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eBook Category: Science Fiction/Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: She haunted him through his life and through the ages. She was always there in one manifestation or another, both science fictional and overflowing with the past. [Author comment: This story-poem is like my "Pavane for a Cyber-Princess" (also available from Fictionwise) in that it is dense and full of allusions. In this case, Andrew Joron's afterward, reprinted from the original edition, does much to illuminate its intent. Note that due to the limitations of eBooks, in particular handheld readers, the poem is presented here left justified. In the original, the justification of lines was irregular, winding down the page like a river.]

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: a signed, limited-edition chapbook by Miniature Sun Press, 2002
Fictionwise Release Date: September 2003

10 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [44 KB], eReader (PDB) [17 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [5 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [6 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [59 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [77 KB], hiebook (KML) [49 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [66 KB], iSilo (PDB) [5 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [6 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [45 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [13 KB]
Words: 1433
Reading time: 4-5 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"'She Was There for Him the Last Time' is a sweeping tone-poem ... a heroic witnessing of mutability and mortality ... practically a philosophical essay on the spirit of the age, and it captures this spirit by means of grandly disquieting shapes and shadows. is a sweeping tone-poem ... a heroic witnessing of mutability and mortality ... practically a philosophical essay on the spirit of the age, and it captures this spirit by means of grandly disquieting shapes and shadows."--Andrew Joron, from the afterword (included in the eBook)

"...a powerful song to the narrator's dark muse.... Each section is a startling canvas of cataclysmic events and death personified."--G. O. Clark, Small Press Review

"...a panoramic survey of the continuum-sprawling career of a fabulous Belle Dame Sans Merci who crops up amidst Armageddon and peacetime, offering both solace and despair. For some reason, I kept humming Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" throughout the reading of this gorgeously tumultuous ballad, which for all its savagery shares some of the winsome melancholy of Young's song."--Paul Di Filippo, Asimov's

"Truly this is a spectacular feat of craftsmanship--one I can't recall ever coming across in my reading: in or out of the genre.... This may be the greatest long poem the genre [science fiction] has yet produced...."--Trent Walter, SF Site

denouement: upon his throat, her gloved hands are white as powder

she was there for him the last time

in the bombed-out city

where the decimating trajectories

left their scars upon the earth

like sabers crossed and waiting

an angel of thanatos and calculation

passing unharmed and vaguely

saintlike or as the kindred of demons

amidst the charred stench and chaos

of the long night's devastation

she was there to demarcate atrocities

for the universal adjudication

of some cosmic tribunal

she had become a high priestess

of means and standard deviations

a mistress of bell curves

and statistical indifference

who could assimilate the heat death of the plenum

and mine quadratic equations