Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer

breaking eggs. Hah. Who cares
anyway?"
    "We're supposed to manage the assets, not
destroy them."
    "I'll take that chance. You just sit back and
watch the show. Not much longer now." Buzzsaw watched the man
squirm uncomfortably and loathed him for his squeamishness. "Buckle
up, jerk, you're in for a show. Hey, you might want to take a
recording of this one for later. I get the feeling it's going to be
a tasty lethal."
    Good Lord, thought SEL6210, the man's
actually enjoying this.
     
    Manny took the paperwork back to the old
house; the boy came running out the door and down the steps to
greet him. Karen stood in the doorway, hands on her hips and a
frown creasing her puffy face—she looked like she'd been crying—but
her depressing gloom wasn't enough to put him off the joy he was
feeling at finally getting to see his son again. Nothing was going
to take that away from him.
    He caught the boy up in a hug as the little
guy came hurtling across the sidewalk to him and a quick flash of
light, some subtle vibration, passed between them; Emmanuel felt as
if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if a giant
oil-saturated rug had been peeled off his head and shoulders and
left him free and clean. Karen seemed to have noticed something
too, because the glare in her eyes had softened and she seemed to
him a little less sharp-edged.
    "I brought the paperwork you asked for."
    "Yeah, that's fine. Do you want to come
inside and talk about it? I've been thinking about things. Come on
inside." Manny didn't believe what he was hearing—it didn't sound
like the normalized hostilities he'd gotten used to—could she have
actually come to some kind of realization? He had to find out.
    He followed her inside and took the cup of
coffee she offered, refused the poundcake, and asked her what she
wanted to talk about.
    "Always getting straight down to business,
eh? Shouldn't surprise me by now. It's just that I've been doing
some heavy thinking lately. I've been in and out of the doctors a
whole bunch of times now and it's got me thinking about how I might
want to spend the rest of the time I've got left to me."
    Manny had the million expected questions and
she fended him off the best she could—how did you answer questions
that had no answers?—swallowed her anger and searched his eyes for
some hint or remnant of what had made her fall in love with him in
the first place. He was handsome, and he was the father of her
child, but that wasn't enough, was it? There had to be love… She
could tell that the boy felt it for him, and that was important,
but did he have any feeling left for her, after what they'd just
been through, after what she'd done to him?
    He didn't look like he hated her, when
she looked into the big brown eyes she'd known for the past nine
years. She made her pitch: he cover his half of the rent and the
bills, kick in some money to take care of the kid, and help out
with the housework every now and then and he could set up on the
couch. It would be better than anything else he could afford out
there in the real world and it would help her to raise their kid.
They could decide later if they still wanted to finalize the
divorce, but she was not about to share a bed with him again
anytime soon and he shouldn't get any ideas to the contrary. He was
barely welcome again in her house, and only on the condition that
he keep paying his fair share, but she was going to give him this
much of a chance and he'd better not mess it up. He could start
showing his gratitude right away by driving her to the doctor's
office the next morning.
    Manny slept fitfully that night, troubled by
bad dreams of invisible enemies. In them, he was protected by a
clear light that came from his body yet wasn't his own; the
threatening forces weren't actually after him so much as they were
simply attacking anything that moved, and the clear light made him
invisible to them. The boy was around somewhere but didn't need
protection; if he'd been more