She nodded in agreement, looking around, awestruck by its beauty, JJ doubly awestruck that he was there with her. She pointed then and said, “Do you wanna go all the way across?” He nodded and turned and they moved off in silence again, talking only sparingly.
And as they headed into the white escape, he became lulled by the feel of the snow, the sound of their skis as they sheared its surface, the cold air as it streamed against his face. His thoughts began to die away, lost in each passing winter moment, until his mind was stripped bare, and then in that vacuum a simple truth arose, from something he’d said to her just a few minutes before, that some people saw all of this and explained it with a belief in God.
It made him realize something he’d almost lost sight of, that maybe some other good too had come of that killing in Moscow. Because he had to believe now, as Naumenko did, that hidden in another winter landscape, a continent away, already sunk in darkness, was an icon, beautiful perhaps, valuable, an Annunciation. It meant more to those people than it ever could have elsewhere, representing to them what it did, representing everything.
They’d kept it through centuries of history’s ebb and flow before its theft, refusing to let it go even then, their faith making them determined to retrieve it from people whose motives were alien to them. And at the last, perhaps only a day away from losing it forever, it had been found and taken back.
That was where JJ had played his part, because it had been returned to the place it belonged by a girl who’d seen him kill a man, a witness, someone who by rights should never have survived herself. She’d seen inside him though, had seen something which in her own silent way she’d tried to communicate.
And at the time he hadn’t understood, but he’d been moved by her all the same, a girl he’d had no reason to spare but who, in a moment of weakness, he’d chosen not to kill. It was a scant gift but all he’d had to offer, and on that night perhaps, few could have offered much more.
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Kevin Wignall’s
FOR THE DOGS
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1
Seventeen-year-old boys die in car crashes, they die of meningitis, rare forms of cancer, suicide. Mostly, they don’t die at all. They pass through the age, shedding awkwardness and anger and self-loathing on the way.
Ben Hatto was a seventeen-year-old close to bursting with anger. He was angry with his parents for stifling just about every plan he’d had for the summer ahead, angry with his sister, too, for spending the second successive summer traveling with someone from college, angry with school and life and everything else.
There was no teen awkwardness about him, but he made up for it in self-loathing, centered at the moment on his hopeless infatuation with Alice Shaw, a girl completely out of his league, who thought of him as a friend if she thought of him at all. And today someone had asked him outright if he had a crush on her, and that’s where he was now, one feeble panicky denial away from total social humiliation.
He lay on his bed as the light faded, head propped up on a pillow, headphones with metal pounding, holding the world at bay. He’d eaten early, pasta. His parents had probably just finished their own dinner downstairs, hardly aware that he was even in the house with them.
His eyes were closed and he was thinking how he’d just have to ignore Alice completely through the final couple of weeks. If one person suspected something, so would others and he’d become a laughing stock. So he’d play it cool with her, and over the summer he’d get his act together and then maybe it wouldn’t seem so ridiculous that he liked someone that beautiful. Maybe.
It was something he could believe in for as long as he lay there, that he could be good-looking enough, cool enough, interesting enough for someone like her, that he could speak to her and say what he wanted to say, what he felt, and not the mess of words that actually came out. Lying there he could be everything he needed to be.
The trouble came when he left the security of his room, the posters, music, books, as though his personality was locked up in those familiar surroundings. He just wished for once that he could walk out of there, leave the house and not have everything fall apart, to be able to express himself, to be cool.
A track ended, and in the two-second digital hush he heard his door open. He kept his eyes closed, let the next track explode into his ears, wanting whoever it was just to go away. Then for one hopeful moment he imagined it being someone other than his parents—it was crazy, but if she were to come there, she might get to know him for who he really was, and then things might be different.