Any Way You Slice It: Before It's Too Late, #2

By Stephen Pocklington

Eco-Terrorism?  Hardly.  With today's steady stream of mass murders, you'd expect at least one shooter to do us all a favor and target someone who actually deserves to die.  Any of the heartless monsters out there intent on killing us all.  Pick a few of them.  An ugly thought but pragmatic.  It's just how Cooper sees things.

And when your body count surpasses a hundred, it's no longer merely how you see things.  It's who you've become.  Indeed, Cooper's been at it for a while, having embraced this bloody mission on our behalf.  Never mind that no one asked him to.  No one had to.  It's simply a judiciously top-down approach to making a difference.

The FBI would prefer that he go away, and not just because he's making them look bad.  It's one thing for madmen to slaughter the innocent and powerless week after week.  It's another thing altogether for a perfectly sane citizen to execute the high and mighty with such good reason.

Cooper would prefer sitting on his back porch feeding the birds.  Still, somebody's got to save the planet, and no one else is stepping up.  Simple solution: Assassinate the worst climate offenders, hoping that will shake everyone else awake.  Unfortunately, most are already too accustomed to obscene levels of violence.  It leaves no option but to up the ante and violate the ultimate taboo.

Happily, his next targets have chosen themselves.  With all their cultural warfare blather, it's only logical to begin hacking at the cultural root of the problem.  Nice of them to volunteer.

Any way he slices it, it's time to unleash the worst violence his spirit can bear…for Humanity's sake.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Pocklington
• Release date: May 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223973690

Stephen Pocklington

Stephen Pocklington lives on a small Certified Wildlife Habitat within the High Rock Lake-Yadkin River Watershed in North Carolina.  He shares this haven with his partner, their dog Dubhshith, and diverse appreciative wildlife. It should be noted that Stephen is holds fast to the precept Cause no unnecessary harm.  He hasn’t fired any weapons since the Army took them away, deemed him unfit, and sent him home in 1981.  He was a fairly good shot, but then he got better.  Since laying down the sword, he has relied on his pen.  He has written so many letters to elected representatives that they each have a special bin for storing them (cylindrical containers, open at the top and about 18 inches tall). Over the years, his car bumpers have sagged from the burden of too many futilely imploring bumper stickers.  Endless marching merely took him in weary circles, wondering how it could be that he still had to protest the same shit.   Yet, now in his seventies, he remains curiously hopeful.

Book preview

The First Slice

Civilized life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

J.G. Ballard

BOBBY DEUTSCH WAS STARING blankly at his 65-inch QLED television screen.  Thursday Night Football masked the distress that had plagued him all afternoon, nothing more.  He couldn’t tell you the score nor what quarter it was.  Nor even who was playing.  He’d turned the game on only because Phyllis routinely vacated the family room whenever she heard the too-familiar voice of Joe Buck.  His wife simply couldn’t tolerate anything so tedious and plebeian as sports, least of all games of gratuitous violence.  Thankfully, Bobby thought.  All he wanted was the room to himself.

It had been an especially difficult day at work.  Not that his job ever required much actual work.  As President and CEO of All-American Foods Corporation (AAFC) of Ames, Iowa, he left all the actual work to subordinates.  He was their leader.  And a leader’s work, Bobby would be quick to tell you, is simply to lead, which apparently involved a lot of huffing and puffing.  Bobby struggled daily with consequential worries.  Now more than ever, with homicidal madmen afoot. 

His troubles and his worries appeared far more consequential now that these damn warnings began arriving.  Not the public warnings that were all over the press.  He hardly noticed any of them.  These were personal warnings addressed specifically to him.  The first simply said:

Please Stop The Killing,

Or Else

Bobby’s first thought was, I haven’t harmed anybody.  I’ve certainly never killed anyone!  So that particular note was easily dismissed.  He had enough to worry about, given continuing trade disputes with China, exacerbated by the administration’s senseless tariffs.  But a week later, a second message called him back from anxieties about trade wars and profit margins:

Sorry if that wasn’t clear enough for you.

Please, Stop killing our animal kin.

Or else

Bobby’s second thought was, Damn these veganistas!  Don’t I have enough to fret about?  But aside from fleeting angry thoughts, the bother of this warning penetrated no deeper than making a mental note to have a word with Corporate Security.  Which he quickly forgot.  Still, when he got home that night, he did check to see that the dog had water in his dish.  Never mind that the dish was dirty and nearly empty.  Nor that Bobby couldn’t tell you who fed the dog or when or what he ate.  Still, he felt pleased with himself, knowing that at least he let him out each night before going to bed.  It didn’t matter that Bobby actually let her out—her name was Daisy—and to be honest, it was only most nights.

Yesterday, the third warning arrived:

You’re not listening.  Please stop killing cows and pigs.

Shut the doors to the killing floor and never open them again.

Or else! Or else means, or else you will die. And very soon.

Okay.  Here’s cause for some concern, he thought to himself.  If this gets out, it’ll impact stock prices.  He realized immediately that, other than Rayford, no one at the office could know.  He was vaguely aware of what had recently been happening across the fossil fuel industry.  Especially that rash of assassinations.  Their stocks had crashed and still hadn’t recovered.  He’d get Rayford to help look into all the fuss about global warming and saving the planet or some such rot.  And check into whether those alarmist public warnings were still being published.  And, if so, what were they going on about now?

It was afternoon before Bobby got around to calling Rayford into his office.  Rayford Dalton was more of an old friend than just Bobby’s head of security.  As such, he wasn’t at all pleased to learn that Bobby was only just now getting around to sharing the personal warnings.

Barely suppressing his frustration, Rayford reminded his boss that they’d talked about all this before, multiple times!  Of course, he’d kept the boss informed about those very public warnings and the string of assassinations.  That was his job, he said.  As usual, Bobby dodged responsibility for his apparent ignorance and dismissive attitude toward subordinates, even old friends.  He feigned angry disbelief and insisted he was only now discovering that AAFC, his company, was on a much-publicized list of targets for elimination.  It didn’t matter what Rayford may have told him in the past.  It didn’t matter that other major meat processing companies were in the same boat.  It was now obvious that executives were in mortal danger.  Presidents, CEOs, COOs.  It was people like him!  If matters unfolded as they just had for the fossil-fuel industry leaders and board members...then he....

"This is unacceptable!"  Bobby fumed incoherently.

Bobby couldn’t wrap his overwrought mind around what he deemed inconceivable, so Rayford patiently walked him through recent events.  Again, but as if for the first time.  Quickly pulling up news articles that were all over the internet, he showed Bobby that the body count thus far exceeded one hundred.  Then, pulling up several recent Daily Warnings (as they were now being called), Rayford showed Bobby how this terrorist, Gaia, was now ranting about industrial animal farming, saying it was destroying the planet.  Google confirmed that fossil fuel executives started dropping just a month or so ago.  Not just executives.  Even their lobbyists.  Even the new nominee for EPA director.  Even their security details.  News of this had been everywhere.

Bobby admitted that he was sort of aware of the broader picture.  The actual events had been too horrifying to follow closely, he declared.  So he’d been focusing on his own troubles.  Business matters.  With the way the Covid pandemic had run through a couple of his meat processing plants, it was easy to keep busy and focused away from this other carnage.  But very slowly, it began to sink in that people in his own industry were now being deemed Deceivers, Deniers, Exploiters, Pollutocrats, Destroyers, or some such nonsense. Worse, now they were being called Torturers and Slaughterers.

Apparently, Bobby muttered, "the eco-terrorists object to my feeding people."

The absurdity of the thought cranked Bobby up again.  So, he unloaded on Rayford.  Again.  From his elevated perspective, "It was pointless even to engage with these extremists.  Somebody needed to do something.  They should be taken out and shot!  They weren’t normal.  None of them were capable of rational thought.  They were sick.  Everybody knows that meat is the only source of the complete, high-quality protein people require for health and strength.  It’s a necessity.  Normal people know that."

Rayford knew that.  He understood.  He was a normal guy.  To placate his boss, he echoed, "What was wrong with these people?"

And so the rant went on, apparently for Rayford’s edification, though presumably he already knew.  "And what could be more natural?  Eating meat is just the natural order of things.  God gave man dominion over the animals.  They exist for us to eat them.  It’s that simple.  These radicals are trying to tear down the natural order.  Just imagine cavemen eating avocado toast!"

Rayford admitted that he, for one, couldn’t imagine such a thing.

When Bobby finally ended his tirade and headed for home, Rayford was left wondering, what the hell is avocado toast?

On the drive home, it dawned on Bobby.  Rayford said something about many recently assassinated executives having received prior personal warnings.  Most, far fewer than the three he’d received.

So, the football game he was not watching was just a cover for some serious worrying.  Private worrying where no one could observe his unseemly fretting.  He couldn’t afford to have staff find out about these threats.  They were already squirrelly enough over this Covid nonsense at the processing plants.

Bobby had casually mentioned the first two warnings to his wife, Phyllis, but she’d been quick to dismiss them.  She didn’t say as much, but she was well aware of the Gaia Killings.  More to the point, she took comfort in knowing that wives and children were being spared.  So far.  Besides, she smiled to herself; his life insurance is paid up.

Phyllis had never forgiven Bobby for ruining her life by making her live on the outskirts of Bondurant rather than in the heart of West Des Moines.  She would have settled for Urbana.  But no.  He wanted to be closer to his office in Marshalltown.  Selfishly, he hadn’t wanted to add to his already long commute.  That meant her friends had to haul themselves 30 minutes on the Interstate just for a morning coffee!  Or abandon her altogether out here in the boonies, which was usually the case.  Her house was next to a cornfield, for god’s sake!  So now, she constantly had to make the insufferable commute.  If it weren’t for the shiny new Mercedes S-Class he bought her each year, the situation would have been intolerable.

In full fretting mode, Bobby paced and vented his concerns alone in front of the TV.  If Phyllis paid any attention to the yelling, she probably thought he was berating officials for making a bad call or screaming at some player who had fumbled.  But Bobby was ranting at his unknown enemies: Dammit, eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary.  Gimme a break. We’re not farming dogs and cats here.  We’re not testing chemicals on bunnies!  We produce food; pork and beef.  Those damn vegans are haters, and they knowingly distort the truth about our nutritional needs.

Joe Buck offered no response to that.  Troy Aikman was speechless. Bobby glared at the TV screen.  He wanted them to respond with a Hell yes! We need the protein only meat can provide!  After all, Joe and Troy were real men.  Well, Troy, at least.

Feeling abandoned by the unresponsive jocks, Bobby turned from the TV and faced the picture window looking out on the fields of corn Phyllis so hated.  He now addressed his ranting to a world he was sure had gone mad: Can’t you see that these vegans are just a bunch of socialist snowflakes...?  They’re overly emotional, and they’re working against their own best interests.  They’re irrational, moralistic radicals.  They’re putting animals ahead of people, endangering our health and survival.  People.  Eat.  Meat.  We need MEAT, dammit!

Bobby was in a full-on rant when a sharp pop startled him.  It came from the picture window he was facing directly in front of him.  Something stung his face in several spots and bit his left ear hard as it whizzed past.  His ear hurt.  A lot.  Whatever it was, it sounded as though it had smacked against something on the wall behind him.  He glanced over his shoulder and saw that the glass on Phyllis’s giant family portrait was shattered.  It was the damn portrait she had commissioned of the three of them: Bobby, their daughter Enid, and herself in the middle.  The one she’d hung next to the big-screen TV as a futile reminder that he had better things to do.  To remind him he had responsibilities to his family and that he shouldn’t be wasting his time staring at televised mayhem.  Only a few jagged shards still clung to the frame.

Bobby tentatively touched his ear where he thought he’d been bitten. He found that much of it was missing.  And he was bleeding.  Quite a lot.  He hardly noticed the smaller bites on his face but for a rivulet of blood that was getting into his left eye.  The whole thing baffled him.  That’s why it took so long to notice the sunburst of cracks emanating from the bullet hole in the window.

Unbeknownst to baffled Bobby, it appeared he’d barely escaped death.  But escape wasn’t the correct word.  Spared was more like it.  But he couldn’t know that.  He’d been spared because of another man’s melancholy.  Because a melancholy man felt uncertain about the efficacy of all these assassinations and was reluctant to execute again without greater clarity. 

The melancholy man had, despite his uncertainty, been positioned and watching since before sunset.  Long before Bobby entered the room and turned on the TV.  The whole time Bobby had been pacing with his back to the family room’s picture window, the melancholy man was watching through his rifle scope.  Zeroed in and watching.  Taking the measure of this all-too-human man.  This fairly ordinary, mortal man.  It was only when Bobby turned and gazed out at the dark night that Nathaniel Cooper, the melancholy man, took his shot. 

The shot proved remarkably accurate for someone wracked with uncertainties.  Remarkably precise for anyone, really.  The bullet popped through the window directly in front of Bobby.  It whizzed just past his head but through the helix of his left ear.  It bit off just slightly less of that ear than intended.  But then, very precisely, it found the smiling version of Bobby in the family portrait on the wall beside the big-screen television. 

The Second Slice

You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.

Charles Bukowski

THE POLICE WERE CALLED.  Phyllis called them.  Not because she had the slightest idea what had just happened in the family room.  Not out of concern for her wounded husband, Bobby.  She called the police because something had burst through the living room wall right above her head.  She’d been sitting on the settee, reading, when something burst through the wall above her head, spraying debris into her perfectly coifed hair and onto her book.  Even into the cup of Earl Gray she was holding.  And then, whatever it was, shattered the picture window across from her.  The one that looked out onto her beautifully landscaped front lawn.  Her beautiful front lawn where nary a stalk of corn could be seen.

Phyllis screamed.  She screamed before calling the police.  At first, she just screamed, but then she screamed for Bobby.  Again, not out of concern for him.  She needed him to do something.  When she called again and again and got no response, then she called the police.  Not out of concern for why Bobby hadn’t responded.  She knew he was useless.  But because, as she often had to, it was up to her to take charge.

The police were prompt.  After all, the call came from the Deutsch residence, and they were prominent citizens, though the police could have taken their time.  Bobby still hadn’t moved when they arrived.  They could have taken an hour, and Bobby would have probably still been standing there.  Quite understandably.

Bobby was in shock.  The wonder was that he was still standing at all.  Ears tend to bleed rather profusely, especially ears with a sizable chunk torn out of the helix just above the lobule.  The trickling had stopped where bits of glass had embedded themselves in his face, but still, Bobby was pretty well drenched.  He looked a bloody fright.  Phyllis had screamed again when she’d finally investigated and found him standing stock-still facing the window.  Thankfully, the police arrived just then, and she seized on the excuse of letting them in rather than face the administration of aid.  The EMTs could do that when they arrived.  It was their job.

The local police officers were a bit slow on the uptake.  That is, it took longer than it should have for them to grasp that they were all standing around in what was still an unsecured field of fire with an unknown shooter or shooters at large.  Once that was grasped, an officer dispatched himself outside for a cautious look around though he neglected to do anything meaningful to clear the field of fire.  The area was declared clear based on no one falling within the beam of the officer’s flashlight as it flicked here and there in the yard.  The officer who’d stayed inside rendered basic aid to Mr. Deutsch, i.e., applied pressure to staunch the oozing but otherwise left the poor man to EMTs when they arrived.  He then secured what was now clearly a crime scene, which meant he stood guard while waiting for the Crime Scene Investigators.  No one noted the significant bullet placement on the portrait.

Marty Venable loved her work, though it was just a stepping stone.  She was headed to the FBI Training Academy at Quantico.  She just knew it.  Some day at least.  But first, she cautiously took over what she knew was still an unsecured crime scene and possibly an active field of fire.  She noted the through-and-through bullet hole on the interior wall and its placement on the portrait.  She used that hole to shoot a reverse azimuth with her laser pointer by inserting it into the hole left in the wall from Mrs. Deutsch’s living room.  The beam shot through the wall, through the hole in the picture window, and out to its point of origin.  It also gave the portrait’s Mr. Deutsch a red third eye.  All the uniform had to do was go outside, stand with his back to the house, and start walking into the cornfield following the beam. 

If you lose the beam, Marty instructed,  keep walking on a heading of 34.5 degrees northeast until you find the sniper hide.  It will be several hundred yards out, so keep scanning left and right with your flashlight.  As he started into the corn, she added, laughing, And you might want to stay low... he may still be out there.  And don’t touch anything.

Sure enough.  About twelve hundred yards out, there it was.  The officer announced on his rover that he had found a new Sturm, Ruger & Company Precision Rifle, Model 18080 bolt-action with a Thunder Beast 338 Ultra Suppressor.  Marty was glad he knew his weapons.  She hadn’t known which particular sniper rifle the officer would find, but she expected something equivalent.  This one fitted the bill nicely.  Marty knew what to expect because she’d been studying the Gaia Killings and knew Gaia’s modus operandi.

The rifle met Marty’s expectations, but first, it scared the living shit out of the officer when he caught sight of it in his flashlight’s beam.  He’d been expecting a trampled spot in the corn with maybe some brass left behind.  The damn thing was set up on its bipod, pointing straight at him.  Of course, no one was lying prone behind it, but the officer was flat on the ground before he sussed that fact.  Only then, face in the dirt, did he consider how an ATACR 5-25x50 scope would have zeroed in on him well before he left the house.  The scope was looking out just above the tops of the corn, which wasn’t even knee-high at this time of year. 

There was no need to search for the single .338 Lapua Mag casing among hundreds of tiny cornstalks.  It was right there, tied with a piece of string to a small box,  placed neatly next to the ejected magazine, still holding three rounds.  A neatly written note on the top of the box said, For Bobby D.

Though the officer called Marty on the rover, inviting her to see for herself that there was every piece of evidence one could want at the sniper’s hide, she stayed put at the house.  She knew there was nothing for her there.  There would be no fingerprints.  No DNA.  Unless some were planted.  She knew the best she could achieve now was not to muck things up for the FBI agents who would arrive shortly.  She had called them as soon as she knew it was him.  She guessed it would take them twenty-five minutes tops.  This was their case now.

So Marty took her time finishing up at the house.  She still wanted to talk with Mr. Deutsch, who seemed more himself now that the EMTs had patched him up.  He refused to go to the hospital, but he seemed coherent for the moment.  Marty tried to process with him, to see what he recalled, but he still seemed to think he’d been bitten by something.  She showed him the hole in the picture window he’d been facing and explained what had made the hole.  He put his hand up and touched the sunburst crazing of the glass around the bullet hole, but he was slow to comprehend that he’d been grazed by the bullet that made the hole.

As it finally dawned on him that this had been the assassination attempt he’d been forewarned of, Mr. Deutsch seemed strangely relieved.  He began chuckling, He missed...he missed...my bullet missed...my bullet missed. 

Marty was puzzled by the phrase, my bullet until she recalled the story about Richard Sunderland, the fossil fuel lobbyist.  Sunderland had similarly been warned yet spared.  And he only learned he was intentionally spared when he received a .50 caliber cartridge with his name engraved on the casing—the bullet with his name on it—delivered by a courier rather than a rifle.  Marty grinned when she remembered what the officer had just said about finding a little box with a note saying, For Bobby D.

Unfortunately, Marty then made the mistake of leading him over to where his likeness was smiling back at him from the now-ruined family portrait on the wall.  It took him a moment to register what was wrong with the picture other than the shattered glass.  The Bobby in the painting had a neat bullet hole right between his eyes.  Marty watched as his puzzlement dissolved into the horrifying realization that there might be more than one bullet with his name on it. 

It was probably the strain of the long day, but Bobby Deutsch then did what any normal man might do.  He fainted.

The Third Slice

I was delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment

that all happiness is fleeting.

Alexandre Dumas

THE CABIN LOOKED OUT over Shenandoah National Park.  It was a part of the park long before there was a park.  Each of the cabin’s rough-hewn logs began life as majestic American Chestnut trees growing on the valley’s eastern edge.  They stood there for well over a hundred years before Englishmen came to the valley in the 1700s and cut them down.  Settlers.  Or invaders.  The native inhabitants, the Monacans, had long ago been decimated by the Rickohocken Indian slave traders who served the English.  None of them were left, so the sound of each tree falling was heard by few human ears but the wood-cutters’.

Each massive log was sawed and hewn where it fell at the valley’s edge, near to where the cabin would be raised.  The finished lengths were dragged to the site, notched, and lifted into place.  First, the two sill logs were set on massive cornerstones hauled up from the creek, and floor joists ran across these.  One at a time, the wall logs were levered up ramps and set into notches.  Once assembled and chinked with the valley’s red clay, the logs became a simple yet stout temporary dwelling.  As time and resources permitted, a larger frame structure would serve as the family home.  The small cabin would take on several other supporting roles over the years, including storage building, smokehouse, and corn/grain crib.  In its various guises, the cabin stood solidly on its four cornerstones in that spot for more than two hundred and fifty years.

Sophia Kalonymous discovered the cabin a year ago on an Airbnb search for romantic mountain hideaways.  A charming bougie couple had found their preservationist dream cabin a few years back.  The dream required it to be carefully disassembled and hauled by semi-tractor-trailer truck fifty-three miles up to their perfect mountain-view site.  Then it was lovingly reassembled precisely as it had stood for two hundred and fifty-plus years down in the valley.  Well, almost exactly.  Some conscientious concessions had to be made to modern practicality.  Simple accommodations like the addition of a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and, of course, a back porch to take advantage of the spectacular mountain view which was the reason for moving the cabin in the first place.  It was a vacation home, after all.  A high-end Airbnb.

Sophia’s discovery occurred at a time of acute loneliness when she was searching for more than just a romantic getaway.  This was back when Cooper was off staging the details of their mission—before any killing had begun and when all their plans still seemed noble.  Simply put, she was missing the warmth of the man she loved.  On the drive up to this particular Airbnb, she was keen on romantic, but at first sight of the two-hundred-fifty-year-old portion of the cabin, she thought rustic was more like it.  And yet she knew it was perfect.

In the first year of their separation, she’d visited several cabins on lonely overnight getaways.  Most wore a thin veneer of someone else’s idea of romance.  High on this secluded mountaintop, Sophia realized immediately that rustic was better suited for a romance between assassins.  Never mind all the pastel canopies, sparkly garden lights, and scented candles the other cabins had touted.  They were a couple with very rough edges, and she was searching for a place of respite from murderous thoughts.  A quiet spot where they might set aside the horrors they were unleashing.  Somewhere they could take a moment to heal.

Their long separation was purposeful rather than a sign of discord.  A higher purpose bound them together even as it necessarily forced them apart.  They were becoming Gaia’s Planet Stewards.  Cooper’s purpose would be to cleanse.  Sophia’s was to help people understand the necessity of her partner’s cleansing.  And, wherever possible, to encourage certain people to clean up their own damn messes before he got around to them.  Once Cooper eliminated the source of a stain, she thought, it would be gone forever.  When Sophia first found the cabin, such thoughts still gave her a righteous shiver.  They were really doing something!

Sophia wasn’t only house hunting.  From the beginning, she was busy doing her part, composing essays and daily messages.  And while Sophia was busy trying to wake people up and forewarn them about what was coming (and occasionally cabin hunting), Cooper was off setting up the things she was warning people of.  He was crisscrossing the country, establishing multiple identities, each with its own alias in what he was calling a hidey-hole.  Essentially, he was busy becoming a well-equipped army of assassins, each of whom required a place to hide in plain sight—hide as someone else who wasn’t hiding.  It would take two years to lay all the groundwork for their mission to save humanity from itself.  And as Cooper often said, they were just the sharp point of the spear.

They knew two years would be a long separation.  Even with a compelling purpose, it proved to be a very long time.  And given what they were up to, a mountaintop retreat seemed a hopeful sort of thing for Sophia to conjure.  Though she wasn’t thinking of hiding in the way Cooper had to, she knew an Airbnb wouldn’t do, even for their temporary retreat.  So she bought this little slice of heaven outright, through a discrete agent, and under an assumed name: Heda Thoreau.  It wasn’t Walden, and you couldn’t see Mt. Fuji from the porch, but on a clear day, you could see Hawksbill Mountain far off in the distance.

A year had passed since she bought the cabin.  The mission, which had now taken more than a hundred lives, was on temporary pause.  Cooper was gazing out from the cabin’s porch as he had each day since his arrival.  Silently gazing.  Days flowed by.  Sitting in perfect stillness, staring without purpose.

In his stillness, Cooper became invisible to the birds visiting  multiple feeders hanging within easy reach.  Perched on Sophia’s mountaintop porch, he relinquished the buzzing energy of constant vigilance.  He surrendered to naked vulnerability.  Rid of protective shields, he dissolved into the setting, just another piece of furniture on some human’s porch.  He became the mountaintop.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds freely and routinely sipped nectar from a handheld feeder.  From time to time, one would perch on Cooper’s trigger finger as it drank his homemade concoction—four parts spring water to one part unrefined sugar.  Not even the wary Scarlet Tanager sensed a perceptible movement to object to.  Cooper, the man, was gone.  He had disappeared into his rhythmic breathing in and breathing out, breathing in and breathing out, becoming one with the trees swaying in the breeze or the burbling water in the creek below.  And he vanished entirely into rock-steadiness on each third exhale.  Not even the twitch of a finger.

Each evening when the sun dipped, Cooper stirred and stretched as though waking from a long nap.  Sophia was always present, standing at the rail, welcoming the sunset.  She held onto every second of every day, but she always welcomed the gathering twilight with equanimity. She greeted Cooper likewise, always with a long embrace and the unspoken hope that this evening he might truly awaken and come home. 

Cooper prolonged these embraces as though he’d been gone for days.  As though he had just barely escaped from something harrowing and was indeed coming home at last.  Come home safely.  Which was true, except that he wasn’t quite home yet.  And they both knew he wasn’t quite back to stay.  Not yet.  He would always be coming home.  And, perhaps, he hoped, Sophia would always be waiting.

Sophia allowed yet another supper to pass in near silence.  She left Cooper to his washing-dishes meditation, which he said he’d missed while constantly on the go.  But later in the evening, when he joined her in the darkness out on the porch, she was determined to renew a conversation too long on pause.  They sat apart, cloaked in the night, until a waning moon rose high enough for its feeble light to filter through the trees.  Sophia started softly.

Cooper?

I’m right here... finally.  I’m ready.

I’m glad.  Are you sure?

Cooper knew he wasn’t really ready.  Not for what was coming.  But he had to listen, ready or not.  He loved her, and he owed her that.  So he took a deep breath and said, I’m ready. I can tell there’s a great deal I need to hear.  I will listen.

All right then. 

Sophia gave him a few more moments of silence.  She knew he always appreciated it when she took her time before speaking.  Even when she’d already had too much time alone with her thoughts.  She started again.

"Cooper.  Do you see how, with you shutting down like you’ve been, it feels as though you’re asking me to clean up your mess?  And all on my own...?" 

Sophia let her question burrow its way into his conscience.  Though she spoke softly, she offered no tender smile to soften it.  She didn’t wait for a response.

I put that poorly on purpose.  My question, and the tone I used, knocked you a little off-balance, didn’t they?

Sure.  Cooper remained unruffled, though it had indeed stung a bit.  He was glad she’d decided to be direct.  But only for an instant, he continued.  I know... your heart.... He wanted to say more but stopped.  He was unruffled, but he knew more was coming.

Good!  Now go back for a second to that feeling of being knocked off balance.  In that instant, do you think you were more or less receptive to whatever else I might have been about to say?

Less.  Much less, actually.  I felt a pang of...hurt, I guess.

"Good!  I mean, good that you recognize it.  But admit it. When I just said good like that, you felt the same pang again, didn’t you?"

I see your point.

I know you do, and I’m sorry for my clumsiness in making a point.  But you know, it’s been a long time since we talked about our respective roles.  I mean, really talked.

Cooper didn’t take the offered opening.  He knew there was more she needed to say, and whatever she expected from him would wait.  Besides, he knew all he had were familiar words she would dismiss as rationalizations.

You sat on the porch for three days...working your way through a jumble of emotions that I can only imagine because you still haven’t talked with me about them.  Which is fine.  I used that same time to muddle through my own stuff, only I process better while walking.  The problem is, all our solitary muddling hasn’t brought us any closer together, which is a shame because we’re all we’ve got.

A long silent moment passed, during which their eyes sought each other out in the dim moonlight.  Out of that long moment, Sophia watched as some of the old Cooper slowly emerged.  It may have been no more than moonlight, but his eyes were twinkling warmly despite the anguish that was there all the time now.  She greeted this small step with a tender smile.  Yet, a sadness still held them physically apart.  Each could see in the other’s eyes the pain their love had yet to pass through to get all the way home.

Sophia had never lost faith in Cooper or their mission, but holding on to it had been excruciating in the face of machine-gun massacres and mortar barrages.  Her mind’s eye kept seeing Cooper drenched in blood.  And there’d been small comfort in knowing none of it was his.  Or rather, all of it was his—just not from his body.  The wounds he had arrived with were all inside, where it seemed doubtful she could reach.  These first few days were like her nightmares, watching him bleed out with no way to staunch the flow.

Despite the tender smile, Cooper could barely hold Sophia’s gaze.  He saw too much pain in those eyes, and she’d come close just now to saying he was the cause.  He wanted to ease her distress, but he felt too dirty to reach out with any comfort.  He was thankful for the cold comfort of the night’s gloom.

He wondered if she knew that he never pulled a trigger or launched a mortar round without the pang of awareness that he was stepping further into darkness and away from her.  He knew she was right.  Each death he caused was another mess for her to clean up, to explain, and to justify to the world—all while in darkness as to whether he had survived.  Didn’t she know he knew?  No.  All she knew was that her part of the mission was to offer the world hope, even in those moments when hers was slipping away.  She offered compassion yet received none.  All she seemed to know was she loved a man who’d gone so far into the darkness that he couldn’t find his way home, even when home was close enough to reach out and take his hand.

And with that thought, Cooper took a chance.  He did reach out to take her hand, only to discover her hand reaching out in the darkness to take his.  They ended up with her hand in his and her other hand on top of them, and his other hand on top of the whole pile.  Which is when they both laughed for the first time in a long while.

"Can you ever forgive me?’

What for?

It took Cooper a long while to find words he could speak.  Maybe they weren’t quite the right words, but the ones he found were honest.

"For being able to do what I’ve done.  For doing...so effectively and efficiently...what I promised to do...for doing what I fear must have appeared too efficient, too easy...too natural.  For making you suspect something frightening and pathological deep in my soul."

"Oh.  That.  Sophia said with a smile.  Her compassion had returned.  I thought we had both agreed something had to be done...."

But I’m the one.... 

How about I forgive you for thinking you needed to apologize. 

Cooper reached out and took her hand again.  It was surprisingly warm.  As warm as her gaze had been.  When he gave her hand a firm squeeze, Sophia said, Apology accepted.

Making love was very much like their first time together.  Less tentative perhaps, but no more hurried.  There was no hiding his desire, yet there was no strain in the unhurried tenderness she remembered.  Though they knew every inch of each other’s bodies, no part of either was slighted in getting thoroughly reacquainted.  He loved all of her, and she, him.  First with delicate touches and then again with lips saying, I love you, head to toe.  When they came together, so did their tears.

When Sophia finally collapsed onto his chest, nothing could have pried her from his arms.  There was nowhere else she ever wanted to be, and he could not let her go.  They surrendered to sleep well before their embrace relaxed enough for Cooper to slide out of her.

What’s this stuff called again? Cooper hoped he was striking the right note of appreciation and curiosity. 

"For the third time, that stuff is Yaupon tea.  It’s the only native plant in North America with caffeine.  A kind of holly.  Yummy, isn’t it?"

So, no more pour-overs?

For a guy who’ll kill to save the planet, you’re having an awfully difficult time letting go of your coffee.

But we only buy organic fair-trade....

"Once again, your espresso blend has beans from Honduras, Timor, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Tanzania, of all places.  Just how exactly do you imagine those beans make their way into your cup?"

Last night was heaven, but they were firmly back on Earth now.  They’d enjoyed a luxurious, lazy morning in bed, catching up on love.  But no sooner did they tackle making breakfast together in a still-unfamiliar kitchen than cracks in their brief harmony appeared.  And it wasn’t just Cooper’s adjustment to Yaupon tea.

After breakfast, Sophia took a stab at expressing what she’d been mulling over on her hikes.  Reaching across the table, she put her hand on his and opened her mouth to speak...but she stopped before uttering a word.  The search for the right words came up empty.

Cooper squeezed her hand.  It’s okay...whatever it is....

I think maybe we started in the wrong place....  Painful uncertainty glistened in Sophia’s imploring eyes.  There was more she wanted to say, but it wouldn’t come.

Cooper smiled at her