The Spirit from the Ninth Heaven
Tom Ong momentarily came awake in his bed, huddled from the cold. In his sleep, he had kicked off the covers. As he reached down and pulled them up, he glanced out the window, through a spot where the curtain always caught on the back of a bookshelf. The outside of the pane was nearly blocked with a drift of fresh white snow. He turned over and snuggled close to the woman next to him. She was a little plump and, he remembered in the darkness, she was blonde. At the moment he didn’t remember her name. The electric blanket was warm and he fell asleep again quickly.
Time passed and he dreamed.
As a child, he ran across the uneven asphalt of the playground, then stopped and looked back through the crowd of kids playing kickball and freeze tag. Two older whit
