Chapter 2

Travis watched the dawn spread across the sky from the front room. He could feel the heavy bags under his eyes but he refused to glance in the mirror to confirm just how bad he looked. His feet were leaden and his head was logy as well.

He gazed at the teenager sitting in the overstuffed chair, drinking in again her lithe form and her face. She was dressed in black britches and a black blousy shirt that shimmered when the light hit it. Her attire was complete with black boots that reached above her ankles. Travis couldn't put his finger on it, but something about her was entrancing, alluring in a manner he had never considered. He couldn't keep some of the excitement out of his pants.

"I'm exhausted," Travis said, stammering. "I haven't slept in a week thanks to your father. I'm going to lie down and catch a few hours of sleep. Okay?"

"In my realm, sleep comes to us. How fascinating that you must catch it here, lying down to snare it no less. How do humans thrive with such contradictions?" she asked.

Travis rubbed his neck in confusion. "'Catch' is just a figure of speech. In any case, I've got to sleep, now. My bed is in there." Travis pointed with his thumb over his shoulder and then followed his own direction. He kicked off his shoes and fell into the sheets. Without another thought, he fell into a deep sleep.

Travis stood in the pew of his childhood church, St. Stephen's. He knew that he was dreaming but the tableau was so real, from the wood with its flaking varnish under his fingers to the faded colors of the wall tapestry of Christ's feeding the masses with fish and loaves. His sense of detail was exquisite. Motion caught his eye. High above the altar hung the crucifix with the figure of Jesus nailed to the cross. The figure on the cross was struggling.

First one hand freed itself from the iron pin and then the second one. With a great sigh of relief, the figure jumped down to land roughly on the floor of the altar. As the figure disappeared behind the offering table, Travis glanced back up at the crucifix where an old, cracked wooden figurine still clung to the cross. A figure dressed in a torn, dirty robe stood up and walked off the altar and came down the center aisle.

When the man with the long, scraggly hair came abreast of Travis, he stopped and looked back at the crucifix. "Do you see that?" the man said. "That pale white man is not me, or at least the me that was at the crucifixion. It's bad enough that my own followers couldn't keep their mouths shut and that the Romans murdered me, but to steal my face after death because it wasn't pretty enough for white Europeans — I find the entire circumstance demeaning."

"Jesus?" Travis asked in a soft voice.

"Get it through your pea-brained head: that's not me hanging from the wall. Since when is piety an excuse for a lack of artistic talent?"

Travis chuckled. "I never imagined Jesus having an attitude."

Jesus snorted. "You and half the world. Belief is not an excuse to stop thinking and this is exacting with millions of people do every day. You can't know me without using your God-given imagination. That image," he said, pointing at the crucifix, "is so revolting and I am so out of here."

With that last statement, Jesus walked out the main doors of the sanctuary. Travis slept on.

The afternoon sun prodded his eyeballs and forced him to blink. Travis sighed with joy, enjoying the delicious haze of waking up rested and feeling whole. The warm body snuggled up next to him seemed to curl into him like a...

"Holy Shit!" he said through his clenched lips. He looked down and saw the girl snoozing happily with her head resting on his chest. His arm was laying over her shoulder and down her back in a protective clutch. His pants were tented. On one hand, he wanted to jump out of bed and on the other hand, he didn't want to scare her. On the third hand, not that he had one at the moment, she was jailbait, bad, bad deliciously tantalizing jailbait.

Travis shifted in bed and the girl stirred. She hoisted herself onto her elbow and gave out a loud yawn. "I caught some sleep too, Travis, and it was as nice as back home, maybe better."

She looked at the bulge in his pants. She stretched out her other hand and giggled, "Is that for me?"

"Don't touch that," Travis demanded with a bit of hysteria in his voice. "You're not old enough to play with it."

"Old?" She asked with confusion in her voice.

"I'm 23 years old," Travis explained, "and you're what, maybe fifteen years old. That is way too young to be fishing for trouser snakes."

"Years? What are years?"

"Oh Prince what have you done to me?" Travis said, crying out towards the ceiling as her alien context spiked his anxiety. "This is the planet 'Earth.' The earth goes around the sun while it rotates on its axis. One rotation is a day, and 365 of them will occur before the earth goes all the way around the sun and returns to the place where it began. That's the universe. I've been around the sun 23 times. Got it?"

"You live in a strange world. I dance in the light of the sun and I bathe in the light of the moon. I don't rotate; I don't go around the sun or the moon. They come to me and always have for a long, long time. To me, you seem very young and I can sense that I have danced under the sun longer than you."

"Damn," Travis blurted as he tried to wrap his brain around that set of revelations. How could there be a world that wasn't a world, where astronomy had no meaning Travis remembered staring into the starry night of the Prince's realm; there were real stars. And the moon, the moon had hung large and heavy above the meadow; surely it was real.

In the meantime, Zithme'anya poked her finger at the small mountain rising from his pants. "You have chained a serpent between your legs? I thought you didn't know any power?"