glistened. Her eyes gleamed. Her body glowed. She reached towards the pool. The cyclops smiled.
“Isabella,” whispered the one-eyed mask.
The woman in the waters moved towards none seated at the seer’s table. A man’s wide shoulders crossed the pool and blotted the woman’s figure. His physique matched all the vigor primed in his sunbathing lover. It was his shape for which the woman reached. Larry’s heart felt hurt. He turned towards the cyclops and was thunderstruck to see tears streaming down the mask’s giant, single eye. Larry could not fathom what craft, or magic, created disguises capable of conveying such emotion.
“She doesn’t remember,” the cyclops cried. “She doesn’t desire me at all.”
The cyclops slumped back into his chair. Mercifully, the seer again waved his stitched hand over the table’s pool. Again, a merciful, unseen drop rippled the pool’s surface and cleared the vision that tormented that cyclops and summoned tears into his mask.
The table’s colors threaded and weaved to give visions to all of those seated around the table. The unicorn watched a young boy plant a flower before another’s tombstone. The boy did not drift to her lonely marker no matter how she cried from that horned mask. The minotaur sneered at what the waters rippled for him. He ranted as he watched those he had loved smoke the thrills and the rushes that had too prematurely sentenced him of the minotaur’s mask to that realm of shades. The eyes of the alligator locked upon a monument erected upon the ground. There, that alligator read the lies that replaced what he had been, so that he too became as forgotten as the others seated around that crimson table.
Larry McPeak felt exhausted as his turn came to look into the fabric and crimson waters. He had not anticipated that witnessing the visions of others would take such a toll upon him. His neck ached. His fingers twitched. His eyes sagged by the time the seer called upon him.
“Do you still wish to look into the waters? Do you still hope to reconnect with the other side after watching how all the others failed? Would you still want to try no matter the hurt you have seen upon those masks?”
Larry feared the failure. H wore no mask. No fur or feathers would hide whatever pain might visit him.
“I have to,” Larry answered. “I’m only a ghost without trying.”
The seer smiled sadly. “Do you still believe you will find what you need?”
“I have to try,” Larry whispered. “I have no weight if I am not remembered. I have no bearing. No direction. I am only a wisp in the darkness if I do not try.”
The seer’s hand again hovered across the table. The invisible drop again fell into the cloth. Again, the colors rippled to paint their vision to a ghost.
Larry quickly recognized the summoned shapes. The pool painted his home’s backyard. His hammock was no longer suspended between the trees. The grass again filled the divots from his practice at golf swings. The radio of his blue pickup, whose hood was so dented during the terrible hailstorm of three years ago, no longer blared the broadcast of the summer baseball game. No gas grill any longer stood on the wooden deck he had constructed one autumn.
Larry missed those things, but looking again upon those items was not the reason that pulled him to that crimson table. Larry saw what he craved as the vision’s angle shifted towards a small garden. There, just before the first rows of snap peas and cucumbers his wife planted each spring, sat a boy, perhaps approaching his fifth birthday, perhaps learning how to tie his shoes, perhaps learning how to ride a bicycle with training wheels. The boy held a lawn hose in both hands and watched as water filled the small, plastic wading pool painted in seahorses and starfish.
The boy gazed into the surface of water the hose’s stream rippled. Perhaps the sunlight reflected from the plastic pool caught his attention. Perhaps the plastic boat floating across the water mesmerized him. Whatever the reason, the watershine captivated the boy, whose eyes did not stray from that pool as it filled from the hose.
Larry swallowed and struggled to resist the urge to plunge his hand through the table’s rippling cloth.
“Logan,” Larry’s voice cracked. “I’m here.”
Fire burned in the seer’s eyes as he regarded the vision. “I can’t believe it. Not after so many visions summoned into these waters. How does a boy know to wait at a pool? Are you so wealthy to know such a boy, Mr. McPeak?”
“He has not forgotten. Not yet.” Larry’s shade flickered.
The seer waved another torn hand over the table, and the view shifted so those gazing around the table peered upwards through plastic wading pool’s water, so the scene stared into the child’s eyes. The masks couldn’t suffocate their gasps of wonder. The conduit was open, and a child waited on the other side, staring into a pool of water as if the seer himself had set the rippling reflection in front of the boy. The masks marveled to look upon a face time had not yet touched, a fantastic omen to shades who fluttered through such darkness to arrive at the seer’s crimson table.
“Amazing,” breathed the seer.
None at the table dared look away.
The mask brimming with all the insect eyes turned to Larry. “He just might hear you. He’s waiting. He might hear.”
Larry’s eyes filled with tears. He could not believe such magic. The seer nodded towards Larry. The seer had also lingered long in the shadows.
“I’m here, Logan,” Larry’s words dropped like stones into the table’s waters. “Look into the pool. I’m right here, Logan.”
The child’s hands cautiously stretched towards the pool’s waters. Carefully, the boy poked at the surface. The touch sent ripples cascading across the crimson table. The cyclops smiled. The vulture shyly touched Larry’s shoulder.
The boy on the other side giggled, and the mirth bridged the chasm between the world of the living and of the dead. Those around the table exalted as their heavy hearts turned lighter.
“Tell me you know,” Larry begged. “Tell me you know I’m with you no matter the distance, Logan.”
The table held its breath.
“Logan!”
A trespasser’s voice shouted through the connected waters. The masks silenced like stone. Another living soul shimmered behind the boy’s shoulder. Another approached the pool. The seer held his breath. The connection remained so fragile. Any intrusion, any distraction, any disbelief, could sunder the gateway so rarely found between the bright and the dark.
“Come inside, Logan! It will be night soon!”
A tall, lithe woman stood behind the child, tossing a hand through the boy’s hair. Her features may have shined once, but long strands of gray had turned her raven hair pale. Swollen, gray bags gripped at her eyes Wrinkles, etched more by grief than by years, chiseled frowns where there should have been smiles. She sighed, and her green eyes did not sparkle into the pool’s waters.
“Charlotte,” Larry’s voice cracked. “Give him a little time. Just give him a little space.”
The woman tugged at the boy’s shoulder. “It’s too cold and too late to play with the pool.”
Logan pulled out of her grip. “There are voices.”
“Don’t be foolish. You have to be grown-up now. You cannot wait for the wind to whisper voices to you.”
Larry’s eyes darted around the table. They pleaded for help. But the masks remained silent and still. Even the seer would not meet Larry’s gaze.
“Stay, Logan,” Larry begged. “Listen a moment more.”
“There,” Logan tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Can’t you hear him?”
Charlotte shook her head.
“I hear him,” Logan repeated.
Charlotte choked a sob before wiping her eyes dry with the back of her sleeve. She looked into the boy’s brown eyes.
“Don’t, Charlotte!” Larry cried at the table. “Let him listen! Let him believe! Let him know!”
“Look at me, Logan,” Charlotte pulled the boy away from the pool. “He’s gone. He’s not living in plastic pools. You cannot hear him in the wind. He cannot come ba
ck. We have each other now. Maybe we’ll have more one day. It’s the world’s way, and the world is stubborn and cruel. We can’t change it. We’ll not see him in waters or in mirrors.”
Larry shouted at the table. “But you will, Logan! Only imagine! Only believe!”
Logan hesitated while the drooping hose chilled his feet in the last of the sunlight. His father no longer fixed him toast each morning. His father no longer pushed him in the swing. His father vanished. No magic would bring his father back. One day, there might be more, but his father was gone for today.
Logan turned away from the pool and followed his mother into their home. Charlotte emerged a moment afterwards and turned off the hose. The waters of that plastic wading pool settled, and the connection between the two sides shattered.
Surrounded by darkness, those gathered around the seer’s table kept silent as the crimson table again morphed into simple cloth. No finger fidgeted upon the fabric. No head turned. Any sorrow, and loneliness, or any desperation remained shrouded by the masks of unicorns and of alligator eyes.
“It’s too cruel,” Larry sobbed.
The seer’s torn face offered no