Oliver Benjamin
madman. And your father sent me away.”
“Our age had nothing to do with it. In olden times it wouldn’t
have mattered. It was love. It was real love. You can’t tell me that it
wasn’t. My father couldn’t have stopped that.”
“Love…” Yak started to say, but then something tugged at him.
He could not play that card. Not now. “Of course it was. It was. It still
is.”
“No,” she said, pulling her hand away from him. “Please don’t say
that to me now.”
“Say what? That I love you? Isn’t it obvious? Lily, I’ve been loving
you my whole life. I’ve worshipped you from afar, in every guise, in
every beautiful thing I ever encountered. You were always there,
inexorable against every backdrop. I could not escape you, so I
abstracted you. I strove to serve you. Every good thing I’ve done,
every person I’ve helped, every tranquil moment in my life has been
there to honor you. When loving you like a woman ended in disaster,
I loved you like a goddess. I still love you that way. Evidently the
whole world loves you that way. Don’t you see? You’re our
inspiration, our holy spirit.”
Sprout wrapped her arms around her own body, exercising
dominion over what little she felt she had left. “That’s unfair,” she
said, “I’m a woman. Not some stupid symbol. I have to live in the
world.”
“I know. So do I,” Yak said. “We were learning to do that at
Roy’s.”
Sprout pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it. Yak began to
shudder. He tried to pull his hand away but she wouldn’t let him. He
was weak as a kitten. He surrendered to her affection. “I guess we’re
like two halves of the same whole, cursed to be apart.”
“That’s why I cut myself,” she admitted, “To cut away what
remained of you.”
“That’s why you have no navel.”
“That’s why we had no baby.”
Yak gripped her hand and turned his bandaged eyes towards her.
“You became pregnant?”
“Oh, Jack,” she cried.
She rubbed his hand against her cheek, slick with tears. A few
drops of blood smeared across her face as she slid his hand down her
neck to her breast. He did not know that she had untied her hospital
shroud. No one in the room had any idea. Her nudity played along an
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