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That very same night, Sharon had a very strange dream.

She was walking down a narrow ochre-yellow, urine-smelly dirt road lined with muddy light brown huts in a dead place, somewhere very foreign to her mind. Out of a movie, perhaps, her unconscious mind ventured into the uncensored scene, probably in some blazing hot lifeless desert in the Middle East or Africa; or maybe out of a Bible study picture book. It was a curious amalgam of desert colors. In her dream were scenes and shades of shimmering yellow and orange pastels, lovely, silent, pastel waves filling her eyes canvas. Everything before her slow moving sight was shiny silent.

Silent stillness everywhere including the imperceptibly shifting tiny grains of sand that inaudibly seemed to move in harmony with the yellow heat of the glistening air. It was a forsaken landscape eerily barren of life, except for the flood of yellow, the color of death, she thought. The straw-mud huts barely endured against the desert wind. They resembled crumbling tombstones in some forsaken ancient cemetery. They looked like they had been shovelled into the ground to wait a second coming. Time had eroded most of the huts back into their deadest grains of sand and dust; their walls had mostly crumbled; they smelled of the dusty death from ages immemorial, tedious all around, the inexorable sun having scorched the last drop of water, of life, out of them.

She looked up and the whole dream, place, earth, and sky, blended into blinding yellow. The high noon sun was glowing intensely unbearable challenging the dead tranquillity of the cast beneath it; its heat was energizing the fine dust in unison with the whispering wind to gust tiny funnels all around, fiercely blinding her and forcing her to lower her kerchief to shade her eyes and block the light, so she could see past the storm. For the first time, in her dream, she realized that too much sun, too much light, can blind a person. She began to hate the sun that now disturbed her dream and sought the comfort of the protected shade and went and sat next to a crumbling hut. Full of uneasiness she found relief in taking deep breaths to lessen the chocking pain in her chest. The gasps of dry air and the blinding stillness of the place worsened her fears and made her want to scream and wake up from what was now becoming a nightmare. Leaning against the ruin, she felt afraid not knowing how to get out of her misery. The puke foul odor of urine was everywhere and the revolting stench was compounding her difficulty in breathing. Again and again she gasped for air, breathing hard through her mouth, for it seemed to her less obstructed and less offensive than breathing through her nostrils. She felt weak and very tired as she tried to make her way out of this improbable dream built out of mud and hay and held together, she was now sure, by nothing more than the fear of emptiness which sometimes is discernible in dreams. Bewildered by the stupidity of her mess, her unconscious brain released ever more shades of color to allay the fear that had trapped her. She frantically gasped to find an exit from her unlikely state but to her terror there was no visible out of her intense surroundings. The strong fear emitting from the deafening filthy dream was exhausting her and she wanted to cry out loud and end her desolate nightmare, but could not.

Ominously, everywhere, including up, and everything all around, raged stupefying yellow, the color continuing to register panic in her mind as the precursor color of death, which was strange because for most of her young life she thought dark, not light, as the color of death. Bright yellow from the life giving sun was what she grew up with; why now death? She felt trapped and wished she could run away or somehow be carried out of this stinking deathly yellow quandary.

Out of nowhere, in her dream, she saw a strange otherworldly figure enveloped in a princely white robe, his head covered, his eyes barely revealed through an opening slit in the folding of a golden mantilla. Even at a distance, the eyes, those eyes, were disturbing, reminding her so much of eyes she thought she knew. The alien apparition was strangely galloping towards her on a powerful white stallion on top of low flying fluffy white pristine clouds.

At first she was startled, but then even in her sleep a smile slowly came over her face, and in slow motion she thought, this obviously is an act of God; the ghostly appearance should not be so upsetting, nor so unexpected, or so sudden, and for sure not so unpredictable, for surely it’s a sign from God. She felt the power of the insight, and calmly focused on the apparition which was furiously swinging a sparkling sword above its head, powerfully reigning in his steed before her as it floated on the aura of white light, now all over the desert sand.

Though she welcomed the spooky visitation of the holy figure, which blended in her mind as familiar as a member of the family, yet it might have been death itself, and she remained fearful in her dream, and tried hard to turn away from it, but could not move, bound as she was on her bed. It was becoming a crazy scene and in her desert bed she was perspiring hard and suffocating under the weight of her miserable jam. She felt trapped between her sheets, stuck without clothes on, nude in an infertile desert with its crumbling mud huts all around her. She might as well have been in some cheap motel anywhere in Los Angeles, stuck in the jaded world of her unconscious. The gagging scene was a scary encounter full of the sin, its only salvation being the Lord’s forgiveness, her rapid eyes aimlessly fluttered. The ghostly sight is a bad omen, an early warning of disaster, possibly of death, her sleeping mind searching opaquely for the shore.

It was no use, only prayer could now and forever save her wretched soul from the immoral Acts of Magnolia High School’s insipid culture, once again retching up the foulness of her barren life with Hank and his dumb friends, ever since high school, always trying to hump her in warehouse sex.

And in her nightmare, her heart filled with the fear of Hank and his friends and Claudio at will with her, and her liking it, in the warmth of her luxurious bed. Her best friends, Kitty, and Robin, and Myrna made cameo appearances in her dream their shinny faces smiling and full of love, together, outside of the warehouse.

But the unforgiving white knight viciously struck his sword close to her face, in full stride on top of his pure white horse, hurling her to the ground before the frowning silence of her mind’s floating illusion.

Alone once again, she was in the middle of a desert wilderness with nothing but lifeless sand dunes as far as her eyes could see. In desperation she prayed for the Lord’s forgiveness and, strangely, as it often happens in dreams, although the sun was as blinding as ever, and the air as hot, yet, the inhospitable surroundings changed with the prayer on her lips, and suddenly the hot orange sand beneath her barren feet felt fresh and cool. And in the setting of the sun she breathed fresh air again and was no longer afraid of being alone in the wilderness. Soon she was walking the invigorating cool breezes of the dusk desert air and in their midst she thought she heard a most melodious song. Or, rather, it was more like a chant, a most heavenly chant, up from above and all around, sung by the sweetest of voices. Like a holy vestment, it engulfed her body and soul and she knew that she was before a blessed presence. The mesmerizing chant followed her for what seemed to have been a long time, though Lord only knows how actually long. It was soothing, and soft, and sweet, and it touched her heart like no other melody before. She vaguely recognized it as one of those full of humanity Byzantine chants that mystically induce a lingering air in the minds of people who have heard them. And although the language of the chant was foreign to her, yet she understood its meaning, which was of love and forgiveness.

A new vision, like a shimmering mirage, now commanded her attention high above her tired eyes, eclipsing everything else around her. Her unconscious mind focused on an iridescent face of what she paradoxically knew was a young beautiful monk. He was undoubtedly the angel sent to save her from her sins. His handsome elongated face was covered with a sparse long light beard that was proof positive that he was of holy rank. He was sitting alone on the windowsill of his monk’s cell in a monastery perched high above the world on a rock-solid cliff. Looking towards the setting sun, he sang in the most pleasing of voices, stirring her mind and capturing her soul, repeating softly his embracing chant which in rhapsody reverberated magically within her captive heart:

Those who have been baptized in Christ

In Christ they shall be resurrected,

Alleluia…

Those who have been baptized in Christ

In Christ they shall be resurrected,

Alleluia…

Those who have been baptized in Christ

In Christ they shall be resurrected,

Alleluia…

Like delicate wind chimes on a muted windy night the chant encircled her mind for hours, so it seemed, before waking her to a disturbing but most pleasing emotion. She lay quietly in her bed, totally unaware of her husband sleeping next to her, recalling the words so powerfully inscribed into her consciousness by a dream. She silently repeated them, “baptized in Christ”, “resurrected”, “alleluia.” They were pleasing words, mysteriously soothing. She felt the warmth of their presence, smiled contentment, and fell asleep again.

The very next morning, Sharon received a bouquet of thirty yellow roses accompanied by a love note from Claudio.

“Last night I saw a thousand stars

Passing before my eyes

Bearing hope and love

Hope that you will love me

Until all the stars of Heaven

In everlasting eternity

Pass before both our eyes…

Nobody has ever cried for me…

Tears came to Sharon’s eyes but for reasons that Claudio would never understand. Never again would he get a chance or an explanation from resurrected Sharon. There could be no Hank, no Mark, nor anyone else in her life, after the sweet faced Monk’s song. She felt spellbound by the holy message dream from heaven and the beautiful face of the holy monk and other saints. She cried and wished and prayed for a life more substantial, more connected to the Lord’s wondrous world. She felt the emptiness of her soul and wanted to be somebody, she told herself. If she couldn’t have children of her own, maybe she could find a more productive life in helping others. Yes, be a good self-sacrificing Christian. She would search her soul and begin to understand, love, and give of herself to those less fortunate than herself. She thought of her friends and happily concluded that there was room for help there. She decided that she would be God’s instrument to help her friends.

Perhaps unkindly, though she didn’t think so because she did love them, in thinking of her best friends forever, she wished that she too could be less sexy, less attractive, more like them. If only she could trade her bodily beauty for something more spiritual, more intellectual, something on a par with the excellence of her splendid buttocks, she smiled the worldly smile that was her trademark. Unfortunately, looking at her fabulous self in the mirror (she couldn’t help it) only made things more confusing for her: why couldn’t she be more normal? She didn’t want to think of herself as only beautiful. If she weren’t so wonderfully blessed, maybe she could have been an art teacher helping children to see the beauty of the Lord’s world; or maybe by adding works of art to His creation through her artistic efforts, or something as equally gratifying.

The more she stared the more she wished; and the more she tried to find fault with herself and bring about blessed change, the more things stayed the same. Trapped in a married life of greasy restaurant rich, she would fret the dissatisfaction with minimum penitence. And in the loneliness of her barren life, time, fast pacing her existence, had become a hateful presence. Weeks went by as fast as days, months as fast as weeks, and her anxiety intensified as her mortal ass began to gently sag below the support level of her youthful vanity.

Jesus, if only she could stop that frigging time.

She began a futile cosmetic struggle to at least slow the weathering tear of time; she tried fantasizing feelings of love for her husband, an attempt to retrieved love from a time when once she thought she loved him. Instant replay fleeting time and trick it back to youth. It was no use, her husband’s presence having long ago become invisible to her. He was gone, vanished from her life. The thought of her husband always made her feel caged, and paralyzed; instead of slowing time as she would have wanted, and prayerfully finding the lost love of the playful high school empty days, thinking of Hank only magnified the waste of precious time. Her husband and his friends suffocated her as she wilted away in her tortured agony now full of sin. Yet, much as she displayed her dislike for all of them at every opportunity and encounter, for all practical purposes, she knew, there was no way she could divorce herself from them. Where on earth, at her age and time, could she make a new start all by herself? She felt stuck with her dumb Hank and his friends as much as they, like frightened, clinging lemurs, were stuck on her. As loathsome as were her silent, inarticulate high school days’ silly admirers, beautiful high-flying tits like hers, after all was said and done, demanded the adoration that she had always, God forgive her, expected from her frivolous dummy devotees. As much as she hated to admit, there was comfort in being part of a crowd, unpleasant as it might have been, and anything less than the amorous glances eyed upon her by the boys of her life made her everyday boredom more frightening. Since Hank had first brought them around, and though she never particularly liked any of them, she always felt the need to have her admirers near her.

Loneliness was a shadow in her gut, and she ached her days away.

And as the days and weeks and months and years rolled by, Sharon became more and more aware of her terrifying solitude. As distasteful as her daytime thoughts were, they were nowhere near as frightening as was the darkness of the moments before falling asleep when the ghost of time would appear and whisper in her ear, “is that all that is? Is that all there is?” Even with her eyes shut, she could see that everything she had was so damn predictable in her modern woman’s urban easy life, so full of the obvious nothing, traveling ever so fast, to more of the same nothing. In her frightened soul, feelings of anxiety and depression smothered her thoughts; that indeed in her case that was all there was, irrespective of her beautiful still high saluting tits. Like the transubstantiated red wine that she loved so much and which was so lovingly morphing her into an alcoholic mistress, she wished that she too might be preserved into a more soothing spirit.

Like Myrna and her gin, Sharon sought salvation in the red, red, wine in which she sought relief from insufferable loneliness. The sweet red wine would grease the memory trails retracing thoughts from the almost forgotten but joyous childhood years. And the recollections would often lead to the love of her Sunday-school days. Such pretty yellow dresses full of the petticoat and Mary Jane red shoes hopping through her mind’s crispness, and of the spring’s many sunny Sundays. Every morning, of those memorable Sundays of her childhood, was full of the sun, full of the everlasting glorious light, and full of the blessed song of Jesus Christ that always warmed her heart to glorious gladness and rapture, young as she was. Oh, wistfully would she evoke those lovely memories of the eternal promises full of gentle love in the beautiful blond bearded face of iconic Jesus. Recalling those wonderfully blessed days of Jesus and the Old Testament tales of justice and joy, of faith and forgiveness, of marvellous miracles and cherished love, was now the only way that she could fall asleep.

And in the absence of an intelligent lover, Sharon found in herself the love she sought. Her mental health and happiness flourished in the privacy of her bedroom where like other young women she too found her way to panting orgasms. In her spacious pink bedroom she rubbed and stroked, selfishly excluding all real intrusion from what she thought was the icy world she was living in. Alone each morning she felt the impulse to rub her naked belly on her silk sheets and artfully masturbate. Alone she found happiness in her very private self-absorption. Daily she found pleasure in babying herself all over until her whole body was consumed in the sensuality of her own adoration. She loved every bit of herself, narcissistic bawdy as it was, and found no disparity between rubbing her baby soft ass on milk white silk sheets and pillows while looking up at the ceiling with eyes closed to find her fate in the heaven of saints. Her God given beauty demanded the attention she was heaving on herself. The morning matins of ritual self-massaging were not an adolescent’s hysterical worship of the temporary body, she had convinced herself, but rather the true adoration of eternal love, even though, more often than not, she found her exhibitionist tendencies to be gestures less than darling. Everywhere she touched, she loved as one loves the first immorally persistent memory, relishing the feverish temptation to repeat. During these sinful moments, her soft hands became playful, depraved, luxuriously elegant enchanters, escorting her whole being to sensual little nonsense meant to tactfully appal. More than ever, she was now looking inward and turning away from the world that had been her husband’s, and her parent’s, even her friend’s, but never hers. Alone in her thoughts she was indulging herself in an irreversible selfish love of her lovely loneliness.

Is there such a thing as love for oneself only, beautiful as one might be?” she would condescendingly think. Could a person love only oneself and none other? Is there such thing as love only for oneself? Can there be love when one is alone as Adam was before Eve? Or even as Adam and Eve were, alone, just the two of them? Or perhaps the three of them? For they say there was a second Eve for the three of them to share each other’s blessings. Could there have been true love with all the sensual pleasures that must be part of love if there were only one, or just two of them? The sweetness of love is surely more tempting, more exciting, more burning, in the presence of more than two lovers, it was a seductive thought. For love is a holy gift to be shared in community with others, as the Lord Jesus had meant it. Doesn’t love involve sharing one’s world with another or better yet with many others?

The thought was persuasive; truly that must be what Heaven is like, she concluded.

Such pleasures standing naked before her full length mirror conversing with her galloping mind in search away from decadent self-pity. At times she chanted her inquiries with angels and saints oblivious to the inanities aborting in a mind not firing with all neurons. Her sanity was intellectually masked with fierce questions as to who she might be with no easy answers forthcoming. There was the reality of the fabulous body struggling to morally reconcile her conscious to the desperate tendencies of an unstable personality. As Jesus would have wanted her, she indulged in consuming spiritual reflections: too many spiritual and base images confusing her mind, the mess at times suggesting divine gluttony. Pissed at her pious hypocrisy, she was grateful at times that there was never enough time to fully settle such ambiguous deliberations like love hiding somewhere in her mind. There would be time enough for all these thoughts and she didn’t want to give time the day to weasel not so subtly into her mind and corrupt her beauty. Too much thinking produced wrinkles in the brain. It was a waste of time, for who really knows what love is. Sadly, after all the years that were her life, Sharon could not say who she was, or that she had any inkling of what love was. Her one worldly stable element in her life, she was thrilled, was the love of her friends. And every so often, without surprise, the ghostly apparition of her dreams, would appear before her cabernet cloudy eyes, and slash his sword through her air, as a reminder.

When at times in the depths of gloom, she wished she could run away from time which was fast leaving her behind. During those moments of unhappiness she could feel time crumbling everything around her. Time was making her old faster than she could measure. It was fast killing her and she had no time to figure out how it was that the ticking of the clocks was racing her breathless to depression. Deep in her heart she knew it was time, of which she felt she had very little left, that was exhausting her, making her miserable and confused as it whirled inside her head like other short term thoughts that faded as quickly as they arrived, leaving her in consternation. Carelessly she would dress and undress, try on different colors depending on the time of day, and drink lots of white and red wines in the privacy of her bedroom to keep away the thought that maybe she should join some miserable nunnery, like Phil and his monastery, and have the time to devoutly think of the meaning of time in her present haphazard life of untested friendships, and an empty husband. Time was sweeping away all the fast food plentiful riches and the uneasy serenity of the many splendored pills and tonics, all of which now seemed to her the equivalent of accumulating blank days in an empty mental archive never again to be visited. Ingeniously she gathered her days into clever miracles of timeless observations that only she could detect.

Is time the same as conscience, she heard herself say.

She wasn’t sure, because in time there seemed to be conscience.

A spark from some undefined sphere within her soul had delivered the unsuspecting message that life is temporary even for the Lord’s most beautiful creations, such as she was. Though she would tease herself, touch and feel good about what she was seeing and feeling, she was tortured by the fear that even she, more beautiful than anything else currently on this earth, was nothing more than temporary. Everything is temporary, and temporary is a tiny slice of time which is eternal, she thought.

Alone, she cried perfectly clear globules of uncontrollable tears to no effect.

Everything was temporary. Between the beginning and the end, everything was full of madness; thank God all things are temporary. Even marriage, contrary to the impossible commitment, till death do us part, was too silly not to be temporary. They had ninety-three wonderful years together, before she passed away, Sharon coldly summed to herself, thinking of the billions of ghosts now floating alone in the vastness of time immemorial. Everything, regardless of the duration, was temporary. Damn unrelenting time! It respects nothing. Why did God have to make time? What a horrible reminder and cruel tormentor of all living things, but especially of youth and beauty, is time.

She looked in the expensive Florentine mirror and sashayed across her bedroom in full naked length noting her lilywhite buttocks, so familiar to her.

Above all, she thought, time is the enemy of all things beautiful, like her alabaster buttocks. Ugly, hateful, pent up time, unmercifully released by the gatekeeper sun to insult youth, her face flushed in anger at the damn light.

Anyway, there was tremendous comfort in the thought that there is no time in Heaven; no clocks, no time; that’s what makes Heaven so beautiful. It couldn’t be otherwise: for Heaven is eternal, and it makes no sense to keep track of eternity.

She put on a yellow Polo knit, soft perfect over her firm outstanding breasts. She would never wear a bourgeois Polo in public but it felt pleasingly soft in her bedroom and she indulged in its comfort, in her bedroom. A little polo pony above the tip of her tit.

“I love you, I love you, and I’m slowly melting away, and I don’t know what to do,” she said to her body. “I love you and I just want to die as I am this moment.”

Her preoccupation with time was somewhat new to her. Not completely new because everybody keeps track of time, and all her life she had a watch, and she was aware of the cliché to be on time. But her recent out of nowhere anxieties about time were strangely curious and not like other times. They surfaced during the weirdest moments, intense and atonal in their determination to disturb at times when her mind was already uneasy. She had no idea wherefrom the timely thoughts invaded her mind, but she didn’t mind, and initially she found strange excitement in her obsession with time. At first she was a bit reluctant to acknowledge the truth, that the reality of her married life came shrouded in time, as did all other weird thoughts that out of nowhere rode on time to irritate her mind, but she eventually accepted the repetitive beat of time as unavoidable. In the beginning, time had been a neutral subject before it slowly became the dominant challenge in her life.

But then, it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.

The problem was that in time, reality and time began to clash. It had become a mystery to Sharon how something innocuous like time could occupy so much of her time. Finally, she concluded that the meaning of time was an explanation of life, an important revelation transmitted into her brain for a reason, by higher sources than she, and were meant to be uttered as a prophet might reveal and preach his holy visions. She began to like the forcefulness of these bewildering apocalypses, because they gave urgency to her life, a sense of participation that was lacking before their visits. At the very least, they made her feel smarter, charged with inspirational mysteries impassioned with poetic promises of wonderful future events, undoubtedly more interesting than those of the unhappy past or the regretful now.

She looked at her digital clock, set it to digital noon, and unplugged it. It would always be noon in her life, she mused. Noon time would never invade with dark shadows to disturb her looks and mind. Not wanting to, she couldn’t help but think that there wasn’t much after beauty, a creation of time, but maybe madness.

Time and its associates, light and madness, gravely waiting on the side line to gouge my heart out, she would think. I hate the hipster sunlight that floods my days with jealousy and envy. Daily it swiftly comes and goes and robs me of my lovely allotted time, she would sob her way to another drink.

“Light is time and time is light, and light is the beginning and end of all. This I know; time is green jealousy, full of envy, for why else would it destroy all things beautiful?”

Alone in the house of Hank, cluttered thoughts streamed across her consciousness sending her mentally back to find comfort in the loving days, when she was with her mother, and light and time did not exist. There she found pleasant thoughts. Immense happiness reappeared the deeper she ventured into her childhood with her mother, and strangely, time disappeared out of her present. Even though she thought she hated her mother, the enjoyment she found in the more and more frequent emotional visits with her had a soothing, stabilizing effect, allowing her to function in her minimum daily chores and affairs without displaying any crazy manners or changes to her personality, so that no one could have perceived any odd behavior. Nothing that she did or said could have been misconstrued as being abnormal because that’s the way Sharon had always been: simply beautiful in all her flaws.

It would be something to live in some Scandinavian country where it’s dark nine months out of the year. Surely the darkness there slows down time, she often thought. And sometimes Myrna would come to mind, and Sharon understood that probably Myrna was of Viking descent because she didn’t seem to be affected by the passing of time. And then quite often, from sunny Sicily, Claudio would pay a quick mental visit, but she didn’t know why, didn’t care, and she wasn’t going to waste her time on Claudio.

It was the Lord that made light and time, including Claudio who was a much better lover than Hank, she immediately cursed the offending thought, darker than the darkest sea. But it was all true, He had made all things, including Claudio.

What strange sensations were these thoughts? Her eyes would sparkle huge more than ever, as each profound mental revelation emerged evermore on a daily basis. She could be doing anything, anywhere, and joyously they’d pop into her brain.

She became convinced that there definitely was a purpose to these vividly illuminating visitations, whose meaning had yet to be made known to her, but it was coming. Surely there was profound intelligence behind the graceful stream of extraordinary beautiful words entering her mind and energising her.

“Without a doubt, the sun is the fast processor of this hurtful life,” she took another hit, obviously derived from ancient lineage.

She waited for the next burst.

“Death starts out yellow,” she heard herself say.

It was a marvellously succinct thought. She liked it very much.

The successive, pedigreed-inspired revelations, and they must’ve been, because they weren’t cogitated by her highly not so bright mind, must have originated from a Higher Source, which made Sharon feel special, that she was who she was, but, at the same time, somewhat confused about becoming what she was becoming. Cheerfully, that Higher Source was now always in Sharon’s mind. A few yesterdays before, she had been less confused, but felt worse at what she was, because being young and even younger, she still had no sense of what she might be becoming.

Being chosen, like others before her, was very satisfying to her soul. She could not deny that perfection lay before her mortal life, which was full of sin, and could only be cleansed with saintly devotion, as apparently demanded by the Lord. Subliminal thoughts focused her eyes on Heavenly realms where the ultimate reality transcended the base existence she was leading. Salvation lay in the Holy Spirit of the Bible. Some use incense to lull the spirit home; some use wine; and some use both incense and wine, for the shades of grey that grace the mind are very dull without the unlimited variety of saintly spirits.

When she was younger she subscribed to the importance of the body’s external looks, as youth is naturally inclined to do. But as she matured and time kicked in without respect, she wanted to believe that she was more spiritual, more intellectual. Certainly more cerebral than her husband’s laughable IQ. She wanted the world to see that she was more than just a fabulous piece of ass. If only she could match her physical beauty with the erudition that was there, inside her, to shock the world and her friends with witty comments, that showed the brilliance of her brains.

And as is the case with too much thinking, every rambling thought was chocked with the malevolent curse of time, which was making her brain smooth and her skin wrinkly. Gratefully, Sharon thanked the Lord for the expensive skin care products and multi-vitamin regimes that pitched in to help deny and keep at bay the not so subtle deathly reminders, like stupid crow’s feet.

Ah, that youth be twice, no three or four times, she thought, and old age never, and she gingerly took another sip from her bloody red savage cabernet full of the Holy Spirit. She had read that cabernet sauvignon increased longevity and it made sense to drink it.

Though her breasts and buttocks were still as firm as ever, there was no denying the evils of light; but the evils of time were even worse. Decaying time was warping all her dreams, and she spent a fortune trying to check it, day in and night out, with creams, serums, and moisturizers. But nothing could blunt the chronic emotional agony of Satan inserted light. Light was evil, and there was evil everywhere in her world. She hated light, especially the morning’s light, because it woke up time. It made her do things when she didn’t want to do anything, like get out of bed just because it was light. Without light the new day would never start and her cheeks would remain forever young. Even the small amounts of yellow light shafting through her windows were enough to whither her blind. Like twin grim reapers time and light had always been there, every day, and although it was too soon, much too soon, to acknowledge the odors as anything more than pre-pre-menopausal angst, there was no escaping the persistence of the cursed sun and its light in this evanescent life.

“There’s no denying that it’s the damn sun and its daughters, time and light, that make the skin wrinkle and remind us of our mortality,” another delightful gem hung bloat-fully in the twilight of her untiring mind. If no sun, then no light, and no time.

She loved the beautiful way she had discovered to pass her time away, pretty much every day, since she had nothing else to do and her husband was simply too dumb to keep up with her way of thinking.

Was it the passing of time that brought to light the rising sun, or was it the light of the sun that measured the passing pulse of time? Light had a pulse as it daily arched across the heavens, and time had a measured beat to Sharon’s heart and both were heartless half-breeds, she was pissed. And the villain of the lot was the seething bastard sun. Sharon had begun to dislike the sun with its life sucking light as the harbinger of the inevitable death climax. The sun and its light were not the source of life, as the silly scientists would have us believe, she cleverly denied its importance.

In the beginning there was the Word … no!

In the beginning there was light …

The silliness of the claim astounded her as she lay in her bed. She had put on her silk kimono and she tucked it between her legs to feel sexy. In a fetal position, she was also sucking her thumb. Light definitely had to come after the beginning, she thought, because if there had been no beginning, then, there could not have been light. Light, then, must have been preceded by time. Time, a beginning, then, light! So, time was first and light was second. Unless, of course, light is the beginning in the sense that it comes before all other things, which essentially means there was nothing but a void, which means there’s no beginning, or anything else in a void but an endless nothing. All this, naturally, revolved, like the sun itself, around the existence of life since without life there is neither time nor light. Unless, of course, light and time were the same, which Sharon was now inclined to believe that they were.

You could go crazy with such thoughts, she thought. Sometimes things that don’t make sense seem very clear to an unassuming mind. Speaking of unassuming, she thought of Claudio, but the stupid ass quickly disappeared

The beginning is much more inconceivable than the ending, she continued. As if the melding of time and light was the answer to anything. Everybody knows the ending.

She switched to a more intoxicating vodka martini from her beloved red and tipped another double in search for more dramatic revelations, alone, in the emptiness of the daylight darkness of her expensively decorated bedroom. There was a praying mantis barely hanging from her ceiling. It wasn’t unusual these days for many coloured animals, large and small, to blur the shadows of her ceiling. She could make out lots of nice animals in the play of the light. Familiar visitors, they were her friends.

It was definitely that damn light.

“Without the sun there is no life, frightened and tired prophets of science repeat with fuzzy vision, as they lean on their staffs, and watch the sun set,” stormed ahead Sharon. “Stupid old men waiting for their time to pass. Without the sun, without light, there is no time, but assuredly there is life. It is without life that there is no light. For Heaven and Hell don’t care one wit about light or time. Proof that light is not essential to life is that old people continue to exist in eternal darkness.”

She smiled because she didn’t like old men.

Forever and ever, amen!

Damn light makes people go mad.

How strange that people are born with wrinkles and they die with wrinkles, she thought. It’s only between the wrinkles of birth and the wrinkles of death, that there’s a little stretch. All life is nothing more than a little stretch, she felt proud.

To her praise, many times Sharon thought she was going mad.

When thoughts of mental illness crept into her delicate mind she sometimes gave way to her evolving madness and clearly saw her thoughts as unfolding of past repressed regrets. Too many thoughts, too many regrets, to put in the right order of things.

“I don’t care; I have no regrets; there are farts and then there’s thunder,” she tittered.

She breathed easier believing that there was nothing bizarre about her peculiar thoughts, other than that she had been perhaps notably blessed with the rare gift of prophetic visitations. Without regret her thoughts were full of curious insights of an unknown but friendly source, which stirred her lonesome soul. And who wouldn’t have likewise thought these feelings of sadness as a blessing, these intriguing outbursts of profound insight? For there you are, one minute admiring a most gorgeous still exquisitely firm titillating body, and the next minute your neurons jump to synoptic probing of strange thoughts that seemed to have no obvious purpose, quirky, yet most coherent, peculiarly there to inconspicuously drive you mad with happiness. Could it have been that the inquisitive mind was searching for some sort of explanation to the ages old question of “is that all there is?” And not until these curious thoughts escaped her unconscious, and intellectually became part of her soul, would Sharon begin to fully understand them, and free her body of sin, and find peace of mind.

Humbly, that insight and the desire to find peace arrived almost imperceptibly but most naturally. It was kind of strange, simple, and yet, to her, it had been there all the time, ever present. It was as if in some mysterious way the secret code had always been there, linked to the question, and that every time her mind now asked the question, “is that all there is?” the all-encompassing response would pop up, in triptych.

For the Lord is truly Holy, and Strong, and Immortal.

“How beautiful these words are, how full of truth,” she smiled, still on her soft bed, eyes half shut in disdain of the Satanic world she now lived in.

She saw a shaft of morning sunlight swaying with the movement of her silk window curtains, and she buried her head into her silk pillow. She could no longer enjoy herself while that triptych was erratically trembling through her still half-naked mind.

For the Lord is truly Holy, and Strong, and Immortal.

That ever, damned, morning sun splashing through her bedroom’s wind-blown curtains startled her sapphire eyes, shimmering to them the cruel perception of those ever-present yellow lumps of death splattered across her ceiling. Streams and streams of light splashed through her windows, invading her privacy, and bringing gloom and shame to what used to be an undisturbed life. It seemed silly, and at times she would wonder about her state of mind, but Sharon had come to dislike, sometimes even hate, the intensity of the morning glow, through her pink curtains, of the tiresome sun. She had come to think that there was nothing worse than starting out a day with bright bursts of morning sharp sunlight intruding into her soul. It was as if her mind were being X-rayed to relentlessly remind her of all her fractured and forgotten thoughts. She hated the blinding light and wished for dark grey days in tune to her cloudy mind, and heart, and soul. She was certain that the exasperating morning brightness would one day unfold the end of her imagined existence. Full of remorse, she wanted only the quiet darkness that must have been before there was the damn light. She remembered the darkness of her yesteryears as the soothing flat line of undisturbed childhood and she ached to relive it again. It was the infantile years of easy tranquillity that she sought while the pulse of light now emanating from her brain was the terrible biological forerunner of inevitable death, a tediously recalled monotony of a deadly past.

“Blessed are the creatures in the bottom of the deep oceans for they see no light and know no time to disrupt the spiritual rhythms of their tranquillity,” another eye opener burst through Sharon’s brain looking for an exit. Surely the depths of the oceans are the beginning of the all.

That’s a ridiculous thought, she thought, and moved on

“Draw the damn blinds, leave me alone,” she shouted to no one in particular, for, again, she was all by herself inside her luxurious bedroom, a loving presentation from her dumb-witted husband.

“Keep that damn light out,” she cried in a half-hearted voice full of sorrow.

She looked up and across her ceiling and as in a psychedelic state she saw a rainbow of colors dancing in slow motion. All the colors of the hateful light were flooding through the prism of her senses diffusing in all directions in the room. All the colors of the universe were streaming through her windows, bouncing off the walls of her bedroom, reflecting up from the mahogany floor, even rising from underneath her bed. She could see every shaft of blended and unblended green, and red, and blue, but mostly jarring yellow dancing across her ceiling. Everywhere within the firmament of her bedroom’s empty space she saw pastel photons dancing on top of air-born dust molecules and though the music was inviting, it frightened her.

“The sparkle of sunlight against the swaying green leaves of trees in the spring coolness of dawn,” she sighed in a tiny moment of upper clarity. “It’s a bedazzling display but totally depressing, because like all fireworks, leaves dazzling in the whispering sun are simple acts of transpiration lacking any mystery and are thus common and devoid of any significance.”

And then her loneliness distracted her back into her very own neurotic reality.

Lovely, she sighed and smiled, but damn it, all was happening too damn fast and there had to be more.

“Jesus,” she cried out loud again to no one in particular, “how can anyone have a private thought with all that fucking light streaming across one’s eyes”?

That boy, that boy, that boy, such rosy cheeks, such hot red lips, she repeated the magic mantra of her memory over and over, again and again, and tried to overlap the boy’s face over Jesus’ but it was no use there was too much light.

“Have you ever been kissed on the lips by a boy on a moment’s lark and liked it,” she asked herself?

She got out of bed, dropped her kimono, and before she put on any clothes she fumbled for a pair of sunglasses to dark out the light and tone down the glare that was bouncing off of everything in the wild bedroom of her mind. Groping for something, anything, to calm her strange anxiety, she thought she saw a stretched spot of skin on the back of her otherwise smooth hand and she violently sobbed at the unfolding wrinkle. No more glowing bedrooms to shock the shit out of your senses and rip your nerves to the frenzied edges of insanity. Thank God for the ever-increasing grey pollution with its dark smog and clouds enveloping this sickly world. That global gook ought to burn some retinas and cut out the blasted morning sun.

“Amen” she said out loud.

“And in your soul let there be Peace,” she heard her mind respond.

She had come to the conclusion that

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

The scattered insights, flashing lightning-like periodically through her mind, were surely of mysterious ways and had to be of portentous things to come, for the Lord surely was their source. She could not predict the sudden outbursts of their appearance but welcomed them and prayed to encourage their visitations to make her day.

Like all the saints, she prayed. Praying reminded her of home, and she found comfort in her prayer, which she understood as true connections to the Holy Spirit; they were not some false neurotic manifestations of brain cell receptors and neurons firing and misfiring at each other at chaotic sequences determined by hormonal adjustments which themselves were predetermined by pre-dispositions as governed by one’s DNA helix.

She interrupted herself to look in her mirror.

I love you with all my heart

Only you do I adore

And to know that you love me

Only makes me love you more

“I am so beautiful,” she wanted to cry. “I could fall in love with me.”

And to know that you love me

Only makes me love you more

Weird thoughts jostling for attention against tiresome everyday boredom came and went, unabated, and Sharon walked her lonely kitchen, more and more unable to grasp the logic of their force. Ambiguity reverberated in her mind, but as she tried to reconcile her thoughts to more natural explanations, the whole perplexing lot took flight towards Heaven, and never looked back. High it flew into the sky, and it became much easier to simply curl up on her silk sheets bed and suck her thumb, like other people do when in bewilderment. So, in cadence with other thoughts and pleasures, which were perhaps common to all human beings, to all human behavior, might not these private thoughts be also natural adjustments to the various realities that were possible, thanks to modern day wonder pills and other pharmaceuticals? The free will choices available to human beings surely would not exclude the blessings to select from the Lord’s inventories of gentle comforts. In the Lord’s infinite varieties, that could have meant recalling the wonderful teachings of the New Testament, or munching salsa and corn chips with a variety of partners, mates, husbands, or wives, while fondling one’s self. For sure there were all those and other choices all of which were simply God’s gifts to man and woman, meant to bring happiness to one’s brief and, God willing, perhaps blessed life. No one ever needs to suffer the loneliness of the heart knowing the presence of the Lord Jesus.

Oh how she hated Hank!

Pray and you shall find salvation within your heart.

Please be kind and understanding

Love me more day by day

The joy of prayer is so rewarding because it’s so frightfully easy.

I direct my prayer toward my salvation, oh Lord, my Destiny,

Three times the prayer touched on Sharon’s lips as she tried to reconcile her thoughts to her morning hot shower.

I direct my prayer toward my salvation, oh Lord, my Destiny,

‘Lord, my Destiny’!

What did that mean, really?

You are my destiny…

She recalled the song and began singing as loudly as she could, the perfumed water trickling down her lovely breasts and all around to her coccyx bone.

She repeated it again with a cha-cha-cha finish, as in … you are my destiny, cha-cha-cha!

She sang to the pulsating hot shower, in pleasing pain screaming, “You are my destiny.”

It was no use, for there was no consolation in the stupid concoction meant only for the adolescent heart. It was depressing to realize that the adolescent silly songs totally lacked the Lord’s eternal destiny. Such a stupid pop song fraudulently directing generations towards ungodly love! You, boyfriend, girlfriend, are my destiny? It had no saintly salvation. No human being is another human being’s destiny. Human beings are simply too minute to secure each other’s destinies. Only the Lord Jesus can be another human being’s destiny. Every man and every woman’s life can have meaning only in their heart-felt love for Jesus. He and only He can be our destiny. For destiny, as well as all things, comes from the Lord, and the Lord alone is one’s destiny, for He is the All. Only through the Lord Jesus is life eternal, as the Lord has meant life to be. Destiny manifests itself only through the will of Jesus. Without Jesus there is no destiny; with Jesus only there’s the All. It is in the All that destiny resides, in the union with the Lord Jesus, and not in pop.

She hesitated; hot water was distending her arteries and increasing the blood flow to her brain making for clearer thinking. She wasn’t sure what ‘destiny’ actually meant, or was. Damn Horace Mann American high school shit that passes for education.

Reluctantly, she got out of the very hot, hot shower that always made her whole body glow with the odors of the wild ‘fleur de printemps’ body gel she loved to use to make her lovely body tingle. She always felt rejuvenated after a hot shower, pumped up like a virgin looking forward to the first time.

Get a hold of yourself, Sharon, she laughed. She dried herself very quickly and dropped her towel. Walking through the house butt naked and half wet, she wished she could drop her strange thoughts as cleanly and casually as she had peeled and dropped her white bath towel cooling off her spotless pink ass. As she walked through her house, she fantasized a handsome blond, blue eyed Viking from the dark North entering her from behind, somewhat like Claudio had done. She felt his rough hands fondling her all over her hot naked body.

“It’s all wrong,” she said. “It’s all so wrong.”

It took Sharon less than twenty minutes to drive to Magnolia High School, just as the students were being let out. All excited, Justine ran to Sharon’s car, like a child running to her daddy after a long absence. Her face sparkled the cool freshness of a beautiful teenager. In one hurried act she opened the car door and jumped into the seat next to Sharon. She turned toward Sharon, and her eyes were two breathless pools of blue, her cheeks blushing rosy pink, and her smiling lips wore fragrant baby’s breath, all framed in the teenager’s tossed carelessness of her blond hair. She leaned and gave Sharon a long tongue kiss, and out of sight, gently squeezed Sharon’s perked up breasts. In a response that had become a habit, Sharon moved her hand up Justine’s cool, perspiring thigh, all the way up to her panties. The girl was wet with anticipation.

“Let’s get out of here before someone sees us,” said Sharon.

“I don’t care,” said Justine.

In Sharon’s silk covered bed, long legs intertwined with long legs, and roaming hands found the pleasures of the female front and back. Tongues stretched deeper in each other’s mouths and lustfully slurped each other’s juices. Like no man could, they sucked each other’s sweet tasty nipples and gladly arched their backs for easy access. Oh what a beauteous thing it was, their frequent lovemaking. They were two immortal, wedded women together bound with all the passion and desire for hot sex. Sharon and Justine were of true legendary beauties, and not to have been loved, in all ways, would have been a sin that nature, and perhaps the good Lord, would have never forgiven. No one was going to deny them their lovemaking that day, so they fucked their brains out, as they had on the many previous occasions. With all their senses, they felt the insatiable lust for each other’s bodies because they were so beautiful.

“We should go,” said Justine, after several winning climaxes.

“Don’t worry, my love, my lovely love,” said Sharon. “I told Myrna I’d pick you up after school and bring you home a little late. She won’t be concerned knowing you’re with me.”

“She’s fucking out of it,” said Justine of her mother.

“Don’t say that, Justine. Your mother is a good woman.”

“That’s right; she’s an old woman.”

“What do you mean? Your mother and I are the same age.”

“Yes, but you’re a little nymphet running through the woods in search for the wild anemones,” said Justine. “My mother likes only young boys.”

“Are you saying she fucks a lot of boys?”

“No, no, no; she’s very discreet and particular with whom she keeps company,” said Justine, very adult like. “I’m sure at times she’s listening in on Doug and me when we’re alone in my bedroom.”

“Justine, you don’t fuck boys, do you?”

“No, they fuck me.”

“You should wait until you’re older before you get into boys, Justine.”

“I’m not into them, Sharon. They’re into me,” she laughed rudely for a young girl.

It was late and this long day’s affair had gotten a little tiresome.