Highwater High

Take it like this:

like a two-step, the downbeat coming quickly and relentless. Take it home with you, and put it in your inside pocket, out of the cold. Take it to your safe imaginary and lock it away, away from the world of asphalt and nuclear fission and sun shine.
Glorious, beautiful sunshine.
For this is love, and it’s fragile in the rays. It needs a long night and quiet.
**
Janet was in the middle of something - of an ice-cream pop to be specific - and it all seemed too damn much for her at a time like that. She had molten chocolate cream gushing down her face, floes drying before she could wipe them away with her withering napkin, increasingly futile in its work. They couldn’t be hid, or played off. She’d have to embrace them. So, five year-old from nose to chin, Janet went out to strut.
He was coming up the hall, still chewing his pencil from his math exam. The way he snorted when he laughed was one of the things she liked about him. When he stopped, she giggled.
He gave a chortle back, a half-snort, almost there. She forgave him this time, for there was conversation to begin – the first since he had dropped her off.
“So how ya doin’?”
She'd play it safe. Keep it honest, sure, but ease him in slow.
“Hi,” he snickered back. “I mean, well, well, it’s just…”
“Yeah. I couldn’t clean it off.”
“No, not the ice cream. It’s just, you see…”
This wasn’t right at all. She had initiated the conversation. It should have been her serve for at least one set.
“Just what?” Oooh. The words popped right out from her throat; she yearned to reel them back, even curling her tongue like they wouldn’t fall off. Now she had to dive in. “I mean, I want to lay this on the line. I really like you. It’s absurd. It didn’t really start last night, and I don’t think it did for you either. I don’t need you to put a ring on me or whatever. I just need to be sure I wasn’t a one-off., that there’s potential for this to go somewhere, you know, if that’s what seems right.”
“Right. No. Totally. I agree totally – I” (Now he snorted for real. Her heart jumped, knocking her mind into a swoon). “It’s just, well…”
“That phrase makes me kinda nervous, Johnny”
“I’m a marsh demon.”
“What?”
Janet liked laughs, especially accompanied by snorts. Janet did not like jokes. Or stupid grins like they could appease her.
“You’re being facetious.”
“No.”
“Ironic.”
“You don’t even know what that word means.”
“Well I’m pretty damn sure I’m using it right now.”
“It’s a good shot, but I’m just telling you the truth. I think you had to know.”
“Why, but, why couldn’t you tell me before? Maybe last night, before you held me so close and…” She was nearly transported by bliss, but matters were pressing here. Unfortunately, he’d already taken control of the discussion.
“It didn’t matter before, and besides, really, how easy do you think it is to get a girl to kiss you if she knows you're a marsh demon?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Especially a hip, sexy, and totally landbound girl like you?”
“Aww, you.” But he had a point, and it would explain the B.O. “Shouldn’t you be, like, shooting noxious fumes and cavorting with banshees.”
“I mean...I should be.”
“But instead…”
“How could I give up this face?”
“Same time tonight? No. Tonight I’ve got bingo with Mom-mom at the Union Hall. Maybe tomorrow, Johnny?"
“That sounds great. I’ll pick you up again.”
“Right after sundown.”
“So this is why you only go out on cloudy days.”
He snorted in response, so big it seemed to echo off the lockers. No one else noticed – in high school everybody’s so focused on themselves. Except Janet.
“Oh, this is really for the best. I feel like I know so much more about you. I can’t believe I never noticed. “
In response, he lifted one slime-coated tentacle to her tender dimpled cheek, and sucked her face into his cavernous maw.
God, he was such a better kisser than Tommy.

It was there in the window

Hold it together, he thought. Just a few more minutes and he'll be here.

His back was pressed up against the window of what might have been a store—maybe it was a cafe—but he was nervous, and he hadn't paid enough attention to notice. He stared down each end of the street in turns; for five or six seconds he would watch the people and cars coming at him from one side, then slide his smooth-heeled shoe across the pavement and stare intently to the other. It was February and he was sweating, and he couldn't stop. His handkerchief was cold and damp, and it gave him shivers every time he ran it over his forehead.

Maybe him? A rather well-dressed older man, the type you could call a gentleman and really mean it, was coming towards him from the left. The gentleman wasn't paying any particular attention to anyone or thing around him. It was nothing overt like that that caught his eye. It was the man's glasses that made him seem like the type to be a spook. But no, he walked right on past, just like everyone else who, over the past fifty minutes, had seemed suspicious because of an oddly-colored scarf, unflatteringly curved nose or indelicate walk.

He squeezed the handkerchief for lack of anything else to do. Moisture came out of it as if from a sponge, and he was disgusted to find his hands moistly greased in a way only sweat could do.

If he'd had a watch he would've been checking it obsessively, but he was pretty sure that it had finally been an hour since he'd arrived here. And then, at his wits end, dismayed that a woman across the street whose pink-rhinestone veil he had thought was a dead giveaway, when he had finally persuaded himself to blow the meeting off and find a glass of scotch and a dry napkin, he was shocked by a finger pointedly jabbing his lower back and the unmistakable uneasiness one feels when the animal brain is aware that it is no longer alone.

A voice from over his shoulder said, “You have ten minutes to make it to Clary's. Take even two seconds more and the whole thing's on ice.”

He wanted to run, right then and there, but he needed to know who the finger belonged to and whether he'd been looking for the right signs. Unable to stop his diaphragm from quavering like a sail in a storm, he decided to turn around, and did. Each of the one-hundred eighty degrees between him and his informant was a torture more hideous than the last.

There was nobody there. It would have been a cliché if he had had time to think about it. No, what he was met with instead was that most awful of feelings, one of revelation and powerlessness, because he saw immediately that there was a man—two men, three men, four—walking towards him, and he knew they were coming for him because they were dressed in uncomplicated, neutral-colored suits and their pedestrian anonymity bled a grinning, thuggish malice.

Run, he told himself.

He did. He ran as if he was being chased—and he knew, though he never stopped to look back, that he was. Everything was so unbelievably fast as he ran; he could make out no faces nor details of anyone he passed, the street becoming a layer-cake of grays and metal-paint greens.

His feet were so heavy, so unbearably heavy, that he couldn't stop himself from crashing into everything nearby; and yet he felt as far from the ground as if he was watching his own panicked dash from the clouds.

He might have turned a corner when he found Clary's, but his mind had accelerated with him and had long since lunged beyond the past. Still wild and unfocused, he was ignorant of his surroundings, and would have overshot completely if not for the flicker of a feeling at the periphery of his awareness, a bell-tinkling that made his roaring mind itch.

There it is, his intuition informed him. And, looking to his left, the newspaper was, through a window, indeed there.

He felt profoundly good, and pressed his face to the glass. The reflection of an old man with a lazy stoop filled the edge of the window, and then the street was mercifully empty.

Without him asking it to, his hand had found the envelope that he had tucked into the inside pocket of his overcoat. Looking at it, he realized that his fingertips had left long, damp marks across its face.

Good, he thought, before dropping it onto the street, at least they'll know it was me.

We are new men

"But of course," he said, in the kind of drawing room lit only by lamps with green-glazed shades, "you can't expect moral discipline, not anymore. The foundations of past times were as concrete as a sidewalk or a Soviet apartment building. Today we do not simply forget to believe. We can't possibly begin to imagine what belief really is! And so you see the absurdity of any appeal to the old staples of that handsome, well-ordered time. The human mind was in chains then, of course, but as the Negro chain gang on the road it was disciplined by the hardness of its circumstance and nourished by the sureness of hierarchy, until its body grew too large and strong for those chains and broke free. And now we stand upon our ruined shackles in an age of muscularity. Not with the wiry strength of the yeoman that hurls the pick and axe over day upon day, but with the dumbell-and-calisthentic physique which the scientists of strength test and refine with their own flesh, must we understand our future to lie."

His son listened to this and nodded, for his father declaimed often on this subject and it brought him a warm sense of reassurance to hear it repeated. It was perhaps also that this room made him almost giddy, so strong was his the feeling it gave him in what he was not embarrassed to call his soul. The desk and the bookcases were older than he. Their constancy reminded him of what he believed he would enjoy in siblings, had he had any who had not died before his birth. He had sat often on a little wooden chair the maid would bring in especially for him, sat and regarded his father while he drew like a winter's wool coat around himself the mystery of his affairs. They rarely spoke, the old man an orthodox adherent of the silence-of-children school, but that did not bother his son overly much; he took pleasure in his other senses, delighting even now in the scribbling of a pen or the vaguely racy sound of a seal pushed into hot wax.

He loved his father as he thought one ought to, which is to say in the fashion of an Israelite to his dangerously equivocal, but nonetheless paternal, God. And so he was only too glad, now as a young man, to sit in the study in the chair reserved for his father's associates and nod agreeably at the old man's lecture. Nor was it merely affectation, his compliance, for in this house he knew the blessings of certitude and consistency, blessings for which he prostrated himself before his progenitor with absolute faith that they had been bestowed by him.

His father was looking into the fireplace although it was unlit.

"Yes, my son, yours will not be a life grounded in religion, but do not curse this fact. Naturally you will never be a man of greatness such as once pierced as the dawn the night of the soul that shrouded ages past. What man now sees within himself with such clarity as Buddha or Christ? This nearsightedness is no fault of physical infirmity. The laws of evolution have made ironclad the proposition that the body is no less motivated by progress than is the force of history itself! No, it is simply that that into which they gazed was made luminous by a thing, at once magnificent and primitive, that burned hotter than the purest manganese. That was the soul, my son. For if it is that ours is an age of great bodily hypertrophy, yesterday it was within a man that one found the same mightiness of sinew. You cannot be so strong within, so embrace it without."

He had been taking a cigar out of the humidor in the desk's top drawer while he spoke, and now stopped speaking in order to snip and then light one for himself. He did not extend the same courtesy to his son, and, from the settling of his brow and the way his eyes lost their focus, it was probably the case that to do so had not occurred to him. There was quiet, and it stretched on without showing any signs of stopping as the clock added each second. Eventually it became clear that the old man was finished and his son was to recognize that their company was meant to be parted.

He hardly noticed the telegram in government off-beige on the edge of his father's desk as he was walking out of the office, for he thought he heard the sound of a woman crying in the hallway, and was sure it was his mother. The old man, too, no longer seemed happy, his cheeks having crept up even as his brow had slumped down.

In the doorway, he glanced down at the newspaper he had brought with him into the study.

"Oh, but the Prussians have gone to Belgium," he remarked to his father before stepping out. The old man remained silent. His son frowned, took in the scent of the office as he left, and, smiling, died in the Ardennes two weeks later.