Randall was her high school crush, her old flame, and though small in stature his smile was long and deep, his words quiet, his eyes luminous, and in his sagging jeans he always carried himself like a king. He had traveled through many of her dreams, waking and asleep. Once on a time, he had injected a verse of a song into her yearbook, small handwriting indecipherable as sea-wrack, almost hidden among the flaccidly sincere well-wishing and jokes of the few others who had signed their names between its covers. He himself had not written his name under that twisted suggestion of love, but she knew it was him, and long cherished a false memory--or was it true?--of watching him in one of the underground halls under dim fluorescent lights with the book angled against his lean body, taking his time.

They ran into each other in some industrial sized hotel, on a wine-dark carpet, headed vaguely toward a fancy looking buffet with overcooked entrees and too many desserts disguised as food or art. He was older now, and walked with a cane. She found a few bits of stuff to put on a plate, headed to one of the large tables, and saw him again. His daughter sat by him, young, clever and beautiful. He was telling a story, but Ariana couldn't hear the words and she was studying his face, which fell somewhere between George Harrison and a tragic chestnut-haired elf king. Yes, he was older now, as she was, the horror and pain of being boxed together with two thousand adolescents, half cruel, half curled into shells behind frightened smirks, now all miraculously vanished into other worlds or unraveled like balls of string and never seen again, thank god. He had married, as she had, though at the moment, she and he were traveling each in their own direction up or down the vast western coast and their spouses were elsewhere.

He was as she had remembered, bursting with an odd brilliance and warmth under his quiet exterior. They spoke pleasantries, while in her mind she remembered he had always put a glass of water by his bed, and she remembered the exact shape and size of his erection. She remembered words of his love letters, the pearl buttons on the shirt he had made, but mostly she watched his face, now creased as a redwood trunk in a forest, now seemingly lit with long columns of sun flickering with dust-motes, as he spoke to her, and then she confessed to him she had never really gotten over him.

His face became human again, his arm went round her, a peace offering, she thought. They embraced awkwardly even now, even after traveling across such a great ocean of fifty-odd years. And the young girl was gathered in as well, the three of them, he, she, and the daughter who might have been theirs but who had been born to another woman of the same name. It was just a coincidence, to share that name that was neither common, nor uncommon, with an unknown wife.

She knew he had gone through many lovers; so had she. Some had been magnificent, some had been weasels, some confident bastards who had tortured her, and one had been kind.

Back then when they were young, Randall had deselected her for good reasons, but she hadn't understood at the time, though in hindsight the unintended insult (one should not attempt to give pet names to men of nobility) the poison of her own anxiety, and the hormonal toxins in the early birth control pills that had made her functionally insane, all became obvious to her, not that he didn't have his own problems, then.

Here in this blond-walled neutral stockyard of travelers they met again, and made a silent mutual agreement not to pick apart the past, but to let it lie on its long far-distant beach, encased in a white pickup truck like a sleeper in a glass coffin, suspended in moonbeams, parked in the glamour and dissatisfaction of having had everything you wanted, almost.

The child went to bed. They walked out to a balcony in the night. Randall limped, leaning on an antique cane, a strange old artifact with an ivory handle and a blackwood shaft, with worked silver bands encircling it. It made her think of a wizard's staff in a story like and unlike her own. And then he turned his face to the wall in the darkness and for a moment she knew his pain, and let it flood through her because what else could she do, and she was thankful, thankful for all of him and for the wreck of her life, and then he turned so quickly she knew it couldn't be real and their faces came close, breathing the shared air between their lips, the skin barely touching, warm, cold, a garden of petals in the black night. They gathered the nectar of one another for the few short moments they might have.

His cane had fallen, but she held him, touching his back beneath his shirt, moving over the separate muscles, still miraculously taut as when he was young. He must still exercise, she thought. It's as if he were a field hand, harvesting... whatever they harvest. And then as all embraces end, so did this one. The child was calling.

She bent to pick up his cane for him, but it had grown longer and more elaborate in detail while on the ground. She wondered at the combination of smooth exotic woods, ivory, subtle carving and silverwork. There was some cleverly concealed mechanism by means of which it had expanded to the full height of a man. The handle, too, had changed, flattening and stretching into a curved ceremonial blade lined with runes, and though it was hard to tell in the soft low light, she recognized it for an object of power.

A scythe, to be precise.

The kiss was worth it, she thought, as she handed it back to its owner.