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Exodus ... Genesis

I

The Carters were on the balcony above theirs, arguing again, saying ugly vicious things to one another, and starting to get loud. Ted Fralich looked at Eve, his wife. She nodded. They picked up their drinks and left the pleasant July night. Before he stepped inside, he looked toward the west. The Front Range, marked here and there with light clusters, lay black below the star-filled moonless night.

Wincing at an obscenity, he let the door close behind him.

"I'm glad I married you," Eve said.

He grinned. "Hold that thought. Actually, I'm lucky to have a neighbor like that to be compared with. I wonder what they were thinking about, getting married to one another."

"Don't you know? What they were thinking about?"

He sat down across the table from her. "Yeah, I guess I do at that. But most of us thought about other things, too. Some of the time, anyway."

He sliced crumbly yellow cheese, laid it on a rye cracker from a polished wooden bowl, and capped it precisely with another. As he did, his vision hazed slightly. A sudden small pain made him frown and touch his forehead.

"Is something the matter, dear?"

"A sharp little pain in the forehead. I felt it once out on the balcony. Too much tridee. What in the world did people do in the evening before . . . ?" He stopped, showed his teeth, and finished the canape in one bite.

Her eyebrows arched. "You're feeling a little frisky tonight for a man your age, aren't you?"

"At my age you have to make hay while the sun shines. Or the stars."

In an age of minimum interaction with nature, it didn't occur to him to wonder how that archaic expression came to be.

* * *

His restless movements wakened her just before he threw up. In the darkness, the violence of his vomiting was shocking, so that her cry of "Ted!" was louder than she intended. He lay with his head hanging over the side of the bed, shuddering. Raising herself on one elbow, she reached across for his forehead. Her fingers felt sweat.

"You're sick! Really sick!" It was surprising, something no longer common. "Let me call the med. And don't get up!" she added, swinging her feet out of bed. "I'll clean the floor later." Sitting there, she rapped out the med number on the building comm.

As she did, Ted lunged upright and out of bed with an abrupt violence that shocked her so she didn't even call out, simply stared, round-eyed. He lurched from the bedroom without hearing Eve's muted words to the med. In the kitchen was a towel dispenser, and he began to jerk sheets from it one after another, rapidly, violently. When he had an armful, he pressed a switch. Eve peered in at him. A burner glowed quickly red on the stove, and he thrust the towels against it, glaring as they began to burn in his hands.

"TED!"

Her scream and clutching hands had no effect. Knocking her aside was trivial, perhaps inadvertent, as he moved about the living room, thrusting burning paper among cushions, into shelves and a basket of newsfax, while his pajamas reluctantly took fire. Eve followed him, snatching at the paper towels, her pleading drowned by the smoke alarm. Staggering he opened the hall door, his pajamas flaming now, strewed burning fragments on the carpet, and collapsed before the elevator.

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Framed