The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Four by Randall Farmer

him.  He was mine .
    I knew better than to stand in his room and watch him
sleep while the fires of post-kill lust raged along my nerves.  Just waiting
here on the edge, until something pushed me over and I crawled into bed with
him and burned his candle down a little bit farther.  The look of him, and the
sound of his breathing held me here, and I didn’t have the strength to leave.
    Bobby’s breathing remained ragged from the pneumonia.  I
couldn’t keep him, but I couldn’t let him go, either.  I was a predator, but Bobby
had become the one person in the entire world who cared for me in any form at
all. 
    Now I cared for him.  I didn’t know how I would be able to
survive losing him.  Despite all my good intentions, I couldn’t stay away from
him.  I needed him too badly.
    I turned away.  The guilt finally grew large enough to
surpass my desire and I left him to his sleep.
     

Focus Rizzari Talks with Henry Zielinski
    “…and normally, I work in my lab at night during the
week.  I came home today because of you,” Focus Lori Rizzari said.  She had
been exchanging stories with Zielinski for several hours in the library of her
oversized house.  Late in the evening, silence finally made its rare appearance
in the Inferno halls.
    “I would like to examine the hand,” Zielinski said. 
Carol had run into a talking Chimera and they fought.  Interesting about the
former, inevitable about the latter.
    “Later,” Lori said.  “I don’t want to keep you up past
your bedtime, Henry.”
    “Me?” Zielinski said.  Then he yawned.  “Sorry.  I’ve
just been having so much fun with your household I got myself fatigued. 
Normally…”
    “Workaholic?”
    Zielinski nodded and glanced at the stack of papers on
the low table between them.  “I looked through a few of your unpublished
papers, and…”
    “These old things?” Lori said.  She picked through them
and skimmed his comments, wincing at the repetition of ‘crap’ over and over
again on the second paper.  “I’ll bet you had a nasty reputation among your
grad students.”
    Zielinski had seen enough of Focus Rizzari’s work to
know he needed to edit his thoughts and put as good a face on his reactions as
possible.  Lori wouldn’t ever be a top-end researcher, not with her mind so
often curbed by low juice.  She would be perfect working for someone like himself,
as part of a hot research team.  Not quite a plodder or bottle washer, but also
not a research genius.  She was good enough to get a few grants, perhaps even
keep a Professorship, but she wouldn’t ever change the world as a researcher.  She
worked hard enough.  However, she didn’t possess the spark to ‘see things
sideways’ enough to find her way through the research obstacles.  Zielinski
knew he could, but he also knew his limitations.  He had produced a few medium
important discoveries and many low-end ideas, more than enough in his
relatively short research career to get him a name in the field.  Nothing huge,
though.  He often wondered if he hadn’t blown his chance at ‘the big one’
because he started so late, in his mid-thirties, at the research game.
    “I chased away a few in my time,” he said.  Blandly.
    Lori took the offending marked-up paper between her
thumb and forefinger, as if it was a nasty smelling piece of garbage, and
deposited it in a trashcan.  “I thought I’d discovered something important regarding
mitochondria and juice, back when I was doing my post-doc work.  My advisor
told me to write it up but I was never convinced I had found anything real.  I
nearly had as bad a time with my juice overuse work, following up on your
paper.” 
    Juice overuse was a discovery of his.  Long ago, he discovered
Focuses could overstrain their ability to use juice after his favorite Focus,
Mother, started to have slurred speech problems after too many attempts to
recover lost memories.  Mother, a Focus who transformed late in life