THEY WERE SCENES OF RAPE AND TORTURE AND BUTCHERING, and of things far more horrid, things on which I will not dwell lest they become further embedded in my mind. I walked down the street, and with the merest of glances at them, set people afire, caused them to clutch their hearts and drop dead with a scream, made little schoolgirls to tear away their skirts and blouses and masturbate in a frenzy, shattered windows here, brought about terrible crashes there. It was all so horrifyingly delicious, especially those visions of which I cannot tell. And I was immune to all consequence. It was my own world, the world of these visions, a world of crime without punishment.

At times I yearned for it to be real. At times I wished to banish it all from my mind. At times I merely wondered at the darkness of an imagination given more to seeking beauty in the sky.

I brewed some coffee, stuck another pin in the voodoo doll, and reflected that this day belonged to me, and that it would bring whatever I willed it to bring, if only within myself.

From the window I saw, like cockroaches down in the street, hurrying little figures of hurrying little people, flinching and cowering in the cold and the wind. This made the hot coffee taste and feel even better. I looked at my thick leather and shearling coat draped over the chair.

At the bar I sat with another coffee, in a paper cup, from the corner store across the street. Candlemas was only a few weeks off. On the television set above the bar, I noticed a commercial for what seemed to be a Christian dating service called Christian Mingle. The ichthus, the Jesus fish, was part of its logo. I thought of Lorna on her cross, scaring away whatever kind of suitors she might find through Christian Mingle. I wondered if anybody ever got raped and strangled through Christian Mingle. I thought of the origin of the Jesus fish thing. It was a stupid fucking acrostic in which the five letters of the ancient Greek word for “fish,” pronounced ichthus, were taken in order to stand for the first letters of the five words in the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” A stupid fucking acrostic. The goddamn Church made the Word Jumble look high-class, if not downright divinely inspired, by comparison. Fucking mah-jongg mackerel.

No, it would probably be impossible to get away with it, raping and strangling one of these Christian Mingle cunts. Ah, but what a sweet thought.