Free Twice Dying by Neil McMahon

into her mind: that her cousin had taken her place.
    Herself, dropping like stone in a dead faint.
    Later she learned that she had been unconscious for several minutes. She remembered only the distant sense of a vast barren landscape, with herself on it. Far away at the horizon stood a sort of beacon, endlessly searching. She remembered it sweeping closer, the electrifying instant before contact, and then nothing more.
    But whatever had happened during those lostmoments made the next months of her life unreal, a shadowy existence that she had reentered like an amnesia victim. And she knew that whatever had touched her had been looking for her ever since. It had colored everything: career, men, life.
    She leaned forward to start the car. Her gaze caught the pale oval of her own face reflected in the rear-view mirror. Her hazel eyes, which a man had once told her caught sunlight and reflected it back in bursts, looked feverishly bright.
    From another car, another pair of eyes watched the Mercedes back out and drive away. A band moved to the ignition key, but then stopped.
    It was so delicate a matter, one that no texts addressed: the purification of a vessel, laying to rest the one who was there and bringing forth the one who waited.
    But clearly, they were already coming together.

Chapter 6
        
    O n his way home, Monks stopped to buy groceries and liquor at a small store run by an extended Portuguese family, a quiet place with scarred wooden floors and counters and a fine pall of dust hanging in the air. It was a biweekly ritual, more expensive than the bigger supermarkets, but they kept a fine butcher counter and a wealth of other delicacies: toothsome sausages, pungent cheeses, and jars of tart pickled vegetables.
    Moreover, there was the feeling that they had come to depend on his trade, ordered in Finlandia vodka especially for him, and that the family would dwindle in some obscure but significant way beyond money if he failed them. The elderly beret-wearing padrone, or his sturdy black-dressedwife, would thank Monks with a heavy accent, dark eyes seeming to measure his vice as he lifted the vodka bottles into his arms.
    From there the journey was on two-lane roads, traffic thinning and pavement narrowing as he drove farther west toward the north Marin coast. The drizzle had thickened to rain. He paused at his mailbox, tugging free the usual accumulation of journals and junk. The house was seventy yards farther up a graveled drive, isolated from the road and neighbors by a thick second growth of redwood, live oak, and twisted snakelike madrones, their slick bark glistening in the wet.
    Inside, he went straight to the cat food cupboard. A whirl of rumbling fur erupted across the kitchen, the skirmishing of children inside too long on a rainy day: the little calico his daughter had named Felicity, and Cesare Borgia, a scarred old black-coated felon who had been feral until Monks gradually won his trust. Omar, a blue Persian the size of a beagle, watched from the couch like an emperor for whose entertainment the battle was being staged. By all indications he had lain there since Monks’s departure, without moving or noticing that his human was gone.
    The fight ended with Felicity crowhopping across the floor, tail held stiffly down, while Cesare sat on the contested ground licking a paw. Monks noted that everyone had ended up closer to the food bowls. It was sheer extortion; a neighbor had fed them hours earlier. His ex-wifehad been able to hold out against them, but he had long since stopped even pretending. He considered the selection and chose the Kultured Kat Kidney Entree, feeling it was appropriate to tomorrow’s ASCLEP business, and divided two cans into three clean bowls, an arbitrary assignment since everyone stole from everyone else’s.
    Then he made his first drink. Finlandia vodka steamed as it spilled over ice, with a twist of just enough lemon to bring out the flavor. The taste was somewhere