From the Corner of His Eye

bacon.
        "Who told you pigs?" he asked.
        "Mommy."
        "Ah. Well, Mommy never lies."
        "Yeah," Angel said, looking suspiciously at her mother, "but she teases."
        Celestina smiled distractedly. Since arriving at the hotel an hour ago, she had been openly debating with herself whether to call her parents in Spruce Hills or to wait until later in the afternoon, when she might be able to report not just that she had a fiancé, and not only that she had a fiancé who'd been shot and nearly killed, but also that his condition had been upgraded from critical to serious. As she'd explained to Tom, in addition to worrying them with the news about Cain, she'd be stunning them with the announcement that she was going to marry a white man twice her age. "My folks don't have one ounce of prejudice between them, but they sure do have firm ideas about what's appropriate and what's not." This would ring the big bell at the top of the White Family Scale of the Inappropriate. Besides, they were preparing for the funeral of a parishioner, and from personal experience, Celestina knew their day would be full. Nevertheless, at ten minutes past eleven, after picking at her breakfast, she finally decided to call them.
        As Celestina settled on the sofa with the phone in her lap, hesitating to dial until she worked up a bit more courage, Angel said to Tom, "So what happened to your face?"
        "Angel!" her mother admonished from across the room. "That's impolite."
        "I know. But how can I find out 'less I ask?"
        "You don't have to find out everything."
        "I do," Angel objected.
        "I was ran over by a rhinoceros," Tom revealed.
        Angel blinked at him. "The big ugly animal?"
        "That's right."
        "Has mean eyes and a horn thing on its nose?"
        "Exactly the one."
        Angel grimaced. "I don't like rhinosharushes."
        "Neither do I."
        "Why did it run over you?"
        "Because I was in its way."
        "Why were you in its way?"
        "Because I crossed the street without looking."
        "I'm not allowed to cross the street alone."
        "Now you see why?" Tom asked.
        "Me you sad?"
        "Why should I be sad?"
        " 'Cause your face looks all mooshed?"
        "Oh, Lord," Celestina said exasperatedly.
        "It's all right," Tom assured her. To Angel, he said, "No, I'm not sad. And you know why?"
        "Why?"
        "See this?" He placed the pepper shaker in front of her on the room-service table and held the salt shaker concealed in his hand.
        "Pepper," Angel said.
        "But let's pretend it's me, okay? So here I am, stepping off the curb without looking both ways-"
        He moved the shaker across the tablecloth, rocking it back and forth to convey that he was strolling without a care in the world.
        "-and wham! The rhinoceros hits me and never so much as stops to apologize-"
        He knocked the pepper shaker on its side, and then with a groan put it upright once more.
        "-and when I get up off the street, my clothes are a mess, and I've got this face."
        "You should sue."
        "I should," Tom agreed, "but the point is this…" With the finesse of a magician, he allowed the salt shaker to slip out of the concealment of his palm, and stood it beside the pepper. "This is also me."
        "No, this is you," Angel said, tapping one finger on the pepper shaker.
        "Well, you see, that's the funny thing about all the important choices we make. If we make a really big wrong choice, if we do the really awful wrong thing, we're given another chance to continue on the right path. So the very moment I stupidly stepped off the curb without looking, I created another world where I did look both ways and saw the rhinoceros coming. And so-"
        Holding a shaker in each hand, Tom walked them forward, causing them to diverge slightly at first, but then moving them along exactly parallel to each other.
        "-though this Tom now has a rhinoceros-smacked face, this other Tom, in his own world, has an ordinary face. Poor him, so ordinary."
        Leaning close to study the salt shaker, Angel said, "Where's his world?"
        "Right here with ours. But we can't see it."
        She looked around the room. "He's invisible like the Cheshire cat?" "His whole world is as real as ours, but we can't see it, and people in his world can't see us. There're