It wasn’t me you felt.

Like the others, this was a child’s voice, but there was something about it that sounded…incomplete; the voice of a being who hadn’t yet lived long enough to discover it had a voice to use.

It wasn’t me you felt.

Ronnie had reached forward with his dream-hands (that’s how he thought of them) and sorted through the various silver threads (every child had one that connected them to him) until he found the one belonging to this alien, incomplete voice.

The incomplete child placed a warm, loving hand on Ronnie’s shoulder, a touch so sensual in its silent softness that its physical pleasure transcended the merely sexual. This incomplete child leaned forward and kissed Ronnie on the lips, long and lovingly, a kiss of gratitude from all the children Ronnie had saved from further Hurting; then, with great tenderness, cupped his face in magical yet unformed hands and squeezed until Ronnie had no choice but to part his lips; when he did this, this nameless child breathed into his mouth an age-old breath filled with the breath of all children before and yet to come. It seeped down into Ronnie’s core and spread through him like the first cool drink on a hot summer’s day; an ice-bird spreading chill wings that pressed against his lungs and bones until Ronnie was flung wide open, dizzy and disoriented, seized by a whirling vortex and spun around, around, around, spiraling higher, thrust into the heart of all Creation’s whirling invisibilities, a creature whose puny carbon atoms and other transient substances were suddenly freed, unbound, scattered amidst the universe—yet each particle still held strong to the immeasurable, unseen thread which linked it inexorably to his soul and his consciousness; twirling fibers of light wound themselves around impossibly fragile, molecule-thin membranes of memory and moments that swam toward him like a proud children coming back to shore after their very first time in the water alone, and when they reached him, when this memory of a very specific moment emerged from the sea and reached out for his hands, all of the children merged into one, giving momentary shadow and shape to the incomplete child, and Ronnie ran toward it, arms open wide, meeting the incomplete child on windswept beaches of thought, embracing it, accepting it, absorbing it, becoming Many, becoming Few, becoming One, knowing, learning, feeling; his blood mingled with the incomplete child’s blood, his thoughts with its thoughts, dreams with dreams, hopes with hopes, frustrations with frustrations, and in this mingling, in this unity, in this actualization, he became lost and lonely, Ronnie feeling himself being wrenched backward, down through the ages, through the infinite allness of want and desire and isolation and dreams and shames and moments of pride and self-worth and meaning that all his actions had been leading to, and Ronnie felt himself being crushed under the weight of this terrible Knowing, his eyes staring toward the truth that was his soul, his whole body becoming involved in drawing it back into his in one breath, and in the moment before he came away knowing what had gone wrong, in the millisecond before he found himself once again lying in a shabby bed in an even shabbier room in a motel in Lexington, Kentucky, in that brief instant of eternity that revealed itself to him just this once before his final metamorphosis took place, he broke into a clammy sweat as the incomplete child made him understand: what he had sensed so many years ago when he touched the pregnant woman’s belly was not the pain that would be suffered by the incomplete child she was carrying then, no; what he felt was the suffering that would be waiting for the woman’s next child, her daughter, the one with whom the incomplete child had already forged a connection.