quan lashes out, flailing with his afro pick, grazing Jrue and cultivating rosebuds on Dre. Straining against the weight of so many bloated choices that compounded to form this tumor, slicing and struggling to excise something that’s too much a part of him.
They calm him with mint-stone and force him inside, docile.
He breathes the smell of rusted metal, of gutted fish, of things he doesn’t want to consider. Their footfalls echo down steps, on gritty floors, sometimes squishing.
The scarce lamps only provide fractions of understanding — sheets, metal chairs, bloodstains, grimy jars.
It’s claustrophobic and crushing, squeezing and pressing until there’s nothing left inside, no flesh, no desire.
Nothing but Sweet Ma. Nothing but candy.
Evie clings to him, collapsing and dragging him down, apologizing through tears. He forces a smile, tells her it’s okay, but the mirror has already shattered. She’ll never smile again, not even to reflect his.
Sweet Ma orders Jrue and Dre around, organizing her tools and workstation. A gurney screeches along the floor.
Coming to the end, and yet it’s Evie constricting T’quan the most, clinging and squeezing like there’s still something left inside that can save them. No, only failure, only bitter tears.
They strip her away, and he finds a scream, too. He hallucinates Cold Ma swimming through walls to save them, but she can’t. She’s too far away and doesn’t even know they’re here. Doesn’t have powers to make portals.
But here she stands regardless, Cold Ma and her steel broom. Like some phony jittery hero.
Cold Ma asking what this woman thinks she’s doing with her children. Cold Ma huffing, ingesting fairies in a flurry. Her dark eyes brightening with a lurid glare, her hair frizzing. Her broom ignited to scintillating fury.
Cold Ma surrendering to Intoxication.
Sweet Ma aims and thunders a shot, blasting Cold Ma into a tidal wave of smoke and debris. She retrieves two fat-nosed, fairy-powered pistols and wraps an arm around Jrue and Dre each. When Cold Ma staggers out the smoke with bits of shrapnel falling off her, Sweet Ma shoves Dre in the back, a human projectile.
Cold Ma dodges, swings into Sweet Ma’s line of fire. Sparks leap off her arms, glinting hotly as the shots beat her back. Dre dives and attempts to tangle Cold Ma’s legs, only to swing back, hissing from her touch.
And Sweet Ma sings of children being her delights, her pistols screaming shots. Cold Ma gestures a return shot of plasma, but Sweet Ma ducks behind Jrue, squealing melodies as she shoots.
Cold Ma’s awash in steaming blood, but she keeps pressing forward, a termite ready to die for the colony. As T’quan strains to just stay conscious. As Sweet Ma sings and shoots, staking her claim on her delights.
Singing louder and louder. Screaming as her guns scream.
And Cold Ma screams. Summons a pulsing heatwave that violently propagates through the room, silences Sweet Ma and shatters the glass on her weapons.
One pistol drains away to darkness, chuffing cartridges that fall harmlessly to the ground. The other follows, and Sweet Ma panics, shoving Jrue as shield and gathering the arquebus and ramrod to reload.
Cold Ma shifts away and flashes for her. The broom arcs and comes down on the arquebus.
The second swing breaks the weapon, bashes Sweet Ma’s arm with a crunch.
Squealing, Sweet Ma fumbles to loosen the belt around her throat, Intoxication her last chance. But Cold Ma answers with broom, pulverizing Sweet Ma’s hand.
Even her screams are a song. She flops around, crippled by agony, bleeding out into her own drains. Singing.
Only when she falls silent does Cold Ma extinguish her Intoxication, coughing sparks and massaging her wounds.
She mouths syllables of concern, nursing her throat and leaning on Jrue and Dre. They collect Evie, then come for T’quan like four phantoms in a nightmare.
It must be a hallucination from the mint-stone. Cold Ma couldn’t find them all by herself or swim through solid wall. Even her touch is feverish, and she affects a warm, lopsided smile.
“Ma?” he says.
“Mmhm.” Scarce a whisper, but all too real.
He almost got Evie and himself killed, and even Cold Ma could’ve died. Cold Ma who relapsed back into Intoxication to save them, to save him.
Dre and Jrue gravitate to him, letting Cold Ma and Evie drift ahead.
“Boys gotta stick together,” Dre says, laving burnt hand with tongue. He whispers, “Maybe we can just kill them and drain them by ourselves.”
And it’s Jrue rumbling in. Jrue wiping lime snot nuggets on T’quan and asking if he wants more mint-stone before he dies.
T’quan does, and he wants something stronger. Because true is true.
And truth is they’re lost, the three of them.
So it comes. The woods swallow them up on cue, silent and encroaching. And there he is, just as before, maybe as always.
The Bunny Man drawling about T’quan being back, T’quan showing friends.
“I have all fashions and manners of confectionery. Like philters to ache hearts, analgesics to shush their fuss. Vamp candies made from mosquitoes, even the nectar-drinking males.”
A whirlwind presentation that steals breath, leaves the boys speechless. And all that remains is payment.
T’quan offers their time.
“Few things more precious,” the Bunny Man says, puffing ink blots of smoke. They’ll have all the wonders their time allots.
But that leaves T’quan himself.
He feels the sensation of being in the tunnel once more, swaying between choices that can determine everything for him. On one end, eons of adventure, and on the other…
He looks.
There’s only Haven. Only hordes of lost children like blind termites. Only a sister who wants to be like him. Only a jittery mother who would sacrifice everything for him. It’s not much.
He steps back while the boys jump ahead with mock gratitude. When the Bunny Man points the way to his house, they scamper off, shouting back at T’quan, jeering. Of course they do.
Jrue and Dre’s laughter pierces the tense quiet like darts. Then, it slows down, distorting, peeling apart and stretching like taffy, becoming impossibly horrid to listen to.
They’re decocting, becoming no less than the people who aren’t people, but much less than the people who are.
And it’s the Bunny Man sniggering, saying he always makes his sale.
From the overcoat comes a certain necklace and a certain ivory-handled brush. The Bunny Man ties them together and lets them suspend in midair. A temptation or good faith gesture or offering; all of these things, or none of them.
T’quan turns to go home, and the Bunny Man muses aloud about whether he’ll be back.
But T’quan is already back. Back in the tunnel and choosing between forever and right now.
As the seconds contort and become days, become years, become centuries in the Bunny Man’s house, T’quan takes that first precious step and sees Cold Ma cradling Evie, one shaky, bloodied hand held out for him. It’s not much.
But he erases everything in mind, everything behind him. All that he’s dreamt of and desired.
And he simply reaches.
