The parameters of his life were colliding and expanding, operating in a forceful collusion just outside his influence. Within his mind he could feel burning, changing, and the sour milk of regret. He cursed the apartment and threw papers in a flurry that flapped and danced to his feet, his creations covering the ground in a soft rain of release. The screen of the computer awaited him patiently, certain and smug in its digital rightness that he would return to it when he needed to, when it was time for another tale to begin. Breathing in rapid gasps he dropped to his knees and crumpled the papers together, his large thick hands--not those of a writer, surely--squeezing and compressing like he could draw the printed words back into his flesh, into his heart. His tale-telling heart.

It had been five weeks since the door had shut and his existence had altered radically in that time, re-learning what it meant to be a bachelor again with the added weight of being a divorcee. He liked to tell himself that it wasn't a weight, it was a release, but when he stood his shoulders slumped and his eyes were dim and he strained under life just the same.

At times like these, when he had to cry to stay alive and he hated what he did and the thing that made him do it, flashes would come to him of his life as it had been. The greatest satisfaction in his life--no, he had to admit, even now, especially now, that writing had always been his greatest satisfaction--the second greatest satisfaction of his life had always been to wake up in the long watches of the night and feel the warmth of her in the bed with him, asleep but there in some intangible way that had meant more than anything else they did together. Some nights he would cry at the wonder of it, and hold her in her softly breathing quiet, and at times like that he could stop listening to his heart and just be alive. Now, at times like these, he remembered what it was like and he cried all the more for what he had lost, for what his heart had cost him.

The moment passed, his tears dried, and he released the papers back to the floor and began to put them in order again. When they were so, he put them on the desk, breathed for a moment, then sat back down at the keyboard. His heart began to speak.

The boy is twelve years old. It is a warm day, the kind of summer afternoon that doesn't darken with twilight until you aren't paying attention to it anymore. The sidewalk is hot to his bare feet, but not so that he can't walk on it, protected as he is by the thick callous of a hundred similar days' activities. He is sitting on his bike, pushing himself along with his feet rather than with the pedals, so that he lists from one side to the other as each foot reaches down in turn. Ahead in the sidewalk lies a young bird, still lacking feathers. It is pink all over, with some darker areas where the organs are dimly visible through the translucent skin. It's eyes are defining, beads of black that suggest life, life that is confirmed by the open beak and soft breathing of the fleshy thing. The boy watches it for a moment, fascinated, glancing up at the tree a couple of times from where it no doubt fell, as if expecting to see a worried mother bird hopping around in the branches looking for her missing young. Then he rolls forward, and the soft thing is lost under the rubber tire as the boy rolls back and forth over it, pushing off with his toes. When he pulls back it lies there, a ruin, and he makes a face, then turns the wheel and pedals off in another direction so as to avoid whatever punishment such an action might incur.

When Aldous rose the following morning from the empty bed he glanced at the computer on the desk and the fresh sheets of paper by it and shook his head. He wondered why his heart spoke to him, why it told him these stories with an insistence that had mounted in the last few weeks. At one time writing had been only a job, the great passion of his earlier days having long subsided into a more peaceful continuity. For a long time, when his heart spoke it was only occasionally, and then with a nudging gentleness. But in the last few weeks of what had once been a marriage it had awoken with a stronger voice than Aldous himself could remember ever having possessed, and since the divorce it was more and more coming to rule his life as much as it already ruled his work.

Fortunately for his peace of mind his heart was quiet for the rest of the morning. He was able to sink into the comfortable lethargy of life like an old man wearing cotton. The day was not all to be so empty, however, and early afternoon found him dressed nicely and sitting in a comfortable chair with plastic rollers. Before him was a small table, a stack of books to one side.

"To Ginger," the woman was saying, standing in front of the table, smiling. Aldous smiled back (though with pinched eyes) and inscribed the book as she had asked. He pushed it across the table with a firm hand and she took the book up in hers, slightly nervous and excited at the same time. She thanked him and stepped off just past the nearest shelf of best-sellers, where she stopped and confirmed what was written. Aldous watched the pleased expression on her face as she moved off towards the front desk to make her purchase, and wondered if he'd be drinking when he got home.

Several other people were waiting to get their books signed as well, all polite and pleased and upper middle class. Aldous greeted the next one and the routine went on. It was not a large event--he was not the most famous of authors and this was not the finest of book stores-- but it was part and parcel of his work and it wasn't a bad thing to be reminded that the stories his heart told him had applications beyond his own.

His agent was off to one side, chatting up the manager about the sales of Aldous' books as well as those of some of his other clients, and so he wasn't paying much attention to the progression of signings. He didn't notice the woman with dark hair and too-large eyes step up to Aldous, and wouldn't have recognized her if he had. Significance, Aldous had once written, is in the eye of the beholder.

She said hello, and Aldous replied in kind and then looked at her, full in the face, and the tightness in his eyes went away, another thing his agent couldn't notice.

"Bernice.." he began, then continued with "I'm glad to see you" and a couple of other things that didn't mean a lot and sounded even emptier than they were.

"I heard about the divorce," she said with what he thought might be concern. "How are you, Aldous?"

"Okay, I'm okay, things are going well, I.." he paused and all he could think of for a moment was the story he had written about this woman back years ago, before writing paid the rent.

In the story, a woman who was and who was not Bernice gnawed on his fingers and chewed his nails off, or rather those of the narrator of the story who was and who has not himself. She spit his fingernails on the floor, then licked the torn and bleeding skin and whispered her love stickily. It ran no more than a page but when she read it it was more than enough to turn her away from Aldous Stillwell and his damned heart.

"Aldous?"

He realized that he was still halted in mid-sentence, a petit mal seizure of memory locking his jaw. He recovered, wondering why she was here now, and in his best Warren Beatty stammer continued as well as he could.

"What, um, did you, were you just here or.."

"I read about the signing and thought I'd stop by. Are you all right, Aldous? You don't look good."

"No, I'm, I'm fine, just signing books, and, well, what are you up to? These days, I mean?"

"Well, drafting of course, still at it. I started my own design studio, you remember?"

"Oh right, yeah, I forgot about that, right, how's it, how's it going?"

"Great, it's going great." She looked at him with a clarity he had grown unused to. "Why don't you give me a call sometime?" She lowered her voice a notch. "I'm worried about you. You never looked like this before."

He sort of twiddled with the pen, glanced at his fingers and was glad to see that they were intact. He wondered why she was here now, after what he had once written and what she had once said. He mumbled some assurances, trying to paste the smile back on, and he took the card that she gave him from her purse.

"Yeah, I'll, I'll do that, I'm glad to see you, now, Bernice."

She sort of looked at him strangely like she could see more than was allowed, then said goodbye and moved off. He slipped the card into his pocket. His agent, finally sensing that something was slightly amiss, glanced about as a cat sniffing the air and then, oblivious after all, slipped back into conversation with the manager. At the table, another person stepped forward, this time without revelation, and Aldous eased back into the way of things.

Mr. Johnson from the town's only department store was a skinny old fuck, lived in the same house as his parents had and their parents before them, and a couple times a month he lowered the shades and rode young boys like shetland ponies.

Aldous lay in bed, dozing fitfully. In his slumber he could still hear his heart roaring out the words.

The big fans ran in the upstairs balcony to muffle the noise the boys made when Johnson got inside them, but it was always the hush money that kept things really quiet in the town.

His right hand lay on the empty pillow beside him in the bed that was only half filled. There the fingers twitched and jerked, the wrist flexing at odd moments, and somewhere he wished for a pen.

One of Johnson's regulars eyed the fine furnishings of the old house a little too much and brought a shiv to the next visit. He managed to take one of Johnson's eyes out before the wiry little man caved the side of the boy's head in with a poker from the fireplace. Johnson screamed all the night through to the sheriff about the naked young burglar who supposedly broke in and attacked him and the sheriff made the right noises and cleared it up and made a healthy deposit to the bank in the morning.

The sun was coming up now, spilling into the room and casting shadows where the ceiling fan ambled around slowly. Aldous' hand was still, the anxiety of the tale passing in a fitful release.

But in the slow hours of the next night the sheriff went to the house where the old man sat with bandages on his face and pressed the pillow down on his head and killed the son of a bitch.

The knocking at the door of the apartment woke him from half-forgotten dreams and other things, and he made his way out of the bed and into some clothes. Through the peephole in the door he could blurrily make out a young man in a suit, glancing about. Aldous noted the clock on his desk that was approaching noon, and tried not to see the empty bottle lying on the floor nearby. It had taken a great deal to shut up the voice inside after the long book signing and the longer dinner with his agent, but it had worked and he had gone to sleep untroubled by the one thing, at least. Now as he tried to dredge up what he had been dreaming he wasn't so sure that the effort had been a success.

"Mister Stillwell?" More knocking. Recalled to his surroundings again, Aldous opened the door.

"Mister Stillwell? Sorry if I got you up, didn't think you'd still be in bed."

The young man was struggling hard not to glance at his watch to confirm that it really was the time he thought it was, when most people like himself are up and about and taking care of business.

Aldous blinked a couple times. "'s okay. Needed to be up." The truth of this was beginning to be apparent. He could feel the beating of his heart, knew it had been telling tales again, knew it would be doing so again almost at once.

"I'm Dean Harris, from Morgan & Flatbush? We're representing your ex-wife?"

The young man looked at him sort of hopefully, as if this might trigger a response in the half-awake man before him.

"Harris, right, what do you need?"

The man still looked a little uncomfortable. "Well it's, um, the first alimony check is due. Past due, actually. I was visiting a client nearby and thought I'd stop by, rather than, you know, make a fuss at the office and all. It's the first time, I'm sure you've had a lot on your mind."

Aldous sort of stared for a moment, then nodded hurriedly. "Yeah, of course, no problem, come on in.

"His girlfriend doesn't like it when he hits her."

"What?" Harris looked up at Aldous' mumbled words.

Aldous glanced back, stopping in mid-stride, wondering what he had said. "Nothing.. just, uh, talking to myself."

He sat down at his desk and took the checkbook from the drawer. He picked up a pen.

"Harris' girlfriend doesn't like it when he hits her."

"What did you say?" The young man's voice was a little more demanding now.

Aldous looked at him stupidly, thick fingers grasping the pen. He shook his head like he was being swarmed by flies and started writing out the check.

"He gets off on it, because it makes him feel like a man. The class ring he wears sometimes tears her cheek, and her parents wonder why she doesn't go see them more often."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Harris looked angry now, insistent, frustrated by the dumb-cow expression on Aldous' face, belied by the anger in his eyes.

"Nothing else even comes close to doing it for him anymore, it's only when he hits her that everything clicks. She's too scared to tell, yet, and so he holds all the strings."

"What? I'm not dating anyone!"

Aldous was slumped back in the chair, the check lying completed on the desk. Every part of him that could be seen looked dead except for his eyes, the eyes that flickered with the rhythmic beating of his heart.

"You think the truth matters?" Aldous asked in his own voice. Then, "When Harris was a boy he and his cousin stuck cats onto boards covered with sticky warm tar, then set them aflame. Sometimes one of the cats would get free and run off yowling and crying as the burning tar consumed it with fire, and it couldn't run away from the pain. The boys would grin and chase off after it to make sure it didn't singe anything important."

"Fuck you!" Harris yelled, enraged and confused. He grabbed the check from the desk and ran out through the open door. Aldous sat there and his lips moved for another few moments, but the pounding was gone from his eyes and he could no longer hear the words.

The restaurant was furnished in the nondescript decor of a dozen other places not unlike it, those places of relaxed dining that are classy enough to be expensive but not expensive enough to be unique. It was a place for three-martini lunches, first dates, and occasional evenings-out by those who don't really know where they should go. Aldous and Bernice fell somewhere into the latter two, though their choice was prompted more by their memories of the restaurant as it had seemed when they dined here together a few times years before. He had called an hour after Harris left, digging her card from the little collage of change, keys, and crumpled receipts that occupied the top of his dresser. She agreed to meet for dinner at the restaurant, a sentimental favorite, though what right they had to sentiment was beyond Aldous' reckon.

They had known each other slightly in their final year of college, and ran into each other enough times in the years immediately following that a relationship was on them before they knew it. For a while they had come to this restaurant when it was not yet shopworn, dining when their limited budgets could afford it. She was working as an architect's assistant, full of ideas for opening a studio of her own. He was a health inspector for the city, a job he hated that was made bearable only because when the day ended it required nothing more of him, freeing him to write.

Looking around now at the other diners and the waiters moving around stealthily Aldous wondered why he had insisted on being so difficult to get along with then, why he was so willing to give into his heart and its tales, why he had let it cost him so much.

He became aware of Bernice sitting back and looking at him, carefully.

"You aren't listening, are you Aldous? Lost in your mind again, like always."

"I'm sorry.. I just started looking around this place and thinking. I didn't mean to get so distracted."

She smiled briefly. "I suppose I should have remembered you were like this." Her face clouded. "I asked you how you were yesterday. You didn't seem to be sure."

He frowned. "I know. I'm not handling things well I guess. The divorce and all.. I've never been very good with this kind of.. well, whatever."

She gave a little laugh. "You sound just like I remember, never sure of anything."

"Yeah I guess so.. same old Aldous." He paused for a moment. "What was it, Bernice? What was it about me, about that thing I wrote, that angered you so much?"

"Where I chewed your fingers off? Oh christ, Aldous, it wasn't that, not really. You were just so damn hard to get along with sometimes, you acted like I should only be there when you wanted me to. You seemed so self-sufficient... I remember you said that you didn't want me to read that thing, but you had left it out where I had to see it."

"I didn't want to hurt you."

"You did and you didn't. It's like I said, you were never sure of anything. Still aren't."

"I'm sure sorry," he said with the beginnings of a grin, still taking pleasure in the tweaking of words, of language.

She laughed again. "You haven't changed much, Aldous."

"But I have.. or at least I had. It feels like I've been regressing since Samantha left, maybe since before."

Bernice looked at him slowly, seeing the person she had known and someone else she didn't. When she decided to speak, it was a difficult step.

"Aldous.. I have to say.. I can't completely explain why I wanted to see you yesterday, or why we're here now or what should happen next. But you have to know something, because I don't think you ever figured it out back when we were together.

"I'm not your salvation. I'm not defined by who I am to you. I do have a life that goes on when you aren't around, and that's something you never seemed to understand."

"I know, Bernice. At least I think I do"--beginnings of a smile again--"and for what it's worth I am sorry. I've never understood life, I've never understood the things people do, least of all myself. But I think I know more now than I did then."

"Well," she said, somewhat resigned, somewhat hopeful, "that's a start."

A single drop of blood defines the floor it rests upon, creating a point of interest in a plane of gray. Another one joins it, gaining presence, and they are coming from his fingers. He holds his hands before his face, and sees the torn skin and the wrecked nails, the lines of fresh blood running from the tips down across the palm and dropping off at the wrist. It's happened again, or perhaps it's the first time, and he looks around, expecting to see her.

Aldous lay alone in bed--neither he nor Bernice were ready for anything beyond dinner--and his heart was beating swiftly, coming on a great settlement with the one whose body it inhabited. He slept deeply, breathing slowly, and though his fingers did not twitch they still possessed a tenseness that gave lie to his rest.

She isn't there, and he's confused. Then he swallows and tastes the sticky copper in his mouth, and he licks his lips and it's there too. He, the agent of destruction, tasting and seeing the result of his will. Not her, nor Harris, nor Johnson or the boy on the bike, could be held accountable.

Aldous rolled over onto the side of the bed once taken by his ex-wife, something he had been conditioned not to do, yet done now unaware of the transgression.

He had asked the man if the truth mattered, and it didn't, not in here. Here his heart could tell him tales, could lie to him, all it wished. But in the world of the breathing its lies had to be seen for the desperately sincere murmurings of one who had only its own interests at stake, his interests, for his heart was not as separate as he wished.

In the morning Aldous woke up slowly, calmly, not wholly aware or not remembering the whispers of the night's slumber. He could feel it beating inside him still, his tale-telling heart, and for once he knew it to be truly his.