Bob The Wizard 4 Final

Anna had lost her father to cancer and her mother to the slow decline of Alzheimer’s, so she knew a thing or two about loss. She’d once told Bob, as they lay entwined and staring at the bedroom ceiling, that no one actually understood loss. No one, not even her, not even someone who’d lost everything. No one understood it, she said, and that’s why people said they’re sorry for your loss. Not that they weren’t sorry, usually they were. But the thing they were most sorry for was something they couldn’t put their finger on, maybe weren’t even aware of. It was that they couldn’t explain how someone could be there one moment and gone the next. The finality of it was just too much for them. They liked to pretend that death wasn’t real, that people who were dead weren’t really gone. Some people, like Anna’s sister, actually talked aloud to their dead relatives as if they were there in the room. Most people didn’t go that far, but they still played games with themselves. Told themselves things, so they wouldn’t think about death, at least not the ultimate finality of it. Losing Anna had destroyed Bob from the inside out. After she and Daniel were dead, Bob found himself talking to her, In all his travels across the Astraverse, Bob had been in many tight spots, but none quite so precarious as this. Hanging off the side of a skyscraper had a way of putting things in perspective. The wind tugged at his mane of black hair and bushy beard, whipped at his black leather trench coat as if angry he’d dared to climb so high. The brown backpack he carried also protested his position, pulling on his shoulders toward the hard asphalt far below. As his coat swayed, the sawed-off shotgun tied within it clunked heavily against the concrete building. Bob wanted a cigarette, and seriously considered trying to light one. He might have actually given in to the urge, but angry yells from inside a nearby window impressed upon him a need to hurry. Below, the vast city sprawled beneath him. Sun glinted off the other skyscrapers and winked off passing cars as they zipped through the air in invisible traffic lanes. Cars didn’t fly where he came from—his world, his Earth. Then again, Bob hadn’t seen his Earth in a long time. The yelling from inside the building, muted by wind and traffic noises, was growing closer, and Bob heard a door slam open somewhere. He was on a shallow concrete ledge, gripping a