Free Grist 01 - The Four Last Things by Timothy Hallinan

she gorgeous?” Skippy said. It was the second time my mind had been read that evening. I felt like a library book; anybody could check me out.
    “Even if nothing happens,” Mary Claire said, “we’ll meet you in the other room afterward. Or I will, anyway. Angel may not feel up to it. Are you okay, Angel?”
    Angel was staring at her mother. Slowly she shook her head in the negative. Her jaw was hanging open.
    Mary Claire looked at her watch. “We’ve been up here four minutes,” she said a little nervously. “If Angel doesn’t Speak in a minute, we’ll go back home. Five minutes is usually—”
    Angel groaned. Her head lolled back and her right hand slipped from her lap and hung lifelessly at her side. The kitten looked right and left. Angel shuddered.
    “You are the fisherman,” she said in a preternaturally deep voice. “And you are the lake.”
    My neck prickled.
    Mary Claire stepped away from the microphone and gave her daughter a concerned look. She might as well have been shooting at a rainbow; Angel wasn’t there anymore.
    “You float on the skin of your past,” Angel said, her eyes wide and sightless, “suspended above the dark landscape below. There are hills there and valleys there. You created them but you’ve forgotten where they are.”
    Her mouth moved in time with the words, but it wasn’t a little girl’s voice. And yet it was her voice, there could be no doubt about it.
    “You cast your line down into the waters and you bring up small pieces of yourself. They are bright, silvery, and quick. But how many more shimmer away, how many escape, every time your line splashes into the water?”
    “Hot shit,” Skippy whispered to himself.
    “You must do more,” the voice speaking through Angel said. “You must learn the map of that invisible landscape below. It is the map of your life.”
    “And a little child shall lead them,” someone said behind me.
    “Why should they escape, those silvery ones?” Angel said. Her body was limp and lifeless. Her spine sagged against the hard back of the chair. Only the jaw seemed to be animated. It moved as though it had a life of its own. The kitten had jumped from her lap and strolled offstage.
    “They escape because you throw your nets, you cast your hooks, into the past. There is no past. You know that and you’ve always known it. A baby knows it.
    “The eternal moment is now. Only by existing in now, now and only now, can you command the power you need to deal with a world that will break you, defraud you, destroy you, if you let it. There are things you must cast away.
    “You have baggage with you. Cast it away; you can’t fight with your hands full.”
    Skippy sighed beside me.
    “You have memories with you,” Angel droned on inexorably. “Cast them away; you can’t float on the moment when you are anchored in the past. That is what the Listeners are for. To help you chart your explorations, to receive your memories.
    “You have commitments with you. Cast them away; you can’t diffuse your strength by fighting others’ battles. You can only give them one thing, the gift of example, the example of someone who can survive in the world.
    “You have your past with you. Cast it away. Become born in the eternal moment, the moment of now.”
    Except for the stretched, contorted voice, the hall was absolutely silent. No one coughed, no one shuffled his feet.
    “There are devils in the world,” Angel said. “They’re not supernatural. They look like you and me. They are you and me.” People cast sidelong looks at each other. “They’re people who are stretched beyond their breaking point, people who are held together only by their skin, people who are trying to sustain the burden of their past, of all their pasts, in a world that exists only in the present.
    “They are people who haven’t learned to cast away the Four Last Things: possessions, memories, others, one’s self— one’s past self. Pity them.”
    Mary Claire had