and skulls spiked on ramparts. This was progress as largesse, violence shorn down to evolutionary impulse. For him, an eight-pound trigger pull, the drop of the plunger, the whine of a drone—these were the products of men being men, a call of the wild as distinctive as a roar.
His oohs and aahs died in the wind as the bathtub twisted, an awkward porcelain projectile turning from blackish blur to whitish speck, until it disappeared from his sight entirely; he listened intently, then heard the muffled explosion as the tub bounded to a halt among the other snowy lumps on the valley floor.
“That sure is something,” a woman remarked from behind.
Jeb turned around but could only see the haze of a figure mired by the light refracting off the snow.
“Marchella’s not here. She went into the city.”
“I was hoping to speak with you.”
“You know whose property this is?” Jeb asked, taking off his mitt and reaching for the guidewire underneath his hand.
“I don’t, actually.”
“The old saw ‘do me a kindness’ doesn’t roost here, friend. I’m sure you can find your own way home.”
His sight must be the shits, Jeb thought. Normally, he could make out shapes (the shadows or impressions of features, the depressions of the eye sockets), but the woman seemed all but faceless. A strange course of electricity seemed to ripple through her body.
“You a godly man?”
“You a nun?”
“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m more like a debt collector.”
“That so?”
“To astronomers, the stars are nothing more than red shifts, distance, and chemical composition,” she branched off. “These people ask us to acknowledge our insignificance every time we look at them: ‘The sun is larger than a million Earths. The stars are billions of miles away.’ But for most of us, when we look at the stars, we don’t feel insignificant. In fact, we’re buoyed. The stars do more than ‘exist a long ways away.’ They connect us through history and through time: from the Blackfoot to the Greeks. There’s a spiritual dimension that is exempt from empirical measures. This is how I see humanity—to study the stars is to study the light of humanity.”
“That’s all well and good, but you’re in the Bible belt. We believe in the good Lord and saviour here, not your mumbo-jumbo.”
“You’re absolutely right. And I’m here to collect that,” she persisted.
Jeb just waved her off, becoming impatient. “I’m sorry if I wasn’t being direct before. Maybe you would prefer I told you to fuck off!”
Jeb began to make his way back home, but the woman stepped in front of him. Even this close, Jeb couldn’t make out distinguishing features. Like a roiling mist, she seemed to have no solidity. The figure reached out and touched the guidewire, and suddenly Jeb felt cut off from the world, as though the neuronal pathways between his brain and limbs had been severed. Panic began to well up in him—thinking about his rifle mounted on the boot-room wall.
“You’re swimming in the dark,” she said.
“What do you want?” Jeb said.
“Like I said, I’ve come to collect on your debt.”
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