***

The sea is her place, the Naked Goddess on a half-shell. She rose from it and rules it, just as much as the trident-bearing bearded Poseidon. And so, with the sound of the sea roaring, I dedicated that experience to her, letting my mind drift from the movement of hands and the sand grains under my shoulder blades and the prospect of being discovered to Aphrodite, her pale palms pushing up from the waves.

"Thank you," she replied, her cupid's bow curling. "I'll pay you back someday, in a way you will like. But it will take time."

She is no fool, the Foam-Born, no bleach-blonde diva in a bathrobe trimmed with pink fur a la Marilyn Monroe. A strange logic guides the movement of her limbs and her appendages: the fleshy lips of flowers and creatures, the subdividing amoeba, and roaring tigers swiping at each other in the act. She inspires poets and singers, for she loves all that glitters with beauty, for isn't the awkward act of mating all about perceived beauty? Life continuance, the salty thread the runs from our tears and our sweat to the crashing waves. She is married to soot and ash, a limping man who creates beauty with his big callused hands. But he knows he cannot possess her, no more than her ill-tempered boy-lover with his gladius and his helm.

"What man can own a woman?" she laughed, and then shed the white draperies of a respectable woman.

My eyes drifted awake, and he had gone. Footsteps in sand seemed to lead to the bathroom stalls, and the sarong was missing, along with his Ecuadorian knit wallet. I vaguely remember his voice detailing the momentary departure, but the words had flown down the rabbit hole of dreams. And so I stepped out into the beating afternoon sun and stretched, delicately padding on the burning granules of silicon before hitting the water. My eyes squinted against the rayed halo, mercifully since I tried to avert my gaze from men's units. The women I didn't mind. But there is an etiquette with nakedness, at least in Pagan circles. The body is glorious and whole sans cloth, but it is not your body and you've no right to reach out with lustful grabbing hands or their corollaries, the eyes.

But I wasn't prepared for the eyes prickling along my breasts and the line of my thighs as I picked my way through the colorful rectangles of blankets. And finally I reached the bathwater-warm line of the waves and I stood, water to my knees, watching. A clothed man, heavyset with graying hair, produced a mahogany-hued violin and began to tune it. Then, his bow danced as he played a rousing fiddle tune, softly and half-drowned by the backbeats of someone's boombox, before returning it to a velvet-lined case. Turning back, I slipped into the blue-green saltwaters of the bay.

The sudden chill under the sunwarmed surface layer rippled along the gooseflesh of my legs. Overhead, the haze half-concealed the steaming solar orb. I chatted with two older men in the water. One said he was trying to convince his spousal unit to come, but she adamantly refused. I let my weight shift into the waves, parting the cool water like wintery veils with my small hands. "Oh, it's not so bad," I said, praying silently to the Foam-Born as I swam in between the threads of conversation. The men drifted away like seaweed as the sunlight dimmed momentarily and the water receded to a sheet of steel gray. I tried to feel the Lady beneath me, murmuring, "Mother I feel you under my feet; Mother, I feel your heartbeat," that old hackneyed womyn's chant, save that my feet were floating in the sea, as if I was dangling in the cosmos.

And I swam in, emerging onto the shore, feeling like Aphrodite as the foam swirled around my ankles. And then I saw the perv on the shore, his binoculars pointed at me. You know the type: pale, a loner. Only with a half-sandy beach towel and a ready smile for women, not understanding why they won't throw thsemlves at him in force once they have seen the glory of his pasty naked flesh. I've even encountered a few at the larger regional Pagan gatherings, and someone usually takes the man firmly by the elbow and gives him a sound talking-to, usually with an athame safely stowed on the hip for effect. The trajectory back to the half-tent took me just past the shaved-head little perv, and he tried to talk to me as I passed. I grunted antisocially, wondering if I should remark on the misdirected binoculars.

A wave and a familiar voice calling my name emanated from a circle of chairs. Christian stood, waving me over, using his sarong as a blue flag. And so I padded over, the coals burning my soles. In the circle, a group reclined, catching rays, mostly women and a few men. Christian introduced me to one of the men: Gavin, his workout partner, who had introduced him to the beach in the first name. I nodded toward a man with the pale skin of the British Isles and an aquiline nose, half-bred Celt and conquerer. My wet hair dangled and slapped my face. Christian waved me to an empty chair and I sat, as Gavin thrust a cheap American beer in my hand. I popped the cold wet topped and sipped, trying not to grimace at the acrid taste.

"I was walking back from the bathrooms when I saw him," Christian offered, giving me an impromptu toast with his sand-grimed can.

The names went around, female names. But there was one I remembered: Lori. She wore a neon pink bikini, and thus was a stand-out in the world of nakedness. Her skin seemed leathery with a mass-produced tan, and she gangled long model-limbs over the chair. A tall woman, almost as tall as Christian himself, with a Germanic chin thrusting outward and bleached hair. When she took off her fashionable black sunglasses to rub the bridge of her nose, I caught a glimpse of her hazel eyes, which seemed both falsely warm and scored with an armature of hardness, something steel underneath a decorative cushion.

She laughed loudly at one of Christian's jokes, a laugh with a calculated warmth. Behind the mirrored plains of her sunglasses, I could feel those steely eyes dart peripherally as she dug the bikini from her ass-crack. She chatted briefly about her job in public relations for an advertising firm, but offered no real information. Fluff and blunder. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back on the chair momentarily. Lori and I were obviously not of the same species; instead, she was one of those thoroughbred women, born to cater to the whims of every man. From her chatter, her darting gaze and that strange hardness under the softness, I could tell that she had no center, no rock of self at the core. No, center was something to grasp at; it had a penis, and it could only be bought with wedlock. Those kind of women and my kind of womyn negated each other, matter and anti-matter in the warped engine of gender identity.

Curious, I asked why she came. She smiled, uncertain, forcing her friend to answer.

"Oh, I brought her along with me. I come here from time to time," said the friend, a chubby brown woman who proudly displayed her belly and sagging breasts � a signal that she was, indeed, my kind of woman. We chatted and laughed about binocular-bearing pervs, as I attempted to ignore Lori's brittle, too-bright laughter, like sound reflecting off bathroom tile.

The sun slunk behind a thick veil of gray, and a distant flash of light spread over the distant ocean.

"Shit, it's a thunderstorm coming," Gavin griped. Christian and I ran on the dunes back to the half-tent, quickly dissembling it and shoving our meager possessions into mutual bags before trekking our way back to the SUV. Drizzle began pattering on the pavement as we loaded the car. Lori came behind us, two cars away, as she and her nameless friend pulled a big-wheeled beach wagon. Christian came over to help them lift the wagon into the back of an old gray Honda with a miniature hula-girl on the dashboard, and purple Mardi-Gras beads dangling from the rearview. Pointing at the hula girl, Christian cracked a grin and remarked, his voice too soft for me to hear as I worked the sand off my footsoles. Lori laughed, that same brittle reverberation. The rain fell harder and thunder growled, so we leapt into our mutual vehicles.

"We were trading work stories before you got there," Christian offered, fooling with the crackling stereo. "PR and politics have a lot in common, you know?"

"I know. I deal with a lot of PR people and politicians in my line of work." He nodded.

"This was a great beach date," he said, pecking my cheek. The rain poured down the windshield as the wipers pumped frantically, unable to clear the view. White lightning arched down, a jagged electron river, exploding two towns away.

***

The colorblock woman slipped off the high bench, replaced by the greasy man in the ponytail. Livelihoods and years thread through their words: the tenants above the stores, watering potted plants; the old women lined at the deli counter; old men reeking of tobacco smoke rustling the latest edition of The Times. Plus-sized women picked through racks of unflattering coral shirts, as poodles nipped and growled at the soap suds and the shears. Children used colorful paint to decorate the windows for the Fourth of July, with eagles and flags and red, white and blue hearts. Shopkeepers slipped outside with jugs, to water their old planter boxes; magenta impatiens spilled over the edge.

"I put in all regulation windows five years ago. I went down the street and asked Bob -- Bob Szilagyi, the fire marshall, what I needed," the apartment house owner was saying, waving his hands to indicate size. "There's nothing dilpilated � delipilated � dilapidated about it."

The pen scrawled words mercilessly. Compassion edged into my heart, and I cruelly slapped it back. There's no room, on the job; you are merely the clinical eye, floating on a stalk high about the room. And they will lose, their shops and apartments falling to the wrecking ball, hitting the pavement in a shower of bricks and siding, like terracotta leaves. The regulation windows will be webbed with cracks and then ground beneath the treads of the backhoe, which trundles like a Sherman tank over the wreckage. They will lose, and progress will bash the sides of buildings, the steel bucket of a backhoe.

I've seen too much of this in my four years on the job. City hall? They're not ogres; they, too, do what they think is right. Politicians watch baseball, kiss their kids and run out of toilet paper like the best of us. When Mayor Simpson talked of his plans for the town's refurbished entrance, his face flushed red with pride and excitement. "It's been an eyesore for years!" He pulled the glossy cardboard pictures from the utility closet where he had stowed them for safekeeping. "Don't they look good?" A cottage-type arrangement of stores, with gardens and a gazebo (can't forget the gazebo). Boutiques with high-end chocolate and designer handbags. A fountain and walking paths. The land behind needed for the project, an abandoned factorystead, had already been acquired. The newspaper stand, dog-grooming shop, apartment house and related stores were simply more hurdles on the track.

It's too easy to let the wave of words and pain and fate crest over you, crumbling like a clam shell on the ocean bed. And pen, my glasses, the notebook are barriers, setting me apart, protecting me from the onslaught. I am allowed to care, but not too deeply. Not so deeply that I am buried in the sand of their point of view, unable to clamber out of the hole and see another way. Not so deeply that I cannot salt their wounds with my questions, and etch them into Times Roman print. Not so deeply that I cannot forget them or their words when I slam through the glass door and clamber into my car, headed to home after a long day.

Offensive, isn't it? Don't we all want others to make our problems their center, their revolving orbit? Don't we want others to sweat and moan over our woes deep in the darkness of night before the alarm clock screams, to worry and fret so we do not? Or so we have company? And the terrible things I see, they wound me deeply, but in a week's time they've healed, a crusted papercut. I am the floating eye of God, so to speak. Nothing touches me, at least out on assignment. In the office is another story, but one that's never told. The writer can never tell her own tale; that would be narcissism.

***

His apartment was on the first floor, maniacally neat with a few framed pictures and a large bed with navy-blue sheets that match the SUV. A mirror was propped on the floor, toward the bed. His cat, black and fat, hid in an obscured pile of laundry, hissing when I went near. White rolls of toilet paper were stacked, pop culture Grecian columns in the yellow-painted bathroom.

The steaming silver trays of Chinese food graced the coffee table in front of the large-screen television. I primly place an egg roll on one glass plate, waiting for him to join the repast. "What's wrong with you? Go ahead and eat," he said, freeing the sesame chicken from the tray. I sip water from a turquoise blue glass, not sure what to make of his statement. Perhaps it's an unreasonable thought: waiting for all the dining partners to have their food before one digs in. The fact of the forks subtly distressed me; I had hoped for the foreign elegance of chopsticks. Using oil-moistened fingers, I lifted and crunched the egg roll.

"Survivor" blared from the television. I watched, pretending to be interested in the babble box. We exchanged observations from the show, but he seemed to be more involved with watching emaciated, dirt-grimed women cavorting in string bikinis and eating raw fish than with me. Silently, I swallowed the egg roll and sipped the water. I know my welcome had worn away, a rock in the water. That I was just . . . those horrible two words: fuck buddy, raw meat. A nothingness with a vagina. The feeling confused me, sucked me into a metaphysical black hole. I've never known a Pagan man to use women who, after all, were all part of the Goddess. Surely, it was just a perceptual problem on my part?

And then his smile gleamed, a lightbulb in a dark room. He ran a hand through my salty hair, and I forgot. We took a shower.

But the next morning, on the drive home, I stopped at a red, looking at the ailanthus waving in a slight breeze from the roadside. My forehead banged against the worn steering wheel, and the tears slipped from my eyecorners, unnoticed. I cranked up the radio, trying not to wonder why. As the light transformed into green, a catbird darted over my hood and landed on the ailanthus branch, staring with black bead eyes.

"Meow," it said.

"Chirp," I said back, nonsensically.

"We've got to get down to business one of these days," it replied, cocking its small head.

My heart beat, a bird in the cage of the sternum. Talking birds. My foot hit the gas.

***

Before lunch, the decision came: injunction lifted, the city can go ahead with the condemnation. The colorblock woman wept, her black eyeliner pooling under her eyes. Mayor Simpson shook hands with the suited lawyers, and came over for a few comments. I tried to corner a young attorney for the landowners, to see if they would appeal. "We're considering our options," he said, shuffling papers.

And so, out I clicked along the faux marble corridors, glaring in their white sterility. The wind had begun to pick up, flinging green leaves from the roadside Bradford pears. As one hand fished the parking ticket stub from my lint-filled pocket, the other dialed Brenda, a remarkable feat of work coordination. I told her the result. She said we had no map, but that a photographer had been sent out for a fresh real estate shot.

My heels clicked down the sidewalk, stepping over dandelions hellbent on destruction. A gray mass hovered on the horizon ominously as I slipped into the concrete stairwell of the parking deck, and clambered up the piss-scented levels. At the exit, a bored-looking clerk misunderstood me the first two times that I asked for a receipt. And then I was off, stopping for a sandwich first.

As I slid into my desk chair, I waved at Brenda, letting her know I was back. And then I set to the task. Before long, Rachel pulled up the chair beside me. My fingers stalled, waiting. And then I turned, to see her eyes nearly leaking water behind the thick glasses she wore. She leaned to whisper.

"Brenda called me a chink today." Her voice seemed clogged with emotional phlegm.

"Well, she called me a dumb pollack last week," I replied, not sure of the emotional tenor of my response. Rachel was an odd girl, both friendly and prickly by turns, a fleshy-beach cactus. She seemed child-sized, a fact accentuated by her jet black hair, which she always held back in pastel barrettes. Despite its tailoring, her clothes always looked disheveled, as if she were either an unwilling teenager playing corporate dress-up, or a mad scientist. She was pretty young, in truth.

When she fairly skipped through the door, brought on a fellowship or somesuch from the Asian Journalists Association, Brenda glowered and hissed, something about ethnic quotas, about how jobs should go to the most talented applicant, regardless of skin color or cheekbone structure. I shrugged, keeping my peace. After all, Rachel was a body in a newsroom deficient of warm blood. The pennypinching corporate flunkies, including the newly-selected head honcho (whom I rarely saw) had let scores of reporters leave without replacement. And I saw my beat expand like lycopodeum powder from two towns to four, and sometimes even five when someone was out with the flu or car trouble or a plain old nervous breakdown. We had finally hired an obituary writer the week before, a shy-looking Goth girl with a distinctly rat-like face who kept slouched close to the keyboard. Sometimes, she tried to accost me at the water cooler to discuss the Faces of Death videos that were all the rage a decade ago. I told her that I didn't have a working VCR.

But Rachel and I have chatted on occasion, sharing witty repartee about politicians, editors and other acceptable targets. I wouldn't call her, or anyone I worked with, a friend; I've been burned too badly by the flashy cut-throat nature of some of my younger colleagues, who didn't quite realize that this was not the set of Shattered Glass or Veronica Guerin. My friends had all left the newsroom for more nutritional pastures, complete with leafy green paychecks. And where morale has plummeted faster than a flaming 747 and the glass door seemed to revolve endlessly, it was too tiring to reach out again and again to see the silver tie dissolve, as everyone on the North American continent achieved better employment. Except me.

Brenda herself said it when I was hired, and still working toward my masters.

"You're taking women's studies in grad school?" she asked with a mocking rhetorical grin. "Four words for you: Got fries with that?" And I felt some of those multivalent oppressions, based on socioeconomic status and gender, close in like a net. Damn it, theory should remain theory.

But Rachel sat, near crying. Brenda had disliked her for the start, and repeatedly kept her over to edit copy, sans overtime pay. Most of us were expected to do a fair number of articles a week; Rachel seemed to be required to write virtual dissertations on obscure subjects. Perhaps the editors had initially thought that the child-sized woman would adhere to stereotype and nod meekly, shuffling on bound feet back to her desk. But Rachel argued, her small hands bundled into fists, her dark eyes narrowing behind the thick panes of her glasses.

"That silent Chinese woman thing is such a stereotype," she told me once as she munched a bologna sandwich. "You should hear my mother scream. You can hear her hollering down the block."

But odd that one syllable could finally hobble the little spitfire. She told me the circumstances: the usual fight over copy. She showed me the rough print-out of the original. The lead could be tweaked, but it didn't require dramatic alteration. I told her so, trying to come up with a happy medium between editor and writer. After all, we were theoretically working for the same end: a kick-ass assortment of words that slams the chest. But the argument evolved. Rachel loudly complained about the hours she was kept over her time to edit copy. Slamming her coffee mug down, Brenda screeched that it wasn't her fault that Rachel was "a dumb Chink."

"You don't understand. It's as if everything I've done, everything I am, is negated by my face, my race," she explained slowly, wringing her hands.

"We should complain," I said, looking at the head honcho's office, which was open and beaming with light. "We shouldn't be subject to racial slurs. I've never been under other editors. Have you?"

"No."

"Well, then, if you come into the corner office with me, I'll do all the talking." Reluctantly, she agreed. I knocked on the doorframe. Frank, the head honcho, bid us entree. Fearlessly, I closed the door behind me as his black eyebrows rose. I've worked here four years, I told myself. I have proved my worth, and thus have some rights. We sat in the two hard chairs.

The mystery man was a virtual peacock: too young for the post, with slicked-back black hair and a company ring on his wedding ringfinger, even though I knew he had a wife and some progeny somewhere. Although I've heard grumblings from the editor, I've rarely dealt with him; he always seemed to be speedwalking out the door for a company meeting. Since he came on board, the staff meetings had stopped, although I've never wondered about it.

I told him, as delicately as possible, of the problems we've had since Brenda came on board two years ago. With a light touch, I weighed the need to edit copy with the need to change words unnecessarily. And then I talked about the slurs. Rachel nodded, and told her story in a soft voice, looking down. She looked up again. His face was unreadable, a hieroglyphic newspaper.

"Brenda is a good editor," he said finally.

Oh, of course, I gushed, trying desperately to read the situation. Her dedication to the job is not a question. It's just the slurs and the put-downs, which negate otherwise normal editing sessions. He folded his fingers and the company ring glinted.

"How do I know that she actually said those things?"

"She's surrounded by people," Rachel pointed out, as neutrally as possible. "They could tell you. The Chink comment was actually pretty loud. A lot of people heard it."

"Perhaps it was a misunderstanding." His fingers were still crossed primly, and I found myself wondering about the amount of grease he put on his hair.

"No, it wasn't," she said, shaking her head. Her hair bounced.

"I'll think about what you said." As we rose to leave, his finger lifted, beckoning me to stay. He asked about my story for tomorrow, and I told him the details. He paused a moment.

"I've reviewed your work, Jasmine. In the four years you've been here, you've done good work. The editors tell me that." He leaned over the desk, smiling. "But that's not a compliment. The first time you slip up, in the smallest way, I'm going to come down hard on you."

Am I being fired? I wondered, praying to Hecate. I parried.

"Why? What did I do?"

He smiled, folding his hands anew.

"You've been openly critical of the new administration here." My brain frantically searched for any misplaced comments of late; I could find none.

"No more so than everyone else. I pretty much mind my own business. Am I being fired?"

His smile tightened.

"By no means. We appreciate your hard work and we look forward to having a long relationship with you." He drew out the word, showing his teeth. "But we're all on the same team here at The Times. I've been meeting with employees individually about the team approach. Are we on the same team, Ms. Potoczek?"

"Yes sir," I replied.

"Good. I look forward to reading your story."

As I slunk into the hall, I could've sworn that he muttered, "dumb pollack." Safely out of view, I galloped to the bathroom as my colleagues watched me from the corner of their eyes. I hid in a stall, my ass on the seat, and sobbed. Some minutes later, a knock sounded on the stall. Two other reporters, Kiri and Jo Ellen, pulled me out. Patiently, they worked the story out of me and handed me tissues. Kiri shook her head, her long black braid dancing.

"He did that to the editors, too. He did it to Bob and Dan. Dan fought and was given a week off without pay," she said simply. "Now he's starting in with the reporters."

"Who� who is this guy?" I choked on tears.

"He's the fucking nephew of the head of the chain," Jo Ellen said.

"Christ. I didn't know."

"The editors are going nuts," Jo Ellen continued. "Except Brenda. She went off the deep end before she ever got to this damned paper. I feel bad for you and Rachel, having to work for her. Isn't there another person on your team?"

"Joe. He quit six months after she came."

"Don't blame him." They wiped my face with wet paper towels, cleaning me up.

"Hang in there, girl," Kiri said, her smile inspiring me. "Don't let the bastards drag you down. You're a damned good reporter."

***

Storm clouds speed and gambol over the flat gray horizon, imparting a feeling of wildness and change. A lake lies beyond, reflecting the steel gray, and whipped to a froth by the wind. The gale blows the victor's short shock of hair as he gleefully gathers the five confiscated swords. His opponents, disarmed by mandate and not skill, slink away with sunken shoulders and bowed heads. One stops, facing the lake. The androgynous figure weeps, face in hand, turned away in shame from the viewer.

And the conqueror smirks with his load of swords, a trickster win. He's not a strong man � a knave, really, as Eden Gray describes him. He could never beat them all in a fair fight. But he feels the victory is his, nonetheless; the victory always goes to the knaves, the scavengers, the field-pickers, who fling insults like both shit and weapons. Looking at the card, you are filled with a barely suppressed desire to slap that fucking grin from his face. But you can't; it's a two-dimensional image, and you are sitting there, occupying space in three dimensions.

In most cards, reversal reverses the meaning, but not so with this one. It's simply a matter of degree. On its head, the degradation and the weeping may seem less severe, but the victories are just as empty, a gaping hole filled with stormclouds, and your weapons fallen uselessly to the ground with a hollow clang.