M. K. Hobson

“I’m sorry Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn’t mean to miss it. Things...happened.”

“Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up.”

It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true.

“What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

”I have no idea what kind of idiot you are,” Miss Jesczenka said. “That’s why I’m asking.”

Could one die from boredom, she wondered? From complete, oppressive, crushing, unmitigated boredom, the likes of which made all other boredom seem like ecstasy’s sweet thrilling embrace? And in such a case, if one happened to have a life insurance policy, would it pay?

It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious.

Having engaged in vigorous and passionate debate while on their honeymoon trip from New York, they had arrived at the startling—and rather liberating—conclusion that the marriage itself was not at all necessary. Stanton no longer had a name to give, and taking Emily’s would have involved all the tedium of authority and nonsense they’d hoped to avoid. So, in the end, he had returned to her the simple gold band she had worn for so long, sliding it onto the ring finger of her new right hand. And she had given him a soft slow kiss. They were the only vows required.

“Was your mother furious?”

“She’ll get over it,” Stanton said. “Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there’s still hope.”

“Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.”

“Don’t lie,” he said. “That’s my job.”

Sadly, there is a fine line between patriotism and paranoia.

Love. Such a lot of damn fuss.

Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead.

It is your world.

It is the world we will make for you.