he added, “we could put a small wager on the outcome.”
“What kind of wager would we be talking about here?”
Staley didn’t know why she was even asking that, why she hadn’t just shut down this idea of a contest right from the get-go. It was like something in the air was turning her head all around.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How about if I win, you’ll give me a kiss?”
“A kiss?”
He shrugged. “And if you enjoy it, maybe you’ll give me something more.”
“And if I win?”
“Well, what’s the one thing you’d like most in the world?”
Staley smiled. “Tell you the truth, I don’t want for much of anything. I keep my expectations low—makes for a simple life.”
“I’m impressed,” he said. “Most people have a hankering for something they can’t have. You know, money, or fame, or a true love. Maybe living forever.”
“Don’t see much point in living forever,” Staley told him. “Come a time when everybody you care about would be long gone, but there you’d be, still trudging along on your own.”
“Well, sure. But—”
“And as for money and fame, I think they’re pretty much overrated. I don’t really need much to be happy and I surely don’t need anybody nosing in on my business.”
“So what about a true love?”
“Well, now,” Staley said. “Seems to me true love’s something that comes to you, not something you can take or arrange.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“That’d be sad, but you make do. I don’t know how other folks get by, but I’ve got my music. I’ve got my friends.”
The stranger regarded her with an odd, frustrated look.
“You can’t tell me there’s nothing you don’t have a yearning for,” he said. “Everybody wants for something.”
“You mean for myself, or in general, like for there to be no more hurt in the world or the like?”
“For yourself,” he said.
Staley shook her head. “Nothing I can’t wait for it to find me in its own good time.” She put her fiddle up under her chin. “So what do you want to play?”
But the stranger pulled his string strap back over his head and started to put his guitar away.
“What’s the matter?” Staley asked. “We don’t need some silly contest just to play a few tunes.”
The stranger wouldn’t look at her.
“I’ve kind of lost my appetite for music,” he said, snapping closed the clasps on his case.
He stood up, his gaze finally meeting hers, and she saw something else in those clear blue eyes of his, a dark storm of anger, but a hurting, too. A loneliness that seemed so out of place, given his easy-going manner. A man like him, he should be friends with everyone he met, she’d thought. Except….
“I know who you are,” she said.
She didn’t know how she knew, but it came to her, like a gauze slipping from in front of her eyes, like she’d suddenly shucked the dreamy quality of the otherworld and could see true once more.
“You don’t look nothing like what I expected,” she added.
“Yeah, well, you’ve had your fun. Now let me be.”
But something her grandmother had told her once came back to her. “I tell you,” she’d said. “If I was ever to meet the devil, I’d kill him with kindness. That’s the one thing old Lucifer can’t stand.”
Staley grinned, remembering.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t go off all mad.”
The devil glared at her.
“Or at least let me give you that kiss before you go.”
He actually backed away from her at that.
“What?” Staley asked. “Suddenly you don’t fancy me anymore?”
“You put up a good front,” he said. “I didn’t make you for such an accomplished liar.”
Staley shook her head. “I never lied to you. I really am happy with things the way they are. And anything I don’t have, I don’t mind waiting on.”
The devil spat on the grass at her feet, turned once around, and was gone, vanishing with a small whuft of displaced air.
That’s your best parting shot? Staley wanted to ask, but decided to leave well enough alone. She gave her surroundings a last look, then started up fiddling again, playing herself back into the green of summer where she’d left her friends.
Robert’s pretty impressed when Staley just steps out of that invisible door, calm as you please. We heard the fiddling first. It sounded like it was coming from someplace on the far side of forever, but getting closer by the moment, and then there she was, standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at us. Robert’s even more impressed when she tells us