You’re missing something. You will always be missing something – a sense of security, perhaps, or the certainty of your own rectitude. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe you don’t have the heart for the fight any more, and you hang up your sword and sling your shield over your slumping shoulders. Let someone else take the arrows for a while. Let someone else rescue the damsel, slay the dragon, and put that windmill in its place. Or maybe you just can’t imagine winning: you know the word is there, hanging on a nail by the door, but you don’t dare wear it.

It’s okay. The soul remembers what the body has long forgotten – how to shed a tail and regrow it. How to make a new limb – maybe not the same as the old one, but it balances you just the same.

“As you say, Majesty,” the artist said. “But may I suggest seven portraits instead of just one?”

The Emperor was intrigued. “Why?”

“One will show her on the throne in her full regalia – the golden crown on her auburn hair piled high, the ivory scepter in her firm grasp. She looks out across the throne room with pride and certainty. The set of her shoulders and her jaw reveal her strength of character and will.”

“Yes!” the Emperor said. “That is what I want.”

The artist went on. “Another will show her bending to comfort a poor blind man. He cradles the crushed body of his daughter as he sits by the broken wall of his home. Her lips brush his dirty forehead, and her tears mirror his as she reaches to hold him.

“The third will show the Empress rising from her bed. She is wrapped in a white silk robe with a red velvet lining, and she has caught it as it slips from her bare shoulders. A silver chain circles her neck, nearly covering a bruise,  and she smiles seductively with crimson lips. Her free hand beckons with an iron key dangling from her wrist.”

The Emperor shifted in his chair. “Go on.”

“The fourth portrait shows her in polished steel armor, sword in hand as she treads the neck of a terrible serpent. Her head thrown back, she calls her warriors to battle and glory. Her sword points to the sunrise driving night from the sky, and the wind whips her hair past her face.”

“In the fifth, she leans through the open window of a common home and with a long pale arm seizes a young boy by the neck. Her fingernails are the color of dried blood. His parents are helpless and terrified, and she rejects his mother’s pleas with a cruel laugh. She holds a misericord, the point turned away from the boy.”

“A sixth portrait would show her kneeling in prayer to the goddess of the harvest. There is strength in her gaze as she implores the goddess’ kindness, but her tightly clasped hands betray her terrible fears. Just out of the firelight a rat crawls on a sack of grain.”

“And the seventh?” the Emperor asked.

“A mirror, her face but faintly etched in its surface,” the artist said.

Parker smiled into his tea. “He’s … different.”

“Different,” I said. I looked at the sun-white windshield of the car parked outside. “What does that mean, ‘different’?”

“I don’t know,” Parker said. “There’s something about him. He has a quality. He’s different.”

“Okay,” I said patiently. “Different how, exactly? What makes him different?”

Parker leaned away, frowning. “Don’t interrogate me.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“You’re trying to box. You want to pigeonhole everything. I hate that about you.”

“Oh, stop it,” I said, waving off his outrage. “I just want to know what you see in this guy.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Because he’s important to you,” I said. I took another sip of my chai. “And you’re important to me.”

“And you want to know if I like him better than I liked you,” Parker said.

“God, I’m having flashbacks to every fight we had for the last three weeks,” I said.

“Me too. So can you stop with the third degree?”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I -”

“Jason, let it GO,” Parker said. He glanced out, shielded his eyes with his hand, and looked back into the café. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Fine,” I said. “How’s work?”

“Same as always,” he said. “Food comes in, food goes out. In between we get money.”

“So business is good?”

Parker shrugged, sipping his tea. “Good enough. How’s the wild world of architecture?”

“Nothing new,” I said. “Still working on the same commissions. Thanks so much for asking,  Parker.”

Parker stuck out his tongue. He started fidgeting with the condiments. “Why are these here? Salt and pepper for coffee?”

“I think they serve breakfast, too,” I said.

“Two Tabasco sauces? Just what we need, more ways to drown all the flavor.”

“Or enhance it,” I said. I wanted to needle him a little.

Parker frowned, shaking his head. “They’re the same thing.”

The wind shifted, and a tree leaned just enough to block the sun from the windshield.

“The same but different,” I said.

“Nothing was getting done,” he said. “I figured I’d call it a day.”

“Hmm,” she said, stopping to give him a quick peck. “Well, I wasn’t expecting you.”

“If you have plans -” The words dropped, stones in a bottomless well.

“No,” she said. “Not really. I was just surprised, that’s all.”

“I should’ve called,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just wasn’t ready.”

“Ready?” he said.

“I don’t think this is working,” she said, holding his eyes. Space recoiled from him like flesh from a cut.

His mouth was dry. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think we should stop seeing each other,” she said. “I just … I don’t feel what you feel. I’m sorry. I know you want me to, but I don’t.”

“So I like you too much?”

She shook her head. His hurt echoed back at him in her eyes and the set of her mouth. She scooped spiders in newspaper and set them in the yard. He didn’t care.

“You like me how you like me,” she said. “It’s just not how I like you. I’m sorry.”

He took a deep breath. His mouth was so dry. His laptop bag cut into his shoulder. He shifted it a little.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get you. We’re having a great time. I’m nuts about you. What did I do wrong?”

She reached for his arm, then caught herself. “You want so much. And I want you to have it, because I like you and I care about you. But I can’t give it to you. I can’t make you whole.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said. He could hear the edge in his voice and it embarrassed him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“I think I should go,” he said, already walking away. “This doesn’t make sense.”

The car started. He turned on the a/c. He heard the traffic report but none of the streets were close. He stared at the seat belt light. There was air all around him, but none of it touched him. He felt as if he were shrinking in on himself and sinking into the chair. The sun was too bright.

He backed out suddenly without looking. He felt a jolt and heard a crash, but it was all far away. He got out to look. The other car was dented, too. His taillight was in shards. His car looked like a child’s toy now, not a serious piece of machinery. His face felt hot and he wanted to scream.

The cabin was close. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything near it. Just out of reach the world turned to a swirl of white.  But he had six long years’ knowledge of the mountain in snowstorm and sunlight. Her bones shaped the drifts, and he knew them through the crunch of crystals under his feet.

Every step was a struggle. The storm fed on earth, branch, and snow, an endless avalanche scraping the slope raw as a wound.  His breath brittled under his nose. Precious wood rattled and slid as he stumbled, then righted himself.

The door coalesced from the blizzard. He drove himself to one last effort – five more steps and he was home to walls and hearth. Four. Two. Now the fire crackled in the hearth of river rocks, and he stacked the wood beside. Now he slumped in his chair, just for a minute.

The fire was lower and the wind no louder when he woke up. A log for the fire before he took off his coat and gloves to sit at the keyboard. He made it himself: a pine bough planed flat and smooth, keys painted on in shark-eye black and bleached bone. It looked wrong – odd keys in each octave, the minor keys in particular often misplaced and too many.

He knew it. He knew the sounds of his instrument as well as any made by man. He knew the touch and action of these flat lifeless keys. He could close his eyes and let his fingers summon triumph, heartache, love, loss, and every tint and texture of the heart. Felted hammers on taut wire could not match the beauty his mind heard.

He looked down into the valley, down into the lighted orderly streets of the city. The lake lay still under a sheet of ice, just as it had six years before.

He started singing. He knew he wasn’t very good, but that night he was a virtuoso filling every note with passion and energy. Put him on stage with a band and he’d rock socks, no question. He danced across the bedroom with wild abandon, and his cat jumped out of the way with a startled cry. He laughed and picked the little menace up for an impromptu dance.

He laughed again, at nothing and everything. It didn’t matter – none of it did, none of it really ever had – and he was alive in a world where magic happened.

Perhaps you will be remembered for your fine selection of breads. You always took pride in that, and your guests often remarked on it.  Crusty loaves with a soft crumb, savory with rosemary and perfect for dipping in oil and herbs.  Sweet rolls that melt in your mouth even before the butter. Tart, hearty sourdough bowls full of steaming soups. Crisp breadsticks almost forgotten in the heat of a lively debate across the table, then remembered fondly before bed in place of an embarrassing gaffe.

Perhaps you will be remembered for your oratory. The speeches you used to make! You could quell a riot with a few well-chosen words, your clear voice cutting across the angry to fill their hearts with shame. You roused men and women to swell their better selves, and you gave children lessons that would shape them forever.  You used words that everyone used, but somehow in your mouth they were stronger. They carried the weight of meaning not like porters worn down from years of heavy labor, but like proud athletes in the prime of their skill and vigor.

Perhaps you will be remembered for your service to others. On the night of the great fire, you let seven families stay in your home. Every weekend you volunteered at the humane society to help abused and neglected pets, and no matter how it broke your heart you came back every week to do your part. You were a tireless advocate for the orphaned and the homeless. Your friendship was as sure as the tide and more priceless than gems.

Perhaps you will be remembered as a great lover. You did not have a vulgar excess of partners, but rumors of your exploits made many men and women look at you admiringly. You cherished every inch of your lovers’ bodies, treating your lovemaking like the most profound worship. Or you took them like a savage storm pounding the shore with wave after relentless wave. You always knew with perfect certainty what they needed, what their hearts and bodies craved most in the soft intimate dark. And you always gave it generously with neither hesitation nor anxiety.

Perhaps you will be remembered for your fine taste in clothes. Your devotion to preserving old banjo recordings. Your attention to detail when signing checks. The effortless way you changed your windshield wipers every spring. The great respect you showed your elders. The affection in your voice when you read poems to your daughters.  Your skill in organizing outings to orchards and berry farms. The way you always had a smile and a kind word for the heartbroken.

You have written the book of your life. Everyone who wrote it with you will carry their own favorite passage in their heart. And though the book itself may be lost – the ink fades, the paper crumbles, the binding dries to dust – those passages will resonate in other books and influence whole literatures in time.

She had tea-shaded eyes, twinkling as if she were on the verge of asking a clever, slightly insouciant question. He loved them more than her long straw-colored hair, her cherry-tainted lips, or the long subtle curves of her figure. Her eyes were a question, a challenge, a puzzle.

Jessica? Carlie? Maybelle?

There hadn’t been so many. He never liked to play the field: better one steady girl than a stream of conquests. But somehow the name kept floating away, like a note he couldn’t quite hit anymore. Fifty years later it seemed important to remember.

He walked her through the park. She bumped his shoulder and ducked her head, teasing him about his freckles. Her quiet laugh rolled over the dense grass like a fresh breeze. He never saw grass like that anywhere else, each blade an individual condensation of green.

At the concert, her shoulder next to his and the same grass flattened under their backs, he showed her Orion’s belt. She knew the Big Dipper, and so did he, and the other stars wheeled nameless around Polaris as they waited for the next band. He stole a glance at her dim-lit profile. She looked soft and smooth as a cloud.

They walked down the street holding hands, stopping to look at old kitchen tools in the antique shop window and posters for European films at the theater. He let go her hand to feel her small pliant waist in his tingling palm. She leaned into him. The sun brightened. The birds sang sweeter.

It was Ellie. Yes. Ellie. Or Karen. His mind was a lock, and her name was the key, and the more he fumbled with the jangling ring the more keys there were. He didn’t have much time anymore.

The name was so close he could taste it, like hot buttered popcorn in a theater or the damp charged air before a storm. She loved popcorn. She wore a white sweater that seemed to glow in the theater, and she smelled like sweet vanilla and gardenia. He could see his fingers reach so tentatively to pluck a stray kernel from the front of her sweater. He could feel the heat of the red rush to his cheeks as his fingertips just brushed the top of her breast.

And later that night the sweet moment of anticipation as he closed his eyes and leaned toward her sweet glossed lips. That first kiss made sweeter for waiting, the innocent fumbling, their bodies finally close.

Catherine? No, Karen. Karen. It was Karen, and her father owned the drugstore. Or was it Amber? Such a long time to carry something so small, and dropping it now felt like a betrayal.

She shows you a small tin of dark chocolate lozenges. You take one gratefully and put it in your mouth. It begins to melt pleasantly. You enjoy the sweetness, the little rush of pleasure chocolate always gives you.

The chocolate melts away. Inside it’s a bug. You feel it waving its feathery antennae, tickling the roof of your mouth. It stretches its long spindly legs and crawls down your tongue. Before you can stop it the bug slides down your throat and is gone.

Your friend laughs at your shock and disgust. “See? It’s marvelous!”

You laugh at yourself to wash away the bitter taste of her trickery. Hours pass. You enjoy dinner and her tales of a far-off country where they serve tins of chocolate-covered bugs. You don’t think it can still be alive in there: surely another glass of wine will have drowned it? Surely even a bug that can survive days or weeks encased in rich dark chocolate will have died in your stomach acid by now?

But perhaps not. You’re not an entomologist, you know little of how hardy these fragile-seeming creatures can be. They live in volcanic vents on the ocean floor.  They live in fissures on ancient Antarctic glaciers. They thrived millions of years ago, and when our kind have turned this world to toxic ash they will thrive as our damned bones fade. A little acid and darkness are nothing to them.

Lying in bed, you’re not sure you can’t feel it’s sticklike legs crawling inside you. A little cup of Pepto should have coated it in chalky pink goo. So you must be imagining it. You fall asleep and dream of nesting dolls: the first smiles, the second frowns, the third cries, and the fourth doll has a face of such perfect horror that you wake screaming. You flip the sweat -soaked pillow and go back to sleep.

The clock goes off far too soon. The sun casts thin shafts between long shadows, and as you step through both you have nearly forgotten the bug. You imagine its feathery antennae like tiny peacock feathers coated in corn flakes. You think of your schedule, your meetings, a phone call you have to make. Your briefcase is a pleasant weight in your hand. Your steps ring sharp on the sidewalk.

Passing a coffee shop, you catch the scents of espresso and chocolate. And you remember the face of the fourth doll, twisted in a silent scream.

He looked out the coffeehouse window. People walked down the street with their chins down and their hands crammed in well-insulated pockets.  A coat was a bubble for warm air. Insulation against the cold of a bubble on a rock circling through an endless void. Bubbles in bubbles.

The faded green of his old Army coat sickened on the umber tabletop. He held the paper cup – coffee in paper, paper under wax, corrugated cardboard over wax – in his hands.  The heat felt good.  The creamed and sweetened coffee warmed him deep inside.

Josiah wondered about the person who’d left the paper like that: half-open. Didn’t they want – didn’t they need anything? He could see her in her tailored skirt and jacket, careful not to get scone crumbs on her fine silk blouse.  Maybe she found what she needed, and left the rest for someone like him.

Or maybe she looked more from habit than hope, too.