Release(8)

She drinks. The taste is a railroad train, the boom of a timpani, a lighthouse through fog. She laughs aloud, the foam running down her chin.

“God, I hated this stuff,” she says, in a voice that is entirely hers and entirely someone else’s. It shocks her into silence.

I have never drunk this before, she thinks.

I have drunk this before and hated it, she thinks.

“Both are true,” she says.

“They always are,” the man says.

“Tell me. How many of me do you see?”

“I’ll see as many of you as you wish.”

She wonders if he speaks true, if he will be able to answer the questions that hover here, just above and behind her, a flock of watchful birds, waiting for her to stumble. How is she here? Where is she going? What is this thorn in her heart and what does it bind there?

But no. He is troubled by his state, she can see that now. He is a damaged human, as so many of them are (them? she thinks), and he struggles through the best he can manage. She can’t even feel disappointment, only pity.

“Thank you,” she says, handing him back the can with a deep seriousness.

“She gives it back to you,” the man says. “She turns the sun to you and she thanks you.”

“I do.”

“She thanks you.”

The man watches as she crosses the square of concrete, wading out towards an unbusy road, an intent seriousness seeming to drive her, one that ignores the broken ground punishing her feet.

“She leaves,” he says, drinking from the can.





He keeps the same unsurprised expression when the faun steps onto the square of concrete, hooves clopping like a prim donkey’s. He is seven feet tall, furred to his haunches, horned of head, bare of chest, naked as a wild creature, his priapic goat smell clearing the man’s nostrils as effectively as any menthol. He reaches for the man.

“It’s touching your eyes,” the man says. “It’s a dream, this. It can only be. It offers you forgetfulness and the forgetfulness is sweet.”

The faun leaves the man standing there, in a euphoria that will be the only thing he’ll remember of this encounter. The faun hurries after her, glancing up at the now mid-morning sun. The day is long, but it is not endless.

He has until dusk. He has only until dusk.





Adam crossed the seven-mile mark as he finished the little segment of lakeside path. One mile from home, unless he wanted to turn left and add another four. But all that was out that way was a closed 7-Eleven and probably half the meth labs in the county. He might have, regardless, and had done so on his very best running days (and his very worst), but today he had no time.

He turned right instead, running through the parking lot at the end of the trail, noticed his brother’s truck there, his brother behind the wheel.

“Adam!” Marty shouted, loud enough to be heard over Adam’s playlist.

“Not stopping!” he yelled back. He turned onto a back country road – shoulderless, of course, it was an ongoing miracle that he’d never been knocked into a ditch – and kept at full pace. Halfway down this road, he’d pass the western fence of Angela’s farm. You couldn’t see her house from there, but her horse and its companion goat might be grazing.

“Hey, bro,” his bro said, pulling alongside in the truck, keeping pace, waiting for Adam to turn down his music. “I honked for you when you started on the lakeside. Guess you must not have heard me.”

“Sure.”

“Get in. I want to talk to you.”

“No. And I thought you were helping Dad.”

“Yeah, well.” Marty’s voice had a surprising hitch in it, enough to make Adam look over, but not enough to make him stop.

His golden brother. Hair so blond it was almost white, facial hair that faded to lighter blond rather than the usual ginger, a strapping set of shoulders, a smile that would normally have made him the world’s most successful youth pastor, if – and this was his father’s point about effectiveness – Marty hadn’t been the most boring Sunday School teacher Adam had ever had. If the rumours were true, Marty had also matured into the most boring preacher in his entire seminary.

When you were that handsome, everyone assumed you could work an audience, so often that no one ever actually bothered showing you how. Physical beauty, of all the curses, was obviously the best you could get. It was still a curse, though.

“He wasn’t happy with the suggestions I made for his sermon tomorrow,” Marty said, puttering alongside Adam. “The words ‘grade-school hokum’ were used.”

“Dad’s from Oregon. Why does he talk like an Appalachian hick?”

“They call it ‘folksiness’ in seminary.”

“I’m on the home stretch, Marty. I really need to concentrate–”

“Get in. I’ll drive you.”

“And again, no.” He kept moving. Marty kept pace, watching out for traffic behind them. The road was deserted, which was why Adam used it.

Marty was starting his senior year in a couple of weeks, too, at a church college in rural Idaho, one that was training him to preach and to minister, with an eye to being taken on at The House Upon The Rock and maybe, one day, being the second-generation Thorn as head pastor. This was something Marty wanted very badly, despite what was slowly being confirmed as his complete unsuitability to do so.