"The little shit," Pam Colby hissed to herself, scrubbing out an errant stain on her dining room carpet. "That -- little -- goddamn -- shit." She had just heard the clock in the living room chime 8 o'clock, and this particular Monday had already been a terrible day. She was boiling; angry over an argument between herself and her husband at dinner time. She had no idea where Jason was; by five o'clock Phil was already too involved with a glass of scotch to do anything more than pick at his carefully prepared food and mutter "Yes, dear." She had swatted the glass from his hand, he had swatted his plate to the floor, refilled the glass, and fell into a groggy nap on the couch in the den.
"Bullshit," Pam muttered again, scrubbing the gravy from her Oriental rug. "This is bullshit. Bullshit work for a bullshit ingrate that needs to learn to come home on time." Her head swam in the waves of fury that coursed just under her skin; she enjoyed imagining the incredible punishment that Jason would receive when he finally showed his face. He was gradually getting worse, she knew. She didn't know how, but Pam Colby wasn't programmed to be compassionate or optimistic, and rather decided that he must be getting worse, and that something needed to be done.
Those friends -- those haircuts -- those cars -- hardly civilized people, she thought. That boy needs to find out what life is really like -- he doesn't know, but I do. Life is me cleaning up other people's mistakes so often that they forget how much I do goddamnit. I'll give him a taste of what he thinks he wants. The little -- she viciously hit the floor with her brush and swore at herself as flecks of soap popped all over the carpet. "Goddamn --," she started, but then the front door opened, and she could hear a low voice. Time to find out what the hell was going on. Pam stayed on the floor; composed her face into concentrated contempt, and waited for Jason to pass the wide doorway. He was making noises out there in the narrow hallway, but still just out of her sight. It sounded like he was singing, no -- humming low to himself. How dare he come home late and be so happy about it, Pam thought. Doesn't he know what I've been doing all day? In a sudden rage she flew to her feet and briskly walked to the door, grabbing her brush so tightly that her hand was red and her knuckles white. As he came into sight, she saw that Jason was leaning, smiling, eyes closed, against the front door of their modest house, humming low under his breath. He wasn't just happy; he was glowing. And it pissed her off.
"And where have you been," she asked, pointed and loud. He remained where he was, unmoving, still humming low. "Answer me," she screamed, beating the brush into other hand, "where have you been Jason!"
He slowly allowed his head to loll to the side, and gently opened his eyes, still humming. He had an expression of arrival, eyeing this woman with all the contempt and coolness of a jungle tiger. It ebbed some of her anger to see him so calm, but then enraged her to see him so unaffected by his lateness.
"Jason Colby -- don't you dare look at me like that -- you think you're just so cool? You just look ignorant, and dumb. Where the hell have you been, stupid?" She was malevolently breathing now, harshly gripping the poor brush and bruising her hands in the heat of her anger. The coolness had faded from his eyes, and was replaced by his regular mixture of fear, shame, defiance, and dependence. Pam's eyes flared in violent pleasure at the realization that the calm, unfamiliar man that had entered the house had faded back into the fearful little boy that she could control, although Jason still eyed her through his sidelong glance.
"Not such hot stuff now, are you? No one likes a ninny, Jason -- take it like a man. You have to learn what's right. You think you can stay out after school ends with my car? Do you pay the bills, do you know what a bill is? Hell no, hell no! Pansy high school boys think the world of themselves, tearing around, being cool, being tough, being trendy -- it just makes you look like a -- like a -- like a fag, Jason! Just like your father; not a pair of balls between you! Cant you do anything right?" Jason had straightened up during her outburst and was now watching her build up a head of steam that could last for days if he didn't say something.
"Mom -- I do, I do a lot of stuff right --"
"Football? You think that's going to help you? You think a football player gets anywhere in life? Look at your father! Do something useful"
"Mom!"
"You're a drain on this household!"
"Mom, come on --"
"Cant you learn to help?"
"Like how?!"
"Go scrub the carpet," she said, thrusting the wet brush in his face. "And when you're done with that, come back to me, there's more to do. A lot more." Pam Colby bore into his eyes for a moment, put a tentative hand on his cheek in a reassuring manner, and then gave him a sharp, stinging slap. "Go," she ordered. Jason, completely thunderstruck and outraged, looked at the floor and brusquely brushed past her into the dining room. He took a look at the wet stain on the floor, like an entire plate of food had been dropped, and slowly crawled down to his knees. He scrubbed slowly for a moment; sadly, before he heard an annoyed tapping, and looked up. Pam was standing there, arms crossed, pointedly tapping her loafer on the floor. He suddenly briefly appreciated her sharp features; there was no statuesque beauty about his mother, but there was a powerful, slender, handsome grace about her. Hers was a face that could launch a thousand ships; Helen of Troy probably hadn't been a conventional beauty either. And now she was setting Jason to his job, on the floor, looking up at her, almost pleading, just, as she believed, as he belonged. She stopped tapping her foot and, sharply eyeing him, slid away down the hall.
In the den, Phil Colby was groaning in his sleep as he napped, hands neatly folded across his chest. The door from the hall opened gently as Pam slipped inside, and then closed again. She made a hateful face at the smell of spilled beer and gas, and stopped to look over her prostrate husband.
"Football? You think a football player gets anywhere in life? Look at your life, Phil, look at me! Look at us! Look at your son; another generation of loser. No wonder, he was raised by the biggest, dumbest, regretful losers of them all. Nothing ever happened right -- I hate us, Phil, I hate us!" She allowed the tears to flow, dripping in the solitude of the den on to her unconscious husband. He flinched, and broke his clasp to reach an unsteady hand to his face, then lay still again. With a scream of disgust and hatred, Pam angrily slapped her tears off of Phil's face, and then gave him a sound thump in the chest for the hell of it. He muttered in his drunken sleep and his mouth stayed open. A slight line of drool exited the side of his mouth, and as it dripped onto his shoulder, she yelled again at her disgust. She gave him another sound thump with her fist, and then kicked the front of the couch. "I hate you," she shrieked, kicking the couch; pounding his thick chest, beer belly, and shoulders with her closed white-knuckled fists.
The tantrum was visibly bothering Phil, who was called again and again to the surface of consciousness, but who immediately faded away each time into his own private hell. Pam carried on, enraged more and more at her unresponsive husband, wishing he could register each stinging blow as it fell from her contemptuous hand. Finally, she collapsed next to the couch in a heap of spent, empty tears. She wiped her forehead with the back of her sore hands and held her face as she relentlessly but silently cried and prayed for energy to keep on the defensive. It was the prayer she'd been whispering her whole life.
William Renault Montgomery looked at the huge street sign bearing his name.
Montgomery Avenue, a wide, lush thoroughfare with a heavily treed median, was calling out to him. Here was his name on a sign in what had grown out of the village of Capeton. Now called Cape Town, the immense stretch of forested bayside acreage that he had purchased well over one hundred years ago had somehow fallen out of his possession and been subdivided, and then grown into a city of it's own. Bizarre, William thought, that I should have lived to see this.
Wandering wonderingly through the immense traffic circle that Montgomery Ave became at the north edge of town, William started walking down the beautiful thoroughfare. He gazed through the wide gates into the park along the lake, stopped and looked into storefronts of the many tiny shops that attracted tourists and residents alike, skipped over puddles and nodded to passersby. William was in a state of complete awe. He'd grown used to the horseless carriages that whizzed down the beautifully paved roads, marveled at the remarkably bright, steady light in the streetlamps, but couldn't understand the silver devices that people were speaking into. He admired the colorful square light boxes that hung in the intersections, and speculated that maybe it was carnival time until he realized that the flow of carriages alternated when the lights did. All in all the bright colorful lights, the free and easy way that people walked arm in arm, chatting, laughing, the trees, the light wind on his face, made William feel truly alive, and the most fulfilled he'd been since he woke up. The world, he thought, is even more beautiful than I remember. How could I have forgotten about the colors . . . Smiling in the breeze, William continued his mesmerizing trek down lively Montgomery Avenue.
Meghan Williams was typing at her computer when it happened. A sudden, light tug in her right eye, like a quick muscle spasm. She blinked and rubbed it and went back to writing her sociology paper. A few minutes later, it happened again. Stronger this time, and in both her eyes, as if they were trying to look to the right without her doing it. She stopped typing and rubbed her face, trying to assemble the next paragraph of her paper in her mind. Her window was uncharacteristically open, the lacy curtains of her feminine bedroom waving limply in the breeze. She rubbed her eyes and started typing again when it happened a third time, and this time it was violent.
Her entire head jerked to the right, her neck muscles cramping with the unexpected movement, and her right hand flopped down to her side. She let out a little yell at the pain and the surprise, and her mind was finally wholly pulled from her work just as jarringly as her arm had been made to tremor and shake. There was a problem here, something possibly serious, but she would give it a minute and then go downstairs to her parents. She flexed her right fist, rubbed her eyes again, and then got up and wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the cloth of her soft blue sweater as she looked reproachfully at the computer.
Too much staring at that screen, she rationalized. She was shivering and looked to the right, at her window. The curtains were flapping now; a strong wind had come up and was violently pushing into her room. The wind was cold and piercing, and hit her like a wave of frigid Lake Erie water, which caused another slight twitch through her right eye. She walked to the window to shut it, but had just gotten there when she was immediately taken aback by what she saw.
Though it had been unseasonably rainy for the last couple days, that night the sky looked unnerving; the biting wind was mercilessly pushing the thick, low cumulous clouds around the sky like balloons, and where the night sky shown through the rushing clouds, it was a brilliant deep blue velvet, pierced by thousands of sparkling crystal points. Faintly in the distance, she could see the slightest hint of purple and green lights playing in the hearts of the lowest, thickest, blackest clouds; clouds that slept grim and still on the horizon.
Her right foot started to twitch and her leg began to hurt with the quick, unwanted motion. She clutched at her neck for her locket as she watched rain patchily fall and fog begin to roll down around her middle class neighborhood. Some children ran inside their house next door, and the blue cover of the Williams' backyard pool began to billow with a slow engulfing sound; like the earth itself was taking a deep breath of the astounding night.
Meghan's right side began slowly shaking, first on her skin, and then she could feel her lungs and stomach fall into the grip of the alarming spasms that rocked her body and almost dropped her to the floor. She began having trouble breathing as her right hand suddenly cramped into a tight fist, which she beat against her chest as she fought to expand her deflating lungs. Clutching at the windowsill with her left hand, her immediate reaction was to call Jason. She took one step back, looking at the white slim line phone sitting on her nightstand, and then had a terrible, rocking spasm shoot down that leg. She let out an anguished screech and dropped down on her left knee, her right leg flexing crazily beneath her. The clouds were still rushing around outside, and as she leveraged herself up to look out the window, she saw that the weather had gotten worse.
The clouds were flying now; huge things, a mile high and black as death, were running like frightened animals from horizon to horizon, but always managing to circumnavigate a medium sized hole in the middle of the sky, through which shone something that Meghan couldn't identify as her eyes twitched open and closed and fought for breath. It looked like the moon at first, a perfect white circle, but Meghan had looked at the moon often, usually after making strained love with Jason, and knew that nothing in the heavens above Earth was that purely white. The diamond-white stars were twinkling and shining like diamonds, and as Meghan painfully pulled herself closer to the window, she could swear that they were moving too. They were following graceful arcs, peeking out where they could from behind the clouds, and looking brighter and kinder and more purely white than anything she'd ever seen.
Another spasm coursed through her, this one through her neck, making her head torque backward and look at the ceiling, and then she started to hear the whispering. All at once the pain was over. The moon bright circle was larger now, and more yellow. It cast its ochre pallor over the entire neighborhood, and as Meghan stood up, perfectly comfortable and relaxed, she somehow connected the gentle, lively whispering with the beam in the sky. It was as if the yellow was tinged with blackness, but had a center of pure bright white, and it was from that center that the whispering laughed with Meghan and somehow beckoned her. Carefully, she looked into the shining orb, and found her eyes were strong now, impermeable and could handle the strength of even that holy light. Somewhere in the middle of it, like a white shadow, she saw movement. It looked like an arm, perhaps, or a leg, but she knew that it was a person; that she could feel. And it was joyously whispering at her as if from another room, as if from another place. Curious, Meghan flexed her left foot and found that it not only worked, but that it felt relaxed and beautiful. She took a tentative step, all the time focusing on the light, and found that in one stride she had traversed half the distance across the heavens and was standing somehow closer to the light. Meghan's eyes danced as she focused harder on watching the whispering shadows that kept slipping away into the light, and she took another step toward the yellow rim. In one more stride that bridged the earth and the heavens, she was standing, curious, nervous, and elated at its threshold.
Warm wind was pouring from the entrance, and the white shadows in the white oblivion were moving quickly, as if beckoning her to follow them. They were getting smaller also, and she knew that they were leaving her, and that her chance, if she took it, may be coming to an end. She touched the locket at her throat again, only to find it was gone. She tried to wrap her arms around herself again, only to find her sweater was gone and she felt only the warm, young skin of her smooth, bare breasts. She lifted one leg into the oblivion, and immediately the warm wind grabbed hold of it, and she understood. She didn't have to go in, but however far she went, she was bound. The warm wind embraced her other leg, and then her body as she was fully engulfed in the gentle air. Immediately she was clothed in the softest, most gentle cloth she knew; it was cloth like air; and she was warm, comfortable, and happy.
And there, in the vestibule of oblivion, she turned and her gaze fell like rain down upon her neighborhood, her house, and upon the distant speck of blue in her house that was her beautiful sweater, lying wrinkled and empty on the floor by the window. With a smile that emulated happiness like waves of warmth, she said a silent goodbye to that neighborhood, her house, her lone, empty sweater, and all the other things she'd fleetingly known in her life. It was beautiful, and it had ended. The angels' whispers breathed their sweet warmth breath around her, and she answered the call with a calm, full heart; turned from the cold raining world and became one more pinnacle of shimmering diamond light in the sky. She was gone.