Swan Song

Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire.

Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful, it just takes the right touch

We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls.

Put one foot forward and the other will get you to where you are going~!" Bag Lady, Swan Song

...the magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think of how lovely Heaven was going to be.

This was a dank, sinister chill: the chill of shadows where poison toadstools grown, their ruddy colors beckoning a child to come, come take a taste of candy.

...just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw.

It is a contradiction this creek- a hundred thousand years old but renewed with each rainfall.

...he was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous facade...

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

...and his bones were a cage of ice.

take it one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

Josh Hutchins’s battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs.

If ... if you were God ... would you destroy this world?” Hannan

and as she’d watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.

Wearily, she sat up. Jesus was not coming today. She would have to die later, she decided. There was no use lying out here like a fool in the rain. One step, she thought. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear?

Once upon a time, he thought, we had a love affair with fire.

Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful, it just takes the right touch.

Dear sweet Jesus, come down in your flying saucer and take me with you!

an answer. Josh smiled. “I guess I am.

He listened to the keening of the wind whistling through holes in the walls, and he pondered the thought that there might be something out there in the dark—God or Devil or something more elemental than either—that looked at humankind as Josh had viewed the roach—less than intelligent, certainly nasty, but struggling onward on its journey, never giving up, fighting through obstacles or going around them, doing whatever it had to do to survive. And he hoped that if the time ever came for that elemental fist to come crashing down, its wielder might take a moment of pause as well.

as she’d watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.

Josh was beginning to believe the whole thing was like professional wrestling: the superpowers put on their masks and stomped around, roaring threats and swinging wildly at each other, but it was a game of macho, strutting bluff.

hand over her facial features. Swan’s touch was as soft as smoke.

Rudy had been a kick in life. But in death he was a real drag.

Contemplating the great cloud-streaked orb of the Earth, he’d been moved to tears, and his emotional radio transmission of “I think I know how God must feel, Houston” had done more than anything to win him the presidency. But he’d inherited the mistakes of the generations of presidents before him, and he’d been ridiculously naive about the world on the eve of the twenty-first century. The

I popped the last Tylenol about three days before the bombs hit. A poem I was writing fell to pieces.

The solution to things he did not understand was very simple: Destroy it. He

One Step...and then the next gets you where you're going." - Sister Creep

Sometimes you can see a person’s inside face—but only for a second or two—if you look close and hard enough. The eyes give away the inside face, and likely as not it’s a whole lot different than the mask that’s stuck on the outside.

She looked like the daughter of a marriage between ice and fire.

Something that resembled a small, unblinking scarlet eye opened in the center of the flame, and he wanted to scream.

Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world,

The insect kept going, out of the light’s range and into the darkness on its purposeful journey. Who am I to kill such a thing? he asked himself. Who am I to deliver death to even the lowest form of life?

And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper ... and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

I judge God, or the power that we know as God, to be very, very weak. A dying candle, if you like, surrounded by darkness. And the darkness is closing in.

If a person’s gotta die, he oughta die tryin’ to go home to somebody he loves, don’t you think?

But he’d looked into her eyes and seen forgiveness, and he could not stand up to such a thing. Forgiveness, even for him.