“You take care of yourself, Dr. Lathum. Don’t catch cold out here.”
“You are going to burn you know? They don’t forget. The kids. They never forget.”
The nurse shook her head and walked away. When she opened the front door, the blast sent pieces of her in every direction, a pink mist of atomized blood, bone, and flesh. The entire front of the building collapsed and the fireball blew all the way through to the back of the building.
Jason started scratching himself again. He could still feel the little spectral fingers all over him, tugging at him, but there were less of them. The fire must have burnt some of them away. God always sends fire to cleanse the world. He craned his head to look up at the heavens as the dark clouds rumbled above him, roiling like a pot of boiling oil. The rain still bombarded the earth, flooding the streets, washing away all the filth and debris.
“Sometimes a few long days and nights of rain are all the world needs.” Jason thought, “ Still, there’s no substitute for the flame of the righteous. Nothing cleanses like fire.”
Jason slowly stripped off his clothes, smiling as he walked into the building, feeling the fire lick at his flesh, warming his soul, as all of his sins melted away.
Perpetual Motion
Help me to avoid the next woman
The one who comes after you came before you and before her who will lie in bed beside me love me tell me about our future together never ever ever ever leave me like you those before you and the next woman the one who will be you
If I blink.
I awake and the morning sun sears my eyes. I have to concentrate hard to keep from blinking. My eyes are starting to water now. It’s a discomfort I’ve come to accept. I can feel the gummy film that has formed on my retinas. I reach out and try to wipe my eyes clean with my fingertip. It doesn’t help much. Already my eyes are beginning to dry out. I try to ignore it as long as possible. I try not to blink.
I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here with this cold clammy sweat sticking my ass to the bedspread, staring at the ceiling with that damned Lord Byron poem playing in my head like a tuneless soundtrack.
“Yet still this fond bosom regrets while adoring/ that love like the leaf must fall into the sear/ that time will come on when remembrance deploring/ contemplates the scenes of our past with a tear…”
I have no idea why I’m thinking of it or what it means in relation to my current situation or why I haven’t yet bothered to see who it is lying beside me snoring softly. I wonder if she’s someone I love, or someone I hate but love to fuck, or someone for whom I have no feeling at all and only fuck for lack of anyone better to occupy my time with. I guess I’d better look before my eyes get any blurrier.
When I first see her caramel skin, smooth slender body, and small neat afro, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I nearly leap from the bed. She looks so much like my mother that for a moment I thought I had done something really, really bad. Then I realized that my mother hadn’t looked like that in nearly twenty years, and besides Mom is more of a reddish brown, more like mahogany than caramel.
I examine the sleeping woman’s face meticulously, watching the rise and fall of her supple breasts, dark nipples pointing skyward like little Hershey kisses, the sweet gentle smile that crosses her face as she flutters awake. She is beautiful. At least that’s something. They aren’t always beautiful. Sometimes they’re just shy of pure flawless ugliness with only a nice ass or a pair of perky round breasts saving them from abject hideousness. Can’t say I’m terribly particular. It doesn’t matter a hell of a lot what they look like as long as I have someone. But this goddess makes up for every dog that ever scented these sheets.
She ain’t the most beautiful woman I’ve known but definitely the most beautiful one that I’ve shared a bed with in a very long time. There have been many others. Too many. Delicate, lovely, soft, and supple, fading in and out of my life like phantoms, desert mirages sent to torment a weary and dehydrated traveler, to fuel his hunger for the unattainable like the schizophrenic hallucinations of a wino or chronic drug fiend. In the end they leave only their heart wrenching memories, pale afterimages, mere suggestions of substance seared into my consciousness with a scalding teardrop and the familiar tightening of the stomach that comes with the remembrance of joys never again to be enjoyed. Many of them I’d cared deeply for, even loved. Too many. It only hurt that much more when they inevitably passed. Pricked by a thousand thorns for the sight and smell of a single rose. Watching each lover dissolve into the past to be replaced by the next woman. It was tearing me apart inside. I no longer had the stamina for it.
The woman is so beautiful that I hope to God I wasn’t foolish enough to fall in love with her. I can’t stand another heartbreak. But I was cursed with a romantic heart; a poets heart.
“…Yet still this fond bosom regrets while adoring.”
Her skin is like whipped milk chocolate, so fresh and clean that I can smell the water from her bath in the pores of her skin, beneath the smell of sex. She has dimples and round little cheeks suspended above a smile that imprisons all innocence and softness in its pearl white cage. Her body is all long legs and break-neck curves. She reminds me of Tyra Banks or like Pam Grier back in the seventies when she starred in movies like “Foxy Brown” and “Coffy.” She has the type of voluptuous, wantonly sensual form I’ve always admired- no…worshipped!
“That love like the leaf must fall into the sear…”
Her breasts, unlike most, seem to have a remarkable aversion to the ground; gravity defying. They are larger than you’d ever see in the Miss America Pageant but firmer and more buoyant than those flabby pendulous monstrosities found in magazines like “D-cup.” She also has a deliciously flat stomach. She has mad body! A stupid boomin’ figure! I can’t tell what that ass looks like because she’s lying on her back. Of course there are memories to supply that information. There are always memories.
“That time will come on when remembrance deploring…”
We met last year (although I’m sure she didn’t exist until she magically appeared in my bed this morning). I was sitting on a bus reading a book. When I looked up, she was staring down at me.
“So how’s the book?”
It sounded like one of my “break-the-ice-quick” pick-up lines. Something I’d say right before: “Where’d you get your earrings?” Or “That’s a lovely dress.” Or “Are you a dancer/model/artist/actress?” I could barely stifle my urge to laugh. I thought I’d better answer before she started throwing a few of those lines at me. I closed the book, making sure to save my place.
“It’s not one of his best,” I replied, as I looked her over from head to toe, lusting conspicuously. She had the retro sixties look down. A perfectly round afro framed her face lavishly in a cushion of black wool. Huge hoop earrings dangled alongside her head clanking noisily as the bus bounced along. Her lips were full and pouty as she blew out her words like kisses. It was amazing how much she looked and dressed like my mother did in 1973. I was freaked out by how much it turned me on.
“He doesn’t seem to be trying, does he?”
It always annoys me when someone frames what ought to be a rhetorical question as if they genuinely expect an intelligent response. I know they do it only to prolong conversations that are better off dead and I always wish they were conversationally adept enough to simply change the subject. I felt like screaming to her “That was just the opening line! Move on to something more interesting!”
I wasn’t going to be the one to perpetuate this infantile dialogue so I decided to flip the script on her.
“So, what’s your name anyway, you sexy muthafucka you?”
It was too much. I knew it right after I said it. Or rather right after she turned on her heels and walked away. Before she retreated she let me know I had fucked up by catching my own piercing predatorial stare, that I always thought was irresistible, in her own hard dark eyes and crushing it. She threw me a more effective version of the look I’d attem
pted and I flinched visibly.
“My name is Lynn.” She said in a voice not unlike those stuffy asexual women that always seem to wind up as your immediate supervisors. Then she turned on her platform heels and walked off down the aisle. Her mini-skirt clung to her like white on rice and her ass was truly a marvel to behold.
I stood up and started to follow her to the back of the bus when I suddenly realized that she was very likely moving back there to avoid me and that by following her I would only look like some persistent asshole nuisance. I might even get my ass cussed out in front of the whole bus full of rush hour commuters. I was already halfway to the back of the bus and I froze there, trying to find a way to gracefully return to my seat when some teenaged, hippie, skateboarder loaded his pot-reeking, saggy-jeaned ass into my seat blocking my retreat.
I stared at her trying to decide if she was genuinely interested and reminding myself to keep my natural sarcasm in check this time if I did manage to get another crack at her. A good attitude has saved as many lives as a bad attitude has lost and Lynn was a true sharpshooter, willing and able to shoot gaping holes in an ego at 500 yards in the dark. I was in eminent danger of losing points on my player card. I looked to her for help.
“Do you want me to come or not?” My eyes pleaded, but hers were ruthlessly silent. She was paying me back with interest with this painful moment of embarrassment for every arrogant thought I’d dared foster during our brief conversation.
Just as I decided that the only way for me to get out of this with my pride and players’ card intact would be to act like this was my stop and simply exit the bus; she motioned for me to sit down. We had begun a battle of wills right then that ended with a circus sex marathon in the hallway just inside the door of her apartment. We had gotten ourselves so worked up that we couldn’t wait to get into the apartment before we tore into each other. After an Olympian session of panting and thrusting we called our battle a draw. We’ve been dating ever since.
“Yet still this fond bosom regrets while adoring…”
Lynn rolls over and locks those hypnotic eyes on me, bringing me back from my reminiscence.
“Do you love me?” she asks.
“That love, like the leaf, must fall into the sear…”
I can tell by the matter-of-fact sound of her voice that she already knows the answer and is only seeking the comfort and reassurance of hearing my deep rumbling voice form the words. But I have no idea if I love this woman or not or if it even matters. I can’t possibly keep from blinking much longer.
My eyes have begun to itch irritatingly. I wonder what she thinks of the thick red veins that must be crosshatching my retinas by now? I wonder if she notices that I haven’t blinked in almost ten minutes? I wonder if I love her?
From my mind comes a staggering deluge of images. Memories of moonlit walks in the park, by the river, on the beach, down deserted streets; memories of dancing ‘til morning staggering around parties together drunk and giggling in each other arms. Memories of going to a dozen different movies, plays, art openings, poetry readings, or making love in a dozen exotic places, in a dozen exotic ways, and I realize that I do love her. That’s fucked up. That’s real fucked up.
‘Cause there’s no way I can keep my eyes open much longer.
“Yes I love you, Lynn.”
“Will you love me forever?”
Unwilling to get into a discussion of loves’ ephemeral nature, I reply instead with a kiss. I kiss her with the same hungry eager passion I bring to every experience in this timeless continuum where each moment is murdered as it is conceived. Our lips touch, and I send out my tongue in search of hers, to coax it, warm and slippery, into my mouth. I reel and sway in rapture as I nip at her lips and suckle her tongue. I want to devour her; to posses her forever as an intimate part of me, but I know that cannibalism is not the answer.
I’d only wake up in jail the next time I blinked and the cycle would continue, only this time with an endless series of big hairy convicts.
Not at all a pleasant thought.
When we separate from our embrace, she brushes against my cheek with hers. Bringing her lips to my earlobe, she whispers softly…too softly!
“I’ll love you always,” she says, “We’re going to have a wonderful life together.” Her voice has changed.
It is no longer Lynn.
I realize that in my ecstasy I have closed my eyes. I find myself not wanting to open them. Not ever again. But the heat of the body pressed against me is doing a number on my physical resolve, and a stubborn curiosity, originating from somewhere between my legs, begins to force my eyes open. A single tear drops from each eye and washes away the filmy residue that had built up on them, but unfortunately, fails to wash away the taste of Lynn’s lips against mine, or the rosewood scent of her perfume.
The woman in my arms, with her face inches from mine, is black.
Not caramel, or cappuccino, but gunmetal black, with long dreads decorated with seashells and little silver ornaments. Her breasts are small and unremarkable, but as I run my hands over her body, I find an ass the size of two of Lynn’s, that sits up high on her back and jiggles pleasantly when I rub it. Her arms and shoulders are hard and muscular, and her thighs are likewise carved of some unyielding black stone. She is obviously some type of athlete.
“I’ll love you forever” she whispers in a lush, smoky voice. She grinds her wetness against my manhood, causing it to leap to life and swell almost painfully erect. Before I can really get a good look at her, she disappears beneath the covers. As her lips caress my body, I notice that I’ve been working out in the time between Lynn and…Uh…um…Alicia. Yes. What a lovely name. My body is now ripped with muscle and her kisses fall expertly upon them. I lie back and enjoy, as she descends down my body with her mouth and tongue teasing tingles from my flesh. Soon it is over. Still shaking from a powerful orgasm, I wait for her to rise from beneath the covers. When her face reaches mine, it is no longer Alicia.
This face I have seen before; not in my memories or dreams, but here in this room, in this bed. We had loved each other, and I had blinked, and she was gone, like the others, but now…she’s back. As if the rotation of the earth had carried her away from me and then right back again, like some twisted carousel ride, a demented merry-go-round with horses going in opposite directions that meet every so often for the briefest of moments. Somehow I have to stop the ride right here, with Shana in my arms. I can’t deal with the idea of losing her again.
“I love you, Shana. God, I love you! You have no idea what I’ve been going through without you!”
She smiles at me, rather perplexed and amused.
“Nigga, what you trippin’ on?”
I just look at her, smiling through tears.
I remember how wild she used to be. She was my best friend, and we went everywhere together. She was so gorgeous, still is, in an androgynous sort of way. Her small breasts, short, dyed-blonde crewcut and aggressive mannerisms, could have easily allowed her to pass for a man. Though not the kind you’d want on your side in a fight. I can’t count how many times we would get peculiar looks as we walked down the street, holding hands and kissing, by people who thought she was a dude. She didn’t help the situation by getting all ghetto and yelling: “Fuck is you lookin’ at, fool? I’ll bust a cap in your ass!” Though it usually caused them to find more interesting things to look at. That always sent us into hysterical laughter. Once, when she overheard a couple on the bus speculating about whether she was a girl or a very pretty faggot, she stood up and flashed her tits at them ending the debate. Baby was pretty wild. Those were good times…very good times.
“Yet still this fond bosom regrets while adoring…”
I hug her to me and begin kissing her face while repeating my declaration of love over and over, like a program stuck in an infinite loop; like my whole life, an infinite loop. Meet girl. Fall in love with girl. Lose girl. Meet girl. Fall in love with girl. Lose girl. So on and so on. Over and over.
One girl after another. Ad infinitum. But not this time.
I stretch my eyelids back and prepare to fight off the inevitable. Shana smiles at the bizarre expression but I hold it despite the discomfort.
This time it will be different. No matter what, I will not blink. I will not lose her again. I will never let my eyelids drop. No matter the pain. No matter the gnawing itchiness and irritation. I’ve got to hold on. I can’t let Shana slip away again. This isn’t just another ho I’m fucking. Shana is a friend; one of a very few. Perhaps that’s why she came back when none of the others did? Maybe the carrousel has finally stopped?
“That love like the leaf must fall into the sear…”
I ask her to tell me all about herself; about us, and our life together, our future together.
“That time will come on when remembrance deploring…”
“You know all about me. What can I tell you?”
And of course I do know all about her. I know that she wanted to be an actress when she was in high school, before that she wanted to be an artist, and now she designs hats and makes jewelry. I know that she was a tomboy in high school, and that she didn’t get her period until she was fourteen, and didn’t develop breasts until she was sixteen. I know that she lost her virginity (to me) at age eighteen, and that when she was in college she decided she was a lesbian and gained nearly twenty-five pounds saying that she no longer felt compelled to conform to male standards of beauty. I found that amusing. It seemed to imply that the true nature of femininity was obesity. When I shared this observation with her she called me every son-of-a-bitch she could think of, and punched me ‘til her arms got tired…even after I’d apologized. I can still remember sitting there, hugging my battered body, as I continued to apologize, laughing and being secretly amazed at how hard she could hit. I guess all that extra poundage did have its practical applications.
I remember all of it like it was yesterday. The memories are always clear as a photograph. They ought to be. They’re only about a few hours old. Wasn’t that when she was here last? When all those years went by? Just a few hours ago?
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