Wayfarer at the Zephyr ➵ Solangelo

Prelude: Estranged Cadaver

Valhalla told him of paradise, he saw a battlefield and walked his way. On the flipsides of paint-red daffodils lining around crescent slabs of wolverine teeth, envisaged before is a lone island of shallow viking dreams. When he turned, he saw the angel of death and the snow of stygian ice dusted on the lonely glass shard, perhaps a little too unorthodox and the slightest bit unsettling.

He sees a dark place maybe a few feet away, the dream reveals golden locks on the mouth of River Lethe as he had drowned to his demise. He sees a smiling face. Reincarnation, he had thought. What strikes him unfortunate was about why he thought he lived all that life only for a run-over to the head and realizing all he did was living.

So when the current washes over and crimson paints the bay at his cutthroat, rusty old pair of shoes, he witnesses heaven and an opera-singing of about five thousand miles away. Five hundred million years. History unfolded far better than he would have liked.

That day, the ghost of Will Solace roamed the ground again in 1983, and he had been told it was his final journey.

He leaves the ominous hum of the bestial purgatorio, the slowest reconciliation of human life memories filling up the crevices of his mind. Humane. His final judgment hails at the end of the month, curtains revealing a standstill of ten days.

Ten days for the last farewell.

He sees him later; elderly grime felt too soon for thirty years old. His widowed husband watches by his bedroom porch, grey cars and worn-down minivans littering the townie road below, his gaze emanating the same old fondness he had fallen in love with. The new paperback on his desk read that the 1980 research on chronic illness had indeed been credited to Nico di Angelo, and his news articles indicated that his husband died not too long ago.

What countryside Arizona didn't know was that Nico di Angelo was a wielder of supernatural sorcery, and he had vaguely died each and every day of his life talking to the saints.

Will Solace briefly remembers that he had died of chronic heart failure seven years ago, and the arduous scratch of laughter rumbled deep in his gut, ridiculing of bastardly irony. The pseudonym Dr. Solace had been a product of the olden days—a cardiologist, they had called. He laughs as tears grow molten hot at vast expanses of translucent skin, he laughs at the deathly pale silhouette of his form, stops, and then laughs again—Will Solace laughs at the run-down house that had never changed since the day he had died.

He slowly understands—comprehends why his husband had chosen to alienate at his own will, grasping more of the cursed sorcery in his small cave of space. Nico di Angelo had accepted his absence; he had done it way before when he started his medication, when he started telling him his hands were cold. He knew when he saw the first drafts on his work space, the mortified gape of medical research forgotten on the howls of colder nights.

When Will Solace was given his last ten days on earth, the first thing he wanted to do was apologize.