Calamity

heat burned inside him. There was only one way to quench the heat and that was with hers. One hand found its way into her crotch. Too many thoughts moving too quickly beneath the hollering FIRE! tried to rush into his forebrain—this is fucking amazing, holy shit, this is ridiculously great, Paul will never believe this, but it could be a trap, it could still be something bad, something sinister; bullshit, she’s begging for it, this time she really wants it.

“Is this what you want?” she whispered into his ear. Her hot breath threw more logs on the raging flames.

“Yesyesyes,” he said all as one word.

“Do you love me?”

Paul had once said, during one of his many elaborate “dictations” (as he called them) on women, that when women are completely overcome with passion, they can think of nothing else. Men always take the blame for being perverts and constantly thinking with their dicks, but once a woman is in the mood she is a completely illogical beast that cannot be stopped. That may sound great (it did) but there was a small problem. Over the millions of years of evolution, Paul said, women have developed a last resort safeguard to protect them from sex that may later seem like a bad idea. This final stop-all is the dreaded love question. This isn’t, Do I love him?, no. When a woman’s panties are sopping wet, she doesn’t care about her own feelings; she’s committed. But she does care about the man’s. She wants to know not just that she is wanted and desired—she wants to know she is loved.

Paul warned that no other question throughout all time could so shatter a man’s chances of getting laid as the Do you love me question. How a man handled that determined everything. If the man hesitated or replaced it with another I want you so bad, the woman would know immediately that the guy was using her like he uses a porno site and, for most women, the brakes would hit the floor and the final barrier would never be breached.

Tyler had known the question would come eventually, but a second date seemed really soon. Who knew if love existed on a second date? For that matter, what was love anyway? Hadn’t Hallmark invented it?

The heat started to recede. The other thoughts, those buried ones, jumped forward, but no longer did they offer doubt; now it was ridicule. What the fuck are you doing? Tell her you love her and get on with it. It might be too late already, you asshole. You could be fucking her already. Just say it, whisper it.

Someone was behind him. There was no reason why he should know that but he did and with absolute certainty. Someone was watching them from the doorway. He started to pull up, but she held him, nails biting his scalp.

“Say you love me,” she begged in his ear. “Please.”

“Someone’s in here.”

He yanked more aggressively and her nails pierced his scalp.

“Say it. Please, Tyler. Please!”

He felt blood in his hair. What the fuck was this crazy bitch doing? He thought of the candles downstairs, her mother’s face in the window last night, mouth opening and closing slowly, deliberately (just a dream). He thought of penises in jars of formaldehyde, their skin flaking off over years and years.

“I don’t love you.”

He jumped up and free of her. She cried out in surprise, “No!,” and it was so pathetic, so desperate—he had been a complete idiot to think she was even slightly attractive.

Someone was whispering behind him. He spun around. Sasha’s mother stood a foot away. Her matted black hair dangled around her face like torn window curtains. Heavy black and purple blotches smudged her face like severe bruising. The whiteness of her teeth made them appear fake, like she could slip them out of her mouth. Her lips moved slowly, forming words and complete phrases in a barely audible voice.

She raised one hand, black robe falling off her slender arm that was mottled with bruises. She held a small tube. She whispered something and he caught most of it: sac rice bloods the luff chide use crate. He leaned toward her, unable to fight the need to know what she was saying. She shook the tube and warm liquid splashed across his face, in his mouth, up his nose, and into the corner of his eye.

For a moment, Tyler stood there as Sasha’s mother kept whispering something he couldn’t quite hear and then his left eye started to burn. He pawed at the eye frantically, rubbing to wipe out the liquid, but the burn intensified. He closed his eye and covered it with one palm, pushing against it because the pain from that helped mask the pain of the stinging fluid.

“What the fuck was that?”

From behind him, Sasha begged on the verge of tears, “Please, Tyler. Please don’t freak out. Please.”

He spun on her. She shrank back against the bed, breasts flopping. “Stay away from me, you weird bitch.”

He turned back and Sasha’s mother was nose to nose with him. “Sac rice bloods,” she whispered. Her lips pulled back and her teeth were no longer white: streaks of blood melted off them and dribbled onto her chin.

Sasha was still crying for him to not freak out, not run away, for him to stay and listen pleasepleaseplease, but Tyler was already in the hall and moving fast. He skidded down the few steps to the foyer, almost lost his balance. Once outside, he could breathe again, though he didn’t pause for a breath of air until he was in his car speeding over the windy roads with one hand planted against his burning eye.

Not a tube of something—a vial of blood. And probably diseased blood. Maybe the kids at school were right and it was Sasha’s menstrual blood. The crazy bitch had a genuine fucking witch for a mother and he had been fooled just as he feared. The scene had happened so quickly that he couldn’t make any sense of it. He had to wash the blood out of his eye before it did any permanent damage. It has already, the Paul-like voice said. She threw it in your eye because it would have a chance of getting in your blood stream and once that happens you’re fucked completely. You should have been more careful.

Was that true? Could blood in the eye lead to infection? What if the blood was from an AIDS patient or something insane like an Ebola victim? He could be dead in a few hours. That fucking bitch. She wanted her revenge—you raped me—and he had fallen for it. He’d get her back. Unless, of course, he died first.

He couldn’t go home—Dad was having some alone time with Mom, likely watching her sleep—and he didn’t want to explain what happened to his eye or why he left Brendan at the bowling alley anyway. He could drive to the hospital but he was too frantic for anyone to give him the time of day, never mind medical treatment. He was probably overreacting. It was just a little blood. Right? He headed to Paul’s house, which wasn’t very far. Paul would help him figure this out.

As things went, he ended up at a hospital anyway.

2

Grief is a pit. You are dropped into it and then it’s up to you which way you go. You can struggle out of the pit, occasionally slipping on the muddy sides, or you can get on all fours and keep digging that sucker deeper until your fingernails break and your blisters bleed. Trying to crawl out is noble, good and respectful; digging deeper, however, is honest.

Anthony had crawled out before, but now there was no way. He couldn’t do it. What he could do was dig and dig he had for the past several days since Saturday when the Sergeant told him there had been an accident and Anthony sped to the hospital and was asked to identify the remains of his only daughter.

Her ravaged face hadn’t made him ill, but it had made him cry with torrential power. He had never experienced such tears before, tears that wracked the whole body and left him unable to move. On his knees before her corpse, Anthony wept and wept until a psychologist at the hospital brought him to her office. She spoke to him for over an hour, but he didn’t hear anything she said. He heard only his own screaming mind as it replayed for him over and over Delaney’s mutilated face. The clumps of blood in her hair reminded him of dried jelly or red tar.

The funeral director insisted on a closed casket, but through tears that never wanted to stop, Anthony handed the man an 8x10 school photograph, picture wobbling, and told the director he wanted him to make his