Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

as the clash of heavy swords rang inside his head. Massive warrior angels dueled behind his eyes. Their wings beat against carmine skies, and his head pounded from their silent shrieks. George couldn't tell the combatants apart by dress or weapons, although one had dark hair and the other light. The warriors fell back, and he glimpsed the face from Lucien's photo.
    "Sephrim. Not Winged One. Sephrim."
    As the name filled his head, the bloody clouds roiled around the combatants. The smoke cleared, and he saw the dark-haired angel from the photo again, this time inside a brick-lined room. Sephrim stood, and it was if George borrowed the angel's eyes for a moment as he gazed out a window down at a rusted suspension bridge. Below the bridge, a river spilled over a rock dam. From the surrounding vegetation and red clay, George got the impression the location was local. Then Sephrim blinked, restoring George's vision and the battle scene returned. Now the angel was face-down on the ground. His opponent held the tips of Sephrim's wings in one hand. With the other, he raised his sword as George watched through tightly closed eyes. With one mighty swing, the victorious seraph sliced through Sephrim's wings, severing them at their midpoint. The truncated appendages bled profusely, the blood from the horrible wounds turning black as it spilled onto the red clay around him. George's stomach heaved as he watched the angel's once-pristine feathers soak up the blood. The room came back, and this time he saw the spatters on the walls again. Worse, he saw the way the blood got there, slung from the arcs of wings which still beat but would never again fly.
    He ran his tongue across dry lips as his sight returned. He'd have killed for a drink, but one good thing about coming back to this small southern town where he'd attended college was its dearth of all-night bars. George looked at his watch. He still had the habits of a photojournalist, if not the job. The closest library was on the campus of his alma mater, where Oliver worked, and it would be opening soon. He reeled toward his truck.
    Eschewing the main entrance to the campus, he circled the bounding streets, passing Fraternity Row, then the dorm he'd lived in as a freshman. It soothed his tremors to look at the graceful old buildings. He drove slowly, the clicking lifters in his Chevy the only disturbance to the early-morning serenity. The baseball field had a new scoreboard. He'd put a few runs on the old one. The row of parking for library visitors was carved from the student parking lot for his senior dorm. Turning off the truck, George stared at the building, thinking about his college days, meaning he thought about Oliver. Oliver Evans, of the elementary school Evanses, baseball team bench-warmer, frat brother, and the first man George ever had sex with.
    There'd been a group of them. Someone jokingly named it The JTSC Society— Jocks That Sucked Cocks. That they'd found each other was remarkable, given how conservative this place was, but they had, mostly from sidelong glances in the showers, wrestling matches and hard-played games of touch football. It'd been little more than hot hook-up sex between hetero relationships for most of them.
    Then graduation came and Oliver stayed in town while George left for an internship at a television station in Atlanta. His work caught the eye of the network and he'd moved on to New York City, eventually traveling the world covering international news stories.
    When that fell apart, he checked into rehab, and when he'd checked out, the first – and hardest – thing he did was admit to Connie he preferred sex with men. With no ties to anywhere much, he'd returned to this small southern town boasting five colleges, at least one church for every five-hundred residents, and the Beacon Drive-In. Connie followed, even though they were getting divorced, swearing she only wanted to make it easy for him to stay in their son Adam's life.
    George had trouble referring to Oliver as his boyfriend, even though Oliver's had been the first number he'd called after unpacking. They'd picked up where they'd left off after graduation. The research George needed to do on how to restore the photo would give him an excuse to see him.
    Walking toward the library, the magnolia trees seemed taller, their branches more gnarled. The campus was still meticulously groomed. To his relief, other memories crowded out his hallucinations. Memories of pranks pulled,