much it rained, no matter how many showers he took, no matter how hard he scrubbed. His own tears joined the cascade.
Ghosts haunted his footsteps, seethed even in his own shadow. He had killed so many children now that it felt as if every inch of his skin was crawling with their vengeful spirits. Over and over he dragged his jagged nails over the surface of his skin trying to scrape their lifeless forms from his flesh, but they would not go away. They held tight to him, burrowing deeper than he could scratch. He could feel their spirits clinging tight to his own. At times, Jason could even feel their tiny spectral fingers tugging at him, deep within him, trying to pull him from his own flesh, trying to drag him off to their side of eternity.
Each time a child passed him in the street, he wondered if they were real or one of them, one of the dead, one that he had murdered. Their wide innocent eyes bore deep into his, accusing, demanding, condemning until he turned away in shame. He heard their laughter in his dreams. Heard their screams and cries even when he was awake. He could hear them even then as he made his way through the rain-soaked streets. They had still not forgiven him… even after all this time.
Jason thought that perhaps if they had graves. Maybe if he could have laid them to rest in hallowed ground they would give him peace. But that was impossible. Their bodies were long gone. What was left of their bodies after he was done with them had gone into an incinerator or landfill somewhere. He honestly didn’t know what happened to most of them. All he knew was that they were gone, unsalvageable.
Sometimes the faces of the women, the mothers, were even worse than the kids. They had all been too young to know, some, too young to even scream. But the mothers had known. They had known what he was doing. They had come there looking for someone with his skills so he had performed for them. He had taken the life from them, sucked it from their wombs, and now they would never leave him in peace.
The rain dripped from his nose just as a young boy stepped from the shadow of a nearby alleyway, pointed at him, then dissolved into the sewer fog. Jason wondered which child that one was. It could have been any of them. He’d never even gotten to see their faces.
Jason turned the next corner and sat down in front of the abortion clinic he used to work at. He paused there a moment to collect himself. Rethinking his life as he unwrapped the package under his raincoat and stuck it behind the front door of the building. He had taken so many innocent lives at this place, halted their existence before they could even truly live, before they took their first breath. Atonement would not come easy. Perhaps, it would not come at all. Still, Jason knew he had to try.
Jason scratched at himself again and almost cried out when his hand came away from his neck bloody. The blood of the children he had murdered. He wiped at the back of his neck again before he realized that he had scratched his neck raw. His own blood. Not theirs.
The bomb had not been nearly as hard to make as he had thought. Gasoline, nitrogen-based fertilizer, laundry detergent, put it in a big jug and you’ve got something very similar to napalm. Perdition’s flame.
For some, a religious epiphany is a great thing, a liberating thing, like being born again. For others, it is like dying, like being flayed and crucified but never knowing for sure if you will be resurrected, never knowing for sure if you deserve to be. Jason was not hoping for resurrection. All he was hoping for was absolution.
“Dr. Lathum? Dr. Lathum, is that you?”
Jason recognized the voice, Mary Thompson, the Physician’s Assistant he had hired his first day on the job. Her red hair, dimpled cheeks spotted with freckles, fiery green eyes, those unreasonably large breasts, had been immensely attractive to him once. He would have asked her out eventually, even knowing that she was married. But that was before God had called to him.
“That person no longer exists. You know you are killing God’s children in there, don’t you? You know you will be judged for it, don’t you?”
“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
