“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge-myth is more potent than history-dreams are more powerful than facts-hope always triumphs over experience-laughter is the cure for grief-love is stronger than death.”

Robert Fulghum

Book One


The important thing is…
Marvin


One

Denver, Colorado 1998

Marvin Fuster held a soggy, crumpled bag and a wine bottle in his right hand, and swung his leg over the edge of the dumpster, searching down along the face of the bin for one of the longitudinal depressions stacked like ruled paper lines in the metal. He sat for an instant, afterward, balanced on the two-inch thick top, and glanced up and down the alleyway behind the hundred dollar a plate restaurant.
The evening was quiet except for the occasional purr of tires on the street a hundred feet away. Across from the dumpster a single lightbulb marking the rear entrance to a taxidermy building was fixed inside a half-domed canopy of tin, illuminating the lonesome alley in an anemic glow. Above him the impossibly clear sky smiled down, blinking with a hundred million stars, smothering the dreariness of the alley. For reasons he would never know, but were clear to another set of eyes, he thought back to a little girl he’d known so many years ago, and who had died at his father’s vicious hand. He had forgotten her name, but not the dreadful circumstances surrounding her death.
He didn’t bother to bend his head over to look down as he shook the image of the girl from his mind, leaning outward, putting his weight on the leg with its precarious toehold.
The sole of his shoe slid quickly, and Marvin Fuster’s body followed, headfirst. The trip down—he clung to the bag and bottle he’d just retrieved with a religious fervor—was quick, but Marvin was able to relive several different, important scenes of his long life, say the entire act of contrition, recite the pledge of allegiance (those portions he could remember), and calculate that it was going to hurt like hell in just a second. After all these thoughts were completed there remained a split second of nothing in his mind.
He hit, and true to his expectations it hurt like hell. And then his world went to peaceful black.

*

This was clear as crystal.

He was flying, soaring with his arms spread wide, high above a calm blue sea. Ahead of him the late afternoon sun painted the bank of clouds tangerine, and there was another figure nearing them—a woman with long, dark hair who glanced back at him at intervals. Even across the distance that separated them he could see her sparkling almond eyes each time she turned her head, a look of fear and revulsion written in them. He must catch up to her before she disappeared into the clouds; tell her what he’d done for love of her—but what was it he’d done?
He desperately needed to catch her.

*

Marvin Fuster half-opened his eyes and perceived the dim vision of doors opening. A voice; the sensation of being rolled along on a cart over an unending series of railroad tracks.
“Go! O-R 2!...” he heard a voice call out urgently.
O-R? Wha…?

And then, darkness.
Voices once again…unclear and growing distant as semi-consciousness drifted away.
There was no pain, only white mist as the orderlies rushed Marvin down the long hall to the operating room, his head laid open and bleeding. He drifted off, deeper now, into a strange netherworld, and found himself inside a thick mist of blinding white.
He was falling again.
Down he went, gaining speed it seemed, so much so that his cheeks began to stretch backward because of the G-force.
Down. Down. Down.
When I hit,

Marvin Fuster was thinking in a panic…
How long did he have? It didn’t matter, the ground was coming, and when it arrived he knew his life would then be over. That’s all.
The ground arrived right on schedule, and he hit hard. Painfully hard. Reason told him he should experience no further sensation or thought whatsoever after the impact, but in fact he did. Surprise.
He had landed on his back. Thought one. He wondered next if he had splattered; if his blood had exploded upward and outward like coffee from a shattered cup? Was he in a hundred different pieces, his brain lying somewhere all by itself thinking this? Or was he just a bloody glob in the dirt?
It was dirt. His fingers clenched and unclenched in the fine dust beneath them. This was good. If his brain had bounced away and come to rest in some detached place he probably wouldn’t even have noticed his fingers. He felt the jack-hammering of his heart, and knew that, too, was good. All of this was good. If he was dead, at least he was still thinking-dead.
Marvin opened his eyes.
Gray. Not good.
He tentatively raised a hand to his face and felt first the cheek, and afterward the top of his cheekbone. He blinked. Very good. His eyeball, at least the left one, was still inside the socket where it should be. He let his fingers follow the weather-beaten lines of his face upward to his scalp, and then patted it front to rear. He scanned the length and breadth of his body. Two arms, complete with hands, his beloved, filthy trench coat. Ratty trousers belted with a length of wire at the waist; two legs inside them. His shoes and socks were missing.
Well, hallelujah! I ain’t all busted up…

Secure in the knowledge that he had miraculously survived, he stood and took in his surroundings. The first smoky images he saw were of walls that changed perspective each time he turned his head. A tall, wide archway to his left, and then in the blink of an eye, a solid sheet of more dismal gray. To his right a window suddenly appeared with nothing beyond it on the outside except blackness, and then it too disappeared, to be replaced instantly by another solid wall even as he stared at it. One moment the ceiling vaulted skyward endlessly, only to shrink down on him the next. The chamber was alive in movement, but at the same time strangely dead. And it was hot, unbearably hot.
Above him there was no roof, but neither was there a sky filled with stars or clouds or a moon—only a pall of thick gray and the outline of the dreary walls that rose like monoliths until they lost themselves in the enormity of the height. Goosebumps sprang up his back at the sight of it. High above in one of the walls a small window suddenly materialized, casting a feeble spear of light downward. Dark birds followed quickly, sweeping in circles along the edges of it, cutting across it as though feeding on it, killing its chances to dispel the gloom.
Another doorway stood lit with a burst of kinder, brighter light breaking through—and now a young woman standing all aglow in the midst of it. She raised a hand toward Marvin as if beckoning him to come forward. He pointed a finger questioningly to his chest, then glanced behind him into the shadows to see if someone else was present. Surely she meant…but there was no one, and so with faltering steps he began to move in her direction as the birds spiraled slowly downward in silence far above him. There was no sound; not the padding of his bare feet on the earth, not the rise of his breathing or the beating of his heart that grew more rapid with every step.
He approached her, stopping a foot or two in front of her in deep embarrassment. She was beautiful, more beautiful than the stars in heaven, he could see—this young woman dressed in golden strands of the light reflecting off her deep auburn hair, radiating through the fabric of her white gown.
She turned without saying a word and left him, then, walking with the smoothness of flowing water, down a long flight of worn stone steps, out onto a path that led through soft sand up to the base of a tall dune. There she turned and looked back up to where he stood.
“Well?” she asked in a faraway, melodic voice.
Marvin felt his muscles tighten with a forgotten excitement. He bounded down the steps and ran to her side.
“This is where my friends left me,” she said, and he found her full voice quite as lovely as her eyes and hair and lips. The sudden awakening of the world of sound surprised him, but no more so than the world of color and smells—the low crashing of waves somewhere in the distance, the smell of salt air, the fragrance of some exotic perfume flowing from her as she walked along the edge of the dune with him. There was the chattering and chirping of brilliantly foliaged birds flying from tree to tree, branch to branch. There was sunlight playing off the motion of leaves that moved to and fro in a breeze coursing inland from the distant sea. There was an air of magical wonderment, as though he’d stepped inside a wondrous painting.
He imagined the feel of her skin, as fine as Oriental silk.
For a fleeting instant he became aware again of his decrepit, hideous wreck of a body when she stopped and looked upward toward the top of the hill of sand. This thing he was cursed with was just a ragged case holding a heart, but in that instant the heart hammering in his chest was ageless, and it split into a hundred pieces for love of her. He spoke in a faltering voice.
“I…won’t leave.”
“Oh, I know. I know that very well, Marvin Fuster,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You…how do you know my name?” he asked.
She smiled, and then left him to climb the steep dune without answering. She moved upward easily, like a shadow slipping over the white sand disappearing beneath her feet. He clamored after her, joining her when he got to the top, and what he saw amazed him—though it did not seem to affect the young woman at all. Below them ran a wide ravine, and in the ravine was a river, rushing upward, away from the sea far to their left in the south. Were this not enough to make him scratch his head and wonder at his sanity, a parade of cars floated along in the swift current, like sheets of colored paper being whisked along.
“There they are,” the woman remarked casually. “No telling where they’ll wind up.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“My friends,” she said.
“Cars?”
The woman laughed at his silly question. “No, Marvin Fuster. My friends…they’re in

the cars, and God only knows where they’ll finally stop.”
Marvin squinted at the caravan of flattened, wavy cars rushing up the cataract.
“Well, if they’re inside those things, they’re deader than cats in a gunnysack. I can tell you without lookin’…”
“Come on,” she said, leaping back down the steep side of the dune. “We’ll go another way and find them.”

*

He heard voices high above him, coming from the clouds—strange voices. Olympian. Thundering for sutures, or maybe it was dentures. One moment they were whispering something about blood—hematoma? Heraclitus? Something.
He felt no pain.

*

“What’s your name…if ya’ don’t mind me asking? I mean, you know mine and all.”
“Amy.”
“Oh. Well, Amy…”
They were on a pleasant dirt path now, under a teal sky, walking along a country lane. On their right a wood-railed fence straight out of a pastoral painting ran up a small hill along the side of the path. On the other side of the fence tall trees grew in deep rows and followed the contour of the hill. Amy seemed enthralled by all of this, left his side, and ran across the path. She stepped up onto the bottom rail, which enabled her to reach out and pluck a word from the branches. The tree shook as though it had suddenly been awakened. A pair of eyes, and then a mouth materialized far inside the foliage.
“Redemption,” the woody mouth said. “Very good! Pick another.”
Amy stood with her thighs pressed against the top rail, her back to Marvin. He scratched the thin hair on his head and watched her in wonderment. Hundreds of words like so many pieces of fruit appeared where seconds before there were only leaves. She reached out again and plucked another.
“Fear,” said the tree. “Interesting.”
Amy giggled. “No, interesting is too high up in your branches. This word,” she said holding it high for the thing to see, “is the only other I could reach. Bend forward a little, please. I see one I like much better.”
The tree rustled and obeyed graciously. Many limbs that had been twenty or twenty-five feet above the ground bent toward her, almost enfolding Amy. She picked one, then another, and another, and placed each in the cradle of one arm near her breast until she could hold no more.
“Thank you, kind tree! Now I’ll sit and compose a lovely poem just for you. Right here beneath your branches.”
Marvin watched. The tree shook itself again.
“Not for me, child. For him,” it said motioning across the path at Marvin. Amy turned, dropping the word “Desire” into the dirt beneath her as she did. She looked over at the man who could have been her grandfather Sebastiano. Sebastiano, who had died five years ago, but had climbed out of the grave today.
“Hah! For him? What on earth for? He’s ready to die, and he’s horribly filthy and ugly,” she said.
Marvin’s countenance fell, like a soldier shot through the heart. Yes, he was old, he thought despondently, and yes, he was filthy and horrible for her to even look at. He knew he loved her in that terrible moment of rejection, but he knew also that no power in heaven could make her love him. He hobbled as swiftly as he could across the distance separating them and knelt down before her, scooping up “Desire”. He looked up, holding the word much as if it were a jewel resting on a velvet cushion, and she was a queen. Amy reached down and swept it from his hands.
“Thank you, Marvin Fuster. We simply can’t do without desire, now can we?”
Marvin’s eyes began to tear. No, we cannot.

He fell back onto his rear and brought his eyes to rest on her feet. He knew his place. He did not look up again until Amy left him and the tree to continue along the path alone. Marvin stared at her back as she moved away, climbing the hill in graceful movement. Her image would haunt him and follow him from that instant onward through every dream. After she’d gotten to the crest and he lost sight of her on the other side, he looked over at the tree.
No words. It was just a tree.


Two

He woke several times from broken dreams. A beautiful young woman dressed in white, smiling at him in a bleak and cavernous room, motioning him to come to her. A little girl with dark, satin hair sitting beside him in a tiny house high up in the trees. A demon snorting puffs of white, steamy breath, standing before a fence in a snowstorm. A mansion, with a retinue of servants, and another young woman at his side, her hand on his shoulder. Stacks and stacks of books lying on a polished wood countertop. A land inhabited by strange creatures garbed in spiral gowns, calling to him to enter their dance. A tree that spoke. Searing bright lights, and in the lights, a creature with wings outspread peering down at him. His mother sitting in the corner of their kitchen, covering her battered face with trembling hands. But most often, over and over, he dreamed of the young woman dressed in white, beckoning him to leave all of this and come to her.
His head ached.
He reached up to touch the spot where it hurt most and felt gauze. Gauze wrapped around his head, beginning just above his eyebrows in thick, padded layers. Marvin opened his eyes, confused for an instant until consciousness slowly began the deliverance of stable images. This place was real. It was a hospital room, and he was lying in a bed with a gleaming chrome frame. He was covered with a clean sheet. He was cold. A tube snaked from a half-empty bottle dangling from a stand, down into his left arm, and he instinctively wanted to yank the needle out.

He had been injured—but how? When? He wanted a drink. Anything. Whiskey, wine, even cough syrup. Did they still lace cough syrup with alcohol? He couldn’t remember.
A nurse breezed in, dressed in polyester blue, carrying a clipboard. When she saw Marvin with his eyes opened she dropped her arms to her sides and broke into a smile. “Well, good morning sir! Welcome back.”
He said nothing, merely stared at her. She glanced quickly at the chart fixed to the foot rail. “We don’t have a name for you. How are we feeling this...” she went on as he tried to bring her face into focus. A young woman with indistinctly colored eyes, slightly squinting as though she couldn’t see the chart or her patient very well. Her lips were thin, and barely moved as she spoke.
His head hurt.
“Why am I here? How long? What happened?” he interrupted her.
The nurse laid the chart she carried onto the sheet and then walked to the bottle, touching it with her stubby fingers as if to assure herself that the clear liquid hadn’t frozen or congealed into a solid form.
“Good.” She looked down at Marvin with that thin smile. “We’re so glad you’re finally awake.”
Who is we?

He saw no one else. Why did she continually refer to herself as we?
“Why am I here?”
“You were injured.”
She gently rolled his arm over and looked at the IV, then seemingly satisfied, left it and brought her fingers to his eyelids and lifted them. Marvin watched her eyes dart left, then right. They were pale brown.
“Good. Good,” she said releasing her grasp.
“Good? Good? I feel like someone hit me with a goddam’ hammer! What happened? How did I get here?”
“We don’t know for certain what happened…”
We again.
“You had a nasty accident somewhere,” she said. “You split your head open, two…” she glanced at his chart again, and then continued. “Two nights ago. It was very serious. You lost a considerable amount of blood. We put you back together, and here you are. Do you remember anything? Can you tell us your name?”
“You. Well that’s better at least. It’s Fuster. Marvin Q. Born May sixth, nineteen thirty-two…or thirty-three. Thirty-two, I think. Whatd’ya mean I split my head open? How? I don’t remember nuthin’.”
She jotted the name down. “I’m not surprised. Basilar skull fracture, Mister Fuster. A considerable amount of bleeding in addition. Some brain swelling. The doctor will explain it better when she arrives.”
“I know what a basilar fracture is.” I do?

“That’s nice,” she said in a patronizing tone. “We were unsure whether a man of your age would even survive, as you can imagine—we’re sure you can understand.” She winked at him. “But, we’re glad you’ve awakened. That’s a positive sign.”
“We’re glad we’re awake, too. When do we get outta’ here?”
She laughed. “When you pay your bill. Otherwise, you’re our prisoner.” She posed the next question more seriously. “Do you have a home address?”
“’Course I do. 1830 Wazee. Central Packing Company. South end of the loading dock. An’ in case you’re wonderin’, I don’t have no money.”
She scribbled on her chart again as he spoke.
“Hmm. I’m sorry. When the time comes, we’ll see about releasing you to a shelter.”
“I ain’t homeless. That’s my home, and I’m comfterble and happy there.”
“We’re sure you are. It isn’t our place to say anything about that, but we’re sure you’ll want to arrange to go someplace less exposed…social services can help you there. You’ll need someplace clean to recuperate. We’re just happy you’re finally awake.”
With that she turned and began walking out of the curtained-off area of the room.
“It’s clean enough there! YOU go to a goddam’ shelter—all of ya’—just for one night! You’ll see…” He heard the door swish open and the squeak of her shoes on the polished tile.
“You’ll see,” he mumbled. “You’ll see.”
The morning light flooding through the windows across the room rippled, darkened slightly, quickly, and then grew bright once again. Marvin brought his eyes to bear on it and thought he saw the hazy outline of a figure moving, and the distinct shimmer of what looked like wings before the vision dissipated. He continued to stare for several moments, waiting for something further, listening for any sound. Nothing, only the occasional clattering and squeaking of heels in the hall outside the room.

*

“How much you want for it?”
The squat, balding man with a full butcher’s apron covering his gray suit eyed Marvin, not warily exactly, but carefully. They stood at the edge of the dock behind the meat packing plant, near to the spot where several boards covering its face had been roughly removed.
“I won’t let it out for less than two thousand a month,” he said at length.
“Hah! You’re nuts! I can lease a goddam’ penthouse for that.”
“I can see you haven’t been in the market for quite a while, Mr…Mr…”
“Fuster. With an F, as in Fuck you.” He instantly regretted having spit that out. It could only be a deal breaker. “Tell you what I’m gonna’ do. I’ll give you a hundred-fifty a month for this rat hole. That’s my best and only offer.”
“There are no rats here. Look. Look for yourself.” He bent down, a glint of afternoon sunlight catching hold of his scalp making it look like an oversized cue ball aproned with black fuzz. “Clean as a hospital operating room. No rats.”
Marvin bent down and peered in.

*

“How are you this afternoon, Mister Fuster?” The voice was softer than the one he’d just heard. The one belonging to the nurse who wanted to stick him in a homeless shelter a moment ago, and it belonged to only one person. Marvin opened his eyes. She was short, with a stunning figure disguised poorly beneath her white lab coat. The doctor stood at the side of his bed, stethoscope at the ready.
“Okay, I guess.”
After blinding him with her tiny flashlight for several seconds, she pulled the sheet down to his waist and then undid his hospital gown. “All right then, take a deep breath. Hold it, and then exhale slowly,” she said firmly.
He did as he was instructed. The faint odor of her perfumed hair falling close to his nose, jumbled up though it was with the antiseptic smell of her hands, caused him to relax and try as best he could to expand his chest to the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Marvin was able to fill his lungs to the size of a water glass. A sharp pain struck his head as he inhaled, making him wince, and the doctor noticed immediately.
“Okay?”
“No. Yes.” His lungs deflated when he spoke, garbling the indecisive answer.
The flashlight reappeared. He closed his eyes, weary of being blinded.
“Open.”
“Do ya’ have to keep doin’ that?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I need to look. Open, please.” She laid a hand on his temple, and her fragrant hair brushed his cheek. He opened his eyes and took another deep, painful breath.
“Take yer time, doc.” The light flashed back and forth.
“Count to ten for me, please.”
“What for?”
“Just count.”
“Okay. One. Two…four, five, six, seven…nine, ten.”
She snapped the flashlight off and left him without a word to scribble something onto the chart she’d brought with her.
“I never was any good at numbers. Lemme’ try again. I’ll betcha’ I can get all the way to a hundred this time.”
The doctor didn’t bother to answer as she scribbled away, her back to him. He watched her, wondering whether or not she was married—wondering why he would wonder that. Suddenly he saw the dimming and then brightening once again at the far end of the room, a few feet beyond her, and the faint outline of wingtips.
“Holy smoke! Ya’ se that?”
She wheeled around at his exclamation. “See what?”
“Somebody else is in here! Somebody with wings! Dintja’ see it? The light an’ them wings? Ya’ musta’! It was right in front of ya’!”
She eyed him for a second before turning quickly to scan the area behind her, then turned to face her patient once again.
“Wings?”
“Yeah! Christ Almighty! Ya’ missed it! It was there, I swear it…I saw that same thing this morning. Jesus Jones, what’s goin’ on?”
The doctor slipped her pen into the clip of her chart and walked to his bedside again. She squinted at him, turning her head sideways a bit, as if the valley on the left side of his nose was what needed to be observed.
“Mr. Fuster,” she said at last, “you’ve suffered a brain contusion, which means…”
“I know what it means. And a basilar fracture. I know all that. That don’t mean my eyes are playin’ tricks on me. I saw it!”
“It isn’t your eyes that are playing tricks on you. It’s your damaged brain. Your eyes are dilated…not badly, but enough. These distortions of vision are quite normal for someone who has…”
“That weren’t no distortion!”
“Certainly. Be that as it may, they’ll pass in time as your brain begins to heal itself. Now, I want you to try and get some rest. I’ll check in on you a little later. Try counting to a hundred after I leave.” She smiled and touched his bare arm gently before turning to leave.
“I saw it. I did.”
“Rest now, Mister Fuster. I’ll return a little later.”
“When do I get outta’ here?”
“In good time,” he heard her answer from beyond the curtain.
Marvin waited, glancing back and forth from the space at the end of the curtain to the bank of windows, positive that the doctor was as beautiful and desirable as he had seen her; equally positive that something else was in the room watching him, and that it would reappear. Neither image a trick of the mind.
“I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts.”
And yet, he questioned that pronouncement over the ensuing days. The shadowy form continued its visitation, more often than the beautiful doctor. Where she spoke and listened to him try to describe it in inadequate words, the specter wandered in and out, silent. Always with the wings that sometimes moved like the shadow they were attached to, sometimes drawn closed and tucked tightly to its back.
Finally, at the end of Marvin’s fifth day, just when he was getting used to being insane, the creature approached his side in the darkness and whispered to him in a voice that woke him and brought chills to his soul.


Three

A

my Alionello woke when the little Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the nightstand beside her bed sprang to life, early that morning, while Marvin Fuster listened in a fog of disbelief to an angel in his room at Denver General Hospital. She threw her arm out from beneath the covers, found the button at the top of Mickey’s head, and pushed it down. It was six o’clock and a new day had begun. She rolled over, pulling the covers back over her bare shoulders, and lay quiet for a moment as the tailings of sleep drifted away.
The sun had poked over the horizon half an hour ago and illuminated the bedroom in a cool, dim glow, forcing soft shadows beneath all of the objects along its path. Atop the covers at the foot of the bed, her old friend, Mr. Pudge, sat half-upright and stared blankly at her with his two black glass-bead eyes. Had he not had the sturdy footboard at his back he would have long ago become a casualty of the night and wound up on his belly on the woven rug covering the polished wood floor. She raised her head slightly and saw him resting in his bent position.
“Good morning, Pudge. See anything unusual in here while I slept last night?” Reaching down, she grabbed the stuffed bear that her father had given to her long ago when she was just a little girl back in Chicago, and curled up with him again to enjoy a last moment of warmth before rising to begin the day.
Pudge had not seen a thing, of course, but a visitor had been there all the same, watching Amy throughout the night. He had scoured the mail sitting in neat stacks on her small desk in the living room, made note of the statuary she had gathered over the past two years after she had moved into the charming old building on Capitol Hill. He looked with interest at the framed photos of her and her family back home. An album of who this woman was beginning to emerge.
Pushing the light blanket to one side, she climbed out of bed and grabbed her robe from the chair-back a few feet away near the window. She pulled it casually around her bare shoulders and pushed the curtains aside to peek out at the new morning light, the lushly-leaved trees across the street, and the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains in the distance.
“June is the finest month in this city,” she remarked under breath. “I love you, Denver, all of you. You’re everything I imagine Heaven itself to be…” She let the curtains fall back and turned to leave the bedroom for the bath. “Everything except for that devil I work for.”
She had rented the apartment in a 70-year-old building a few months after John Sampson had hired her three years ago, but it was nothing at all like the place he had imagined in his fantasies. Hers had one bedroom, a comfortable old bath with the original ball and claw tub, fine, tall windows in every room, and much too much woodwork gracing it to suit John Sampson’s modern tastes. Had he seen it. The floors were hardwood, and creaked along the hallway leading from the bedroom at the front of the building to the entryway at the center of the small complex. She’d never minded that, though—in her eyes it simply added another dimension to her home’s character. She had immediately fallen in love with the place when she first had seen it, and scavenged enough furniture and knickknacks to fill all of its nooks and crannies to her liking after having signed the lease. It grew dearer and dearer to her with every passing day.
She turned on the radio and walked into the bathroom, tossing her robe onto a small ornate chair beneath the dressing table. She stopped abruptly at the edge of the sink and looked beyond it to the oval mirror. Her dark hair was strewn about on her head as though she had just climbed out of a boxing ring after twelve furious rounds, but her brown eyes were clear as crystal, and her skin was a soft bronze without a single blemish. She pushed her fingers through the tangled mess and remarked to the woman in the mirror.
“You’re a fright, Amy Alionello. Where in the daylights have you been?” Laughing under breath, she smiled at her reflection, and bared her teeth slightly.
“Hmm…you guys need a good cleaning and polishing.”
But they did not. As with the rest of her body, they were perfectly placed and perfectly in balance, and it should have been no wonder to her why every man she encountered would die for her attention. She had never quite understood that crazy fact, thinking she lacked so much in physical beauty, resenting the stares and dropped jaws in a crowd. It was not so much the crude nature of men reacting to her, but rather the rawness of her beauty that demanded some measure of a response by anyone in her presence. John Sampson might be a fool, but not when it came to recognizing a true beauty when he saw one. It was a wonder he had maintained his equilibrium for as long as he had, working beside her everyday for the last three years.
Stepping over the rim of the tub she sneered at the thought of him. The endless invitations to go for a drink after the workday was finished. To his apartment in the sleek Tremont Towers. The little innuendos; the calculating look in his eyes.
Twenty minutes later she left the bathroom, dressed in front of the mirror outside, and then walked down the creaking hall floor to the kitchen for a light breakfast of grapefruit and yogurt before leaving for the office. At least the presence of Delilah would make the day tolerable.


Four

T

he hospital room was dark that evening except for the glow of the monitors on the wall above Marvin’s head. Anselm had entered and stood beside him, not a fleeting vision colored light and dark, but solid, like a ship emerging from a thick fog bank. Not across the room by the windows, either, but close enough to reach down and touch the patient. The angel spoke.
“Who are you?”
The voice awakened Marvin, and when he saw Anselm his bleary eyes blew wide open.
“Ho-ly Shit!”
Grabbing the top of the sheet

Impressum

Texte: Patrick Sean Lee, (c) 2013
Bildmaterialien: Cover-Meli Castillo...and thanks, Stephen Johnson, Jr.
Lektorat: Valerie Fee, Carolann Kaiser, Trish Munroe, Rebecca D. Bowslaugh
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 17.02.2013

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Widmung:
I owe the following people a deep debt of gratitude for their contributions to make this book a reality: My wife...my star, my staff, my Maribeth. Trish Munroe for helping me find my voice. My critic and cheerleader. Valerie Fee and Carolann Kaiser for editing and catching all my mistakes over the past two years. And my dear Cherilyn DeAquerro who was always there.