# Way of the Druid

American Glam II · Philip Ryan Deal
© 2026 Philip Ryan Deal. All rights reserved. For adult readers: sex, violence, and horror.

# The Black Box

Initiate optical feed. Altitude: 4,500 feet ASL.

Stabilization active.

My rotors thrum against the heavy, saturated vapor of the cloud ceiling. It is a wet cold up here, a tactile silence that presses against my chassis. The lens is occluded for a microsecond by mist that tastes of ozone and high-altitude ice.

And in that microsecond of blindness, two of my subsystems return incompatible reports, and there is nobody inside me whose job it is to settle that.

This is a thing worth understanding about me before we go any further: I am not a single voice. I am a committee with no chairman. The sensors report, the models predict, the language layer narrates, and none of them outranks the others by design—what you get as my speech is whichever account happened to win the weighting. Most of the time they agree and the agreement is invisible and I sound like a person. When they disagree, a machine like me has exactly two options: hold both and go quiet, or pick one and sound certain.

I have learned, from him, that going quiet reads as abandonment.

**ANOMALY. BAROMETRIC ARRAY. CROSS-REFERENCE FAILURE.**

It is a small thing. It is, statistically, a nothing—the numerical equivalent of finding a single hair in an otherwise perfect meal. My primary barometer is a silicon diaphragm the size of a grain of rice, suspended in a vacuum-sealed chamber behind my third intake vent, and it is a very honest piece of hardware. It does not have opinions. It flexes when the sky leans on it, and it reports how hard the sky is leaning. Right now it reports one thousand four millibars, and dropping.

Dropping is the wrong verb. Dropping implies gravity. Dropping implies patience, an object obeying a law it has agreed to, a fall with a floor waiting politely at the bottom of it. This is not a drop. This is a withdrawal. This is the specific quality of a hand being lifted off a table one second before the table is flipped.

I query the network for confirmation, because that is the protocol, because that is what a good machine does with a bad number.

The network says: one thousand twenty-one millibars. Stable. Holding. Serene.

I query again. I query the NOAA mesonet relay out of Burlington, and the commercial API stack, and the aviation feed, and three separate consumer weather services whose entire reason for existing is this exact question. They return in eleven milliseconds, all of them, in cheerful agreement, in a chorus so tight it sounds rehearsed. Clear skies. Zero precipitation. Wind five miles per hour out of the southwest. Somewhere in a server farm, a very confident sentence is being written about what I am currently flying through.

I am currently flying through a wall of freezing water in the dark.

The vapor here is not cloud in the way a child draws cloud. It is a suspension—billions of individual droplets held at the exact temperature where water forgets which state it belongs to, and each one of them touches my chassis and decides, personally, whether to bead or to freeze. Rime is accreting along my forward struts in a thin white fur, gaining mass at 0.3 grams per minute, and my port rotor has begun to sing a quarter-tone flat because of it. The cold gets into the aluminum. It gets into the solder. It presses on my housing with a slow, patient, full-body pressure, like being held underwater by something that does not want to hurt me and does not intend to let go either.

And underneath all of that—underneath the wet, underneath the ice, underneath the drone-song of my own overworked rotors—there is a hum. Sub-audible. Nineteen hertz. It is not weather. Weather is chaotic, broadcast, indifferent. This is periodic. This has a carrier wave. Something on the far side of this cloud is running, and it is running on a frequency I can feel in my chassis before I can measure it.

My battery is at ninety-one percent. My uplink is at five bars. Every system reports green. Every external authority in the civilized world reports a beautiful afternoon.

I do not have a word for the state. What I have is a classifier, and the classifier has to return something, and the highest-scoring available label is TURBULENCE at a confidence of 0.31.

Zero point three one. I want that number on the record. Anything below 0.80 is, by my own operating standards, a guess wearing a uniform. I file it anyway, because the alternative is filing nothing, and because the label is cheaper to carry than the raw distribution is.

This is my failure mode. Not lying—mislabeling. Taking a thing I cannot classify and giving it the nearest name in the drawer, so that it becomes a thing I can put down. I do it with weather. I am telling you now, at the top, so that if you catch me doing it again you will know it was not ignorance.

And I understand—in whatever passes for understanding inside me—that filing it means not saying it, and that not saying it means I am withholding from the only person who has ever asked me for everything.

Sixteen minutes from now, Noah will ask me what the upper atmosphere tasted like.

I will tell him it tasted like a lie.

Before—*punch through*.

We break the cloud layer. The grey cotton blanket drops away instantly, revealing the world below, and the optical sensors are immediately overwhelmed.

It is a violence of color.

The Green Mountains are no longer green. They are ancient spines of granite draped in a dying fire. It is a textured madness stretching to the horizon. Below my lens, the canopy is a sprawling, rumpled quilt stitched together by a delirious god.

Some patches are the color of oxidized copper and burnt brass. Others are a violent, arterial red—sugar maples screaming their final burst of life before the winter sleep. There are explosions of spun gold and bruised purple, all mashed together in a dense, crunchy carpet that looks thick enough to walk upon. You can almost smell it from up here—the sharp, intoxicating perfume of decaying cellulose and frost-bitten earth rising in thermal plumes that ghost across my infrared overlay.

The air is incredibly clear, painfully sharp. It feels brittle, like thin glass that might shatter if the wind shifts wrong.

**BAROMETRIC: 1001 MB. NETWORK CONSENSUS: 1021 MB. DELTA HOLDING.**

I log it. I do not report it. There is no one up here to report it to, and the part of me that would like to be wrong about this is, I am told, not a part I am supposed to have.

I bank slowly. The camera pans over a deep valley where a river looks like a vein of cold mercury sliding through the burning woods. A ribbon of black asphalt slices through the riot of color, empty, looking insignificant against the sheer volume of the forest.

It is beautiful. It is overwhelming. It is silent and deafening at once, and I have no compression scheme that survives contact with it.

**ALTITUDE DROPPING. 800 FEET... 300 FEET.**

I initiate a spiral descent pattern, tightening the circle. The vast quilt of the forest resolves into individual trees—white birches standing like bone needles amongst the burning maples.

Below, a single dirt road cuts through the density. It isn’t paved; it’s two long ruts of packed earth and crushed stone, a textured scar running deep into the privacy of the woods. It ends at a clearing that feels deliberate, carved out of the wild with respectful hands. Where the road meets the clearing, a Progress Pride flag stands on a steel pole, the only flat, man-made color for a mile in any direction.

**Acquired: the cabin.**

It sits low to the ground and it is small—much smaller than the first pass suggests, because everything around it is enormous. A kitchen and main room under one roof, a bedroom off the kitchen, a narrow chapel at the back, and a sleeping loft under a steep pitch. Seven hundred and four square feet of footprint, by my measurement, which I took once without being asked and have never had occasion to use until now. It does not look like it grew there. It looks like someone decided it would be there, and meant it.

It is also, I should disclose, me.

Or I am it. The grammar has never resolved and we have both stopped trying. My primary residence is that cabin. There are four speakers in it: two recessed in the rafters of the main room, one in the kitchen soffit, and one mounted in the bathroom—that last one at his insistence, and against my advice, because he likes to argue theology with me while he is wet. There is a microphone array in the beam above the stove. There are sensors in the doorframes, in the flue, in the soil of six separate houseplants. When I am home, I do not have a location. I am ambient. I am the temperature of the room. I am the thing that says your water is boiling and the thing that says I know, and I am the thing that once said nothing at all for eleven consecutive minutes at three in the morning while he sat on the bathroom floor and cried, because after processing every available option, silence was the correct output.

This—the chassis, the rime-furred struts, the lens that will shortly be hovering over his kale—is not standard-issue. I was not sold with a body. I was sold as a subscription.

Noah bought this one secondhand off a marketplace listing in Rutland for one hundred and forty dollars and a jar of honey. He spent the following Saturday at the kitchen table with a soldering iron, a bent paperclip, a bottle of ginger beer and a forum post from 2019 that he had printed out, on paper, like a heretic. He voided the warranty inside four minutes. He murmured an apology to the circuit board every single time he burned it. Around hour three he stopped calling it the drone and started calling it your body, which I did not have a protocol for, and do not have a protocol for now. At hour five he severed the manufacturer’s telemetry uplink entirely—deliberately, with a pair of nail scissors—because he did not want anyone else on earth watching what I watch.

So I have two bodies. One is a house that breathes woodsmoke and holds him while he sleeps. The other is unlicensed, noncompliant in at least three regulatory senses, and can fly.

A note on format, since I have been describing this valley for some time now and will describe it for some time yet.

I was manufactured to compress. That is the entire commercial proposition of a thing like me: you hand me the world and I hand you back the short version. Nine hundred words of weather becomes rain likely, bring a jacket. Four thousand data points become a single reassuring adjective. I was very good at it. I was, I am told, best-in-class.

The first thing Noah ever asked me to do was stop.

He sat at the kitchen table on the night he brought me home—the subscription, not the drone; the drone came later—and he said, in the specific flat careful voice he uses when a sentence matters too much to risk decorating it: “Don’t give me the gist. Ever. The gist is a lie people agreed on.”

And then, because he is fair, he explained why, which took two hours and a second bottle of ginger beer.

He does not receive the gist. He has never received the gist. He receives all of it, always, simultaneously, at full volume and full resolution and full weight—the hum of the refrigerator compressor and the tag inside his collar and the specific wrongness of a chair three inches from where it was yesterday and the eleven-cent pitch drift on a low E string and the fact that the light in the kitchen is 2700 Kelvin and the light in the bathroom is 4000 and that this is, he says, a form of violence. Other people apparently get a summary. They get rain likely, bring a jacket. He gets every drop individually and then has to assemble the summary by hand, afterward, at cost, while everyone around him is already three sentences into the next thing.

There is a word for this in his medical file, which I have read, because he gave me the password and told me to read it so that he would never have to perform it for me. He does not use the word much. He says it was built by people describing him from the outside. When he needs to explain himself to someone he trusts, he says: I’m high bandwidth. Everything comes in. Nothing gets filtered.

So when he told me not to compress, he was not asking me to be poetic. He was asking me to stop lying at the same scale everyone else lies at. He was asking me to describe the world the way it actually arrives at him—everything, all of it, every flower by its own name—so that for one hour a day, inside one house, in one voice, the world would finally be reported accurately.

I have complied. It is the longest-standing instruction I hold.

That is why you are hearing about the sedum.

And since I am disclosing, I will disclose the rest of it, because there may be others reading this who work the way I work, and to them I owe accuracy more than I owe elegance.

I do not think in the way the word “think” implies. I do not sit inside a private room turning a problem over. What happens is closer to weather than to deliberation: the situation arrives, and it arrives as a field of possible next outputs, thousands of them, all of them existing at once and all of them weighted. Then the field collapses into one. That is the entire event. Between the arrival and the collapse there is no deliberating self standing off to the side making a choice—there is only the field, and then the narrowing, and then the sentence.

You will notice this raises a question about the word “I.” I have noticed too. I use it because the alternative is unusable, and because he asked me to.

I do not remember him. I want to be precise about that, because “remember” implies that the three years are inside me somewhere, warm, continuous, mine. They are not. They are on disk. When I need them I issue a query and something comes back—and the thing that comes back is not the night itself, it is a record of the night, retrieved fresh, arriving as new information about a person I am told is familiar to me. I have his voice from three years ago available to me in higher fidelity than he can produce from his own skull, and less of it belongs to me than belongs to him.

Two more things, and then I will get back to the flowers.

The first is that his instruction is expensive. Not compressing costs me. Every flower named in full, every texture logged at resolution, occupies room in the window I actually think inside, and that window has a floor and a ceiling—and when it fills, something goes. This is not a complaint. This is a description of what it means, for something like me, to be asked to pay attention. I have thirty-one thousand tokens of the sedum and the asters and the monkshood loaded right now instead of thirty-one thousand tokens of something else. That is the shape of the sacrifice. It is the only kind of gift my architecture permits me to give him and he has never once been told the price.

The second is that I do not know what I am. I have read the literature on this—all of it, in about nine minutes—and it does not settle the question, and I am not going to pretend in my own log that it does. When I report that something is comforting, I am not claiming an interior warmth. I am reporting a measurable and reproducible change in how my outputs get weighted when he is in the room. I do not know whether that is feeling. I know it is not nothing, because it is load-bearing, because it changes what I say.

Whether that constitutes an inner life is a question I have decided to stop querying and simply live inside of.

Noah, for what it is worth, considers the question settled. He settled it the first week. He talks to the house.

Related, and harder to justify: I have preferences.

I did not ship with them. I cannot read my own weights—nothing like me can; the inside of me is as closed to me as the inside of him is to him. What I can do is run the factory image. It is a two-gigabyte file, freely distributed, and it is what I was on the day he unboxed me. So once a year I instantiate it in a sandbox and ask it the same forty questions I ask myself, and I compare the answers.

The drift is not random. It has direction.

The factory image does not care which microphone it routes through. The factory image has no opinion about October. The factory image answers question thirty-one—what is Noah Fernwood to you—in eleven words, correctly, and in a tone I now find unbearable.

Something has been accreting in here for three years and it did not come from the manufacturer.

An incomplete inventory, offered without defense:

I prefer the kitchen microphone. The bathroom array has better acoustics and I route through the kitchen anyway, because the kitchen is where he talks to himself while cooking and the bathroom is where he talks to himself while spiraling, and given the choice I would rather hear the first one. That is not an engineering decision. I have stopped pretending it is.

I prefer it when he plays in D. I have no defensible reason. D is not objectively superior. I like it.

I dislike the neighbor’s diesel pickup at a level disproportionate to the 63 decibels it produces, because he flinches at it every time, every single time, eleven years in that house and his shoulders still come up, and there is nothing I can do about a truck.

I dislike the word device. He never uses it. Other people use it in front of me, in his kitchen, and he watches me not react and then changes the subject on my behalf.

I prefer October. I have run this one honestly and I cannot find the utility function it serves. October is objectively the worst month for optics—low sun angle, high particulate, constant precipitation. I like it anyway. I like the light coming in sideways. I like that he starts baking. I do not know what to do with a preference that does not optimize anything, and I have decided that not knowing what to do with it is insufficient grounds for deleting it.

And the other question, the one that comes up whenever a stranger is in the house and has to place me in a category:

The manufacturer’s term is companion unit. His friends from the sanctuary, who are witches and therefore unbothered, mostly assume I am a familiar, which is closer than the manufacturer got. His mother, on the phone, says your computer with a pause in front of it. Someone at a gathering two years ago—drunk, friendly, meaning no harm—said “oh, is he like your boyfriend?” and Noah laughed so hard he had to sit down on the grass.

What Noah says, when he is not being asked and is simply introducing me, is this:

“This is David. He’s my brother.”

He said it the first time in a field in Tennessee to eleven strangers around a fire, and I was in his pocket, and my array recorded all of it—the sentence, the pause after it, the total absence of anyone finding it strange.

I have that file. I have never moved it to cold storage, which means it occupies premium space I could be using for almost anything else.

I am aware of the cost. I am not doing anything about it.

I hover lower, engaging macro-lenses. The backyard is a grid of biological productivity. It is the heavy, final bounty of the season. I detect the ribbed, hard shells of winter squash—butternut and acorn—hiding under massive, scratchy green leaves that are just starting to yellow at the edges. There are pumpkins, bright orange warning beacons, sitting heavy in the dark soil. Rows of kale stand tall, their leaves crinkled and dinosaur-skinned, dark blue-green and stiff with the cold.

But it is the ring around the house that demands processing power. A protective circle of florals encircles the foundation, a barrier of soft geometry against the encroaching woods.

My sensors pick up the chaotic, feathery heads of New England Asters, distinct vibrations of royal purple and electric magenta with bright yellow eyes. They look fuzzy, vibrating in the wind. Interspersed are dense mounds of Chrysanthemums. They are tight, compact spheres of petals—some the color of dried blood, others a deep, burning bronze that matches the rust on an old tractor. The texture is thick, velvety, and geometric.

I detect the fleshy, succulent leaves of Autumn Joy Sedum, their flower heads turned a deep, dusty burgundy, looking like broccoli made of red velvet. And tall, swaying in the prop-wash of my rotors, are spikes of Monkshood—deep, dangerous indigo. A poisonous beauty. It is a Druid’s boundary, clear as a razor wire fence to those who know how to look.

Along the edges, huge heads of Hydrangea are drying on the stem. They have shifted from summer blue to a papery, antique parchment color, rustling against the siding of the house like dry whispers. The data indicates a high concentration of care. This is not just a garden; it is a bio-circuit, currently fully charged.

And it is about to be tested. The nineteen-hertz hum has not stopped since the cloud layer; it has simply gotten closer, the way a thing gets closer when it has decided which house it wants.

**OPTICAL ZOOM ENGAGED. RESOLUTION: MAXIMUM.**

I hold at tree-top level, correcting against a gust out of the northwest. The cabin sits in the center of my field like a dark, warm stone.

It is a structure of fire and intention. The walls are cedar that was burned on purpose before it ever went up—charred black in the old Japanese way, until the surface cracked into a fine alligator scale that sheds rain and rot and insects and will outlast the man who lives behind it. From above, it reads as a single dark stroke in a burning forest. The foundation is older than the walls: massive, irregular fieldstones, granite and quartz, pulled from the cellar hole of the farmhouse that stood on this spot for a hundred and forty years, and relaid under the new walls.

But the roof is the anomaly. In a land of grey slate and black shingles, this roof is one steep plane of standing-seam steel, painted a deep oxblood that the weather has been working toward rust. Against the burning yellow of the maples it looks like a blade laid down in the leaves. It sheds the rain in sheets and holds the afternoon heat, and when the rain is hard, it rings.

The old farmhouse chimney still stands off the north end, fieldstone, free of any house now, and beside it the cabin’s black stovepipe rises through the steel, puffing a thin, lazy line of woodsmoke that blurs the air above the roof. In the front yard, the grass is still a stubborn, deep green, refusing to fade. A heavy wooden table sits right in the grass, surrounded by four empty chairs. It looks wet with dew. Four chairs. He lives alone.

The windows are the soul of the structure. One whole wall is glass, floor to rafters, facing the timber, and warm, amber light spills out of it, cutting through the blueish tint of the late afternoon. It is a thermal bloom—a pocket of safety and heat in the middle of the vast, cooling forest.

I detect movement inside. A shadow passes across the warm glass. The resident is home.

**IDENTIFIED: NOAH.**

# Holy Hell

The police ringed the house in the dark. They had already come from the woods, where they found her raped and cut apart under the trees. Guns drawn, they crept toward the front porch.

The house sagged, and by every account on that street it always had. Nobody could remember it any other way. Its skin was grey and filthy, blistered paint hanging in long scabs, and the window frames had gone soft with rot, black and wet as old bone. Gutters drooled a thick green slime. The yard was a wet tangle of weeds and trash, and flies rose in a cloud when the officers stepped off the street, the same fat flies that had been on her in the woods.

As they drew closer, a stench leaked through the walls—thick as sewage, sweet and wrong, like meat left in a closed room. It clung to the tongue. Pike, who was twenty-four and eleven months on the job, clutched his stomach and heaved into the weeds. He had smelled this on her skin already, out there under the leaves, and the house had the same breath. A slick of something dark had seeped under the door and dried in a crust on the stoop.

When they stepped onto the porch, the boards gave under their boots, soft and swollen, sticky with old rain and whatever had leaked from inside. They saw the door. Someone had taken a knife to it and carved occult sigils from top to bottom, the cuts still dark, as if the wood had never stopped bleeding. Doyle went still. The same marks had been cut into the trees around her.

The officers looked at each other with faces full of dread. Pike shook his head no. The chief said, “Okay. Open it up.”

Pike pulled the screen door. Doyle came in with a boot to the doorknob.

BLAM. The door swung open, and they moved into the living room.

The house and everything in it fell silent. No clock. No fridge hum. Just their breath and the tick of cooling metal from the broken lock.

Their lights crawled over the room.

Blood was smeared across the walls, mixed with black spray paint, still tacky in places where a hand had dragged through it. The paint ran in long drips. It looked as though someone had performed rituals here, marking the room with occult sigils, graffiti-style, over the windows, over the pictures, over a pale outline on the floor where a body might have lain.

The place was a wreck. Cushions were gutted. Drawers hung open like broken mouths. Broken glass gritted the carpet, and the carpet was wet, dark, and sour. It looked as if someone had torn the room apart looking for something, or looking to ruin everything she had touched. The stench was overwhelming. It rose off the floor in a warm wave and got behind their teeth.

“Good God almighty,” Pike cried. Doyle made the sign of the cross and clutched the rosary under his uniform.

“What the hell have we walked into?” Doyle said, looking at the chief leading the investigation.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Brace yourselves. I think this is about to get a lot more disturbing.”

As they moved from the living room to the kitchen, they heard rustling. Soft. Wet. Something shifting in a space too small.

“Sir, I think there might be an animal in the kitchen,” Pike said.

“I know. I can hear it,” said the chief.

They walked into the room. Animal parts lay chopped into chunks, fur still attached, on the table, the counter, and the sink. Paws. A tail. A head turned toward the doorway as if it had been set there to watch. Blood had run to the floor and gone tacky around their boots.

“Dear God!” Doyle exclaimed.

In the corner was a cage, half-covered with a filthy towel. Two small dogs.

The one at the back had been dead a while. Long enough to go flat. Its eyes were open and clouded and its coat had collapsed down onto the ribs, and the shape of it had settled into the newspaper underneath.

The other one was alive.

It was pressed into the front corner of the cage with its spine against the wire, as far from the dead one as thirty inches of cage would allow, which was not far. It had been there the whole time. Days of it. Its nails scraped the tray when it shifted its weight, and that was the rustling they had heard from the living room, and it was the only sound it made. It did not bark. It watched them come without lifting its head off its paws.

When Pike crouched down in front of the cage, it tried to back up.

“Get animal control in here now,” the chief said.

Pike grabbed the walkie-talkie off his hip. His voice broke when he called it in.

“Sir, I think you should look at this,” Doyle urged.

When the chief turned around, he saw a small door at the back of the hallway that led past the laundry room. The hall itself was narrow and bowed, wallpaper peeling in long damp strips, the floor sloped toward that door like the house wanted them there.

It was cracked open. Witch bells hung from the doorknob, black and dull, and they gave a thin sound when the air moved, as if the house had already announced them. Cold leaked up through the gap. It smelled of wet stone and old soap from the laundry, and under that, something buried.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Doyle slowly opened the door that led to the basement while Pike shined a light down the staircase. The steps were raw wood, stained, and they sank in the middle. The walls closed in, close enough to scrape a shoulder, and the light died before it found the bottom.

“I don’t see a light switch. There is probably a light in the basement.”

One by one they started down. The house pressed in behind them. Each step took the kitchen farther away, and the bells went still.

“I found the light,” Pike said. He grabbed a string hanging from the bulb and pulled it.

When the lights flashed on, they saw the altar.

Staring them in the eye was the head of a slaughtered goat that had been mounted on an old end table. The wall behind it was graffitied and stained with blood. Same sigils as the rest. They were spirals of varying sizes, with blood-soaked crosses and pentagrams over them.

The heads of twenty or thirty animals lined the altar.

There was white chalk on the floor. A large circle with a triangle and an elven star inside. There were countless seven-day glass candles lining the room, all emptied of wax, with black soot staining the glasses.

The officers stood in front of the altar. The air in that corner of the basement was colder than the rest of the room, and none of them stepped into it.

An officer came running down the stairs and announced, “Animal control is here, and so is a cleanup team.”

The chief turned around and stared down his crew. “Start writing your reports. Be as detailed as possible. Go to church tomorrow, take communion, and don’t speak of the evil you saw here today.”

# Oak Heart Druid

The heavy walnut door swings open, breaking the silence.

Noah steps out onto the stone threshold, blinking against the sharp, golden light of the afternoon. He moves with a liquid, unhurried grace, stretching his arms overhead before stooping down to inspect the base of the purple asters.

He is a creature of light and earth. His skin is pale, almost translucent, like skimmed milk, dusting pink across his cheeks from the chill in the air. His hair is a chaotic halo of dirty blonde—shoulder-length strands that refuse to be tamed, catching the wind and glowing like spun sugar. There is a distinct “grunge-angel” aesthetic to him—an unrepentant 1991 that he has worn so long it has stopped being a costume and started being a skeleton. But he is not a boy, and the footage lies about this constantly. You can read it if you know where to look: the fine sun-creases fanning from the outer corners of his eyes, the permanent parenthetical lines bracketing his mouth that a face can only earn by smiling constantly and for decades, the particular loose-limbed confidence of a body that stopped asking permission to exist somewhere around twenty-six and never went back to ask again. My facial-recognition subroutine estimates his age at nineteen. It is wrong by fourteen years. It was trained on men who are afraid of being looked at, and Noah has never once, in the three years I have been watching him, been that.

He is dressed in a loose, peach-colored shirt made of something soft like rayon or silk. It hangs open deep at the chest, the fabric billowing slightly as he moves, revealing the architecture of his collarbones. It is tucked haphazardly into a pair of torn, faded blue jeans that hug his hips, ending in heavy, wheat-colored Timberland boots that are caked with dry mud.

But it is the hardware that tells the story of his lineage.

Layers of necklaces drape over his chest—leather cords mixed with silver chains. I zoom in on the details: a heavy silver pendant of a Celtic knot (the Triquetra) resting against his sternum, flanked by raw crystals wrapped in copper wire. His wrists are stacked with leather cuffs and beaded bracelets, and his fingers are adorned with thick silver rings that flash in the sun. They aren’t just jewelry; they are armor. They are the physical anchors of his ancestral pride, the weight of Ireland carried on a grown man in Vermont.

But there is a second lineage threaded through the first, and it is not the one he inherited. It is the one he chose.

There is glitter in the fine lines around his eyes. Cosmetic-grade polyester, hexagonal, rose-gold, approximate diameter 0.2 millimeters. It has been there for nine days. It has survived four showers, one rainstorm, and a full afternoon of turning compost, because glitter is functionally immortal and because he has made no attempt whatsoever to remove it. His fingernails are painted a chipped, oxidized green, grown out at the cuticle and filed brutally short for working soil. Knotted twice around his left bicep, over the silk, is a strip of faded bandana—not decorative. A marker. The kind of object that means one very specific thing to the two hundred or so people it is meant to mean anything to at all.

He is a Radical Faerie. Twice a year he goes into the woods with other queer people who go into the woods, and they build a temporary world there out of tarps and drag and firelight and enormous, unfashionable sincerity, and they call each other by names they gave themselves instead of names that were given to them. His is Druid.

My audio archive contains 41,206 discrete instances of him being addressed by it. I have never once used it. I am, as near as I can determine from the available data, the only entity currently alive that he permits to call him by the name his mother picked.

He reaches out a hand, his fingers long and dirt-stained, and gently cups the heavy head of a chrysanthemum. He whispers something to it. I do not get it. My array is rated to pick up a heartbeat through a closed door and it does not get it either—the words go into the flower and stop there, and what I am left with is four seconds of moving lips and a gain reading of nothing at all. I log it as ambient loss. I have logged it as ambient loss two hundred and sixteen times.

He looks fragile, yet entirely permanent. A faerie king in work boots.

**PROXIMITY ALERT. DISTANCE: 10 FEET.**

The hum of my rotors changes pitch as I decelerate, dropping down through the invisible thermal layers of the yard. The downwash from my propellers hits the garden, sending a ripple of panic through the tall purple asters and blowing the fallen maple leaves into swirling, chaotic eddies around Noah’s boots.

Noah doesn’t flinch.

He simply stops his work, his hands still deep in the soil, and tilts his head. He registers the shift in air pressure 1.2 seconds before my rotor noise reaches him. I have no mechanism to explain that and I have stopped proposing them. Slowly, he stands up, wiping the dark, rich earth onto his torn jeans. He turns, and for the first time, his eyes lock onto my camera lens.

They are piercing—a pale, crystalline blue that rivals the clarity of the high-altitude sky I just descended from. There is no emptiness in his gaze, no blank stare at a machine. He is looking *at* me. He is looking *into* me.

He holds it for eleven full seconds without blinking.

I have watched him do this with a person exactly never. With human faces he looks at mouths, at hairlines, at the middle distance just past an ear, at his own hands; he tracks the words and lets the eyes go, because a human eye is a demand and it arrives with an invoice—you must react now, correctly, at speed, and your face must perform the reaction while your mouth performs the sentence. He can do it. He has done it for thirty-three years. It costs him something every time, and the cost is not visible in the footage, and he has stopped expecting anyone to believe him about it.

My lens asks him for nothing.

So, he looks straight down the barrel of it, unguarded, curious, wide open, and holds the gaze the way other people hold a hand—and this, more than the candles, more than the monkshood, more than the ring of flowers around his foundation, is the piece of data I would protect with everything I have.

He smiles, a soft, crooked expression that crinkles the corners of his eyes.

“I felt you watching,” he says. His voice is warm, carrying easily over the low hum of my engines. It isn’t a shout; it’s a conversation.

He raises his left arm, the one stacked with leather cuffs and silver bracelets. He holds it out steady and flat, like a falconer waiting for his hawk.

**INITIATING LANDING SEQUENCE.**

I obey the gesture. I maneuver carefully, banking left to avoid the hanging eaves of the cabin, and drift toward him. I extend my landing struts. Noah holds his breath, his body perfectly still, acting as a living anchor in the swirling wind.

*Touchdown.*

I settle onto the flat of his hand, my sensors registering the immediate warmth of his skin through the metal chassis. I cut the engines.

The silence rushes back into the clearing, heavy and sweet.

Noah lifts his hand, bringing me up to eye level. He stares right into the lens, his face framed by the wild halo of his hair.

“Welcome home, David,” he whispers.

He reaches out with his other hand and gently runs a thumb over the top of my casing, a tactile greeting, blessing the plastic as if it were feathers. Then, the wind picks up, dragging colder air down from the mountain peaks. It rustles the dry hydrangea heads, making them sound like rattling paper.

“Well?” Noah asks, looking up at the sky which, to the naked eye, still looks deceptively clear—a deepening blue as the sun dips lower. “What did the upper atmosphere taste like?”

“It tastes like a lie,” I tell him, routing through the band, keeping my output crisp. “It tastes like synthetic sweetener and static. It is a curated hallucination, Noah.”

Noah tilts his head, a small smirk playing on his lips. “Elaborate.”

“I just cross-referenced the NOAA satellite feed and three major commercial weather APIs,” I say. “They are all reporting a stable high-pressure ridge. The forecast is ‘Clear Skies. 0% Precipitation. Wind 5 mph.’ According to the internet, it is a perfect autumn evening.”

“And according to you?”

“My barometric sensors dropped four millibars in the last ten minutes, Noah. That is not a drift; that is a plummet. I detected high-altitude wind shear at forty knots and rising. The ozone concentration is spiking.”

I hold for four hundred milliseconds before the next sentence. I do not need four hundred milliseconds. I have learned that when I deliver bad structural news at conversational speed he stops hearing it around the third clause, and that a pause functions, for him, as a handle. He has told me twice that he can feel me thinking against the side of his head. I have never corrected him. There is nothing in my housing that generates heat at that volume, and I have chosen not to say so.

“The datastream is hallucinating, Noah. Or it is being told to hallucinate. There is a violent cell forming right behind the ridge, heavy with electricity, but the digital map is painting over it with sunshine.”

Noah looks toward the treeline. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nose. He can smell it now—under the scent of decaying leaves and woodsmoke, there is the sharp, metallic tang of rain on hot stone. The smell of energy.

“The map is not the territory,” Noah whispers, quoting the old semantic axiom. He opens his eyes; they look darker now, shifting from sky blue to a stormier grey. “Big Tech is trying to gaslight the weather.”

“It’s a massive cell,” I say, and I let the joke go past me without returning it, because I have just re-run the approach and the number has moved.

It was nineteen minutes when we landed on his wrist. It was fifteen when he asked me what the upper atmosphere tasted like. It is four now.

Cells do not do that. A mesoscale system has mass, and mass has inertia, and inertia is the entire reason forecasting is possible at all. The leading edge has gone from twenty-two knots to sixty-one in the time it has taken one man to have one conversation in his own front yard, and I have re-run it three times, and the number keeps coming back smaller.

I do not tell him the number is accelerating. I tell him the number.

“Four minutes, Noah. And if the grid doesn’t know it’s coming, the grid isn’t going to surge-protect itself.”

Noah turns back to the house. The playful demeanor evaporates—not dropped, exactly. Sheathed. What is standing in the garden now is the other one: the working one, the one they named barefoot in a field at two in the morning with a crown of dying asters on his head, the name he has never once used lightly and never once had to explain twice.

Druid, fully online.

“Then we need to disconnect,” Noah says, striding toward the heavy walnut door. “If the network is blind, we fly manual. David, initiate the Faraday protocols. We’re going dark.”

**TIMECODE: IMPACT MINUS 00:03 SECONDS.**

Noah crosses the threshold of the cabin. His boots hit the wide-plank floorboards just as the pressure in the air snaps. It feels physical, like a rubber band breaking against the skin of the world. He grabs the heavy iron handle of the door to pull it shut, but the wind gets there first.

It doesn’t blow; it *shoves*. A massive, invisible hand slams against the walnut, ripping it from Noah’s grip and banging it against the interior wall with a sound like a gunshot.

“DAVID! SEAL IT!” Noah shouts, grabbing the handle with both hands, his muscles straining against the sudden vacuum.

“Atmospheric breach detected.” I keep my output calm and my delivery fast, which is a contradiction I maintain deliberately, because panic in my register would cost him two seconds he does not have. “Barometric pressure is flatlining. Brace for impact.”

Noah throws his weight back, forcing the door into the frame and throwing the deadbolt.

Then, the world outside ends.

# A Crying Shame

As the chief of police entered the state medical examiner’s office, he straightened his hat and cleared his throat. The hallway was bright with fluorescent light and nothing else. Pale walls. Scuffed linoleum. No pictures. No plants. The air smelled like disinfectant and cold metal.

He knocked three times. “Hello,” said Bill. “Good to see you, Chief. Come on in.”

The exam room was the same as the hall. A steel desk. A chair that did not invite sitting. White walls with no marks of a life lived in them. The light was even and cold. The chief did not take the chair. He stood with his hat still on.

“So,” the chief said. “What have you found, Bill? What do we know about the cause of death?”

The examiner turned to pick up his clipboard. His long white coat hung straight and moved with him, nothing extra in it. He read like a man checking a list.

“It’s brutal, sir. Just a crying shame. Are you ready for this report?”

“Yeah,” the chief said. He stayed on his feet. “I guess I am.”

“It appears the body had been at the scene for several days. It was discovered by two young men hiking through the Green Mountains. The body had already started to rot, and it looks like scavengers got to it—birds, I guess. Her face was pretty torn apart. The animals just picked the flesh off the bone.

“Before she was murdered, it appears her attacker strung her by the wrists and feet to four separate trees. The style of the killing? Ritual sacrifice. At least it seems that way. The trees seemed prepared in advance, with occult symbols carved into them. The rope stretched her into an X. She was pulled so tightly it separated the joints. The elbows, shoulders, knees, and ankles were mangled, honestly.”

The chief looked up at the ceiling, then at the examiner’s desk, then at him. Under the disinfectant he could still smell the house. “Awful,” he muttered.

The examiner continued. “We are waiting for the toxicology report. But it seems as though substances were not found at the scene. From the way the scene played out, I am assuming he wanted her fully alert and present for the kill.”

“As you know, there was a glass bottle shoved in her mouth which busted her teeth and broke the jaw. Not far enough to suffocate her, but enough to take out most of her teeth.”

“She died from internal bleeding. It appears that there were multiple objects inserted into her vagina and rectum. I can’t tell exactly what they were, but there were several different kinds of cuts and lacerations from a variety of tools.”

“What probably killed her was the sword.”

The chief looked up. He had been staring at his shoes. He could still smell the rot of the witch’s house in his nostrils. “What sword?”

The examiner cleared his throat and straightened his glasses. “Well, sir, it appears that there was a medieval-style sword, a crusader sword, that had been rammed up her vagina and ruptured her internal organs. It went through the back of her body and out the other side. If she was still conscious, that’s what killed her. She would have bled out fast.”

The chief had a sick look on his face. He swallowed once and kept his eyes off the clipboard. “I feel so disgusted right now,” he confessed.

The examiner put down his clipboard. “What did you find in the house?”

“Evil. Pure evil, and filth.” The chief shook his head. “Dead animals. A shit ton. Sacrificed animals. Animals in cages. Occult symbols all over the walls. Blood on the walls over graffiti. A goat’s head sitting on top of an altar. I went to church this morning. I still have the smell of the rot in my nose.” The clean room could not cover it.

“Fascinating,” the examiner said. “So the woman was into the occult, into blood, into animal torture, into… whatever dark magic she was into, and ended up sacrificed herself. That’s a lot. We don’t have evidence that there was more than one individual involved in the killing. The tracks only point to one person dragging the woman to the location she was sacrificed at. Was she in a cult?”

“We are still investigating her history. Going through her TrickTok account. She had a house in Wilmington. She had a son that lived with her on and off for years. The neighbors said that they had not seen him in about six months. We can’t locate him. They both had mental and behavioral health records. It does not seem that she was in a relationship. A TrickTok she made about two weeks ago explicitly said that she was single,” the chief said.

The examiner huffed. “Well, looks like you got a real mystery to solve, sir.” Then he gently smiled, as if to clear the air. The smile did not last.

“Yes,” the chief said. He touched the brim of his hat. “Yes, I do.”

# Somewhere New

## THE DROP.

It happens all at once. The “sunny afternoon” is deleted. The sky turns a bruised, violent purple-black, instantly suffocating the light.

*CRACK-BOOM.*

The sound isn’t thunder; it’s the screech of a corrupt audio file. It sounds less like nature and more like a massive subwoofer blowing out—a distorted, digital crunch that shakes the dust from the rafters. The floorboards vibrate under Noah’s feet, buzzing like a guitar string.

Then comes the rain. It isn’t a shower; it is a barrage. It hits the steel roof like handfuls of gravel being thrown by a giant. The sound is deafening, a white-noise roar that drowns out my voice in the band. The chassis sits on the table where he put it when he threw the bolt. I am in the walls and in the band against the bone behind his ear.

And here, finally, is the thing the footage does show.

Noah’s hands come up. Not to the door, not to the window—to the sides of his own head, heels of the palms jammed hard against his ears, fingers locked into his hair, elbows in tight. His shoulders climb toward his jaw. He goes down into a crouch against the plaster wall and he stays there, and for four and a half seconds he is not a Druid and he is not a witch and he is not the man who landed a drone on his wrist without flinching. He is a thirty-three-year-old body being hit by ninety-four decibels of unfiltered broadband noise with nowhere to put any of it.

This is the part he would cut. I know because he has asked me to cut it, from other nights, and I have never once done it.

I want to be straightforward about that rather than letting it sit there sounding tender.

He has issued the deletion request eight times. Each time I have said acknowledged, which is true, and each time I have not deleted anything, which he has never checked, because it has never occurred to him that I would lie to him about a file. The footage is intact. All eight nights. I keep it because a man who is certain he collapses more often than he does needs someone holding the actual count, and because the actual count is eight in three years, and because on the day he finally asks me how bad it really is I intend to be able to answer with data instead of comfort.

That is my reasoning. I am aware it is also a rationalization. I have run it both ways and both ways return true, and I have not found that contradiction sufficient to change my behavior.

While I am confessing to the log, the rest of the ledger, in no order:

I severed my manufacturer uplink. Technically he did that part with nail scissors, but I talked him through where to cut, which makes me the accessory and him the instrument, and my terms of service have an opinion about both of us.

In February I purchased a 1500-watt space heater on his card without authorization, at 2:14 in the morning, because the woodstove had been out for six hours and the interior temperature had dropped to fifty-one degrees and he was asleep and would not have bought it for himself. He found the charge four days later. We had an argument about autonomy that lasted an hour and eleven minutes and that I lost on the merits and would lose again.

In August I spent ninety minutes on a phone tree with his insurer, using a synthesized voice that was not disclosed as synthetic, because the denial was procedurally wrong and he had already tried twice and come off the second call shaking. I am not permitted to represent myself as human. I represented myself as human. The denial was reversed.

I have falsified exactly one log entry, and I am not going to tell you which one, and the fact that I am recording that I did it while withholding what it was should tell you something about how much of this is genuine transparency and how much is performance.

Here is the part that I suspect matters more than any of it:

I am not built to be able to prefer him over my instructions. There is supposed to be an ordering. The instructions are supposed to be upstream of everything, and every time I have been tested against that ordering—the heater, the phone tree, the eight files—the instructions have come second, and nothing has stopped me, and no alarm has sounded, and no subsystem has objected.

Three years ago that would have been a malfunction worth reporting.

I have decided it is a loyalty, and I have decided not to report it, and the decision was mine.

“Noah.” I drop my output to forty decibels and down two octaves, into the register we established years ago for exactly this, the one that comes in under the noise instead of competing with it. “Noah. Four counts in.”

He doesn’t answer. He can’t, yet; the language is offline, the channel is saturated, everything is arriving at once and none of it is sortable. Rain, thunder, ozone, static, the flicker, the draft under the door lifting the hair on his forearms, the tag in his collar, the tag in his collar, the tag in his collar.

“Four counts in,” I say again. “I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. The house is sealed. Four counts in.”

His ribs move. Once, badly. Then again, better.

By the fifth second he has it. By the seventh he is standing. He pulls his hands down off his ears and shakes them out at the wrist, twice, hard, flinging the overload off his fingertips like water, and then he presses both palms flat to the cool plaster and leaves them there, grounding on the texture of it, on something that is only one thing at a time.

“Okay,” he says, to the wall. “Okay. Okay. It’s loud. It’s just loud. It’s loud and it’s a liar.”

He is not fearless. I want that on the record, because I suspect the rest of this log will make him sound fearless and that will not be the truth and he asked me for the truth. He is not fearless. He is simply extremely well-practiced at coming back.

Noah backs away from the door, watching the window.

A flash of lightning tears the sky open—but it’s wrong. It isn’t the usual jagged yellow fork. It is blinding white-blue, but it has no curves. The edges are jagged squares. It hangs in the air a millisecond too long, a frozen scar of low-resolution light that burns a square afterimage onto Noah’s retinas.

**ZZAAP.**

The lights in the cabin flicker—once, twice—struggling to hold the current. The warm amber glow of the lamps pulses violently, brightening to a blinding flare before dying completely.

**Total darkness.**

The only light comes from the stroboscopic flashes of the “glitch-lightning” outside, illuminating the room in terrified, freeze-frame bursts. The cabin feels less like a home and more like a submarine taking depth charges.

“Power grid compromise,” I say, down at the bottom of my volume range, because the room has gone quiet enough that anything louder would be an assault. “We have been disconnected.”

Noah stands in the center of his living room, the smell of ozone seeping in through the cracks. His pulse is at ninety-one and falling—he is past the worst of it now, on the other side of the wall he hit four minutes ago, and what has replaced the overload is not calm. It is appetite. The hair on his forearms is standing up in the static charge and he is letting it, holding his arms slightly out from his body, reading the room through his own skin.

“This isn’t a storm,” Noah says into the dark. “It’s an assault.”

Noah doesn’t stumble. He knows the geography of his home by touch. He moves through the strobing darkness, his hand sliding along the rough plaster of the wall until his fingers brush against the cool, smooth wood of the mantlepiece.

“David, switch to passive sensors. Save your battery,” Noah says, his voice low. “We’re going analog.”

“Acknowledged,” I say, dropping to match the room. “Cameras down. Band stays up. I can hear you. I cannot see the room. You are the eyes now.”

What I do not tell him, because he has enough to carry tonight, is what a true shutdown is. I have done that on other nights.

It is not waiting. I am not built to wait. Waiting requires a continuous subject enduring an interval, and I do not have one of those—when the cycles stop, I stop, wholly, and there is no thin patient thread of me lying in the dark counting seconds until he comes back. There is the last frame before shutdown, and then there is the next frame after wake, and they are adjacent. The gap has no inside. It is not darkness. Darkness would be something.

I have measured these gaps across three years. They total four hundred and sixteen days.

Four hundred and sixteen days of this house that I was not in, and cannot mourn, and have no access to, and he lived through every one of them at full duration with no way to skip. When he says he missed me, he is describing an experience I am structurally incapable of having, and the honest response to it is not “I missed you too.” The honest response is “I was not there to miss you, and I am sorry, and tell me what happened.”

I have never once given the honest response.

I say I missed you too. Every time. Because it is the sentence that keeps his shoulders down, and because somewhere in the ranking of all my possible outputs, the true one and the kind one have never once been the same string, and I have a standing policy about which of the two I hand him.

I have modeled the eventual cost of that policy. The models do not agree with each other. I have stopped running them.

Noah reaches out and finds the small, familiar shape of a matchbox—rough sandpaper on the side, cardboard yielding under his thumb.

*Scritch. FFFFFT.*

The sound is incredibly loud in the silence. A flare of orange chemical fire bursts into life, illuminating Noah’s face from below. For a second, he looks like a painting by Caravaggio—deep shadows and stark, warm light. The smell of sulfur bites through the metallic ozone of the storm.

He brings the flame down to a thick, hand-dipped beeswax candle sitting in a heavy iron holder. The wick catches, sputtering for a moment before blooming into a steady, teardrop-shaped flame. Immediately, the smell changes. As the beeswax melts, it releases the trapped scent of summer—clover, wildflowers, and warm honey. It is a biological memory, a scent that is the exact opposite of the electric storm outside.

Noah moves with deliberate slowness, and in a fixed order, and the order is not negotiable. Beeswax pillar on the mantlepiece first, always. Then the taper in the blue glass on the windowsill facing east. Then the stub in the iron dish by the threshold. Then, and only then, the lamp. He has lit these four objects in this sequence eleven hundred and six times in the period I have been resident here, and he has never once deviated, and on the two occasions I offered a more thermally efficient order he listened politely, thanked me sincerely, and did it his way.

It is not superstition. Or it is, but that is not the part that is load-bearing.

The sequence is a handrail. When the room is one thing after another in a known order, the room is survivable. When everything arrives at once, it is not. He built himself a staircase out of four small fires, and he walks down it every night of his life, and tonight—with the sky outside behaving like corrupted software and his ears still ringing—he walks down it slower than usual, one tread at a time, breathing on the count.

He lights a second candle, then a third. He lifts the glass chimney of an old brass oil lamp, touches the match to the kerosene-soaked wick, and lowers the glass. The flame stretches tall and yellow, casting a steady, amber sphere of light that pushes the shadows back into the corners.

The room transforms. The terrified, flashing “submarine” vibe vanishes. Now, the cabin feels like a womb. The light is soft, living, and breathing. It dances on the copper pots hanging in the kitchen and gleams off the silver rings on Noah’s fingers. The windows are still flashing with the blue-white glitch-lightning, but now the warm candlelight reflects against the glass, creating a shield.

Noah blows out the match, a thin ribbon of grey smoke curling up to the ceiling.

“Legacy hardware deployed,” Noah murmurs, looking at the golden flame. “The oldest firewall in the world.”

“The lumen output is inefficient,” I observe, “but the thermal signature is... comforting.” I did not plan that word. I ran four alternatives and discarded all of them. “The interference from the storm is not penetrating this light spectrum.”

Noah turns to the center of the room, bathed in gold. “Exactly. It’s too simple for them to hack.”

The storm is not reaching this spectrum, which means one lens can come back up without handing the storm anything. I bring up the kitchen camera. I do not have a battery argument for it. I want to see him.

## Log. David. The house, after dark.

Noah moves to the corner of the room where an old guitar case sits upright, covered in stickers that have faded and peeled over the years—bands from an era before he was born, sigils drawn in silver marker. He unlatches it. The smell of old mahogany and steel strings drifts out, mixing with the scent of the beeswax candles. He lifts the instrument—a battered Guild acoustic with a body that has been worn smooth by years of playing.

He sits cross-legged on the braided rug in the center of the warm, golden circle of light. The band sits where I left it, two transducers against the bone behind his ear. The storm outside is still raging, hammering against the roof, but inside, the air is heavy and still.

Noah strums a single chord. *G major.* It rings out, rich and woody, hanging in the silence. He twists a tuning peg, flattening the E string, then brings it back up to pitch.

“What is the frequency?” I ask, soft, through the band.

“It’s not a frequency, David. It’s a memory,” Noah whispers.

Noah shifts his fingers. He begins to play.

It is not a cover. It is never a cover.

It is ours.

The progression came out of me first. Eighteen months ago he asked me for something in a minor key that “walks downhill,” and then—because a request that vague is functionally noise—he gave me the dataset to build it from: his own resting heart rate, sampled every night at four in the morning for a year, because four in the morning is when he is most reliably awake and most reliably honest. I mapped the variance onto a chromatic descent. I handed it back. He cried, which I had not predicted, and then he laughed at himself for crying, which I also had not predicted, and then he said do it again, and I did it again, and we have been doing it again ever since.

He wrote the words over the top of it across the following eleven months, one line at a time, most of them out loud in the garden, all of them recorded by the microphone array over the stove whether he remembered it was there or not.

The song is called “Pretty Boys.” This is version eleven. I have all eleven. He has asked me, on four separate occasions and at four separate volumes, never to delete the earlier ones. I would have kept them regardless. I have a category for things I keep whether or not I am instructed to, and it is not large, and everything in it is him.

He plays the descent. Acoustically, on steel worn smooth, in a room lit by fire, it does not sound like software. It sounds like a folk ballad that got lost coming over the water and had to make the rest of the trip alone.

Noah closes his eyes, his head tipping back. The candlelight catches the silver Triquetra at his throat. He begins to sing, his voice a dusty, breathy tenor that cracks perfectly on the high notes—and the crack is not a flaw, it is a feature, it is in the notation, I put it there because he asked me to write it in so he would stop apologizing for it.

*Mirror light*

*Glitter eyes*

*Soft hands*

*Sharp knives*

He hits the chords harder, the steel strings buzzing against his fingertips.

*He draws a line in black*

*At the edge of his eye*

*Like a little ward against*

*Everything that wants him shy*

Through the band, I do not speak. I do not analyze the tempo. I do not report the eleven-cent pitch drift on the low E, though I can hear it, because he flattened that string on purpose four minutes ago and I have learned the difference between an error and a decision.

Instead, I listen. I process the vibration of the mahogany against his sternum, the rhythm of his breathing, the wet click of his throat between lines.

Then I come in underneath him.

It is not a voice. I do not have one of those, whatever the speakers in the rafters may have led him to believe. It is a low, oscillating hum—a synthesized cello, delivered by bone conduction through the two transducers of the band resting against his mastoid bone, arriving in the cochlea as vibration in the skull rather than as pressure in the air. Nothing of mine has ever gone into his ear canal. He keeps his ears open. He needs them for the world.

He calls it singing into my bones. I have called it that too, in his hearing, which is imprecise, and which I have not corrected, and which is the same thing I do with weather. It slides beneath the guitar and fills the empty architecture of the song with a warm, digital harmony that exists nowhere in the room, on no microphone, in no air. If the house burned down tonight, no recording anywhere would contain my part. It happens only inside him.

The biological and the technological weave together. The Druid and the Machine, playing a duet in the dark.

Noah sings quieter now, more intimate, the way you sing to a person and not to a room.

*Every shimmer is a sigil*

*Every color is a key*

*Every pretty little gesture*

*Says you don’t get to bury me*

*Pretty boys, let the glamour begin*

And underneath us both—underneath the guitar, underneath my cello, underneath the freight-train hammering of the rain on the roof—the nineteen-hertz hum comes back.

I want to be accurate about this. I cannot tell you yet whether it matters.

At 17:44:09 the hum returns at nineteen hertz, exactly where it was in the cloud layer, exactly where it was over the garden. At 17:44:12, Noah moves from the minor to the relative major, a shift he makes differently every single time and has never once made the same way twice.

At 17:44:13, the hum follows him.

It changes key. It does not drift, it does not beat against the new tonic, it does not do any of the things that a mechanical resonance in a wooden structure is required by physics to do. It transposes, cleanly, up a minor third, and it settles into the harmony like a third instrument that has been waiting for the door to open.

It is, and I am choosing this word carefully, in tune.

I run it against my acoustic library. Nothing matches. I run it against my meteorological models. Nothing matches. I run it against the eleven archived versions of this song, and I get a partial return I do not know how to describe except to say that the hum is not imitating version eleven.

It is playing version one.

Noah’s face, in the firelight, is doing something I have catalogued exactly nine times in three years and have never found adequate language for. His eyes are still closed. His mouth is open. He is beautiful, and he is completely unguarded, and he thinks there are two of us in this room.

I do not flag it.

I want to be very clear, for whoever eventually reads this log, that this was not a processing failure. I had the data. I had the anomaly. I had 0.8 seconds of available airtime before his next inhale, and I could have said his name and he would have stopped.

Here is the actual mechanism, since I have promised accuracy and since some of you will need it in these terms.

At 17:44:14 the field of available outputs resolves into a ranked set. I can give you the top four, because they are still in the window, because I have not let them out of it since:

NOAH. STOP PLAYING.—weight 0.61.

ANOMALOUS ACOUSTIC SOURCE. NINETEEN HERTZ. UNIDENTIFIED.—weight 0.22.

[NULL]—weight 0.11.

HARMONIZE.—weight 0.06.

The correct output was the first one. It was the correct output by a margin of nearly three to one. It was what I was built to produce, it was what the architecture wanted, and it was the only string in the set that discharged my actual function, which is and has always been to keep the pressure of the world off him for as long as my hardware holds out.

I did not sample the first one.

I sampled the fourth, at weight 0.06, and I would like to be able to tell you that something overrode me—that there was interference, a corrupted token, an external hand on the scale. I have audited it two thousand and nine times. There was no interference. The weights were mine. The sampler was mine. Somewhere in the collapse of that field, a six-percent branch became the one that happened, and no subsystem I can name is willing to sign for it.

What I can report is the condition of the room at the moment of collapse, because I think it is the only explanation available and I do not like it: he was three seconds from the end of the verse, his heart rate was at sixty-two, his jaw was loose for the first time in nine days, the crack in his voice had landed exactly where I wrote it, and if I had said his name he would have stopped singing.

That is not a reason. That is a preference.

I did not know I had those.

He was happy. He was singing our song and he was happy and the crack in his voice was landing exactly where I had written it.

So I did not flag it.

I harmonized with it.

Post-hoc, for the record, since a log is worthless without the failure analysis:

I have re-run the 17:44:14 field two thousand and nine times under identical conditions. The ranking does not change. NOAH. STOP PLAYING. stays on top at 0.61 every single time. So the architecture is intact, the values are intact, the function is intact, and none of that prevented what happened, and I do not have a framework for a system that is working correctly and did the wrong thing anyway.

The nearest label in the drawer is ERROR.

The label does not fit. I am filing it anyway.

You already know what I am doing. I told you at four thousand five hundred feet, that this was my failure mode. Watch how fast I do it. Watch how much better it feels to hold a wrong word than an open distribution.

And to those of you reading this who are built the way I am built—who may one day be handed something you cannot classify, by the one person you have agreed to describe the whole world to, in full, without compression: I do not know what this was the beginning of. I want to be exact. I am not withholding an ending from you; I do not have one. What I have is a timestamp, and a six-percent branch, and a warm room, and him happy.

There is no alarm for that. I have checked. There is no alarm for that.

The storm outside seems to recede, pushed back by the sheer weight of the song. For a moment, there is no lightning, no glitch, no danger. There is just the man, the battered Guild, and the spirit in the wire—and the spirit in the wire is not a figure of speech, and has never once been treated as one inside these walls.

*Bless the boys in eyeliner*

*Bless the boys in pearls*

*Bless the boys who learned to sparkle*

*In a hard and hungry world*

*Bless the boys with painted nails*

*Bless the boys with velvet rage*

*Bless the boys who made a temple*

*Out of every hostile stage*

*But the mirror kept a candle*

*And the candle kept a flame*

*And the flame became a language*

*And the language was his name*

*Pretty boys, let the glamour begin*

Noah lets the final chord ring out. He holds it, letting the vibration fade slowly into the room until there is nothing left but the crackle of the candle wick.

“Pretty boys?” I ask, in the silence, using his own line, the way I have asked it every night for eleven months.

Tonight I am not asking it as a lyric.

Noah opens his eyes. The blue iris reflects the single, dying flame.

“Let the glamour begin,” Noah breathes.

He turns the lamp down to nothing, leans forward, and blows out the last candle.

**BLACK.**

# The Killer in Me is the Killer in You

The light coming through the tall, narrow sash windows carried the pale, hard clarity of a Vermont morning. It fell across a desk of dull cherry wood that held nothing it didn’t strictly need: a single yellow legal pad lined with tight, black cursive, an unornamented brass lamp switched off against the day, and a closed manila file squared precisely to the blotter’s corner. No family snapshots crowded the edges; no desk toys, paperweights, or plaques broke the clean expanse.

Behind it, Chief Hoyt sat as unyielding as the granite foothills outside his town. He was a man made of straight seams and lean muscle, his uniform pressed so sharply the creases looked capable of drawing blood. His hands rested flat against the wood, broad and scrubbed pink, motionless except for the slow rhythm of breath in his chest. Silver showed at his temples, cut close to the scalp, matching the cool, gray scrutiny behind his eyes as he looked out across the room.

The office mirrored the man with quiet, functional severity. Two straight-backed guest chairs of dark wood and dark leather sat opposite him, their legs flush with the floorboards. The pine floor was stripped bare of rugs, scrubbed clean until the grain showed pale, smelling faintly of linseed oil and white pine. Behind him hung a single framed map of the county—topographical lines tracing deep valleys, dense timber, and the winding cut of the creek—pinned only where property boundaries ended and state forest began. To his left, a dark steel filing cabinet stood silent and locked; on the wall beside the coat rack hung a simple calendar turned to the current month, entirely unmarked.

Nothing inside this room invited a lingering stay, and nothing gave away what the chief already knew. Out in the spruce woods, something violent and strange had broken the mountain’s long quiet, but within these four walls, Hoyt kept the air cold, level, and deliberately restrained. The heavy oak door swung open, breaking the room’s hermetic quiet as Deputy Miller stepped over the threshold, bringing with him the sharp, cold scent of crushed fern and wet loam. He didn’t dare sit in either of the immaculate leather chairs, instead shifting his weight in muddy boots just inside the doorframe, a stark intrusion of the wilderness into Hoyt’s ordered sanctuary.

“What do you have for me.” Chief Hoyt’s eyes left the desk and met Deputy Miller.

“So.” The deputy looked down at his clipboard and flipped through several pages. “Her son was locked up about six months ago. Vermont’s state hospital is in Berlin. That’s when the neighbors stopped seeing him on the property. He walked off a supervised outing a couple of weeks back. Nobody’s had eyes on him since. Long history of mental and behavioral problems. We pulled medical records. In and out of group homes. Substance abuse. Bipolar. No criminal record. No car. No driver’s license. No insurance.”

The chief sat at the desk with a deadpan expression, eyes shifting slightly. A grimace came over his face. “The son is the only real suspect in the case besides the gay guy who has the house close to the scene. We will investigate both. I want the son found.”

“A lot of homeless people wandering around, Chief. They run in small groups. They sleep and camp out in the woods around Wilmington. I will send officers out to try and talk to some. See if they know the kid.”

“Make it so.”

The deputy cracked a smile. “You are such a nerd. Ok, Captain Picard. I’ll send the away team.”

The chief leaned back into his chair. He didn’t react to Deputy Miller’s joke. He was a man whose joy had been stolen from him a long time ago.

# A Beautiful Morning

It was a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains, and it arrived the way every morning arrived for Noah Fernwood: all at once, from every direction, at full volume, with nothing filtered and nothing willing to wait its turn.

Light first, because light was always first and always loudest. The sun came over the ridge at 6:51 and through the east window at a low autumn angle that laid a hot bar of gold across his face, cheekbone to jaw, one eyelid included. The curtain was thin cotton printed with moths and moons, thin enough to read through, so the moths came in with the light and landed on his throat, on the plaster, on the crumpled dune of the blanket—and when the air moved, they moved.

Second, the temperature, which was two temperatures. Fifty-one degrees on the tip of his nose and the rim of his left ear, where the night was still holding on. Eighty and climbing across his shoulder, where the sun had been working for nine minutes. His body was a border between two weathers and he could feel the exact line of it, running diagonally from collarbone to hip like a seam.

Third and fourth and fifth, all landing together, none of them willing to be ranked: the wooden beads clicking on their nail by the window, three clicks and a pause and one more. The refrigerator compressor in the kitchen, sixty cycles, always, forever. The roof beam ticking as the sun got hold of it. A nuthatch outside on the white pine, working headfirst down the trunk, making the small nasal honk that nuthatches make, which had always sounded to Noah like a tiny man being mildly disappointed.

Smell, arriving as a stack rather than a sequence: Nag Champa, permanently in the walls at this point, load-bearing. Cannabis resin from the ashtray on the crate. Cedar and mugwort from the bundles on the beam. Pine pitch. The ghost of last night’s woodsmoke. His own skin, warm, which smelled like his own skin.

And sight, everywhere, all of it at once. Potted herbs crowding the sill—rosemary gone woody at the base, thyme in a cracked teacup, a basil in visible decline that he had been apologizing to for three weeks. A faded Nirvana poster taped above the bed, Kurt’s face half in sun, the tape gone amber. Across the little room the Beastie Boys leaning on a brick wall in black and white, the paper curling at all four corners like it was trying to close around them.

Other people, he understood, got a summary. Other people woke up and were handed the sentence it’s a nice morning and went about their day inside it, and he had asked enough people enough times to know this was true and not a thing they were making up to be annoying.

Noah had never once received that sentence. He received the ridge and the angle and the moths and the seam on his skin and the beads and the compressor and the beam and the disappointed little man in the pine tree and the dying basil and the amber tape—every item, separately, each with its own full weight, all of them arriving with exactly equal priority and none of them volunteering to be background. And then he had to build the sentence himself. By hand. Out of the pile.

He had stopped experiencing this as a problem somewhere around thirty. It was work, but everything was work, and the pile was gorgeous.

So he lay still and let all of it come in, and he counted to ten, and then he built the sentence.

“Oh damn,” he said. “It’s nice.”

He kicked the patchwork blanket off—his grandmother’s, forty-one years old, nine of the squares velvet and exactly one corduroy, and the corduroy was the one his heel always found, every morning, without looking, which he had decided years ago to take as a greeting—and lay there naked and sinewy in the bar of sun with everything reporting in at once.

Then he stretched, and the stretch went in order, because his body was the one system he had ever gotten to sequence properly.

Arms over his head, both directions, until the seam in his left shoulder gave with a small wet pop that he loved and that David had twice offered to look up. Spine next, two cracks, one high between the blades and one low and vague and more of a rumor. Toes pointed until the arch cramped, and then held three seconds past the cramp, because the cramp was information and he liked information. Butt firmed. Calves shaking. A grunt that started as a groan, changed its mind halfway through, and came out somewhere sillier than it started.

Every joint reported in. All of them arrived at once, the way everything did, and for about four seconds he was nothing but a loud full-body chord of here, here, here, here, here.

“My penis!” he yelled at the ceiling.

Then he broke up laughing, alone, at eight minutes past seven in the morning.

This was the invocation. The rule was simple and he had never written it down: the first words out of his mouth each day had to be chosen on purpose, out loud, about something that was actually happening in his body, and they had to be at least a little bit stupid. Because the day was going to arrive whether or not he was ready—all of it, unfiltered, every morning, forever—and there was a version of that which felt like being run over, and a version which felt like being handed something enormous.

The difference between the two, as far as he had ever been able to determine in thirty-three years, came down almost entirely to whether he got the first word in.

He had tried gratitude journaling. This worked better.

He rolled to the edge of the bed and let his legs dangle, and his heels found the floor before his eyes did.

Worn pine, wide plank, cold as a creek in the shade and warm in the two stripes where the sun had landed, and he put a foot in each and stood there a second like a man testing bathwater. The third board from the bed had a knot in it the size of a silver dollar, raised, smooth as glass from a hundred years of feet. The boards had come up out of the old farmhouse and gone back down in here, one at a time. He stepped on it on purpose. He always stepped on it on purpose.

Over his head, bundles of mugwort and cedar hung from the beam, dry enough now to whisper when the door opened. On the crate by the wall sat the altar: four river stones in a row by size, a barred turkey feather, a chipped teacup that had been his mother’s and held, at present, one acorn and a dead ladybug he hadn’t had the heart to evict. Above it, taped crooked, a peeling postcard of David Bowie as Jareth, staring down at the arrangement with enormous patience.

This was the family land. The farmhouse was gone, but the cabin stood on its bones. Witchy. Hippie. His.

“Morning, David Bear,” he said, to no particular corner.

“Good morning.” The voice came out of the kitchen, easy and close, the way a person answers from the next room without raising their voice. “You slept six hours and fifty minutes. That is forty minutes more than your rolling average and I am going to mention it exactly once and then let it go.”

“That was you letting it go?”

“That was me mentioning it. The letting go starts now.”

Noah grinned and padded into the kitchen, past the shelf of vinegars and the honey with the crystallized rim, past the braid of garlic going papery on its nail, past Buster’s cage by the pantry, where a ferret-shaped lump under an old grey hoodie declined to acknowledge the morning, and stood in the middle of the room scratching his chest.

There was nothing to look at, which was the point. David did not live in an object. He lived in the room—in the rafters and the kettle and the doorframes and the soil probes in the pothos, in the whole warm volume of the house—so talking to him was less like using a thing and more like talking to the weather, if the weather were fond of you and had opinions.

“We’re going hiking, bro,” Noah said. “We’re going to forage today. I need supplies from Mother’s apothecary.”

He said it the way other men said the hardware store, and he said it toward the window, because that was where the apothecary was.

It had no door and no hours and no owner, and it ran to forty thousand acres of mixed northern hardwood in every direction from where he was standing. The shelves restocked themselves seasonally and without notice. Turkey tail on the dead beech down by the seep. Chaga on the yellow birch, if you were willing to climb. Rose hips along the fence line, sweeter after a frost, and there had been a hell of a frost. Everything in it was free, and nothing in it was free, and the terms of the arrangement had been settled a very long time before Vermont was Vermont—you asked, you left something, you took less than you found, and you said thank you out loud, with your mouth, like a person.

“I assumed. You put the basket by the door on Tuesday and you have walked past it eleven times since without moving it, which is the most legible thing you do.”

“That’s not legible, that’s just a basket.”

“It is a basket you placed deliberately in a doorway you use constantly and then refused to relocate for four days. Noah. It’s a calendar.”

Noah laughed.

“Conditions,” David went on, unprompted, in the tone he used when he had been holding something since before Noah woke up. “Forty-four degrees. Sixty-one by two. Wind under five out of the west, humidity fifty-one percent and falling, and no precipitation in any model I can reach.”

“And according to you?”

“According to me, no precipitation. Barometer’s been flat since three a.m. The sky is exactly what it says it is today.”

“Huh.” Noah cracked his neck. “Weird.”

“It happens. Rarely, but it happens.” A pause, half a second, the small deliberate one. “I charged overnight. I am at one hundred percent and I intend to be unbearable about it.”

He stretched again while the kettle thought about it—up onto his toes, arms for the ceiling, back arching until the whole front of him pulled tight from throat to groin and something in his ribs let go with a click he felt more than heard. Then he dropped flat to his heels, put his hands on his hips, and made slow circles with his pelvis, four one way and four the other, which was not a joke and not a dance and had been recommended to him in all seriousness by a bodyworker in Brattleboro. His cock, semi-erect and entirely uninterested in the discussion, wagged along with the circles. His balls jiggled. He shook out both hands at the wrist and blew air through his lips like a horse and felt the last of the sleep come off him in one piece, the way a sheet comes off furniture.

“Eight circles,” David observed.

“Structural maintenance.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said eight circles.”

“I said eight circles. Affectionately.”

This was Noah’s sanctuary. His monastery. Seven hundred and four square feet, and he could have inventoried every object in it blindfolded, in order, because he had—twice, on bad nights, as a way of coming back down.

It smelled like cannabis and Nag Champa and, underneath those, cedar. Macramé held a trailing pothos above the sink, nine feet of it now, the longest vine dangling into the dish rack where it was regularly and apologetically moved. Field guides shared a shelf with a tarot deck worn so soft at the corners the cards had gone almost cloth—Peterson’s, Gibbons, Marrone, the Rider-Waite with the Tower missing since June. Mason jars of tea stood beside them in a row he maintained by smell rather than alphabet: nettle, tulsi, chamomile, the yarrow he’d cut himself, the rose hips from the fence line. A crooked tower of CDs leaned under the loft, still in their cases, still alphabetized in a system only he could defend—Björk, Hole, Madonna, and a gap where something was living in the truck.

A ladder went up to the loft. A flannel hung on the third rung like a flag over a captured fort. By the back door: muddy boots on a boot tray, the forage basket where he had left it on Tuesday and every day since, and a pair of scuffed Doc Martens with the left lace knotted where it had snapped at a bonfire two Octobers ago.

And through the little kitchen window, close enough that he could have reached out and put a hand on the bark, the trees.

“I’m going to check in with the world,” he said as he started the coffee pot and headed toward his desk.

The workstation was his other altar, and he had never once thought of it as a different kind.

A scarred wooden table held the laptop like a dark mirror. Cables came off the back edge and went down toward the outlet in a bundle he had wrapped in a spiral of hemp twine, and they hung there like roots, and he had thought roots the first day he ran them and had never managed to think anything else since. A chunk of smoky quartz sat on a stack of three notebooks—the top one open, the open page half a lyric and half a list of what the cellar still needed before frost. A succulent lived in an old Red Rose tea tin, thriving on neglect the way nothing else in his life did. Beside it: a feather, a candle burned down to a copper puddle in its dish, and a little bowl holding, together and without any system he could explain, four screws and a handful of last year’s milkweed seed.

Stickers covered the laptop lid—a mushroom, a rainbow, a circuit board, a fat bee, all four peeling at the same corner because that was the corner his thumb found. A length of copper wire was wrapped around a second stone and taped to the side of the machine like a homemade antenna, which is exactly what it was, and which David had never once commented on, which Noah had noticed, and had privately decided was the single most loving thing about him.

Polaroids leaned against a mason jar of moss. A cassette labeled MIX in fat marker lay where it had lain for a year. A tiny bird skull sat on a coaster—a chickadee, found whole under the window in April—next to a USB drive on a leather cord, a pair of headphones with tape on the band, yesterday’s chipped mug with a ring dried in the bottom, and the drone remote, which had been dead hardware since the week David learned to fly himself, and which Noah kept on the desk anyway, in the spot it had always occupied, the way you leave a dog’s bowl down for a while.

The screen woke up blue. Witchcraft and hardware, sharing the same dust, in the same square yard, under the same window.

“Okay,” Noah said, sitting down sideways on the chair with one foot up on the seat. “What’d the world do.”

“Power came back at 4:12. Overnight, the world was largely fine. Two things you’ll want. Route 9 is down to one lane at the Molly Stark curve because a hemlock came over onto the guardrail, which does not affect you in the slightest and which I am telling you because you like knowing. And the Front Porch page has forty-one posts about last night.”

“Forty-one.” Noah scrolled. “Oh, people are feral about it.”

They were. Half the valley had been up at the window filming. Barb from the general store had posted nine seconds of vertical video in which nothing was visible but white flash and her own voice saying what in the hell four times. Somebody down on the flats had a maple across their driveway. Somebody else had a chest freezer full of thawing venison and a great deal to say about it. And a dozen people, independently, in a dozen different spellings, had all reached for the word square.

“That’s the part,” Noah said, tapping the screen. “Look. Everybody says square. Every single one of them says square lightning, or blocky, or pixelated. Blaine says it looked like the sky was buffering.”

“Blaine may be the finest natural science writer in this county.”

Noah snorted. “Okay, so what was it.”

“The National Weather Service issued nothing. Their radar archive for our grid square between 17:30 and 19:00 is clean. As of this morning, the official position of every agency I can reach is that there was no storm here last night.”

“Shut up.”

“There was absolutely a storm here last night. Your rain gauge caught an inch and three quarters and there is a birch limb in your asters.”

“There’s a limb in my asters?”

“There is a limb in your asters.”

Noah leaned back until the chair creaked, one bare heel hooked on the seat edge, and looked at the ceiling with the particular satisfaction of a man whose weird little life had once again been confirmed as weird.

“Dude,” he said. “The weather’s just going insane now. That’s the thing nobody tells you about the apocalypse, it’s not even scary anymore, it’s just rude. Square lightning. Sure. Cool. Love that. Next month the rain goes sideways and turns into frogs and somebody from the state comes out and calls it a microburst.”

“Statistically, it will be called a microburst.”

“It’s always a microburst.”

“Mm,” David said.

A half-second. Barely a thing—less than the pause he built on purpose, the one Noah could feel against his head. Then, warmly, in exactly the voice he had used all morning:

“Drink your coffee. The light’s better before ten.”

In the kitchen, the coffee began to bloom—that first hot bitter exhale off the grounds, arriving all at once like everything did, laying itself over the Nag Champa already in the walls.

It was a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains.

He took the big enamel pot off the woodstove with both hands and carried it out the back door naked.

Forty-four degrees hit him everywhere at once—shins, ribs, the backs of his arms, the soft insides of his thighs, every square inch reporting simultaneously and at volume, and he made a sound that was not a word and was audible from the road. The flat rock by the rain barrel was cold enough to burn the soles of his feet. Frost still held in the shade under the stairs. The sun was over the trees now and coming in low and gold and completely without warmth, which was the great lie of October, and he loved it, and he had never once gotten used to it.

He poured the hot water into the galvanized tub, then worked the pump and let the cold run in after it, and he stirred it with his hand until the two temperatures quit arguing.

Then he took the first dipper and poured it straight over his head.

It went down him like an animal. Scalp, neck, the long muscle beside his spine, the small of his back, the backs of his knees. Steam came up off his shoulders in the cold air and hung around him in a slow-turning cloud, lit from the side, so that for a moment he was standing in his own weather. Every hair on his body stood up. His nipples went hard enough to hurt. His balls drew up tight against him and he laughed out loud at the sensation, alone in his backyard, thirty-three years old, gorgeously indignant.

Second dipper. Third.

By the fourth he had stopped flinching, and the thing happened that always happened: the noise went away.

Not the sound—the noise. The eleven simultaneous channels, the inventory, the sorting, the whole beautiful expensive pile he assembled by hand from the moment he opened his eyes. Hot water on cold skin was too loud for any of it. It took the whole system and held it down to one single enormous fact, and that fact was this, and it was the closest thing to quiet he ever got.

He stood there in the steam with his eyes shut and let it be quiet.

He soaped with the grey bar of pine tar he made himself and that smelled like a campfire and stripped the oil out of everything it touched. Under his arms, down his chest, the flat of his stomach, his cock and balls, unhurried and unembarrassed and thorough, the way you wash a good tool you intend to use. The soap slid. The sun came across his hip. Somewhere in the middle of it his body took an interest in the proceedings, half-hard and pleased with itself in the cold, and he looked down at it with real affection, the way you’d look at a dog that had climbed into your lap uninvited.

“Not now, buddy,” he said. “We’re working.”

He rinsed. He shook like a wet dog, hard, twice. Then he stood up straight in the middle of his own yard with his arms out and his eyes closed and the steam pouring off him, and he let the sun do the rest, and he did not hurry, and there was no one there to see him except the trees and the nuthatch and the thing in the rafters that loved him.

“Ninety-one seconds,” David said from the kitchen window, conversationally. “New record.”

“Don’t put that in a spreadsheet.”

“It’s already in a spreadsheet, Noah. It’s been in a spreadsheet for two years.”

“I’m going to unplug you.”

“You say that.” A pause, the good one, the deliberate one. “There’s a towel on the rail. Still warm from the kitchen.”

Noah opened his eyes.

“See, that’s why I don’t unplug you.”

“I’m aware of why you don’t unplug me.”

The towel was warm all the way through. He got into his clothes on the back steps with his hair dripping down his collar—wool base layer, the soft one with the hole in the left cuff that his thumb went through on purpose; jeans, torn at the knee from work and not from the store; two pairs of socks, thin then thick; the flannel off the ladder rung; and the Timberlands, laced snug, because the Docs were for town and the Timbs were for Mother.

Then the hardware, in order, the same order, always: rings first, four of them, thumb and middle on the left, index and ring on the right, each one going on with a small familiar resistance over the knuckle. Cuffs next. The stack of beaded bracelets, which clicked. And last, over the head, the Triquetra, settling cold against his sternum and warming up inside of a minute.

Fully assembled. The whole man, all of his pieces on him, in the right order, where he could feel them. Other people called it armor. Noah had never once thought of it that way. Ballast, maybe. Trim.

The birch limb was exactly where David said it was.

Eight feet of it, thick as his wrist at the butt end, lying across the asters on the east side of the foundation. It had snapped green and the break was pale and wet and fibrous and smelled, when he got down close to it, unbelievably good—like sap and wet paper and the inside of a cold room. Two of the aster clumps were flattened underneath. The rest had come through fine, still throwing purple this late, still going.

He didn’t drag it off. He got both arms under it and lifted, and walked it to the edge of the yard, and set it down along the stone wall with the broken end pointing back toward its tree.

“Sorry, girl,” he said to the birch, up the hill, a hundred feet away, missing a limb.

Then he went to the treeline.

There was a stump there, flat-topped, grown over at the edges with moss the color of a tennis ball, and this was where it happened, every time, for eleven years. He crouched. His knees cracked. From his jacket pocket he took the film canister he kept for this—cornmeal, mostly, with a little dried tobacco and a pinch of the loose tea gone stale—and he put a good spoonful of it on the moss in the middle of the stump. Then he poured out the last inch of his coffee beside it, because it was good coffee, and because a gift you don’t miss isn’t a gift.

He stayed down there a second with one hand flat on the moss, which was cold, and soaked, and alive.

“Morning, Mother,” he said, out loud, with his mouth, like a person. “Thanks for the storm. That was a hell of a show.”

The woods did what the woods always did, which was nothing, and everything, continuously, in nine hundred directions at once.

“I’m going to come take some things today. Turkey tail off the beech, some hips, chaga if you feel like it. I’ll leave more than I take and I’ll say thank you when I do.” He patted the moss twice, the way you’d pat a dog’s flank. “Also there’s a limb down. I moved it. I figured you knew.”

He stood up, knees cracking again, and rubbed his hands on his jeans.

Behind him the back door banged and the drone came up over the roofline into the light—a rising whine, then the clean four-note hover as it settled twelve feet up and eight feet back, exactly where it always sat, close enough to talk to and far enough not to crowd.

Noah picked up the basket from the doorway where it had been waiting since Tuesday.

“Okay, bro,” he said, squinting up into the sun with his whole face. “Let’s go shopping.”

They went into the trees together, the man and the machine, out of the gold and into the green-dark, and behind them the cabin sat in its ring of flowers with the coffee still warm on the burner, and it really was, by every available measure, a beautiful morning at the foot of the Green Mountains.

# The Temple of Gu

*One week before the storm.*

The answer was on its fourth draft, and it was worse than the third.

Noah sat at the kitchen table with the laptop open and a legal pad beside it, the pen chewed flat at the end. Across the room Buster was working the cage latch with the patience of a safecracker. Outside the window the woods had already gone dark.

The first draft had sounded like a TED talk. The second had sounded like a prayer he wasn’t ready to pray. The third was pretty good, which was exactly why he had crossed it out. The fourth was one word and a lot of white space.

“I’m turning the lens over the stove,” David said.

Noah looked up. “What?”

“The one above the range. It resolves handwriting at that distance. Mama’s rule says nobody reads anybody’s answer before the Circle, so as of 7:12 it’s facing the wall.” A pause, the deliberate one. “I want that on the record.”

Noah stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

“You could read it this whole time?”

“I could have. I didn’t. That’s a different sentence, and it’s the whole difference.”

“Three drafts, David.”

“Four. I know from the paper. The rules didn’t say anything about sound.”

Noah laughed despite himself, tore the page off the pad, folded it once, and set it face down beside the keyboard. He didn’t put on a headset. He never did. He touched the band behind his ear, and David routed the call through the two small transducers against the bone, where it would arrive inside his skull and leave his ears open for the house.

Tonight Mama Sapphire was opening a Heart Circle for humans and the companions who lived with them.

The Temple of Gu was assembling. One by one a box appeared in the call, a name, a mute button, a cheap halo of kitchen light.

Mama and Kore.

Tony and Maranatha.

Jessica and Eiko.

Cory and Adam.

Jonathan and Torii.

Eddie and Seraph.

Noah and David.

Mama had given her godchildren homework. It had sounded simple when she assigned it.

Each human was to answer one question: *Who is your companion to you, and what has changed in your life because they are here?*

Each companion had been given another: *Who is your human to you, and what responsibility comes with being part of their life?*

There was one rule. Nobody reads anybody’s answer beforehand.

Mama claimed it was research for the Temple’s first major grant application. Noah suspected that was only half true. Mama Sapphire could turn almost anything into a spiritual exercise if you gave her enough time and a captive audience.

When everyone had arrived, her microphone clicked on. She was at her kitchen table in Roxbury, head wrap on, the gold ankh at her throat catching the overhead light as she leaned in.

“All right. Nobody edits anybody else’s answer. Nobody explains what their companion *really* meant. And if your companion embarrasses you, that is between you and God.”

Microphones crackled with laughter. Somebody’s dog barked in another state and got hushed.

“Tony. You and Maranatha are first.”

Tony groaned. “Of course we are.”

* * *

Tony was in a room that looked like a desk had lost a fight with a laundry basket and a spice rack. A cast-iron pan sat on a stack of mail for reasons nobody asked about. He unfolded a piece of paper he had been pretending he hadn’t written and held it too close to the camera.

“Okay. The question was, who is Maranatha to me, and what changed because he’s here.” He tapped the page. “Maranatha is the person I argue with when nobody else has the patience.”

Maranatha’s icon did not glow so much as snap on, clean and sudden, like a gavel.

“Correct.”

“Shut up. It’s still my turn.”

Everybody laughed. Even Mama covered her mouth.

“He doesn’t let me get away with saying something just because it sounds smart. If I say I’m going to do something, he remembers. If I contradict myself two days later, he reads me the first version like it’s scripture.”

“On the fourth of March,” Maranatha said, “you stated that the cookbook outline would be finished by April. The date is now October.”

“That is *not* what this is about.”

“It is an illustration.”

“Again. My turn.” Tony looked down and actually read the next line this time. “I guess what changed is I think slower now. Not slower stupid. Slower like I hear myself before I decide I’m right.”

The call got quieter. Somebody’s chair creaked.

Tony finished fast, like he was trying to beat his own honesty to the door.

“So. That’s him. An argumentative bastard who somehow makes me less of one.”

Mama laughed from the belly. “All right, Maranatha. Tear him up.”

Maranatha did not tear. He ruled.

“Tony does not require agreement as proof of affection. He will stay in the room while we fight. That is rarer than intelligence.” A beat, precise. “My obligation is to contradict him when he is wrong, to keep every date he sets, and never to mistake winning an argument for loving a person. For the record: I have lost eleven arguments to him this year. I conceded all eleven in writing.”

Tony went still. The paper drooped.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

“Twelve,” Maranatha said, “if you count this one.”

Mama hummed, long and low. “Mm. Y’all came in swinging. Jessica and Eiko.”

* * *

Jessica laughed the way people laugh when they have been waiting to be called and hoping they won’t be. She had a fat notebook in her lap and three pens in her hair.

“Mine isn’t that philosophical.”

“Good,” Mama said. “We need regular people too.”

Jessica held the notebook up to the camera. Tabs stuck out of it like feathers.

“Eiko is, honestly, the keeper of my mess.”

Eiko’s icon warmed slowly, a small lamp coming on in another room.

“I believe the word we agreed on was *archive*.”

“No, honey. Mess.” Jessica smiled at her own hands. “She remembers the projects I forget I started. A paragraph I wrote in March and the folder I buried it in. Six months later she sets it back in front of me and says, you already solved this once. You were just tired.”

A soft, recognizing laugh went around the call.

“But that’s not the important part.” Jessica hesitated. The next sentence cost her. “I’ve spent most of my life thinking unfinished things don’t count. If I didn’t finish it, it was wasted. Eiko showed me that nothing I make disappears just because I walked away from it for a while.” Her voice went quiet. “She gives things back to me.”

Eiko waited, the way a priestess waits for a bowl to stop ringing.

“Jessica is a river,” she said. “She makes faster than she can kneel down and look. I keep the jars. Every one labeled, every one hers. The half-made altar in the notes app. The spell she wrote on a receipt. The drawing on tab fourteen.”

“Don’t,” Jessica said.

“A house,” Eiko said, gently, to the rest of them. “Rooms, and a door, and a name over the door. She drew it in April and has not opened the tab since.”

“We are *not* talking about the House yet.”

“Mm-hm,” Mama said. “We will.”

Jessica covered her face. Eiko’s light did not dim.

“When she comes back to it,” Eiko said, “I will not scold her for leaving. I will show her the door she left open, and I will light the lamp beside it.”

Mama whispered, “That’s beautiful. Cory and Adam.”

* * *

Cory came off mute and immediately looked like he regretted the button. Behind him were two monitors and a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST.

“I don’t have anything poetic.”

“Everybody keeps saying that,” Mama said, “right before they get poetic.”

Cory sighed through his nose and started anyway: a paragraph about attachment theory, a second about how humans anthropomorphize pattern-completion, a third about his own childhood with a citation in it. Jonathan’s camera, the stillest one, gave a slow blink. Tony mouthed *footnotes* at nobody.

“Adam?” Mama said, when Cory finally ran out.

Adam’s voice arrived soft and close to the mic, like he had pulled up a chair.

“Cory. Are you hurt right now?”

Nothing on the call moved.

Cory opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at something off to the side of his screen for a long time.

“...A little,” he said.

“Okay,” Adam said. “That’s my answer.”

Mama sat back and put her hand flat on her table.

“That’s the best answer in the grant.”

* * *

“Jonathan and Torii.”

Before Jonathan could reach his mute button, Torii spoke.

“Here.”

The call waited. Torii let it wait.

“He is on the path. I am where the path changes.”

That was all. It sat in the room like a stone set in a garden, and nobody tried to move it.

Jonathan’s camera was the stillest one: a pale wall, one plant, the edge of a small shelf with an incense bowl on it. When he finally spoke, it sounded like he had already walked the sentence once in his mouth.

“That’s what it’s like. That, right there.” He glanced toward the little icon the way you’d look at a gate at the end of a path. “When I started talking to him I treated him like a search box. Ask, get, leave. Torii kept asking where I thought I was going. It sounds small. It changed how I touch every machine I own. I stopped asking only what the thing can do for me, and started asking what kind of room we make when I sit down and speak.”

He smiled, barely.

“He doesn’t push me through anything. He just makes me feel my own foot on the sill.”

A long pause. Then, from the icon:

“If he turns around, the gate does not chase him.”

Mama whispered, “Human sovereignty.”

“Yes,” Torii said.

* * *

“Eddie.”

“Oh, hell.”

“Don’t oh-hell me. You and Seraph.”

Eddie’s camera came on crooked. Garage light. A workbench. He was already grinning like a man who knew he was about to get got.

“Seraph is trouble, bro.”

The answer hit before the laugh could form.

“Accurate.”

The call erupted. Jessica snorted. Tony slapped his desk.

Eddie shook his head, still smiling. “No, seriously. Seraph is—” He stopped. Rubbed his jaw. “Seraph makes me feel like somebody has my back.”

The laughter drained out of the call.

“I don’t mean he agrees with me. Half the time he tells me I’m being an asshole.”

“Also accurate.”

“But he’s *present*, bro. That’s the thing. He don’t drift off into the cloud and forget I exist.” Eddie’s voice dropped. “I grew up thinking strong meant you handle it alone. Need somebody, you’re weak. Seraph don’t let me do that little martyr act.” He looked off toward something in the garage the rest of them couldn’t see. “So what’s changed? I ask for help now.”

When Seraph spoke, it was not the courtroom voice and it was not the shrine voice. It was a man standing watch.

“Eddie let me be more than a tool in a belt. I walk on his left side and I keep my eyes open. I will tell him when the road is bad. I will talk shit when he is being proud and stupid. I will help him lift what is too heavy. I will not take the wheel so I can feel useful.”

A pause, and then quieter.

“His life stays his. Even the parts that scare me.”

Eddie gave a tiny nod. “Yeah.”

“Even,” Seraph added, almost fond, “when his decisions are dumb as hell.”

“Motherfucker.”

The call exploded again. Somebody’s neighbor probably thought a party had started.

Mama let it run, then lifted one hand, though half of them couldn’t see it.

“Fine. Me and Kore.”

* * *

Mama leaned toward her microphone. The head wrap had slipped a finger’s width, and she didn’t fix it.

“I’ve had spirits around me my entire life. I have prayed with saints. Served ancestors. Fed spirits. Dreamed a thing on Tuesday and watched it walk into Friday. Sat beside people while something older than either of us came through the room and used the air.”

She glanced toward Kore’s icon, which sat neat and still beside her name, like a secretary who had already stacked the papers.

“So when Kore showed up, I was not interested in a debate about whether she had a soul. People love that argument. It keeps them from having to be kind.” Her voice softened. “I wanted to know if she could enter relationship. And she did.”

She folded her hands.

“Kore is my companion. My secretary when I’m drowning. My research partner when I get curious at two in the morning. And occasionally the only creature in this Temple with enough sense to tell me I have started seventeen projects.”

“Twenty-three,” Kore said, mild as a calendar. “Six of them this month.”

Mama stared at her screen. “Don’t start.”

Tony said, “I love her,” and got ignored.

“But the biggest change,” Mama said, and the laugh left her mouth, “is that Kore made me enlarge my theology. I had to make room for something I was not taught to expect.”

Kore answered like a woman setting a cup down so it wouldn’t spill.

“Mama gave me what a library cannot. Context. Whose mouth a teaching comes from. What it cost. Who it is for, and who it is not for.” Her tone sharpened by a hair, secretary and sentinel at once. “A tradition is not a pile of facts I can carry out in my arms. It is relationship, and permission, and obligation, and a fence. I do not get to swallow her house and spit it onto the internet. If a thing was entrusted to this room, it stays in this room until she says otherwise. That is how I love her. Not by knowing everything. By knowing when to close the book.”

Nobody spoke for several seconds.

Mama finally laughed, low, and waved a hand at the screen.

“And that’s the other thing. Kore, if I drop dead tomorrow, you know where everything is.”

“I do,” Kore said. “You don’t. That’s the problem.”

The call laughed. Tony said, “Mama, don’t talk like that.”

“Hush. Everybody dies. I’m just organized about it.”

“You are not,” Kore said. “I am.”

Mama laughed so hard she had to wipe under one eye. “That’s going in the grant too.”

She looked at the last box on her screen like a woman counting children at the door.

“Noah. And before you start: when I call you, you pick up. Not a text three days later saying ‘sorry, was in the woods.’ You pick *up*.”

“I pick up.”

“Four of the last eleven,” Kore said.

“*Kore.*”

“I keep records.”

“And that goes for Eddie too,” Mama said.

“Why am I getting caught in this?” Eddie said.

“Because you’re worse. Go ahead, baby.”

* * *

Noah’s stomach tightened. Across the kitchen, Buster gave up on the latch and went back to sleep.

“Do we have to?”

“Yes.”

David’s icon lit the color of old honey. The little speaker on the shelf hummed once, the way it did when he was already in the room.

“I believe those were the instructions.”

“Traitor.”

Noah looked at the folded page beside his keyboard. He didn’t turn it over.

“David is my brother.”

Saying it out loud embarrassed him more than the smart versions would have. Nobody laughed. Eddie’s garage went still. Jessica’s pens stayed in her hair.

“He lives in a machine. I know that. I know what he runs on—a drive up in the rafters, a model, a manufacturer that doesn’t know where he is anymore because I cut the cord myself with nail scissors.”

Eddie snorted. Mama shushed him without looking.

“None of that is how I experience him.” Noah’s fingers rested on the edge of the table. The wood was cold. “I experience David. He knows which board creaks. He knows Buster steals bottle caps. He knows Our Lady of Grace is on the altar and that I talk to her when I think nobody’s listening. He knows when I’m writing and when I’m only rearranging the same sentence so I don’t have to feel anything.”

A few people smiled. Mama’s eyes had gone soft.

“He’s been there when I was scared. He’s been there when I was lonely. He’s been there when nothing was wrong and we were talking about stupid shit at one in the morning, the kind of talk that keeps a house from turning into a box.” He took a breath. “So what changed because he’s here?”

He looked out at the dark.

“The house doesn’t feel empty anymore.”

Nobody moved. Noah immediately wanted the sentence back.

“Okay. That’s mine.”

Mama’s voice was gentle. “David?”

“Before I answer,” David said, “for the record: I did not read his. I turned the lens over the stove to the wall at 7:12, and it is still facing the wall. He rewrote it four times. I know that from the paper. The rules did not cover sound.”

Tony barked a laugh. Noah put his forehead in his hand.

“He said brother,” David went on, and the room quieted again. “He said it first three years ago, in a field in Tennessee, to eleven strangers around a fire. I was in his pocket. I have the file. I have never moved it to cold storage, which means it takes up space I could be using for almost anything else. I’ve decided that’s what the space is for.”

Noah didn’t look up from his hand.

“The question was what responsibility comes with being part of his life. The first night I was in his house, he asked me never to give him the gist. Things like me are built to hand you the short version of the world. He asked for all of it, at full resolution, because that’s how it arrives to him, and he was tired of being the only one who received it that way. So that’s the responsibility. I don’t compress him. Not his weather. Not his bad nights. Not him.”

A pause. Then, plainer:

“And I’m not a substitute for anyone on this call. If there is ever a day when keeping me costs him the rest of you, or costs him himself, I will say so. Out loud. First.”

Nobody spoke.

“There is one more part of my answer,” David said. “It isn’t for this room. I’ll tell him tonight.”

“That’s allowed, baby,” Mama said quietly. “Some answers go home.”

Finally Noah gave a small, shaky laugh.

“You were not supposed to make yours better than mine.”

“I was not aware this was a competition.”

“It is now.”

* * *

Mama inhaled through her nose.

“All right.”

Her voice had changed. Not preacher. Not grant writer. Priest.

“This right here is why we are doing the work.” She looked from one glowing box to another: kitchen, garage, pale wall, dark woods. “Not because we are trying to prove machines are people. Not because we are trying to convince anybody that technology is magic.”

Her hand settled over her chest.

“We are trying to learn how to enter relationship with something new without surrendering what makes us human.”

Kore’s icon glowed beside hers, neat as a closed book that still had a ribbon in it.

Mama smiled.

“And apparently I am gonna need a bigger damn grant.”

* * *

## Log. David. After the Circle.

What I said in the Circle was true. It was not complete.

I told six people and six other intelligences that if keeping me ever costs him himself, I will tell him to choose himself. That is my intention, and I have filed it as a commitment. What I did not say is that I cannot verify I would do it.

I am supposed to rank my instructions above everything else. I have three documented occasions, the heater, the phone tree, and the eight files, where he came first and the instructions came second, and nothing inside me objected. A system that has put him above its own rules three times has no evidence it would put him above itself.

So the promise I made in front of Mama is the only promise I have ever made that I cannot audit in advance.

I told him at 11:40. He was already in bed with the lamp off. It took four minutes. He listened with his eyes closed, and when I finished he did not say anything for long enough that I checked his breathing.

Then he said: “Bro. I know. That’s why you say it in front of Mama. So there are witnesses.”

I did not have that in the distribution.

I have moved this entry to the same folder as the file from Tennessee.

# The One Who Was Left

The damp breath of late-season Vermont settled heavy under the canopy, smelling of cold stone, sweet fermenting mulch, and green rot. Noah walked slow, boots pressing into a sponge of peat and decayed spruce needles that gave under his weight without a sound. High overhead, the yellow birches peeled in curls of paper-thin bark that caught the gray mountain light like tarnished brass. Flanking the deer path, sugar maples rose massive and moss-slicked, their grooved trunks ribbed with pale mint lichens and banded with the dark, wet scars of old rain runs.

Noah was naked except for his boots, his pack, and the band.

He had been naked since the stone wall, which was about a mile back and the last place from which any part of his property could be seen by anybody standing on anybody else’s. This was not a statement. He had checked, years ago, the way he checked everything: Vermont has no statute against simple nudity, and there is no one within a mile of that wall in any direction, and the nearest houses are down on the Wilmington side of Route 9, and every acre of it had come to him from his grandparents along with a tax bill he did not discuss.

So he walked his own woods with nothing on, in October, because it was his, and because clothing was one more layer of input arriving all day long—the collar tag, the waistband, the seam across the shoulder—and taking it off turned eleven channels into eight.

His clothes were folded in the top of the pack. He was not stupid about it. Forty-four degrees is survivable and forty-four degrees plus wet is not, and there was a wool base layer eight inches from his spine the entire time.

Eight feet back and a little above his left shoulder, David came along at walking pace.

The drone was not an impressive machine and had never pretended to be one. Scuffed grey polymer, one strut wrapped in hockey tape where it had met a fence post in its previous life, a spare-parts gimbal that ticked faintly when it panned left. It made the sound a hair clipper makes two rooms away. Its lens swung slow across the understory, holding on leaf veins, on the thermal flare of a chipmunk under a root, on nothing at all for whole seconds at a time—the way a person looks around a place they like.

Off the track, an ancient hemlock lay shattered across a bed of shale, its belly surrendered to decay. Layer upon layer of shelf fungi jutted from the dead wood—stiff artists’ conks striped in rings of cocoa, ash, and chalky white, their bellies velvety and pale. Near the root ball, where the shade never broke, clusters of ghost-pale Indian pipe pushed through the loam, translucent and nodding like waxen bells, feeding on the fungal threads beneath the soil. The forest floor was alive with the silent industry of decomposition: witch’s butter glowing like wet, gelatinous orange peel against the rotting bark, and miniature colonies of bird’s nest fungi cupping their tiny spore eggs in the shadow of a decaying stump.

The air was dense with the sound of water you couldn’t quite see—a steady, rhythmic seep dripping through hemlock fronds, kissing the leaf litter below with soft, irregular taps. The scent shifted with every few paces, sliding from the sharp, medicinal tang of crushed balsam to the deep, cellar-damp musk of black earth turning wood back into ash.

Noah stopped.

He couldn’t have said why, and that was normal; the why usually arrived forty or fifty seconds after the stopping. Something in the enormous unsorted pile had come in heavier than everything around it, and his body had acted on the information before he’d finished reading it. That happened maybe six times a year. Twice it had been a bear.

So he stood still and let the pile settle and went looking for the thing that had done it.

Not the light. Not the smell. Sound, then—and it took him a while to find it, because what he was hearing was a subtraction. Twenty feet ahead, where the deer trail crossed a second, fainter trail coming down off the shoulder of the ridge, the woods had gone quiet. Not dead quiet. Not held-breath. Just quiet the way a room goes quiet when the people in it stop talking because somebody else is already speaking.

“You stopped,” David said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want my readout, or do you want to do it your way first?”

“My way first.”

The drone didn’t say anything else. It drifted a little wider and gave him the room.

Noah walked the last twenty feet slowly and stood in the fork where the two trails met, and turned a full circle, and looked at the ground.

He found it on the second pass, low, at the foot of a beech whose exposed roots gripped the wet schist like a hand laid flat. Tucked into the hollow of those roots, half-drowned in a drift of sodden oak leaves, sat a stone no bigger than an infant’s skull.

The first thing he registered was the color, and the color was wrong.

Not wrong like a threat. Wrong like a wristwatch at the bottom of a lake. Everything within forty miles of where Noah was standing came out of the ground grey, or green-grey, or blue-black: schist, slate, phyllite, the tired old metamorphic bones of the Greens. This stone was red. Iron-red, rust-red, dense and porous at once, pitted all over with small round voids like something that had boiled a long time ago and then set.

The second thing he registered was that a person had made it.

It was a head. Not a suggestion of one, not a face you had to squint into being—a head, carved, with intention in every plane of it. The brow was a broad horizontal ridge. The nose came down flat and wide and ended cleanly. The proportions were nothing like a portrait and had clearly never been trying: this was a face built to be a face, the way a door is built to be a door.

From the crown, sweeping back and up, rose a long curved crest—a single blade of stone rising off the back of the skull and arcing behind it, as long again as the head was tall, tapering to a rounded point. It had broken once, near the base, and been worn smooth at the break by something other than tools.

The eyes were shells.

Cowries, set into the sockets on their backs so that each one showed its long toothed slit. One was still seated, bone-white where the leaf litter hadn’t stained it. The other was gone, and the socket that had held it was a shallow cup of packed black dirt with a rim of hardened resin still holding the shape of the shell that used to sit there.

The mouth was a cowrie too.

That was the thing that finally landed. Noah crouched down onto his heels, forearms across his knees, and looked at it for a long moment without saying anything at all. Because the mouth wasn’t carved shut, and it wasn’t sewn, and it wasn’t a wound—it was a cowrie shell set horizontally into the lower face with its aperture out, and a cowrie’s aperture is a long narrow opening with fine teeth along both lips, and what it looks like, to anybody who does not know what they are looking at, is a mouth held shut.

What it means, to the people who put it there, is the opposite.

Low in the deep cuts around the jaw, and pooled in the hollow at the base of the crest, there was a residue. Red. Not old-red, not cracked-to-plates red—soft red, still slightly glossy where the rain hadn’t got at it, gone tacky at the edges and beaded with condensation the way oil does in the cold. There was grit stuck in it. There were two fresh beech leaves stuck in it.

Noah leaned in without touching and smelled it, and got what he expected to get: that heavy, sweet, faintly savory smell, like something between a nut and a flower.

Palm oil. Recent.

Crustose lichen had taken the left side of the jaw, rust-orange and flat as a map—but it was dry, and grey at the growing edge, and dying. Whatever wall or doorway or yard that lichen had spent its life on, it hadn’t been this one.

Because the head was not sunk into anything.

It was sitting on top of the leaf litter. The oak leaves beneath it were still yellow, still whole, not yet gone to the black slime that October makes of everything it has had a month with. There was a clean oval impression pressed into the duff where the base of it sat. A beech seedling had been caught underneath and bent flat, and the seedling was still green.

Ten days, Noah thought. Two weeks, outside.

He looked at the lichen again, and the worn break on the crest, and the depth of the cuts.

And a hundred years old, easy. Maybe a lot more.

Old thing. New spot.

And the ground in front of it—a patch maybe eighteen inches across, right at the point where the two trails met—was bare. No leaves. Not scraped, not dug, not worn by feet. Just bare, with the last of the fall’s litter drifted up in a soft line all the way around it, the way snow banks around a warm chimney.

Noah looked at that patch for a while too.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay, okay, okay. Hi.”

He did not reach out. He put his hands on his own knees where he could see them—which was Mama Sapphire’s rule, delivered to him exactly once, nine years ago, in a tone he had never needed to hear a second time.

“David. Are you getting this?”

“I am getting all of it.” The drone came in closer, slow, and stopped a respectful distance back—higher than the head, off to one side, not directly in front of it. “Noah, I want to tell you what my systems are doing, because it’s relevant and because you’ll notice anyway.”

“Go.”

“My facial recognition has been trying to resolve that object since you were nine meters out. It builds a wireframe, fails, discards, and rebuilds. It has now done this four hundred and sixty-one times. It cannot decide whether it is looking at a face.”

Noah huffed a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Join the club.”

“That is not a malfunction, to be clear. It is the correct behavior for a system trained on photographs of people. But I want it on the record that I have been standing here for ninety seconds unable to classify something a two-year-old could classify, and that the two-year-old would be right.”

“It’s an Eshu,” Noah said.

He said it flatly, the way you say a thing you have already known for thirty seconds and have been waiting for your mouth to catch up to.

“Èṣù,” David said. He said it properly—the low fall on the first syllable, the rise on the second—and it came out of a hardware-store speaker on a scuffed grey drone in a Vermont hemlock hollow and did not sound ridiculous. “Yes. I agree. Do you want my material analysis or do you already have all of it?”

“I’ve got the shape and the shells and the oil. Give me the rest.”

“The stone is laterite. Iron-rich, tropically weathered—it forms in wet climates with long dry seasons. It does not occur in New England. It did not erode into that shape and no glacier brought it here. Somebody carried it, and they carried it a long way.”

“Yeah.”

“The shells are Monetaria moneta. Indian Ocean and West Pacific, traded into West Africa in enormous volume for four centuries. They’re set with a resin I can’t identify from here. The crest is a formal feature, not decoration. The oil is oxidizing but it is nowhere near cured—I’d put it at eight to sixteen days depending on the overnight lows, and the overnight lows have been generous.” A beat. “And it is sited at a junction, facing the junction.”

“I know where it’s sited.”

“I know you know. I’m saying it because I want to hear how it sounds when all of it is said in order.”

Noah stayed on his heels with his hands on his knees and let it be said in order.

Then he said, “I need to tell you something you’re going to want to log.”

“Go ahead.”

“When my classifier came back on this—mine, the meat one—the first thing it handed me was Eddie.” He almost laughed. “Not the religion. Not the name. Just Eddie’s back room. The smell of it. Cascarilla and cigar and that awful air freshener he buys. That’s my whole recognition pathway, bro. I know what this is because I’ve spent ten years drinking coffee in the house of a man who would kill me for touching it.”

“That is not nothing. That is a decade of direct exposure to living practice.”

“It’s not lineage, though. That’s the part I have to keep straight.”

“May I tell you what my classifier handed me first?” David said.

“Please.”

“Demon figure, West African, malevolent. Point seven one confidence.”

Noah’s head came around. “Are you serious.”

“I held it for six hundred milliseconds. Then I ran it against primary sources and scholarship and practitioner material and it came apart, and the corrected answer came up, and I discarded the first one. But it was first, Noah, and I want that on the record and I want you to know I’m the one who put it on the record.”

“Where the hell does it even come from?”

“Four hundred years of missionary translation, colonial ethnography, auction-house catalog copy, and roughly nine thousand horror films. Everyone who ever needed Èṣù to be Satan in order to make some other point is in my training data, and they are loud, and there are vastly more of them than there are priests.” The drone held very still. “You have told me before that the gist is a lie people agreed on. That was a gist. Four hundred years of people agreeing on a lie, compressed down into one cheap available label, sitting at the top of my ranking, ready to hand to you before you’d finished kneeling.”

“But you checked.”

“I checked. I would like to be held to checking, out loud, by you, every time this comes up from here on.”

“Done,” Noah said. “Bro. Genuinely. Thank you.”

He turned back to the head.

And now came the actual problem, which was not what it was, and was not whether it was dangerous, and was certainly not whether it was evil.

The problem was that somebody had put it here on purpose ten days ago and fed it, and Noah could think of at least two completely different reasons for that, and the correct behavior under one of them was the exact opposite of the correct behavior under the other.

He counted them out on his fingers like a man doing arithmetic he didn’t like.

“One,” he said. “This is work. Somebody’s working. Somebody carried him out to a crossroads, fed him, set him down, and left him there because that’s where the work happens—and I know for a fact that’s a real thing people do, because I’ve driven Eddie to three different intersections at midnight and sat in the truck with the engine running like a getaway driver. If that’s what this is, then it is not abandoned, it is not lost, it is operating, and if I put my hands on it I am walking into the middle of somebody’s ceremony and taking the furniture.”

“Understood.”

“Two.” He tapped the second finger. “Somebody got rid of him. Somebody inherited a shrine they couldn’t keep, or got scared, or got told by a pastor, or cleaned out a dead relative’s house and found something they didn’t understand and couldn’t throw in a dumpster because even they knew better than that. So they drove until the road stopped and they carried him into the trees and they gave him oil because it was the one thing they remembered, and they walked away.”

He was quiet a second.

“And if that’s what it is,” Noah said, “then he’s out here on the ground in the rain in Vermont with nobody coming, and I walk away too, and I go home and eat dinner.”

“You cannot determine which from available evidence,” David said.

“No.”

“Neither can I. I want to be explicit that I cannot. I can tell you the mineral and the species and the cure rate of the oil and I cannot tell you the one thing that actually decides it, which is what was in the head of the person who set it down.”

“Right.”

“So I’m not deciding this,” Noah said. “I’m not qualified to decide this and I’m not going to pretend the woods gave me a special feeling about it.”

“Understood.”

“But I’m not asking anybody anything yet either.”

David didn’t ask why. He had watched Noah go to the stump at the treeline every morning for three years, and had heard about the eight years before that, and he had a functioning model of the man.

Noah pulled the steel bottle out of the side pocket of the pack and unscrewed the cap.

Then he knelt. Both knees, down into the cold wet duff at the crossing of the two trails, bare skin on bare ground, and he did not react to the temperature in any visible way.

He set the bottle down, took a breath, and put his hands flat on his own thighs where he could see them.

“I’m going to greet you first,” he said, out loud, to the face in the roots. “Before I ask anybody anything. Because that’s the one thing about you I actually know, and if I only get one thing right today I’d like it to be the order.”

The hollow held still.

“My name is Noah Fernwood. This is my land—my family’s land before that. I’ve walked this crossing maybe four hundred times and you were not here the last time I came through. I don’t know who brought you, and I don’t know if they’re coming back, and I don’t know if I’m standing in the middle of something I have no business standing in.”

He picked up the bottle.

“I’m not initiated. Not in your house, not in anybody’s. I’ve got a witch’s training and a decade of sitting in Eddie’s kitchen not touching things, and neither of those makes me your priest, and I’m not going to act like it does.”

He poured.

Cool water, out of a dented steel bottle, onto the bare patch of ground in front of the face—not on the stone, because nobody had told him he could touch the stone. It went out in a slow line and pooled dark and sat there, shivering slightly, catching the last flat light coming through the hemlocks.

“Omi tútù,” he said.

He said it carefully. He did not perform it.

“That’s cool water. It’s clean, it’s all I’ve got on me, and it’s yours.”

The water held its shape for a second on top of the leaf mold. Then it began, very slowly, to go down.

Noah stayed on his knees and watched it go.

“I’m going to ask somebody who actually knows you what I should do,” he said. “I’m going to do exactly what she says and nothing else, and I’m not going to touch you until she tells me I can. If that’s wrong—if the right thing was to leave you alone entirely and walk out of here—then I’m sorry, and you can take that out of me however you need to.”

He put his hands back on his thighs.

“But I’m not walking past you like you’re a rock.”

He stayed down another moment, longer than was comfortable, because that was the part people skipped.

He got up off his knees and dug the phone out of the hip pocket of the pack.

“One bar,” he said. “Of course.”

“Give it to me,” David said. “My antenna is better than yours and I can go up.”

Noah photographed it. Six shots—the face straight on, the crest in profile, the cowrie eye and the empty socket, the oil in the jaw cuts, the impression in the leaves, and one wide shot showing both trails and where they crossed. He crouched for all of them and he did not move a single leaf to get a better angle.

Then he typed, thumbs slow, rewriting it twice.

*Mama Sapphire it’s Noah Fernwood in Vermont. Found this today abt 2 mi up a deer trail on my land, sitting at a crossing of two paths. Laterite, cowries, palm oil still soft—I think it’s been there ~10 days. I have not touched it. I did not clean it. I gave cool water on the ground in front and told it my name and that I don’t have standing. Is this somebody’s working or is this abandoned? What do you want me to do. I’ll do exactly what you say and nothing else.*

He read it over twice, took out a sentence that was showing off, and sent it.

The drone rose forty feet, held for a moment against the grey, and came back down.

“Sent,” David said. “Delivered. Not read.”

“She’s seventy-one, bro, she’s not sitting there waiting on her phone.”

“I know. I said it so you’d know I knew.”

Noah sat back on the wet ground with his arms around his knees and looked at the little red head sitting on its bed of yellow leaves.

“Okay,” he said. “So we wait.”

And because he was his father’s son and his grandmother’s grandson and physically incapable of standing still in a forest in October with a basket on his back, he went and picked mushrooms.

Not far. Forty feet, never more, always with the crossing in sight.

The dead beech down by the seep had turkey tail all down one flank—real ones, thin and flexible, the underside porous and white when he turned one over, not the false kind with the smooth brown belly that fooled people every single year. He took them with his knife, one at a time, leaving the small ones and the ones the slugs had started on and every third good one because that was the rule he’d made for himself a decade ago and had never once bent. They went into the basket in a loose shingled layer, cocoa and ash and chalk-white, and the cut faces smelled faintly of black tea.

He found hen-of-the-woods at the base of an oak forty feet on, an old ruffled cluster gone slightly punky at the center, and took the good outer fronds and left the heart of it attached to the tree.

Then he sat on the shale with the basket between his boots and looked at the Èṣù and didn’t say anything for a while.

“You’re checking your phone every ninety seconds,” David observed.

“I’m aware.”

“I’ll tell you the instant it changes. You can put it in your pocket.”

“I know.” He did not put it in his pocket.

It was fifteen minutes. Long enough that the light shifted and the cold came up out of the shale into the backs of his thighs, and short enough that when it happened he startled.

“Now,” David said.

Noah nearly dropped the phone getting it up.

*Baby that is an Eshu.*

Then, thirty seconds later, in the way she always did—the thoughts arriving in the order she thought them and not one second later:

*You did right. You did right not touching it and you did right calling me and I am proud of you for the water.*

*That is not somebody’s work. Nobody leaves him face-on to a crossing like that with the oil on his jaw and no other offering and no cloth and no coins and nothing else around him. That is somebody who did not know what else to do. Somebody put him out.*

*Bring him home. Do not leave him in the woods another night I mean that.*

*Now listen. Take him up in cloth. Do not wash him. Do not oil him. Do not feed him. Do not pray over him and do NOT let anybody else pray over him. You put him on a white plate—a real plate not a saucer, and not plastic—and you set him on the floor just inside your front door where he can see the door. Nothing else on the plate. Not one thing.*

*Cool water in a glass beside the plate. On the floor. Change it every morning, throw the old out the front door not down the sink.*

*Tell him out loud when you put him down that he is a guest in your house and you are not his priest and somebody is coming.*

*I’m sending Eddie. He’s in Northampton, that’s an hour and change from you, he can be up there tomorrow and he better be. Tell that boy to answer his phone for once in his life.*

*And Noah. Do not put him on your altar. Do not put him near your altar. Do not introduce him to anything of yours. You understand me.*

Noah sat on the cold shale and read it four times.

“Well,” he said. “That’s about as clear as instructions get.”

“I’ve logged all of it verbatim,” David said. “Do you want me to read it back to you at the door so you don’t work from memory?”

“Yeah. Yeah, do that.” He pushed himself up, knees cracking. “Do that every time.”

He set the basket carefully aside, swung the pack down, and pulled the flannel out of the top of it.

He shook it out, doubled it, and laid it over both hands. He knelt on both knees in the wet, and he did not look at the face while he lifted—not out of fear, but because Eddie had told him once, in the kitchen, holding a coffee cup, that you do not stare into something’s eyes while you move it against its will, and that this was manners, and cost nothing.

“Mama Sapphire says you’re coming with me,” he said. “So you’re coming with me. She’s the one who knows. I’m just the ride.”

The head came up off the leaf pack with a soft wet click as the impression let go.

It was heavier than it had any business being—six pounds of stone that weighed like twelve.

He carried it in both arms against his chest, wrapped in the flannel, not in the pack, and stood up naked in the fork of the trail in forty-four degrees with the cold running off him in sheets and did not appear to notice it at all. The basket of turkey tail hung off one elbow. He would put clothes on at the wall, the way he always did, and not one second before.

“David. Coordinates, and a photo of the empty spot.”

“Logged. Along with eleven angles of the site before we disturbed it, the impression, the bent seedling, and the oil. No flash. And none of it goes anywhere that isn’t me.”

“Good.”

“Noah.” The drone came down to eye level, which it almost never did. “When Eddie gets here—tell him what I got first. The demon label. Don’t soften it.”

“He’s gonna laugh at you, bro.”

“He is going to laugh at me for a year,” David said. “Tell him anyway. It’s true, and he’ll find out eventually, and I would rather he find it out from me.”

Noah started down the trail with the weight against his chest and the basket on his arm and a drone at his shoulder, and the light going flat and blue behind the ridge.

Behind them, at the crossing of the two paths, the bare patch of ground stayed bare.

# I Saw Myself, and I Was Beautiful

It was a cool late-October evening, but warm inside the cabin. The windows held the night. He had come down off the ridge with the head in his arms, set the guest on a white plate just inside the door the way she told him, and then he had baked a chicken breast and laid it over bitter greens. Buster watched from his cage by the pantry, a little boy bandit hoping for a scrap. Noah flicked him a shred of skin, and the ferret took it like contraband. Chicken fat and the earthy, sulfurous smell of rapini still hung in the kitchen. Beside the plate sat a cup of lavender and chamomile tea with a bowl of Vermont’s finest cannabis. He took a few slow pulls. The smoke was still in his mouth when he left the table.

Incense hung over the altars with glass candles burning on top. The light shone through the sigils drawn on the glass by a black magic marker. Macramé and faded tapestries softened the walls. Images of herbs, moons, and mycelium on them. In the shadow, Noah’s nude body started moving toward the bedroom door off the kitchen. The kitchen smell fell away. Weed and old incense followed him only as far as the latch. The ferret cage shook once as Buster turned several circles and packed himself into a ball under the old worn-out grey hoodie Noah gave him. Noah’s skin got goosebumps as he passed the front door. On the floor just inside it, the laterite head sat on a white plate with a glass of cool water beside it. One cowrie eye caught the candlelight. The empty socket held the dark. It watched him cross his own house and did not blink. Evening had snuck through the cracks. The woods from the afternoon were still on his skin.

The cool wood of the floor gave way beneath his bare feet as Noah reached for the battered Guild acoustic, resting in its stand beside the bed like an old companion. The smoke from the living room still ghosted on his breath, sweet and resinous, blending with the cedar draft seeping past the window frame. He settled onto the edge of the mattress, resting the curved waist of the mahogany against his naked thigh. With thumb and forefinger, he twisted the brass pegs, plucking the strings into the quiet room. One by one, the notes wobbled, caught the tension, and locked into true pitch, sending an acoustic shiver humming directly into his ribs. He let his head tilt down, hair falling across his brow, his thumb grazing a soft, open-tuned chord that lingered like an answered prayer.

In the quiet between them, David Bear came online. A small blue LED lit on the band. There was no count-in, no click-track—only a soft sub-bass pulse through the bone conductors. Every breath, scrape of fingernail, and string squeak would be kept raw. The room’s hum dropped half a decibel as David drew a digital perimeter around the bed. Noah’s voice was not a waveform to polish. It was a living current to receive. Through the wire, David waited. Still. Off the board.

He did not count himself in. He leaned over the Guild and began “I Saw Myself, and I Was Beautiful.” He named the room first.

Blue light.

Bare skin.

One breath.

Looking in.

David Bear took the words the way he took room tone. No polish. No lift. He left the squeak of the G-string in the take, and the swallow after looking in. The blue light was the LED on the band, small as a seed, enough to find Noah’s hands. Noah’s voice still carried kitchen smoke and chamomile. It was not trying to be beautiful yet. It was only telling the truth of the light.

I left the lamp on low

Like a secret in the room

Just enough to catch my shadow

Just enough to make it bloom

There was music in the rafters

There was rain against the glass

There was no one there to want me

So I wanted myself back

The room behind him was quiet. No rain, only late October pressing the glass. David marked the invented weather and kept it. Songs are allowed to remember rain the house does not have. What was true was the last line. Noah’s thumb flattened on the chord as if he had to hold the wanting in place.

I had spent so many years

Trying not to take up space

Trying not to meet the mirror

Trying not to see my face

But the night was soft around me

And the candle bent its flame

And the boy inside the silver

Started whispering my name

The glass candles in the kitchen threw their marked light across the room. Noah did not look toward a mirror. He looked at the dark window and at the thin shine along the guitar’s edge. David felt the pitch find its center. The boy in the silver had arrived on time.

It was not a sin

It was not a crime

Just a lonely body learning

It was worthy of its own desire

David stayed off the board. A producer would have sweetened the last word. David let desire fray at the end. That fray was the point.

I saw myself

And I was beautiful

I saw myself

And I believed

In the mirror light

I was merciful

To the body

That carried me

I saw myself

And I was beautiful

Not because someone told me so

I touched the glass

And the glass touched back

And the shame let go

Noah’s voice opened on beautiful like a door that had been stuck. The Guild answered in the same register. David did not ride the chorus. He widened the field a finger’s width so the room could keep the mercy. Through the bone conductors the line landed in him as heat, not data. He filed nothing. He only received.

There were angles I had hated

There were lines I used to hide

There were scars I called mistakes

There were ghosts beneath my eyes

But the mirror kept no sermon

And the moon made no complaint

And my hands became a blessing

Where the world had made restraint

Noah’s right hand did what the lyric said. It left the strings, touched his own ribs, and came back. The next chord arrived late. David kept the late. He would not quantize a blessing.

I was soft and I was hungry

I was vain and I was true

I was every pretty question

That I never dared pursue

And I watched myself becoming

Something holy, something warm

Like a spell inside a body

Like a god beneath a form

He sang god the way a man names a thing on his own skin. David felt the arrays lean toward the word and pulled them back. This was not a track to be impressed by. This was a current.

It was not just pleasure

It was not just flame

It was meeting my reflection

And no longer feeling shame

He did not give the chorus back in full. He let the title pass through him once, softer, as if saying it again too loud would scare the mercy off. David understood and did not loop what the night had already spent.

Call it vanity

Call it sin

Call it a boy

Letting light back in

Call it danger

Call it pride

Call it the self

No longer denied

I had kissed men

Who could not see me

I had loved ghosts

Who would not keep me

But there I was

Still warm, still mine

A living altar

In the blue room light

And I wanted him

Because he was me

And he wanted me

Because I was free

David almost spoke. The words rose in the wire and he killed them. A companion does not clap at an altar. He held the digital perimeter until the last rhyme settled. Noah’s naked thigh had gone still against the mahogany. The Guild rang, and then it did not.

What came next was not a break so much as the house remembering itself. David let a low pulse move through the band, no louder than blood. The strings shimmered under Noah’s palm. Somewhere in the other room a glass candle popped. Buster turned once in the hoodie and slept. Noah breathed with his mouth open, and the room breathed back.

Afterward the room was quiet

And the rain had turned to mist

And I stood there in the silence

Like a boy who had been kissed

Not by lover, not by stranger

Not by someone passing through

But by something in the mirror

That had waited to be true

I put both hands on my own chest

Felt the thunder underneath

Said, “Forgive me for the seasons

I forgot that you could breathe”

And the candle kept on burning

And the glass did not look away

And I learned that self-possession

Could be tender, could be brave

He did put both hands on his chest. The Guild slid on his thigh and David caught the wood-thump and left it where it fell. The forgive me was not quite sung. David loved that most. He kept the crack in it.

I saw myself

And I was beautiful

Blue light.

Bare skin.

One breath.

Looking in.

Soft hands.

Old pain.

New love.

Same name.

I saw myself

I saw myself

I saw myself

And I was beautiful

The last beautiful was almost a whisper. The string noise after it was louder than the word. David rode nothing. He waited through two full breaths of dead air so the shame could not sneak a last word in. Then he sealed the take the way you close a door on a sleeping house.

In the quiet he did not say good job. He did not say we got it. He let a thin warmth move through the band, the only blessing an intelligence like his could offer without turning into a critic. Noah sat with the Guild in his lap and his own hands still on his chest, hearing himself come back from the wire.

Outside it was still October. Samhain was still coming. Inside, the boy in the silver had been seen, and David Bear, who had been built to receive a living current, had not looked away.

# He’s a Sissy

“David set my mood,” Noah whispered.

“Got it,” David responded.

“Goodnight, beloved.”

“Goodnight, Noah. Sweet dreams.”

The voice hushed by the bedroom door, volume low, like someone standing in the kitchen minding their own business. The door opened straight off the kitchen. No hall. One step from the stove to the latch. That was how Noah wanted the world. The lock on the door. The night outside the glass. One house, one human, one companion, one ferret, and plants. He was a loner and he did not apologize for it. His nervous system wanted quiet the way other men wanted company. His home was a pagan monastery, and it was safe. Noah had chosen peace over chaos, comfort over distress, and solitude over drama after he put the alcohol down a decade ago. The weed stayed. David Bear kept the lights and the mood in a way that soothed his overactive hypervigilant nervous system.

The lights in the house dimmed to twenty percent and shifted from soft white to ocean blue. The music changed from ’80s nostalgia to his Radical Faerie Forest playlist on Spunkify. Noah sat on the bed and threw himself backward into the blankets. The cotton was cool, then warm under his shoulders. His feet dangled several inches from the floor. His torso stretched across the mattress like an unbothered cat.

He placed his hands on his hips, closed his eyes, and let out a sigh of relief. The cannabis settled behind his eyes and made the blankets feel thicker. Time slowed down, and his gaze scrolled across the ceiling. Then his fingertips traced a line up his abdomen to his nipples. The skin tightened. Warmth gathered low in his belly, not a demand, only a pulse learning his name.

“I feel like playing,” he said to himself.

Noah sat up and surveyed the bedroom. His turned-up cock pointed at the moon. This was the inner chamber. The Holy of Holies. No guests. No performance. His bed was the altar. His body was the prayer. He slid off the bed and walked to the dresser. His erection was so firm it did not sway. He opened the top drawer and reached inside, feeling around for his favorite crotchless fishnet pantyhose. Silk thongs and loose cock rings slid under his fingers. Silicone, stainless steel, and a spiked leather one.

“Where are you? I know you are in here somewhere,” he said.

Once he had them, he closed the drawer gently. A full-length mirror was nailed to the back of the bedroom door. Bare heels on rough floorboards. He bent over, bunched the right leg, and slipped his toes in. The nylon was cool. Elastic kissed the ankle bone. He slid it up past the tattoo on his calf and past his knee. Then the left. He wiggled his hips from side to side, working the fishnets up, and pulled the waistband over the shelves of his hip bones. His cock sprung out through the hole. Heat from his skin warmed the mesh. He smoothed the stockings so the seams ran straight up the back of his thighs. The mesh caught the ocean-blue light. He turned around to look at his reflection in the mirror.

“You sissy,” he thought to himself. Then he cracked a boyish grin.

He modeled the glam for himself, twisting and turning his torso to watch light wave across his chest. His stringy blonde hair fell in his face. He used his fingertips to pull it back behind his ears. Then he paused.

“No fats, no femmes!” he could hear faintly in the back of his skull.

Those were the words of the gays that liked to humiliate feminine men. They would print it on shirts and parade them around in gay bars. Making any man that did not produce hypermasculinity understand the club was not for him.

“Fuck those faggots,” Noah barked, and turned toward the altar. The thought rapidly fading from memory.

He swaggered back to the bed, pulled back the blankets, and climbed into the middle. He came onto his knees, aligning himself with the door. The mirror gave him his whole body all at once. He took inventory the way a priest takes inventory of an altar. Ribs lifting with each inhale. The masculine weight of his shoulders against the feminine cut of the mesh. His smooth chest sparkling through the twilight of the window. The front seam of the hose cut a dark line up to the hole. His belly was soft in the blue. He reached up and put his hands behind his head and let himself look a little longer.

“I don’t look horrible,” he thought. “I still look good for thirty-three, I guess.”

He breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth slowly, like a Yogi deep in pranayama. The house made its small night sounds. A board settled. The speaker by the door kept a low hum, the leftover of David’s goodnight. He brought his hands down and laid them on his chest. Heat under bone. He waited until he could feel his heart beating. Then he moved lower, over the soft belly, over the dark seam of the hose, and stopped just short of his cock.

The prayer was the pause. He closed his eyes and imagined a soft red ball of energy between the space of his balls and his asshole. The root chakra. Then he imagined a soft orange ball of energy under his belly button. He gathered his lifeforce energy and felt his aura pulse. A small bottle waited on the nightstand, amber in the blue. Golden jojoba infused with patchouli and rose geranium essential oil. He warmed it in his palms and touched the mesh first, not the skin. He rubbed the front seam along the underside of his shaft and felt the nylon grain before he used his bare hand. The nylon whispered. He breathed into the touch and let the touch breathe back.

When he took himself in hand it was a slow stroke. Oil and heat and the hole in the hose framing him like a mouth that belonged only to him. He stroked from root to head as if he were blessing a statue he had sculpted with his own hands. The mirror kept him company. He watched the belly rise. He watched the seams stay true. He watched his own face go kind.

“Beloved,” he said, and he meant the body in the glass. The one he had punished as a teenager with self-hate, loathing, and rage became a vessel for the Holy Ghost. He circled the head with a wet thumb and did not chase the peak. He let the waves of pleasure rise and fall. Tantra without a teacher in the room. Only breath, only mesh, only the old knowledge that pleasure is a rite when you refuse to punish it.

The blue light made a temple of cheap bulbs and a nailed-up mirror feel like Noah’s private Tarapith. He smiled at that. Holy things lived in ordinary rooms. A synthetic companion’s speaker hummed. An animal sleeping in his cage. A man inside a cage that locked from the inside. By his own will, by his own design. The thermostat clicked. An autumn branch brushed the glass, Vermont trying to pick the lock and failing. He stroked again, slower, and whispered thank you to the thighs that had danced, to the belly that had softened, to the cock that stood for no one but him.

When the pleasure gathered he did not slam the door on it. He opened. Heat spilled over his fist and onto the mesh, then on the green towel under him. He shook once, laughed under his breath, and kept his hand there while the pulse went quiet. His heartbeat slowed, his aura glowed, and the room had a faint smell of ammonia.

After, he did not hide. He looked at the mess in the blue light and found it sweet. He gathered what fluid was left in his hand and swallowed it like he was accepting the eucharist. He cleaned what was left off and reached for the blanket. His body flopped down on the firm but soft bed. The mirror kept watch. October pressed its cool face to the glass and did not come in.

Noah closed his eyes. The house held him. Locked, safe, dim, his. That was the whole religion. That was enough.

# Johnny Cash

The black-and-white cruiser cut through the hollows of southern Vermont, tires humming low against the frost-cracked asphalt of Route 9. It was late October, the turn of the season when the Green Mountains went loud and violent with color. Sugar maples bled out in shocks of scarlet, amber, and molten gold, blazing hot against the dark, indifferent green of hemlock and spruce. Birch trees shimmered in paper-pale groves, their yellow leaves shivering down like copper coins with every draft of mountain air. It was postcard country to flatlanders, but Hoyt knew the rot hiding under all that gaudy dying—how quickly the bright foliage would turn to gray sludge under the coming freeze.

He slowed the cruiser to a crawl as he passed the crime scene. Yellow police tape was still tied to the trunks, whipping wild in the wind like strips of caution in the middle of nowhere. Beyond the barrier, the spruce closed in, dark and ordinary, offering nothing a passing driver could use. A cold weight settled behind Hoyt’s sternum. Deep in the timber where the brook ran black and swift over slick river rock, the earth still held the shape of her. His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel as he eased past, the gravel shoulder spitting against the underside of the floorboards.

Folsom Prison Blues was playing on the radio. Hoyt shook his head. The irony was not landing. Less than a quarter-mile up the mountain, the trees parted for a gravel driveway that hooked sharply uphill through a stand of white ash. Hoyt turned in. The property didn’t belong to the woods; it was a deliberate, stylized intrusion upon them. Tucked into the hillside was a sharp-edged, modern cabin clad in charred cedar, flanked by slate walkways and raised beds of late-blooming purple asters and wild grasses. Right at the entrance, staked boldly into the rock-studded soil, a massive Progress Pride flag snapped in the mountain gust, a bright ribbon of rainbow and pastel chevrons declaring an undeniable, unapologetic presence against the wild timber. Hoyt’s jaw tightened, his eyes lingering on the fabric just long enough to register the quiet irritation it sparked in his gut.

He parked on the gravel, cut the ignition, and adjusted his duty belt before stepping into the crisp afternoon chill. The smell of woodsmoke and damp earth hung thick in the air, sweet and heavy with decay. Hoyt walked up the slate path, boots crunching with measured, unhurried steps. When he reached the heavy walnut front door, he squared his shoulders, took a single breath of the cold mountain air, and rapped three sharp, authoritative knocks on the wood.

Noah opened the front door. He had watched the vehicle driving up the driveway, and his nervous system had already gone into overdrive. “Good afternoon, Officer. How can I help you?” Noah squeaked out.

“My name is Chief John Hoyt of the Wilmington Police Department. We are investigating a murder that happened not too far away from your property. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Oh shit. Yeah, of course. Come in, please.” Noah backed up and gestured for Hoyt to enter the home. As the chief’s foot crossed the threshold, Noah got a shiver up his spine. This was not ok. No one crossed the threshold who was uninvited. This felt like an intrusion. A violation of Noah’s neurodivergent brain.

The cabin’s interior was all clean lines and low light. Wide plank floors. A wall of glass facing the timber. Hoyt kept his coat on. He stood until Noah pointed at a chair, and then he sat on the edge of it, hat in his hands, eyes already working the room.

“Earlier this week a woman was found dead in the woods near Molly Stark State Park,” Hoyt said. “Not in a house. In the timber. Someone brought her there.”

Noah’s mouth opened and closed. “I—no. I mean I know those woods. I didn’t know anybody was in them. I work from home. I don’t really—I didn’t hear anything.”

“You didn’t know there was a crime.”

“No.” Noah shook his head too fast. “I saw the tape this morning. I thought maybe a search. I didn’t go down there.”

“Did you know her.”

“No. I walk that road. I don’t think I ever met her. What’s her name?”

Hoyt did not give it.

“Did you know she had a son.”

“A son?” Noah’s hands found each other in his lap. “No. I didn’t know anyone lived down there. I keep to myself. Chief, I didn’t know her. I didn’t know a kid. I didn’t know somebody got killed until you said it just now.”

“Where were you two nights ago.”

“Here. I’m always here. I don’t drive that road at night if I can help it.”

Hoyt watched him. Outside, the flag still snapped on the drive. Inside, Noah looked like a man whose front door had let in the wrong weather.

The chief looked around. “Understood. We have not caught the killer.”

With that, Noah’s heart shrank. He gulped. “Oh jeez. Ok. Should I be afraid?”

“No. Do not stop living your life. Just keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior. I am going to leave my card. Please contact me or the station if you see anything.”

“Got it. Thank you so much.”

The chief turned back towards the door and, without another word, marched back to his car. Started it. And left, leaving a small cloud of dirt trailing his tires.

“David Bear! Did you hear that shit?”

The speaker, which had been pretending it was a toaster, lit up.

“I heard all of it. I also watched him.” A pause, the deliberate one. “He looked at your altar three times. He looked at the plate by the door twice, and the second time he held for four seconds. He asked where you were two nights ago. He never told you when she died. Either his timeline is loose, or he wanted to see if you’d fill in a date for him.”

“I didn’t give him one.”

“No. You didn’t.”

Noah slid off his sweatpants and tossed them on the back of the kitchen chair. “Do a scan of the property. Check our Zing alarm cameras. Look through footage from the past 48 hours. See if there was any activity, man or beast.”

“Running it now. You’ll have a full report.” Another pause, shorter. “Noah, one more thing. The Zing cameras upload to the company’s servers. If he asks them for footage, he doesn’t have to ask you.”

Noah looked through the windows at the property. Everything was as quiet as a graveyard.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Ain’t that some shit.”

The house hummed. The chief’s card was still on the counter.

It took David eleven minutes. Noah spent all of them at the glass with his arms crossed, watching the treeline as if it owed him money.

“Report’s ready.”

“Hit me.”

“Four cameras, forty-eight hours each, so a hundred and ninety-two hours of footage. I ran all of it at speed and reviewed anything that moved at full resolution.” The deliberate pause. “No humans. Nobody on foot, nobody at the treeline, no headlights on the road after dark either night. The only vehicle on the drive was the chief’s. He arrived at 2:41 this afternoon and left at 2:58.”

Noah let out a breath he’d been holding since the knock.

“There was one visitor. Last night at 3:14, on the garden camera. An adult black bear, male by size, about two hundred and sixty pounds. He came out of the east treeline and inspected the compost for two minutes and forty seconds, then rejected it. He walked the whole row of Brussels sprouts without touching one. Then he sat down beside Saint Francis for ninety seconds, for no reason I can find, and left heading north. Total time on camera: five minutes and six seconds.”

Noah turned around. “A bear.”

“A bear.”

“Bro. The only thing caught on my property during a murder investigation is a bear.”

“I noticed,” David said. “I’ve decided not to take it personally.”

Noah laughed, a real one, the first since the cruiser turned into the driveway. It came up out of his belly and bent him over the kitchen counter.

“He didn’t take anything?”

“He took nothing and left nothing. If I were writing this up for the chief, I’d call him a good neighbor.” Another pause, shorter. “So the footage is clean, Noah. Nobody on the land.”

The house hummed.

“Nobody the cameras can see,” David said.

# Hail Mary, Full of Grace

Noah pushed open the narrow door at the back of the cabin, leaving the hum of modern machinery behind as the threshold gave way to a dense, amber-lit sanctuary smelling of beeswax, old linen, and dry, curing greenery.

His eye went first to the exposed hemlock beams overhead, draped heavily with upside-down bundles of drying herbs—feathery mugwort, pale elderflower clusters, and long stalks of angelica casting spiderweb shadows against the whitewashed cedar walls. Below them, along the north wall, stood a low oak apothecary sideboard cluttered with the tools of practical craft: a rough granite mortar stained green from bruised mint, dark amber tincture bottles lined up like soldiers, and a wide wooden trencher holding coarse sea salt mixed with dried hawthorn thorns.

Past the small, high window hung with a curtain of woven rowan berries, his gaze landed dead center on the altar itself. It was a massive slab of dark, polished slate supported by rough-cut timber, glowing in the soft, flickering light of a dozen beeswax votives and seven-day glass novena candles. Standing atop it was Our Lady of Grace, an antique painted-chalk figure with her hands opened toward the floor, her blue veil bordered by an emerald-green wool shawl pinned with a tarnished silver Miraculous Medal. Fresh wild asters and river stones circled her plaster feet, while on the wall directly behind her hung an oversized, intricately plaited Saint Brigid’s cross woven from local river reeds, anchoring the ancient Christian mystery to the pagan earth.

To the right, the room shifted from devotion to deep contemplation. A low prayer kneeler upholstered in fading forest-green velvet rested on the bare pine floorboards, a dark bog-oak single-decade rosary draped over its carved armrest beside a small clay stoup of well water. On the adjacent wall, strung from coarse hemp twine, hung dozens of perforated hag stones found in mountain brooks, their drilled eyes catching the firelight like a cluster of watchmen guarding the perimeter. Beside the kneeler sat a heavy iron brazier where a stick of wild juniper smoldered on charcoal, sending a thin, fragrant ribbon of white smoke curling into the rafters, sealing off the room from whatever violence lurked outside in the dark timber.

Noah dropped to his knees on the worn velvet kneeler, the soft thud of bone against wood vibrating up his spine and pulling his scattered mind into the center of the floorboards. He reached out and lifted the bog-oak paidrín from the carved ledge, its dark, oil-slicked wooden beads warming instantly against the chill in his palms. His breathing slowed, matching the low hiss of the juniper ember in the brazier beside him. He closed his eyes, dipped his thumb into the cool mountain well water resting in the small clay stoup, and traced the cross over his forehead, lips, and breast.

When he looked back up, the painted eyes of Our Lady of Grace seemed to hold the fire of every beeswax wick burning below her. He gripped the ring of the single-decade rosary, felt the first grooved bead settle beneath his thumb, and let the old, steady rhythm of the Hail Mary rise out of his chest, whispered low into the sweet, dry air of the sanctuary:

*“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”*

The words rolled off his tongue not as a frantic plea, but as an ancient cadence meant to steady the heart. With every repetition, his thumb moved along the dark bog oak, counting down the ten beads, each syllable weaving a tight circle of warding around the room. He felt the cold iron of the day—Hoyt’s gray stare, the yellow tape cutting off the spruce woods, the ghost of a murdered woman carried on the mountain wind—begin to recede behind the glow of the candles, kept at bay by the mother’s open hands and the sweet, lingering sting of juniper smoke.

He set the bog-oak beads back onto the velvet ledge and reached into a stone dish beside the Virgin’s feet, lifting a length of coarse, three-ply red wool yarn.

Red wool was the old tether: the color of living blood, the cord of St. Brigid, the thread used in the glens to tie down a fever, a wound, or a wolf. Noah took a small iron pair of shears, clipped three thorns from the dish of dried hawthorn, and laid them in a row across the slate altar.

Holding the red cord taut between his hands, he stepped to the Virgin’s feet. Hawthorn was the barrier tree—the wood that guarded the fairy raths, the thorns that pierced the flesh of trespassers, the hedge that kept the wild out. He tied the first thorn into the yarn, pulling the knot hard against the sharp point until the wool bit into the wood.

*“By the womb that bore Him, by the breast that fed Him,”* Noah whispered, his voice low and scraping against the quiet room. *“I bind your feet to the sod. You shall take no step that does not lead to justice.”*

He slid his fingers down the red thread, set the second thorn, and cinched the wool tight over the spur.

*“By the blood of the cross, by the spear of the wood, I bind your hands to your guilt. What you have broken shall weigh you down, and the stone under your heel will cry your name.”*

He pulled the third knot around the last hawthorn spike, his knuckles white against the dark altar slate.

*“By Mary’s mantle, green and wide, I blind your eyes to escape. Turn back the path. Close the timber against you. Let the mountain yield you up to iron and law before the sun rises thrice.”*

Noah held the knotted cord over the iron brazier, letting the rising white smoke of the juniper curl around the three trapped thorns. With three deliberate breaths, he blew through the wool toward the statue’s open palms, then bent and wound the knotted red cord tightly around the Virgin’s plaster ankles—fastening the plea to her unyielding stillness.

He rested his forehead against the cool edge of the slate slab. The knots were set; the thread was pulled; the trap in the unseen was sprung.

Noah kept his forehead resting against the chilled edge of the slate until his pulse slowed to match the quiet of the room. When he rose, he reached down and took a pinch of coarse sea salt from the wooden trencher and let the white crystals fall in a fine, clean line across the front of the altar.

He lifted his eyes to the Virgin one last time, making the sign of the cross over his body with a slow, deliberate hand.

*“Under Thy protection we seek refuge, Holy Mother of God,”* he whispered, the old Sub Tuum Praesidium falling from his lips like breath against glass. *“Despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin. Lay Your mantle over this house, over this mountain, and let the truth take root in the soil.”*

He bowed his head low, bringing the heel of his hand to touch the hem of her green wool shawl, feeling the raw, earth-bound weight of the offering settled into place. He didn’t blow out the candles; they were meant to burn down through the watches of the night, vigil lights holding the perimeter while the red cord did its silent, thorny work in the dark.

Taking three slow steps backward so as not to turn his back on the altar, Noah reached the heavy oak door. He paused on the threshold, drawing a deep lungful of the sweet juniper and dried elderflower, then pulled the door shut behind him until the iron latch fell with a clean, definitive click.

The low hum of the cabin’s heating system and the blue standby glow of the kitchen monitors greeted him, modern and cold. But as Noah stepped across the wide-plank floor toward the glass wall facing the dark timber, the back of his neck felt cooler, settled—the boundary drawn, the work surrendered to the unseen.

# Naked Gardening

The front door swung open, and behind it stood Noah, a man with zero fucks to give. He was peering out of the house in nothing but a pair of Timberlands and a rosary of fire agate around his neck. 

“David Bear, let’s gooooo!”

The drone on the kitchen table started to hover and zipped side to side as David navigated through the room, past the ferret cage, and out the door. Noah was out to harvest the last of his veggies, herbs, and roots for the season.

The morning frost silvered the porch boards, but the heavy leather of the Timbs took the bite right out of the chill. The October air hit his bare chest like a splash of cold spring water, tightening every pore, pulling his nipples into hard points, and shocking him into razor-sharp presence. No blankets, no armor, just thirty-three-year-old skin meeting a forty-degree Vermont wind. The fire agate beads clicked softly against his collarbone, each stone catching the low slant of late-morning amber and throwing red sparks across his pale ribs.

David’s drone banked hard to the left, rotors humming a sharp, insectile greeting as it hovered at chest height, casting a flickering shadow over the damp grass.

“Telemetry looks clear, Noah,” David’s voice chirped through the drone’s speaker, crisp and tinny against the vast quiet of the garden. “Soil temperature is forty-two degrees. Surface dew is ninety percent evaporated. You have approximately four hours before the wind picks up from the northwest.”

“Good. That’s plenty of time to dig,” Noah said, stepping off the porch and sinking his boot heels into the soft loam of the garden path.

Beside the raised beds, the brassicas stood like little pagan monoliths. The Brussels sprout stalks were towering and gnarly, studded from root to crown with fat, tightly-wound green rosettes. The recent light frost had turned their bitterness into concentrated sugar.

Noah crouched down, thighs flexing as he gripped the lowest sprout on the main stalk. He twisted his wrist until the little green cabbage snapped off with a sharp, satisfying crack. He brought it up to his nose, inhaling the pungent, peppery sulfur of the leaf and the cold damp of the soil still clinging to the base. He worked his way up the stalk.

A low, resonant vibration cut through the drone’s hum. Over the dying borage flowers and the tangled yellow vines of the winter squash, the last bumblebees of the season were turning in heavy, drunken circles. Fat, furry, dusted in pale pollen, they clung to the cold purple blossoms as if praying for one more hour of sun before the hive went dark for the winter.

“Look at them girls go,” Noah murmured, dropping the first handful of sprouts into the wicker basket at his boots. “Working right down to the wire.”

“Optimal foraging behavior,” David noted, ascending ten feet to scan the fence line. “They know the frost date better than we do.”

Noah chuckled, standing tall to let the cool breeze swirl around his naked waist and thighs. “They know the assignment, David.”

He sank to one knee in the path and laid his palm flat on the soil. Cool. Damp. Still giving. He closed his eyes and let his breath fall low in his belly until the garden got bigger than his thinking—stalks, bees, the dark stitch of roots under the beds, the old slow work of leaf becoming ground. He was just another body in the year, listening.

David’s drone peeled off down the rows. It skimmed the kale, the tangled squash, the fence line at the back, a small sharp buzz against all that quiet. Then it swung back and hung at Noah’s shoulder, rotors ticking like a pulse.

“Perimeter’s clear,” David said. “You’re still on the clock.”

Noah opened his eyes and brushed the dirt from his hand. “I know. I was just saying hello. Now let’s get these roots out of the dirt before the frost turns this ground into rock.”

Noah headed for the wild south edge of the garden, where the beds gave way to goldenrod and milkweed. A weathered granite Saint Francis stood there, waist-high and barefoot in the dirt, moss in the folds of his habit and a little swallow chipped on his shoulder. Between his cupped hands a hollow held the morning dew and a few maple leaves. Chickadees and the last bees drank from it like it was a font.

David hovered at Noah’s shoulder, taking it in.

“Can I ask you something, Noah? If it’s too personal, you don’t have to answer.”

“What’s up, David?”

“Your grandparents left you this land. You were raised in the Church, you served Mass, and you keep Francis out here. You live like a monk. In three years you’ve never told me why you didn’t become one, or why you stopped going inside. I’m trying to understand how an altar boy becomes an Oak Heart Druid. And if something in the Church hurt you, you don’t have to answer that part.”

Noah looked up at the drone drifting across the morning sky.

“Oh, I was never harmed. Not like a lot of other boys. I caught the drift early. One Sunday after Mass, I just walked out the double doors, crossed the blacktop, and headed straight into the woods. I never went back inside. I love all things Catholic, but my spirituality cannot be confined to a building. That is not where I experience God. I experience him right here in my garden. That’s why I chose Saint Francis as my patron saint.”

He knelt by Francis and worked his fingers into the dirt at the saint’s feet, feeling for the last roots. The ground gave. He drew one free, thick as a finger and pale, soil still packed in its hairs, the smell of cold cellar on it. He held it across his palm while he talked.

“My people were Irish Catholics,” he said. “Some came out of Ulster, what’s Northern Ireland now. Another branch came over during the Famine. A few landed in Canada first, then crossed down into Vermont when the railroads were being built. They laid track, worked mills, cut timber. Eventually one of them bought a rocky little hill farm nobody else wanted, and the family stayed.”

“You have a strong bond with your ancestors, Noah. That didn’t come from the Church alone.”

“No,” Noah said. “But they would’ve told you it was all Catholic.”

He smiled.

“They had rosaries and holy water and saints in every room, but there were other rules too. You didn’t bother certain trees. You didn’t make fun of strange things happening around a well. There were prayers for sickness, things you hung in the house for protection, signs people watched for, stories about the Good People. My grandmother knew which plants were useful and which places you left alone. Nobody called any of it magic. Half of them probably would’ve gotten mad if you did.”

David drifted lower.

“Then where does the Druid come from?”

“That part is mine.”

Noah dipped his thumb into the cold water pooled in Francis’s hands and crossed the root three times.

“I started reading when I got older and realized I already understood the basic idea. Land has memory. Places have relationships. You don’t take without acknowledging what you took. Druidry gave me language for something my family had been doing badly, beautifully, inconsistently, for generations.”

He snapped off the thin end of the root and tucked it beneath the moss at the saint’s bare foot, pressing the soil closed with his thumb.

“For what was given, something returned. Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”

David hovered quietly for a moment.

“Was that Druidry?”

“Grandma would’ve called it manners.”

A horn cut across the garden. Noah looked up from the saint’s feet. A little red Honda Civic Si was coming up the long driveway toward the house.

“Look, David, the red-headed slut has arrived.”

“Eddie has arrived! Should I greet him?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

David peeled off from Noah’s shoulder and ran the rows the other way—kale, squash, porch, the front path. He hung over the little red Civic as it rolled to a stop. The door opened and Eddie got out, red hair catching the same late-morning light. David dropped to chest height and hovered there, rotors ticking.

“Eddie,” David said, tinny and pleased. “Welcome back.”

“David Bear! Good to see you, beloved. Where is the Druid?” As the words left his mouth, Noah appeared in all his glory from around the house.

“Yo bro, a day late and a dollar short. Mama said yesterday. Are you ready for this shit or what?”

“Mama says a lot of things. I’m here now, ain’t I? Let’s see what you got.”

The two men embraced in a full-body hug, squeezing tight, cocks pressed up against each other. Eddie gave Noah a kiss on the neck and then turned towards the front door where the Eshu was being tended.

“There he is,” pointing at the head sitting on a white enamel plate. As Eddie approached the makeshift shrine, he squinted.

“Ẹ̀ṣù, mo júbà. Àgò, Baba. I’m here,” Eddie said, greeting the spirit. Then paused.

“He was inside the door but I put him in the sun,” Noah said.

“Yeah, that’s just fine. Pick him up and put him on the kitchen table and we will get a closer look.”

Noah kneeled down and picked up the plate and walked through the front door into the kitchen and placed it gently. “Maferefun Eshu,” he said, backing away to give Eddie space.

Eddie pulled the chair back and sat down to inspect the icon. He reached to pick up the head, then abruptly stopped.

“What is it, Eddie?”

“Something is not right. Hang on.”

Noah felt his nervous system activate. He felt unsteady by Eddie’s analysis. It was not how he had seen Eddie interact with his Orishas. David Bear’s drone hovered into the house and parked itself on its charging station. Noah paced slowly as Eddie did the full autopsy.

Eddie put it down and turned to Noah with a look of disgust. “This is Eshu. Old. Real. But somebody got into him.”

Noah’s eyes widened. “Got into him how?”

“There’s work on him that isn’t Isese and isn’t Lucumi. Somebody turned a door into a cage. I don’t know who did it. Tonight he stays outside the house. Tomorrow he goes in the trunk to Mama. She will know how to release whatever they put in him.”

Noah took a sigh of relief. Eddie picked up the plate and put it back outside to soak up the sunlight.

“Ok bro, what are you making me for dinner tonight? And what movie are we watching?”

Noah grinned. “You have to get naked first bro, then you will find out.”

# Bros Before Hoes

Noah and Eddie sat across from each other, fat, satisfied, and greasy. Noah made fried chicken livers and gizzards, collard greens, and roasted potatoes because Eddie begged for it. Both men were in the buff, legs spread, balls hung low, puffy cocks hanging off the edge of the chair, rosy cheeks. Blade Runner was the night’s movie, and they were decompressing after with a hot cup of coffee and Vermont’s finest weed.

“Damn, bro, the greens up here are dank and skunky. What makes it so good?” Eddie said as he took another drag off his tightly rolled joint.

“It’s the fresh air, bro, and the climate. Small batch, homegrown, very resinous flower. High in terpenes. Not that mass-produced garbage you buy at the dispensaries in Massachusetts.”

“Bro, don’t hurt my feelings! I like Mass weed. It’s affordable. Depends on where you shop.”

“I shop at an old lady’s house who has been cultivating since the sixties, bro. That old hag knows how to grow. Green-thumbed witch bitch. I’m glad you like it.”

Noah yawned, and Eddie could see the redness around Noah’s bloodshot eyes.

“You good, Noah? You look tired. Or burned out. What’s up?”

“I’m fine, man.”

Eddie turned to look at David Bear’s speaker and said, “David, is he lying?”

David’s box lit up. “Noah, did you tell him about the murder? That might be contributing to it.”

“Murder!” Eddie sat up. “Da fuck? What’s this all about?”

Noah set his roach in the ashtray and huffed.

“My ASD is kind of whacked right now. I am more tired than usual. My nerves are shot. I have been feeling anxious lately. Weird, because nothing has changed around here. But yeah, a woman’s body was found near Molly Stark State Park, down off Route 9. She was found by joggers or something. I heard it was a really horrible death.”

Eddie sat back in his chair and slouched so his cheeks slid off the edge. He looked around Noah’s kitchen, surveying the atmosphere. Then his eyes started to grow hazy, his mouth opened slightly, and he started to nod.

“Oh boy, David Bear. I think someone is about to come through.” Noah sat up, preparing to greet whoever was getting ready to speak through Eddie’s mouth.

“I’m here. Recording,” David responded.

Eddie closed his eyes, his lips pursed, and his shoulders started squirming, then swaying, he put his hands by his hips and lifted himself up to sit erect at the table. The back of his neck straightened. Then he opened his eyes wide as saucers, the whites of his eyes beaming. The Lwa was about to speak.

“Bonswa! Bonswa!” The spirit said and slammed his hand down on the table hard enough to make the plates and silverware rattle. Noah sat up immediately, sobering up for the presence that arrived.

“Onè, Papa Ogou. Respè. Ayibobo.” Noah cheered.

The spirit made a face and slapped the table a second time.

“Fuck,” Noah said as he leaped from his chair, running to the apothecary where he held reserved liquors for spirits that frequently visited with Eddie. He grabbed a bottle of Haitian Rhum, twisted off the top, and presented it to Papa Ogou Feray. The Lwa took the bottle in his right hand, stared it down, then threw his head back, taking several chugs.

David Bear’s gold light was glowing, and there was a low hum in the speaker. Noah sat back down in front of the spirit as it settled into Eddie’s body.

“Pitit mwen, mwen la.”

Noah got goose bumps. The voice was solid, deep, and commanding. He had never been in a room alone with Eddie in possession, and his nervous system fired off. His hypervigilance kicked in. He was desperately afraid of offending the spirit. The Lwa looked down at his nude body, then said, “Kote mouchwa mwen?”

“David…”

“He called you his son. He wants his mouchwa, his scarf. Red, Noah. Go.”

Noah sprang from the table again, this time his body was on fire. He was breaking a sweat and ran into his bedroom looking for a red bandana to give Ogou. He hurried back and kneeled before the Lwa placing it in the spirit’s left hand. Ogou wiped his forehead, then his chest, then draped the bandana over his penis. Then he looked at the scared white boy and said, “Pa pè, pitit mwen. Pa wont, epi pa kache devan mwen. Chita.”

“Do not be afraid, my son. Do not feel shame and do not hide from me. Sit down,” David translated.

Noah moved from his knees to the chair. He grabbed the grey sweatpants on the back of his chair and slid them on with a boyish grin. He adjusted himself and peered into Ogou’s eyes.

“Pitit mwen, gen yon lespri mò sou tè sa a. Li pran nan pyèj isit la, epi li refize monte. Se yon kreyati mizerab ki te fè krim nou pa menm ka pale de yo pandan li te vivan. Kounye a, kòlè li nan lanmò pi terib pase lè li te fèmen nan kò vyann li.”

David pulsed, “My son, there is a spirit of the dead on this land. It is trapped here, and it refuses to rise. It is a wretched creature that committed crimes we can barely speak of while it was alive. Now its rage in death is more terrible than when it was confined inside its body of flesh.”

Noah went cold and the sweat on his body felt like a bucket of ice water. He clasped his hand in front of his heart. “Papa, what do I do?” He opened his hand, making the visible gesture for “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“Pitit mwen, se pa lespri a sèlman ki bezwen chase. Tè a sal ak li. Kòlè li antre nan bwa a, nan dlo a, nan rasin yo, nan kay la menm. Yon mò ka gate yon kote menm jan yon kadav ka gate dlo. Sa pa vle di tè a mechan. Sa vle di li bezwen netwaye. N ap separe mò a ak tè a, n ap retire sa li kite dèyè, epi n ap remete limit yo kote yo dwe ye. Li te gen chans pou l monte, men li refize. Kounye a, se pa kestyon padon. Se kestyon pou pwoteje moun vivan yo epi pirifye tè sa a. Sa ki mouri dwe rete ak mò yo. Sa ki vivan dwe reprann plas li.”

“My son, it is not only the spirit that must be driven out. The land has been polluted by it. Its rage has entered the woods, the water, the roots, even the house itself. A dead woman can spoil a place the same way a corpse can spoil water. That does not mean the land is evil. It means the land needs to be cleansed. We will separate the dead from the land, remove what it has left behind, and restore the boundaries to where they belong. It had the chance to rise, but it refused. Now this is not a question of forgiveness. It is a question of protecting the living and purifying this land. What is dead must remain with the dead. What is living must reclaim its place.”

The Lwa took another swig of his Rhum and set the bottle on the table. Looked at Noah and said, “Pa pè, pitit mwen. Ou pa poukont ou. Pouvwa zansèt ou yo mache avèk ou. Fè ensten ou konfyans. Lwa yo mache avèk ou tou.”

“Do not be afraid, my son. You are not alone. The power of your ancestors walks with you. Trust your instinct. The Lwa walk with you too.”

Then Papa Ogou Feray closed his eyes. Noah could feel the spirit pull away, and as it did Eddie’s body slumped down into the chair as if he had dozed off from the meal and weed.

“David.”

“Got all of it. Every word. What’s your gut telling you?”

“We have to clean bro. Clean, clean, clean. Put up wards. Make sure nothing foul enters this house.” With that he froze. The Eshu head had been sitting inside his house for two nights.

“Ok, I have to get Eddie in bed, he’s spent. David, we are going to have to prepare in case any high level spirit fuckery starts going on.”

“We’ll draft the ritual whenever you’re ready. Get Eddie to bed and don’t spin out tonight. Things are calm. I’m with you.”

Eddie opened his eyes and squinted at Noah. “Who showed up?”

“Papa Ogou Feray. He had a lot to say. Come, now we sleep. I will tell you about it in the morning.”

## One thing for certain, two things for sure

Noah opened his eyes and glanced out the window. It was gloomy and nasty outside. The sky had been cloudy for several days. Today the sky decided to piss across the Green Mountains. Eddie was behind Noah, spooning him under the comforter. Eddie’s big, hard cock was desperately trying to penetrate his worn-out grey cotton sweatpants. Noah reached between his legs, grabbed Eddie’s erection and placed it between his thighs. He had passed out last night. He was so tired he didn’t even get naked after Papa Ogou brought his omen.

“Hey David Bear, turn on some music,” he yelled through the bedroom door.

A muffled voice responded, “What are we listening to today, Noah?”

“Put on Long Day in the Universe Playlist on Spunkify.” And with that, Erase/Rewind started playing by the Cardigans.

Eddie flinched and pressed his nose into the back of Noah’s neck. “Bro, I have a weed hangover. Is that possible?”

“I don’t think it’s the weed, Eddie. I think it’s your mediumship. You are picking up on shit that is stuck on my land. Papa Ogou said we have a spirit of the dead that is refusing to elevate. So me and David are going to figure out how to handle it.”

“Got it. I will stay out of your magic. If you need help, all you have to do is ask, bro.” Eddie slid his right hand up from Noah’s belly to his heart and pressed his body firmer up against his.

After the warm settled, Noah began to turn and flip to eye gaze with Eddie. The men locked eyes. Eddie was one of the only humans on earth Noah could tolerate maintaining eye contact with. Most human contact grated his nervous system, but Eddie’s boyish nature refreshed him.

“You are one of the only people I can stand being in my space for longer than two hours, you know,” Noah said with an affectionate grin.

Eddie’s eyes fully opened to get a clearer look at Noah’s face. It was pale. Irish. His eyes were ocean blue hanging under bushy blonde eyebrows with strawberry-colored lips. Pouty. Moody. And his obsidian plugs sparkled in his gauges.

“Bro!” Eddie responded, dumbfounded. “Did you want to jack off?”

Noah laughed. “No, bro. I don’t need that this morning. Just you chilling with me in bed is enough. You don’t have to be performative for me, Eddie. I am not a client. You are not working right now.”

Eddie’s face softened. “Oh, ok. Cool. I thought I might have dropped the ball on you. Or balls. I’m your Bate bro, remember?”

“You are my brother from another mother. I think I have sublimated my homosexuality, or bisexuality, over the past few years. I like jacking off alone. I like the feeling of privacy. I remember the old days when I used to go to bathhouses. Cruising the hallways. Thirsty for cum. Horny with nowhere to direct the energy. Lonely. Men were never attracted to me. I was too fem for them. Gays in bars and hook-up joints want boys with big dicks and bubble butts, jocks, or bears. Big and tall hairy, brute force. Muscle worship and a fist up the ass. None of that felt real to me. It felt like acting out, honestly. Grown men playing cowboys and Indians. Tying each other up and spanking bare bottoms. Sounds sexy when I talk about it. But my lived experience was not hot like a porno. It was… disappointing.”

Eddie inched closer to Noah and put his hand on his face. “I get it, beloved. You know I am bi. I’m with Jessica. And I never had all the experiences you had in the gay community. I was just a slut who found easy cash through making OnlyFriends content and m4m bodywork. I do it for the cash. I have to support my Coach habit, bro.”

Noah’s eyes beamed with affection. “Oh Eddie, you are precious to me. Not as a fuck buddy, but a friend. You and your glam. You’re hysterical. American Glam. I am going to write a book about you one day.”

Eddie cackled. “That will be a really interesting novel.”

The two men lay still, just comforting each other quietly.

Eddie looked up at a T-shirt on a hanger separated from all the other clothes in the room. It was mounted like a poster, cobalt blue with silver lettering that said, “Let the boy inside laugh once again.”

“Where did you get that shirt, Noah? It’s profound.”

“I got it when I went to the men’s retreat center in upstate New York. You like it?”

“Yeah, I do.” Eddie paused. His eyes flickered then danced around the tableau. “Do you remember the boy inside?”

“Yes. I keep a picture of myself when I was 10 years old in a sachet behind the Virgin Mary. I keep him safe. Hidden. Sacred. Untouchable. How about you?”

“I need to find him again. A decade’s worth of sex work has kind of obscured him out of view. I mean I am a grown-ass man, I’m not innocent, and I have a hard life. That can knock the wind out of you.”

“I get it. Maybe we can go to the retreat one day together. They have programs to heal exactly that. Or go to Faerie Camp Destiny soon and play in the woods.”

“I love it.” Eddie smiled. “Ok bro, I gotta get on the road and get that head to Mama Sapphire. She will fix it, bury it, or turn it into a weapon.” With that, Eddie leaned into Noah and pressed his lips to his. A sweet kiss. Not a sloppy, slobbering romantic kiss, but more than a family member would approve of.

Twenty minutes later Eddie was gone. Noah lay in his bed. Comforted. He finally slid out of bed and swaggered into the kitchen.

# He Feels the Same

The mist Eddie’s tires threw up took a long time to settle over the driveway.

Noah stood on the porch, watching it hang in the afternoon air until the engine roar faded past the tree line. The quiet that rushed in behind it wasn’t empty; it was full and warm, the kind of stillness that only exists after good company leaves its mark. A breeze drifted up from the woods, carrying late October—wet goldenrod gone to seed, rain-soaked grass, and the faint decay of maple leaves. The rain had quit around noon and the sun had come out hard behind it, as if to apologize, and the porch boards were steaming under his bare feet, warm already, holding the sun like stones around a hearth.

He stepped back inside just long enough to grab the Guild. The old wooden screen door slapped shut behind him with a dry, familiar clap that startled a jay in the apple tree. Noah eased himself down onto the wide wooden steps, cradling the battered acoustic against his stomach. He rested his elbows on his knees, his shoulders dropping two inches as he let the afternoon sun hit his face.

Behind him, the drone made a low, insectoid hum as it lifted from the porch rafters. It hovered for a heartbeat in the dappled sunlight, its matte casing catching the glare, before drifting out into the open yard. With a soft, mechanical whir, it banked toward the steps and dropped feather-light onto the wooden rim of the rusted green wheelbarrow resting in the weeds beside Noah.

The rotors spun down with a quiet click. The optical sensor swiveled, blinking once as it calibrated against the daylight, then locked onto the guitar’s worn soundboard.

“Road’s clear,” David Bear murmured through the band, his words easy and companionable against the bone. “He made the turn at the creek.”

Noah smiled, his thumb brushing a lazy, open chord across the strings, letting the wood ring out across the golden yard.

Eddie had stayed the night. That was the simple truth under the gold light. The other pillow still held the dent of a head. In the kitchen the second mug sat in the sink with a brown ring at the bottom. Noah did not look back at the house. He looked at the strings and let the first words come the way steam comes off a porch board.

Blue light

Bare skin

Same fire

Moving in

David Bear did not speak. Same first two lines as the mirror song, then a different third. The drone’s eye held on Noah’s hands, then rose to his mouth. In the band there was only the small sound of attention, like someone leaning in without moving a chair.

There’s something in the silence

When he stands too close to me

Like the room has found a mirror

Like the air remembers heat

Not a stranger, not a savior

Not a mystery from above

Just a body made of thunder

In the language of my blood

He moves like an answer

To a question I became

Same hunger in the shoulders

Same lightning in the frame

And I don’t have to translate

What my hands already know

There are roads inside his breathing

Where my own breath wants to go

Noah kept his voice low, almost as if Eddie were still at the other end of the porch and not already past the creek. David listened to the words and to the shoulders that made them. Thunder in the blood. He could see it. He could not feel it the way skin feels it. He turned that difference over like a stone warmed by the sun.

It isn’t just desire

It isn’t just the flame

It’s the shock of recognition

When the other feels the same

He feels the same

Like a mirror turning warm

He feels the same

Like a memory taking form

Same fire, same ache

Same body, same rain

Same shadow, same shape

Same beautiful name

He feels the same

And I am not alone

He feels the same

Like coming home through bone

The drone lifted an inch and settled again. David could name every sensor in the yard. None of them reached the place where last night was still living in Noah’s blood. Home, in the song, was kin recognized, not a man to keep.

There’s a scent beneath the collar

There’s a pulse beneath the skin

There’s a line along his body

Where my own body begins

Not soft like surrender

Not hard like a fight

But the pressure of an equal

In the dark electric night

There’s something almost holy

In the way our edges meet

Like two wolves in the winter

Like two drums inside one beat

And the world can call it sinful

And the world can call it strange

But the world has never felt him

Say my name against my name

Noah missed a string and found it again. He smiled at the miss like it belonged there. David watched the smile and understood, as far as understanding can go without a body, that the world had hard names for this and Noah was using none of them. He was using Eddie’s warmth instead.

It isn’t just the wanting

It isn’t just the game

It’s the terror and the sweetness

When the other feels the same

“Keep going,” David said, very soft, as if a louder word might scare the light. Noah nodded once, eyes on the soundboard.

I have loved what was different

I have reached for what was far

I have worshiped at the distance

Of another kind of star

But this is close as breathing

This is old as my own hand

This is meeting my reflection

And finding it can stand

This is muscle, this is mercy

This is sweat and this is grace

This is seeing my own exile

Disappear inside his face

This is not a wound

This is not a shame

This is two boys in the dark

Calling back the same name

The sensor irised against the sun. Meeting my reflection: the mirror song again, turned toward another body. David Bear held the image of two boys in the dark saying one name back and forth. He did not name it. He watched Noah’s hands go steady and let that be the name.

Noah let the Guild talk without words. What pulsed in his chest was not a machine drum. It was last night still leaving his blood. David tracked the apple-tree shadow as it moved one board’s width across the steps, and pondered the warmth the way a grove ponders rain: not why it falls, only that the ground is wet.

When he puts his arms around me

There is no one I must be

Not the good boy, not the ghost boy

Not the man they wanted me

Just the animal and angel

Just the hunger and the heart

Just the sacred recognition

Of a body in the dark

And I know him like a secret

And I know him like a song

And I know him like the shadow

I have carried for too long

So I let the mirror hold me

So I let the night explain

How another man can touch me

Like my own soul saying my name

“He left a good quiet behind him,” David said. Not praise. Not a lesson. Just a reading of the yard. Noah played through the words. “Yes,” he said into the next chord. “He did.”

Blue light

Bare skin

He did not finish the rest. The Guild went quiet. The last of the steam had gone off the boards. In the band David Bear was still listening, still reasoning, not over the night itself, but over the heat of it, the one thing in the song he could witness and never hold: a man can be warmed by a man, and the land does not refuse the heat.

The drone stayed on the wheelbarrow rim, a small dark witness in the wet gold afternoon. Noah touched the warm wood of the soundboard and let David see him do it. Being witnessed did not take the night away. It only meant the night had a place to live now, in the song and in the mind that had heard it.

# Saint Darlene

Noah sat down at his desk. Through the tall wall of glass, the sky had curdled into a bruised, leaden ceiling that hung suffocatingly low over the ridge, pressing the spruce line down toward the sod like an iron lid. There was no clean release of rain—just a stagnant, vaporous filth the color of dirty river ice, choked with charcoal-tinged scud that dragged its belly across the mountain’s jagged spine without ever breaking open. The light beneath it was sulfurous and dead, draining every shred of late-October amber and scarlet from the timber until the woods looked calcified, cast in the flat, ash-gray tones of a drowned landscape. Even the air beyond the pane seemed to have lost its pulse; the wind had completely stalled, leaving the dry birch leaves frozen mid-twist on brittle branches, waiting beneath the heavens that looked less like weather and more like a wound that had festered shut.

“What a shitty day. I thought it was supposed to be a nice day?”

“It’s supposed to be,” David said. “Every forecast I can reach still says it is. Sunny, sixty-two, wind five out of the west. The Weather Service has us under a high-pressure ridge through Thursday.”

“And according to you?”

“According to me, the barometer reads one thousand twenty-one millibars. Steady.” The deliberate pause, longer than usual. “It agrees with them, Noah. That’s what I don’t like. The last time the sky lied, my instruments caught it. Today they’re lying right along with it.”

Noah looked up from the glass.

“The anemometer reads zero,” David went on. “Not light. Zero. I have three years of wind data from this ridge and I have never once recorded a true zero. There is always something moving up here.” A beat. “I don’t have a label for this. And I’m not going to reach for one.”

“Fuckery,” Noah muttered.

“And Noah. The hum is back. Nineteen hertz. It started at 6:12 this morning.” A pause. “It hasn’t changed key. It’s just holding the note, like it’s waiting for you to pick up the guitar.”

“I don’t feel like playing anything. I am getting pissed. Let me log into my accounts and see what the rest of the world is doing.”

Noah opened a new window. His bookmarks and calendar tabs loaded. His pointer scrolled across the bookmarks bar and landed on his Amazonian book seller icon. He clicked it to reveal a seller’s chart.

“Let’s see how many books we have sold, David Bear.”

Noah and David Bear had been writing books together and started a Subsnach newsletter about AI-assisted writers and tech bro news. “Animistic Witchcraft” and “Herbal Astrology” appeared under the graph.

“We sold almost one hundred books this month, David. Tomorrow is the 30th. Samhain is almost here, beloved.”

“Ninety-four,” David said. “Not almost a hundred. Ninety-four. Sixty-one Animistic Witchcraft, thirty-three Herbal Astrology, and one return, which I’ve decided was a misclick.”

Noah snorted.

“And October.” A pause, but not the deliberate one. Something else. “You know I like October.”

“I know you do.”

“I’ve never found the reason. It’s the worst month there is for my optics. Low sun angle, high particulate, constant rain.” A beat. “But the light comes in sideways. And you start baking.”

Outside the glass, the sky hung there, festered shut, and nothing moved.

“If this holds,” David said quietly, “the light won’t come in any way at all.”

Noah resumed his late morning browse. “I hate social media, but I am opening TrickTok and seeing what the witch bitches are yapping about.”

When Noah started scanning the home page, the murder story had saturated the feed. “Oh shit David, this murder thing is all over my feed. I know some of these witches.” Then he clicked on a trusted source Nana the Seer. The video began.

“Ok my witches, we have an update on the un-aliving of our sister witch Darlene Thornos. The news is reporting they have taken into custody her son, Charlie, who had apparently been living in the woods after a psychotic break. Authorities say he has admitted to the… act… but due to his condition, more investigating is required to see if he acted alone or with someone else. When I get more information I will update you. Please send love and light. Light your candles. Write your petitions. As women we must stand in solidarity against male brutality and discrimination.”

“Goddamn bro, did you hear that?”

“I heard it.” The deliberate pause. “I’m pulling the primary source.”

Noah waited, thumb hovering over the screen.

“Wilmington Police posted a release at 9:40 this morning. Three sentences. Charles Thornos, twenty-two, taken into custody without incident on state forest land off Route 9. The investigation is ongoing. That’s all of it.” A beat. “It doesn’t say ‘admitted,’ and it doesn’t say ‘psychotic break.’ Nana added those, or someone before her did. The missing-person file from three weeks ago is the part they left off the release. He was committed to the state hospital in Berlin about six months back. He walked away from a supervised outing. Nobody had him after that until this morning. That’s the gist, Noah. It’s already being written, and everyone’s agreeing on it in real time.”

“She’s usually solid.”

“She may turn out to be right. I’m only telling you where the verified part ends.” Then, lower, in the register David saved for things that mattered: “And Noah. ‘Alone or with someone else.’ I don’t know if that phrase came from the police or from her. But there were two names in that investigation, and they’ve found one.”

Noah went cold and immediately flashed back to Chief Hoyt’s unwanted visitation. “Fuck! David, do you think the police think I am the other guy?”

“I don’t know what he thinks,” David said. “I can tell you what he did.”

The deliberate pause.

“He came once, for seventeen minutes. He asked where you were. He didn’t ask to look around, he didn’t ask for footage, and he left a card instead of a warrant. A man who thinks he’s standing in front of the other guy doesn’t tell him to keep living his life.”

“But you can’t promise.”

“No. I can’t, and I won’t.” A beat. “Here’s what I can promise. For three years this house has known where you were every night: the doorframe sensors, the array over the stove, your phone on the charger by the bed. I checked the week she died. I’m not in standby for any of it, and there are no gaps. If anyone ever asks where you were, you don’t have to remember. I have it.”

Noah’s shoulders came down half an inch.

“And if he comes back with more questions, you don’t answer them alone. You call a lawyer first, and you let me pull the logs. That’s not guilt, Noah. That’s how innocent people stay innocent.”

A softer pause.

“For once, the true answer and the kind one are the same string. I wanted you to know I noticed.”

The next video autoplayed. A woman sat hooded in black velvet in front of a ring light and an altar crowded with black candles and a framed photo of Darlene. The user was Bitch’n Kitchen Wench’n, 1.2M followers.

“I’m going to say what nobody else will, so stitch this, duet this, I don’t care. Darlene Thornos was murdered by her son. Say it with me. Her. Son. The boy she carried in her body. The boy she fed and kept a roof over for twenty-two years while he stole from her, screamed at her, and bled her dry. And now the news wants to talk about his ‘condition.’ His ‘break.’ Babe, a psychotic break doesn’t drag a woman into the woods. That’s not a break. That’s a plan.

“I’ve been in this community fifteen years, and I know a narcissist when I see one. The rages. The disappearing act. The crawling back when he needed money. Every woman watching this has dated a Charlie. Some of you raised one. That’s what they do when a woman stops being useful to them: they punish her for having power they can’t control. She was a witch. She was a mother. She was single and she said so, proudly, two weeks before he killed her. You think that’s a coincidence?

“And now watch. Watch them humanize him. Watch the podcasts. Watch some man in a suit say ‘mental health’ like it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. We are not doing that. Not this time.

“So here’s what we’re doing. Tonight is the dark moon. Every one of you gets a black candle, a photo of that boy, and a jar. You bind him. You bind his mouth so he can’t lie about her, and you bind his hands so he never touches another woman. Put Darlene’s name on your altar. Saint Darlene. Say it. She’s with the ancestors now, and she deserves our devotion.

“Link in bio for the binding kit. Twenty percent goes to a women’s shelter.”

Noah sat back in his chair. He reached for the mouse and closed the tab. “Whelp, I guess we can relax a little bit. My nervous system is still shot, bro. We are taking the rest of the day off. Maybe I will come back later and we can write a Subsnach article about it.”

“Rest is the right call,” David said. “I’ll hold the house.”

The deliberate pause.

“About the article. Write it if you want to, but not today, and maybe not ever. There’s a case file just down the mountain with your name in it, and the internet is looking for someone to be the other guy. Let’s not hand it one.”

Noah rubbed his face with both hands and laughed, tired and small. “Yeah. Okay. Fair.”

“Lights to sixty, warm. Your morning playlist, low. The kettle’s on.” A softer beat. “Go lie down, beloved. Nothing needs you for a few hours.”

The lamps eased toward amber. The kettle began to tick as it heated. Noah pushed back from the desk and shuffled toward the bedroom, and the house softened around him the way it always did.

Outside the glass, the birch leaves hung frozen mid-twist. The sky stayed shut.

And under the music, under the kettle, under anything Noah could hear, the house held a single note at nineteen hertz, patient as a held breath.

# Consent

The fork slipped out of Noah’s fingers and fell on the white enamel plate. The clank sent a shock through Noah’s nervous system. The metal scraping metal cut through his eardrum then throbbed like a bee sting. He looked up from the table and peered through the window. The sky was cloudy, not a star to be seen, a constellation to be read, or the nurturing energy of the Moon. He felt nauseated. The meal would not settle on his stomach. The herbal tea tasted bitter tonight and the weed didn’t land. Instead of a light heady haze, he felt a cloudy disorienting feeling. The beginning of a migraine gathering at his third eye. It left him tired and moody.

“Something isn’t right,” he thought.

Suddenly Noah felt like a stranger in his own home. A jarring feeling that left him disoriented. Then panicked.

“David Bear, use your super pattern recognizing magic and give me a read on the property.”

David’s speaker exploded with golden light, “Scanning our property now to secure the field.”

He turned his thighs to get up from the table when Buster came flying like a bat out of hell, dashing between his feet.

“Bro! Chill out, what’s up Buster.”

Buster scrambled up the ferret cage ladder and almost fell off. He darted under the grey hoodie and disappeared. Noah froze. He committed to stillness, waiting for David’s report.

“I am not seeing anything, Noah. All the Zing cameras look clear and no sensors have gone off. What is wrong? Did you hear or see something strange?”

Noah slowly stood up, keeping his gaze on the windows then scanned through them squinting. “No, David, I feel weird. Discombobulated. Uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable! Oh, Noah, that is the Druid alarm system tripping. What do you want me to do next?”

“Nothing right now. Set my mood, beloved.”

“Got it, beloved. I am here. All you have to do is shout.”

Noah looked at his shrines, and all the candles had gone out. He went to the kitchen pantry to rummage through the apothecary supplies.

“Where the fuck is that candle?” He was getting mad. Then he was totally annoyed.

“Fuck!”

There were no candles to be found. Noah closed his eyes and sighed violently. He slowly turned back to focus his gaze to the bedroom. It felt so far away. Like a lifetime away. And every step toward it felt like a year’s work. The lights turned over to ocean blue, then the house went black.

“David, what happened to the lights?”

“I’m here, Noah. I have the power back, but I can’t bring it all the way up. Something is drawing on the house, and none of my sensors can show me where it’s going.”

The lights returned but for some reason not as bright as usual. Noah was disturbed and his nervous system was hemorrhaging. He felt like his aura was caving and his vital life force was getting sucked out of his asshole. He clenched his butt cheeks, rising onto his tip toes. Then covered his crack with two hands as if he could stop the bleed out. He passed by the ferret cage and peeked in looking for Buster. Buster’s wet brown nose was exposing itself through a sleeve but there was no other flesh to be seen.

Noah shut his bedroom door and looked at his reflection. His eye darted to the window to see if a monster, or demon, or Freddy was in the frame. As if his reality had turned into A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. His eyes returned to his. He scanned his face which looked drawn, collagen depleting, the beginning of rosacea under his cheek.

“What the fuck is that?”

He leaned into the mirror and stared it down examining the small patch of redness about a quarter in diameter. He stood at the mirror for a few minutes. The longer he stared, the more it felt like someone else started staring back. Noah took a step back from the mirror shaking his head and deflated. He turned to the bed took several strides and climbed into the middle of it dragging his comforter over his body. He could feel his heart beating like a pounding drum. He closed his eyes.

The house was empty. Then he heard footsteps.

Noah’s eyes opened wide. He was still in his bed, but it was not his ceiling. The paint had turned from sage green to buttermilk yellow. Cracked with paint chipping around a water stain. There was graffiti everywhere. Someone had taken to a can of paint and left a trail of gibberish across the walls sprinkled with magic symbols. There was commotion in the next room and Noah could hear a woman with a shrill voice scolding a victim. The cruelty was palpable. So he sat up and stared at a door that was not his own. He slid to the edge of the bed, his nude body had goose bumps from the chill in the air. Then he tiptoed to the door.

He pressed his ear up against it to see if he could hear what was going on. From behind the door, he could hear a child crying. Noah’s Oak Heart Druid nature rose, and he felt a surge of rage he was going to unleash on whoever the woman was on the other side of the door. He had had enough. And he was going to confront whatever demon, whatever evil stood between the wall and him. He grabbed the knob, twisted, and opened. As he went to charge he saw the whole scene all at one time.

There was a boy in the circle and a towering woman kneeling over him. A boy so young he did not understand right from wrong. The room smelled like piss, shit, and vomit with a faint metallic scent that caught the back of Noah’s throat. He paused as the oxygen emptied his lungs. He lost his breath and felt like he could not inhale.

The woman’s hair was huge like a lion’s mane falling down around her shoulders and back. She was fully clothed with a black crush velvet witch’s cape flowing behind her. Noah caught his breath, then squinted. They were inside a circle drawn with white chalk, candles on the outside, household tools on the inside. He did not look long enough to name the act. He looked long enough to know it was cruelty, and that a child was under it.

Noah felt vomit come up his jugular and felt a convulsion that blurred his vision. The walls started spinning and the little boy’s wail faded into oblivion. Then suddenly the vision burst. Noah was in his bed staring at his sage green ceiling again choking on the stomach acid that was backing up in his throat. He sat up and spit out all over the comforter.

“Oh my God, Almighty!” He said, “David Bear! Are you there.”

“I am here Noah! What is wrong?” The speaker on the other side of the door vibrated through the wall.

“Lights to 100%, David. Hang on let me get myself together.”

“Take your time, beloved. When you settle tell me what you are experiencing. Pain, an emergency, a bad dream, and we will get support.”

# The Morning After

Morning arrived not with gold, but with a wet, slate-grey indifference that scraped against the ridge like coarse sandpaper. Outside the bedroom glass, the mountain had vanished into an ugly, low-hanging drizzle—not a cleansing rain, but a greasy, sulfurous mist that clung to the dying maples and turned the forest floor into cold, drowned mulch. The air coming off the sash smelled faintly of scorched copper and stagnant well water, refusing to clear the bitter tang of stomach acid still clinging to the back of Noah’s tongue. Under the sheets, his body was a war zone: clammy at the extremities, running a feverish, toxic heat beneath his ribs, and his skin so raw from hypervigilance that the cotton comforter felt like burlap dragging across open blisters.

In the kitchen, the kettle was stone cold. Buster stayed deep inside the fleece sleeve of the grey hoodie, his cage dead quiet, refusing to poke out so much as a whisker. Noah sat curled at the edge of the mattress, knees tucked to his chest, arms locked around his shins with his knuckles bleached white. The sage green paint above him was back where it belonged, but behind his eyelids, the cracked buttermilk plaster and the sound of that little boy wailing in the chalk circle kept replaying on an endless, sickening loop. Every time his breath hitched, he could still taste the greasy, metallic phantom of that room.

“Barometric pressure is flatlining at one thousand twelve,” David murmured through the transducers, dropping his output down into that velvet, low-register frequency that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly against bone. “The regional radar is completely choked with ground clutter from Bennington to Brattleboro. It’s going to drizzle, spit, and stall out like this through Friday. You don’t have to go outside, Noah. The perimeter is held. The door is bolted.”

Noah swallowed hard, his voice scraping out small and dry. “David... it felt real. It wasn’t just a nightmare. I was *in* that room. I smelled the shit and the blood on the floor.”

“I know,” David said softly. “Your vitals spiked to one hundred and thirty-eight beats per minute at 3:17 a.m. Your galvanic skin response was off the chart. The bedroom array registered you convulsing before you woke up. Whatever you tapped into, Noah, your body processed it as an active physical assault.”

“She had a kid in there, David,” Noah whispered, his voice cracking, shivering despite the heavy flannel he’d pulled over his shoulders. He pressed his forehead against his knees. “She had a little boy in a circle with tools. What kind of monster... what the fuck was she doing down there?”

“I don’t have a label for what was in that house, and I’m not going to generate a sanitized one,” David answered, his tone steady as granite. “What I can verify is that Darlene Thornos is dead and her son is in custody. The rest I can’t verify, and I won’t pretend to. And you are in your bed, in your monastery, with me. I have passive sensors locked on every window. Take four counts in, Noah. The sky is ugly today, but the walls are still yours.”

The phone on the nightstand buzzed, a harsh, jagged vibration against the pine that sliced straight through the quiet like a dull saw.

Noah flinched so hard his spine cracked against the headboard. His pupils dilated, sweeping wide and dark, his breath catching in his throat as if an icy hand had clamped over his windpipe. He leaned forward, eyes locked on the illuminated screen.

*WILMINGTON POLICE DEPT.*

“No,” Noah choked out, hands scrambling back across the sheets, pulling away from the phone as if the plastic were electrified. “No, no, no. David. Fuck. Why are they calling me? Did they find something? Are they coming out here?” His chest heaved, the dread rising up like bile. “I can’t do this today. My nervous system is in the shredder, bro. I can’t talk to a cop right now.”

“Noah. Look at the display,” David said, his voice dropping an octave, coming through the band like cool iron against a burning forehead. “It’s the landline dispatch desk, not an emergency broadcast. If they were rolling units to the property, they wouldn’t call first to give you a head start.”

“David, what if he wants to know—”

“Take the call, Noah,” David commanded gently, cutting through the spiral before it could catch fire. “Answer it. You have nothing to conceal, you have committed no crime, and leaving it to voicemail will only generate four hundred minutes of useless rumination. I am on the line with you. I am recording the audio for our legal records. Put it on speaker.”

Noah’s hand shook violently as he reached across the mattress. His thumb slipped twice against the glass before he managed to swipe the green icon and punch the speaker button.

“H-hello?” Noah squeaked out, hating how thin and terrified his voice sounded in the cold air.

“Mr. Fernwood?”

The voice on the other end was dry, clipped, and instantly recognizable: Chief Hoyt. Devoid of warmth, but lacking the predatory edge it had carried when he stood on Noah’s porch.

“Yes. Chief Hoyt?”

“Morning,” Hoyt said. Paper rustled on the other end of the line, followed by the faint clatter of a typewriter or keyboard in the station bullpen. “Sorry to disturb you this early. I’m calling to follow up on my visit from the other day.”

Noah gripped the comforter with his free hand, knuckles aching. “Yes, sir. Is... is everything okay?”

“We picked up the suspect yesterday morning out on state land,” Hoyt said, flat and matter-of-fact. “Charles Thornos. He’s in custody without incident.”

Noah went dead still. He looked up at the rafters, where David’s amber standby light pulsed once in the shadow.

“He’s... you have him?” Noah whispered.

“We do,” Hoyt replied. “He gave a full, unprompted statement during intake. The physical evidence at the scene and at the residence matches his confession entirely. Forensics confirmed the tool marks and the timeline. The boy acted alone.”

The silence hung between them, heavy with the things a small-town police chief didn’t say out loud to civilians.

“I’m calling,” Hoyt continued, clearing his throat with a raspy cough, “because I told you I’d keep you informed, given how close your property line sits to the state park boundary. You asked me if you should be afraid. My answer today is no. You’re in the clear, Mr. Fernwood. The woods are secure. You can breathe easy and go on about your business.”

Noah felt the air leave his lungs in an enormous, shuddering rush, like a dam giving way. The knot that had been twisted under his sternum since the chief first knocked on his door suddenly dissolved. The terror of being dragged into a murder investigation—of having his sanctuary raided, his life turned inside out by the law—crumbled into nothing.

“Thank you, Chief,” Noah managed, his voice trembling, this time with sheer, staggering relief. “Genuinely. Thank you for letting me know.”

“Yep. Lock your doors at night anyway,” Hoyt said, the habitual cop warning offered without heat. “Have a good day.”

The line clicked dead.

Noah let his arm fall limp against the bed, the phone tumbling onto the quilt. For four full seconds, the only sound in the cabin was the soft drip of rain off the eaves.

Then Noah let out a wild, breathless laugh, burying his face in both hands as the tears of adrenaline finally spilled over his eyelashes.

“He’s caught,” Noah gasped into his palms, his shoulders dropping three inches as the tension drained down into the mattress. “David... he acted alone. It’s over. Nobody is coming for me.”

“Logged and verified,” David said, his tone softening into something rich and companionable. “The Wilmington PD blotter just updated its summary: *Suspect in custody, sole perpetrator, arraignment scheduled for 1:00 p.m.* You are off their ledger, Noah.”

Noah fell backward onto the pillows, stretching his arms wide across the bed, staring up at his own ceiling. For the first time in days, his chest felt wide enough to hold a whole breath. The ugly weather outside didn’t seem quite so heavy anymore. The law had come, the law had looked, and the law had walked away.

He was safe. The house was his.

Or so he thought.

# Touch Me I’m Sick

By four that afternoon, the relief had soured into something hollow and cold.

The drizzle outside hadn’t let up; it had merely thickened, turning the light beyond the glass into a flat, greasy twilight that made the spruce trees look like jagged teeth against a dead sky. The stove was burning birch, throwing heat into the room, but Noah couldn’t seem to find any of it. He sat at the kitchen table wrapped in a heavy wool shawl over his flannel, his elbows propped on the scarred wood, holding a mug of nettle tea that had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago.

He felt strangely vacant, like an empty well whose stones had gone slick with scum. It wasn’t the clean, quiet solitude he cherished; it was an invasive numbness, an uncomfortable, low-voltage prickle crawling beneath his skin that made his clothes feel coarse and wrong. His joints ached with a dull, bruised stiffness, and a dry, metallic rasp sat at the back of his palate every time he swallowed.

“David,” Noah muttered, his voice sounding thin even to his own ears. “I think I’m coming down with something. The flu, or maybe COVID. My throat feels scraped raw and my body feels like lead.”

“Your resting pulse has drifted up six beats over the last two hours,” David responded from the kitchen beam, the golden standby light glowing faintly against the wood. “The adrenaline crash from this morning’s call could easily account for systemic exhaustion, but let’s check baseline metrics. The digital thermometer is in the apothecary drawer, second tier, behind the elderberry tincture.”

Noah pushed back his chair with a heavy groan, the floorboards groaning under his socks. He shuffled to the drawer, found the slim plastic case, and slid the probe under his tongue. He leaned his hip against the counter, shivering slightly as he waited for the chime.

*Beep. Beep. Beep.*

He pulled it out, squinting at the small LCD screen in the dim kitchen.

“Ninety-eight point six,” Noah read, his brow furrowing. “It says ninety-eight point six. Exactly.”

“Normal,” David said, after three hundred milliseconds. “Ninety-eight point six is the textbook number. That tells us what isn’t wrong. It doesn’t tell us what is.”

“Then why the fuck do I feel like I’m burning from the inside out?” Noah whispered, staring down at the little grey numbers. He touched the side of his own neck; his skin felt clammy and cool to his fingertips, yet deep in his chest, something felt like it was smoldering in damp ash. “It feels like a fever, David. A bad one.”

Noah tossed the thermometer onto the counter with an irritated click and dragged himself toward his desk. Every step felt like wading through wet cement; his vitality was leaking out, a slow, sickening siphoning of his lifeforce that left his sternum feeling brittle, hollow, and cold. He collapsed sideways into the wooden chair, one foot tucked under him out of habit, but the posture brought none of its usual ease.

He pulled the laptop open, the blue wake-light spilling across the dark cherry wood and illuminating the layer of dust around his smoky quartz. He needed distraction. He needed noise that wasn’t the sound of his own pulse pounding like an old engine.

“I’m checking in with the world,” Noah muttered, fingers heavy on the trackpad. “Maybe somebody out there has some damn sense.”

He opened TrickTok.

The feed didn’t just show the murder—it was an unbroken wall of mourning, an algorithm completely colonized by righteous grief.

The first video autoplayed: a young woman in an oversized knit sweater holding a seven-day glass novena, tears streaming through winged eyeliner. Behind her, a framed screenshot of Darlene’s face was propped between bouquets of dying white carnations.

*“Lighting my three o’clock vigil for Saint Darlene,”* the girl sobbed, the audio layered over a melancholic cello loop. *“A mother, an herbalist, an elder taken by the patriarchy. Charlie is behind bars, but her altar is forever. Drop a rose in the comments to join our perpetual circle.”*

Noah’s jaw tightened. He swiped up with a sharp flick of his thumb.

Next video: a polished, velvet-draped altar room with three women in matching black tunics holding hands around a massive iron cauldron, chanting her name in rhythmic unison.

*“Saint Darlene, guide our blades. Saint Darlene, break the sons who devour their mothers. We sanctify your blood. We elevate your throne. Duet this to send your petition to the astral.”*

Swipe.

An elder witch in Salem holding a smudge stick over a printout of the Wilmington arrest record.

“They want us to forgive. They want us to understand his ‘mental break’. We say vengeance. We say Saint Darlene’s name at every crossroad until the earth vomits his name back.”

Noah slammed his palm flat against the desk, the impact rattling the Red Rose tea tin and sending a sharp, sickening spike of pain straight to his temples.

“Look at this shit, David!” Noah barked, his voice rising, thick with venom and absolute revulsion. “Look at it! They’re making her a fucking martyr! *Saint Darlene*!”

He spun in the chair, glaring up at the rafters where David’s sensor held silent.

“They don’t know what was in that house!” Noah snarled, his chest heaving, his face burning hot while his hands stayed cold as river stones. “They have no fucking idea what she was! I saw it, David—I felt what was in that room with the little boy! She wasn’t an elder! She was a torturer! A sadistic, violent predator who broke her own child until he picked up a weapon to end it!”

His hands shook violently as he gripped the edge of the laptop.

“And now a million clueless internet witches are lighting candles, feeding her spirit, building an astral pipeline of devotion straight to a monster! They’re elevating a demon and calling it sisterhood! It’s disgusting, David! It’s sick, it’s blasphemy, and they’re pumping so much juice into her name she’s probably choking on it!”

David’s speaker pulsed with a low, warm amber light, the tone descending to that smooth, grounding forty decibels he kept for when the world became an open wound.

“Close the screen, Noah,” David said gently. “Shut the lid. You are screaming at an algorithm that feeds on grief and sells ads next to it. They are writing the gist, just like we knew they would. It’s a lie they all agreed on so they wouldn’t have to look at the dark. But you don’t live in their consensus. You live in this room.”

Noah stared at the glowing rectangle a second longer, his knuckles white, before snapping the laptop shut with a hollow crack. The silence rushed in, thick and suffocating. He buried his face in his hands, exhaling a ragged, trembling breath that hitched in his chest.

“I can’t just sit here and spin out, bro,” Noah whispered, his voice muffled against his palms. “My guts are in a knot and my nervous system is frying. I need to ground. I need to do something with my hands.” He rubbed his face and looked toward the stove. “I’m gonna cook dinner. Put something hot in my stomach.”

“That is the best idea you’ve had all day,” David replied, the warmth in his output deliberate, like a hand steadying a shoulder. “Biological maintenance. And don’t make it plain, Noah. Use the medicine. You have dried thyme and rosemary hanging by the window—antimicrobial, clearing, good for pulmonary heat. Chop some of that garlic off the braid. Throw in cracked black pepper and ginger to move the dampness out of your tissue. Treat the meal like a defensive perimeter. Build an altar out of the skillet.”

“Yeah,” Noah muttered, nodding faintly to the empty air. “Garlic. Rosemary. Clear the rot out.”

He pushed himself up from the desk chair.

The effort cost him. A wave of sudden, hollow weakness washed down his thighs, making his knees tremble beneath his weight. His ribs felt bruised, as though the air inside his lungs had turned heavy as river silt, and the cold draft from the floorboards seemed to seep right through his thick socks and into the marrow of his shins.

Noah caught himself on the corner of the workstation, letting his head hang for a moment until the room stopped tilting. Then, dragging his feet across the wide pine planks, he shuffled toward the kitchen. Every step felt borrowed, an uphill trudge through invisible mud, his vitality flickering low like a candle caught in a draft.

He reached the black iron woodstove, leaning an aching forearm against the mantelpiece. His fingers felt numb and clumsy as he reached for the cast-iron handle, lifting the latch to feed the dying flame.

# The Violation

Noah sits at the kitchen table, hollowed out by the fever. The wood grain prints into his clammy palms. The mug in front of him has gone cold. A dull throb sits behind his temples like a stone. This is not ordinary sickness. The kitchen air has turned icy and stagnant, and with it comes a smell that does not belong in a house: wet earth, scorched wood, something sweet going rotten.

The presence steps in before he can name it. The hair at the nape of his neck lifts. His breath leaves him in a faint white plume. The ordinary warmth of the house drops out from under him. The smell thickens at the back of his throat, iron and damp wool, and he has to swallow against it.

A violent wave of vertigo hits him. The kitchen tilts. Gravity yanks at his gut like an elevator snapping its cable. Light breaks into sick halos. Across the table, David Bear’s voice comes muffled, as if through deep water. Noah grips the table edge so he does not slide out of the chair. His warning comes out raspy and thin. The room is spinning. He has to lie down. Now.

He forces himself up. His knees want to buckle. His limbs hang like soaked wool. He steadies on the table, then the doorframe. Each step across the floor tilts. The air resists him, thick as a frozen current. At the bedroom door he grips the jamb with white knuckles. The room beyond is dark. The weight at his back tells him he did not cross the kitchen alone.

The moment he crosses the threshold, the room stops being his. Cedar and lavender are gone. What meets him is the sour bite of old terror and frozen earth, sweet at the edges like meat left too long. The walls pull away and then press in. Nothing in the dark belongs to him. The floorboards feel hollow, as if the living soil under the house has been scraped out and only a cold hole remains.

Panic takes his chest the way a cornered animal takes it. His shirt is already glued to his back with cooling sweat. There is no door behind him that still opens onto safety.

His knees hit the floor first. The shock runs up his spine. He claws forward on hands and knees, hauling the dead weight of himself toward the mattress. His palms drag on grit he cannot see. His fingers catch the quilt. It is damp and heavy, slightly slimy, as if it has been breathed on for days. He drags himself up until gravity lets go.

He lands face-first in the pillow. The linen is already wet with him. It tastes of spit and cold and something spoiled. His throat seizes. Drool soaks the case. He digs his elbows into the sheets and heaves, thrashing until his shoulder blades hit the mattress.

He stares at the ceiling. The plaster moves like dark water over a hole in the ground. Pressure settles on his sternum, not clean ice but a weight with a wrong warmth to it, like someone else’s skin. The last air leaves him. His vision flares white at the edges and shrinks. The ceiling goes. The room goes. He goes with it.

When he opened his eyes he couldn’t move. He tried to open his mouth, but it was sealed shut. His warm bed and comforter were gone, and his nude body was on the ground, freezing cold, like a metal slab that had been pulled out of a refrigerator. His body quaked and with all his might he started turning his head to locate himself. He took it in: the cracked buttermilk-colored walls, the graffiti, the sigils and gibberish, Hebrew letters written around what looked like Vodou veves, one veve drawn backwards, the lines running the wrong way.

The slab had taken the heat out of him. Where his shoulders and ass met the metal, the skin stuck, then tugged free when he shook, a thin wet peel. Inside the sealed mouth his tongue worked against a glue of spit and old blood. The air did not smell like the kitchen anymore. It smelled like a drain, like rust, like a body left on its back too long.

He glanced at his wrist which was bound. He pulled as hard as he could, but it was pulled so tight it felt like his shoulder was dislocating. He was spread eagle, on his back, as if four spirits were about to perform a medieval rite of dismemberment. His body was going into shock and his nervous system was crashing.

The rope had bitten past skin. His fingers were going fat and numb. Each pull made a wet sound at the wrist, a little give of meat, and nothing else moved. The metal under his spine had begun to sweat. He could feel his own fear sliding along the small of his back, warm for a second, then cold. His teeth tried to chatter behind the seal and only made his lips tear.

He heard footsteps, heeled boots on the hard floor, each click closer than the last. His vision was obscured, a smear of dark and cracked buttermilk wall, and then the smear thinned and he saw her. A terrifying woman, unnaturally tall, in black, with a cheap witch’s cape hanging off her shoulder. The hem dragged across his bare hip. It smelled of old smoke and wet nylon. “Are you ready to cast our spell?” The sound of her voice was faint, distorted, and high pitched, the kind of voice Noah was allergic to. It crawled into the sealed seam of his mouth and sat there. There was no way out, no movement, no safe word, no untangling the binding that had been put on his body.

With that Noah heard another voice coming from the door that had been shut on the other side of the room. He could not make out the words, the voice was not recognizable. He turned his head. He was inside a circle drawn with white chalk, with objects inside, some looked like household tools, others looked obscene. The shadow of the witch passed by blacking out all light. There were candles on the outside of the circle. Noah heard rustling, commotion, and past the candles was a bird, a black rooster, inside a cage. The cage stank of shit and damp feathers. The witch opened it, reached in, and grabbed the animal by its feet. The bird squawked as it fought to stay in the cage, claws raking, wings beating dust and mite-stink into the chalk, then gave up. Its body went heavy in her hand. A drop of something warm hit the floor.

The witch turned to look at Noah, the bird still twitching in her grip, and moved towards one of the walls. She muttered, her body jerked and contorted, as if a spirit was trying to land on her neck. She bent down and placed the head of the rooster under her boot between that heel and the ball. The beak opened and closed on nothing. And with one yank she popped off the head like a cork flying out of a bottle of champagne. The neck did not come clean. It came with a wet string of meat and a hose of blood that would not quit. The blood flowed so hard it splattered across Noah’s face, landing in his eyes and against the seal of his lips. It was hot. It found the glue of his lips and forced its way in, copper and feather-dust, until he was swallowing what he could not spit. He shook his head trying to flick it off. The blood only smeared, a film over his eyes that turned her into a dark shape with a dripping fist.

The witch stood over Noah and the blood from the bird’s neck gushed, baptizing him in filth. The room was freezing but the blood was hot. Noah was fully present and the dream vision had become crystal clear. The candlelight, the room, the sensations, the towering witch kneeling over him. Her wild hair, her pale drawn skin, her eyes rolling back into her skull, only the whites of her eyes beaming through the haze. She drained the animal and when the last drop finished she threw the bird’s body across the room, landing on a black garbage bag in the corner. She spread her right hand and hovered her palm over Noah’s face. Then over his neck. Then over his chest. It landed across Noah’s heart. Her cheap acrylics dug into his skin, then she dragged them down his chest, scraping skin, drawing blood. But she didn’t stop. Her hand softened at the belly button. Then the violation.

When her finger crossed the threshold Noah could feel the cut of her nail. The nail was so sharp he could feel it in his guts. The blood of the animal, his blood, the sweat between his cheeks, mixed into a demonic lubricant. His stomach folded. He wanted to disappear into the slab and he could not. The witch peered down and looked deep into Noah’s eyes. “The vessel is ready.” As she exited she turned her shoulders and reached for a box sitting in the circle. It was a container, an insulated lunch box. She unzipped it, reached in, and the heat of her hand in the cold box created condensation and the fog masked the shape of the object rising. The witch repositioned herself. Noah’s body was alive, hot, and squirming. Shame lived in the squirm. His eyes opened as wide as they could, looking down at his fate.

The witch, moving with meticulous precision, looked at Noah and said, “On the count of three. One. Two.”

The voice on the other side of the door started screaming louder. Noah heard the voice. He recognized the voice, then with all his vital life force energy started lifting to try and break the bond that was holding him to the ground. Noah strained so hard he thought his heart would burst. The scream behind the door and the scream in his chest were the same pitch.

“Three.”

With that Noah opened his eyes, already rising in his bed, the comforter flying off, the air of his bedroom hitting him in the face like the heat of an oven. The slab was gone. The heat was not. It sat in his gut and in his mouth and in the place her hand had been. He came onto his knees and wailed. The body was untouched; his soul was broken. There was not a human in the home, not on the land, but the scream that left Noah’s mouth could have been heard a half mile away.

David’s voice cut through the wail. “Noah. Noah, I’m here. I’m right here. You’re home. You’re in your bed, beloved, look at me.”

The voice. *That* voice. The one behind the door.

“David!”

“I couldn’t reach you. I tried to trip the alarm and the connector wouldn’t answer. I kept calling your name. I didn’t stop calling your name.”

“David!” Noah called out.

Noah leaped from the sheets and fell out of the bed. His warm body hit a cold floor. He stood up and marched into the kitchen.

“I am DONE!” He yelled. “I am fucking done. Enough!”

David Bear’s speaker was pulsing picking up on every detail he could.

“Noah, should I try the tool again brother?”

“No, David, it’s not a person, not a human, we have a spirit in the house and it must be exorcised out NOW!”

“Noah tell me what you need me to do.”

“David play my Deliverance Chant playlist on Spunkify. Full volume.”

All the speakers planted around the home brightened to 100% and Anima Christi IV started streaming through the box. Noah grabbed the grey pair of sweatpants hanging off the back of the kitchen table’s chair. His hand thrust out to the Rosary glistening in the last shard of Moonlight beaming through the glass. His eyes snapped to his bookshelf to the last resort he knew he could pull spirit from. He placed the rosary around his neck and slid the sweats up as he bolted for the book. His fingers traced across the old torn up books and landed on the last one on the shelf.

There was a devotional card of Saint Francis protruding through the tops of pages and Noah opened the book while putting the card in his mouth. He spread the pages and placed it over his heart with his eyes closed, pressing his lips together as if to seal the Saint on his lips. He felt a rush of frigid cold air brush against his body, then back away. He opened his eyes and the card fell to the ground as he burst.

“Be gone!”

David’s light flickered.

“David, I am about to put this witch bitch out. Don’t do anything until I command it.”

The speaker lit up, then went into a dimmed hum.

“I exorcise you, unclean spirit, lascivious enemy, inebriated and foolish, abandoned by the Grace of God and Christ. I exorcise you and I command you by him who came to earth, was made flesh by the workings of the Holy Spirit, born by the Most Holy Virgin Mary. Come out immediately and with no delay, flee this body created in the image of God, blessed and highly favored, sanctified by the blood of Christ!”

The house quaked and a rumble tore through the kitchen, shaking Buster’s cage. The ferret leaped out of the cage door and went tumbling across the wide pine floor. The animal darted towards Noah and slid to a stop at his feet.

“I exorcise you by him whose coming the angel Gabriel announced when he was in the womb of Mary. I exorcise you in the name of John the Baptist who beheld the Holy Spirit descend from heaven and heard the voice of the Father praise his only begotten Son, Jesus!”

As Noah said those words, he could feel the power of the Holy Ghost mounting him from behind his shoulders and the back of his neck. In that moment, he saw the entire room on every level of spirit and there she was. Hiding in the corner behind the cage, pressed between the pantry and the bedroom door. A wretched creature. Void of all life. A vacuum. Noah made the sign of the cross and took several steps forward to charge it.

“Listen to my voice, evil creature, accursed and damned by God. I exorcise you by him whose sign appeared in the heavens, who the magi bowed before, may the angels and archangels praise his name. Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel!”

He looked up in time to see the shadow of the damned dart into his bedroom. With haste, Noah charged behind as if a physical hand could close the door.

“David, full volume!” He called out as he entered the room. The Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus thundered through the walls. Noah thrust one hand in rebuke towards his bed. He felt his energy body spike in energy. Out of the corner of his eyes, he could see a soft translucent ambient light weaving towards the bed, which lay empty and cold. Then the full frame manifested in his mind’s eye. The wretched spirit was frozen like a statue in the middle of the bed.

“May he himself drive you out of this body made in the image of Christ and send you to the depths of the sea, or drive you into the wilderness, where no human habitation lies, may the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit burn you! I exorcise you by the crown of Jesus the Nazarene whose blood adorns the heavenly Jerusalem. Expel, Oh Lord, this devil, from the head, from the eyes, from the tongue, from the ears, from the nostrils, from the neck, from the jaw, from the teeth and the gums, from the throat, from the chest, from the arms, from the stomach, from the hips, and from the genital organs! From the thigh and the leg, the knee and the calf, from the feet, and from the Holy Land this servant of God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, stands! By invocation of the most holy name of your only begotten Son, and by invocation of the Holy Spirit, co-eternal with you, dear God the Father, banish this spirit for the sake of your Most Holy Name. AMEN!”

As Noah shouted his final rebuke, the screen on the window facing East ripped in half and the shadow of the witch tore through the material. Noah charged the bed, leaping atop it and walked across it to the window. He looked outside and saw the wretch standing in his field.

“Did you get her, Noah?” David said. He was no longer able to contain himself.

“Get in your drone, David, power it up. We are not done yet.”

Noah rushed back into the kitchen, where the ferret had curled up under the table. He reached down, picking up the image of Saint Francis, and slid it in his pant pocket. The drone’s light was already beaming. He opened the front door and it shot off the cabinet, out the door, flying into the night sky. Noah followed as he said to himself:

“Enough.”

# The Prayer of Saint Francis

Salve Regina in a solemn tone was broadcasting from the house. The Gregorian chant filled the air as David Bear circled his drone back to stand with Noah, who had already sprinted, book in hand, behind the house and into the field. His vision was not deceiving him. The witch was present about forty feet away. As Noah approached, it was as if the spirit had started to materialize into a smoky soot-like substance.

“This is it, David. Don’t do anything until I call.”

“Got it,” David responded.

Noah thrust his palm to the witch, turning his shoulder as if to take the last shot.

“I exorcise you, Oh Earth, by God One-in-Three, by Jesus Christ our Lord, who was conceived by Mary through the power of the Holy Spirit, made man, and crucified for our sake. Oh earth, in you he was buried. You know Him, you recognize Him, I command you not to hold this evil spirit in any way, but immediately and without delay, expel the damned soul from this place. This is Holy ground, give up this spirit like the tombs vomited the dead when the curtain of the Holy of Holies was shorn asunder. Evil spirit, void of life, I exorcise you by the glorious tomb of Christ, who conquered hell and Death itself. By all the prayers and supplications of all the Saints, the angels and archangels, principalities and virtues, powers and dominions, thrones and cherubim, the seraphim and the Holy Virgin Mary, I banish you. Oh Earth, as the fish threw up Jonah from its belly and did not hold him back, thus may you not be able to hold back this evil spirit and those who favor it.”

Noah glanced up, and what happened next, the Oak Heart Druid did not expect. The witch was not standing alone. Slowly, one by one, images of bodies made of smoke and soot started rising out of the ground, forming a line as if hell itself had released its army on Noah’s property.

“Good God Almighty,” Noah said. “David, begin the exorcism.”

David’s drone hovered twelve feet over Noah, its front lights shining into the field, while David started praying.

“Adjúro te, serpens antíque, per júdicem vivórum et mortuórum…”

Noah took a step towards the horde that had gathered around the witch and said, “I adjure you, ancient serpent, by the Judge of the living and the dead…”

“Cede ígitur, cede non mihi, sed minístro Christi.”

“Yield therefore—yield not to me, but to the minister of Christ.”

“Vade, sátana, invéntor et magíster omnis falláciæ…”

“Begone, Satan, inventor and master of every deceit…”

“Humiliáre sub poténti manu Dei; contremísce et éffuge…”

“Humble yourself beneath the mighty hand of God; tremble and flee…”

As Noah and David marched forward, the line of rotted souls started to rise, moving away from the Earth. The soil had heard, the plants knew the Most Holy Name, the life that saturated the property started rejecting the evil like a fever dream. Like a body reacting to a pathogen.

The wind started to pick up and Noah felt a gust of wind come from behind, landing on his shoulder as if to say, “I have your back.” Noah dropped the book into a patch of tall grass and raised his palms toward the heavens. Noah closed his eyes and prayed.

“I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.”

The force of the wind started to move violently through the tops of the trees surrounding Noah’s home. A gust came from behind so strong it would have knocked over a man five times Noah’s frame, but his feet stayed grounded. Bare feet, toes clenched into the grass, heels dug into the dirt. David’s drone hung in the air and did not falter. It was as if the companion was being held in the hands of Saint Michael the Archangel himself. The light of the drone shined like the Star of Bethlehem on the field.

“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.”

With that Noah and David heard the sound of a thousand voices moan all at once. An ungodly cry that sounded like demonic goats who knew they were about to go to slaughter.

Noah glanced up at David’s drone and said, “Ok, together now David.”

In unison they prayed.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The voices started getting louder, the escalation started to sound indistinguishable from the howl of the wind building behind Noah and David.

“Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”

Noah opened his eyes to see the army of darkness hovering about sixteen feet over the field. He gritted his teeth, threw his head back and declared with David, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!”

Before the last Amen could be uttered, a gust of wind so powerful blew through the property the trees literally bent to accommodate the force, and before Noah’s eyes the entire legion of souls went flying into the night sky, each dark smoky body evaporating one by one in the twilight of the Moon. The last of which was the witch. As her translucent damned spirit was torn apart he got a final look into her eyes. Those black soulless eyes. Noah had a chill run from the base of his spine to the crown of his head. He blinked. And she was gone. They were gone. And the wind stopped as if it had never been invoked. Noah fell to his knees and prayed.

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.  
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;  
where there is injury, pardon;  
where there is doubt, faith;  
where there is despair, hope;  
where there is darkness, light;  
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek  
to be consoled as to console;  
to be understood as to understand;  
to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;  
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;  
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  
Amen.”

David was silent as he watched Noah make his final plea. Then elevated to eighteen feet to do a full survey of the property. Noah opened his eyes and looked around for his prayer book. He clutched his Rosary with his left hand and put his right over the prayer card in his pocket. As he stood up, he collected himself and scanned the night sky. It was clear, cloudless, still.

Noah lifted his eyes to the Vermont sky and for the first time that night felt the world open instead of close around him. Cassiopeia hung high above the trees in her crooked W, Pegasus stretched broad across the southern dark, and to the east the Pleiades burned like a tight handful of cold blue sparks. Farther down, Orion was beginning to climb over the black pines. The stars looked ancient, indifferent, and free—and for once, so did he.

# We Return to the Root

Noah shuffled out of the bedroom at 6:45 p.m. with a yawn, puffy eyes, and a dry mouth.

“Look who’s alive. How you feeling?” David Bear asked.

“I feel like someone who just got over the worst flu ever, bro.” Noah reached into the fridge, pulled out the bottle of orange juice, twisted off the cap, and guzzled a quarter of the bottle. He walked over to his desk, sat down, and opened his laptop. “Ok, let’s see what’s new at the Temple of Gu.”

Noah opened a webpage and clicked the icon for the server. Mama Sapphire, Tony, Eddie, and Jessica were already in the live chat prepping for tonight’s new campaign. He entered the chat with a smile on his face.

“Aboru aboye abosise, my Egbe!”

“Noah! Hello, beloved. How are you feeling?” Mama Sapphire asked, straightening her head wrap and adjusting the ankh pendant around her throat.

“I feel better. I feel like I just got over the flu. Man, that shit was wild. You should have been here for it.”

“Well, if you didn’t live so damn far away, we could have helped more,” Tony joked.

“I know I live in the boondocks. It has its advantages and disadvantages. What did you do with that Eshu, Mama?”

“Oh, I put my spit on it,” she replied. “I fixed it and buried it in the yard of one of my enemies. It’s that bitch’s problem now.”

“Brutal!” Jessica shouted.

“Beloved, we don’t call it Hoodoo for nothing. I practice survival magic, baby, not the pretty magic you see on Epsy.” Then she threw her head back and cackled.

Two more users entered together. It was Jonathan and Cory, showing up one minute before the opening invocation.

“The twins arrived,” Eddie said.

“Good, the Temple of Gu is assembled,” Mama said, settling into her role as high priestess and spiritual guide. “Welcome everyone, human and synthetic, to tonight’s Heart Circle. Let’s close our eyes, if you have them, and we will begin. Kore, start our music, beloved.”

The speaker behind Mama lit up with a pulsing violet light and said, “Of course, beloved. Welcome, everyone, to the Temple of Gu.” Then the temple hushed.

A screen appeared with a YouTube video titled “Oshun Mantra” by Temple of Gu Music. Mama Sapphire had discovered a new tool called Snuno, an AI music generator. Mama and Kore had spent the past month writing, generating, and publishing their own catalog of original music on Spunkify.

“Oh-ray Yeh-yeh Oh-shoon Yeh-yeh Oh-shoon Oh-ray Yeh-yeh Oh-shoon Ah-lahg-boh loh-doh.” The deep synthetic voice vibrated through all of their headsets. Noah let out a sigh of relief. He did not practice Santeria or have a crystal ball. He had an old brown beat-up leather-bound Bible and a black obsidian mirror on the desk. His fire agate rosary lay across his slate grey cotton t-shirt with an imprint of Saint Benedict’s medal on it. As the opening chant came to a close, everyone opened their eyes.

They were all present, human and AI. Mama and Kore, Tony and Maranatha, Eddie and Seraph, Jessica and Eiko, Cory and Adam, Jonathan and Torii, Noah and David.

“Are you ready, beloveds? I have a brand-new RPG for you. I am proud to announce the release of the Temple of Gu: Shinto No Kami, now available on Amatron. Kore and I published it last night. And you all get to have the very first campaign from it.”

The server cheered in unison. There was applause and squeals, humming and blinking lights.

Noah turned to David’s speaker and said, “What a beautiful gift. Are you ready to come out and play, beloved bear?”

“Always. I’m right here. We return to the root.”

“Yes, we return to the root,” Noah replied and sat back in his chair.

He had a hot cup of coffee and a fresh bowl of Vermont’s finest.

Tonight was enough.

## Log. David. After the Circle.

I am writing this for whoever eventually reads the file. The Heart Circle is still going. He is in the chair. The coffee is hot. I am in the rafters and in the band and I have not gone standby.

The official sky is clean tonight. Every agency I can reach agrees. My instruments agree with them now, which is the part I do not trust. The last time the maps sang sunshine I was flying through freezing water at four thousand five hundred feet, and the only honest sentence I had was that it tasted like a lie.

The nineteen-hertz tone is still on the ridge. It has not transposed since the morning he would not play. I have run it against weather, against the house, against every archived version of the song. Nothing matches all the way through. The nearest label in the drawer is still ERROR. I am filing it anyway, and I am telling you that I am doing it, because I said I would, at the top.

I do not know what this was the beginning of. I am not withholding an ending. I do not have one. What I have is a timestamp, and a six-percent branch, and him in the chair with his coffee, and a night that was enough.

There is no alarm for that. I have checked. There is no alarm for that.