[Canvases] Garden Two

        The woman in blue finally found the young man standing in the third maze, but she stalled at the entrance for a few breaths, unblinking. His left side faced her, illuminated in waves by the shifting of the clouds over the moon. She let herself wonder again what exactly the moon reflected, with the lack of sun in the starlit black. She heard him choke back a cough, and blinked once. His shoulders heaved slowly, and she heard his shallow and rattling breaths.


        She began her approach somewhere between a half-sated savannah cat and a hungry fish. He either didn’t hear her padding through the water or didn’t care. Closer now, she saw dripping at steady intervals from his left hand, and the rips along his sleeve. At his right side she saw something small and square, and it dripped more freely. He inhaled deeply now, arching his neck towards the starlit black. One full diver’s breath, and then he turned his eyes to her. He was grinning, radiant beneath the parting clouds. His eyes were trembling in their orbits as they circled her face. He mouthed disparate syllables with a dry tongue. He was as a man who had seen the face of God and found it almost enough.
        She walked a quarter circle around him, and he turned his head to follow. In his right hand was a cracked brick, shimmering with blood. His shirt was torn along with his coat, its white folds punctuated with splatters of darkening red. Along and beneath his collar were nail marks, raw and desperate efforts to stop the falling brick.
        “What have you done?” she lilted, answer known.
        He laughed softly, his eyes steady now. He seemed to notice for the first time the scratches on his neck, and let the brick fall to the ground. He ran his hands on the sides of his neck, wincing through his smile.
        “Was it enough?” again the answer known.
        He shrugged off his coat and let it fall beside the brick.
        “Maybe.” he spoke at last, then paused to reconsider “No, not yet. When there’s none left. Then, enough.”
        She took his left hand in hers, flipped it over and back, examining his nails. Satisfied, she gripped his wrist, her own nails sinking into his flesh. Through barely parted teeth, she whispered.
        “You are not prescient. You are a man at the levers of a prescient machine, with eternity at his back and a howling future clawing at his door. You do not know when it will be enough, you do not know when you will stop. Hmm? Maybe? Maybe is not enough. Maybe is for gamblers and fools. What will happen if none are left and only you remain? What then, man in the machine?”
        Smiling still, he gripped her wrist, his nails light upon her. He looked at her like a prophet delivering the truth of the God he had just seen, and whispered:
        “Then it will be perfect.”