The Everborn by Nicholas Grabowsky

living room, past the flickering music television, out the front door and down the apartment complex’s inner hallway, leaving Andrew standing snug and silent and alone.
    And if it wasn’t for the distraction of the deep and disorienting sleep he’d awakened from, Andrew would have wondered what Ralston meant by The Everborn , which wasn’t the title of the novel he believed he’d written.
     
    ***
     
    Andrew remained still for a moment’s time until he softly padded across the living room carpet and closed the front door. Turning, he stepped to the recliner, reached for the TV remote, and paused as he viewed an MTV news report about the trampling of several teenagers at a metal concert mosh pit. Kurt Loder signed off with the image of an electrode-studded globe and station logo. Andrew signed off with depression, both from his thumb and his sigh.
    There were times like these when Ralston and Ralston’s crock of flamboyant cockiness would indeed get to him, get his goat and leave him fucked like one on a witches’ sabbat, but times few and far between in recent years. He’d learned to accept what needed to be, what (he was convinced) was meant to be , and in truth this ghostwriting racket remained an ongoing sacrifice Andrew would just as soon sign off as drink goat piss.
    This conviction made Andrew clench his teeth and bite his tongue whenever his father came to mind, the great B-movie director father he never knew, the father he wished were alive somewhere but doubted was anywhere but six feet under.
    A.J. Erlandson was declared missing sometime before Andrew was born, and had been missing since, yet remained an inspiration and an icon to Andrew, yeah even a legend to not only he but many, and what many who knew of him remained to this day as thinking of the heralded director as one would fancy the likes of Elvis....not so much as a king of things but nevertheless working in some obscure Burger King in Utah. Anything but being dead . For some concealed, undercover reason. Though even more so for A.J., since his body was never found, no body at all.
    Nobody except for maybe the Weekly World News.
    And when someone was missing from someone’s life for so long, as long as Andrew had been alive, which had been twenty-eight years so far, in similar circumstances, one might as well declare them dead. Andrew had done so, quite a while back, and so had Andrew’s mother, who’d refused to so much as date anyone let alone marry until a little under a decade after the disappearance. Deep down, it was all due to wishful thinking. After thinking of the impossible-become-probable for so long, thinking can really become quite dominated by wishes.
    “Wish you may, wish you might, what is it you wish tonight, dearest Andrew?” whispered the hallway darkness which led to the bathroom and single bedroom. “Tell me of your wishes.”
    It was the distant echo of a voice, calling, speaking, a woman’s spoken caress, smooth and hushed and provocative, beckoning into close intimacy. Within the apartment, within the single bedroom, in the hallway. Somewhere, yet everywhere.
    As it always had been.
    Andrew took several steps backwards, leaned likewise into the hallway.
    “I don’t wish anymore, if I can help it, and I don’t wish to talk to you tonight as well, Bari,” Andrew grumbled with bridled contempt. “You know how I get when I let go of another work like that, to that conceited drug geek. You made it so I have no choice....you’re responsible for this goddamn arrangement, you made it happen. And each time I write him another book, I’m stuck wondering what Dad would think of all this.”
    “And just what would he think of all this?” An obscure figure accompanied the voice now, a mere silhouette, a shady sketch of blackness, seen yet unseen.
    “You know what he would think, and you know he would be insulted,” Andrew spat, then added quite reversely serene, “Unless he knew about you .”
    Andrew turned and