Odd Thomas

moonlight. Beryl-blue eyes, lustrous pools, were windows to a melancholy so profound that I knew at once she belonged to the community of the restless dead.
        The lone coyote on my left settled to the ground, all hungers forgotten, the fight gone out of it. The beast regarded her in the manner of a dog waiting for a word of affection from its adored master.
        To my right, the first three coyotes were not as humbled as the fourth, but they, too, were transfixed by this vision. Although they hadn't exerted themselves, they panted, and they licked their lips incessantly - two signs of nervous stress in any canine. As the woman stepped past me and toward the Chevy, they shied from her, not in a fearful way but as if in deference.
        When she reached the car, she turned to me. Her smile was an inverted crescent of sadness.
        I stooped to put the broken bottle quietly on the ground, then rose with new respect for the perceptions and priorities of coyotes, which seemed to give greater importance to the experience of wonder than to the demands of appetite.
        At the car, I closed the back door on the passenger's side, opened the front door.
        The woman regarded me solemnly now, as though she was as deeply moved by being seen, years after her death, as I was moved by seeing her in this purgatory of her own creation.
        As lovely as a rose half bloomed and still containing promise, she appeared to have been not much more than eighteen when she died, too young to have sentenced herself for so long to the chains of this world, to such an extended lonely suffering.
        She must have been one of the three prostitutes who were shot by an unbalanced man five years earlier, in the event that had closed Whispering Burger forever. Her chosen work should have hardened her ; but she seemed to be a tender and timid spirit.
        Touched by her vulnerability and by the harsh self-judgment that kept her here, I held out a hand to her.
        Instead of taking my hand, she bowed her head demurely. After a hesitation, she uncrossed her arms and lowered them to her sides, revealing her breasts - and the two dark bullet holes that marred her cleavage.
        Because I doubted that she had any unfinished business in this desolate place, and because her life had evidently been so hard that she would have little reason to love this world too much to leave it, I assumed that her reluctance to move on arose from a fear of what came next, perhaps from a dread of punishment.
        "Don't be afraid," I told her. "You weren't a monster in this life, were you? Just lonely, lost, confused, broken - like all of us who pass this way."
        Slowly she raised her head.
        "Maybe you were weak and foolish, but many are. So am I."
        She met my eyes again. Her melancholy seemed deeper to me now, as acute as grief but as enduring as sorrow.
        "So am I," I repeated. "But when I die, I will move on, and so should you, without fear."
        She wore her wounds not as she would have worn divine stigmata, but as if they were the devil's brand, which they were not.
        "I've no idea what it's like, but I know a better life awaits you, beyond the miseries you've known here, a place where you'll belong and where you'll be truly loved."
        From her expression, I knew that the idea of being loved had been for her only a cherished hope that had never been realized in her short unhappy life. Terrible experience, perhaps from the cradle to the sound of the shot that killed her, had left her in a poverty of imagination, unable to envision a world beyond this one, where love was a promise fulfilled.
        She raised her arms once more and crossed them over her chest, concealing both her breasts and her wounds.
        "Don't be afraid," I said again.
        Resumed, her smile seemed to be as melancholy as before, but also now enigmatic. I couldn't tell if what I'd said had been of comfort to her.
        Wishing that I were more persuasive in my faith, and wondering why I wasn't, I got into the front passenger's seat of the car. I closed the door and slid behind the steering wheel.
        I didn't want to leave her there among the dead palm trees and the corroded Quonset huts, with as little hope as she had physical substance.
        Yet the night ticked on, the moon and all the constellations moving across the heavens as relentlessly as hands across the face of a clock.