Eyes are not the window to a man's soul.
They are the window to a man's body.

And so his tenure as Vice-President of Sales at GreenAge Vendors ended;

Kip hadn't even planned on going to the GreenAge company dinner, but, at the urging of a very urgent Katrina, he decided it was better than the very cold shoulder of the alternative. He also did not plan to swear violently when his car bumped over the quivering body of a raccoon, an event that, additionally, he had not planned.

Neither had Kip meant to graze the left buttock of the President's wife during the company swing dance; she hadn't meant to mistake Kip for a rapist she'd seen on the news and scream bloody murder; the President hadn't meant to throw several punches (or at least hadn't meant to miss); and the pitcher of iced tea couldn't have possibly meant to spill all over the wall socket, starting the horrendous and destructive fire that would consume the entirety of GreenAge Headquarters by mid-evening.

Needless to say, Kipling Pilgrim considered himself lucky not to be charged with animal cruelty, sexual harassment, disturbing the peace, and arson, respectively.

Kezia recalled the story with a somewhat impish delight; her laugh grated slightly against Kip's insides, but her face soothed the small pains away. As she recited it to him, she grasped his hand at regular intervals, her voice becoming more gentle, her husk more of a coo, until the tiny tendrils beneath his cheeks released the red blotches of embarrassment.

The softest winds were bending the blades when the suns set, and Kip could smell the faintest odor of blood, carried warmly by a receding tidal zephyr; a drop of the sanguine in a sea that rushed to meet the ocean.

Kezia laughed.

Kip's father had always said that you can tell more about a person through their laugh than any other aspect of their entire being; then again, Kip had heard the expression in ten different ways, all suggesting that different facets were far more valid than this, that, laughs.

But Kezia's laugh wasn't what Kip had expected. He'd expected something silvery; something like a brook in a forest, a waterfall cascading, some poetic crap like that. A light, airy, fey something.

Instead, it was a sound similar to that of shucking corn;

a husk, husk, husk.

He found it oddly reassuring.

"What are you?"

Husk, husk. "We are you, Kip Pilgrim."

"You know I don't understand that."

"I suppose not!" Husk.

"So will you tell me?"

"I did. We are you. Just a different aspect. A different facet. For each human, there is one of us."

"Why?"

"Believe it or not, humans aren't the only ones searching for the purpose in life."

Kip blinked at that.

He picked a blade of glass, held it to the suns. They shone through rather like the skylight in the hospital, he thought.

Kezia nodded. "Yes, it certainly does. I spent a lot of time in that room with you."

"What?"

"I spent a lot of time there. I was there when she died." Kip stiffened. "When you woke up. Both times. When you fell."

"Why did I fall?"

We all fall.

He felt her words spiral inside his forearms, twisting, churning. His tongue tasted bitter. He heard nothing but the grass scraping against itself, the clouds brushing each other.

"The world is quiet, here," she said. The words fell like leaves on Kip's feet, brushing his toes. He heard the leaves settle on the ground, laughed, a stuttering, breaking thing; he couldn't remember the last time he had laughed.

"Why, yes; yes, it is."

The suns began their descent, the shadows lengthened; Kezia cast none.

If there was one thing Kip Pilgrim remembered about his wedding night, it was the heat; the intolerable heat.

Katrina was beautiful, excited, wonderful; Kip was hot, burning up, tired, afraid.

It was as though all the warmth in her body had gathered in one spot, and he was repulsed by it. It felt wrong, it felt wrong, too hot, too many coals, too much glowing metal, red tongs, this is torture.

He never felt it but for that one day; but something about the heat shamed him. It stained her wedding gown with scarlet, painted the marriage bed incarnadine; every night after, fear came again, anticipation of the warmth and the fire.

He never realized that he had a fever, and that Katrina was just as afraid as he was; afraid of the cauterization of love's first touch.

All his life, he'd heard of heroes and villains.

Kip momentarily wondered why the villains were always more worth knowing.

When he leaned against the wall, arm spread across, head rested on the forearm, panting, sighing, crying;

when he kissed her for the first time, hands held, lips meeting in an infinitesimal space of time that passed, a sparrow, a patch quickly torn, breathing, sighing, smiling;

when he fell into the void, arms flailing, voice cracking, eyes searching, searching, screaming, sighing, dying;

he let go of his heart; he let go of his soul; he gave it away; and breathed in bone dry quicksilver, coughing, hacking, sinfully stopping the beat, the grave a mile away, a mile beneath his feet; he let go. He fell. He gave.

With that, Kip Pilgrim had lost his begierd; had given it; had let it fall. Each moment was frozen; crystals in the cabinet; there, there, here, here; forever.

Kip felt like he was wearing a mask. He wanted to tear it off, throw it away, but every time his fingers grabbed the edges and pulled, scrabbling spiders wrenching at the seams, it hurt, it burnt; the mask must've been fused to his head, the way it felt. He realized that he would have to remove his own skin before it would come off.

His eyes were screaming, screaming past their lids, past their lashes. Blood coursed through them, a vein of quartz full of precious, living gold.

They'd been screaming for hours and hours, begging to be closed, begging to rest, but Kip had no intention of satisfying them. There was work to be done.

Each and every stump in front of City Hall was to be covered in sheep intestines. That was the plan, and he was sticking to it. It did not matter that there were over seventy stumps. He had an entire truckload of offal, and he had the will.

He had his tools; a five gallon bucket, a shovel, a spade. Shovel the guts into the bucket, carry the bucket to the stump, slather, slather, slather, scream.

No one had seen him yet. It was three in the morning, thirty stumps done. Thirty bloody stumps, torn limbs, severed heads, bleeding bodies.

"God," Kip swore, "the Mayor better be pissed."

Of course, that was the whole idea. Piss off the Mayor, save the trees down on Main Street.

Kip stopped, looked at the spade in his hand, the blood on his shirt; the utter horror of what he was doing hit him in the chest like his bloody shovel, point first. Upon further inflection, he had a hard time remembering why, exactly, this had ever been a good idea. Gory bits of slime made a sopping blanket under his feet, and he was struck by the fact that all those guts smelled like dung.

That's what his father had told him:

"War smells like crap."

He'd never thought he meant it literally.

He dropped his spade into the bucket and walked towards the truck; eyes wailing, hands shaking, heart pounding, pounding, pounding,

war.

The girl sat next to him, slipped her tiny feet between the velvety blades, wiped a tinge of sable from her cheek.

Kip extended a hand, touched her knee. Felt it touch him back.

"You're real."

She smiled. "Yes. All of this is real."

A surge of joy splashed over his senses. Something about this place, this child, this glade, these clouds; something about it sang hope. He heard the trees whisper, whisper, Live, for all is lost, all is lost;

all is lost
all is found
all is forgotten

all is lost
all is found
all is given away

it's not the end
it's just one tongue

for all is lost, all is lost, whisper, whisper.

For the first time in his life, Kip felt no shame; and in that perfect absence of shame, he felt the dying son of that hope;

the girl must have sensed it, smiled at the sensing of it; smiled with no darkness in her eyes, in her hair, in her limbs.

"My name is Kezia."

Live, for all is lost, all is lost.

"Kezia," murmuring, whisper, whisper.

Kip was drunk. Intensely drunk, blisteringly drunk, maniacally drunk; happily drunk.

Everything tasted like flowers when it hit his tongue.

Kip had made a fool of himself. He knew that. He couldn't remember how, though.

But Katrina remembered. Boy, oh boy, Katrina remembers, I'm catching hell for that. Giggle.

Katrina remembered, very well, how Kip had staggered to the front of the room, stood on a table, stoutly inquired why flowers smelled so good and tasted so piss, stoutly wet himself in front of a sizable audience.

Katrina took him home and put him to bed.

But on the car ride home, Kip had felt obliged to share more deep thoughts, mostly relating to picnics, lightning, and the size of the sex organs on most mammals, specifically whales, and how that related to their culture.

She had borne the tide with great long suffering, had tucked him in, kissed him goodnight, calmly wiped the saliva of his overly enthusiastic kiss onto her dress, smashed into her chair. She believed very strongly that it was of no use to reprimand a drunk. The sober feel more pain.