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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