Warning: Mature themes, including but not limited to profanity, death, godlessness, sex, murderous inclinations, sweat-filled sleepless nights filled with an unnamable terror and an unacknowledged longing so deep that every desperate, gasping breath is a knife in the back, the conquering of the ego by the id, homosexuality on a flaming cross, and consumerism.

It begins, I remember, at sunset.

A wash of red and orange across rumpled silk sheets and sweat-choked air and moving limbs. A woman and someone blond and muscular. Her fingers, trembling on the bed frame; her legs, splayed sideways, a leg thrown above his shoulder; her face closed in apparent ecstasy, mouth open and noisy. The man above her riding his orgasm out like a wave, yanking her legs even farther apart as he did so. She is a doll in his hands, and I think it a wonder she hasn't ripped apart at the seams between her legs.

I turn. My shadow flits across her eyes and she blinks as if trying to believe I am merely a phantom, an object of her conscience, if she has one. She cries out my name, guilt spelled out across her face like those magnetic letters I had on my refrigerator when I was a kid, blatantly obvious and obviously fake. She was never a very good actress, even during her soap opera days. The man on the bed, motionless, leaning back on his arms, looking sated.

Grey eyes serene.

A hand grabs at my sleeve, the hand that had, seconds ago, grasped and clung to blond hair and tanned skin. I shake her off; she seizes the front of my Hugo Boss shirt and pops off three buttons. The shirt is expensive. Anger flares.

Then my hands are at her throat but I am the one who can't breath, it is my tongue that lays thick and heavy in my mouth, I am the one suffocating to death. And then the man tries to pry my hands off her neck, tries to save her--impossible, because I can't even save her and I am the one who is fucking killing her.

Then he falls backward and his head bounces like a meatball on the corner of the vanity and he collapses to the ground. In a few moments she stops struggling and her head slumps backward. I drop her weight. The fury leaves as quickly as it came, replaced with a curious sense of calm different from any I'd ever experienced before. I feel as though I had just emptied my filthy soul in a confessional and came out of the darkened room as pure and unspoiled as baby Jesus.

Thirty miles away in the dark of the night, an old abandoned cherry orchard watches as I shovel dirt onto the blond man's face. Here in the short ditch where some long-ago farmer had irrigated the land so the rain wouldn't drown his shallow-planted trees, a dead woman and a living man will be buried.

Will you love him, comfort and keep him, and forsaking all other remain true to him as long as you both shall live?

Her blue lips claimed, "I will."

She is draped over him in a grotesque parody of love, her cold and greying face inches away from his. A creamy white leg peeks out from under the dirt, a ghost of past perfect days. The man is terrified now, no more calm, cool, smooth amber body reclining on silken sheets. His arms and legs are bound with a silvery duct tape that complements his eyes better than the blue Ben Sherman shirt he had been busy not wearing. He is beautiful in his own right, sun-coloured skin slick with cold sweat, grey eyes bloodshot and panicked, plump lips gagged and marvellously silent. I can see the tears of pure terror in the corners of his eyes.

It makes me smile.

And because all good things end, eventually the two lovers are covered up and hidden from the coming dawn. I drop the shovel and step back from the mound. The next winter, after the heavy rainstorms and violent winds, after the mound erodes--

One day her beautiful, porcelain leg will be once more exposed, rotted and discoloured, maggots crawling in and out of flesh and sinew alike. I walk on top of the mound, staring down at it. There is no movement.

A breeze whistles through the skeletons of cherry trees and far away a murder of crows takes flight, the rustling of their wings like applause for my brilliant performance, my beautiful acting. You'd almost think I didn't care at all. You'd almost think I'd gotten some perverse pleasure out of it, from the expression on my face.

With this ring I thee wed, and all my worldly goods I thee endow. In sickness and in health, in poverty in wealth…

'Till death do us part.

TBC.