Each Silken Strand

By: Wilona Riva

Disclaimer: I don't own Danny Phantom or Carl Sandburg's "From: The People, Yes"

Ahead and Beyond

"I love you," said a great mother.

"I love you for what you are

Knowing so well what you are."

"Danny, have you seen your father's...?" Maddie poked her head in the doorway to her son's bedroom, only to be greeted by a blinding flash of light.

Her arm fell limply to her side.

The ghost of her son stared back at her in fright. "Oh, no," he moaned.

Before she could move, he vanished from her sight.

"Danny?" Maddie whispered, her body too shocked to move.

"And I love you more yet, child,

Deeper yet than ever, child,

For what you are going to be."

"That sucks," Tucker commented, fiddling with the buttons on his PDA. "But maybe it happened for a reason."

"Quit playing with that!" Sam snapped at him, throwing the PDA out the window.

"Hey, I had two payments left on that baby!" Tucker yelped, watching helplessly as it smashed into bits on the concrete below.

Danny sighed, floating upside down on the ceiling. "What reason?" he asked, returning to the topic at hand.

Sam paused in the act of braining Tucker with a pillow and blushed. "Sorry," she apologized, the wheels in her head turning. "Your mother has over twenty years of studying parapsychology, gaining knowledge, and training skills you could learn from her, Danny. An enemy you might have to fight someday may require the skills your mother can impart to you; it might save your life, and ours."

"In other words, dude, go home and face the music," Tucker replied, producing a new PDA from his knapsack.

"How many of those things do you have in there?" Sam sarcastically commented, as she yanked the book bag from him. "Go home, Danny. Keep us posted."

Danny sighed.

"Knowing so well you are going far,

Knowing your great works are ahead."

His mother was caressing a picture of him taken when he was only six years old, showing the gap in his newly lost front teeth.

"Danny..."

A slight breeze fluttered the curtains and signalled the drop in temperature. She looked up to see Phantom smiling sadly down at her. "Mom, I..."

"Just answer one question, Danny," Maddie cut him off. "Are you dead?"

"Half," he mumbled. "The ghosts call me a halfa."

Maddie nodded.

Danny shifted back to his human form, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes, he looked directly into his mother's, and began to recount the story of his translation to walking the line between this life and the next.

Maddie sat back and listened.

"Ahead and beyond,

Yonder and far over yet."