She watched, though, and sometimes helped, while others did these things.
Maria Ximena married Jesus Franco, and they had three daughters. The fishermen started putting little five-horsepower engines on the back of their boats and catching more fish. One year there was a hurricane. For several years, there was a war. One year everything was wonderful! Sometimes that happens. The fish were bigger, everyone was healthy, and they had a festival with a bonfire twenty feet high. Iago Fortuno married a woman who, although not a nun, had nonetheless taken a holy vow of silence, and the other men were in awe of this and thereafter considered Iago one of the wisest and most clever of men, and they convinced him to fill the mayor’s office.
A young man named Carlos des Casas Montoya tried to impress Suzie by swallowing a sword. Two swords at once! Three! And then died, coughing blood.
Maria Ximena Franco died of a fever. Jesus, her husband, went blind in one eye the day she was buried. Two of their daughters grew up and moved away to the city. The third daughter became a communist and carried a rifle everywhere.
A young man who called himself El Gato courted Suzie with poetry. He played his guitar for her and sang a song he had written, comparing her to the wind.
“El viento es una mujer y un canción y un sue?o,” he sang, and died in his sleep.
If the villagers noticed that Suzie had remained beautiful and unchanged for a great many years, they didn’t mention it. The old women still looked at her with the same knowing eyes, although the original old women had given way to new old women.
A day came when she felt moved to sweep out the house one final time and go back where she belonged (technically). She knew it the way you know it’s time to go to bed at the end of a day.
She knew it, not surprisingly, the day Iago Fortuno died of old age.
She walked through his garden and his greenhouse and found him in his bed, sitting up, waiting. Before she could lean down and kiss him on the forehead, he stirred, saying, “I have something for you.”
And he retrieved something from the wooden table at his bedside and handed it to her.
A flower. A small yellow flower.
“Una flor inmortal,” he said. “An immortal flower. You can just enjoy it and not be sad.”
The flower was made of silk and wire.
Suzie said, “Bueno, Iago,” and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, and off he went to the afterlife.
Suzie went back up the hill and swept her house and closed the door behind her and became a wind along the beach.
The old women made respectful signs but whispered, “La rana está fuera del pozo. The frog is out of the well,” and broke out a bottle of wine their grandmothers had put aside years before.
—
The waitstaff at Santana’s didn’t approach Suzie while she was drinking her margarita.
They weren’t afraid. They just wanted to see if she could drain the whole bucket.
She could, as it turned out. Afterward, though, she fell asleep right there at the table, so someone had to wake her to tell her it was time to go. They fetched Santana himself.
“Se?ora?” he said, poking her in the shoulder a little bit.
“Milo?” she slurred, raising her head. Then: “Oh. Hi. Sorry.”
She stood to go, staggering. As she staggered, she noticed something that disturbed her. She felt…less…than before. Like chunky soup that had been thinned with water. If she raised her hand to the decorative ceiling lamps, she knew, she would find herself becoming transparent.
“Shit,” she said to Santana. “I’m starting to fade.”
“Sí,” answered Santana. “Lo siento. The frog is in the well.”
“It sure is,” she agreed, and stumbled out and became an evening breeze. A thin, unsteady breeze that made snoring noises and wobbled around in the park all night as if lost.
Milo had lived many lives in which he was talented in some way.
Sometimes the talent was developed through practice and hard work; other times it was more like a birthday present. Either way, special abilities always made things easier. It was like going into battle with a magical sword.
—
He was a racehorse named Across the Sea, with lungs like locomotives and hooves like war hammers, who couldn’t bear to see another horse pass him by.
—
He (she, actually: Milona Oxygen Templeton) managed cargo for interstellar freighters—one of the hardest jobs ever. You had to be able to keep schedules in your head and coordinate quantum collapse points. She could imagine hyperspace the way other people might imagine a stick of chewing gum.
—
In India, long ago, he was a snake charmer. Just an ordinary snake charmer at first, until one day he wasn’t careful and was bitten. He went home and lay down and waited to die but didn’t. It turned out that he was immune to all sorts of poison. He became a swami, a holy man, and people would come to see him drink terrible things and be bitten and survive. He said prayers for pilgrims, and they paid him.
One day a lot of black fluid came gushing out of his mouth and eyes and pores, and he fell over dead. Things add up. You can’t help it.
—
One time he had what people like to call “a way with animals.” He became a famous cowboy, in an age of genetically engineered beef. He rode horses with legs like whips, careening among beef cattle like corn-fed tankers, under an artificial deep-blue sky.
“Gee!” he would yell, and “Haw!” and the horses flowed the way he wanted, because they loved him. The cows mooed at him like foghorns. They loved him, too, in their sad, doomed way.
—
He was Mona Rivette, the precocious daughter of a waveform physicist, a beautiful child with the misfortune to be one of the last victims of a terrible wasting disease. By the age of nine, she was almost completely paralyzed. Her condition, and her terror of being shut up within her own body, drove her to an act of singular genius.
She asked her father to let her use some of his cloud time on the solar supercomputer, and he did. She asked him now and then to bring her such-and-such a material or to have such-and-such a thing machined or molded, and he always did.
On her eleventh birthday, she presented her family and the District 45 Galactic Patent Board with an invention she called a “fish,” a communications device that hovered over a person’s shoulder and served to call people, or compute things, or record sights and sounds, or broadcast, or measure things with lasers, and so on. It was the ultimate personal assistant.
People loved the fish because it did a lot of the tedious technical work they often didn’t feel like doing. The pricier models would even fetch things. They also loved it because it was cute, hovering beside them, or flying with them, or even swimming with them, if swimming was something they did.