The only other person in the place was a young guy with unkempt red hair and a greasy beard and a ratty fatigue jacket. He could have been a junkie, or even one of those Juilliard music pricks. But he wasn’t.

He was Death.

I don’t know how I knew, but I just did.

I tried not to stare. I stole glances at him as slyly as I could, and whenever I turned his way he was just reading a newspaper and giggling quietly to himself. Amusement? Self-satisfaction? I couldn’t tell, but it gave me the creeps either way.

At length he got up and walked to the door, and I felt not a little relief. But before leaving, he paused and said, “Do you want to know?”

“Excuse me?” was all I could say, and I choked it into my coffee cup as I was too frozen with sudden terror to turn around.

“Do you want to know when I’m coming back for you?”

I heard the word “yes” come out of my mouth, and I turned to look at him.

Death looked at me with his surprisingly green eyes, and smiled, almost kindly.

“It’s right there in front of you,” he said with a nod towards the counter.

I swiveled back towards my cup and saw the check for my breakfast. Coffee, buck ninety-five. The bell on the door rang as Death disappeared onto the snowy Manhattan streets. Eggs and toast, six dollars and twenty cents. Bacon, two seventy-five. Tax.

That bastard. It was there in the numbers somewhere. He was taunting me. To have the date of one’s own demise right in front of you in a handful of digits and still not know the answer for certain is agonizingly worse than not knowing at all.

I paid the bill and left the diner and that’s where the dream ended.

But I’ll now always wonder, every time I leave a tip at a restaurant, if I’m not arbitrarily choosing my own fate.

Thanks so much for coming over to kitty-sit this weekend while I’m at the MS Office seminar. I can’t believe my company paid for me to go to Providence for an overnight trip and a whole Saturday of training! I’m very excited – I just know there is so much more Excel can do. Have you seen those crazy 3-D charts that Terry from Accounts Receivable puts in his reports?? I want to learn how to do that!!

Anyway, you’ll soon see that Buster is a hungry little guy (just like his mommy! There is an Applebee’s right next to the hotel where I’m staying and I am going to eat the biggest burger they have! It’s like the Cathy cartoon on my fridge!! LOL!), so make sure his bowl is topped off with dry food all the time. Also, you can give him treats, but make sure they are the tartar control snacks in the blue pouch, because the seafood ones in the pink pouch upset his tummy and I don’t want you to have to clean up kitty-barf!

I think his litterbox will be fine until I get home, but if you get the gumption to scoop it out, it is in the basement under the stairs. If you go down there, please ignore any sounds you might hear coming from the storage room, no matter what.

Also, and this is really important, make sure you do NOT step into the chalk circle in the middle of the floor. IF YOU DO STEP INTO IT, DO NOT STEP OUT. FOR YOU MUST PUT DOWN THAT WHICH YOU HAVE SUMMONED. Y’AI ‘NG’NGAH! YOG-SOTHOTH! H’EE – L’GEB F’AI THRODOG UAAAH! Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. YOG-SOTHOTH!

Oh, and there are a couple of strawberry Activia yogurts left in the fridge – go ahead and eat them if you want!

See you Sunday. Buster and I thank you!

Pamela

Mom told me that Washington Irving was a writer and then I learned about him last year in the fifth grade so I guess that’s OK but it’s funny because I don’t like to write. I like to do math, though. Well I did, until my teacher started making me show my work and I don’t like to show my work and so my grades got bad this year.

Mom got really mad though because she looked at all my homework and told me the answers were right and that my teacher shouldn’t fail me if I got the answers right even though I didn’t show all the steps I was supposed to show. So she went to the school and got me signed up for the gifted program, and it is pretty neat, because I get to be in a different classroom and the other kids are fun and I have a new math teacher.

Every day we get to spend a whole hour doing whatever kind of work we want and my new math teacher came over and asked me about the paper with all the numbers on it in my Trapper Keeper. It was the plain blue one that I keep my own junk in, not the Batman one that has my school papers in it. Anyway I told him that one night I was up late because mom let me stay up, and I was watching TV and then I found one channel that was all black but there was a song on a piano. It sounded really neat so I started writing it down. He asked what I meant by write it down so I told him that music sounds like numbers to me and I wrote down the numbers that the piano song was playing. He asked if he could borrow the paper and I said it was OK but to give it back when he’s done with it because I wanted to use the back side for other stuff.

I haven’t been back to school in a long time though because after my math teacher took my paper, the angry guys came to my house. They yelled at mom and went through all our stuff and mom cried and they kept shouting about codes and secrets and how I knew them and I don’t even know the Fibanachy or Fibowhatever guy they were talking about.

Then another guy came in and he was an army guy but he was really nice and he reminded me of grandpa because he smelled good and he smiled a lot. He talked to my mom for a long time and she stopped crying and then told me I needed to go with the man but just for a couple of days and then I could come home and go back to school.

I don’t know how far we drove but it felt like a whole day and I couldn’t see anything out the windows of the van but they let me bring my Nintendo with me so that made it OK.

I have a nice room here and they let me eat pizza and stuff, and the bed is a lot bigger than the one I have at home but it’s been longer than a couple of days. I sort of want to go home but I’m afraid to ask and the people are nice to me. The army guy comes to my room in the morning and plays different kinds of music to me and asks me to write down what I hear, so I write it all down in the numbers but it makes my hand hurt to write so much.

Before dinner the army guy takes me to see a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t do anything but ask me questions. He gives me math problems to do and I do them and he asks why I don’t show the work and I tell him every time that I can’t. He asks why and I tell him that I just know the answers, that’s all. He asks other silly questions about how I sleep and if I hear voices and have bad dreams. I don’t know why, because the doctor mom always takes me to just wants to look in my ears and puts that cold thing on my chest and tells me to breathe so I don’t know why the other doctor asks so many questions.

The army guy just brought me a cheeseburger and a Pepsi and it smells really good and I’m hungry, but my mom makes good cheeseburgers too. He told me tomorrow I’m getting a cat scanner or something. I don’t know what that is, but it reminded me of my cat, and I just want to go home to see her. I’m tired of writing down all the numbers.

I served my goddamn country for over forty years, risking my life for the Company nearly every fucking day, and they celebrate my retirement with cake. How quaint.

I shove a couple more framed photos into the cardboard box; a 12×12x24 testament to a life led in secret. Things used to be different here. Our work used to mean something.

I get to the conference room and already the college boy pedants are chatting it up. They all think they know so fucking much, but not one of them has ever seen real field work. You can play with computers and gizmos all day, but that’s still not playing The Great Game. Sit at a cafe table in some godforsaken Eastern Bloc city, chatting pleasantly with the man across from you, knowing that only one of you is going home alive? Now that’s playing the game.

“…and I was like, fuck, Jerry, you’ve been looking at the sat shots all afternoon and even I could spot the trucks near the… Oh, hey Jack,”

“Andy. Francis. Pete,” I greet each of the boys there, talking among themselves. And Jesus, they are boys. Did they recruit these kids right out of Cub Scouts? Fuck.

“Jack, I was just telling the guys about how we spotted those Taliban ammo trucks near Kabul on the sat photos, and…”

I laugh right at him. What a fucking punk.

“Sat photos?” I laugh again. “Andy, let me tell you what real covert work is. There was this time in Prague in sixty-three, and this KGB guy had been tailing me for…”

“Yeah, okay Jack,” Francis says, with a patronizing clap on my shoulder, “we know all about the Good Old Days.”

“Sorry fellas,” I say, “it’s just that, you know, things were different then. We didn’t have all the computers and satellites and crap. We had to go out there and–”

“Yeah, we know, Jack.”

“Yeah.. okay.. you know. You know it all,” I mumble, and excuse myself for the moment.

I head back to my office, close the door behind me. In the bottom desk drawer is my service pistol, the same one I’ve had since the 50’s, my old Colt revolver – not one of those slick black Glocks they issue to the new kids nowadays.

I chamber one round, and sit down in my chair.

It’s time for this old man to retire.

They met at his car on the top level of the parking garage, his faded blue Civic covered with a fine layer of city soot and whatever other crap fell out of the sky from all those jets flying overhead into JFK.

He threw her pink nylon bag into the trunk and it looked out of place amongst his black suitcases and rusty jumper cables and other bits of boy things, and suddenly it was his turn to question the idea of riding for so many days in a car with a strange girl, a soft creature so frightening to him that he thought he might be sick from her beauty.

Their uneasy smalltalk petered out by the time they reached the tunnel, and she reflexively reached for the radio buttons. He told her with a chuckle that he’d just installed a new CD player, but it had jammed with the very first disc he’d inserted so unless she was willing to be in charge of the FM tuner for the length of the drive, they’d be listening to REM’s Monster for four days straight.

By the time they reached Ohio it was clear they had little in common. Conversation was strained all the way through Illinois, and they didn’t speak for most of the next morning after they’d stayed the night in Des Moines.

They fought about something trivial all the way through Nebraska, which turned out to be an FM graveyard, so they had to listen to the REM disc for the umpteenth time just to fill the post-argument silence.

The chill in the car dissipated in Colorado, and they even managed to have some laughs together in a shitty diner outside of Denver before spending the night in a cheap motel room with two double beds, a broken TV, and a breathtaking view of the mountains.

They were hardly friends when the dirty Civic finally rolled into Las Vegas. He dropped her off outside a nondescript house on an arrow-straight lane of prefabs, and they never saw each other again; he left his car for dead in a lot in Henderson and flew back to New York, while she dropped out of school for good and started her new life.

But for the rest of their lives, every time they heard one of those songs on the radio, they would smile.

“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” is your Benzedrine, uh-huh
Butterfly decal, rearview mirror, dogging the scene
You smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
You said that irony was the shackles of youth
You wore a shirt of violent green, uh-huh

My new Muse was late for work today. Again. One week on the job, and already she’s pissing me off. I’m not sure this is going to work.

I had to get working first thing today. Last night I tossed around for hours, struggling with some dialogue, yet stubbornly refusing to get out of bed and work it. So this morning I wanted to deal with it as soon as my fingers hit the keyboard.

At 7:30, she hadn’t come in. By 8:30, she still hadn’t shown up. Shit.

I called her cell. The one I provided for her when she started working for me. The one I told her to leave on all of the time.

“Hey, you know, sure would be great if you could show up some time today. I can’t sit here all morning staring at the screen.”

“Stuck in traffic on the I-90, sorry,” she said.

“You couldn’t have left, oh, thirty minutes earlier to beat traffic?”

“Car wouldn’t start.”

“Pretty sure I specified ‘must have reliable car’ in the want ad,” I said, and hung up.

She came highly recommended, and she’s wicked expensive, so I didn’t feel too bad being irritated at the tardiness.

Twenty minutes later she trapsed into my office and plopped on the couch. She opened a whimsical turtle-shaped messenger bag, pulled out some tablets, and tossed them on the coffee table. After propping up her feet, she took out a pack of Camels.

“Well, what’ve you got so far?” she asked.

“Nothing yet. Been waiting for you. And I’ve told you before, Calli, you can’t smoke in here,” I said. She pouted and put the cigarettes down.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to snap like that. I’m just struggling here, you know, and I needed you a bit earlier.”

We sat in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. “That’s a cute bag,” I said, changing the subject to clear the tension. “Where’d you get it?”

“My little sister gave it to me. She’s a good kid. Now, are we gonna sit here and chat all day, or are we gonna write?”

I smiled. Calli pushed her sleeves up over her beautifully inked arms, and grabbed one of her tablets. “Now, I’ve got some dialogue I want you to try out. I think this will work.”

Yeah, it might work, I thought. I’ll still need another week to feel this arrangement out, but I think it might work.

He brought down the champagne, the last of it, to the shoreline from their makeshift hovel under the trees a few yards back.

Lane took the cup from Tom’s hand, and thought to herself how there were few other places in the world that could look more like Eden than this. The sun had just completely set, but through the early moonshine she could still see right through the crystal clear waters to the coral reefs just under the surface, which occasionally spiked up through the gentle seafoam-topped waves.

They spoke little that night, making only passing remarks about the way the stars shone with a brilliance greater than the city lights they had left behind.

Just after midnight, as the fire died, Tom considered getting off of the wool blanket and heading back up to the trees to gather more palm leaves and bark to keep it going. Lane stirred gently in her sleep, wrapping her arms tightly around him, and he changed his mind.

February 25, 1954

“You know, I really can’t remember the last time I had fish for breakfast,” Lane called down to the beach. Tom was there cooking the morning catch over the fire, as scrub-robins and flycatchers pecked their little beaks into the sand in search of the morning tide’s offerings.

“Ever have lox on your bagels?”

“Of course.”

“Well, that’s fish.”

“Yes, I know that, but this is, well, it’s like raw fish-”

“It is not raw fish, see, I’m cooking it,” he said, pointing dramatically at the fire.

“I can see that. You know what I meant,” she glowered at him.

They continued bantering right through the meal, stopping only long enough to devour the huge slices of tuna. Fish were plenty in the shallow waters of the reef, and Tom had no trouble catching upwards of ten large yellowfin and dogtooth tuna a day.

After spending the next few hours competitively skipping flat pieces of coral off of the glassy waters, they chased each other through the sand, knocking one another over playfully and kissing each other raw.

They had become accustomed to the harsh tropical sun, but still had a daily ritual of getting into the shade of the hovel at mid-day and making love. Knowing there was no way to cool down, the heat of the day was decidedly best shared with one another.

February 28, 1954

Tom squinted at the glare off of the salty white sands, looking at the ships moving across the horizon.

Lane rose from sleep and sauntered over towards him. “What are you looking at?”

“The navy ships are gathering,” he intoned, “it probably won’t be long now.”

“Do you know what day it is?”

“I dunno, maybe Thursday, Friday, who the hell knows,” he said, kicking sand and turning away from the ocean.

Both of them looked towards the trees and to what remained of their small airplane after it had crashed through the dense brush many days earlier.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she whispered.

“I do love you, you know.”

“I know.”

Silence.

“Tom, where is the device?”

“Other side of the trees, I’d expect.”

“Should we go nearer to it?”

“Doesn’t matter, anything within a mile is-”

Lane began weeping, silently at first, like a small bird cooing, then sobbing.

“It was just a goddamn vacation,” she yelled, “we were supposed to go away for a few days on your shore leave, but..if…” she trailed off, and fell to the ground clutching at handfuls of sand, her tears being absorbed the instant they fell to earth.

A storm cloud crossing the sun granted Tom a momentary reprieve from the glare, and he could see that the navy ships were moving closer.

March 1, 1954

Though it was the same fish they had eaten every single day prior to this one, the day’s catch was particularly tasty, and they ate it with a coconut relish that Tom had somehow managed to scrape together.

They talked of cold nights in Chicago, of kissing goodnight on the platform of the L train as they went their separate ways after university classes each night.

They talked of the long days in the summer of ’44, when Lane would wait for the postman to bring word from Tom – was he doing okay in France, and how soon would it be until he came home?

They talked of rainy afternoons in San Francisco, staring out of their apartment window across the bay, wondering when he would get reassigned to another air wing and another city, knowing that as long as she was with him, it would all be fine.

The day passed in effortless conversation, a kind that they had never had before.

When silence finally overtook them in the afternoon, they couldn’t help but smile and stare into one another’s eyes, despite the fate they had already resigned themselves to.

In the last fraction of a second of his life, Tom thought to himself how wonderful it was that those big brown eyes of hers could reflect so much sunlight.

The hydrogen cloud rose quickly over Bikini Atoll, with the brilliance of a thousand suns.