It was the first Christmas season I had spent without family and friends. Christmases past had been filled with caroling, long conversations, poking and prodding wrapped gifts under the tree. This year I was on my own.

I tried to make the tiny artificial Christmas tree in my living room resemble a real one, complete with tinsel and blinking lights. I stepped back and scrutinized it. It was not convincing, even to its decorator.

My eye was caught by a card I had tacked on the wall - a baby-faced blonde Virgin Mary smiling beatifically at the Baby Jesus in her arms. It had been sent to me by a pious woman whose religious convictions were as binding and deep-rooted as a feather upon the wind.

I looked lower and saw the full-blown poinsetta in their pot on the floor below. It had been the holiday saluration of a decadent youth who had often cast a warm look toward my charms. Erotic red and cool green in the leaves together.

I suddenly longed for home. Home. Home was a small house in North Carolina, nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains.

Friends. Friends were Bill and Jenny.

The three of us were now scattered across the country. For a time, we three had known one another better than many husbands and wives did.

When we had separated, we had vowed never to forget those years, those very special years. We stayed in contact.

Somehow, long letters and telephone calls never bridged the gap that touching could.

Bill and Jenny. When we had first met, we had instinctively recognized the sensitivity in one another. That sensitivity made us social outcasts, just as individuals suspected of practicing witchcraft had been in another age.

We didn't fit it, didn't belong in isolated Asheville. In a place where blind religious faith was the norm, and television was regarded as the pinnacle of intellectual achievement in the Western world, we probed for answers and read books.

Of the three of us, possibly Bill bore the greatest burden. Homosexuality was regarded as a sin far worse than murder in a small Southern town.

We began to meet at each other's houses for "salons." I was assigned the role of Gertrude Stein, with Bill and Jenny as the "lost generation."

Perhaps there was more truth in our jesting than we realized. We were children of the Seventies, a decade whose hallmarks were alienation and disillusionment. I dubbed these times "the novocaine era" - for everyone I knew seemed numbed by disappointment.

We three met and discussed art, literature, and music into the small hours of the morning. We spoke openly of our dreams, hopes, and fears. We were bonded together in our knowledge of one another, in an intimacy I had never dreamed of.

The telephone rang, shrilly demanding attention and shattering my reverie. I was back in the small room with its tree, suggestive poinsetta, and Virgin Mary card.

I picked up the hand-piece.

"Hello, may I speak to Lis, please?"

"I don't see why not. Hi, Bill, how are you?"

"Lis, hi. How are you?"

His voice was odd - subdued and somehow mechanical.

"Bill, are you alright?"

There was a long silence.

"Bill, what's up?"

I lit myself a cigarette, feeling a tightening in my stomach I had no reason to feel.

"Have you - Lis, have you heard about Jenny?"

This surprised me. It seemed to have come from left field.

"She dropped me a note about a month ago. I sent her a card, didn't get one back yet. We'll all be seeing each other again when I come down, but -"

"Lis," Bill's voice forced itself between my chatter, "she can't. She's - she's dead."

"Bill, that's really macabre. It's not funny."

Bill exploded with a fury I had never suspected he was capable of.

"She's dead, goddamn you, you stupid bitch! Don't you understand? What the hell is the matter with you? She's dead."

Dead? Dead? Jenny?

I struggled to grasp it. Jenny, sweet, laughing Jenny, dead?

Images flooded my vision. Bill and Jenny, a freezing winter night.

We trudged along with a tobaggan behind us, with the intention of mounting it as soon as we reached the hill. The snow shimmered with an eerie luminosity from the stars above. The cold night air discouraged most people from venturing out of doors. We walked along, the last three people in the world.

When we reached the hill, Bill suddenly began to pelt us with snowballs. I dodged them, while Jenny took the direct approach: she simply tripped him, then sat right down on his back.

"Ow, damnit it, Jen, get up, will you? You're killing me!"

"Not until you apologize."

I laughed at the spectacle of Jenny in a long knitted cap, seated complacently on top of the struggling Bill.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sooo sorry!"

Jenny looked at me for a decision on Bill's fate.

"Make him buy us a pizza," I suggested.

"Ouch, okay, okay!" he howled.

"Promise?" Jenny asked.

"Yes, yes, anything!"

"Okay," she said as she stood up.

Bill rose slowly and rubbed his back.

"My god, Jen, have you ever considered a diet?"

We were on him, then, laughing as we washed his face in the snow.

"Lis, are you there?"

Bill's voice jolted me back to the here and now that suddenly no longer had Jenny in it.

"Bill, how did it happen? Was it a car accident?"

"No, no accident. She was murdered, Lis."

Murder. Murders happened in detective paperbacks and on the six o'clock news. Murder in Asheville seemed unreal.

"How is Charles doing? God, he must be going through hell."

Jenny and Charles had gotten engaged a few months ago. He had struck me as rather colorless, but Jenny seemed happy with him.

"Lis, he did it. He killed her."

I could only stare at the receiver in disbelief.

"He broke both her arms. He strangled her with a piece of wire. He - he -"

Bill broke down, sobbing. When he could speak, I listened silently as he described the rest of Charles's handiwork.

The creek. Our creek.

The creek's water was so clear that brown and gray stones scattered upon the bottom were visible upon the surface.

Bill and Jenny and I waded in slowly, allowing our bodies to adjust to its icy temperature. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the dogwood all around us on the banks.

We swam languidly, enjoying the perfect summer day. Bill swam to my side.

"I never want to leave. It doesn't seem right we'll all have to leave this behind eventually. In a few years it'll be jobs and mortgage and taxes."

"I know. I never understood why people were so wild about nature until you and Jenny brought me here. It's so peaceful, like another world."

"Speaking of other worlds - "

He nodded his head in the direction of the boulder.

Someone had once rolled a boulder to rest at the side of the creek, in the shallow water. Jenny perched on top of it. Her long, dark hair clung to the sides of her head. She stared off into the distance, as if listening to some inner music.

I swam to her side, frightening away the minnows schooling around the boulder.

"You look like the White Rock girl, Jen. Or better yet, like the little mermaid.

She turned to me and smiled. The enigma of Jenny: a summer day in the Blue Ridge mountains - warm enough to make one's senses reel, yet cool enough to be comfortable.

I heard a voice from long ago, speaking the words of the master inside my head.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

In the Jennyless here-and-now I thought of God. My early religious training had portrayed a wrathful deity, constantly watching the Earth, poised to descend upon sinners at any moment.

Jenny's only religion had been tolerance. She had tried to understand every situation from the other person's point of view.

I was guilty of many sins. I delighted in breaking every rule, of defying convention and God.

Yet Jenny was dead, while I still lived. Where was justice in this?

The images of Jenny laughing, throwing snowballs, dreaming upon a boulder overlapped with new images of Jenny strangled, her lovely arms akimbo, Jenny with a screwdriver shoved up her vagina.

Grotesque montages flooded my vision.

I laid down the telephone hand-piece.

I never made it to the bathroom. I vomited violently in the hall, clinging to the wall to avoid falling down. The taste of acid clung to my mouth.

I strode into the living room and caught sight of the card with the Holy Virgin smiling on it. My hands shot to the card and ripped it into pieces, savagely.

I looked at the telephone. Bill was still in there, and I was still of this world.

How would we live now?

Bill parked the car carefully at the side of the road. From where we sat, the ground sloped gently downward to the creek.

I reached for the box beside me on the seat. I turned to Bill.

We studied one another's eyes as though the secrets of the universe were contained therein. We embraced easily, and tried to relive those tender days we three had once shared.

I turned, opened the car door, and stepped out into this "best of all possible worlds."

The dogwoods rose out of the ground stolidly, stark against the January landscape.

Bill and I walked to the water's edge, and we stood as near as possible to the boulder.

I remembered a night when Jenny had given me a verbal puzzle - had said something I'd never understood.

"Never give up on your writing. You will do a lot of things in life, but never give that up.

"Maybe," she smiled crookedly, "maybe one day it will save you."

Through the years that passed between the night she spoke those words and the present, I kept a journal. My quest for my own identity led me to some dark paths. Sometimes, the journal had been my only link to sanity.

I looked to Bill and he nodded, smiling a little.

I opened the box and withdrew a single white rosebud. I held it lovingly as I paid my last respects to Jenny.

I set the rosebud upon the water, near the boulder. The currents bore it away downstream. I watched it bobbing until it passed from sight.

As I stood there, I thought of many questions, questions to which I felt closer to knowing the answers than I ever had before.

The wind, the waters, life, death, friendship, love - where do they begin, and where do they end?

Does it matter?

Jenny ........

( Author's note: we are only dead when we are forgotten. Jenny will live forever.)

early 1980s

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