as milk fresh from the breast. His gaze caught Sara's. He smiled. But her eyes drilled into his like iron rods.
Cold and hard. She's slipped away! he thought. With the thought came pain.
But Puppetman wasn't buying pain. Not tonight. He drove himself into her through the eyes.
And she came running for him, arms spread, her mouth a red hole through which love-words poured. And Hartmann felt his puppet wrap her arms around his neck and makeupstreaked tears gush onto his collar, and he hated that part of him that had saved his life.
And down away where light never was, Puppetman smiled.
MIRRORS OF THE SOUL
Melinda M. Snodgrass
April in Paris. The chestnut tress resplendent in their pink and white finery. The blossoms drifting like fragrant snow about the feet of the statues in the Tuileries Garden, and floating like colorful foam atop the muddy waters of the Seine.
April in Paris. The song bubbling incongruously through his head as he stood before a simple gravestone in the Cimetiere Montmartre. So hideously inappropriate. He banished it only to have it return with greater intensity.
Irritably Tachyon hunched one shoulder, took a tighter grip -on the simple bouquet of violets and lily of the valley. The crisp green florist's paper crackled loudly in the afternoon air. Away to his left he could hear the urgent bleat of horns as the bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled up the Rue Norvins toward Sacre-Coeur. With its gleaming white walls, cupolas, and dome the cathedral floated like an Arabian nights dream over this city of light and dreams.
The last time I saw Paris.
Earl, his face holding all the expression of an ebony statue. Lena, flushed, impassioned. "You must go!" Looking to Earl for help and comfort. The quiet; "it would probably be best." The path of least resistance. So strange from this of all men.
Tachyon knelt, brushed away the petals that littered the stone slab.
Earl Sanderson Jr. "Noir Aigle" 1919-1974
You lived too long, my friend. Or so it was said. Those busy, noisy activists could have used you better if you'd had the grace to die in 1950. No -even better-while liberating Argentina or freeing Spain or saving Gandhi.
Laid the bouquet on the grave. A sudden breeze set the delicate white bells of the lilies to trembling. Like a young girl's lashes just before she was kissed. Or like Blythe's lashes just before she wept.
The last time I saw Paris.
A cold, bleak December, and a park in Neuilly.
Blythe van Renssaeler, aka Brain Trust, died yesterday.... Gracelessly he surged to his feet, dusted the knees of his pants with a handkerchief. Gave his nose a quick, emphatic blow. That was the trouble with the past. It never stayed buried.
Straddling the slab was a large elaborate wreath. Roses and gladiolas and yards of ribbon. A wreath for a dead hero. A travesty. A small foot came up, sent the wreath tumbling. Contemptuously Tachyon walked over it, grinding the fragile petals beneath his heel.
One cannot propitiate the ancestors, Jack. Their ghosts will follow.
His certainly were.
On the Rue Etex he hailed a cab, fished for the note, read off the name of the Left Bank cafe in rusty French. Settled back to watch the unlit neon signs flash past. XXX, Le Filles! "Les Sexy." Strange to think of all this smut at the foot of a hill whose name translated as the Mountain of Martyrs. Saints had died on Montmartre. The Society of Jesus had been founded on the hill in 1534.
They proceeded in noisy and profane lurches. Bursts of heart-stopping speed followed by neck-wrenching stops. A blare of horns, and an exchange of imaginative insults. They shot through the Place Vendome past the Ritz where the delegation was housed. Tachyon hunkered deeper into his seat though it was unlikely he would be spotted. He was so sick of them all. Sara, quiet, sleek, and secretive as a mongoose. She had changed since Syria, but refused to confide. Peregrine flaunting her pregnancy, refusing to accept that she might not beat the odds. Mistral, young and beautiful. She had been tactful and understanding and kept his shameful secret. Fantasy, sly and amused. She had not. Hot blood washed his face. His humiliating condition was now public to be sniggered at and discussed in tones ranging from the sympathetic to the amused. His hand closed tightly on the note. There would be at least one woman he could face without embarrassment. One of his ghosts, but more welcome than the living right now.