Jody pedaled slowly, looking down at her feet as they moved up and down, propelling her and her favorite tricycle forward, up the slight incline and back towards her house. This tricycle was her favorite because it was the best shade of red. The red reminded her of the color of the maple leaves when they turned bright in october and burned in the reflection of the low setting sun, cold in the autumn months. She enjoyed these leaves, had spent all day riding her tricycle down the neighborhood roads collecting the biggest, brightest, least crinkled leaves which she would add to her collection back home. She now held four leaves that she could show mommy. Mommy and daddy had bought big old encyclopedias at garage sales for her to press the leaves in. During winter she would take them out and look at their brightness, kept preserved sandwiched in between Never and Nirvana. She always gave one to mom, who always put it on the fridge with a magnet to make the kitchen brighter, and one to daddy who took it with him to work to put on his desk. The red made her home brighter when the sky filled with grey, unpleasant clouds in the winter.

Stopping to rest her legs before the final push up the little hill, she looked up noticing a rising cloud she knew to be smoke coming from ahead of her. She knew smoke meant fire, because the Ronald Mcdonald's fire safety house had passed thru the neighborhoods a week ago, and she had learned all about crawling on the ground to escape smoke. Afterwards they had gotten paper hats, which were very colorful, and also a vanilla shake and a bag of fries. Maybe, she thought, peddling her trike again over the hill, the fire safety house was back. She glancedup. The house where she lived was licked in orange. The wood sides burned a red as red as the sky, as red as the leaves in autumn, as red as the lights and the shine of the approaching fire trucks. The flames were as red as her tricycle, and as red as the leaves in her hand. When she looked at them they were fire.

Pumping her little legs faster, the fire trucks zoomed by her with a loud noise. In the upstairs window two shapes moved. Amorphous, wrapped in something, they crashed thru the second story window in flames. Rolling off the roof they hit the cement with a soft thud, and did not rise. She dropped her leaves, her hands burning. A man in a heavy rough coat and metal hat swept her off her trike and covered her eyes with his hands. There was much shouting. Between the mans fingers danced dead shadows. Her eyes filled with water, than with darkness. "Mommy!" she screamed, and a dark presence loomed large, spreading out over her. The horror closed in, with its fog and its fear, and filled her struggling head. She screamed again, trying to escape the sound, the constricting noose of the dark which strangled her tighter and tighter...

Jody awoke with a start, her heart pounding, sweaty and tangled in the down comforter, the scream dying raw in her throat. Shit, she thought to herself, putting a hand to her forehead and feeling the damp sweat that clung there like a jungle miasma. She rarely had bad dreams, at least ones she could remember, but when she did, it was hard to recover. The autumn morning sun hazed in through the window, and over the brown grassed features of the yard and surrounding fields shrouded in fog. Her mind was momentarily blank as her eyes blinked, struggling to recall the dream already being replaced by the new day dawning, already forgetting the images of the night.

Suddenly, a thud at the window again, the sound from her dream sent her heart into her throat. Leaping up, she peered apprehensively out the window. Twitching, lying between two long stemmed rose plants, a small bird lay, it's neck snapped, a mucous substance spilling from behind its staring eye; once alive, now dead, feeding the red of the roses with the rubies of its body. Jody felt herself trapped between her desire to help, and the knowledge that she could not.

Were you an Oscar Wilde bird? she wonderd, sacrificing your life for some noble, ignored deed? Why couldn't you see the window? Her fists clenched and unclenched as she suddenly felt the full impact of the dream, of the memory of her parents wash over her. Even our most simple constructions cause death. Like moths to a flame she realized, the danger seemed invisible.

An even darker melancholy struck her. A memory of her mother, sitting in the kitchen at 6 am as she always did, crying over the death of moths in candles after learning that they imagined the flame to be guiding them to their mates. Mother had shed tears, knowing that moths died before they found love, thinking they were going to find love. Shaking her long brown spun hair loose, sending the memories of her mother cascading down the strands, Jody arose from bed. It was time to get her day started, to let go of old cobwebs with empty promises of entanglement.

On the way to the kitchen, dreaming of coffee, she passed the white work table in the sun room, her glance lingering as it had every day for months now upon her forgotten typewriter. Pages of her unfinished childrens book thrust haphazardly into an old box leaked their guilt into the back of her brain.

sliding into the chair with a tired sigh, she let her fingers play lightly over the keys. Weak sunlight streamed in through the yellow curtains. Whispers rode in on breezes, whispers of old memories. The typewriter lay under her hands, dusty, unused. Lost in the past, she walked through her impressions. The pages she had written unfolded about her, hazy on the horizons. A story of a child, herself as a young girl. A bicycle which travels on moonbeams. A cat with many toes, an unformed beast creature which chases them. There should be more, but she hadn't written anymore. Now there were only the scattered pages, half finished ideas and preliminary sketches, like so many beach stranded logs after a storm, kittens caught in rain.

I don't know where to take them, I can't figure out the next step, she said, silently to herself. Gazing up to the shelf above, the bright color of her first children's book stood out. It looked faded now, not as bright as she remembered.

I've done it once, I can do it again. Jody tried to solicit a strength from that knowledge, trying to work her creative juices, to get them flowing.

Her first book which had been published two years ago had thrust her life into a state of blissful consumption, but now, the funds dried up, her motivation was gone. The scattered trail of fine wines, Pigeon Forge pottery and wicker chairs from Indonesia, along with her prized collection of tin toys were no longer enough to keep her going. She sighed, looking out the window at the trees and hills, bathed in the strengthening sunlight. Memories were her inspiration, and the recent months had inspired nothing but bankrupt trinkets purchased on the empty whims of a momentary impulse, as bankrupt too as her personal life, her lack of social relationships on any deep level. Already she could feel an invisible push, a shortening of time, a closing in of walls. She would have to finish another book, or else she wouldn't have money, but more importantly, she wouldn't have a purpose. If only it wasn't so hard, so intangible. She stifled a yawn which overtook her, enveloping her life; the alarm buzzed it's annoying call, announcing to the empty house that it was 7:30, time to wake up.

Peter's eyes jerked open, his body twitched hard against the chair. The photostat of the Torvelson Rock carving slipped from his hand, scattering down onto a pile of other photos.

"Asleep again?" out loud, frustrated at himself. Punishment for staying up all night working, he thought. His eyesight was blurry, his head pounded with the rhythm of aching drums, his mouth felt woolen and dry. The computer stared woodenly out at him, it's screensaver images of a penguin shooting down flying toasters, sending muted colors rippling over the cluttered desk.

Papers loomed up at him, their features coagulating with the exhaustion in his eyes. Old nordic rock carvings, archeological tracts and reports on Viking migration from Scandinavia to the New World, the strange mishmash of information which he had accumulated over long years of graduate study rose around the walls of his study like tall ivy creepers, threatening to condense into an impenetrable jungle. Facts and histories stuck to him like a sticky glue. At times it drove him to distraction, but he knew he would have no other. This was his interest, this was his world.

The weight of the knowledge was oppressive, and lately it had grown, trapping him under it, rendering him unable to move, to make a decision as to what exactly he should choose out of the flood of facts to be his dissertation. Stacks of digitalized photographs of the rock carvings from Ausevik, near Sogn in Norway, horses, men with spears, and depictions of a one-eyed man with a stick, hovered over by two ravens; old all-father Odin and his constant companions, thought and memory, all so much headache. Or that was the lack of sleep?

Just need the right insight, he told himself as the birds outside begin to call in the lightening day. I need Odin's eye he gave to Mimir for the power of runes, of history. With that eye I could make up my mind, I would truly know.

" It's freedom of choice I got, but it's freedom from choice I want!" Peter groaned, pushed himself away from his desk, swiveling hard in his chair. Maybe he should just be a lawyer, make more money like his old college buddies. A frown distorted his face. Who cares to know what the vikings did when they landed in America 200 years before Columbus and his 500 years of resistance ever set foot here? He counted, remembering; five? No, four. Four people out of thousands. Probably out of millions.

He knew his bent for history was not exactly an exciting profession. In conversations at parties, the stories he would most often relate, in between long hard sips of a whiskey sour, were tales of the past. If some drunk party girl talked of the latest in clothes fashion, Peter, eyeing her leather skirted body, would tell them all the reason the native Indians of the Andes wore those pork pot styled hats was that, at one time, the King of Spain had decreed it as law. the look she had given him, one of a bottomless boredom, instantly dissipated the crowd around her, as she had stomped off huskily, annoyed by this nerd from outer space.

Sure, it had hurt him, but he was used to it. He didn't care. History in its many forms, quixotal happenings, and as a very phenomena of nature, was his ideology. If one worked their way back, through the labyrinthine networks, piecing together moments and movements, one could, theoretically, chance upon the very event which set history itself in motion.

Cracking open a pack of new cigarettes, Peter went out onto his back porch and began to smoke, the addictive nicotine clarifying his sleep deprived brain, momentarily focusing his vision. As the morning fog lay damp dew upon his shoulders, Peter realized with a sigh that he cared, perhaps too much, about history. Someone had to in this country, and for all its current headaches, history is what Peter tried to live and breath, to keep current. History, and especially history with a viking slant, was his bread and water, and it was his duty to integrate the past with the present.

The lone cigarette was not enough to hold the weariness at bay. Peter felt his limbs grow heavy. Another night of studying, and no more closer to Mr. Dissertation, he thought to himself. If he didn't accomplish something worthwhile soon, such as his doctorate, or even something a bit more substantial like a girlfriend, then he felt doomed to a useless life, filled with emptiness and stuck in some corporate sector job. And that, for Peter, would be Ragnarok, the final doomed battle of the gods.

The gods are doomed, and the end is death, he muttered darkly, recalling a nordic poem. Already, he could feel it coming.

On the old crabapple tree near the fence, a black raven settled onto a twisted limb. Peter paused, not wanting to return inside where the mess stood waiting, like Fenhir, the monster wolf, the god-eater, waiting to pounce.

"Morning, bird..." he whispered softly to himself. "Are you Hugin, Old Odins eyes on the little world of our thoughts? Come here on a little recon?"

The bird did a small hop, peering around quizzically at the sound of his voice travelling damply in the thick fog.

"Maybe you're Munin instead, picking at our memory" Peter mumbled, imagining the bird pecking away at human brains like it would pick at a worm. I hope you are Munin, and that you don't go. You'd take my future livelihood with you, he thought, trying to visualize a world without history... and historians. No, Peter needed his memory; as Goethe said, if you can't draw on 3000 years of history, what was it? Something something something up the creek without a paddle.

See, he chided himself, already your memory fails. Time to rest the old noggin. He shook his head in a fashion similar to the raven's crooked inquisitiveness. The bird took to the air, perhaps to fly back to Asgard and the shoulder of Odin, the all-father of the aesir gods, to report on the young mortal who entered a house, shaking his head wearily. But Peter was already back in bed, setting the alarm for 1:00 pm, the red digital lights of 7:32 burning themselves into his eyes as he fell fast asleep.