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by Mary Doria Russell

began to pray. Dear Lord, please, give him time! Please, Lord, let him finish! But John Henry Holliday was praying too, just as earnestly and to any god who might listen. Now. Now. Now. Take me now. Now: with this music beneath his hands. Now: while he was still a gentle man who might have made his mother proud. Now: while beauty could still beat back the blind and brutal disease that was eating him alive. So he held nothing back, tempting the Fates, defying them, seducing them. Now: as he bent into thunderous, muscular chords. Now: as he drew back for brilliant, chiming fantasies. Now: as he hurled his hands into the impossibly swift runs across the keyboard. Now, now, now, he prayed when the music darkened and fell, and spun and caught itself, and rose again, until at last—Orpheus to his own soul—he climbed beyond Hades’ grasp, beyond himself, beyond the terrifying, suffocating horror that awaited him, until exhaustion and peace had claimed him, as the