Release(37)

“Are you done in here?” frowned his dad, leaning into the tiny sound room. It had literally been converted from a bathroom beside the balcony sometime before Adam was born. It could only fit one person at a time, and even then, Adam’s elbows bumped either wall.

“Almost,” Adam said.

“You’d be past almost if you weren’t wasting time on the phone.”

“I’m meeting Angela after this. I was arranging it.”

His dad softened. Even in his worst moods, Angela’s racial difference gave him a chance to feel magnanimous. Big Brian Thorn liked to feel magnanimous. “She’s welcome to come to the Labor Day musical, you know. She’s always welcome here.”

“Yeah, but do you know what pizza places are like on Labor Day? Everyone in the world is having one last summer party. It’s basically their Black Friday.”

To Adam’s surprise, Brian Thorn almost smiled.

“I saw the craziest thing today,” his dad said. “Driving here.”

“What’s that?”

“A man dressed up as a goat.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I know, that’s what I thought. Proper costume, too, movie quality. Not just something you’d slip on but like someone had glued actual hair all over him.”

“What kind of costume is a goat?”

“Well, he was standing up, I guess. Not a goat on all fours.”

“So … a faun? Or, what do you call them? A satyr?”

His dad frowned, obviously disliking the move from animal into pagan. “Maybe they’re filming something around here. Some HBO thing.”

“The Satyr Housewives of Frome, Washington.”

“I don’t even begin to understand that joke.”

“At least you understood it was a joke. That’s a start.”

His dad almost smiled again. Maybe, Adam thought, as Big Brian Thorn left for the lower level to test the microphones, maybe this is what Marty felt like all the time. Marty had gone unexpectedly Prodigal, which left Adam the son closer to home, the one to be allied with, the one not quite so lost, free, for a moment, from the Yoke.

Interesting, Adam thought.





The shouting begins before they even fully crest the hill.

“Get down!”

“Hands where I can see them!”

“What the hell is that?”

“I said, GET DOWN!”

The faun raises his hands – an accidental show of surrender that probably stops them from firing – and all three guards fall to the ground, unconscious. His only recourse is to remove this entire day from their memories. A blunt solution, but the only one available in the time they have left.

The Queen stops at what seems to be the entrance, a surprisingly unobtrusive one for a building so secure. She reaches for the handle, but he knows, of course, that it will not simply open, it is a prison. He moves to help her–

The door flies off its hinges, the metal of it warping as if punched by a giant hand. The faun has to step out of the way as it clangs down the drive, probably bouncing all the way to the car they stopped on the way up.

“My lady?” says the faun.





The door comes open in her hand, more than open, she merely has to brush it with the intention of it not being there and it is destroyed, flung from her sight.

It is unexpected and yet feels right. I have power, she thinks, power older than civilization. She tests it again, waving her fingers at the woman who approaches holding a gun. The woman drops to the floor, a threat no longer.

I lit a fire with my hands, she thinks. I moved through the air by thought alone.

She remembers these things. And has always known them.

I am two. I am the spirit and the second spirit that binds me. We are growing closer. We are blurring into one.

“You are the Queen,” says a voice behind her.

She does not look back, merely answers, “Yes, I am the Queen,” and tears another door from its hinges.





No one looked at the Jacuzzi between the baptisms, and even with the cushioned lid on top, there was always a layer of dust inside as well as – this time – one, two, three dead mice that Adam picked out with rubber gloves. Once, in a mystery still unsolved, he’d found an open box for a diaphragm, but try as he might, there wasn’t a single person in the church he could imagine having left it there.

He’d been baptized himself at eight years old in this very spot. Big Brian Thorn scoffed at the notion that full-body immersion was going out of fashion – it was, but scoffing brought in the people who still wanted it – and had baptized Adam himself, praying over him, asking him the questions (“Do you dedicate your life to Jesus Christ as your Personal Lord and Saviour?” “I do”), and had dunked him. He had been so small that the congregation couldn’t actually see him, and – once dunked – his dad had lifted him entirely out of the water, over the lip of the doors behind the choir and said, “Can you all see my boy?”

The congregation had laughed, heartily.

“Not at you,” his mother had said at his bedside that night.

“Yes, they were,” Adam sniffled.

“Honestly, Adam, do you really think the world revolves around you? Do you think all those people, friends of your father, would sit there in a worshipful place and laugh at you?”