The Tiger Catcher. Paullina Simons

to the sea. Up here, the air was thinner, the oxygen weaker. It was time for nosebleeds and birds of paradise and whispering bells. The summer flora was blooming, the mustang mint and golden currant vivid in the high noon sun. There was a smile on her lips and thunder in his heart. He knew there was magic in these hills. All he wanted to do was kiss her.

      She sucked in her breath, a bird of paradise herself, a whispering bell. “We’re standing above the fault in the earth called Benedict Canyon,” she said, rummaging in her hold-all until she pulled out a clear stone on a thin rawhide rope. Silver wire was braided and wrapped around the stone like a basket. She placed it in the palm of her hand. It was a chunky rough teardrop with sharp multi-faceted edges, translucent in part, occluded in part.

      “What’s that?” He studied it with mild curiosity at first. But the stone tweaked something inside him, peaked his interest. Stirred some indefinable emotion. He felt an electric buzz through his body as he stared at it. The buzz wasn’t entirely pleasant.

      “A quartz crystal.” Josephine lifted her arm to the sky. The crystal sparkled in the sunshine.

      “Not a diamond?” Julian smiled.

      “Ha. No. I’ve had it appraised, believe me.” She brushed her hair away from her face. “My grandmother gave it to me. It belonged to her cousin in the old country.”

      “Old country where?”

      “Not sure. Near Blackpool, maybe. Or Scotland.” As if the two were interchangeable. They walked a little farther until they reached a clearing, a hidden mesa in the sun encircled by chest-level exposed rock, a stony enclosure. “Jules, you’re standing in a cave of quartz!”

      “Do I want to be standing in a cave of quartz?”

      “Aha. Mr. Know-it-All doesn’t know everything. Yes, at certain times of the day, the quartz glitters like diamond dust. If you’re lucky, you might find yourself inside a rainbow.”

      What man wouldn’t think himself lucky to stand next to beauty in girl form, rhapsodizing about magic diamond dust inside rainbows. He was motionless, catching his breath, interested, bedazzled, open to her, open to anything.

      Their eyes flickered between the crystal in her hand and each other, the sandy desert hills falling away below them. In the valley, the outlines of Beverly Hills and Century City gleamed, farther west the yawning maw of the Pacific. Her flushed face was so near, all Julian had to do was move his head half a foot forward and kiss her open lips. His head slowly tilted sideways.

      “How long till noon?” she asked.

      He rocked back to check his Tag Heuer. “A minute.”

      “Excellent.” Her palm faced up. “If you can think on your feet, you can make a wish. At noon, for a brief moment, the stars and the earth and the whole of creation will be so perfectly aligned that any wish asked for in faith can be granted.”

      Clearly Julian wasn’t quick enough on his feet, or he’d be kissing her. “Why are you holding the crystal like that?”

      “Trying to catch the sun with it.”

      “You’re a sun catcher.” He gazed at her.

      “I’m a wish catcher,” she murmured. “Around us are the oldest rocks in the Santa Monicas. Like forty million years old. You’re standing inside stone as old as time itself. You can touch time with your hands.” She took a breath. “Do you want to touch time with your hands, Julian?”

      I want to touch you with my hands, he thought. His wish must have been apparent in his eyes. She blushed.

      “What happens to the crystal when the sun hits it?” he asked. “Does it get hot?”

      “Julian, I’ve led you up a mountain,” she said. “This is no time to be a cynic. We’re standing inside a volcano. The river beds below us have dried up, the land looks stern from here and is sometimes cruel, even ruthless, to weakness.”

      “I know that all too well,” he said.

      “Man, despite his fire and chaos, has made barely a ripple in these hills.”

      With slight shame Julian thought that you could tell a lot about how he had chosen to live by his languor in the land of palm trees and summer, by how he had breezed through a decade of his chill life in which he made barely a ripple, and which had made barely a ripple on him.

      “Is that what you’re going to do, Julian Cruz?” Josephine asked. “Be carried unfulfilled to the grave?”

       Not anymore.

      “All the colors of your world are about to disappear,” the ephemeral girl whispered.

      A bright flash stopped Julian from speaking. The sun reached zenith. The rays hit the lucid gem in her hands. The light flared and dispersed through the prism, sparks of fire bounced off the glittering quartz of the cave. A moment earlier Julian and Josephine had stood amid green and sepia. Now they were dancing inside a kaleidoscope of purples and yellows, a phantasmagoria of color, an electrical unstoppable aurora. The hills vanished, so did the trees, and the valley below, and the sky. Everything was drowned out. Everything else was drowned out. Julian could barely see even her, and she stood right next to him. It almost looked as if she herself had dispersed, had broken into a million moving shards of the deepest scarlet. For half an inhale, the blinding red blanched his pupils, and she was gone.

      He blinked, and she was gone.

      In the reflection of the vanished world, with flames exploding in his eyes, Julian couldn’t say what he saw, but he felt so intensely that it took the breath away from him. He felt love, and pain that doubled him over, he felt crushing fear, and desperate longing, and deepest regret. He felt terror. He felt profound suffering. It hurt so much he groaned.

      With a gasp, he blinked again, and there she was, restored to him, the crystal in her hands, dancing sunbeams around her. When he could breathe, the weight inside him shifted. Not lifted. Shifted.

      The sun moved a quarter of a degree. The colors faded. The world returned to what it was.

      Almost.

      The pressure in his chest remained, the saturated heat of a punch in the heart.

      He couldn’t speak. The lens through which he saw the world had become distorted, had lost focus in its very center.

      Josephine took his hand. “Told you,” she said, squeezing and releasing him.

      “What was that?” It was like waking up from a nightmare. For a minute you didn’t know where you were. Julian still didn’t know where he was.

      “What did you wish for?” she asked.

      “It’s not what I wished for. It’s what I saw.”

      “What did you see?”

      Julian didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. Something he didn’t want to see. He stared at her enthralled, yet unsettled.

      Josephine dropped the stone back in her bag. “Sometimes,” she said with a melancholy tinge, “when I come here, I don’t know what to ask for because I don’t know what I want. I want so much to believe it’s all in front of me, and I wish for a break, or a role of a lifetime, for accolades, for applause. But sometimes it feels as if everything is already behind me.”

      “It’s not,” Julian said, for some reason certain. “It’s all still up ahead.”

      “I hope you’re right,” she said. “My biggest wish still hasn’t happened. I want to be in London, on the West End stage.”

      “Why London?” he said. “It rains all the time. New York has great theatre, too.”

      Longingly she smiled, imagining her perfect future. “We wish for what we don’t have,” she said. “I want to sell out the legendary Savoy.” She swiped her hand through the air. “Have my name above the marquee—Josephine Collins tonight