Swans Over the Moon (9 page)

The shadow of the blue planet fell completely
over their world. Selene removed her goggles as the sun, behind the
hills, could not now blind her. She wanted him to see her face as
he lay dying. She watched him push himself up to his hands and
knees, then she carefully removed his goggles.

Through the chromatic whirlwind he saw her
face – saw it more clearly than he ever had before, as if his past
views of her had been through a distorting glass that had now been
removed. Her countenance shone, an iridescent aura enveloping her
white hair, casting lambent rainbows into the churning
prism-vortex.

A glimmer of revelation sparkled in his eyes,
then a full-fledged sun broke over his clouded mind. “I know now,”
he wheezed his last, failing breaths. “You are not alive, you are
dead.”

She laughed, an honest laugh, not malicious,
like the sounding of a million tiny silver cymbals.

“Oh, father, how silly you are! Did mother
not tell you of her pregnancy before the fall? I am not dead. How
can that die, which was never born?”

Selene, Queen Selene Pelevin, reached down to
close her father's eyelids with ghostly hands. The vortex
dissipated, along with her beautiful face, the face of one never
born, never alive, never dead, everlastingly never, into the
void.

###

About the Author:

Forrest Aguirre’s fiction has been published
in over fifty magazines and anthologies. His work has received
honorable mentions in several Year’s Best anthologies and he was a
finalist for the StorySouth Million Writers Award. Forrest is also
a World Fantasy Award recipient and Philip K. Dick Award finalist
for his editing of the Leviathan 3 anthology with co-editor Jeff
VanderMeer. Forrest lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife,
children, and ferret.

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