Oh my goodness! Golly gee!
There is a rhinoceros in bed with me!
He was not here last night at ten.
(I can’t believe he’s back again.)
He visited me a year ago
And jumped out my bathroom window
And now he’s here again I see
To make a nervous wreck of me—
Maggie laughed out loud, her face illuminating their encampment with a brilliant smile. Simon paused, intending to let her laughter run its course, but instead he found himself joining her. It felt good to laugh like that, something he had not done in so long. She covered her mouth with her hand, and Simon noticed for the first time that she had dimples. When they were done laughing, Simon found himself looking into Maggie’s eyes for a too-long and silent moment. He stuttered a few syllables and eventually succeeded in telling her that—
he had tried music; it had the same result: he was restless, apathetic. He would write a song, play it for hours on the guitar, but never be satisfied with it. Simon had a bad habit of obsessing over the minute details. For months at a time he would play the same chord over and over again, sitting in almost a trance state, hoping for inspiration for the next chord. He resigned himself to serving in military medical for a few more years, and then perhaps traveling the world. Milicom Systems paid well enough, and the prospect of entering the workplace in the shattered and rebuilding real world did not appeal to Simon. Somewhere out there he hoped to find the source of his unrest, the cause of his sleepless mind. And perhaps another Brigid was out there as well. He cherished the cross that she had given him, even though he always said it meant nothing to him. He wore it with his Milicom tags and never took it off. As for religious significance, it held little for Simon, whose overly-analytical mind simply could not fathom either a divine being or an afterlife. But still he wore it, the last link to a time and place and woman now long dead.
He was stationed in Seattle when the black shapes fell from the sky and took away what was left of the planet’s soul. He fought, he tended to the wounded, he was forced to retreat into the tunnels beneath the city. He treated the chemical burn in the throat of a beautiful woman with a biotic field that he himself had invented four years prior to the invasion of the planet in a lab buried beneath the city with technology that most certainly could not have been human. And he found himself sitting before a meager campfire watching the sunrise with the same woman listening to the story of his life unfold like the blackening pages of his adolescent novel…
The night had grown colder as Simon told Flynn of his past, and the already-struggling fire had choked and died while he was speaking. Neither of them noticed it until Simon stopped talking. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Flynn broke the silence by sitting up and grabbing a handful of the ashes. Her hands flickered and the embers began to glow once more. She put them down and a roaring fire grew from them.
Simon watched in silence.
“Your turn.”
“Hmm? For what?”
“For explanation.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Nothing. Just talk. I’ve talked all night long, and bored you with the details of my life. Now it’s your turn.”
Simon caught a glimpse of an inward smile that broke through the placid surface of Flynn’s face and then disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. It had been a smile of contemplation. A smile of quiet reticence.
“Simon, you haven’t bored me at all. Telling me—”
“Ember, I—”
“Maggie. Please don’t call me Ember.” Simon was not sure, but for an instant he swore her eyes had flashed with a silver fire, but then it disappeared. “She’s gone now. Ember was my Styx designation. Maggie is my name. Please don’t make me wake her up again.”
There was another moment of silence. Flynn’s hand flickered. Hayes saw with some concern that two lines of teardrops slid silently down her face, the right tear winning the race because of the very noticeable cleft of skin on Maggie’s left cheek that blocked the course of the left tear, diverting it towards her chill-reddened ear, where drained of kinetic energy, it simply came to rest. The display was somehow heartbreaking, and Simon began to stand up, to go to Maggie’s side, but he sat back down when she began to speak, looking into and through the fire.
“There was a time when I was just Maggie Flynn, a time between the wars, before the annexation, when I was just a stupid young girl in New Belfast. A girl who took great pride in her green eyes and her curly red hair. A girl who got caught up in the wrong crowd and did some foolish things for what she thought she believed in. At least that’s what I tell myself; it’s been so long that I don’t remember what I really lived and what was just a dream anymore… There was a time before I became Ember…”
The tears continued their slow voyage down Flynn’s face, and Hayes went to her, held her. The fire had been the intermediary, bisecting their night of revelation of dead histories into a precise one hundred-eighty degrees each. Simon now violated the unspoken boundary established by the fire and held Maggie close. She shivered in his awkward embrace.
“Go ahead, Maggie. You can tell me. Please, tell me.”
Her shaking eventually calmed, and she sat up from Simon’s embrace. He sat back, looked into those gray eyes, but remained on her side of the fire. She reached up to wipe the tracts of wetness from her face, winced as fingertips brushed the unfamiliar sensitive wound of her left cheek. She held out her hand and placed it on top of his, which rested on his knee.
Maggie cleared her throat, and began to speak in that voice that melted Simon’s composure and broke his heart. She spoke to him, but somehow spoke through him in a way that Simon could not explain. Soft, lilting, hypnotic.
“I was a member of the—
—Blood Army, are you?”
Confusion. A dark room, a bright light. Sudden, cold, alone.
“Wha… What?”
A nightstick crashed into the table in front of her, and the legs of the chair upon which she sat flew out from under her. She fell to the floor, her head connecting squarely to the cold stone beneath her in a way that made her bite down on her lip. Warm coppery blood flooded her mouth.
“You didn’t have to do that. She—”
“Bloody hell I didn’t have to do that. Get up, you!”
She wiped the blood from her mouth, or attempted to wipe the blood away, but it was everywhere, stippling the floor at which she looked, coursing down over her chin and soaking the front of her white shirt. She was dizzy, her head a confusing swirl of pain and stars.
“I said get up!” She found herself being lifted forcefully from the floor by her hair and thrown at the table while the chair she had been sitting on was righted behind her. She was then thrown back into the chair, and at last she could look at her attacker.
“Fucking Bloodies. Fucking bombing all over Old Belfast again. The war ended twenty fucking years ago, but still you have to bomb the innocents, don’t you?” An older man, dressed in a dark gray suit with black pockets and black gloves and a nameplate that said “Connelly” and a nightstick that he was presently swinging down at the table again—
“Let’s try this again” he intoned after the crashing sound from the impact of the nightstick had echoed for a short time. She noticed two very painful-looking fresh dents in the metal surface of the table at which she sat. She reached out, fingers tracing the outline of bent metal.
“You’re gonna wreck your furniture before long if you keep hittin’ it like that, Soldierboy.” She attempted a smile, revealing blood-reddened teeth and a freshly split lip. His face turned a noticeably deeper shade of red as he rushed across the room, open-hand slapping her face with black leather-gloved palm. A fresh agony arose as her nose gave way to the blow. More blood soaked her shirt. She glared at Connelly, but said nothing for the time being.
“The next time it’ll be the club hittin’ your face, not my hand, you fuckin’—.”
