“Was she murdered?” the sergeant says.
Yama closes his nondescript notebook after pressing the dull-tipped pencil against the book’s interior spine.
The body…scratch that he mutters and chastens himself, the woman, the dead woman, on the open metal stairwell was, herself, nondescript.
Yama looks at the sergeant.
She sees his frown.
“Sorry, sir.”
He exhales.
“Don’t be,” he says. “I don’t know. When will Doctor Dodson arrive?”
The sergeant looks at her tablet. “Ah, by eighteen hundred.”
Yama nods. “Good. And sergeant…”
He moves close to her and in a barely audible whisper says, “Don’t let them move her.”
Yama looks at her.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant says.
“Very good.”
“And, sir,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I’m under orders to take you to the Armory. Or arrest you for disobeying a direct…”
His phone alerts him. “I need to take this.”
He leaves the sergeant. He moves out of the stairwell.
He brings the device up to his ear.
“Hi, Vic,” he says. “It’s good to hear your voice again.”
***
The ocean water is warm.
This is long ago; a different time.
Yama is young.
He closes his eyes.
The sun is high overhead. He feels it on his arms, his legs, his body, nude, on this isolated run of beach.
The sky is so blue and cloudless. So blue, one could fall into it.
He walks into the surf. The water is past his knees, past the stitches on his groin.
“It’s alright,” she says, behind him. “Your wound is waterproof.”
Yama lets his body float in the salt water.
He’s buoyant.
And he’s weak.
She knows it.
Yama feels her hands under his armpits.
“Easy,” she says. “You’re not a hundred percent. By any stretch of your imagination. You won’t be for a while, given what they did to you.”
Yama doesn’t care.
He’s floating.
A wave washes over him.
Her breasts, bound in her swimming suit, press against his upper back.
“I’ve got you,” she says.
He wants her to let him go, to let him drift. But, yet, he doesn’t want her to let him go, to let him drift.
Above, the Stigmata taints that clear blue cloudless sky. This is the time when those interstellar dust clouds are just beginning to announce their presence in our world.
“They say it’ll eventually blot out the sun,” she says.
“You believe anything they say?” he says.
He knows her enough to feel her frown.
And he closes his eyes and lets another ocean wave wash over him.
And she still holds him.
And yet, in the still of midnight, when they lay in the narrow bed, her nude back to him, the sheet draped over her hip, he hears crickets for the first time this summer.
He knows their Fall is coming.
Crickets sigh loud…
A Lover’s bed also sighs
And Beckons the Scarecrow
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