Like finding two hungry children, a boy and a girl, on the street who were so undeniably charming that I bought them both a slice of pizza, even though I was totally broke and down on my luck myself.

And then having it turn out that they were the children of a man who could save the world with a certain pendant (which looked strangely Celtic) but didn't, because that would mean he'd have to leave his wife and kids behind. But the wife knew, and guilt of him sacrificing the planet for them was tearing her up inside.

It didn't matter in the end. Rhe little girl was looking through her parents' things and found the pendant, and I knew that it meant the parents were going to die in their beds that night, and the brother and sister were going to have to save the world by themselves. I don't know how I knew, because I wasn't in the story anymore, but I did.

Everything changed, and I saw them all grown up, climbing down from some high mountain, their task complete, and the brother was dying. The ghosts of the misguided lovers who fell to their deaths while opposing the sibling's earlier ascent had entered the brother's body and were poisoning him from the inside.

So the sister took his body back the valey at the bottom of the mountain and put it on a boat. She sailed up the river to the capitol, where she was met by cheering crowds and a parade in her honor. The streets were like Venice, and she took the boat all the way to the cit's High Temple. Before the could get there she'd have to climb the steps. A huge flight of stairs, long enough that the palace/shrine at the top was only a speck on the horizon.

The stairway itself was lined with flowering cherry trees, a loving populace, and Japanese-style gates every five huge, platform-like steps. The young Princess, who was also High Priestess at the same time, met her at the boat landing. The two girls, looked very similar. I could only tell them apart by their hair.

They took the body up the stairs together, and finally reached the top, where they placed it in a gold laquered box in the courtyard. The sister was so unbearably happy that her brother's death was a good one. He'd be comfortable in the next life. She was so happy it hurt. And then it hurt because she knew she'd never see him again, and she was crying in the princess' arms.

And then I saw myself, back in New York, sitting on a stoop, smoking a cigarette, hunched in my jacket and savoring the cold, painfully conscious of the weight in my coat pocket. I think I was looking at the sky. The smell of pizza was in the air.

... Weird, huh?