“Yes, and we had never seen anything like them. These were no spirit-beings but strange and alien creatures, swimming in the water and flying through the sky. So queer and diverse. Even Lucifer watched, stark eyed, beside himself with amazement. And I knew, with a vestige of that single accord that we had once shared, that he coveted this strange new world and all the things inside it. He had wanted to be a god, but in that moment I believe he remembered why he was not.
“But now, a stinging blow! El did something he had never done before: He blessed them. Never before had I heard such things spoken, even to Lucifer, and he had been the anointed one. Coveted words! And then, to these creatures, these base and strange new things, he gave license to create more of their own for as long and often as they dared.
In the rearview mirror I saw fever in his eyes.
“These were no gods—no spiritual beings even—these
I had never seen him this emotional.
“We had no such power! They had been blessed. We had no such blessing. Can you understand?”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking how a firstborn must feel at the birth of a younger sibling—how I had felt at the birth of my sister when I was six years old.
“That day,” he said, at a stoplight now, his hand a fist on his chest, “another new thing sprouted, this time inside me, its roots embedded in the soil of my changed heart. By nightfall, jealousy had wound its tendrils through my innards, choking me from the inside. From Lucifer’s face I knew I was not the only one.
“And now, with the passing of another day, there came new creations more exotic than before, walking on legs, many of them without wings, roaming over the land. By any logic they should have been miserable—censored, condemned to swim, to roam on land without flying, to fly and not swim. I wanted them to be miserable. But they fascinated us with their strangeness and variety. And they ate things.”
He chuckled, but the sound was hollow. “Never before had we seen such a phenomenon. Terrible, fascinating—the devouring of green, living things for the sake of a too-mortal body. Mesmerizing. Horrifying. We watched them do it for hours, transfixed—mouthfuls of green, leaf and branch, fruit and seed, even the tiny plankton of the sea—all devoured by bodies with appetites we did not understand. So strange, so novel. We couldn’t get enough of it.”
I thought back to the coffee in the café, the scone at the bookstore, and the demon watching me. Even in the tea shop, he hadn’t drunk from his cup but watched me lift it to my lips so intently I had wondered if he had poisoned it.
“Yes!” He laughed. “So now you know why I will never tire of watching you consume things.”
This struck me as deviant as a foot fetish. “Then why don’t you ever eat?”
His expression slowly twisted. In the rearview mirror, I saw acid leak into his eyes. “Because it all tastes like the
I fell back against the seat, startled into silence as he drove on, eyes boring into the road before us.
We entered a residential area of large, rolling yards. Iron fences enclosed wooded drives, old elms screened houses buttoned tight by latched iron gates. I recognized this Belmont neighborhood; in college I had attended a party here at the family home of a friend-of-a-friend. I had been struck by the sheer size of the house, awed by the French table clocks, chinoiserie secretaries, and mahogany sideboards that whispered “heirloom” and “old money,” each of them at anachronistic odds with the modern security system panels and television sets. Someone had set a sweating beer bottle on top of a Queen Anne table and I had discretely removed it, trying to save the old oak the indignity of a ring.
For years I returned whenever I found myself in the area, to admire the gabled roofs and columned porticoes, the dark shutters and diamond-paned windows, to tell myself that when I got caught up at work, I would pull out one of my own manuscripts and finish it. And when that day came—the one with the six-figure advance and movie deal—I would buy a place here where my kids could play on the lawn or ride their Big Wheels in front of the garage, where our two family cars—one of them an SUV and the other an Audi sedan—were parked inside. When the kids were old enough, they could go off to the local private school, complete with its own ice-hockey rink.
I indeed finished the manuscript and sold it in a three-book deal as the Coming Home series. But I never bought the house. The first book sold fewer than 3,500 copies, and the series was cancelled after the release of the second. Had it stayed in print long enough, I was sure it would have done better, but the unsold copies returned too quickly, their shelf space surrendered to higher volume tenants.
