title: The Waterbear: Some Kind of Love
author: Taylor, Wade C.
description: Samhain Shake has never had a conversation with his mother due to her dying only hours after birthing him, but he feels himself infused with the curiosity of spirit born of the mystic collision of French, Spanish, African and Native American in her Creole blood. This curiosity of spirit manifests not only as the common, normal spiritual curiosity most humans share, but as a spiritually curious view of the world Shake himself describes "as disturbing to those conservative minds (bent as they are on preserving worldly divisions) as to witness semen slung, like a chameleon tongue, upon the innocent eyelids of a virgin cheerleader." The world is no mystery to Shake, whose cosmic predisposition rejects both organized religion and atheism alike, and whose attitudes towards love, friendship, and fatherhood are colored by an indiscriminate detachment. Warren Meek, his "black brother from a blacker mother" and "gallant psychopath" who's "dispersed his mischievous seed on enough stoned minds and inside enough drunken white girls throughout the American South to have gotten him lynched to all the way to Jim Crow Hell and back in an earlier lifetime"; and Constance Hopkins, whom Shake describes as a proud "Baptist slut," are the closest souls in his orbit of mayhem. Both friends are ardent defenders of their own wanton passions -- passions which have already tangled the younger Constance and a married Warren together in an extramarital affair, and threatens to spin everything and everyone off axis when Shake -- who's been secretly aware of their secret -- eventually and unwittingly insinuates himself as the third angle of an unexpected love triangle.