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Chapter 6: Child's Slay
"'The West Wind!'" Dave said excitedly. "It's a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley!"
"What did you call me?"
"The poet, Fitz! The poet!" Dave mused, happy as a lark. "He wrote 'Ode to the West Wind,' exploring his muse! His inspiration!" He stood out away from Fitz and recited a line from the poem with the grace of an actor of the stage. "'Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!'"
Dave turned back to Fitz, illuminated with joy. "It's as if Kathy is speaking to me from the dead! Or Sawyer! Or hell, even my wife! I feel rejuvenated! I feel...reborn! A new man! No longer will I look to the past! No, no, no. I am an agent! I am a warrior! Like the leader of the Light Brigade! I look only to the future! It's marvelous! Ha ha!"
And then, without being prompted, he burst into one of his favorite songs. "'A summer wind/Comes blowing in/From across the sea...'" Only then realizing what he had just done, he stopped himself, looking sheepishly to Fitz. "My apologies, Fitz. I don't know what just came over me."
Fitz watched Evans's rapture with an expression of mixed awe and terror on his face.
Is this what hope looks like?
He must've been the most hopeless sot in the world then.
"Never mind, Evans!" he told him, wrapping an arm around his shoulder, "It takes nerves of steel to be a singer!"
Nerves he had never been able to master.
But perhaps...now, in this finite world...it was not too late.
"Summer wind..." he boomed alongside him, his voice strained with exhaustion and disuse, yet rising all the same with his new hope, "Comes blowing in/From across the sea!"
He held the bottle up, raising it in an invisible toast, "It lingered there/So warm and fair/All summer long/We sang a song/And then we strolled on golden sands..."
Fitz bounded up to the patio, "Two fine friends!/And the summer wind!"
Dave beamed and reciprocated the gesture, putting his arm around Fitz's back.
Together, they sang, sheltered from the rain, watching the stars fade away as a new dawn was born.