Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 10

years of pale-skinned shamans calling to their spirits, singing them down, setting them to heal or harm.
    I have a choice, and simultaneously no choice at all. Because I love him. He is my son and my brother and my father and my lover, my creator and my destructor and my master, and I love him. Maybe my impossible age has made me wise to or resentful of my purpose, because I can't fulfill it. I can't let him die.
    My hand, in the shape of his own, clasps his. I feel his broken ring finger and his fluttering pulse. His starved blood and hungry veins.
    Live. Live.
    Death's green gaze pins us both, playing silent witness to my rebellion. Sound returns to the forest. Joseph's chest expands, strong and full. His elegant writer's hand gives mine a squeeze.
    The cold air punches my lungs. We both breathe.
    Joseph speaks.
    "I know what you are."
    ****
    June 1930
    I am a young boy.
    No. I take the form of a young boy.
    I am nothing. A disembodied nameless thing wearing a young boy's face.
    The boy is dying. That's why I'm here. His mother and father keep a deathwatch by the iron lung. The hulking coffin-shaped thing swallows up the boy's entire body except for his head, which rests on a stack of three overstuffed pillows. His tiny throat is wrapped in cotton batting, which shields his paled skin from the chafing black rubber neck of the machine. In the shadows behind him three more machines stand in a row, their rhythmic mechanical hissing playing backdrop to the murmurs of the boy's parents, who are the ward's only visitors.
    I can instantly tell by their prayers that they have an uncommon marriage. She sings, in a high reedy Hebrew, the Mi Sheberakh ; he mutters, in an English marked with the lilt of his home island, the Lord's Prayer. The prayers fly frantic from their mouths, beat against the metal of the iron lung, dissolve into the air. I breathe them in.
    The boy's face becomes clearer. He is very pale and struggles to breathe, even with the aid of the machine. The polio winds its way along his nerves like a mass of parasite vines, paralyzing even the most basic of functions: breathing. In, out, in, out the machine hisses, pumps, wheezes. His parents continue to pray. It's the saddest symphony in the world.
    Releasing him from this agony will be a mercy. I reach out and lay a translucent hand on his shivering, clammy forehead. Joseph. My boy. "I'm sorry," I tell him. "I'm sorry you didn't have more time. But we have to go now."
    The very second he feels my touch, time shatters into a multitude of second-fragments, minute-slivers, hour-motes. I will pull him out of life and into this inhuman realm. We will cease to exist. I realize I am far more sorry than I could have imagined.
    This is my purpose. This is my purpose. This is my purpose.
    A sad note of the Mi Sheberakh still quavers in the air, but I notice that the Lord's Prayer has ceased.
    Joseph's father crashes into me, his hands around my throat.
    This can't be happening. How can he see me?
    I will myself more immaterial, more transparent. My attacker's hands clap together. He falls through me and lands face down on the floor, howling in rage. "Fetch! Get away from my son!"
    He names me. No longer Joseph, I am my own hideous thing. Fetch.
    His wife casts her gaze wildly around. I wait, invisible. She helps her husband to his feet. He can't see me anymore, but he knows I am here. He knows death is here.
    Joseph continues his labored, marvelous breathing, too absorbed in his own body to witness the strange drama on the other side of his iron lung.
    They wait there all night, keeping vigil, keeping Death and I at bay.
    I wonder what it feels like to be loved so fiercely. I wonder why I'm still alive, still waiting.
    They take coffee from the nurses, ignoring their suggestions to return home for the night. Joseph is stable, the nurses say. It's in God's hands now.
    I look down at the hands only I can see. My hands, but I am not God. Not unless God is a kind of cosmic shorthand for the power that flows unexplained through this world, of which I am some small part.
    In the early hours of the morning, another of the infected dies. A girl. Very quietly. I feel the disturbance in my world and drift across the hall to her side. She's even younger than Joseph, even paler, even frailer, and her death makes me angry. It's an emotion I've never felt before. I've never tallied up enough time in this world to feel such things.
    The girl is not mine to take. Why am I here?
    She