Minute for What (continued)

The boy repeated what he said at the pub, that he was trying to help, shadows from the cell striping his dredlock mane. So much like Rob at that age. Philosophy of invulnerable youth took many shapes but amounted to the same kind of cage within which to stew: nobody could unlock that door but yourself. Rob entered his at a tender age, marked in memory by an excursion with his mother that would have lasting effect.

They had been shopping. He was no more than a child, and his LOBE -children of families that could afford it were routinely implanted with a Low Oscillation Bandwidth Emitter by the age of five- was tuned to the store's piped music as he followed Mom down through several departments, from clothing to handbags to jewelry. He happened to look up and caught sight of her pocketing a pair of earrings. Whatever question he had wished to ask died in his throat. To this day he could remember the Bob Dylan song playing in his ear, Simple Twist of Fate.

After his mother passed, Rob became conscious of society's ills and entered the priesthood, immediately upon ordination taking to the streets to agitate for the poor. Arrested more times than he could count, Rob was finally exiled by the parish to Luna, where he discovered the key out of his cage. It coincided with the arrival of a ghost.

Of anyone to haunt his waking, he would have expected his mother. His faith taught him of the membrane wrapping life in one of multifold divine aspects. Ghosts were not standard operating procedure, as it were, but they weren't cause for alarm. It was an apparition of the singer that invaded Rob's waking life, manifested out of the air without invitation and popping up at odd times since that dark hour on the moon first ushered him in.

He could see it now, the rumor of hat and beard behind the boy in the cell. I'll keep an eye on him, it intoned with a voice only Rob could hear.

One less thing to worry about, he thought.

On the way out, he asked the agent, "Ever heard of Dylan?"

"Dylan Thomas?"

"It's a singer from a long time ago," Rob said. "My ma really liked him."

The rain had stopped. Cold night air outside sharpened his senses with smells of fresh earth and oils pooled at the roadside. There under a streetlamp waited his wife.

TO BE CONCLUDED