Lives move along signless paths, some ending in a paradise of realized dreams, some in a purgatory of unintended consequences and some in eternal regret for that one thing that shouldn’t have happened.

     The postcard says "Mexico, Land of Tropical Splendor". A slice of earth and sky meets and pulls my eye from the distance into a tropical garden of flowering stalks and arched palms. Midday light flows through the slats of the bamboo curtain and into the shed where she sits. One arm is raised and a scarlet parrot perches on her wrist. She smiles, but this is no enigmatic pose. There is a promise, a hint of intimate innocence in those bright brown eyes. Bare shoulders, made for a lover’s touch, are the stuff of flesh on flesh dreams simmering somewhere just beyond sight.

     Her other arm cradles a straw basket laden with fruit and bananas, ripe and ready. Bunches of green bananas hang from the rafters in upturned geometric precision. Toucans pose among orchids. A riot of color surrounds all; her lips are so red and this unrestrained fecundity threatens to spill a-greening from that printed card into this place.

     Her name is Maria de la Luz (Mary of the Light), and she is half of me. She escaped a life of begging on the streets of Mexico City and came to California, adopted into a landscape of promise, thanks to the humanity and generosity of a good man, her father. I met her when she was a college student and dreamed about her for months before gaining the courage to tell her how beautiful she was.

     Would she still be struggling on those dirty crowded walkways, I have wondered, if not for chance? Would she suffer from hunger, brutality and injustice, never knowing the good that is in the world? Would she see life through eyes tarnished by the hardness of daily survival? Would human frailty conspire to deny her a meaningful existence?

     This brown-eyed goddess beckoning to me was pulled from hurtful possibilities and flown, heart and body, to where I am. I breathe each breath with the sweet knowledge that she was saved for me.

     This wasn’t exactly a part of the job that Georgie had known about or expected, but he had an obligation and he had to do it daily, without fail. He hadn’t counted on this situation becoming a regular part of daily life, although he had promised Karl that he would be would be happy to do anything it took to win the election.

     Karl stood behind the desk at one end of the Yellow Room, clad in crisply ironed brown shirt and black riding boots, hair combed perfectly to one side and unblinking dark eyes distorted behind thick lenses. A small square mustache was prominent in the center of his upper lip. He motioned to Georgie.

     "Come here."

     Georgie cringed, face down, prone on the floor, hands clasped behind his back. When Karl said "Come here", Georgie would squirm and wiggle slowly, worming his way across the room, eyes averted, toward his boss and those delectably shiny boots.

     The harvest yellow shag carpet (from which the room got its name) had a well-worn trail, the result of daily squirmings over the course of four years. Prob’ly have to replace it soon, thought Georgie. Doubt if’n it’ll last another four.

     Karl’s cell phone rang, a Wagnerian chorale. He held up one hand, signaling Georgie to stop. Georgie cowered, flat and trembling, while Karl talked. "Yes, Congressman, I’ll have him return your call. Soon." He then motioned to Georgie and the hapless head of state continued worming his way across the floor, slowly, barely daring to look up.

     The sight of those beautiful boots, his coveted goal, made Georgie’s heart pound like a jackhammer and his mouth water. Mistakenly, in his eagerness, he increased the pace of his crawl, drawing Karl’s wrath. The riding crop cracked across his back, a stern reminder of who was in charge, who was calling the shots around here.

     Georgie continued his slow measured squirm. Almost there. The boss was standing up now, creased brown trousers unwrinkled and perfect. Georgie was now only inches away from those gleaming black boots. Karl held up his hand.

    Professor Hanover Klingst sat in the dark, watching out his office window as the August moon rose up over a dusty, dry North Bergen. The room was bathed in starlight and the only noise was his rapid breathing as he looked heavenward, the cosmos reflected in his glasses. His last assistant had gone home hours before.

    His reverie was uninterrupted, no phone rang, no voices sprang from his computer, telling him he had mail, and even the crickets were silent, perhaps aware of the sparkling behemoth that hung from the night sky.

    Klingst never tired of seeing his creation as it majestically passed overhead, raining its broken, glittering bits down into the ionosphere. Each tiny prism gleamed as it turned, then disappeared into a vaporous wet puff.

    For six months now, the Phoebe Project had orbited the earth, a ball of ice that was slowly replenishing the dry rivers and streams that a century’s worth of human hubris and neglect had created.

    Professor Klingst had designed the near-lightspeed craft, the Mercurion, that had snatched Phoebe, the ice ball moon, from its ancient path around Saturn and dragged it across the solar system and into earth orbit. The idea, praised by far-out visionaries and pooh-poohed by beancounters, was to melt the icy moon to replenish the precious water that an overheated Mother Earth was boiling off into space. Most scientists agreed that this celestial kidnapping could be humanity’s salvation, but as the nuts and bolts and costs of the Phoebe Project became apparent, the scientific community was at once excited but divided.

    "It will never work", squeaked Stephen Hawking in his robotic monotone.

    "It’s an elegant solution to a very big problem", announced Bill Gates, whose company then designed the software to run the automated project. Of course, Gates was better at putting together funds than the ex-felon Klingst, and the project became reality. NASA wasn’t involved, the organization that had given us the first men on the Moon and Mars had long before been downsized and privatized to the point where it had simply disappeared.

    Project Phoebe was now in full operation. The moon was being systematically chopped up into village sized chunks of ice by Klingst’s ultimate scientific triumph, the Pick. It rode alongside Phoebe in orbit, a shiny metal claw wielding a giant ice pick that struck the moon every three minutes, knocking off colossal bits of frozen water that fell from orbit, saturating the upper atmosphere.

    Alvie Tovsky had one beer too many that SuperBowl Sunday at Foggy’s Sports Palace, and by the time he stumbled into his empty three rooms and retched out his guts, his memory of that evening was gone, dissipated into the fog that darkened the neon lights of Gypsytown, hiding his doorstep in wet shadow.

     He would not be able to remember the winning touchdown, or how in hell he got home, or why he, a virtual non-drinker, had gotten so shitfaced and out of control. Somehow, he hauled his limp waggling carcass onto the futon and sank, closer to death than life, where he slept, drifting in and out of dreams til far too late for work.

     Bright sparks pricked the edge of his consciousness, then a sliver of light forced his eyes open. His head felt odd, light and dull, unfeeling, numb. Something was definitely wrong. Shit. He must have really tied one on last night. Couldn’t really remember the details. He couldn’t feel his legs, or arms, either. He tried to reach for his genitals, just checking things out, and realized that he couldn’t reach or touch anything. His arms seemed to be missing, and it was dark.

     He was a more alert now, and alarm bells began to ring in his head when he realized that he wasn’t alone, that an entity, a form of some kind, was within him, moving, forcing itself against his brain, his lips, his neck.

     This was scary. Alvie had never been afraid of anything, after all, wasn’t he the Bergen Basher, the Golden Gloves Champ? He’d been in his share of scraps, and always came through, lumps and all, but this...this was something else.

     Without warning, the thing inside him suddenly exploded in a flurry of intricate movements, forcing Alvie’s mouth into a munching, guffawing shape, and words came out of his mouth.

     "Yo’ momma.."

     Yo Momma? The words spilled out, he had absolutely no control over them.