"I met someone wonderful," my lover tells me from the dark. She is so honest I cannot take offense. Her voice remains calm, and I suppose she feels nothing but sincere hope and love. Fredi says, "He isn't like you at all." After a moment she laughs. "I didn't mean it like that. You are wonderful, too. He's just differently wonderful." She quickly looks at me from across the bed where she sits lotus; I feel the motion behind my eyeballs rather than actually see the shift of her head. I'm sure the glance is meant as an apology. Moonlight reflects silver highlights across her high white cheeks, and I can almost imagine her smile.

I tell myself I should not be injured, I should not mind. She is always attracted to new people, new things. First it was me, years ago, freshmen new to the college scene, to freedom. Then Lydia, the speech professor from whom we both took Small Group Speaking our first semester together. That time too she told me about her interest before doing anything about it, even before approaching Lydia, before Lydia gently told her she didn't "swing that way." Still, though, something inside me congeals, rather like Spam jelly. So I tell Fredi, "That's interesting. Tell me about him."

And she does, and I listen with the morbid interest of a child watching a porno, fascinated by the intrusive violence without understanding. She tells me first, "I've never been attracted to a man before. Not since high school, anyway." For some reason she assumes this will reassure me. "I must say he really isn't handsome, at least traditionally handsome. Very small. Very. I can hold him in my arms and lift him off the ground." She has, I imagine, already done so. She's probably lifted him up and kissed him with her astonishing Amazonian lip vice. I can't imagine her fondling his breasts as she does mine when we kiss, but I suppose she could still grasp his ass and pull his hips against hers.

Fredi continues, "His smile attracts me. His freedom. His movements are so feminine; he has beautiful smooth arms, and they weave around in the air while he talks. It's like he is dancing."

So now I fantasize them dancing, and they twist and braid around each other with fleshy ropy limbs. They embrace inside a glass cabin, where the world around them peers in through the walls, and the aurora illuminate their oily bodies. They make love as a human knot.

I touch her face and say, "Winifred," and her face slowly relaxes into that look that only comes when a lover interrupts a fantasy, sort of both annoyed and concerned. I'm close enough to see her mouth quirk down around the corners like a falling angel food cake. "You'll have to introduce us some day."

Her smile is tentative, and she takes my hand and pulls me into the bed. She says, "Woman, you make me happy." Her kiss and body are both so comfortable and warm, and I succumb as I always do. But after she touches her cheeks to my thighs, after I taste myself on her mouth, even after our wet bodies stick together like Velcro and then peel apart with the same tearing sound Velcro makes, and after I relax and play at sleep, the air and blackness that pours in through the door as she leaves is cold, penetrating, and in the time it takes her to slip out, I am wide awake.

It's barely four in the afternoon, and I loathe the darkness outside the cabin.

The sun sets with an air of finality sometime in early November. The simplicity is elegant; light dwindles day after day until there is nothing left of it, until the only sign of sun is the moon, a sort of pale proxy like a streetlight left to wander carelessly across the sky. In mourning for the missing sun, the air turns bitter and cold. Moisture freezes suspended in the air and great white slabs of ice-fog lay like misty glaciers flowing across the ground, and I pretend the sun left simply to stay warm.

Winifred dresses for the cold. Goose down traps warm air against her body, and a neck gator pulled up around her ears keeps her head warm. Her coat is neon purple and reaches her knees and is very straight, and it's like a tube slipped around her body. Her boots are the rubber and leather kind that clump even when walking through deep snow.

She keeps her brown-blond hair finger combed and loosely ponytailed. She likes the feeling of disarray. She thinks it disarming. She washes it twice a week, once on Saturday and again on Wednesday.

For two dollars the local Laundromat offers relatively clean stalls and hot water. Fredi had just showered when she met the man. He was stuffing all his clothes into one washing machine, reds and jeans and whites. She said, "That's not how it's done."

This was a Saturday.

"Not how what's done?"

"Not how you do laundry." She pointed at the washer, or rather, the clothes in the washer. "You want your whites in one load, your jeans in another, and everything else in another."

"Nope," he said. "I only have enough clothes for one load."

She warned, "They're all going to come out gray."

"That's okay. Gray is my favorite color."

"Nobody likes gray." She hoped he understood she was only teasing.

He asked, "You know what I like?" and before she could answer, continued, "I like my cabin at night, with all the lights put out, just the glow of the stove and the northern lights dancing up out my window." He waved his thin bare arms around in the air, demonstrating how the aurora move. "In that kind of light, everything is gray. The bed, the table, lovers, dogs. Everything."

He said, "I especially like how a woman's skin soaks up the light and spits it back out with all the warmth that's missing from outside."

Fredi laughed at this. "That, Sir, is the worst come-on I've ever suffered."

The man shrugged. His olive-drab overcoat was so large and his body so small the movement barely registered. "I'll work on it, okay?"

"Fredi Bowden." She likes to introduce herself that way, to give people a start. Years ago, after she made love with me the first time, we lay in bed together touching each other and talking. She told me, "I feel like that song, you know, the one Johnny Cash sings. 'A Boy Named Sue'." I told her Shel Silverstien wrote that song, and she pinched my nipple and laughed. "Yep," she said, "a girl named Fred."

So she makes the best of it. When she introduced herself the man, he gave no sign of reaction. He held out his hand and said, "Pleased to meet you, truly. Ivan Smith." She took inventory of him as she shook his hand, and listed his assets and debits. She liked his body, what she could make out under the long coat he wore. His eyes impressed her, too, light brown and friendly with flecks of green. His smile. But he was short, only about to her nose. She didn't like that at all.

"Pleasure to meet you, too."

And that was how they met. They didn't see each other until the following Wednesday, and then Thursday she said to me, "I met someone wonderful."

Then Friday when she returns she says, "I spent the night with him in a house of light."

When she closed the door after leaving me Thursday, after making slow and languorous love with me, she walked three dark, cold miles, past the university and out the Loop, to his cabin. Her neon purple coat shed the frost, but her breath through the gator pulled over her mouth and nose built a mask of ice around her nose and chin. She couldn't part her lips to speak when Ivan opened the door, and he tried to pull the mask off. The ice held barnacle-like to her skin. Finally he was forced to chisel the mask from her face, like Michelangelo sculpting David's perfect marble mouth. The frozen wool shaved away in a thousand icy slivers.

"It's fifty below, you know," he chastised her. "You needn't have come." As an afterthought, he added, "Sorry about your scarf-thing."

As her face thawed she inventoried his cabin in much the same way she had taken stock of him. One room, about twelve feet by twelve. Dirty dishes, but only about a day's worth. One two-by-four frame bed protruded from one corner nailed solidly to the two walls about shoulder-height. Under it Ivan had stacked cardboard boxes; she found herself wanting very badly to know what was in them. Along one wall she saw refrigerator, and an electric stove for cooking. A wood stove for heating. She liked the two pictures on the wall that wasn't either a window or a bed or a door. One was a black-and-white photo of a young boy, maybe five, with his eyes squinched shut as a dog licks him. The other picture was a gray woodcut of a sailboat tossed about in a stormy sea. On one of his bookshelves near the bed another picture had been propped, a photograph of a child at play in a green yard, a little girl with brown hair, apparently kicking dandelion puffs.

She said, "I had to come for you, Darling. I couldn't stay away," but she couldn't keep from laughing, partly at the words, and partly at her bad 'forties-movie vamp voice. "I know I didn't have to come." She despised her silliness even as she laughed at it. She hated the giddiness she felt, the strange disregard for propriety, or for other's feelings. She loathed herself for leaving me.

And yet she said, "I need to know who you are. Show me who you are."

"I'm not anybody, really. Anymore than you are anyone."

"No," she said, "I know. I can feel it. You have something I don't."

"I don't," he echoed.

Her fingers traced then thin stubble on his cheeks, and it tickled him. He pulled slightly away. She said, "I bet you can coax the northern lights from the sky and hold them to your body."

"That," he said, "is the worst line I have ever heard."

"Do it," she commanded.

"And why should I?"

She said, "Because you want to show me you can."

"Of course. I always try to impress the ladies by doing impossible feats. I'm rather like Hercules that way, don't you think?" he said. "That's about the only thing Hercules and I have in common, besides our physique."

She said, "Okay. I can't force you. But I know you can."

And they laughed together, and touched each other's cheeks and arms. He smelled of musk and he of cinnamon. Fredi licked the side of his salty neck to see if tasted like cinnamon. She was surprised and disappointed he did not react; he did not shiver, he did not pull away, he did not twitch.

They played Trivial Pursuit. "What is the only mammal known to lay eggs?" he asked.

"Bats," she said.

He nodded. "Correct," he said, and she smoothly, gleefully added the green pie.

"I'm usually not good at the science questions," she said.

He had lied. The only mammal known to lay eggs is the duck-billed platypus. Bats give bloody birth to tiny hairless rat-like babies that squeal in hypersonic terror.

And after, when she inserted her last pie, she said, "I'm ready for bed." She stood and began undressing, but Ivan held up his hand, touched her wrist.

"Not tonight," he said. "Not yet."

He extended his hand around hers and led her to the door. The cold air swirled in around him, grabbed at Fredi's thin shirt, at her breasts. She felt her nipples tighten, and her spine shivered slightly, shaking her whole body, and she also shivered with the fear he was sending her away. She wanted to be with him tonight, to feel him inside her. Her skin tingled in her disappointment. He was sending her away.

He did not want her.

Ivan stepped out onto the porch, and she followed. Above them the aurora curtained across the sky, waving like sheets in a breeze in a detergent commercial. He lifted his arms up and swung them around, and he reminded Fredi of a rodeo she had seen as a child. There a man had ridden a wild bucking horse, one hand clamped on a rope tied around the horse, and the other arm floating free above his head, whipping around to the beat of the horse's undulations.

Ivan reached into the aurora, and pulled out tufts of glowing plasma. He opened the door to his cabin and threw in the glowing cottony patches. He reached up again, plucked more light from the sky, and quickly tossed it into the cabin. As the small pieces of aurora passed by her, Fredi felt the warmth they gave, and she did not feel cold at all. The tufts diffused light evenly throughout the room, and finally the cabin was filled with light, and the walls glowed so brilliantly they were transparent. Ivan took her hand again, and they entered the cabin.

Although the walls were like glass, Fredi danced naked for him. Her movements were long and sinewy. She arced backward until her breasts stood straight as two peaks of meringue, then twisted forward again to let them softly hang free. She leaped into the air, fell gracefully to the floor. As her breathing grew deep and ragged, the light Ivan had harvested entered her lungs with the air. It warmed her, revitalized her, and she sucked it in with orgasmic irregularity. She danced until she could not stay upright, and she fell onto the bed and the light suffused her and she slept dreamlessly. When she awoke Ivan was gone.

Fredi tells me, "I spent the night with him in a house of light. But I did not sleep with him."

I nod as if that fine point were important, the distinction between intention and action, as if somehow the fact she didn't sleep with him should ameliorate her desire to fuck him.

She says, "I really didn't think he literally had the power to do that, to pull the northern lights right out of the sky."

I tell her, "All men can do that," not so much because I believe it but because it trivializes Ivan's gift to her. I don't want her to fixate on him.

"I wonder what else he can do."

It's too late. She's already fixated. The best I can hope for is some sort of damage control. "He has the worst power of all. He can eat you like a bad dessert and vomit you all over the road."

I really don't mean to say it, but I do. I wish immediately I hadn't, so I say, "Does it matter? I mean, in the grand design, what does he have to do with us?"

She does pause a moment. She looks at me, assesses me. The wrinkles around her eyes smooth out, and reappear by her smiling lips. "Nothing, " she says. "It has nothing to do with you and me." She pulls me to her and whispers, "I love you."

If she means it, if she really does love me, she won't go to him tomorrow. She won't hope to find something buried in his body she hasn't found in anyone else. She will stay with me.

Of course, she doesn't. She goes to him first thing Saturday morning.

And Sunday night she tells me, "He took me to the cemetery."

She left me Saturday morning after a breakfast of Corn Flakes with one teaspoon of sugar and half a cup of milk poured over. We didn't talk. I knew she was going, and she knew I wouldn't stop her. So she went to him, and she carried a hand-warmer with her, one of those devices that burn white pellets at fairly low temperatures, about a hundred degrees. She held it to her face when the ice threatened to engulf her.

He waited for her. He quite cheerfully said, "Come in, warm up. We're going to visit a graveyard today."

She nodded mutely, shuffled in her shuffle-boots to the stove and held her hands and face near. She could not think of anything to say. She couldn't even reason why she had come to him, like some bitch in heat. Maybe that's it, she thought. Maybe I'm just in heat and once I've had sex with him I can go on with life and forget him.

Moments went by, then minutes. The sound of the fan behind the stove captivated her, held her thoughts with the intensity of white noise. "Did last night... happen?" she finally asked.

He nodded once, quickly, from where he sat scrunched near the ceiling on his shoulder-high bed.

"Why? Why did you do that? For me, I mean."

Again he nodded. "For you. Because you asked."

"What else can you do?"

He slipped off the bed to his feet. "Go to the cemetery."

He led her from the cabin down a bike path that followed the road. In the winter, bikes don't use these paths nearly as much as snow machines, but the snow machines keep the path packed solid. Ivan held her hand as he walked confidently on the narrow trail. As long as Fredi stayed near him, she was warm.

The cemetery was quite near Ivan's cabin. Fredi didn't even know it existed until he stepped over the chain and she followed him into the tall cold trees and tombstones. "This place in summer is Eden," he told her. "I come here every day from early May until the first real cold snap in fall."

"Graveyards give me the creeps," she admitted. "I don't like them."

"This is a place of power. If you close your eyes you can feel it."

She closed her eyes. "All I can see are two thousand decaying bodies in little pockets in the earth," she said. "And my own death, too. I can see that."

He nodded. "That's most of the power.

"Follow me," he said.

She opened her eyes and ran to catch up with him. "Where are we going?"

"Two things," he said. "Then we can leave this creepy place." He led her to a set of two symmetric rows of mounds of snow. Board frames held tarps stretched tightly next to each mound, so both rows alternated, tarp-mound, tarp-mound.

"What is this?" she asked.

"Graves. It gets so cold the ground freezes and they can't dig new holes in winter. They make a few extras in the fall, so they can bury the winter corpses. Only problem is, the frost gets the mounds of dirt, too. They pile the dirt up, and it freezes. The permafrost surfaces in the winter, and freezes the piles of dirt from the bottom up. So they have to steam the mounds of dirt to loosen them to bury new corpses in the winter."

"Interesting," she said, and she couldn't mean it.

"It's important," he assured her. "Come this way." He led her through frozen white paths, almost untrodden, to a small monument, an angel playing a harp astride a tiger with bared teeth. He cleared away the snow from the marker. Susan Smith was born on June 23, 1985, and had died January 1, 1992.

"My daughter," he said.

Fredi tried to think of the appropriate response, but couldn't think of any way to describe the way her heart bloated in her chest and gagged in her throat. "I... I'm sorry," she said, and knew just how utterly inadequate that was.

"Don't be. I'm over it now. I only think about her occasionally. Mostly here. I come here to think about her."

He was smiling.

"How..." she started. She couldn't imagine a way to finish the question.

He shrugged. "I picked her up from the sitter's, after a New Year's party, about a block away from my house. We walked. I held her hand most of the way, but she stooped to pick up one of those little plastic poppers, you know, the kind that look like tiny champagne bottles and spit out the colored confetti. So I let go of her hand. She stood, took a step toward me and held out her little treasure to me. Something, I don't know, ice or something, tripped her, or she slipped, and she hit her head on the sidewalk."

Fredi waited, and they were silent for a time. Perhaps he wouldn't continue. Maybe he had said everything he needed to say. She read the tombstones as she walked by. "Born June 2, 1927, Died May 30, 1972." "Husband, Father, Teamster." "Tracy Elizabeth Pearson. Born 8 September, 1987 4:55 PM. Died 8 September 1987, 7:32 PM," and beneath that, "Innocent."

He said, "I thought she just bumped it a little, but when I touched her shoulders to see if she was okay she didn't answer, and then I noticed the blood leaking from her ears. I picked her up and held her to me and I ran all the way to my car. I put her in and I drove about seventy miles an hour until I came to an intersection where some New Year's drunk had taken out a couple of other cars. I tried to turn around, but other cars blocked me in. I pulled Susie from the car and ran to one of the policecars that sat in the middle of street to keep people from plowing through the wreckage, I guess, and he helped me clear a path and he called ahead to the hospital, and he drove us with his sirens screaming loud, almost as loud as me. But by the time we got to the hospital it was too late. The doctors said they could save her, that she would be all right, but it was just a little white doctor lie."

Fredi said, "Oh."

"Yeah. I think the cops thought I'd done it, you know, beaten her over the head with a frying pan or something. They asked me all kinds of questions, but eventually the doctors confirmed what I'd told them in the first place."

"Oh."

Although he wasn't smiling anymore, he said cheerfully, "It's okay. I only get like this when I'm down here. The power of the place overwhelms me sometimes."

"Yeah," she said.

So he walked her back to his cabin and they made fudge, but Fredi couldn't shake the cold in her stomach. She came home to me without even considering making love to him, and after only a couple pieces of fudge.

The next day she tells me, "I can't imagine what it must be like. He lives alone like that, never seeing anyone except at laundry or the cemetery. I would die of lonesome."

"Would you, now," I say, and nothing else. Something keeps me silent, seals my lips against the things I want to say-- leave him to his solitude, live your life with me. I've never thought these things before, never felt so helpless against the loss of a lover before, never felt so needy before. I've watched three lovers leave, and I've watched two more stay while I left, but I've never wanted a movie ending to my life so much as I do now.

The stray hairs from her untidy pony tickle my skin as she pulls me close to her. "Don't think all that," she says. "I'm not leaving you. Not in a million years." The unnatural masculinity of her breath surprises me. The skin of my face warms, tingles. "Not ever."

I nod, and pinch my mouth tight and long and thin, and say, "Yeah, right."

"What?"

I ask, "Are you going out slutting again tonight?"

"Please don't."

"Don't what?" I know I shouldn't, but I want to hurt her. I want to tell her to stay with me, and I want to clench my teeth and my fist and punch through her mouth.

"Don't treat me like a downtown drunken whore who promised to eat you and puked in your crotch." She holds me at arm's length now, and I tremble as she squeezes my arms. I try to answer. I try to tell her I don't want her angry, I want her to love me, but I realize how ridiculous I would sound.

So she turns from me unanswered. She climbs onto our bed and sits as the stereotypical TV Indian sits, cross-legged and blind with closed eyes and deaf with closed ears.

I go to her, touch her face lightly. She jerks her head back. I say, "I'm sorry, I really am. I've never been jealous before. I'm not sure I know how to behave." She is still deaf. I say, "Please forgive me?" She doesn't blink. I skulk from the bed to the door to the outhouse. I'm sitting down with my bare ass already stinging in the cold and I hear the door open and then slam in the darkness, and she is gone before I can finish urinating or thinking.

I waste the day. I drink coffee, and I try to bake bread, but I leave it sit too long in a small bowl and it droops over the side like empty hundred-year-old breasts and I don't do anything with it, and about five o'clock I throw it out. "Damn her," I say, and I swear I will not let her in when she comes back. She can take her boyfriend to hell, and I think these thoughts off-and-on for the rest of the evening.

That night she tells me nothing, because she doesn't come home. When I worry, though, it's not the worry she might be in trouble. but the worry of losing a lover. I try to hate myself for the selfishness, but I can't.

I read a James Thurber collection, and when I get to the part with the collapsing bed, I throw the book across the room and squeeze my eyes shut until I see tiny flares speed around inside the lids, hoping to seal the sleep in.
____________________

The cabin was warm and empty when Fredi entered. "Ivan?" she called, though she could see every corner from the door. The lights were off.

The cold air slipping in around her pushed her in, and she closed the door to keep it out. She opened the stove and saw it was recently packed with wood. In the refrigerator she found a zucchini, which she sliced and fried with butter and garlic in a black cast-iron skillet. She ate without tasting, and until she finished she managed to not think much.

She washed the plate and skillet. She sat down. She looked at her folded hands.

She cried just a little. One tear from each eye, and she breathed normally the entire bout. She checked the clock after she wiped her cheeks; only thirty minutes had passed since she'd arrived.

These were her thoughts: This is not my place. I can't picture myself with him, in this place. I can't imagine a man inside me anymore. I do not want this.

And lastly she thought, So what am I doing here?

But she did want him, and she wanted this place. So then her mind placed her pictures on the wall, and her books on his mostly-empty shelves. The books could completely supplant the tiny cactus in the green plastic planter and the framed mirror. Her CDs could go between the squat pink ugly rock and the framed picture of a small girl at play in a green yard.

The girl in the picture looked about four. The brown pony tail curled around her neck, somehow showcasing the gap in her buck teeth. But her smile was kind, and almost sincere, and very wide and open.

Fredi thought to herself: Hello, Susan.

She lingered on the picture for just a moment longer, then turned away to the bed. The bedspread was soft and cold under her hands as she lifted herself up, swung her legs up. She lay on her back and looked at the red and orange and yellow and purple sunset crayon drawing tacked to the ceiling two feet from her face.

The opening door woke her.

Ivan motioned to her, waved her to life. "Come with me," he said, "I want to show you something."

So Fredi fell from the bed, cocooned herself in the purple coat, slipped her feet into her shabby boots, and followed Ivan into the cold. "Oh, this is a find," he told her. "This is a real treat."

She followed him from the driveway down a trail half-trampled in the deep snow. The clumping of her boots fell still-born into the air, muffled by the snow-shrouded trees. Winter's ability to eat sound whole frightened her. In spite of Ivan's presence, she felt suddenly alone.

"It's up here," he said. He stepped off the trail into the deep snow so she could see.

She saw a bull moose standing placidly in the trail, about five feet tall at the shoulders and planted massively on spindly legs in the middle of the trail. It had not noticed them yet. As soon as it did, the moose would probably charge them.

"It's not moving," she said.

Ivan hopped back onto the trail. Fredi cautiously followed him as he approached the moose. He rapped its shoulder; his knuckles thupped against the bony hump.

He said, "Frozen."

The moose stared icily forward. She stretched her hand forward. A finger slid across a solid marble-like eyeball, dark and clouded as black quartz. "Incredible."

"Yep. I figure it froze from the ground up. The permafrost grew up through its legs."

The ears were turned out to either side like thick shovels held up to the sky. She grabbed one and tugged experimentally, and it broke off in her hand. "Gross." It dropped to the ground and buried itself in the loose snow.

She asked, "How did it happen?"

"Look here," he said, touching the chest of the moose. A wire pulled tight across the skin furrowed across the sternum. The wire stretched back and out from either side of the frozen carcass, forming a V across the trail, a funnel.

"It's an ancient trap," Ivan explained. "The moose will walk down the path like it does every day, la-de-da ho-hum, just a normal day. The wire will lead him into a little chute, and suddenly mister moose can't go forward, and he doesn't have enough room to turn around. The wire has him trapped. He just stands there until the trapper comes along and shoots him."

She said, "No way." That was ridiculous. "Why doesn't the moose just force his way through? Why doesn't he just back up?"

"Moose are stupid. They can't back up, and they don't have the brains to push through. They would starve to death before forcing their way past the wire."

"Huh."

They turned away and left the moose with finger marks on its eyeball and one ear missing and black wire stretched deep into its chest. Fredi found herself wondering how a beast could be so stupid, and that thought occupied her the entire walk back to the cabin.

Inside, the cabin was warm and tender. She asked, "Why didn't it just turn around?"

"You saw the wire. There was no room to maneuver. It'll just stand and freeze. It won't back up."

"Hum," she said. She didn't speak again.

Ivan opened the stove door and stuffed in a wedge of wood. He left the door open and the flames wrapped around the wood, and the wood tsked and sparked reprovingly.

They sat silently for several minutes. Fredi rose and kissed him briefly on the lips, and she left him sitting, staring into the fire. She pulled herself into bed, and fell asleep waiting for him to move.
____________________

She tells me, "It's been a week now and we haven't made love." Somehow, I imagine, I'm supposed to be proud of her. Somehow I'm supposed to say, "So everything is all right now."

The cabin is so hot. I hear the bindings melt from the spines of our books, melt and trickle down and form thick waxy pools on the shelves. The melted glue gives off a noxious gas, and my eyes sting. I say, "This isn't me here, is it?" The heat is making me irritable.

"What do you mean? Who else would you be?"

I don't cry. I never cry, I will not cry. "I would be your lover." Sweat seeps from her forehead, from underneath her bangs, and tracks down her face. Fredi's body is pungent. I inhale, breathing in the heated odor of her sweat and the smell of melting books. I hold it in my lungs.

"You are my lover." She says this with certainty, with a finality that means she is leaving soon.

The temperature is getting to me. "Jesus, why is it so goddamned hot in here?"

Fredi doesn't seem to notice the heat. She says, "Make love with me. Eat me, suck on me, kiss me. Make love with me."

My teeth ache. My incisors bind together and I realize I'm grinding my teeth. "No," I say. "Go to him. Stuff his cock inside you. Fuck him," I say. "And fuck you too."

The red thin cloth of her t-shirt forms closely to her chest. Her nipples protrude slightly.

"No," she says. "Not like this. If I leave you now, this is all our relationship will be, just this last two minutes. Everything else will die. Two years, two years, goddamn you. It won't matter. Any of it."

"Not my fault. You left a week ago. You'll leave again tonight. With luck you won't be back."

She glares at me a moment, then. She stands and reaches for her coat, and with her arms outstretched I see the entire shape of her breast where her shirt has melted like candy to her body. Long loose strands of hair stick to the side of her face.

I say, "Could you please turn down the goddamned heat?"
____________________

God damn pain. I hate it. I keep fighting it, rather like I imagine a fish fights a lure, thrashing and spitting and losing to a force it really doesn't understand. In fact, I doubt a fish realizes it's fighting against anything. It's all just pure instinct, I think, the rippling of long soft muscle against a current as the line pulls it closer to death. Pain is a lot like that. Exactly like that.

So, to carry this analogy to ridiculous extremes, I suppose Fredi is the lure. Ivan is the line. And, when I get reeled in, most likely God is the fisherman.

Fuck it.
____________________

Ivan held her as she cried. He held her close as the tears crawled down her cheeks and into her mouth. Fredi liked the salt, and her tongue stretched to her cheek as she licked the tears away.

She vaguely recognized the crayon sunset drawing hovering above her eyes, wavering in orange and red through her tears, imaginary warmth tacked loosely to the ceiling. Briefly she wondered about Susan. What did she feel as she struck the frozen concrete? Did she pass out from the concussion or from the pain? Fredi thought of the tiny head splitting open on the sidewalk, and imagined her own head splitting open. She imagined Ivan visiting her every day as she hid under a blanket of earth.

"Why?" she asked. "She hurt me. She meant to. Every word she said, she hurt me." The softness of his skin surprised her. Even as she cried, she felt the sensation of his hairless chest against her cheek, and she thought of my breast right then, just for that second.

"Does it matter?" he asked her. "She is jealous, and don't you think she has the right?"

"No. Jealousy isn't a right. It's a disease." Frantically she said, "I belong to me, not to her and not to you. I don't ask for her jealousy, and if she gives it, it's a selfish thing."

He paused a moment, closed his eyes. He said, "Jealousy is something that can't be helped. It's a natural response when we feel betrayed and impotent to do anything."

She lifted her head from his chest. Silently she sucked her lower lip through her teeth. She would tell me later, "I hated him then. It's unreasonable, I know, but for just that second, I truly hated him." But at that moment, she had no words for her emotions, so she said nothing.

He continued, "Look, don't let me lecture you. These are your emotions, not mine. I'll try to avoid being so presumptuous, okay?"

The hatred passed, and left her weak, empty. "I don't have any strength left," she said. "I've been giving you everything I am, and then going home and giving her everything. I just don't have anything else."

He nodded as if he understood, and his fingertips grazed her cheek lightly, tickling her. The cabin smelled stale, somehow oppressive, and she gasped at the air with short violent motions. Her diaphragm kicked at her lungs with staccato abruptness.

"Hey, hey." Pulling her head back to him, he stroked her hair. "Hey there." She cried into his smooth hairless chest. He kissed her, sealed her mouth with his lips, and the warmth of his breath filled her mouth, her throat, burned into her lungs. After they parted she still held his breath inside like a deep toke.

He said, "Do you believe in magic?"

She nodded, refusing to let go of his warmth inside her.

He smiled then, and touched her face lightly with his fingertips. "I have enough power for both of us," he said. The skin of her face tingled where he touched it, leaving cold shivering trails across her cheek. "Take it." Everywhere he touched, her skin first seared, then immediately froze, then slowly grew warm again. It seemed to Fredi he drew pictures across her face, but when he reached her neck his fingers traced long shallow arcs from chin to breastbone. He lifted his fingers from her skin to start the next arc further back along her jaw.

His fingers carefully unbuttoned her shirt. It caught on her shoulders and she had to arch her back to pull it free, and while her hips were lifted from the bed Ivan unfastened her bra.

"Make love with me," she said.

He did not answer.

Instead his fingertouch lightened until it felt as if he lashed at her with down. He drew his fingers slowly across her chest, around her breasts, gently up to each nipple then back down again. He caressed her ribs and her belly. "Do you feel it?" he asked.

She nodded. "That's you, isn't it? The power?" Her body glowed pinkly where he had touched it. With a smooth tug her jeans were off, and then her thighs also glowed.

"Please," she said, "make love with me."

Her legs were like two glowing yellow lightsticks. He threaded his fingers between her toes. The heat penetrated inside her, down into her gut and up her spine into her skull. She felt her eyes open and consume everything around her-- his cabin, the spices on the rack above the oven, the pictures of Susan playing in the grass. She sees the spines of all his books stacked and sorted by subject and alphabetized by author.

"Stop," she said quietly, "you're giving me too much." He ignored her forceless attempts to push him away. "You need some too," she said. "Keep some for yourself. You need it too." And once again he held her body against his, and now he cries.

She said, "You need it too."
____________________

My lover asks, "You know what you do with power?" I shake my head.

She takes my hand and leads me to bed, and my body pinkly glows where she touches me. She tells me, "Nothing," and she touches my face. I pull her close.