Velocity

their long, deeply forked tails. Their backs were dark blue, their breasts orange.
    “I like them very much,” she said, and closed her eyes.
    After holding his breath for a while, he said, “Barbara?”
    She did not answer. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
    Hope, love, and faith are all in the waiting. Power is not the truth of life; the love of power is the love of death.
    The barn swallows flew elsewhere. Bill returned to the book that he had been reading.
    What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.
     
     
     
     
     

NOTE
     
    In moments of stress and indecision, words of wisdom enter Billy Wiles’s mind, and he is guided by them. Although Billy does not make an attribution, these words are from the work of T.S. Eliot.
     
    Chapter 9:
    Preserve me from the enemy who has something to gain, and from the friend who has something to lose.
    Also in that chapter:
    Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.
     
    Chapter 13:
    The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.
     
    Chapter 17:
    May the judgment not be too heavy upon us.
     
    Chapter 33:
    There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
     
    Chapter 66:
    In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession. And what you do not know is the only thing you know.
     
    Chapter 71:
    In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.
     
    Chapter 72:
    The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: the perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
     
    Chapter 77:
    I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
     
    The Napa County Sheriff’s Department in this fiction bears no resemblance to the superlative law-enforcement agency of the same name in the real world, nor is any person in this story based in any way whatsoever on any real person in Napa County, California.
     
    Barbara’s most mysterious statement—want to know what it says, the sea. What it is that it keeps on saying—is from Dombey and Son.