Falling Idols

taking heads.

Twenty shots go by fast, Fenris seems to think so, he’s still with you as you snap on twenty more and bolt the next into the chamber, you bring the street up close again and they’re all in your lens now, some of them still standing there covered in bits and pieces and splashes of the fallen and they haven’t noticed a thing, for them not one thing has changed, sometimes you feel as though you’re the only one alive and you wonder what does it take, what does it take just to get their attention? Some guy down there is still reading a newspaper, you punch the next bullet through the headline, black and white and red all over.

All in all, they’ve at least made your job easier.

You’ll remember to thank them later, in that better world to come.

Cenotaph

After more than half a year since their debut tumble into bed, this was their first genuine trip together. But a whole month across an ocean was overdoing it. A month either cemented the bond or drove the wedge, and barely a week after debarking at Heathrow, Kate found herself warming to the idea of scrapping their return tickets in lieu of seats on the Concorde. Financial cretinism, but it would halve the hours next to Alain and his perfect face.

A few days in London, then southwest, until they’d nearly run out of England altogether in rocky, windswept Cornwall: “My gran came from here,” Kate had told him. “Left when she was a girl, but the place never left her.”

“Yeah?” Alain had said. “I guess everybody’s from somewhere, aren’t they?”

He’d not even meant it as a slight. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that he should be interested, even if it did mean a bit of diplomatic faking.

When feeling lazy or scapegoatish she was tempted to blame the bad days on the gap between their ages, her eight-year jump. Sometimes a crack, sometimes a chasm. Look at them thirteen years ago, where they’d been in the world. She’d awakened one morning after sleeping in her car, and shot the photo that won her a Pulitzer. Twenty-three years old at the time. Alain, on the other hand, would’ve been flunking driver’s ed and drowning in hormones.

Thirteen years later Alain Carreras still exuded the petulant charm of a scruffy teenager. This, she decided, was the problem: It was more appealing on paper. At least there you could furnish your own depth. Alain walked through real life as though having stepped fresh from one of his Gap ads, longish hair mussed so artfully it must’ve taken hours, and really didn’t have anything else going on beneath the surface. In some people — rarer than you might think — surface went all the way through.

Cornwall was the better part of a day behind them, the county of Shropshire ahead on the A49, when he could no longer take the weather.

“And they call this a climate? I thought climates changed.” Too bored by it to sound good and annoyed. “How long does monsoon season last in England, anyway?”

Mist. It was a heavy mist. Barely needed the wipers.

“Look on the bright side,” Kate told him. “It does wonders for your complexion. No sun? Might as well not even have packed your moisturizers. You’ll go home looking like a milkmaid.”

There. That made him happy. She was looking pretty peaches and cream herself, while the damp had fluffed her hair, not quite shoulder length, just enough to make her want to grow it again, renew the wild black mass it used to be before she got practical.

But shoot Alain in the same frame as some of the millennium-old carvings strewn about the region, and the contrasts between skin and stone would never be any more pronounced. Along with the other big difference: Some of those graven faces actually smiled, without fear of giving themselves wrinkles.

Between the two, she was already anticipating which would be better company the next few days.

*

The thing about England was, you could scarcely throw a mossy stone without hitting something to remind you of how vastly old the place was. Back home, Kate Haskins had snapped her cameras across a country that had been given birth by this one, but had lost its mother’s stately sense of time. A century just didn’t mean as much to one as it did the other.

Kate’s grandmother had cherished the antiquity of her birth country, and the history, myths, and legends left behind. Normans, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, Celts … from Bronze Age on, each had left its imprint on both land and psyche. The island absorbed them all, wasting nothing.

The Church of St. John the Baptist was just such a reservoir of essence. Buildings from the Middle Ages could today be found in total ruin or as well-preserved as last week’s corpse, and here stood one of the more fortunate. Stood as paradox — both monument to time, and entirely divorced from it.

West of the motorway, it was shielded from passing sight by hills, and by sufficient oaks and ash to retain just enough of the fourteenth century to send most people seeking a warm hearth the moment the sun began to blend into the Welsh border.

It had been her gran who’d discovered it to be something of a legacy from the earliest known roots of their family.

St. John the Baptist came from the second phase of English Gothic architecture known as Decorated, while still showing clear Norman roots, from the semi-circular arches of its walls, to the square bell-tower whose parapet looked better suited to archers than priests. The leaded glass of the rose window would catch the morning sun, when it shone at all. Rain or shine, though, the stone walls emitted an earthier feel. Once brownish-gray, they were now mottled green with lichen, as though having come to peaceful co-existence with the land on which they stood — a part of it, rather than its conqueror.

“So this is it?” Alain said. “This is all there is to it?”

“This may surprise you, but there’s also an inside.”

They were still in the car, parked. Alain was starting early today. If he was too bored, their bed-and-breakfast down in Craven Arms wasn’t out of hiking distance. Two mirrors, too; those would keep him entertained awhile.

“Well, the way you were talking, I was expecting, like, Notre Dame.” He shrugged. “Color me underwhelmed.”