On the Importance of Passion

                How many moments have you lost to apathy?  Everyone in the world has spent at least a little bit of time performing tasks that they find boring or unfulfilling, it’s inevitable.  The danger is how easy it is to let the boredom swallow more and more of your time.  We live in a world blended from constant novelty and unrelenting monotony, two ingredients that leave us forever hungry.  It is a struggle to free ourselves from an empty life, and it can only be done through introspection and self-understanding.  Each of us must set ourselves a goal and pursue it to the greatest expression of our spirit.

                There is a place for rest.  We are not built for total and constant passion, and we are allowed time to relax and to breathe.  Times of abnegation, of mental rest, help to replenish our spirit and grant perspective.   However these moments must be a conscious choice, and we must depend upon ourselves to wake up and resume the pursuit of that which we love.

                To quote Nicholas Sparks, “The saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there's nothing to make it last.”  I hope that you find lasting happiness.

-Peter Manning

The Brothers and the Duke

    Two brothers had two boats.  The older brother was called Koin, and he sailed his boat on the blue-green gulf, catching fish to sell at market.  The younger brother was called Soin, and he sailed up and down the coast bringing passengers from city to city.
    The brothers were too busy to spend much time together.  Most of the year, they sailed their boats and made their living.  But they both made sure to be back home each fall for a very important event.
    Near the end of autumn but before winter truly began, Koin and Soin would meet at their family home for their annual race out to sea.  They would sail as far and as fast as they could, and the winner was the one who sailed farthest before turning back.
    Since Koin was older and stronger, he won the race every year.  But this year, Soin knew that he would out-race his brother no matter how far he had to go.
    Soin arrived at their family home several hours before his brother.  He started cleaning the house, and lunch was ready by the time his brother arrived.
    “Hi-ho, Soin!” called Koin.
    “Ho-hi, Koin!” called Soin.  “Are you ready for the race?”
    “Ready as ever!” Koin was a man who smiled all the time, and he made you want to smile back.
    As they ate, Koin complained that there were never any fish in the sea, but Soin reminded him that there would have been more if Koin wasn’t late to everything.  Likewise, Koin pointed out that Soin would get more passengers if he waited a while before leaving port.
    “And you could spend a bit more time talking to that girl in the city,” said Koin with a massive smirk.  Soin turned bright red.  Lacking something to say, he started clearing the table.
    After cleaning the dishes and taking a nap, the brothers set on their big race.
    The wind off the water was cold and sharp, and it bit into Soin’s face and hands.  Hours passed, and lunch seemed like it had happened very long ago, but still they sailed forward.
    They sailed farther than anyone had ever gone before, and several miles further than that.  When finally they had gone even farther than anyone could imagine, Koin and Soin saw something floating in the sky.
    It was like a big and beautiful castle built on a large ball.  Towers and walls stuck out at every angle, making the castle look like a giant hedgehog.
    There was a long rope ladder under the castle, connected to a wooden platform sitting on the ocean.  Together, Soin and Koin steered their boats to the platform.  Nailed to the side of the platform was a signpost.
VISITORS WELCOME

    Together the brothers anchored their boats and stepped on to the bobbing planks.
    “Well?” said Koin.
    “What?” said Soin.
    “Do I go first, or you?”
    “You first.”
    Koin took hold of the ropes and began to climb the ladder.  Soin followed him up.
    The wind was even colder up here, and the sea seemed so big and so far below them.
    The brothers climbed the rope ladder into the castle, stepping off into a large and beautifully decorated hall.  Candles in ornate golden candleholders cast light on the polished stone walls and deep blue carpet.
    The brothers stood in silence for a time.  After a while, there came the sound of footsteps running toward them.
    A man rounded the corner at the far end of the hall.    He threw out his arms in greeting, and shouted at the brothers.
    “Welcome, my friends!  I beg you forgive me.  I was unprepared, even though you arrived at the exact right time.”
    “What do you mean?” asked Soin.  “You couldn’t have been expecting us.”
    “You misunderstand,” said the man.  He was closer now, and the brothers could see that he had shiny black hair and clothes made of what looked like gold silk.  “I mean that you arrived precisely when you arrived.  It’s harder than it sounds.  But please, let me bid you greetings.  Welcome, brave and noble travelers, to my Home Above the World.  I am the Duke of Time, at your service.”
    Koin and Soin bowed.  They knew that most people who claim such titles as Duke of Time are either madmen or liars, but they also knew that most people do not own castles that float high in the air.
    “We will not stay long, good Duke” said Koin. “You are certainly busy, and we should be getting home.”
    The Duke of Time made a large and sweeping bow.  “Please, stay for a while,” he said. “You are guests in my home, and I insist that you see its wonders before you leave.”  The Duke motioned for the brothers to follow him.
     The Duke of Time brought Koin and Soin through many halls of strange and beautiful things.  He showed them how he made the sunsets, by pouring pumpkin juice and crushed flowers into glass bottles and setting them to boil over a pure white flame.  He showed them how luck and fortune was carved onto wooden blocks and fed to a stone dragon that spat them out into the world.  Memories were stored on wind-color paintings (“Like watercolor, but easier to spill” he explained).  The Duke had uncalculators for creating risk, working next to the de-snatchers that made opportunities.  But for the very end the Duke of Time saved the very best, the Structure.  It was the spine of the universe, a rotating arrangement of black stone and bronze held together by ropes of lightning.  As they watched the Structure move to the heartbeat of all things, the Duke held the brothers by their shoulders as an uncle to his favorite nephews.  "You must understand," he said "Few people venture here.  My nephew brings everyone sooner or later, but few of them are capable of conversation."
    “It has been an absolute pleasure to meet you,” said the Duke, “So I have one great favor to ask.  Will you two come back to visit again?”
    “Of course!” said the brothers as one.
    “You don’t know how much that means to me,” said the Duke, tears in his eyes. 
    So Soin and Koin left the Duke of Time in his Home Above the World, with the Duke’s blessing.  They returned the following year, Soin with his new fiancee and Koin with a young apprentice, and they continued to visit the Duke every year until the end of their days and even for a few years afterwards.

The Short yet Remarkable Criminal Career of Walter and Scratch

Scratch did not breakfast at this diner very often, but every time he had been here the same old man had been sitting in the corner.  He had a frizzled white beard with a single black stripe all the way down it.  He sat in the corner, reading the daily newspaper.  He got coffee with a lid, but always removed the lid to add sugar and never replaced it.  What Scratch had noticed today was that the old man always seemed to wear the same suit.  He briefly considered telling Walter about it, but decided that his new partner wouldn’t care.  Scratch also briefly considered calling Walter his “partner in crime,” but he realized that actual criminals would never use such terms.

Walter was his middle name.  His first name was, in theory, Stephen, but his partially illiterate father had misspelled it.  For a long time Stefen had been proud to have such a unique name.  But by the time he met Scratch, the novelty of explaining the name Stefen had long since worn off.  Though he hadn’t told his partner, after they robbed this bank Walter planned on using part of his share to have his name legally changed.  Not changed to Stephen.  He’d figure out something unique that was less of a hassle to talk about.

Their decision to rob a bank had been initially brought up as a joke, “the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme,” and before long they had bought a pair of guns and a getaway with little to no difficulty.
The first major hurdle had been buying a pair of leggings from a small clothing store outside the town.  Walter had made the actual purchase, since Scratch had tried twice and come back once with netting and once with the kind that have both legs attached to each other.  That afternoon, the two entered the bank wearing the black leggings in the traditional criminal style.
Automatically they got into the line for the teller window.  After a full minute of waiting, Walter tapped Scratch on the shoulder.  They left the line and walked straight to the counter.
“Why are you wearing pantyhose on your heads?” asked the teller, a woman in her early thirties with thick glasses and a large silver coin around her neck. 
Walter and Scratch glanced at each other.  They had assumed that this aspect of their operation would be obvious.
“Well, we’re robbing you,” said Walter, feeling rather stupid as he said it.
“Really?” said the teller, confused but interested.  “Have you got any guns?”
Walter quickly patted himself down.  He turned to Scratch, anger obscured by the fabric. 
“Scratch, where are the guns?”
Scratch looked at him, head tilted slightly to the side in confusion.  His shoulders jerked with realization.  “Shit, I left them in the car!”
“Well then go get them!”  Scratch sprinted out the door.  Walter turned back to the teller.  He wondered if his sweat was showing through the pantyhose.  “Um, I don’t suppose you’d, uh, not press that button under there?”
“What button?”
“You know, the one that sets off an alarm so that the police know that there’s a robbery.”
“There’s a button for that?”  The teller got out of her chair and went down on her hands and knees.  “How long has that been there?”
Scratch burst through the door, carrying two pistols.  “Got ‘em!” he yelled triumphantly.
“Right,” said Walter, who had entirely forgotten why they were there.  “Now then, ma’am, if you could hand over all the money in the vault…”
“But,” she interrupted, “it’s like I said.  Why are you two wearing pantyhose on your head?”
Scratch joined Walter at the counter.  “Well, it’s like he said,” said Scratch, gesturing to Walter.  “We’re here to rob your bank.”
“But why pantyhose?” said the teller.  “Why not wear something more original?”
“Are you saying I’m boring?!” yelled Walter.  “Are you calling me…” he struggled for the right word.  “cliché?”
The teller shook her head.  “No, not at all.  But you could do something to make it, I don’t know, more memorable?  There’s a costume shop down the road with a lovely selection of masquerade masks, you could get something from there.”
“Fine!” Walter shouted.  He marched toward the door.  “Come on, Scratch, let’s go.”
Scratch, who had been staring at the woman’s neck, jerked to attention.  “Uh, Walter?  Shouldn’t we…”
“It’ll just take a second,” said Walter, throwing the front door open. 
Almost two hours later, Walter and Scratch were standing in front of the locked door to the bank.  In unison they gave a heavy sigh and returned to the car.

Scratch watched the old man reading his newspaper.  The front page article in his newspaper was about some politician meeting with another politician, probably in another country.  As Scratch watched, the man spilled his coffee on the right leg of his pants.   The old man saw Scratch staring at him, and flashed him an angry look that made Scratch turn away, embarrassed.

The next day they came back, wearing flamboyant feathered masks.  They strode up to the counter.  The teller from yesterday gave them a professional smile, which widened into a genuine smile once she recognized them.
“Hello gentlemen, how can I help you?” she said.  “I see you got new masks.”
“We almost didn’t,” said Scratch.  “It’s outrageous what they charge for this sort of mask.”
“I know,” said the teller, nodding sympathetically.  “I’ve always wanted one of those, but it never seemed worth the money.”
“Really?” said Scratch.  “Tell you what- after this is over, you can have mine for half price.”
“Scratch,” said Walter, in the tone of a parent waiting for their child to turn off the television.
“I know I’d take a loss,” said Scratch, turning to face Walter, “but it’s for a friend, and it’s not like we’ll be hurting for cash at that point.”
“Friend?”
“Well, she’s been very polite to us, and she’s even given us some good advice.  I’ve had worse friends.”
“Speaking of advice,” said the teller, “I can tell you this; you don’t want to rob us today.”
“Why not?” asked Walter.
“Well, right after you two left yesterday, several people came in and took out fairly large loans, so we’re a little lighter than usual right now.” 
“That’s okay, we’ll just take what you have.”
“Hang on, Walt,” said Scratch.  “We could go to jail for this.”
“Are you just realizing that now?”
“No,” said Scratch, rolling his eyes.  “It’s just I want to make sure that the reward is worth the risk.  I’d rather go to jail for stealing fifty thousand than twenty thousand, wouldn’t you?”
Walter looked back at the teller.  She shrugged and grinned apologetically.  “If you come back tomorrow, we’ll have more money to steal.”
“You see, she agrees with me,” said Scratch.
Walter sighed.  “Well, I guess I’m outnumbered. Let’s go, then.”

The next morning, Scratch cautiously watched the old man with the beard and the newspaper.  He had acquired several new stains on his pants, as though the first spill had opened the floodgates to a crashing wave of uncleanliness. 

Walter burst through the bank’s doors again, waving his pistol.  “Hey, so last night I realized that loans are mostly done electronically these days, and- wait, who are you?”
As Scratch joined Walter at the counter, a young man of Asian descent nodded and smiled at them.
“Hello, my name is Ken, how may I help you?”
“Where’s the other teller?” asked Scratch.  “The lady who wore the silver 19th century Victorian medallion around her neck.”  Walter stared at Scratch for a moment.
“Oh, Susan?” asked the young man. “It’s her day off today.  She went upstate to spend the day with her girlfriend.”
“Susan- wait, what?” Scratch angled his head in confusion, causing several loose feathers to float away.  “I didn’t know that she preferred ladies.”
Ken nodded.  “Actually,” he glanced around, then gestured at the two to bend over.  He whispered, “she probably doesn’t want me to tell you this, but Susan’s girlfriend told me she’d be proposing today.”
“Really?” said Walter.  Ken nodded, grinning.
Scratch gave Walter a friendly slap on the arm.  “Well then, let’s do this tomorrow and we can find out if she said yes!”
Walter considered this for a moment, then nodded.  Scratch flashed an excited thumbs-up to an older woman in the line.

The old man with the beard was not at the diner that morning.  Scratch drank his coffee, wondering if the man’s pants had become so filthy that they had gained sentience and abandoned him in the night.  He debated with himself about whether sentient pants were scarier than the idea of an old man wandering the streets in his underwear.

Susan blushed bright pink, then smiled and showed them the ring on her hand.  Scratch roared like a lion entering its surprise birthday party.  “You said yes!”
The entire line applauded.  Scratch pumped the air. “Congratulations!” said Walter, shaking her hand.
“Thank you,” she said.  “We’ll be getting a civil union next June, but we’re getting our families together for the party once I go on vacation this summer.”
“That’s fantastic,” said Scratch, his broad grin disappearing into the sides of the mask.  “Really, I’m so happy for you.”
“Thanks, boys,” she said.  “And now I suppose you’ll be wanting to rob us?”
“Yeah,” said Walter sheepishly.  Truth be told, his heart wasn’t in it anymore, but it seemed pointless to have tried so hard only to give up now.
Something in his tone seemed to speak to Susan.  “You know,” she said, “today’s Friday...”
“Already?” said Scratch
Susan continued “…so most people get paid today, and they deposit it this afternoon or evening.”
“So what you’re saying,” said Walter as realization dawned like the red sun over the african plains.
“...Is that if we come back tomorrow, we can steal even more money!” said Scratch.  He looked at Walter, and tapped the side of his forehead knowingly.
“All right,” said Walter.  He nodded at Susan.  “See you tomorrow.”
“See you then,” she said.
Walter and Scratch started to walk for the door.  Walter turned back.  “And tell your fiancee we said hi!”
That morning, the old man was back.  His beard had been trimmed, and he was wearing a new suit.  The front page had a picture of the local high school with a student standing in front of it, with a headline about budget cuts for education.

The next day, just before they entered the bank, Scratch could sense that something was wrong.  He looked at Walter, and saw that he felt something similar.
As they entered, the usual small crowd of people looked at them, terrified.  They  were lined along the walls, hands above their heads.  Susan was at her counter, staring straight ahead.  In the center of the room, turning to see who was entering, there was a young man, barely more than a teenager.  He was wearing a ski mask, and he had a gun.  In slow motion the kid pointed the gun and fired.  Walter saw the muzzle flash, and felt something knock him onto his side.  From the floor, Walter watched Scratch running towards the kid.  The kid fired his gun again at Scratch, but either he missed or Scratch didn’t feel it, because the man tackled him and brought him to the ground.
Walter got to his feet as Scratch wrestled with the kid, gunshots firing.  “SUSAN!” Walter yelled.  “Push the button!”

The old man at the diner carefully replaced the lid on his coffee cup to avoid spilling coffee on his relatively new suit.  The front page today had an article about a bank robbery foiled by bank robbers, with a picture of two idiots in masquerade masks standing next to a beaming bank teller.

Ice Cream

    In a small city, right next to the shopping district, two ice cream parlors on Flint Road were locked in the most appropriately-named cold war in history.  During the city’s hot summers, McSweeney’s Sweet Treats got almost exactly the same amount of business as Ice by Abigail.  The tiebreaker, as it were, was the group that both owners privately thought of as the Sundae Sisters.  This name was not entirely accurate, since none of the six of them were related and two were in fact men, but it seemed to fit and in any case neither Abigail nor Mr. McSweeney ever used the name aloud.
    It always began on the first fine spring weekend, when the sun had been polished by the winter and the summer was preheating the hemisphere.  The six Sundae Sisters tended to go shopping every Sunday afternoon from early spring to late fall, and between 4 and 6 they would walk to Flint Road with their bags in hand.  They would get their ice cream and sit at a table, talking and relaxing until either they finished or it melted.
    Every sunday, Abigail and Mr. McSweeney would watch with great anticipation as the Sisters approached.  Over the years, they got to know them. The route that the Sisters took gave them an excellent view of both shops, and any number of things could determine which one they chose.

    Mackenzie, who was diabetic, would check her insulin and usually order a single scoop of black raspberry ice cream in a cone.  This gave Abigail an advantage, since her staff had neater scooping skills.  The size and style of a scoop can be a surprisingly major factor in what a person thinks of their ice cream.  However, on sunny days Mackenzie liked to sit outside, and McSweeney’s had a lovely patio with flowers all around it, maintained by Mr. McSweeney’s wife and business partner Clarice.
    The flowers on Mr. McSweeney’s patio would, in the spring, aggravate Jillian’s allergies, so she would want to sit indoors with her favorite vanilla milkshake, which Mr. McSweeney had elevated to an art form.  She, however, also hated Mr. McSweeney’s taste in music, which was mostly limited to country and classic rock.  Thus, she would generally nudge the group over to Abigail’s.
    Mike, the one who carried most of their bags, loved both classic rock and McSweeney’s frozen yogurt, but he also had a very obvious crush on Jillian.  He followed her decisions without question.  Yet Jillian’s job had a very sporatic schedule, and sometimes she would need to leave the group early.  On those occasions, Mike would emphatically steer the Sisters towards McSweeney’s with a commanding personality that consistently took them by surprise.  This frustrated Abigail, since one of her servers, a girl named Rose, would flirt endlessly with Mike whenever she could, and Abigail’s guilty pleasure was matchmaking.
    Determinedly ignoring all matters of unrequited lust, Ken (the group’s second Mackenzie) was the one grinning and giggling all day.  Ken was short and round and loved to experiment with her desserts.  She had invented the Panda Diplomat, hot chocolate with soft serve ice cream, a drink that McSweeney served frequently on the colder days or when customers were feeling depressed.  Yet McSweeney believed that mixing too many things into the ice cream was a crime against dairy, so for sheer innovative potential he could not match Abigail’s “Mix-in” blasphemy, offering candy bars and cookies to be crushed and used to corrupt the ice cream.
    “Mix-ins” horrified the hypochondriac Aria.  But, more importantly, she loved saying McSweeney’s name. He assumed that she was a singer or voice actress, and he was astonished to find out that she was the former mayor of one of the city’s suburbs.  Whenever he could, Mr. McSweeney would get Aria her order personally, just to give Aria an opportunity to say “Thank you, Mister McSweeny” in that delightful way she had of holding the ‘M’ for a moment and swinging the ‘E’ like a roller coaster.
    Robert didn’t like Mr. McSweeney’s name, mostly because he had a severe lisp.  Of the six Sisters, he had the most severe body image issues, and felt guilty at how generous Mr. McSweeney was with portion sizes.  He was also unique in that he knew Abigail better than the rest, having entered the same college shortly before she had dropped out.  

    Time rolled on in this way.  For most of every year, Mr. McSweeny and Abigail subtly competed for the Sundae Sisters.  She would introduce new Mix-ins to delight Ken, until it all became too much for Aria.  He bought new albums from trendy European pop bands to satisfy Jillian, until Robert started to mention that he missed Abigail.  And the hundreds of other customers who walked along Flint Road stopped by the two ice cream shops each week just for ice cream, because it was cold and sweet and that was what they wanted.

    It was early May when Abigail, in a bad mood and unwilling to play the “will they or won’t they” game, half-cheered half-bullied Rose into asking Mike to join her for dinner that evening.  In the time it took Abigail to crush a cookie into powder, Mike began to turn towards Jillian, paused, frowned, sighed, smiled at Rose and nodded.
    Mike started to spend more of his Sunday afternoons with Rose, at least on the days when she wasn’t working.  When she was, he would wave to her but bring the Sundae Sisters to McSweeney’s, claiming that it was to to give them both room to breathe.  The rest silently agreed that Mike just preferred to breathe air with country music in it.  Jillian was of course baffled by Mike taking charge.  As the one person poised to resolve romantic tension, she had been entirely ignorant of it as decreed by the laws of the universe.
    With Mike consistently directing the Sisters to McSweeney’s, Ken began to grow bored.  To an artist such as her, such a limited selection was like a composer being forced to work on a xylophone.  Eventually she decided to start getting her ice cream from Abigail and chat with the rest of the Sisters by leaning on the patio fence.  Robin followed her lead, determined to eat his way skinny with an average of five percent less ice cream in his usual root beer float.  By this point, it was mid-June.
    On the first of July, Mrs. Clarice McSweeney took a bad fall down the stairs and suffered a serious leg injury.  To cheer her up, Mr. McSweeney brought most of the flowers from the patio into her hospital.  The Sundae Sisters, though sympathetic and hating themselves for being selfish, felt that the patio was less welcoming than it had been, and anyway the days were getting a lot hotter, so they started sitting more at Abigail’s air-conditioned indoor tables.
    Yet Aria, whose hypochondria was getting worse, decided to keep going to McSweeney’s for her preferred dish, a scoop each of strawberry and chocolate.  She was joined by Mackenzie, who privately said that she preferred Aria’s company over the rest of the Sundae Sisters, if only by the narrowest margin.  The two of them started talking for hours on end, once or twice going until McSweeney had to close up shop.  There they worked out that Aria’s hypochondria was partially caused by her perception of a lack of control in her life.
    Eventually the two were joined by Robert, who had finally worked up the courage to ask Abigail out to dinner, been gently but firmly rejected, and now was worried that meeting her again would cause what he described as an “awkward party.”  The next week, Robin brought the draft of a screenplay that he had been working on.  It was a tangled mess of plot holes where all the characters were essentially himself, but it gave Aria an idea.  Next time, she brought the draft of a short novel, a science fiction romance about a starship captain finding love among her crew.  Robert dismissed it as cliche, but Mackenzie encouraged her to send the manuscript to some of the publishing companies in the area.
    Aria disappeared for the next few weeks.  Mackenzie, acting as a surrogate source of smugness, told Robert and Mr. McSweeney that Aria’s manuscript had been accepted by a publisher and would be printed the following year.
    By this point, Mike had stopped joining the Sundae Sisters and was spending most of his time with Rose, who had altered her schedule to give them more time together.  Without Mike carrying bags, the remaining four were tired, and started sitting more at McSweeney’s, which was slightly easier to walk to than Abigail’s place.

    By mid-August, Mackenzie, Ken, Robin, and Jillian, the four remaining Sundae Sisters, were sitting on McSweeney’s patio eating ice cream.
    Jillian and Robert were splitting the largest vanilla milkshake that McSweeney had ever made.  Robert was struggling to comprehend how easily Aria had mastered the written word.  Jillian had just figured out what had been suppressing Mike’s confident side, and was attempting to drown her embarrassment.   Ken was picking at a small cup of chocolate ice cream, painfully underwhelmed by its monochromatic flavor.  And so, Mackenzie decided that this was the perfect time to announce that she had lost her job and couldn’t afford their weekly shopping sprees anymore.  She insisted that, as much fun as she had with them, her lack of self-control would drive her bankrupt.  Her health insurance was already a major drain on her finances, and her insulin was more important than ice cream and shoes.  Besides, she grinned, I’ll find a job soon, and then it’ll be like I was never gone.
    Now it was Jillian, Robert, and Ken.  All three of them preferred Abigail’s shop as a rule, So that was where they went.  Yet Robin still felt uncomfortable seeing Abigail, Jillian was developing negative feelings towards Rose, and even if they hadn’t felt that way Ken was beginning to suspect that she had tried all the possible combinations of ice cream and candy.  They agreed that it would be best if they postponed their next trip indefinitely.
    The last Sunday of August, a slightly baffled Mike was sitting in McSweeney’s.  He was joined by Aria, who had made a large amount of money from her book and was experiencing that unfathomable depression of having no one to share happiness with.
        Abigail and Mr. McSweeney watch them part ways.  She handed things over to the assistant manager while she took the rest of the day off.  He gave a heavy sigh and made himself a Panda Diplomat.  Although it was still warm outside, it felt like winter already.

    It was the first fine spring weekend.  The sun was gleaming like a newly-earned trophy, and summer was dusting off its cookbook.  The clock ticked 4:36.  Mr. McSweeney was cleaning the tables on his patio, the flowers replaced after Clarice’s full recovery.  Abigail kept glancing out the window, filling in the time until she found someone who could replace Rose.
    Down the street came four women and two men, talking and laughing and carrying bags full of things.  The two ice cream shop owners watched, grinning ear to ear, as they started a friendly argument about which shop to visit.

The End of the First Universe

First, you must understand that the universe you and I inhabit is the second of its kind.  I am not the right person to explain exactly how I realized this fact.  The ideal candidate would be a college graduate with a double major in poetry and thermonuclear dynamics, contemplating half a glass of red wine at two o clock in the morning while wearing most of a tuxedo.  I am sure that once someone has all the numbers worked out, in five years it will be the sort of fact that people memorize to make themselves seem smart.  I was more interested in what had happened to the first universe.
While I probably could have found my answer after a few hours on the computer, my first instinct in these matters has always been to visit the library, just a short bus ride from where I lived.
At the bus stop, I stood next to a rather large person.  We waited in silence, staring straight ahead for a few minutes before I ventured to look at them.  He was very tall, easily six and a half feet, and composed entirely of weapons.  Naturally my first instinct was to mention the fact, but I can’t imagine that he was unaware of it.  As I looked he scratched the gun of his nose with a hand made of knives.  By this point I had stared at him long enough that I needed to say something to prevent further awkwardness.
“Are you waiting for the number eight bus?” I asked.
He shook his head, which caused a number of clanking sounds.  “Number nine,” he said, in a voice like gunpowder being sprinkled into acid.
“Ah.”  I was silent for a while.  “I’m Theodore, by the way.”
“M’name’s War,” he said.
“Not the War?”
“Yup.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.  I imagine that either a proud veteran or a vehement pacifist, while no doubt uneasy to meet war in the flesh, would at least have something to talk about.  Being neither, I just asked where he was going.
“I’m seeing a play, actually,” he said.  “There’s a little theatre downtown, and a friend of mine is trying to become an actor.  The play’s called ‘Where is my Rabbit,’ it’ll be running all week,” he said in that embarrassed salesman voice people use when giving personal recommendations to complete strangers.
“Thanks, I’ll try to check it out,” I said, nodding.  He looked relieved.
“Anyway,” he said, “where are you going?”
“Oh, just headed to the library,” I said, shrugging.  “I thought I might see if they had an Agatha Christie novel I hadn’t read.  Oh, and I’m trying to find out what happened to the first universe.”
At this, War gave an embarrassed little cough.  “Uh, if it’s all the same, I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked, confused.
He rubbed his hands together nervously, producing sparks and scraping sounds.  “Well… listen, if I tell you, would you promise not to tell anyone else?”
“Of course I wouldn’t!”
He shuffled in place, rubbing one wrist with his other hand.  “I suppose I might as well get it off my chest.  It’s all my fault.”
He sounded so distraught, I was compelled to comfort him.  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said.  “Please, if you want, I’d like to hear the whole story.”
    He took a deep breath.  “Well, back then, I was called Conquest.  I had a very nice system in place.  There’d be two groups, they’d fight, and the winners took over both groups.  Then the best parts of the losers would be sort of integrated into the whole, see?  That way the best of everyone got to shine through.  So then there’d be a time of peace, a little break for everyone to get used to each other and swap recipes or whatever, and then they’d all go out and fight the next group.  I admit, it didn’t always go ideally, but it was more... constructive? Yeah, it was a constructive approach to conflict.
    “So, I kept it going like that for a long time.  And the groups got bigger and bigger, until everyone on the planet was in the same huge group.  Then they’d go out and fight other planets, and it just kept going.  Then I made a dumb mistake.”  He sighed, and sat down on the little wooden bench.
    “I won.  I won all of it.  Everyone in the universe was part of the same group.  There was nobody left.” He rubbed his face with his hands.  “Conflict keeps everything going, you see.  If you just have something you should do eventually, most of the time you never really get around to it.  It helps if you’re fighting somebody.  I didn’t get it, so I let everything just smooth into place.  I guess, if you say that life is like a big wheel rolling down a hill, I took away the hill.
    “I got lucky.  The boss, the Celestial Administrator we call them, they gave me a second chance.  They made this one, the second universe, just so that I didn’t screw it all up again.  So long as I do my job right, the wheel keeps rolling.”
    At this point, I could hear the bus coming down the road, but I wasn’t sure I could just leave him like this.
    War sighed heavily.  “Everyone has been really nice about not mentioning it.  The other three especially, they let me back in the group like nothing happened.”  He glanced up as the bus came to a stop, and he broke into a massive grin.  “Speak of the devil.”  He started waving at someone on the bus.  “Theodore, was it?  This is your bus, right?”
    “Uh, yeah,” I said.
    “Well, anyway, thanks for listening.  I hope you manage to see that play.  Take care of yourself, all right?”
    “Sure.  Nice talking to you!” I called back as I boarded the bus.

    I glanced around for an empty seat, when I noticed someone gesturing at me from the middle of the bus.
    I sat down on the seat next to her.  She was very tan, more or less what I imagined whenever I heard someone described as olive-skinned, and she had buoyant, fluffy black hair.  She wore a white button-down shirt with a blue tie.
    “I saw you chatting with War back at the stop,” she said.  “What’s your name?”
    “Theodore,” I said.
    “Nice to meet you.  I’m Death.”
    “I see.  Sorry, I just need to check something real quick.”  I turned to the person sitting behind me, a round-faced girl with headphones and a sketchbook.  “Sorry to bother you, but am I sitting next to anyone?”
    The girl looked over at Death, who waggled her fingers and grinned.  She looked back at me with an odd expression, but nodded.
    “Excellent.  Thanks,” I said.  I turned back to Death.  “Best to check these things, just making sure you’re not a hallucination.”
    Death nodded her head toward the girl.  “But then, she might not be real either.”
    I gesticulated that it wasn’t worth checking further.  “If she was, then I’d have to ask someone else, and then I’d need to ask for a third person to confirm, and it just gets too complicated too fast.  As far as it really matters, I believe that you’re Death.”
    She nodded.  “Well, aren’t you going to ask?”
    “Ask what?”
    “Generally, people ask me one of two questions.  One, if they can bribe me for immortality, and two, how I can be in so many places at once.  The second one’s my favorite.”
    “Actually, I worked that one out when I was eight.”  She made an inquisitive noise.  “You’re secretly Santa.”
    Death laughed and clapped her hands.  “I love it!”  She gently poked me in the shoulder, almost a flirtatious gesture.  “So, I have to ask.  What were you talking to War about?”
    I twiddled my thumbs for a moment.  “I don’t know that I should talk about it.”
    She poked me again.  “C’mon, I know everything that he knows.  It’s okay, I won’t mention it to him.”
    “Well, if you must know, we were talking about the end of the first universe.”
    She withdrew a little.  “Oh.  He told you about that, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s okay, it doesn’t really bother me.”
    The way she said that made me curious.  “But,” I said, “if it’s all the same, I’d like to hear your side of it.”
    She looked at me for a while, chewing her tongue as she thought.  “I might as well,” she said.  She stared out of the window for a while before beginning.
    “Then, like now, I traveled around the world, doing my job.  That’s actually how people can die at the same time everywhere.  So long as I’m doing my job, my job gets done.  And if I can do it anywhere, it’s happening everywhere.
    “But one day I found myself in a cell with somebody.  He was being tortured, tortured every day, but the people who kept him there were keeping him alive.  They fed him, they cleaned him, they healed his wound so they could hurt him again.  They could have kept him for years like that, and I couldn’t do anything about it. So I did something about it. 
    “I let him die, and after that, it became easy.  Whenever I found someone suffering, someone in unbearable pain, I let them slip away.  I took a new name.  Euthanasia.”
    She stopped.  “Euthanasia.  It’s a lovely word, isn’t it? Like Anastasia.”
    We were silent for a while before she continued.
    “I think that there was one point, one beautiful moment where it worked.  Where being alive meant being happy, that there was literally nothing worse than death.  But it’s like I said.  So long as I’m doing the job, the job gets done.  And suffering… well, there’s not really a clear line on what you can call unbearable, is there?”
    She shook her head.  “Everyone gets sad sometimes.  And if you die as soon as you get sad, you never get a chance to make things better.  That’s how the Celestial Administrator explained it to me.  So now I’m here, in a universe I haven’t killed, and I’ve got to do my job right.”
    I reached out to touch her shoulder, but she brushed me off.  We sat in silence for a couple minutes, until the bus pulled in to my stop.  I got up to leave, when I heard a voice behind me.
    “See you later.”  The farewell sent a cold primal terror up my spine.  I turned back to look at Death, and she gave me a little smile.
    “Sorry,” she said, “it’s just, that one never gets old.”  She smiled and waved goodbye to me, but I could see tears in her eyes.

    There is a park right near the bus stop.  I found a bench and sat down on it.  My thoughts at the time, organized with the benefit of hindsight, were thus.
    In the last half hour, I had met two different supernatural beings, both of whom believed that they were personally responsible for the end of the first universe in very different ways.  I am not a detective, but I have read enough mystery novels to understand that when two accounts of an event differ, someone is wrong.
    It was at this point that I noticed an old man shuffling along the park away from me.  I said that I am not a detective, and that is true.  I am, however, a physical therapist, and I know what it looks like when someone can or can’t walk, and even from a distance I saw that the man was faking.  But, more to the point, I noticed how the breeze was following the old man like a dog on a very short leash, and how the long sleeves of his coat faded out at the ends.
    It wasn’t hard for me to catch up to the old man.
    “Excuse me,” I said, “but you wouldn’t happen to be,” I glanced at the sun’s position and remembered a simple mnemonic, “The North Wind, would you?”
    He cackled at me, toothless and jubilant.  “Close enough, you little snot, close enough.”  I knew he was insulting me, but he did so in such an amiable way that it was impossible to be offended.  He gestured for me to come along, saying  “Walk with me, walk with me.”  I fell into a slow pace alongside him.
    “I wasn’t always the, well, let’s say The North Wind,” he said.  “I used to be just The Wind, you know.  And I didn’t walk like this, like some fat little sloth like you.  No, I ran.  Kid, you should have seen me run, I was amazing.  I ran as fast as I wanted in any direction I wanted, and nobody told me where to go or what to do. 
    “OI!” he yelled, making me jump.  This was directed at a small boy climbing an old oak tree a few yards from us.  “Get off that tree, you little toad!”
    I saw the boy’s mother glaring at us from her bench, and unfortunately the old man saw her too.  “Keep an eye on your little hellspawn, woman!” He turned back to me.  “Where was I?  Oh, yes. So I just kept going, faster and faster until I was going too fast, and I just kept whipping along straight ahead until I tore open the sky!”  He laughed madly at this.
    “You should have seen it, boy, it was incredible, with clouds dangling down from the vacuum like someone had punched through a sheet of paper.  So that big gash started to drag me and everything else out into the nothing, but the Celestial Administrator they grabbed me by the wrist and brought me back down, closing up the hole in the sky and they said that I couldn’t do it again.  So to make sure, they rebooted the universe, and they separated me into all the winds, all three hundred and sixty of us, each going in exactly one direction, and we’ve all got a schedule of exactly how fast we can go at any time.” 
    He pulled out a little book, which he handed to me.  “Here, take it, I’ve got it all down up here.” He tapped the side of his head with a finger.  “Now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, I’m due to speed up all the way to point oh eight knots.”  I watched, holding the book, as the old man shuffled away moving imperceptibly faster than he had been before.

    One can imagine that I needed coffee at this point.  Fortunately, there was a place fairly close to the park, which happened to have a delightful little bell set up to ring when the door opened.  The barista asked me what I would like to have.
    “If you don’t mind, I’d like a black coffee and… yes, a chocolate croissant, it’s been that kind of day.”
    “Oh?” she said.  “Why’s that?”
    “First, let me ask; what’s your name?”
    “Padma.”
    “Okay, Padma.  Have you ever had a surreal day?”
    She contemplated this for a while.  “Lemme think.  Well, the other day I ran into two people I hadn’t seen since high school.  Like, not at the same time.  I saw one of them in the morning and one in the afternoon.  That was kind of surreal”
    I nodded.  “Well, Padma, I’m here to tell you that that was dimestore surreality.  By the end of the day, I expect that a peguin will be offering me real estate on Saturn.”
    “The planet or Saturn the drummer I dated in college?”
    I nodded, impressed.  “I like you, Padma. We should talk sometime.”
    She smiled, then glanced at the clock.  “Not today.  I have a ton of stuff right now, but sometime soon.
    While I enjoyed the mediocre coffee and rather excellent croissant, I flipped through the book that the old man had given me, which turned out to be about half as interesting as the average phone book. Eventually, I noticed that Padma had written her phone number on the coffee cup lid.  When I was done, I put the lid in my pocket before tossing the empty cup into the trash.  As I should have expected, there was still some liquid in the lid, and so I left the coffee shop pretending not to notice the coffee staining my pants.

    The library was just down the road.   I was halfway there when somebody poked me in the back.  In the same way that one can feel the presence of an annoying ex-roommate, I knew that I was being approached by another personification of a natural force.  I was tempted to just keep walking, but the combination of politeness and risk that I would be hunted down by Pestilence forced me to turn around.
    Sure enough, there was someone who almost certainly wasn’t human, and who would have been terrifying even if she had been.  She was human-shaped, true, but I find that it’s more effective to imagine that she was a bull with chainsaws for horns.  She also was carrying too many large bags of groceries.
    “Please help?” she said, nodding to the bags.  I took one in each arm, smiling in what I hope was a friendly way.
    “Unmaker thanks you,” she said.
    “Sorry- ‘Unmaker?’” I asked.
    “Is name and job,” she said, with a professional stiffness.  “There is Maker, who makes things, and there is Unmaker, who takes things apart.  Not destroys,” she added with a touch of defiance, as if I would have dared accuse her.  “Not for fun.  Important work.  Celestial Administrator said so.”  She paused for a moment, then said “Sorry if Unmaker being wordy, attempting to clear up common misconceptions.”
    “No, no, it’s quite fine,” I said.
    She nodded towards some destination I couldn’t see.  “Unmaker lives in apartment building couple streets down.  Handy for the shops.  Not usually get this many groceries, but having guests later and needed hors d’oeuvres.”
    “I see.” Her politeness gave me confidence enough to keep talking. “I met Death on the bus down here, will she be coming?”
    Unmaker shook her head.  “No, she always working.  Busy busy busy.  Unmaker tells her the other day, going to work herself to the bone.”
    It went on like that for a while, the two of us making chitchat.  I didn’t ask her about the first universe, if only because I try to avoid embarrassing people big enough to block out the sun.  But if I had to, I could take a guess.
    I was tempted to think that she simply unmade everything, but if there was indeed a “Maker” figure constantly creating things, then they could probably have kept up with her.  I would imagine that Unmaker had simply stopped doing her job and let the Maker fill up the universe with stuff, until the Celestial Administrator came in and explained to her how important it was that she continued to unmake things.

    Now, yes, I had been delayed and distracted, but at no point did I forget that my destination was the library.  After helping the Unmaker with her groceries, and briefly saying hello to an acquaintance I bumped in to on the street, I finally arrived at the old stone building.  There I knew I would find my answer, or at least a book.
    The music building in the background, I pushed open the double doors like a child after watching a cowboy movie.  And there they were, standing behind the information desk.  The Celestial Administrator.
    Introductions were entirely unnecessary.  Once you know that such an entity exists, identifying them is slightly easier than exhaling. They stand out by fading into the background, a trick exclusive to master assassins and the terminally dull.  The key difference is that, when one is looking at the Celestial Administrator, other objects in your field of vision warp slightly to resemble religious symbols.
    I had to wait in line for a few minutes while they helped a young girl fill out her library card.  When that was done, I approached with unjustified confidence.
    “How may I help you?” they asked.  They gave me a look as they spoke, a look that said ‘yes, we have to go through the motions.’
    “I was hoping that you could help me,” I said.  “I came here wanting to find out what happened to the first universe.  On the way, however, I spoke with several personifications of concepts, all of whom believe that they caused that apocalypse. The interesting part is that they all believe that they did so in different ways.”  As I spoke, the Celestial Administrator was nodding with a teacher’s condescending approval.  “This raises several questions.  First, since many of the entities I met were unrelated to each other, I want to know if there is a personification of every individual thing.”
    “Certainly,” said the Celestial Administrator.  “Every species of animal or plant, every action that can be taken, almost every word in the dictionary has someone in charge of them.”
    “So each one of them believes that they personally ended the first universe by not doing their job correctly?”
    “Indeed,” said the Celestial Administrator, “and in each of their memories, I was the one who gave them a second chance.”
    “Right.  Of course, you had a reason to do it.  And if I had to guess I’d say it’s because you need them all to be grateful to you, or else they might band together and bring you down.”
    “Close,” said the Celestial Administrator.  “In fact, any one of them could defeat me by themselves.  Even a solid kick from the feeble king of dust could cripple me.  And then none of them would do anything, and within moments existence itself would end.”
    “That makes sense,” I said.  “But I have one last question.  What really ended the first universe?”
    At this, the Celestial Administrator coughed, and began shuffling papers around.  “If you must know,” they said, pulling a brown coat out from under the desk, “It’s still there.  I just lost the key.”
    I stared at them.  They walked out from behind the desk and headed for the door.  “If you’ll excuse me,” they said, “my shift is over and I’m meeting Breakfast for lunch.”
    And that was the last I saw of the Celestial Administrator, and the end of my journey to discover what happened to the first universe.   I checked out Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, and I went home.

Overture to Chemistry

    In a small apartment in a small city, Nigel stares at his toaster.  The television is on in the background.  Someone on the news claims to have mathematically disproven Wednesdays.
    Nigel works at an average-sized gardening supply store, stocking shelves and tending the register.  He paints abstract landscapes, which he sells on the internet for between fifty and three hundred dollars.  He used to own a cat, but he gave it to an acquaintance when he got into a relationship with a girl who was allergic.  The relationship has since ended, but he has not asked for the cat back.  Nigel also knows the exact date of the apocalypse, which happens to be exactly six hundred years, two hundred and fifty-five days, seven hours, twelve minutes, and forty-three seconds from when he finished his buttered toast.

    At work, Nigel helps an elderly woman find catnip.  She is six feet tall and she wears a purple dress with a blue sunhat.  She stands in the store for a few minutes before she starts sobbing uncontrollably.  Nigel takes her to the back of the store, where she stutters out an apology, explaining that her husband of forty years died two years ago.  For some reason, the idea hadn’t “sunk in” until today.  Nigel lets her calm down, and lets her have the catnip for nothing.

    An overweight man with a short beard enters the store seven minutes after the woman leaves.  He buys hedge trimmers, a hatchet, and a coil of wire.  Samantha, Nigel’s coworker, gives the man his change.  After he leaves, Samantha mentions him to Nigel.
    “I reckon,” said Samantha, “that guy spent the whole time he was coming here worried that we’d think he was a serial killer or something.”  Nigel shrugs.
    At lunch, Samantha asks Nigel to go with her to a movie that weekend.  He agrees.  Nigel doesn’t tell her that he has already seen the movie, nor does he tell her that he hated it.

    That afternoon, the manager brings Nigel into his office.  He glares at Nigel for a while, then asks why he let the lady in the purple dress walk out without paying for her catnip.  Nigel, not prepared, stammers and bluffs that since she had a good experience at their store, she would be more likely to come back.  The manager stares at Nigel for a minute, then laughs.  He tells Nigel that he’s promoting him to assistant manager.

    That evening in his apartment, Nigel gets out his paint and a canvas.

    A silver sun bows down over the wasteland, caressed by a single wispy pink cloud.  The sunlight strokes the blue-and-bronze-striped rocks that line the copper-colored sand.  The rocks melt up, droplets of liquid stone retaining their stripes as they drip into little upside-down puddles.  The light reflects off of the bronze but not the blue, and there are shadows on the blue but not the bronze.  Somewhere in the middle pure potential is twitching and writhing and glittering, a magnificent detonation intertwined with unbreakable chemical bonds.
   

    Nigel admires the painting for a little while.  He signs it, dates it, and titles it “Overture to Chemistry.” He cleans his brushes, puts away the paints, and folds up the old blanket he uses as a tarp.  He makes himself a ham sandwich for dinner.  Later he puts the painting up for sale, starting at one hundred and fifty dollars.

    Nigel and Samantha both have Saturday afternoon off.  They watch the first forty minutes of the movie, then leave.  They go to Nigel’s apartment.  She stops by again on Sunday.  He meets her at her condominium the next Friday.

    On the first day of the next month, the manager of the gardening store is killed by a drunk driver.  Nigel attends the funeral, but Samantha doesn’t.

    Samantha writes a novella about a serial killer who tortures his victims with gardening tools.  As she writes it Nigel offers constructive criticism, most of which she ignores.  The book, which she titles The Rakeist, enjoys moderate sales.

    The gardening supply store wins an award for a magazine that focuses on locally owned businesses.  Nigel accepts the award, not pointing out that the magazine determinedly ignores the fact that a massive soda company had its headquarters in the city.

    A movie studio offers to turn The Rakeist into a feature film.  Samantha moves to San Francisco to adapt the novel into a script.  Three weeks later, a drunk Samantha calls Nigel to tell him that she won’t be coming back.  A month later, she calls again and asks if he wouldn’t mind picking her up from the airport next week.

    That evening, in Samantha’s condo, Nigel proposes.

    The movie adaptation of The Rakeist opens to generally positive critical reception, but does very poorly at the box office.  Exactly one year later, Nigel and Samantha get married.
    They have two children, both girls, named Mary and Chloe.  One summer when Mary is fourteen and Chloe is ten, Nigel takes them out to the park.  There, he tells them the exact date of the apocalypse.  Mary doesn’t care, but Chloe listens, and Nigel knows that she’ll remember it.