I sing the arms and the man—well, no.

Afraid, she sent me, my holy mother, from out of the sea to live among these women. Unbound my hair and loose my loins; it was a quiet time. Spinning, weaving, the quiet of an afternoon with only the sound of the distant sea for company, the muffled sounds of conversation drifting from the men’s quarter. Peaceful, as I had never known peace. Here in this sunless land, the blood winedark and cooling upon my lips, it seems to me an endless summer, the breezes soft upon the down of my face, the nights ripe as an unplucked berry.

Even now, my fingers long for wool and spindle.

You came, canny, wild, and old, while I was hard at work helping weave a peplos for my foster mother. Not trusted yet—and rightly not!—to handle the shuttle myself, I could nevertheless stand and attend against the day when I might turn my own hand to the loom. A not unfamiliar discipline. How strange you seemed in the afternoon, how alien, even as you scattered well-known toys before us. I reached for the sword when the alarm was raised, and thus you knew me—I scorned the pins and daggers closer to hand, more sure and deadly. I have cursed you for your wiles, cursed myself, cursed the gods for their vanity, but long years and silence have worn me smooth as a river stone.

What a weaver I might have been!

In the middle of the night an egg.

It was Gay’s cafe originally, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, forty eight weeks a year—she took two weeks off, spring and fall, for her vacations—rain, snow, drought, fire, it made no difference. She had a generator out back and the freezer was a dirt cellar before it was a walk-in; the only time she closed it was when St. Helens burst and the whole town was evacuated. Even then she was the last out and the first back.

But then Oran kept through, and he was a talker. Charming, clever in small doses, affable as long as things were going his way; you know the type. Smoked too much weed and made a few too many bold claims: he used to work for Boeing (he said) but he left (he said) because he didn’t want the company claiming the patent (he said) for the motorless freight carrier he’d invented (he said). Gonna revolutionize hauling, just as soon as he got it working at full scale.

He spun her round his finger, and after a while they were living together, and a while after that he started helping out around the diner, and then it wasn’t too long before he was doing more and more, and then Gay left for her spring vacation and just didn’t come back. Staying with her sister down at Rockaway, he said. He was just keeping the lights on, he said.

Lies, of course; he’d locked her in the basement and kept her down there for years while we figured she’d merely got wise and cut her losses. We didn’t get the straight of it until the son he’d kept locked down with her broke the lock and hacked his nuts off with a kitchen knife. Served him right. He was at Coyote Ridge for a while before they shipped him out of state; up to Montana somewhere, maybe.

Anyway, Gay doesn’t work the grill much these days, but the son still does. Corran’s his name; he’s not much of a talker.

“Shoot,” he says, the lazy son, the clever one. “I’ll wrassle ya, if you’re so het up about it.”

The stranger grins in that inhumanly beautiful way they had, and they drop into a wrassler’s crouch, hands held out like there was an invisible beer bottle in ‘em, as if to say, watch out for broken glass. Heelgripper, he pops a similar squat and they circle each other in the fading firelight, serious enough but also friendly. Nobody’s after grievous bodily harm, but it wouldn’t be the first time a body left a friendly wrassle permanently the worse for wear, nor the last; he might be a jackass with more lip than sense, but he’s not a fool. His time in exile has beaten some of his early bad habits out of him; his life in the hills has left him rich, strong, and be-sonned.

He gives as good as he gets, least for the first few hours, but the stranger keeps grinning that immobile, inhuman grin, eyes warm and friendly and fixed, even as they take turns flopping each other into the dust, and it ain’t long before he realizes the fix is in and he is a damfool, but by that point the fire’s long burned to ashes and the sun’s peaking over the hills.