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guy from the Fabulous Four comics, the one who turned into
     fire?
Flame on.
Johnny, his name was? Where in hell did Tamara find the stuff she wore?
    Tamara pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands, trapped them against her palm with three fingers on each hand,
     kept typing with the free forefingers and thumbs. “You doing anything for Easter?”
    Easter again. Long-distance phone call from Vancouver Island from his father. “I long to see you and your brother,” he’d say.
     But it never happened. And if Artho visited his mother with her stiff, dead, pressed hair and the pale pink lipstick blanching
     her full brown lips, she’d ask if he was still working at
that place
and whisper prayers under her breath when he said yes. Aunt Dee would be there too, with her look of fearful hunger and her
     Doberman’s knack of going for the soft underbelly of all their relatives:
Uncle James starting to lose his hair; Cousin Melba have neither chick nor child to look after; and eh-eh, look at old Uncle
     Cecil, taking up with a twenty-year-old chick in his dotage.
Aziman would be sitting in the basement with the basketball game turned up loud. Holidays always made him morose about his
     own divorce. He’d get steadily drunker on Wincarnis Tonic Wine (sugar code 17) while his boy and girl screamed and romped
     and fought around him. “No,” Artho told Tamara. “Gonna stay home, where it’s quiet.”
    There. The autofellatio man looked like he was sucking his own dick now. It was moderately convincing. It’d do.
    Easter meant that Aziman, after fueling himself with enough of the sugary wine, would flare, shouting insults at the players
     on the TV, yelling at his kids to quiet down, brown face flushing burgundy with the barely contained heat. Their mother would
     make him and the children spend the night at her place. “You can drive tomorrow, when you cool down,” she’d say. Artho hoped
     that one day the fire inside Aziman would come busting out, fry away the polite surface he always presented.
    How did that Johnny guy’s flame really work? Artho wondered. Was he always flame on the inside?
    On his screen, Artho checked out the autofellatio man’s skin and hair; this one was going on the “Banjee Boys” page, whatever
     a banjee was, and Charlie thought a light brown black man just didn’t fit the image. Good thing the position the man was in
     now obscured that aquiline nose, those thin lips. Smiling to himself, Artho painted another tattoo on the man’s beefy shoulder;
     “nkyin kyin,” the West African Adinkra symbol for “always changing oneself.” He bet Charlie’d never recognise it in a million
     years.
    Charlie came huffing by, glanced at the screen. “Artho, you still working on that fucking thing? Time is money here, y’know.
     I want Tit for Twat uploaded before you leave tonight. And no whining at me about overtime, either.”
    Artho sighed. “It’ll be done before five.” As if. But so long as it was up and running when Charlie came in on Monday, he’d
     never notice.
    “Better be. And make that guy blacker. Looks like a dago.” Charlie turned away. Stopped. Turned back and peered at the screen.
     Guffawed, “Jesus, Arth! He’s darker than you! Well, whaddya know ’bout that? Betcha his dick’s no match for yours, though.
     Eh? Eh?” Charlie cackled and elbowed Artho in the ribs, then shaking his head and chuckling at his own wit, stumped his way
     out of the office. He slammed the door behind him. Everyone jumped at the thump. People avoided Artho’s eyes.
    Artho sighed and got to work again with his mouse, sticking cocoa-coloured pigment to the man like tar on the Tar Baby. He
     ignored the feeling of his ears burning. It went away eventually.
    He finished blackening the man up, then opened up the working files Tit for Twat. He imported the new images, new inane text
     (
“When Daddy’s not home, see these blond sisters work each other up!”
) The “blond” was