“Like what?”
“Like being good and nice and happy. That’s what will make people want to play with you and be around you.” I reach out toward the magazine, and she loosens her grip, letting me take it. “Pretty only matters in pictures.”
I rise and hand the magazine to her father. Unbidden, my mind starts spiraling out of control, picturing this little girl, this man who I can’t help but notice wears no ring, and me. I start picturing what it would be like to have that kind of life, something I never allow myself to do, and the look he gives me and the brush of his fingers over mine don’t help me shut it down.
I stick out my hand when I should be walking away. Running even.
“I’m Kalli.”
His hand is big and warm around mine. The earlier brush of his fingers is completely eclipsed by the strength and surety of his grip. And the inspiration swirls in me, like a storm gathering on the sea, clamoring for him. His eyes trail over my face and then down. His perusal is quick, and his eyes pull back to mine fast. He’s trying to be a gentleman, but that intensity is still there in his gaze, and I feel it burn through my veins. Desire engulfs me, and I can no longer differentiate between it and the unnatural energy that rests just behind my ribs.
“Wilder,” he says, his voice deeper, raspier. And all I want to do is touch him, to know what he’s thinking, to study just where the wholesome and good half of him gives way to the sin I see in his eyes.
I’m almost lost to it, almost ready to push inspiration into this complete stranger, because the buzz I feel around him is addictive. And the release, oh gods, it would be so good.
But I can’t. Absolutely can’t. I have to be careful even with my artists not to overload them, not to give them too much. And it’s so much easier to pass that point with someone who’s not already open to his or her creative side.
Too much and I could ruin him. Ruin this perfect life he has.
And I might do this kind of thing out of necessity, but I don’t have it in me to be that selfish. The other gods might think of mortals as less than them, but I’ve walked among them for millennium. They are not less to me. In fact, I’m more jealous of them than I’ll ever admit aloud.
I’m saved from the temptation when Gwen latches onto my wrist, pulling my hand away from his so that she can have a turn at shaking, too.
“I’m Gwen!” she says, not even really shaking my hand, so much as pulling it toward her, pulling me toward her.
“It’s so very nice to meet you, Gwen.”
This is too much.
Too hard.
I tuck that same stubborn curl behind her ear and say, “I have to go. You be good for your Dad.”
I pull my hand away and stumble back. Wilder protests, says “No,” followed by a series of other words that I don’t hear because I’m already on my way to the door, leaving my ice cream and cookies and everything else behind.
I’m not normal. I won’t ever be.
Dealing with artists does get old. And I hate that I’m living the same story on repeat. But better that than to rub salt in my millennium-old wounds by letting myself get close to the things I can’t have.
Wilder and Gwen are coming out of the store as I pull out of my parking spot. Rather than crossing into the parking lot, they stop on the sidewalk and stare as I pull closer to them, toward the exit.
Gwen’s little hand waves wildly at me, but it’s Wilder’s steady, piercing gaze that has me locking up behind the wheel. He lifts a hand, one side of his mouth ticking up in an almost smile that is somehow even more handsome than the grin he shot me earlier.
As I pull out onto the street, I resist the urge to glance in my rear view mirror.
Eternity has never felt quite as long as it feels right now.
Chapter Two
Swift and sure, my life course corrects back to normal.
History and poets have assigned many attributes to time.
It flies. It dies. It heals all wounds.
But for me, time is so much more. Sometimes she’s a torturer. Others a reward. She’s been a friend. A foe. A nuisance. A nobody. My relationship with her is an ever-changing cycle, but one thing is always certain.
Time is my surest constant.
The scenery changes. The costumes. The players.
But a second is a second is a second until the very end of it all.
Lesson #1 of Immortality:
Accept time for what it is. It can go no faster or slower. Only life can do that.
And my life goes back to its normal speed for nine days.
For nine days, I go to class. I go to the gym (mostly for something to do since losing weight and gaining muscle aren’t really possible with my specific … peculiarities). I choose another grocery store to stock up on college essentials (re: ice cream). And I spend my lunch hours sitting outside various artistically-focused buildings on campus, scoping out possible candidates for my next mutually beneficial relationship.
Maybe scoping is the wrong word. More like eliminating everyone I come across. I need a break. I need some time to just be me before I have to ingratiate myself to another person, before I have to lie about my past and mold myself into some guy’s vision of the perfect woman.
By day nine, I know I’m being too picky. I don’t get to take breaks. I don’t get to just be me. Not without paying the price.
But even so, I continue discounting every guy I see.
Too much chest hair (Dude, when it’s peeking out of a crew neck t-shirt, it’s time to suck it up and tame that beast).
Pointy eyebrows (Shallow, I know, but it made him look like a cheesy movie villain, and I just couldn’t look at him with a straight face).
Dickface (By this I mean that the guy was a jerk … not that his face actually looked like a dick. Although if I had anywhere near the power of the greater gods and could mete out penalties and blessings whenever I pleased, I’d think that would be a pretty creative and deserved punishment).
But still … in the back of my mind, day nine is on repeat, and I can feel the urgency clinging to me. Where the creative energy normally sits comfortably in my chest, I’ve gone long enough now since that last touch with Van that I’m starting to feel it in other places too. My belly. The back of my throat. The tips of my fingers. The top of my spine.
That last place especially. It sits there, coiling around my neck, creeping up into my head until I can feel the way it pushes at my mind, insists that I do something … or it will.
I can’t explain what keeps me from choosing, except that I’m tired. So very tired. And for the first time ever, that outweighs my fear of the consequences. And I keep telling myself that I can go a little longer. I’m not cutting it too close. I know my limits.
Mortals used to think disease was caused by imbalances and overabundances in the body. They would bleed patients in an attempt to restore balance and fight off disease. Of course, as the world grew in knowledge, they realized how wrong they were, how barbaric and harmful the treatment really was. But that’s actually how it works for me. The longer I go, the more the energy builds up in me, and in its raw state it’s even more potent than when I push it into others. If I lock it up inside, if I don’t reset the balance …
Well, it starts with the headaches. Those are my first warning sign. Then the mood swings. Then I start losing track of time, getting caught up in flights of creative fancy. My thoughts tangle and twine, and I can lose hours, days even, wrapped up in my own mind.
What happens after that? I don’t know. I’ve never really let it get that far. But I’ve seen it. Roughly a thousand years ago, in the period history now calls the Dark Ages. It’s named such for the lack of historical records from the period, but for me the name fits in better ways. We were all still together then, my sisters and I. There were nine of us, all muses, each with our own purposes and specialties. By the end of that century, we would all go our separate ways, scattered across the globe, but it would only be eight of us.
&nb
sp; I’m not sure how long I’ve been singing softly to myself when I draw myself back to the present, away from lives past, but a handful of people at nearby benches and trees are watching me, slightly dazed. I clamp my mouth shut, but they continue to stare.
As muses, we have as much of an aptitude for the arts as we do for inspiring them. But it’s an unspoken rule that we don’t seek to create anything ourselves. It’s hard enough to hide among humans and do what we do without being able to change our appearances. Any kind of notoriety threatens our ability to conceal ourselves and live in the world. There’s a reason I’m trolling a college campus rather than finding my next relationship in Hollywood or New York or Paris. I find my artists when they’re still finding themselves. It’s better for me that way, feels like I’m actually making a difference and helping them. There’s also no fame involved (not yet anyway), so I don’t risk getting photographed or noticed or otherwise exposed.
I need the world, need the people in it. Muses can’t survive without it. We can only expend our energy with mortals, otherwise we would have withdrawn with the rest of the gods. And they might have left us here, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching. Doesn’t mean they won’t intervene if one of us jeopardizes the rest.
They’ve done it before. And they won’t hesitate to cut us down to seven if they must.
I gather my belongings and decide to skip my next class in favor of checking out the offerings of the music library (the people, not the music). On my way, I catch sight of the flashing red and white lights of an ambulance by the on-campus apartments between here and the fine arts buildings. I’m heading that way anyway, so I cross that direction until I get to the group of students standing, blocking the sidewalk and waiting.
I nudge a bigger guy next to me as he texts rapidly on his cell.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
It’s the curvy redhead on my right that answers. “Suicide.”
“Attempted,” the Hispanic guy next to her corrects.
“I don’t know. I have a friend who lives in the building, and she said he hung himself.”
“Pills,” the guy with the phone finally answers. “I know the guy who found him. It was pills.”
At that moment, the front door opens, and they wheel out a stretcher. One paramedic is rolling it toward the ambulance. The other has one of those respirator things fitted over the guy’s mouth, and is squeezing it periodically. The crowd begins to shift and whisper, pushing forward in morbid curiosity as the stretcher arrives at the ambulance. They lift the patient up, high enough that I’ve got a clear view, and for all my thoughts about time being a constant, I swear it slows to a stop then.
Because I recognize the dark, shaggy hair. The shape of the face. Even with that oxygen thing over his nose and mouth, and his unusually pale skin, I know with a bone deep certainty that it’s Van.
My Van.
I’ve seen his face in the brightness of day, scruffy from not shaving, and clean and smooth. I’ve seen him in the low light of his room, sleeping and awake. I’ve seen him in the glow of his laptop as he sat up late at night tapping away at the keys while I tried to sleep.
I know him.
Maybe he didn’t know me, and maybe he was just a means to an end, and maybe I was that for him, too. But all the same …
I know him.
My breath catches in the back of my throat, halfway between my lungs and the open air, and for a moment I can’t get myself to push it out or pull it in. My vision begins to narrow, a lens zeroing in until everything else disappears but the boy being loaded into the ambulance.
This is my fault.
If I hadn’t influenced him one last time to get him to go away … If I’d never smiled back at him in that bar six months before that … If Van Noffke had never met me, he wouldn’t be on that stretcher.
I stumble back away from the crowd. I try to walk slowly, calmly. But I just can’t. I put one foot in front of the other, faster and faster, until I’m running. My heart seems to twist between every beat, and I’m just waiting … waiting for it to twist so hard it tears loose.
And somewhere along the way, the image of Van on that stretcher blurs with the wild energy I can feel pumping through my body, mingling with my blood, the energy grappling for release. And I’m no longer sure whether I’m running from what I saw or who I am.
Maybe those two things aren’t really that different.
Creation and Destruction.
These are the things I inspire.
Six days later, I stop going to class. I wake up in bed, and it just doesn’t even occur to me to go. There’s so much energy still trapped in me because I haven’t been able to bring myself to do anything about it, to expel it, not after seeing Van.
And I’m just so full, I can’t think beyond the way it feels. There’s a world inside my head, and it’s so easy, too easy, to vacate my real life for the one in my mind.
There’s a tempest there…
Churning
Raging
Flooding
It laps at me in waves, crashing high and then rolling away. It drags me a little farther away from myself every time, that irresistible tide.
And it’s suffocating and extraordinary and glorious. And I no longer want to push it out. I want to drown in it, in all the colors and ideas and feelings it opens up in me. The thoughts … they’re so big that they eclipse everything else. The past. The future. Emotions. They drown those out completely. For the first time in many, many years, I know what it feels like to not have memories shackled to my ankles, holding me back.
I pick up a pen and paper to write down how it feels to be this alive, to be this free. It’s beautiful. Brilliant. This must be how the other gods feel. I might not be human, but that doesn’t mean I’m free from the mortal coil. I’m just not chained to it by life and death. I’m chained by need. But not now, not anymore. I don’t need anything.
I write a single word first.
Need.
One word becomes two.
Want.
More words spill out of me then, springing to mind faster than I can write them.
hope hatred joy
fear awake freedom
laughter lies faith
beauty wild desire
purpose truth
change art
pain happy regret
passion grace
strength courage
shame
dream life wonder power
sorrow poison peace
mercy wisdom belief grief guilt
time
love
The words shift, become sentences. Those sentences tangle and twine into paragraphs, my ideas grow legs and they walk, run, sprint across the page, and I can’t stop. I write all morning, across every piece of paper I own until my desk, the drawers, my backpack are all empty. Then I write across the furniture and the floors and the walls. I write words I love and hate and feel so intensely that they bring tears to my eyes.
And the words … gods. They’re everything.
All that I am and want to be and hate to be … it’s all in them, and sometimes I sit and marvel at how a series of scribbles can mean so much, how words can hold so much meaning in the space between their measly letters.
INSPIRE.
I write the word across my living room floor in big, black letters. Then I stare at it, unsure whether I want to scratch it out or deface it or write over it.
It’s a curse, that word. A purpose I’m tired of serving.
So what if I just … quit?
I know what it will do to me. Is already doing to me. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I can look around at my scribed walls and know it’s not normal. I know that I’ve let this go entirely too long, and now the power I wield is stronger than I am. It flexes in me, fierce and hungry, and for a moment, I feel a spike of fear. Then it passes in a wave of euphoria, and I know now why people find me, what I can give them, addictive.
It makes me fe
el brilliant and aware and one with everything around me, and for the first time ever, I understand. Not just an idea or a person or a place. I understand everything. The world. The past. The present. My existence.
It’s vast and complicated and I can’t put it into words, but I just know. For the first time in my life, I actually feel like a goddess.
I come to a decision then.
I draw a D at the end of the word I scrawled on my living room floor.
INSPIRED.
Maybe this is my curse, but I don’t have to share it. I don’t have to push it on other people.
Mortals … they’re fragile. They can die or break or ruin. And I suppose I’m not immune to those last two either, but I’m stronger than they are. And I’ve been so very selfish for so very long.
Some already mad part of me rejoices at my decision. Greedy for it, for the way I feel right now. I give in to it.
And when I stumble out of my house, my fingers smudged with ink, it’s dark and I am so very alive.
Chapter Three
Since I had come to the States, I had lived in almost every major city in the country. They each have their quirks and specialties, but move around enough and they all start to feel the same.
Austin doesn’t feel that way. At least not yet.
It is this eclectic mix of modern culture and southern charm and creative freedom. And the best part?
I had nothing to do with it.
All the imagination and uniqueness is entirely a product of the people who live here. And they are my favorite part. The people are all so different. Hipsters and old money and artists and cowboys and geniuses of industry and technology and musicians and actors. Nowhere else but Austin could they (or would they) all fit together … interact like there are no differences between them.
Keep Austin Weird, as they say.
I weave through the crowds along Sixth Street downtown. It’s a mile or two south of campus, but now that I’m here, I don’t even remember the walk from my apartment. Which should worry me more, but it doesn’t. My mind and body are barely connected at the moment. Or maybe they’re more intertwined than ever … so in tune that I don’t even have to think about where I’m going or what I’m doing. Which frees up my mind for other things.