A Work Of Satyr.

"Thou festicating morbulent globule," she said to me. "Thou art pestulous and deseperate. Remove thy funguent corpudesence from my universe!"

I did as she so cruelly demanded. I loved, love, would love her, and could never deny her, so I gathered my possessions, cursed my indiscretions, and departed her apartment barely maintaining my comportment.

I moved next door. She was dissatisfied. I moved to the next floor. She was ungratified. Each time she spied me it enraged her all the more.

"Who will free me from this boobulent beast?" she cried. "Pray deliver me this night!"

I went out into it — the night; it was small and cold and autumnal. I walked under artificial light and felt old and bald.

Out on the pavement fish-faced men, bold talkers, dared winter to arrive. Cold-hearted, they yet had reason to be alive; they would thrive in any season. I hated their eyes — unclosing, accepting everything they saw. They would be perfectly happy in ice.

Synthetic music poured from the doors of clubs. Thin ascetics sat in the windows of restaurants, caressing their water glasses. Merchants wandered the streets, husbands and wives steered their cubs on the narrow path between neo-gothic churches on the left and besmirched stores of the erotic on the right, and I contemplated the aesthetics of sin.

(Oh, Meretricia! thought I: How could I have betrayed thee, one and only love! But how easily we fall.)

Eventually I decided — much history is here elided — that spiritual anesthesia was the answer. Therefore I departed the bizarre and entered the cathedral.

"What is your sin, my son?" said the priest of the sanctuary upon sensing my presence.

"I have lost my love," I said. "I am not sure yet how. We were unmarried, and I have known no other, yet I have made her cuckold."

"Perhaps," he said, "you should return when you are in a clearer mind."

"A clear mind, father?" I said. "I would sooner have anything else!"

He made as if to speak but I overrode him.

"I am told that religion is the opium of the masses, father," I said. "I am a mass, a cold lump; therefore I would become one with the poppies of the field, which spoil naught, as neither do they sin."

The priest was silent for many moments.

"We sometimes despise those we love best," he said eventually. "And we despise them most when we betray them and they love us yet. It may be that the fault is hers, not yours."

"What!"

"Ask not what, but rather who," said the priest. "And neither ask why, for reason is often absent in these times."

I ran from the church, mad to forgive her treason or any other crimes. I lurched frantically through the streets toward the apartment complex; at every opportunity, froward traffic lights flashed from green to red, balking my progress at every intersection with a prolificity of DONT WALK signs.

Even through the thickness of the door I could hear her cries for help. I charged the door, broke it aside, and halted only momentarily at the sickness of the boor I saw. She covered her eyes.

"Whelp!" I roared at he who shall be forever nameless. I confess I assaulted him merrily. "Meretricia!" I cried. "What is your will toward this man? Should he depart without memento?"

"Reprehensissimus!" she cried at him. "Villeous perjaculate — I abjure and foreswear thee!"

Thus she cast him out, and bade him never to return. To sever the past from the future, this she did.

Where doubt burns, faith quenches like a river.