Nocturnes by T. R. Stingley

not. Love will see us through this, I know it. Don’t isolate yourself from me now. Don’t beat yourself up with what-ifs and why-nots. I need you, Isaac.”
    He stared up hopelessly at the heavens. The clouds were swollen with rain, and his thoughts were like them. He wanted to tell her…he needed to say…“I’m so sorry…”
    Suddenly the wind shifted, bringing the darker clouds toward them and pushing the stifling heat aside as they came. Isaac could smell the approaching rain beyond the trees and he rose to collect their things. But Lessa reached up to take his hand and pull him back down onto the blanket.
    They looked into each other’s eyes, each with their own desperate need. The first raindrops kissed their faces like tears as Lessa drew his lips to hers.
    “Eden was never tame,” she whispered into his open mouth.
    Isaac pushed her back and grabbed two handfuls of her windblown hair as the storm unleashed itself. Her mouth tasted of wet urgency. And despite his melancholy he felt the familiar arousal for her sweeping over him like the warm wind. It was easier than anything deserved to be. The way she unzipped him and found him ready in her hands. It was easy the way he lifted her skirt above her waist…easy…exposing the very center of herself to his need. And the easiest part, merging with her and with the erotic rhythm of her hips, with the erotic rhythm of her sighs…filling her to the apex…So. Damned. Easy. Nothing had been that easy since.
    And he hoped, as the warm rain fell unnoticed upon his back, that the darkness before them would be as light-foot quick as this pleasure, as this brief and terrible joy.
    Lessa opened her mouth beneath him, tasting the rain, tasting the mercury-goodness of her life, tasting his very heart. With the rain washing over her upturned face, she allowed the tears to fall freely.
    “Oh, Isaac,” she prayed. “My sweet Isaac.”
    Isaac curled himself into a ball of prayerful agony. “Dear God! Release me from this Hell and forgive my failure. Please, lord. Return me to my Lessa.”
    He covered his head with pillows. Two hours later a certain sleep came, and a mercy from his memories.
    *
    The next morning found a woozy, weary Isaac at the New Orleans coroner’s office, a cup of chicory in hand and some sixty-two files in front of him. He was welcome to them but he would have to make the copies himself. “And would you like a cup of coffee while you’re working, darlin’?”
    After an hour of copying and reading files as he worked, he realized that it was missing. There was no similar pattern here in New Orleans. He would take everything back to his room for closer scrutiny but, aside from a very random and insignificant similarity or two, there was nothing in common with the other cities. Nothing close to what was happening just upriver in Baton Rouge.
    That was odd. Why was New Orleans different when it shared the proximity of the other affected cities? Isaac left the coroner’s office and returned to his room. A closer inspection revealed nothing new.
    “Well,” he thought aloud, “tomorrow I’ll be in Biloxi. We’ll see what’s happening there.”

Chapter Five
    F ather Evan Connor left his residence and walked four blocks to his church. He entered the sacristy and prepared himself to receive confession. As he pulled the chasuble over his head he focused his thoughts on the sacrament that he was about to administer.
    It had, of late, begun to mystify him…to stir his imagination at the power men had assumed. He was about to grant total absolution for a myriad of sins. And he would do it, as he had so many countless times in the past, in the name of God.
    There would be a line of devout Catholics waiting for his blessing. For most of them, it was a powerful new beginning, an opportunity to start afresh. But for him it was, increasingly, redundant and pedantic. The same penance for so many different sins. Ten “Our Fathers”…five “Hail Marys”…or