. . .
“Let him grow up,” says Mr. Gulley, in sudden desperation. “Let him go to school. I’ve bought a secondary school for him.”
“Maybe,” says the wolf.
“Let me see him grow up,” says Mr. Gulley, pleading, crying into the fur of the wolf, “let me have a son, let him be old enough to forgive me and set me free of guilt, or hate me and make me happy enough to die.”
“Oh, come on,” says the wolf. “Come on. You’re stickying me up with snot. Come on. Gumby. Gumby. Hon. Dear. Child.”
The wolf licks Mr. Gulley’s hair. It sears. It sizzles. Mr. Gulley wails and curls away.
“Fine,” says the wolf. It looks away from him. “No promises. I won’t promise. I won’t ever promise. But fine. I’ll say.
“You’ll get to see him grow.”
– 11 –
On the morning of May 11, 2010, a seraph stands in space above the Earth. He holds a trumpet. He is sent by Heaven to make an ending of all things.
He will sound that trumpet.
With that blast, he will trigger the Rapture and Last Days.
The seraph lifts his trumpet to his lips.
He blows:
. . .
Silly seraph!
There is no sound effect. There is no sound. The seraph had forgotten, apparently, that space is airless. He had forgotten that nobody can hear you blow the Last Trump — if you are in space.
He hesitates.
Then he plunges into the atmosphere and draws a deep breath. He gathers chunks of air around him with his mandorla and his seven wings. He rises again. The wolf-wind blows around him.
He sets the trumpet to his lips.
. . .
The seraph lifts his trumpet to his lips.
— but jaguars fall, and their mouths grow red,
And the world, it seems,
Lives yet.
– 12 –
In a small room in the upstairs portion of the Gulley home beats Edmund’s heart.
It is surrounded by a pleasing thatch of straw.
“Can’t beat straw for thatching hearts,” one amateur cardiologist had enthused. Lacking the input of anyone with better judgment, Mr. Gulley had complied.
The truth is that Mr. Gulley is afraid that he will make his son’s life even worse than his was.
. . .
He’d thought about something harder, walls of stone, but nightmare visions shook him; he imagined his son severed from human company, growing cold and sharp and Lethal, and never knowing love. A chain-shattering god; a wolf-killing god; a heartless man; but never any kind of living boy.
It’s what he wants, sort of, but it’s also sort of not.
. . .
So Mr. Gulley wraps the heart in the stuff of life, instead, and he hopes it doesn’t tickle much; that it is calming and that it is pleasing and that it glows soft and amber when the window takes in the midday sun.
He replaces the straw every day.
He comes home from business, even if it’s important business, and he cleans and strategically or entirely replaces Edmund’s straw each day. The only exceptions are when he flies more than three hours away from home.
He doesn’t do that very much.
. . .
Edmund grows up distant but he grows up kind, and his hair is like spun yellow gold, and messy, like a thatch of straw. He is strong and able and he loves the wolf but he loves his father too.
One day he is playing a game with the wolf. He is playing hide and seek. He has hidden himself in a wardrobe, and he thinks this very clever, because the wolf cannot quite reach. Even if it knows that he is there, all Edmund must do is stay very still and very quiet and the wolf can never prove its win at hide and seek.
The wolf becomes irritated and then vexed.
It stretches its mouth. It closes it and opens it, as wide as it is allowed. Then it huffs. It puffs. It blows.
. . .
The wolf huffs. The wolf puffs.
The wardrobe tumbles over. Edmund and the clothes inside are blown. So much for his win at hide and seek!
A wolf-wind rages through the house.
It blows Edmund’s drawings from the refrigerator door. It spins the toilet paper rolls. It teaches the cat Inedible a marvelous new game.
It knocks over Mr. Gulley’s Oriental desk lamp.
It blows down the walls around Edmund’s heart.
. . .
And Edmund’s heart is unshielded, then. He takes it in. The world pours into him, it pours into him, it fills him with its darkness and its light, he staggers to his feet and then falls down, and he cannot stop it, the noise, the light, the life, the death, the all of it, he screams, and Fenris Wolf cannot shield him, nothing can shield him, until Mr. Gulley is home to shelter Edmund’s heart in his two strong hands and hire two stronger carpenters to make his son six fine new walls of mahogany, balsa wood, and teak.
– 13 –
On December 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar runs down. The age of Hans — according to the calculations of the Mayan sorcerer-sages — is over.
Nobody tells Hans, so he doesn’t expire.
Nobody tells the jaguars, or their decaying orbit, either, so they don’t finish up their fall.
Ixchel circles the earth, and muses, chewing on the remnant of a seraph’s wing.
“I’m not,” she says, “I mean, I don’t think, I mean, I’m not going to catch on fire. Either.”
“Oh?” says Yohl.
“I’m going to roll up into a ball to minimize my surface area,” Ixchel says. “instead. And think cold thoughts. Then I will warm up, but I will not catch on fire.”
“That should work,” agrees Bahlum.
“Yeah. It should,” confirms the jaguar named Chan.
. . .
The jaguars fall, as they have fallen. They circle the world, in their degenerating orbit, cold, majestic, and alone. They spin around our tiny, fragile planet and its thin coat of air and warmth. They know, as we should know, that life is tentative; that the odds are constantly working against it, trying to unravel everything that we are.
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