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palette of colors
on his plate—the sea-grass green of asparagus, an arterial red
tomato sprinkled with chalk-white chevre, two seared lamb chops
with golden edges—when those colors get inside his mouth, they turn
to gray. The old man has ageusia, has had it nearly a half-century,
since the year after Elena was lost. All food, whether crisp,
crunchy, chewy or of a pudding softness, whether marinated in wine,
bathed in infusions of basil or rosemary, or drowned in a puree of
Scotch Bonnets, vinegar, molasses and milk, tastes like…gray…like
nothing. Food as slurry. Food as duty. And, since his health has
failed, he can not even eat what is on that brightly hued plate.
That plate is just art, artifice and irony. His health is such that
dinner comes from a bottle fitted with a tube. The centenarian’s
twisted hands drag the bottle toward him. He lowers his lips and
suckles whatever is in it that supposedly harms him least.
    Oh, Romulus, such a meta-mutancy, the craving
wolf into a craven lamb.
    There are not many areas where Fflowers is,
or ever was, dutiful, but this is one. He eats to sustain a life
that passes both too fast and too slow. A life that, at midday, is
much too short, and, alert and alone at three in the morning, much,
much, much too long.
    “Oh, Elena, what we could have wrought.”
    The old head jerks up when he realizes that
he has blurted out in anguish what he only had meant to think.
    He swallows methodically, but thinks less so.
He is dying and hopes for that relief. He is dying and begrudges
that darkness. He has all of an old man’s wants—revenge, love,
forgiveness, eternity.
    He hopes he has just one more day with all
this weighty age that has worn him down. He will dedicate the
building tomorrow. Then, go off to his rejuvenation. If all goes
well, in two weeks he might be eating from a plate. He might be
walking. He might be happy. If all goes wrong, well, then, a bane
is lifted and he is free.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    Betrayals
    Bissell School sophomore halfa-hunk and
modestly talented soccer…hero, Jack Fflowers flung the FRZ-B past
Prissi’s right shoulder toward Lake Wanapocamuc. From twenty meters
below her, Nancy Sloan challenged, “No waya you can playa.”
    Prissi yelled back, “Oh, yaya?”
    Prissi dropped her right wing, threw her left
leg over her right, and shoved her left wing forward and down. Her
body pivoted around. She drew up her legs and pulled her wings
tight to her body. She cannonballed until she was less than ten
meters feet above the lake. When she executed a two-part wing
flare, her silver and red feathers shimmered like the aurora
borealis. Prissi dove down and caught the FRZ-B in her mouth when
it was less than a meter above the glittering surface of the lake.
She barked in delight as she skimmed just above the lake’s dimpled
water. As the winger passed from water to land, she banked up,
then, abruptly dropped her last rows of remiges down to brake. When
she landed, the exuberant teener skidded on a small patch that
remained of the previous night’s snow. As she snapped her body to
keep her balance, something popped in her right shoulder. Despite
the needle-sharp pain, Prissi forced herself to finish off the one
hop landing. The hurting winger stopped just in front of the
granite perches by the Bissell School boathouse where she, Jack and
Nasty Nancy had been sitting nd talking until competitive juices
and spring hormones had motivated them to play an under-manned
version of 3D-FRZ-B.
    Prissi’s shoulder was on fire, but she didn’t
say anything when Jack, with a flurry of bright white and Bissell
blue feathers, muffed his own one-hopper and banged against the
boat house. Nancy slowed so much on her landing attempt that she
fell from the sky with the grace of a pregnant booby. Nancy was
panting, and, as Prissi easily read from her cork-screwed eyebrows
and radish-red face, not too happy that she hadn’t scored a single
point. Since she still had the FRZ-B in her