| Summary: | those bruises the color of a storm off the north Atlantic, didn't include the nightmares induced by pain-killers, by pain. Echo was very lucky, everybody said so, including her lawyer, because the boy who had been driving the other car, the car that jumped the median and exploded into the side of her car, well, that boy's folks were very well off and he'd been drunk andt he police had given him a ticket and, well, the settlement was very handsome, very handsome indeed. Yes, Echo was very lucky. Carol was still in the living room, looking surreptitiously at the slender gold watch on her arm, when Echo came out of the bedroom and said, "Okay. I'll take it. When can we close?" Valentine's Day Her dreams has always been vivid; since the accident, they were frequently nightmarish. The first time she had the moth dream, she'd been in the hospital, her leg immobilized in a cast, her face swaddled in gauze and paper tape. She was the moth. She had a thick, heavily-furred body and broad brown wings; her antennae were feathered above her head, hypersensitive. The dream always started with a sense of exhilaration, with the pressure of air pushed beneath her wings, whispering against her body. Then, the jarring snag: a web, its strands thick as cable, her legs caught stickily, her wings shredding uselessly as she struggled. She twisted, pulled, legs aching, wings tearing, until, exhausted, she finally gave up. It was then that she would feel that singing vibration, that hum along the cables: the spider. She never woke at this point, but hung apathetically, awaiting the inevitable. Strand after strand would be thrown over her quiescent body, thick, prismatic, unyielding. Sometimes, the spider had her face, a pale ivory oval with a thin red line down the left side. She emerged from the moth dream on Valentine's Day tired and depressed. She was tired of the smell of paint. The kitchen smelled of it, the living room smelled of it, the very sheets of her bed seemed to reek of it. It was, then, with a feeling of vast relieg that she opened the back door on a sunny morning that was so mild as to be almost warm. Sunlight, still at a long angle this early in the day, fell across her face and chest like cloth-of-gold, spangling the ends of her hair, of her lashes, relaxing the firm line of her wide, straight mouth. She opened every window in the house. The sun fell in on the polished floors, gilding them, filling the house with warm metal. She was feeling pleased with her new home: the white, white walls, the bright wooden floors, the few but comfortable pieces of furniture, the inevitable and homely clutter of books. She wandered from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room, unmotivated, wearing a flannel nightshirt the color of blood that reached to just above her knees, running her fingers through the black water of her hair. She stared out the back door for a little while, hoping to see the fox, but he was unobliging and she soon tired of watching for him. She opened the refrigerator, was disgusted at the sight of lettuce and cheese and pickles, closed it, made herself a glass of ice water, and then went into the living room to look out the front windows. Pushing aside a lace panel, he saw two children coming down the street with a 6
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