GeneSix Read Free Page A

Darkness saw. And it made him happy. She would never smile like that at him, but he had long since accepted what he had become, and what the limitations were. It seemed to him you could not truly appreciate the benefits of a situation if you could not accept the limitations.
    The truly ironic thing, he thought, is that he was really no more invisible to her now than he had been back when he was human.
    And so he left Sondra and the man who was making her happy. He intended to stop by every so often, in his nightly travelings, and the guy with the square jaw had better make sure he continued to make her happy.
    More years passed, and he continued to check in on Sondra every so often.
    He saw her and Dean move into their first house. After a while, he saw a FOR SALE sign go on the lawn, as they left this place and moved into a larger one, a couple miles outside of Boston.
    He stopped in for a visit the year she turned thirty. She was sitting in a rocker early in the evening, a magazine in her hand. On the cover was a photo of a young man with slicked back hair. Plastered below his face was the name, Ricky Nelson.
    In a small play pen on the floor was a little girl maybe six months old, cooing and drooling and seeming generally happy. Dean was out in the garage at his work bench, hammering something together.
    Sondra’s hair was pulled back in a tail, and she had put on maybe ten pounds, but she still looked incredible. The Darkness allowed himself to simply admire her for a moment.
    She glanced up from the magazine. Was it getting darker in here?
    “Dean!” she called out.
    “Yeah?” he called back. The door leading to the garage was hanging open so they could hear each other.
    “I think you might need to check the fuse box.”
    Time to leave. But he would be back. He would always be back.
    Sondra and Dean had a second child two years later. A boy. He played baseball and basketball. Dean’s hair had receded and his stomach filled out, and he coached the little league team D.J. (Dean Junior) played on. Their daughter, Lisa, was long and skinny the way Sondra had been, and marched with the band and twirled a baton.
    The Darkness busied himself about Boston, sometimes flitting about New York but usually remaining close to home. One night, a man broke into a convenience store and shot down the cashier in cold blood, and helped himself to the cash drawer. He got away, running down an alley. The police found him at the end of the alley, simply sitting against the wall, his eyes wide open but not seeing. He was alive, he was breathing, but there was no brain activity. His mind had gone dark.
    He often visited Mother, who never seemed to age. She did allow her hair to become streaked with silver, though. Looks distinguished, she said. But otherwise, she looked about forty. The way she always had as long as the Darkness had known her.
    He visited Sondra the year she turned forty-eight, and found her saying to Lisa, who was now a senior in high school, “Now, where did I put my glasses?”
    Sondra wore her hair shorter now, and it was seriously graying. Moreso than Mother’s. She was now probably twenty-five pounds heavier than she had been when she and Dean were first married, and there were now serious lines engraving themselves into her face, trailing away from her eyes and mouth.
    Lisa was still tall and willowy, but now had curves and had filled out her shirt a little. She was sitting on the couch with a paperback by the new writer all the kids at school were talking about. Stephen King. On the cover was the title Salem’s Lot .
    The Darkness decided to conduct a quick hunt about the house for the glasses. He found them within seconds, tucked behind a couch cushion.
    He had found that with a little effort, he could actually wrap his darkness around an object and transport it from one place to another. To a normal human, it would seem that the object simply appeared out of nowhere.
    He did this with Sondra’s glasses. He