Pretty Horses
By Noah Copley

Faintly at first, like the distant thrumming from the hoof beats of untamed colts running wild across the Copen’s summer pastures, it begins …

Once, a long time before, Joe Copen, his wife Janice, and six-year-old son Brice vacationed on the southeast coast. The pounding of the surf against ivory cliffs resonated like a mid-summer thunderstorm within the remote beach’s insular cove; gray seagulls regularly took wing to escape the din. Joe and his family had spent the week there fishing, star-gazing and getting very tan. Brice screeched and ecstatically slapped his hands in anticipation of a drenching when Joe tipped the boat inches from the cliff’s face and forced the ocean spray’s backlash to cascade across the small deck. While the gangly youth absorbed the brunt of the sea’s shower, Joe leaned across the helm and kissed Janice fully on her precious lips – a momentary recollection of pure bliss: Janice’s up-cast eyes gleaming marble blue and wanting, her perfumed coconut sun-tanned skin pressed hard against him. Later that night, when Brice’s energy was spent and fast asleep, Joe and Janice made love on the paneled deck, the raining stars their audience, the surf their orchestra …

… consciousness returns to Joe Copen with skewed clarity and rippled pain. Splintered hooves crashing on fractured rock sends sparks like fireworks sizzlers rocketing throughout his central nervous system in metronome bursts. The merciless whinnying of gaunt nags with canyon eyes is electric and awful in his tortured thoughts. The not-so-distant crescendo of faint, mirthless laughter and beckoning screams mixed with the cloying smell of horse manure and caked facial blood limiting his depth perception incites in him clear panic, in spite of the excruciating pain in Joe’s face and legs. He lies flat on his stomach, his arms tied behind him by something sharp and stiff—barbed wire—yes! He remembers now, that is what Tim Rose used. His comprehension draws closer … the hammer … his legs … Janice! Brice!

“Gonna have a little fun with that wife of yours while your new assistant trainer watches, Joe.”

Frantically, Joe works his hands back and forth across his lacerated back, the barbs from the wire cutting further into his arms and wrists. The pain doesn’t matter to Joe. All that matters is getting to his family. He just prays he doesn’t cut his wrists too deep before he finds his freedom.

“Gonna play with her all night, Joe. I’ll make her scream like you never could.”

Joe wrenches one arm free. His right arm has slices of skin that look more like heated pieces of plaster than flesh hanging from it. Joe considers the amount of blood he must have already lost somewhere else in the barn during the struggle because only a few droplets dab the fresh sawdust in the spot he lies.

He tries to rise. His body fails him the first time and he slumps to the floor. His legs are twisted toothpicks.

“After I get finished with pretty Janice, she’ll watch me slit Brice’s goddamn throat before she dies.”

Joe’s fingers claw into the soft bedding of the stall and find purchase with the firmer dirt underneath. Time ruthlessly slides forward as Joe drags himself to the entrance of the stall. The stall door is still open. In his haste, Tim had forgotten to shut it.

He thought you were dead, that’s why.

With all the strength in his fading frame, Joe pushes himself to a kneeling position firmly aware that he is not dead, but that he is dying. He screams between clenched teeth and stretches his hand to the door’s brass handle. He grips the metal and jerks upward with wobbly persistence and suddenly is standing on those shattered legs. He embraces the outer wall of Arsenic’s stall and wonders about motion. The stable of horses begin to nicker nervously.

The barn is 200 feet in length, but thankfully, Arsenic’s stall is only 20 feet from its western entrance, and beyond that, the sloping hill to the Copen home.

Joe reaches one leg forward. Was it just that afternoon that Arsenic had been sold to the horse dealer from Pennsylvania? Time for Joe had become as bent as his ruined legs.

“Shhh, Shhh, it’s ok, everything will be all right, please, shhh,” he begs the fretful horses as he takes another pensive step. He supports most of his weight by grasping the stall’s barred window. Joe shuts his mind from his complaining legs. Another step, and then another. The bone in his left leg is fractured at the calf and he can feel the high and low sections of the shinbone missing contact. The lower half of the shinbone forces its way past the upper and defiantly splits his skin. Joe leans over, far to his right, and wretches. Sweat drains down his clammy face. Joe hiccups and flakes of foodstuff splotch his chin. He quickly assesses that his left leg is useless and takes all weight from it. He then realizes that his right leg does not appear to be as injured as first thought. He amateurishly diagnoses a possible ankle sprain and some bashed ligaments. He begins to hop on his better leg and drags his wasted one behind him. Before leaving, Tim had turned off the lights that evening. The translucent gaze of a teacup-sized autumn moon keeps Joe from tripping over a muck shovel that has been left abandoned and leaning against Leprechaun’s stall. Joe scoops it up in his shredded left hand and uses it for balance as he leaves the barn, hops toward his yard, and remembers that afternoon.

***

Joe and Tim had most of the horses ridden by the time Lane Dupre, pronounced Dew-Pree, a big horse dealer from Pennsylvania parked his trailer parallel to the barn’s south wall. Leonard Baisden, Arsenic’s owner showed up late in his Chevy dually minutes later. Arsenic stood in the barn’s crosstie. He shined like a copper penny thanks to Tim’s early morning grooming and Arsenic called out to Joe when the familiar trainer entered the barn. Dupre and Baisden greeted one another with a terse handshake. Joe silently saddled Arsenic and stepped him through his gaits while the two men talked shop. To Joe’s chagrin and on the horse’s fifth pass down the barn’s aisle, Dupre and Baisden settled and reached hands again. Joe dropped from Arsenic, handing Tim the reins and politely ushered Baisden into his office before the gentleman’s accord was contractually reached.

“Are you sure you want to sell ‘Nic?” Joe asked.

“We’ve been through this, Joe. I can’t turn down that kind of money … and I really don’t think you can, either.” Joe could hear the disappointment in the owner’s voice, but knew himself that there wasn’t any other way out of the financial quagmire in which they found themselves. Leonard Baisden had been a hard working blue-collar man, but his retirement money was fixed and mending a sick wife limited any further outside activities. Baisden was already three months behind on the training bill and six months behind on the feed bill. Joe nodded his lowered head.

Joe elected to lead Arsenic into the six-horse trailer rather than giving Dupre’s two assistants with their dim farmhand eyes the task. Joe was soft spoken and easy handed with Arsenic when they walked the ramp into the gloomy recesses of the trailer. Joe backed Arsenic into his stall and patted his neck one last time.

***

Joe half-bounds, half-drags himself towards the white shingled house, the moon’s glow exposes spider webs of coal dust marking its façade. And Joe exults, for to see the house’s shadowy veins by night means that he is close to his prize. The cicadas still surviving the early stages of autumn chirp as seamlessly as the sounds of struggle from the house’s second floor. Joe whimpers in his throat. The shovel is jabbed underneath his left arm pit. He rushes the steps …

***

“Just because you can whip him doesn’t mean you should,” Joe chided.

“But he won’t stand still, Joe. Day’s a wastin’,” the exasperated young man argued.

Late autumn, three years before. Arsenic stood tied to the wall, trembling.

“Five minutes of quality work beats fifty minutes of quantity work any day,” Joe said, rubbing the liver chestnut. “Patience, Tim. If you’re going to be a horse trainer, you’ve got to learn that. Training horses is not a rush job. You push these babies too fast just so you can get out of the barn early and you won’t keep customers very long. Besides, if you like horses, time should be the last thing on your mind.”

Joe didn’t think Tim was that passionate about horses, but he needed the help and Tim had nowhere else to go. Tim’s father had abandoned the family at the age of nine and his stepfather was only a part-time husband. Tim’s mother was too wrapped up in searching the local haunts for her new man to have time to worry about her son. Tim lacked an education or a trade and when he answered Joe’s help wanted ad, the trainer took him in.

“Watch me,” Joe whispered. He carefully rubbed the saddle pad across the two-year-old’s withers, his shoulders, and then easily onto his back. He raised the small English saddle to the horse’s nose and let Arsenic sniff it. Lightly, he slid it across the colt’s left shoulder and settled it onto the saddle pad. Joe waited a moment for the horse’s nerves to calm before cinching the girth. He paused for another moment, then tightened the girth the final two notches. The colt angrily snorted, but Joe soothingly rubbed the poll in his neck. After an uncounted stretch, the horse’s cocked head dropped. Joe rubbed between his ears. Arsenic passively grunted and flicked an ear.

“See?” Joe asked. “You’ll save more time paying attention to detail and being mindful. They are individuals, like us. Treat them with respect and they’ll give it to you in return. Rush them like they’re just a number and they’ll be resentful of you for life.”

A dawning understanding crossed Tim’s face and Joe’s heart leaped. “Thanks, Joe. Thanks for taking the time to show me this.”

***

Joe lurches onto the porch steps. He presses against the door, praying Tim had not locked it.

He thinks you’re dead.

As the door swings in, away from Joe’s quivering fingers, he realizes that he had been wrong: animals and people are different. He had never dealt with an animal he respected and cared for that didn’t give the same in return.

“I’m so tired of your lessons, Joe. I’m so tired of you!”

Up the stairs Joe scrambles like a beetle. He pulls at the steps with his right arm, pushes the shovel behind him with his left. The shovel digs and scratches shallow nicks in the finished oak. Joe’s tears cry for his pain.

He had known for a year that Tim was attracted to his wife. Who wasn’t? She was the prettiest woman in the county and he had been reminded of his good luck by every man who lived in it at least once.

***

“What are we going to do about Tim?” Janice asked him one late summer night. Her serene face settled on his chest, her sorrel hair tossed across the pillows. Rain pattered the corrugated roof. The hum of the air conditioner quieted for a heartbeat in the darkened room as the approaching storm’s brisk winds played havoc with the power lines.

Summer storms with his woman lying close always made Joe feel comforted somehow; the closeness of the air and the heat radiating from her body sapped from him his daily concerns. Sleepily he answered, “Tim is just a boy.”

“He’s been different lately.”

“He’s become a good hand, but still human. He’s growing up. Who couldn’t help but look at you?”

Janice recoiled from Joe’s grasp and smacked him on the shoulder. “Are you saying, Mr. Copen, that you are okay with other men checking out your wife?”

Impatient thunder rolled across the sky and Joe’s fingers ran across Janice’s bare shoulder.

“If I tried to stop every man from looking at you, I’d have to fight every man in the state.”

“Hum. I guess men will be men. What man’s wife do you fancy?”

“Only one,” he stated with a serious frown as he cupped her thin neck with his farmer’s hands. Joe kissed her ear and breathed intimate words into it. She sighed.

“It’s hard to pretend mad at you, Joe Copen. You may have your faults, but I’ll love you until the day I die.”

Joe had heard her say those words before: as high school sweethearts at their senior prom as they danced and everyone watched, at their wedding when they held hands and said their vows to God, and on the day she put his hands to her stomach and with tears flooding her eyes told him they were having a son. Joe felt his throat tighten and his heart soar. “Those words, Janice, they never get old.”

***

Joe putters down the short upstairs hallway, a young man made old. He hears his voice, muffled and malicious from the bedroom. The door is ajar. Janice is pleading with Tim for Brice’s life. Brice is pleading for his mother’s. Tim is cursing them both. Joe lurches forward and slams the door against the wall, family pictures fall and framed glass explodes on the wood floor. Brice is hogtied with bailing twine and rudely tossed into the master bathroom’s entrance. The florescent lights reveal ugly bruises covering his still-baby face.

“Daddy, daddy!” He cries and it has been years since he has referred to Joe as ‘daddy’.

Janice lies on her side on the queen-sized bed. Her clothes are torn and her mouth is bloody. Tim stands over her, bare-chested. His hands rest on the belt buckle of his pants, but his head is swiveled towards the door.

“How?” Tim murmurs. His gloating face crumbles and becomes sharp at the edges. “Can’t be.”

Joe uses the shovel for leverage and stumbles forward ignoring the leg bone that pushes further through the skin. Joe’s impact with Tim sends them across the bed and colliding with the room’s far wall. The muck shovel drops from Joe’s crooked fingers as his hands close on Tim’s sunburned neck. Instead of fighting, Tim screams, oddly girlish, and before Joe can put any real pressure on his neck, Tim faints. Cautiously, Joe draws back his hands. The shovel is close. Joe reaches for it, snatches and raises it above his head. Janice is calling his name. Brice is crying for them both. But he waits … the pain in his legs is forgotten as he crouches before his enemy, makeshift weapon raised. Tim’s eyes eventually flutter open and Joe brings the flat back of the metal shovel down on Tim’s face. There is crunching and a wet cry. Tim raises both shaking hands palms up. He makes little moon circles with them. He attempts to breathe through his mouth, but starts strangling on his own blood. His nose is doubled over, resting unnaturally against his right cheek.

Joe pants like a dog, licks his lips. He begins to salivate. The cold is gone from his face, as is the sweat. His body is suddenly as hot as a stove and he knows if he stripped that he would be veritably glowing, like a sun gone nova. He shakes his head and fights for concentration.

“Janice … Brice? Are you both all right?” he asks still glaring at Tim. “Brice … Janice?”

So hard to think. The atrocities committed on his body have been reduced to dull aches, except for the exhausting throbbing in his head. The fever that has come upon Joe is palpable. His lunatic heart hurries as he watches Tim’s blood drip … drip … drip down his face, glub … glub … glub from his mouth.

Joe wrenches his head away from the gruesome, delicious sight and eyes his wedding bed.

Janice sits there, blood spattered mouth agape. Brice has come to her, somehow crawled to her still tied, huddled in her arms.

“Joe? Oh, God … Joe,” she chirps between hiccupping breaths.

Suddenly afraid, Joe stands, suddenly quite easily, arms reaching for his family. “I … Janice … what’s …”

The terror in Janice’s face fills Joe with livid anger. I just saved you! he thinks as he spies his reflection in the bedroom’s sole window. The glass is gritty from summer dust. He blinks his right eye in disbelief and pitches backwards.

“No, it’s impossible,” he parrots Tim’s earlier remarks.

He staggers to the master bathroom and peers into it. The window’s reflection had not lied. His familiar Phillip’s screwdriver juts from an ochre-clotted left eye socket. The originator of the abominable thudding in his head and crushed depth perception discovered.

***

“I need a bigger commission on Arsenic,” Tim demanded of Joe after the horse and dealers were gone.

Joe leaned back in his leather office chair. Ribbons of every color and golden trophies of varying sizes filled the tiny stable office.

“This commission is already gone, Tim. All my bills are two months behind. I’ll probably clear a dinner for my family on the deal itself after the overhead is paid up.”

“But I broke Arsenic!” Tim argued.

“We broke Arsenic. I’m sorry, Timmy, but you know the past year has been tough. We haven’t won as much because our stock isn’t as good. When customers’ horses don’t win, they don’t keep them with you for very long.”

“That’s your problem, not mine!”

“You’re wrong,” Joe said, trying to remain calm. “As long as you work here, the performance of the horses decides both of our paychecks. I hate losing Arsenic, but selling him insured us another six months of stability. If I give you more commission now, it would just mean cutting back your salary later.”

“I don’t care about six months from now!” The black haired, ruddy cheeked man-child exclaimed, slamming his fists into Joe’s slight desk.

Joe raised his hands from the trembling table. “I don’t know what you want from me. You already get four hundred dollars a week, your meals and your house trailer paid for by me. I’m not giving you extra money so you can act even more like your no-count family.”

Tim blinked as if slapped. “That was a low shot, Joe.”

Joe tiredly leaned back. “Don’t give me reasons, Tim.”

“I won’t give you any more reasons, Joe. I’m quitting you.”

Ten seconds elapsed. Joe opened his mouth to reply and the phone rang. He lifted it from the receiver. He took one more lingering look at the simmering youth and nodded. “You do what’s best for you, Timmy. Hello? Hi, Janice.” Joe spun his chair to the window. He watched his broodmares and their foals prance in the exhausted day of the browning pastures. He heard the door slam behind him. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“Yes, honey. I’m finished for the day. No, I’ve done all the damage I can down here. I’ll be up to the house in a minute.”

All the lights were still on when Joe stepped out of his office. For the first time in three years, Tim had left the barn without flipping the master switch.

“Guess he is gone,” Joe muttered.

He walked across the barn’s aisle to his equipment room. Joe rummaged through his tool box and found what he needed—his Phillip’s screwdriver. He flipped it in the air and caught it by the handle on the third rotation. “No sense putting off tomorrow what you can do today.” He spoke into the barn’s stillness. The son of a horse trainer, Joe couldn’t leave without finishing the one final piece of quick business. He left his tool room and ambled to Arsenic’s stall. He bent to the floor and began tightening the loose hinges that Tim had been told to fix. In a day, the stall would be filled with a new customer’s horse and he intended for it to be ready.

So what if Tim quit? Joe surmised as he fastened the hinges in place. Tim had become a personal and professional struggle and Brice was spending more time in the barn than he was at his seventh grade studies. In another year, he would be a better assistant than Tim was now. Joe considered Brice’s capable hands with the horses and knew that if his son continued to show interest he would soon be a better trainer than his father. Joe tightened the last screw and vowed that he would get up earlier and groom his own horses. If Brice wanted to ride his and Tim’s horses when he came in from school, Joe would give him the show winnings and a bump in his allowance. Tim’s salary would be set aside for family needs and Brice’s education.

Joe was so lost in thought that he didn’t hear Tim behind him, 3-pound hammer from the tool room in hand.

The first blow sent blistering anguish throughout Joe’s right shoulder and sent him sprawling into Arsenic’s stall. He rolled onto his back, elbows braced against the ground and ready to rise, but much too late. Tim hammered Joe’s shinbone into shards. He straddled Joe’s feet and swung the hammer into Joe’s right thigh. Joe reached for the hammer, but Tim slammed it into his writhing legs again, connecting with previous injuries and forcing Joe’s head back in gaping agony. Tim kneed Joe’s chest and drove his face back into the floor with punch after punishing punch. Dazzled, Joe couldn’t raise a finger when Tim flipped him stomach first into the sawdust. Tim left the stall to swiftly return with a roll of barbed wire. He fitted a pair of sturdy work gloves to his hands. Roughly, he tied Joe’s arms behind him.

“Can’t give me any more money, huh? I’ll just take your wife for payment.”

“What then?” Joe wheezed through the dirt and dust. “You’ll go to jail.”

“Why do you care, Joe? I’m just trailer park trash.”

Tim grabbed Joe by the hair and lifted his head backwards, “You’ve got bigger worries, anyways,” and jammed the 8-inch Phillip’s screwdriver, all the way to the handle, into Joe’s left eye.

As Joe died, he prayed to God—to anyone—to give him life long enough to stop Tim Rose from hurting his family.

***

“Howdy, partner.” The figure, a middle-aged man with black Jodhpur boots that jangled with every easy step from the large gold rowels that rode low on his heels, approached, walking dead center down the middle of the barn’s spacious aisle. He was dressed in well-worn, dingy, brown riding pants, a white button-up shirt with matching, but a less used looking, brown vest and black tie, superbly knotted. He tipped his white felt hat to Joe.

“Who are you?”

“Not God. You can call me the Entertainer since I am quite the showman in my own right. I heard you had a request?”

The Entertainer’s deeply weathered face and cobra eyes aroused panic in Joe that he had never felt from any man. Joe wanted to back away, but could not.

“You can’t go that way, it’s against the rules.”

“My wife and son are in danger.”

“I know. You already said so.”

Joe took a furtive step forward. “Can you help them?”

“No. Only you can. But you’re dead.”

Joe ran his hands across his legs, to his chest, and eventually to his face. No injuries. He peered around him. No horses, just empty stalls. He could not see past the mouth of the barn. The space beyond was empty and opaque.

“Where am I?”

“Between worlds. You would have crossed over and been at His side if you hadn’t called to me.”

“Are you who I think you are?”

“Yep. Time’s wasting cowboy. I can get you back in time, if you quit wasting mine.”

“But God—”

“God doesn’t interfere with mortal men, at least not anymore. God expects you to accept the pain and suffering that goes on in your world and only after years of agony, or moments of greater agony, be rewarded in the next life with eternal bliss. But some, like you, don’t quite agree that good people such as your wife and son should go through torture to be happy in the next life. That’s where I come in.”

“What … what do you require?”

“In Heaven, with your earthly standards, you would be one of God’s chosen, an Angel of the highest order. For me, well, you would be one of my Horsemen on earth, a member of my posse, so to speak. I have a few there now, creating havoc and raising hell in the dead of night. Time’s really up, Joe Copen. Walk past me now and after a day or so of horrendous pain and suffering, your wife and son will join you in eternity. Or make the deal and extend your family’s existence on the side from whence you came.”

“Deal.”

“Remember, to return there means your soul is locked in an immortal body and death must come to all who cross your path.”

“Anything for Janice, anything for Brice. Just so they can live.”

The Entertainer’s hands curled into scarlet fists. The black cinders that were his eyes bubbled to glowing embers.

“God weeps for you.”

***

Joe shambles back into the bedroom. He drops beside Tim’s body and begins licking the blood from the one-time assistance’s face. Coughing, Tim’s eyes open wide and he tries to say something, but he can’t; his jaw is broken.

“Hi, Timmy,” the ghoul utters. “Time to seal the debt. He commands it.”

The awful thing grabs Tim by the head and wrenches him off the floor by it, breaking his neck, but not killing him. The ghoul rips his jugular open with teeth that are growing long and sharp. Like an unplugged bottle of shaken champagne, multiple streams of blood begin to pump like a water fountain from Tim’s neck. The ghoul sips from the eruption.

“Yummy,” it says gleefully as all pain from its legs and face disappear.

“Didn’t I teach you anything, Timmy?” it asks. “Just because you can kill someone, doesn’t mean you should.” It giggles.

The ghoul closes its hand over the streaming blood, its fingernails morphing into talons. It effortlessly lifts Tim from the floor. It turns and briefly stares at the woman who was once its wife and the child who was once its son before carrying the dying man away. It is already forgetting the house as its home as it breaks free from its walls, and into the embracing woods of the Copen farm it sprints. The ghoul finds a comfortable spot amongst maple trees and lets the dying-Tim watch as it unceremoniously rips the screwdriver from its shattered eye and then drives it into first one and then the other of Tim Rose’s own.

***

A speckled fawn bounds across the training fence, bleating and blaring for her lost mother, and zigzags into the path of one of Brice’s early morning training sessions. Brice’s nervous mare bucks and bolts, and his balance on the green two-year-old is compromised, but he does not fall. The filly rushes across the dew-drenched meadow and onto their daily used forest trail with Brice jostling for control. Rushes of galloping wind wrench tears from Brice’s eyes as he pulls against his pommel for purchase. He tentatively tugs against the reins to no avail; she is in full flight. He can’t pull harder for fear of hurting her young mouth. Severe spring emeralds and awakening sky-oranges intertwine and merge in Brice’s peripheral vision and his stomach tightens. The smoothed and familiar course between the filly’s ears before him becomes vaguely foreign from its newly pitched and uneven perspective. He begins to talk to her, to say careful words to her, and he feels her speed begin to lessen, but she spies something emerging from the undergrowth and spins away from the new threat. Brice readies for the inevitable as the ground’s tendrils snatch him from the saddle. He catches the trail’s grassy lane with his right shoulder and all breath goes out of him.

The mare skids to a stop, confused that she is now rider-less. She momentarily forgets her fright and that is all the time the ghoul needs to collect her in his unsavory grasp. The mare explodes in panic, but it says soothing things in her ears and caresses the mare’s velvety muzzle with jagged knuckles. It purrs to her: “Pretty horses, such pretty, pretty horses.”

The riders hurry to the accident. Janice Copen drops from her charger’s saddle and brusquely hands the reins to Brice’s fiancée, Andrea. Andrea is sobbing and Janice shushes her as her eyes flit from Brice, to the filly, and to the nearing woods.

“Stay here with the geldings,” she says to Andrea. She steps away before Andrea can speak and kneels at her son’s side. Whirligigs shower Brice’s faded jeans and buttoned work shirt. Janice grabs Brice’s wrist and feels …

“Is he …”

“Yes, Andrea, he’s alive. He’s coming to.”

“Thank God. Thank God,” Andrea whimpers.

Janice is close to coming unhinged. She is going to be a good wife to my boy, she unconsciously thinks in this, another moment of questionable futures. Janice has come to hate these occasional predicaments that have lead to questionable futures for the Copen family. She needs to tell Andrea, she knows. She will … soon, because Andrea is her boy’s lady, a special person who can handle the burden.

Brice is waking and Janice glances at the near filly. Her left rein has been unhooked from the shank and clasped to the left caveson cheek. She is contentedly tethered by the lone rein to a leaf-heavy silver maple, and Andrea is so focused on Brice that she has not even noticed.

It’s been a while, Joe, Janice thinks as she reflects on the recent newspaper articles she has clipped and stashed in her bedroom’s dresser drawer with the others, less recent. The stories tell of horrible acts and unspeakable attacks, first miles away, then within their county’s boundaries, of coming and ever-nearing death. Brice groans and Janice looks down at her son again. His eyelids stir, shutter and struggle before his face opens up to her, like the dream that recently passed was the best of all possible dreams.

End