Scott Nicholson - Forever never ends

Dignity wasn't a gift given by others, and there was no easy ticket into utopia. Dignity came with consciousness and breath. Compassion was more important than life or death, or those terrible states of existence in between. And utopia had its own problems.

In that one glimpse of shu-shaaa, he’d seen both the beauty and the emptiness of cosmic union. When all was one, there were never two.

He read the rest of Mayzie's poetry.

Bill looked out over the meadows at the foot of Fool's Knob, at the Lord's great natural work. He could almost imagine the pressed place in the grass where he and Nettie had joined in the flesh.

He still had his memories, even if they were starting to fade with the passing of time. The bad memories had fallen away, the sharp edges of nightmare had dulled, the old pains were dead and buried.

But the good ones faded, too, and that made him sad. He could barely picture Nettie's eyes. He knew they were dark brown and deep, but he couldn't quite recollect how they made crescents when she smiled. He didn't remember her voice clearly, even now, here in the field with the sparrows making their songs and the breeze tickling the jack pines. He had to breathe deeply and swell his chest to catch a faint reminder of the smell of her skin.

But they would be meeting in the sweet bye-and-bye. It was just a matter of being patient until the Lord willed him home. He only wished he could have given Nettie a good Christian burial. But she had dissolved like the others.

He couldn't bury her flesh, and her soul was far gone to a better place.

He hollowed out a depression in the damp soil with his fingers, scratching at the roots of clover and dandelions. He picked a buttercup and laid it gently in the shallow grave and pressed the dirt over the bright yellow petals.

Tomorrow was Easter, a day of rebirth. But today was just another day spent sealed inside a dark cave, waiting.

He knelt in the grass and prayed, then stood in the meadow and looked way off.

Tamara put down the magazine she'd been reading. Ginger and Kevin were playing Sorry on the living room rug. It wasn't cold, but Robert had built a fire in the fireplace anyway. The flames were loud and cheery.

Robert sat beside her on the couch and kissed her on the neck. "I'm going to kiss you every five minutes for the rest of your life."

"Can I have that in writing?"

"Hey, you know me well enough by now. After all we've been through?"

"We can get through anything as long as we stick together," she said. So maybe that was corny. She didn't care. It was true, whether dealing with otherworldly invasions or the stresses of everyday life.

"You still haven't told me about-"

"And I will, when the time's right. There are still a lot of things I need to figure out."

"I'm sorry for the way I acted. About the-”

“Gloomies. And being selfish.”

“And doubting you. And for… you know."

"Shhh. I know. You're only human, thank goodness." She touched him lightly on the head. "I understand. I've been there, remember?"

“Are you going to read my mind for the rest of my life?”

“That’s what wives do.”

She looked at Ginger. Her face was scrunched from concentrating on the game. Kevin was too old for Sorry, but he played because Ginger asked him. He was a good brother.

Tamara had been overloaded with powers after the explosion, almost as if shu-shaaa’s dying spirit had jumped into her head. And she'd been able to do all kinds of odd things. Reading minds was easy, she could handle that. It was the other stuff that scared her, like being able to move objects with her thoughts and making the tree branches bend a certain way and making the clouds gather in the sky. And she believed, though she never tried, that she could make the earth move a little faster in its orbit or the moon drop down for a good-night kiss.

And Tamara had sensed Ginger's powers, somehow a miniature, immature version of her own. No person should be so cursed. Nobody should have to see the future.

She didn't want Ginger to be followed around by Gloomies for the rest of her life. So she had sucked up those powers, vacuumed them out of the corners of Ginger's mind by a process she couldn't describe in a thousand psychology papers.

Ginger turned away from her game, smiled at Tamara, then took a drink of hot chocolate. Just a normal six-year-old girl. She picked up a crayon with two bare toes and put it to her mouth and bit it.

Well, maybe not TOO normal.

Tamara wished she could get rid of her own powers as easily. She didn't think she had the wisdom to wield them. She didn't think any mortal did.

But the powers were fading. Nothing lasted forever, and she now knew that was a good thing. What still bothered her was the lingering memory of the shu-shaaa’s dying cry.

Each night when Tamara closed her eyes and hunted for sleep, the cry haunted her. The cry was one of pain, an agony brought by understanding, because at the last, it had realized the destruction it had wrought on this world.

Just before the explosion, it had linked with Tamara and translated the strange pattern of human language and thought. It had finally understood the price of its own survival. And, in its alien way, it suffered regret. It had joined with Tamara and the others in that huge tidal wave of togetherness that had swept it to destruction.

The creature had accepted its death so that others might live.

In Tamara’s darkest hours, when Robert snored and the sheets were damp, she wondered if perhaps the alien had been more human than any of them.

Across the cosmos, in the nibbled edges of nebulae and Oort clouds and asteroid belts and white dwarves, shu-shaaa paused in its star grazing. The members felt a small prick as one of their collective died. There was no pain, only an emptiness that was quickly filled and forgotten.

They resumed their feeding.