Chapter 1

The sun was the same as it had always been, pulling the last of the day’s radiance from the still-warm summer sky as it slid down heaven’s dome toward the waiting embrace of the Earth. The cicadas were noisy, as ever, their insectoid trilling fillng the air as if it were needed, singing their buzzing insistence without any kind of thought as to the gentler atmophere they were displacing. Earlier, the occasional solitary serenades of meadow birds mixing with the staccato burst of a woodpecker and the careful edging of deer through the lush pastoral setting; but now, nothing save a mindless drone as each insect sought to outdo the others in volume. As it had been the year before. And the year before that. And the year before that. And the year before that. And ... stretching out for untold years before, until all the years melted together and became Time, a smooth blanket that covered and embraced the Earth.

Or so William’s vision made it. A year, a thousand, a million ... all the years, stretching back to a beginning even God had forgotten. It was a blessing, an uneventful, unmeaningful, unhurried blessing, to think that all Man’s hoping and striving and heartaching came, in the end, to the same smooth nothing. At least that way he could forget Julie, at least for the moment; at least until the ever-moving tide of Life pulled him out of the pretense of serenity and forced him back into the hustle and noise and stink and sorrow and unrelenting misery that was his life.

Julie. Why did he have to come back to the vision of her face; her sparkling smile, her gleaming eyes shining with ... with ... with some emotion, some feeling that wasn’t Love and never would be? Or, at least not Love as he was capable of understanding it. She ... she was happy, buoyant with an emotion that he had been shut out of for months now. She had had opportunities to see how much he needed her, how much he needed to hear her say “come sit with me and talk to me and share the quiet moments with me”. The opportunities that had been offered to her on a silver platter, that she had upended without so much as a backward glance. Of course it wasn’t her fault; no blame could be apportioned to her, not even the faintest trace of guilt; she was pure. The fact that she had brushed aside his presence as one would the crumbs of a sandwich was just that: a fact, a happening with no shame attached to it. William examined his distorted reflection in the knife’s blade, looking for any sign of the hopelessness and dead despair that sat as an immobile boulder just behind his eyes. He brought the sharp side to his throat and held it for an unguessable number of minutes before turning the flat edge against the flesh and savoring its cool indifference. An inaudible sigh escaped him as he put the knife down.

It was his court of last resort, his plan Z, but it was a reminder of how all his choices had been the wrong ones, doomed to failure because he blindly refused to see the obvious. Looking down, he saw that his hands had come together; the pattern made by the interlocking of his fingers was, for some reason, vaguely pleasing. Separate units that coalesced into a fitting structure, to form a basin; a container for water or sand or something equally useful. Two halves that formed a whole which was well suited to carry something to share; if he wanted to pick up the knife now, he would have to break apart that unity.

A shifting in the grass behind him brought him out of his useless reverie. He was mildly surprised to see Joanne standing behind him, wiping her hands fitfully with a checkered dishtowel. He realized he had heard the hinges of the kitchen cabin screen door announce her imminent arrival some minutes ago, but he had been too absorbed in regret to register the meaning. He wondered idly if she had seen him place the knife against his throat. She climbed over the low wall while slinging the towel over her shoulder, then sat on the wall a foot or two away from William. Her hands came to rest on the shaped stone, supporting and balancing her. The fingers of her left hand were close, almost touching William’s bare thigh, and he could smell her scent in the westering sunlight; a mixture of pancakes and syrup and sweat and ... what was that? Gardenias? Faint, subtle, but definitely there, a floral breath that couldn’t be ignored. She was gazing at the darkening sky with its sprinkling of starlight fading in gradually. William turned his head further, almost against his will, to trace the line of her neck where it disappeared into her t-shirt; a few wisps of her hair had escaped the ponytail and were moving softly back and forth in the breeze, as if they were trying to decide whether to stay or go. An absurd notion, and he cast his eyes downward at the thought. Joanne turned to look at him; her emerald eyes captured the last rays of daylight and infused them with melancholy. She whispered, “Julie?” Of course it was Julie; wasn’t it always? Who else would it be? But before those musings became irritation and peevishness, he shook his head briefly to clear it, settling instead for the almost-but-not-quite-pleasant task of responding in kind.

“Yes,” he whispered back, then realizing he hadn’t meant to whisper, said quietly, “Yes.” He hoped that would end the conversation and matched that desire with a turning away, his head hung low. He didn’t see Joanne’s hand reaching for his hair; almost making it, but coming to rest half an inch above his scalp. There it stayed for quite some time, trembling as she struggled with the need to stroke him, to pull his head onto her breast and cradle it, to wrap her arms around him and give him, if not the solace he wanted, then at least the comfort he needed. In the end, the unknowns were just too much for her, and she drew her hand back with an agonizing slowness that spoke of a desire that had been left on its own for too long. She pulled the flask out of the back pocket of her faded denim shorts, the flask that Walter had given her yesterday. It’s shifting weight brought a small anticipatory rush of lassitude; as though its holder, having yielded to the temptation to consume, was already on the mission of promised relaxation before the cap had ever been removed. Joanne lifted it and placed the bottleneck to her nose. She recognized the sting and odor as alcoholic, but her unfamiliarity with spirits in general left her no wiser as to the identity of the libation.