Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 47 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2010-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

I spend most of the next sixteen years watching over the Boy, afraid to see signs of my Master’s plan, signs of the other messenger; afraid that my Master will pull me away from the Boy. Afraid to enter the Boy and see the answer.

Every once in a while I visit his mother in what I now call my human-form-for-Maria. That’s the only human form I know. I reveal my presence with a white lily, and each time she blushes, finding it. She nuzzles the petals, her eyes searching for my shape. “Gabriel, you silly man,” she sometimes chastises me, “It’s winter!”

I like it when she sits me to a bowl of pottage or tells me about her day. When I listen to her, the words of the Wise One become mute pebbles, a handful among many. I can throw them away. Sometimes she wonders what future holds for the Boy. I say I do not know.

But without her, worry gnaws at me, and the Wise One’s words come alive. If only I could peek inside the Boy, just once, then I would know what he is capable of! I am tempted, oh so tempted! One day I find him at the sea shore, mending a boat. Alone. I succumb to temptation, I take possession of him.

It feels almost familiar, as if he is still an unborn child. But there is something — something that grinds at me. A dry, rushed patter — his heart does not beat, it speaks in tongues. A tangle that draws ever tighter as if devouring itself from the inside out. Suddenly, the Boy’s body slams the sand. He twists and flips like the fish he catches; acid and bile surge the wrong way through his gut. Scared, I exit him.

What have I done?!

He lies flat, his eyes and mouth are frosted with sand, his stomach is deflated and droopy on the rack of his pelvis and ribs. But he comes to by the time I summon Maria to the scene. I have no courage to tell her I may have caused his seizure. I keep a tight watch, pondering the nature of the tangle inside him, but nothing else happens, and I am almost relieved.

One day I visit again, and Maria and I are kneeling by her hearth, she is kindling a fire, I pass wood shavings and twigs to her so she could arrange them in the way she likes. Our heads almost touch. She tells me that she was such a confused and selfish little girl back in the day, that she did not think with her head, and that she cannot believe how bold — and casual — she was with me. But when she lifts her head to glance at me, her blue-green eyes are shining and I know she does not regret a single thing.

The Boy picks up on her smile when he walks in on us. He must not have seen this kind of smile ever on her face.

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