VIVIENNE’S EYES

The bells on the door tinkle; she steps inside to the sound of strangers’ laughter and the smell of fried food. A fork clatters against a plate, a malt glass slams too hard on the counter, the smoky waitress shouts “Order up!” to the cook in his grease-stained apron.

And through it all I feel her presence, feel the room tilt as she turns toward us.

Her eyes burn into me, and oh my God, those eyes . . .

How shall I describe to you Vivienne’s eyes?

They are not easy eyes — neither soft and warm like a mother’s, nor exalted and lit like a lover’s. Sooty lashes, almond in shape, haunted, obsidian-dark; intelligent, unyielding, fixed. Her smile never lands there and doesn’t now, as she approaches with solemn composure, surveying the room with her weighted gaze — as though each face were a ledger to be read, a calculation silently tallied, nothing escaping the relentless arithmetic of her attention.

This is no fiery seductress.

She is Justice without the blind.

Her eyes hold no sparkle, only gravity and perception —

— all-seeing, unfeeling, feral.

Awake.

Like me.

One of my kind.

A CONSPIRACY OF FATE

“I don’t want to be associated with the story I’m about to tell, and short of wearing a mask to our session, I saw no other way to go about this.”

THE PARDON

“ . . . He dreamt of cold places, vast steppes, cascading avalanches. He dreamt of steaming, ice-rimed cenotes bathed in blackness and phosphorescent glow, and tiny invisible cracks that yawned into enormous fissures, and endless mazes of bottomless crevasses. And even in the dream he’d marveled — how had all these dangerous things been so cleverly concealed beneath a flawless field of driven, virgin snow?”