Some Quiet Place

hay around our feet stir. Some cows below sense his unrest and begin to bay uneasily.
    “Calm, Fear,” I say, resting my hand on his arm. He stills at the touch, looking at my hand with a combination of bewilderment and wonderment.
    “No mortal has ever touched me so willingly,” he murmurs. The silken quality to the words causes my wall of nothingness to quiver again. Instinct takes hold, but just as I start to pull away, Fear moves in a blur, snatching hold of me. His fingers interlace with mine, and his power wars with my emptiness for the umpteenth time. But on some deeper level, I do sense a connection to Fear. Not to his essence, of course … to something else. Something far more substantial. But I can’t name it.
    As the quiet wraps around us, I bend my head toward Fear’s and examine the touch. Our hands are odd together—my skin is dark from hours working beneath the sun, and his is pale, smooth, perfect. Not human.
    At the thought, I pull away. “I’m just not like most mortals.” I smile blandly at Fear.
    Surprisingly enough, he doesn’t react. “I’ve been watching you your entire life,” he says instead, directing his attention to the beams in the ceiling. “The first time we met you were … four? Maybe five. That scum swung his fist at your mom, and my touch didn’t affect you. You were just standing in a corner watching it all. You looked right at me. You were wise enough even at that time not to speak out loud. You’re wrong when you say I’m here because I’m bored. I’ve been looking for answers since that day.”
    The screen door to the house slams in the distance. Probably Tim coming in from the fields. I turn my head to look at Fear. He doesn’t notice; he’s staring at the painting straight across from us. His brow is furrowed. He’ll never quit trying to figure me out, not even for a second.
    “How did you entertain yourself before you found me?” I ask him absently, just filling an empty space with words.
    Fear goes against my expectations by actually answering. And it’s strange, because his tone is similar to mine: detached, blank, inconsequential. Like he doesn’t want to care. “Before you, there was another girl,” he murmurs. He shifts, restless, and I see a pain in his eyes that he can’t hide. He’s never spoken of this before, and I speculate the reasons behind this. “Not like you, of course.” He doesn’t smirk or grin. “She was … she felt everything. She danced with so much abandon that everyone would stop just to watch. She was impassioned by just about anything. Her family, her home.” He falters, very unlike his normal behavior.
    “And you loved her,” I say simply. Why does the insight cause my wall to twinge? Even more bizarre is that I ignore the usual impulses and refrain from exploring this.
    There’s a pause. Then Fear swallows. “Yes, I did. I loved her.”
    Nothing more. I don’t bother asking where she is now, since it’s obvious the girl is dead. I find myself trying to calculate what marked her and made her stand out to Fear. We have nothing in common; he said so himself. Do I look like her? Was she surrounded by mystery as well?
I don’t voice any of the questions, because Fear’s posture is stiff and I know he’s reached his limit for truths tonight. But maybe I don’t know him as well as I thought.
    We fall silent again, each buried in our own pasts and unsatisfactory circumstances. It’s not like the silence yesterday with Charles, a stillness where we didn’t speak because there was no need to say anything. No, this silence with Fear is laden with a thousand words, meanings, hints, inclinations.
    The sun is gone entirely, sunken down into the other side of the world. Somehow it always happens without my noticing. The only source of light now—the moon is smothered by clouds—is an old, flickering light bulb dangling from the ceiling. As one, Fear and I look at it.
    What a peculiar pair we must make, I think. I see it from the outside: surrounded by strange paintings, a seemingly ordinary human girl sits, face devoid of all expression, looking as if she belongs among the wood and the hay. Beside her, lounging against the wall with so many expressions on his face that you could never hope to catch and define just one, is a lovely, changeless being, whose very name evokes shivers down the spine. He looks so out of place in the barn that anyone else would keep blinking, thinking he would vanish in another