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through the trial that even after he’d begun to break the skin of Nix’s face, long after the patient was dead, particles of bone from the patient’s jaw and nose had splintered and some had gone, needle-like, into the palm of Layton’s hand.

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    Nearly a year later, Layton tried to sit up in bed, but the restraints held him fast. He wanted to shout for the night nurse, but whom could 62

    he trust? He knew them all, he knew they thought he was one of the many criminally insane, but he knew the staff well, and he didn’t understand why they should restrain him when he had only tried to kill himself once, and had botched the job anyway.

    It was the whisper of night coming up under the barred window, the last light of day was nearly vanished, and he still felt drowsy from the last med administered at two. The nights were the worst, because of the people who moved through it, who came and went and he watched in horror as they did what had to be done. Even Nix, even he came through, his face sometimes a bloody tangle, a forest of twisted flesh and bone, sometimes it was just his face, beads of sweat on his forehead, that trollish look, that milky complexion. The machinery hummed and if he could just believe strongly enough, he could slip through the restraints and join them, he could go and be anywhere and anyone, but it never seemed to happen. Some of the other patients came and went; the walls rippled like a flooding river; the air itself became vivid with the movement of nearly invisible molecules as they went like clouds of mosquitoes, forming and splitting apart again.
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    Layton, in restraints, tried to pray to what he could not see for freedom. His heartbeat raced as he watched a swollen bubble of glass move along the window.

    “It’s belief,” he whispered. “Belief makes it move. It’s absolute belief,” but it wasn’t coming for him, the molecules weren’t changing, the mechanism of darkness was not clicking into place. “Please let me go. Please,” he begged, and then, as happened nightly, his voice became louder, sobs and screams. One of the nurses came by with another med, and as she wiped the sweat from his forehead, he told her how they left nightly, how when the sun went down the machinery of night made it happen and their molecules swirled and how even the two men he had killed in his life, his father and Nix, sometimes came to him and made him do terrible things in the dark. “And the woman who spoke to the courts? Her name was Angela, but she’s really one of the men I killed, only you can’t ever really kill anyone, you can’t, it’s just a rearrangement of molecules and at night they can change again or if they want they can stay as they were that night for a whole day and they can even come to your trial and talk about you and things you told them and 64

    how you seemed to be going slowly mad only you never ever went mad, if anything it’s complete sanity, it’s the kind of sanity that’s like the sun at noon all bright and sharp and please don’t turn off the light, that’s all I ask, when you leave and I get sleepy from the pills, please leave the lights on,” his voice softened, and the nurse nodded. When he awoke later –-when the meds were beginning to wear off –-the room was dark and he felt the brush of a thousand particles that whispered with the voice of his father.

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    “265 and Heaven”
    by Douglas Clegg
    1

    What do we all live for? the bird asks.

    This.

    A glimpse of heaven.
    2

    The town at night seemed all crumbling brick and leaky gutters, alleyways washed clean by the summer rain, the stink of underground swamp, and grease from burger joints in the air. He was always on shift at night, and so it was the town he grew to know: the rain, the steam, the smells, the red brown of bricks piled up to make buildings, the hazy white of streetlamps. The same haunted faces downtown at night--the 66

    lonely crowd, the happy crowd, the people who went from diner