I don't really like endings, but here we are. For now at least, this will be the last issue of the Fortean Bureau.

It's fitting, I suppose, that this column wraps up in the same way it began. The more wonderful and attentive readers among you may remember the first "Please Kill Me", which featured comments from Michael Cunningham, the literary writer who was thrilled and amazed that some science fiction qualified, to his mind, as literature. And the guy wasn't just faking the funk; his readings inspired his subsequent pretty good semi-SFNal novel-in-stories Specimen Days.

"The freak show's here," Jon Singer said. In Japanese.

The army guy driving the shit-brown Tahoe turned to look at the two boys in the back seat, ignoring the ice-slick New Mexico highway. "Wha'd he say?"

"Don't know," Ian Singer said. "He's speaking Jap. Or something."

"Yeah, but whaddoes it mean?"

Ian shrugged. "Fuck if I know. I'm not him."

Mexico City glowed for Agnes -- called to her in her dreams like a lover, sultry and full of heat. Here, her mother had assured her, she could gain strength.

Have you seen, in fields of snow,
frozen Jews, row on row? Blue marble
forms lying, not breathing, not dying...

-Avrom Sutzkever

Editors Note: This story appeared previously in Leviathan 4.

In my boyhood it was the fashion among the established families of the City Imperishable, much aped by the arrivistes, to believe that one's soul fled with each exhalation, and was recaptured with every indrawn breath. Lovers eagerly seized yet another excuse to exchange essences, while members of the Glasswright Guild profited handsomely from tiny "soul bottles" meant to arrest the airy spirit lest it take flight in a strong wind. Parlor magicians compounded spells from the breath of the mighty while scholars in their towers attempted to distill essence of soul.