The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

TRUE LOVE K. W. Jeter

The brown leaves covered the sidewalk, but hadn’t yet been trodden into thin leather. She held the boy’s hand to keep him from slipping and falling. He tugged at her grip, wanting to race ahead and kick the damp stacks drifting over the curbs. The leaves smelled of wet and dirt, and left skeleton prints on the cement.

“Now—be careful,” she told the boy. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. There were so many things she couldn’t forget. . . . Maybe her head had filled up, and there was no more room for anything else. The mounded leaves, slick with the drizzling rain. Her father scratching at the door, the word when there had been words in his mouth, the little word that used to be her name. . . . The boy’s name; what was it? She couldn’t remember.

The boy had tugged her arm around to the side, not trying to run now, but stopping to press his other hand against one of the trees whose empty branches tangled the sky.

“You don’t want to do that.” She pulled but he dug in, gripping the tree trunk. “It’s all dirty. ” His red mitten was speckled with crumbling bark. A red strand of unraveled wool dangled from his wrist.

You do want to . . . That was her father’s voice inside her head. The old voice, the long-ago one with words. She could have, if she’d wanted to—she’d done it before—she could’ve recited a list of sentences, like a poem, all the things her father had ever said to her with the word want in them.

“There’s something up there.”

She looked where the boy pointed, his arm jutting up straight, the mitten a red flag at the end. On one of the wet branches, a squirrel gazed down at her, then darted off, its tail spiked with drops of rain.

The boy stared openmouthed where the squirrel had disappeared. The boy’s upper lip was shiny with snot, and there was a glaze of it on the back of one mitten, and the sleeve of the cheap nylon snow jacket. She shuddered, looking at the wet on the boy’s pug face. He wasn’t beautiful, not like the one before, the one with the angel lashes and the china and peach skin.

“Come on.” She had to bite her lip to fight the shudder, to make it go away, before she could take the boy’s hand again. “It’s gone now. See? It’s all gone.” She squeezed the mitten’s damp wool in her own gloved hand. “We have to go, too. Aren’t you hungry?” She smiled at him, the cold stiffening her face, as though the skin might crack.

The boy looked up at her, distrust in the small eyes. “Where’s my mother?”

She knelt down in front of the boy and zipped the jacket under his chin. “Well, that’s where we’re going, isn’t it?” There were people across the street, just people walking, a man and a woman she’d seen from the corner of her eye. But she couldn’t tell if they were looking over here, watching her and the boy. She brushed a dead leaf off the boy’s shoulder. “We’re going to find your mother. We’re going to where she is.”

She hated lying, even the lies she had told before. All the things she told the boy, and the ones before him, were lies. Everything her father had ever told her had been the truth, and that was no good, either.

Her knees ached when she stood up. The cold and damp had seeped into her bones. She squeezed the boy’s hand. “Don’t you want to go to where your mother is?”

Now his face was all confused. He looked away from her, down the long street, and she was afraid that he would cry out to the people who were walking there. But they were already gone—she hadn’t seen where. Maybe they had turned and gone up the steps into one of the narrow-fronted houses that were jammed so tight against each other.

“And you’re hungry, aren’t you? Your mother has cake there for you. I know she does. You want that, don’t you?”

How old was he? His name, his name . . . How big, how small was what she really meant. If he wouldn’t move, tugging out of her grasp, wouldn’t come with her . . . She wanted to pick him up, to be done with saying stupid things to his stupid little face, its smear of snot and its red pig nose. Just pick him up and carry him like a wet sack, the arms with the red-mittened hands caught tight against her breast. Carry him home and not have to say anything, not have to tell lies and smile . . .

She had tried that once and it hadn’t worked. Once when there hadn’t been any other little boy that she could find, and the one she had found wouldn’t come with her, wouldn’t come and it had been getting dark, yet it had been all light around her, she had been trapped in the bright blue-white circle from a street lamp overhead. And the boy had started crying, because she had been shouting at him, shouting for him to shut up and stop crying and come with her. She had picked him up, but he’d been too big and heavy for her, his weight squirming in her arms, the little hard fists striking her neck, the bawling mouth right up against one ear. Until she’d had to let him go and he’d fallen to the ground, scrambled to his feet and run off, crying and screaming so loud that other people—she had known they were there, she’d felt them even if she couldn’t see them—had turned and looked at her. She’d scurried away and then started running herself, her heart pounding in her throat. Even on the bus she’d caught, she’d known the others were looking at her, even pointing at her and whispering to each other. How could they have known? Until she’d felt a chill kiss under the collar of her blouse, and she’d touched the side of her face and her fingers had come away touched with red. The boy’s little fist, or a low branch clawing at her as she’d run by . . . The tissue in her purse had been a wet bright rag by the time she’d reached home.

That had been a bad time. The little boy had run away, and she’d been too frightened to try again, scared of people watching when it had gotten so dark, so dark that she couldn’t see them looking at her. She’d had to go home to where her father was waiting. And even though he couldn’t say the words anymore, to say what he wanted, she knew. One or the other, and the little boy had run away.

She’d stood naked in her bathroom, the tiny one at the back of the house, her face wet with the splashed cold water. She’d raised her arm high over her head, standing on tiptoe so she could see in the clouded mirror over the sink. A bruise under one breast—the little boy had kicked her; that must’ve been where she’d got it, though she couldn’t remember feeling it. Her father couldn’t have done that, though her ribs beneath the discolored skin ached with a familiar pain. He wasn’t strong enough, not anymore. . . .

“Where are we?”

The boy’s voice—this one, the little boy whose mittened hand she held in her own—brought her back. They were both walking, his hand reaching up to hers, and the streetlights had come on in the growing dark.

“This isn’t my street. I don’t live here.”

“I know. It’s okay.” She didn’t know where they were. She was lost. The narrow, brick-fronted houses came up so close to the street, the bare trees making spider shadows on the sidewalk. Light spilled from the windows above them. She looked up and saw a human shape moving behind a steam-misted glass, someone making dinner in her kitchen. Or taking a shower, the hot water sluicing around the bare feet on white porcelain. The houses would be all warm inside, heated and sealed against the black winter. The people—maybe the couple she had seen walking before, on the other side of another street—they could go naked if they wanted. They were taking a shower together, the man standing behind her, nuzzling her wet neck, hands cupped under her breasts, the smell of soap and wet towels. The steaming water would still be raining on them when he’d lay her down, they’d curl together in the hard nest of the tub, she’d have to bring her knees up against her breasts, or he’d sit her on the edge, the shower curtain clinging wet to her back, and he’d stand in front of her, the way her father did but it wouldn’t be her father. She’d fill her mouth with him and he’d smell like soap and not that other sour smell of sweat and old dirt that scraped grey in her fingernails from his skin . . .

The boy pressed close to her side, and she squeezed his hand to tell him that it was all right. He was afraid of the dark and the street he’d never been on before. She was the grown-up, like his mother, and he clung to her now. The fist around her heart unclenched a little. Everything would be easier; she’d find their way home. To where her father was waiting, and she’d have the boy with her this time.

Bright and color rippled on the damp sidewalk ahead of them. The noise of traffic—they’d come out of the houses and dark lanes. She even knew where they were. She recognized the signs, a laundromat with free dry, an Italian restaurant with its menu taped to the window. She’d seen them from the bus she rode sometimes.

Over the heads of the people on the crowded street, she saw the big shape coming, even brighter inside, and heard the hissing of its brakes. Tugging the boy behind her, she hurried to the corner. He trotted obediently to keep up.

The house was as warm inside as other people’s houses were. She left the heat on all the time so her father wouldn’t get cold. She’d found him once curled up on the floor of the kitchen—the pilot light on the basement furnace had gone out, and ice had already formed on the inside of the windows. There’d been a pool of cold urine beneath him, and his skin felt loose and clammy. He’d stared over his shoulder, his mouth sagging open, while she’d rubbed him beneath the blankets of his bed, to warm him with her own palms.

Warm ... He had kissed her once—it was one of the things she couldn’t forget—when she had been a little girl and he had been as big as the night. His eyes had burned with the wild rigor of his hunt, the world’s dark he’d held in his iron hands. The kiss had tasted of salt, a warm thing. Long ago, and she still remembered.

She took off the boy’s jacket in the hallway. Her shoes and his small rubber boots made muddy stains on the thin carpet runner. Her knees were so stiff now that she couldn’t bend down; she had the boy stand up on the wooden bench against the wall, so she could work the jacket’s zipper and snaps.

“Where’s my mother?” Coming in to the house’s warmth from the cold street had made his nose run again. He sniffed wetly.

“She’ll be here in a minute.” She pushed the open jacket back from the boy’s shoulders. “Let’s get all ready for her, and then we can have that cake.”

The boy had just a T-shirt on underneath the jacket, and it was torn and dirty, with a yellow stain over some cartoon character’s face. The boy’s unwashed smell blossomed in the close hallway air, a smell of forgotten laundry and milk gone off. She wanted that to make her feel better. The boy’s mother was a bad mother. Not like that other boy’s mother, the one three or four times ago. She remembered standing by the greasy fire in the backyard, turning that boy’s clothing over in her hands, all of it clean-smelling, freshly washed. Inside the collar of the boy’s shirt, and in the waistband of the corduroy trousers, little initials had been hand-stitched, his initials. That was what she’d do if she’d had a child of her own; she would love him that much. Not like this poor ragged thing. Nobody loved this little boy, not really, and that made it all right. She’d told herself that before.

“What’s that?” He looked up toward the hallway’s ceiling.

She pulled his T-shirt up, exposing his pink round belly. His hair stood up— it was dirty, too—when she pulled the shirt off over his head.

“Nothing.” She smoothed his hair down with her palm. “It’s nothing.” She didn’t know if she’d heard anything or not. She’d heard all the house’s sounds for so long—they were all her father—that they were the same as silence to her. Or a great roaring hurricane that battered her into a corner, her arms over her head to try to protect herself. It was the same.

She dropped the T-shirt on top of the rubber boots, then unbuttoned the boy’s trousers and pulled them down. Dirty grey underwear, the elastic sagging loose. The little boys things (little . . . not like . . .) made the shape of a tiny fist inside the stained cotton. (Great roaring hurricane) (Arms over her head) She slipped the underpants down.

The boy wiggled. He rubbed his mouth and nose with the back of his hand, smearing the shiny snot around. “What’re you doing?”

“Oh, you’re so cold.” She looked into his dull eyes, away from the little naked parts. “You’re freezing. Wouldn’t a nice hot bath . . . wouldn’t that be nice? Yes. Then you’d be all toasty warm, and I’d wrap you up in a great big fluffy towel. That’d be lovely. You don’t want to catch cold, do you?”

He sniffled. “Cake.”

“Then you’d have your cake. All you want.”

His face screwed up red and ugly. “No. I want it now!” His shout bounced against the walls. The underpants were a grey rag around his ankles, and his hand a fist now, squeezing against the corner of his mouth.

She slapped him. There was no one to see them. The boy’s eyes went round, and he made a gulping, swallowing noise inside his throat. But he stopped crying. The fist around her heart tightened, because she knew this was something he was already used to.

“Come on.” She could hear her own voice, tight and angry, the way her father’s had been when it still had words. She tugged the underpants away from the boy’s feet. “Stop being stupid.”

She led him, his hand locked inside hers, up the stairs. Suddenly, halfway up, he started tugging, trying to pull his hand away.

“Stop it!” She knelt down and grabbed his bare shoulders, clenching them tight. “Stop it!” She shook him, so that his head snapped back and forth.

His face was wet with tears, and his eyes looked up. He cringed away from something up there, rather than from her. Between her own panting breaths, she heard her father moving around.

“It’s nothing!” Her voice screamed raw from her throat. “Don’t be stupid!”

She jerked at his arm, but he wouldn’t move; he cowered into the angle of the stairs. He howled when she slapped him, then cried openmouthed as she kept on hitting him, the marks of her hand jumping up red on his shoulder blades and ribs.

She stopped, straightening up and gasping to catch her breath. The naked little boy curled at her feet, his legs drawn up, face hidden in the crook of his arm. The blood rushing in her head roared, the sound of a battering wind. The saliva under her tongue tasted thick with salt.

For a moment she thought he was still crying, little soft animal sounds, then she knew it was coming from up above. From her father’s room. She stood for a moment, head tilted back, looking up toward the sounds. Her hair had come loose from its knot, and hung down the side of her face and along her back.

“Come on . . .” She kept her voice softer. She reached down and took the boy’s hand. But he wouldn’t stand up. He hung limp, sniffling and shaking his head.

She had to pick him up. She cradled him in her arms—he didn’t feel heavy at all—and carried him the rest of the way up the stairs.

Her father was a huddled shape under the blankets. He’d heard them coming, and had gotten back into the bed before she’d opened the door.

She knew that was what he’d done. A long time ago, when he’d first become this way—when she’d first made herself realize that he was old—she had tried tying him to the bed, knotting a soft cord around his bone-thin ankle and then to one of the heavy carved lion’s paws underneath. But he’d fretted and tugged so at the cord, picking at the knot with his yellow fingernails until they’d cracked and bled, and the ankle’s skin had chafed raw. She’d untied him, and taken to nailing his door shut, the nails bent so she just had to turn them to go in and out. At night, she had lain awake in her room and listened to him scratching at the inside of his door.

Then that had stopped. He’d learned that she was taking care of him. The scratching had stopped, and she’d even left the nails turned back, and he didn’t try to get out.

She sat the little boy at the edge of the bed. The boy was silent now, sucking his thumb, his face smeared wet with tears.

“Daddy?” She pulled the blanket down a few inches, exposing the brown-spotted pink of his skull, the few strands of hair, tarnished silver.

“Daddy—I brought somebody to see you.”

In the nest of the blanket and sour-smelling sheets, her father’s head turned. His yellow-tinged eyes looked up at her. His face was parchment that had been crumpled into a ball and then smoothed out again. Parchment so thin that the bone and the shape of his teeth—the ones he had left, in back—could be seen through it.

“Look.” She tugged, lifted the little boy farther up onto the bed. So her father could see.

The eyes under the dark hood of the blanket shifted, darting a sudden eager gaze from her face to the pink softness of the little boy.

“Come here.” She spoke to the boy now. His legs and bottom slid on the blanket as she pulled him, her hands under his arms, until he sat on the middle of the bed, against the lanky, muffled shape of her father. “See, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just nice and warm.”

The shape under the blanket moved, crawling a few inches up to the turned-back edge.

The boy was broken, he had been this way a long time, it was why she’d picked him out and he’d come with her. Nobody loved him, not really, and that made it all right. He didn’t fight as she laid him down, his head on the crumpled pillow, face close to her father’s.

A thing of twigs and paper, her father’s hand, slid from beneath the blanket. It cupped the back of the boy’s head, tightening and drawing the boy close, as though for a kiss.

The boy struggled then, a sudden fluttering panic. His small hands pushed against her father’s shoulders, and he cried, a whimpering noise that made her father’s face darken with his wordless anger. That made her father strong, and he reared up from the bed, his mouth stretching open, tendons of clouded spit thinning to string. He wrapped his arms around the little boy, his grey flesh squeezing the pink bundle tight.

The boy’s whimpering became the sound of his gasping breath. Her father pressed his open mouth against the side of the boy’s neck. The jaws under the translucent skin worked, wetting the boy’s throat with white-specked saliva.

Another cry broke out, tearing at her ears. She wanted to cover them with her hands and run from the room. And keep running, into all the dark streets around the house. Never stopping, until her breath was fire that burned away her heart. The cry was her father’s; it sobbed with rage and frustration, a thing bigger than hunger, desire, bigger than the battering wind that shouted her name. He rolled his face away from the boy’s wet neck, the ancient face like a child’s now, mouth curved in an upside-down U, tongue thrusting against the toothless gums in front. His tears broke, wetting the ravines of his face.

He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t feed himself. She knew, it had been that way the last time, and before. But every time, hope made her forget, at least enough to try the old way. The way it had been years ago.

She couldn’t bear the sound of her father’s crying, and the little boy’s fearful whimper. She knew how to stop it. On the table beside the bed was the knife she’d brought up from the kitchen—that had also been a long time ago—and had left there. Her hand reached out and curled around the smooth-worn wood. Her thumb slid across the sharp metal edge.

She brought her lips to the boy’s ear, whispering to him. “Don’t be afraid, it’s all right...” The boy squirmed away from her, but she caught him fast, hugging his unclothed body against her breast. “It’s all right, it’s all right. . .’’He saw the knife blade, and started to cry out. But she already had its point at his pink throat, and the cry leaked red, a drop, then a smearing line as the metal sank and cut.

The red bloomed on the sheets, the grey flooded to shiny wet. The boy’s small hands beat against her, then fluttered, trembled, fell back, fists opening to stained flowers.

He didn’t fight her now, he was a limp form in her embrace, but suddenly he weighed so much and her hands slipped on the soft skin that had been pink before and now shone darker and brighter. She gripped the boy tighter, her fingers parallel to his ribs, and lifted him. She brought the bubbling mouth, the red one that she had pulled the knife from, up to her father’s parted lips.

The blood spilled over her father’s gums and trickled out the corners of his mouth. The tendons in his neck stretched and tightened, as though they might tear his paper flesh. His throat worked, trying to swallow, but nothing happened. His eyes opened wider, spiderwebs of red traced around the yellow. He whimpered, the anger turning to fear. Trapped in the thing of sticks his body had become, he scrabbled his spotted hands at her face, reaching past the boy between them.

She knew what had to be done. The same as she’d done before. Her father’s bent, ragged nails scraped across her cheek as she turned away from him. She nuzzled her face down close to the little boy’s neck. She closed her eyes so there was only the wet and heat pulsing against her lips. She opened her mouth and drank, her tongue weighted with the dancing, coiling salt.

She didn’t swallow, though her mouth had become full. Her breath halted, she raised her face from the boy’s neck and the wound surging less with every shared motion of their hearts. A trickle of the warmth caught in her mouth leaked to her chin.

A baby bird in its nest... a naked thing of skin and fragile bone . . . She had found one once, on the sidewalk in front of the house, a tiny creature fallen from one of the branches above. Even as she had reached down, the tip of her finger an inch away from the wobbling, blue-veined head, the beak had opened, demanding to be fed . . .

The creature’s hunger had frightened her, and she’d kicked it out into the gutter, where she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That had been a baby bird.

This was her father. She kept her eyes closed as she brought herself down to him, but she could still see the mouth opening wide, the pink gums, the tongue in its socket of bubbled spit. She lowered her face to his, and let the lips seal upon her own. She opened her mouth, and let the warmth uncoil, an infinitely soft creature moving over her own tongue, falling into his hunger.

The little boy’s blood welled in her father’s mouth. For a moment it was in both their mouths, a wet place shared by their tongues, his breath turning with hers. She felt the trembling, a shiver against the hinges of her jaw as his throat clenched, trying to swallow. She had to help even more, it had been this way the last time as well; she pressed her lips harder against her father’s mouth, as her tongue rolled against the narrow arch of her teeth. The warmth in their mouths broke and pushed past the knot in her father’s throat. He managed to swallow, and she felt the last of the blood flow out of her mouth, into his and then gone.

She fed him twice more, each mouthful easier. Between them, the little boy lay still, beautiful in his quiet.

The boy’s throat had paled, and she had to draw deep for more. The sheets were cold against her hands as she pushed herself away from him.

Her father was still hungry, but stronger now. His face rose to meet hers, and the force of his kiss pressed against her open lips.

The blood uncoiled in that dark space again, and something else. She felt his tongue thrust forward to touch hers, a warm thing cradled in warmth and the sliding wet. Her throat clenched now. She couldn’t breathe, and the smell of his sweat and hunger pressed in the tight space behind her eyes.

His hands had grown strong now, too. The weak flutter had died, the palms reddening as the little boy had become white and empty. One of her father’s hands tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt, and she felt the thing of bone and yellowed paper smear the sheet’s wet on her skin. Her father’s hand stroked across her ribs and fastened on her breast, a red print on the white cotton bra. He squeezed and it hurt, her breath was inside his hand and blood and the taste of his mouth, the dark swallowing that pulled her into him, beat a pulsing fist inside her forehead.

She pushed both her hands against him, but he was big now and she was a little girl again, she was that pale unmoving thing rocking in his arms, playing at being dead. She was already falling, she could raise her knees in the dark wet embrace of the bed, she could wrap herself around the little blind thing at the center of her breasts, that just breathed and stayed quiet, and that even he couldn’t touch, had never been able to touch ... the little boy was there, his angel face bright and singing, her ears deafened, battered by that song that light that falling upward into clouds of glory where her mother in Sunday robes reached for her, her mother smiling though she had no face she couldn’t remember her mother’s face—

She shoved against her father, hard enough to break away from him, his ragged fingernails drawing three red lines that stung and wept under her bra. She fell backward off the bed, her elbow hard against the floor, sending numb electricity to her wrist.

Another shape slid from the edge of the bed and sprawled over her lap. The little boy, naked and red wet, made a soft, flopping doll. She pushed it away from herself and scrambled to her feet.

The bed shone. From its dark center, the depth of the blanket’s hood, her father looked out at her.

She found the doorknob in her hands behind her back. Her blouse clung to her ribs, and had started to turn cold in the room’s shuttered air. The door scraped her spine as she stepped backward into the hallway. Then she turned and ran for the bathroom at the far end, an old sour taste swelling in her throat.

In the dark, between the streetlights’ blue islands, she could feel the leaves under her feet. They slid away, damp things, silent; she had to walk carefully to keep from falling.

There was work to be done back at the house. She’d do it later. She would have to change the sheets, as she always did afterward, and wash the stained ones. She used the old claw-footed bathtub, kneeling by its side, the smell of soap and bleach stinging her nose, her fingers working in the pink water. He let her come in and make the bed, and never tried to say anything to her, just watching her with his blank and wordless eyes, his hungers, all of them, over for a while.

And there were the other jobs to be done, the messier ones. Getting rid of things. She’d have to take the car, the old Plymouth with the rusting fenders, out of the garage. And drive to that far place she knew, where these things were never found. She would come back as the sun was rising, and there would be mud on the hem of her skirt. She'd be tired, and ready to sleep.

She could do all that later. She’d been brave and strong, and had already done the hardest jobs; she could allow herself this small indulgence.

The cold night wrapped around her. She pressed her chin down into the knot of the scarf she’d tied over her hair. The collar of her coat had patches where the fur had worn away. The coat had been her mother s, and had been old the first time she’d worn it. A scent of powder, lavender and tea roses, still clung to the heavy cloth.

At the end of the block ahead of her, the Presbyterian church hid the stars at the bottom of the sky. She could see the big stained-glass window, Jesus with one hand on his staff and the other cupped to the muzzle of a lamb, even though there were no lights on in the church itself. The light spilling over the sidewalk came from the meeting room in the basement.

She went down the bare concrete steps, hand gripping the iron rail. And into the light and warmth, the collective sense of people in a room, their soft breathing, the damp-wool smell of their winter coats.

Where she hung her coat up, with the others near the door, a mimeographed paper on the bulletin board held the names for the altar flowers rotation. Signups to chaperone the youth group’s Christmas party. A glossy leaflet, unfolded and tacked, with pledges for a mission in Belize. Her name wasn’t anywhere on the different pieces of paper. She didn’t belong to the church. They probably wouldn’t have wanted her, if they’d known. Known everything. She only came here for the weekly support group.

There was a speaker tonight, a woman up at the front of the room, talking, one hand gesturing while the other touched the music stand the church gave them to use as a podium.

She let the speaker’s words flutter past as she sat down in one of the metal folding chairs at the side of the room; halfway down the rows, so she only had to turn her head a bit to see who else had come tonight. She had already counted close to twenty-four. There were the usuals, the faces she saw every week. A couple, a man and a woman who always held hands while they sat and listened, who she assumed were married; they nodded and smiled at her, a fellow regular. At the end of the row was somebody she hadn’t seen before, a young man who sat hunched forward, the steam from a Styrofoam cup of coffee rising into his face. She could tell that he was just starting, that this was a new world for him; he didn’t look happy.

None of them ever did, even when they smiled and spoke in their bright loud voices, when they said hello and hugged each other near the table with the coffee urn and the cookies on the paper plates.

They had another word for why they were here, a word that made it sound like a disease, just a disease, something you could catch like a cold or even a broken arm. Instead of it being time itself, and old age, and the grey things their parents had become. Time curled outside the church, like a black dog waiting where the steps became the sidewalk, waiting to go home with them again. Where the ones who had known their names looked at them now with empty eyes and did not remember.

She sat back in the folding chair, her hands folded in her lap. The woman at the front of the room had the same bright, relentless voice. She closed her eyes and listened to it.

The woman had a message. There was always a message, it was why people came here. The woman told the people in the room that they had been chosen to receive a great blessing, one that most people weren’t strong enough for. A chance to show what love is. A few years of grief and pain and sadness and trouble, of diapering and spoon-feeding and talking cheerily to something that had your father or your mother’s face, but wasn’t them at all, not anymore. And then it would be over.

That was a small price to pay, a small burden to carry. The woman told them that, the same thing they’d been told before. A few years to show their love. For these things that had been their parents. They’d be transfigured by the experience. Made into saints, the ones who’d shown their courage and steadfastness on that sad battlefield.

She sat and listened to the woman talking. The woman didn’t know—none of them ever did—but she knew. What none of them ever would.

She looked around at the others in the room, the couple holding hands, the young man staring into the dregs of his coffee. Her burden, her blessing, was greater than theirs, and so was her love. Even now, she felt sorry for them. They would be released someday. But not her. For them, there would be a few tears, and then their love, their small love, would be over.

She kept her eyes closed, and let herself walk near the edge of sleep, of dreaming, in this warm place bound by winter. She smiled.

She knew that love wasn’t over in a few sad years. Or in centuries. She knew that love never died. She knew that her love—real love, true love—was forever.