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up here to the country to talk and neck and, eventually, make love.
    By then Denise had already shown him her poem.
    Now she turned her head slightly, just enough so that she could see him. She opened her mouth, shut it, opened her mouth again and said, “Sometimes I think about trying it again. When you’re at work, when Kyle’s at school, I’m all alone and I sit there and think about … trying it.”
    The night she’d shown him her poem she had been very quiet. Conrad had asked if she was feeling okay and she had just nodded, said she was feeling fine. Then they came up to what they had begun referring to as “their spot,” and before he even turned off the car she sat up and said she had something to show him. Pulling the piece of paper from her pocket, unfolding it, Conrad’s eyes had for some reason been drawn to the necklace he’d given to her as a gift the previous month, to the small diamond reflecting the soft glow of the interior lights. When she did read the poem she only managed to get out seven words before quickly stopping, shaking her head, and crumpling the paper into a ball. A mistake, she started sobbing, a terrible mistake, and she said she was sorry and to please, please, please don’t turn her into the authorities.
    Poetry, literature, music, painting—any form of imaginary expression was illegal. Each consisted of traits that only zombies possessed, and for that reason alone any dead person that tried their hand at any of these things—even if they were unsuccessful—was considered a serious liability and arrested, charged, and sentenced to immediate expiration.
    This was one of the first things taught in schools, the very first thing dead parents taught their dead children. That the reason the living had failed was because of their imagination. It had corrupted their minds, withered their souls, and had created anarchy among its people.
    So Conrad knew the law. He knew he should have turned Denise in at once. But those words she’d read … those words did something to him. He didn’t feel anything, of course, but the simple fact that she had written a poem specifically for him, for his dead eyes only, even when she knew it was wrong, that she could be instantly expired, made him fall for her even more.
    “But I don’t try,” she said, and looked him straight in the eye. “I know better than that now.”
    Henry hadn’t approved of Denise. In his eyes she didn’t have what it took to make a good Hunter’s wife. She wanted to go to school to become a nurse, a doctor, and this would not do at all. A Hunter’s wife was expected to stay home, produce a male child, raise that male child in the proper way so that he would someday become a Hunter. And Denise, Henry had told Conrad more than once, would be terrible at this.
    For some reason Conrad thought about this now as he watched his wife, his wife who had busied herself staring out her window. He thought about how this had been the true thing that came between him and his father, the thing that had enraged his father the most. Conrad never came out and said it, but sometimes he had hinted how he wasn’t really sure he wanted to be a Hunter in the first place. How he would at least like to have the option of doing something else. But no, Conrad was a Hunter’s son, which meant that he would one day become a Hunter too. And because he was Henry’s son, he was to become the best.
    “Denise,” he said, getting her attention, getting her to at least look at him. He wanted to tell her about how he had hesitated the other morning, how the worst thing that could happen to a Hunter had finally happened to him. He wanted to tell her how he was worried about their son, worried that Kyle might turn and what would have to take place if and when that happened. He wanted to tell her how he was scared about this new job, because he had been a Hunter almost all his existence and knew nothing else.
    But before he could say any of these things his