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  Most days, she stayed at home, composing or recording in her studio. Unless she were touring, in which case she might be absent for weeks. In such situations, we would alternate stewardship of our love: sometimes, she would take it on tour with her; sometimes, I would keep it safe at home. It always made me nervous when she took it along; life on the road was chaotic – what if she were to lose or damage our love? On the other hand, it reassured me when our love was close to her and to her heart. Not that she had ever given me any reason to doubt her fidelity, but flesh will be flesh and our love shielded her from the attentions of other men.

  That day, the day she woke to find our love missing, she had no pressing deadlines. As I was getting ready to leave, she said: “I’ll look everywhere. I’ll comb this entire place thoroughly. Every nook and cranny. I’ll find it. Don’t worry. I’ll find our love. And tonight? Tonight we’ll celebrate the return of our love.”

  She tried to sound seductive, but without our love her words and body language were forced. The effect was grotesque, although her intentions touched me.

  She leaned in for a hug, and I obliged. Her body was limp against mine, a sack of anonymous organic matter.

  She repeated, “I’ll find it.” But I knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

  ~

  That week, we retraced our steps of the last few days, inquiring if anyone had seen our love. We asked our friends, our neighbours, our families. We placed an ad in the lost and found.

  Most weeks, we had a steady routine: dinner out every weeknight, then taking in some kind of show – Indian and an art gallery on Mondays, Italian and a film on Tuesdays, Thai and the symphony on Wednesdays, Ethiopian and a museum on Thursdays, a meal at the jazz bar on Fridays, then weekends would be ours and ours alone: we sequestered ourselves with our love, and the rest of the world might as well have not existed so consumed were we with each other and with our love. Despite her passionate and steadfast devotion, I had known from the start that it was inevitable she would one day leave me. Such were the rhythms of life and romance. It was imperative that I protect our love – the most profound love I had ever encountered – from her eventual departure.

  That week, the quest for our love overwhelmed our lives.

  By the end of that week, our love becoming an ever dimmer memory, she was no longer sharing our bed. When she was at home, she rarely stepped outside her studio, rarely acknowledged my presence.

  One late afternoon, I heard her sobbing, the door to her studio ajar. I was tempted then to falter, to succumb to her distress, to confess. To end this charade. But that would only imperil our love. I had to remain resolute, regardless of whatever pain or anguish she or I might experience.

  Only our love mattered.

  ~

  That year, I took a sabbatical. We travelled across the world. In search of our love. To cities we’d visited before – Paris, Barcelona, Casablanca, Rome, Venice, Trieste, Budapest, Vienna, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Copenhagen – and, when that proved fruitless, to countless cities in which we had never set foot. But our love was nowhere to be found.

  Most years, we travelled to one city and stayed there for several weeks, a temporary home away from home. We loved discovering new places but were not fond of the stress and irritations of travelling. This way, we minimized the discomfort and maximized the stimulating experience of being somewhere new.

  That year, if felt as if we spent more time waiting in airports and travelling in aeroplanes than we did in our intended destinations.

  In Paris, we booked a room together, but, without our love to unite us, such proximity proved unbearable. From then on, our accommodations grew farther apart: first, a two-bedroom suite in Barcelona and again in Casablanca; then, as of Rome, separate rooms. By the time we hit Asia, we rarely stayed in the same hotel.

  Neither did we explore together. I imagine that, as she told me, she spent her time in the cities of the world seeking our love. She was not the deceitful kind, and despite our changed circumstances I had no cause to mistrust her honesty.

  As far as she knew, I, too, was searching for our love. That was what I told her. But I knew it would be a futile exercise. Thus, I lied. I was not as good a person as she was. I had never been, might never be. Only our love made me seem better than I truly was. In time, perhaps our love would truly make me a better man. But for now I had to make do without our love, as much as I yearned for it. What if some overeager customs official searched my luggage and found our love? No – I did not want to risk discovery and put our love in jeopardy.

  While she quested, I, bereft of our love, diverted myself in the brothels of Barcelona, in the private apartments of Italian courtesans, in the erotic massage parlours of Budapest, in the FKK clubs of Frankfurt, in the sex hotels of Singapore, in the termas of Rio de Janeiro...

  Flesh will be flesh.

  ~

  That night, long after our return from that futile journey around the world, long after she had given up hope of ever locating our love, I was careless.

  Most nights, I would wait until I was certain she had left (she was away from home with increasing frequency) or had gone to sleep. I would take out our love from its hiding place and taste it, play with it, caress it, enjoy it, nurture it. Without fail, our love would bring me to orgasm, and there were no sweeter orgasms than those our love granted me. There were no sweeter moments than those precious minutes of serene bliss following those climaxes, when I surrendered myself to the warmth and closeness of our love with blind, unthinking, animalistic trust.

  That night, I was certain I had heard her leave. I built a fire. In the warm flickering glow of the fireplace, I lay naked on a blanket with our love. I was feverishly aroused – hard and wet, sweating and trembling with anticipation.

  “How long?”

  I heard her voice before fully registering her presence.

  “How long have you been keeping our love from me? Was it from the very start?”

  The answer must have been written on my face.

  “So – our love was never lost. You hid it. You hid it from me. Why?”

  There were tears on her cheeks and unforgiving fury in her gaze. It had been a long time since she had tasted our love.

  “Talk to me! Tell me!”

  But I had no words for her. I owed her no explanation. I no longer cared what she thought or felt. I had long ago accepted that our marriage could never be eternal. But our love ... Our love could be everlasting. Only our love mattered – not our marriage. And so I set out to protect our love from our marriage and its unavoidable disintegration.

  She advanced toward me; her body radiated violence. Naked, on the floor, I curled into a ball, shielding our love from her potential brutality.

  She growled at us. “You’re pathetic. I should take our lo— I should take that thing from you and destroy it.”

  Her fists were tightly coiled, ready to strike at us.

  “That thing was ever only a lie. I see that now. That thing disgusts me. I don’t ever want to touch it again.” The violence seeped out of her. She said, “I’ll go now. Just stay there – you stay here with that thing. That filthy thing. I’ll pack essentials for now, but I’ll move everything out tomorrow. Make sure you and that thing are out of the house for the whole day, and then I’ll be gone forever. But for tonight ... don’t budge until I leave. You’ll know when; I’ll slam the door on my way out.” She laughed, injecting palpable disdain into her mirth.

  Within a few minutes, I heard the outside door open and slam shut.

  Yet, I lay still for a long time. I kept drifting in and out of sleep. Eventually, our love sheltered within the palms of my hands, I sat up and shivered. The room was cold; the fire had mostly died out, with only a scattering of embers struggling to maintain a faint orange glow.

  The shivering intensified, fuelled not only by the cold but also by a maelstrom of unexpected, unwelcome emotions. My first impulse was to turn to our love; it would – as it had always done – restore
me, bring me to serenity. But I was afraid to pry open my clasped hands. The thought of looking directly at our love was, at that precise moment, odious, repellent.

  Driven by an urge I could not control, I hurled our love onto the dying embers. Immediately, the fireplace erupted into a conflagration the intensity of which I had never beheld. The wild flames burned with colours of subtle, complex, ever-changing shades, releasing a rich blend of intoxicating aromas, redolent of sex and brine and ripe fruit.

  Heedless of the passage of time, I sat contemplating the fire as it consumed our love. It burned long, bright, and deep.

  credits

  “Ted’s Collection” first appeared in The Seventh Black Book of Horror (Mortbury Press, 2010), edited by Charles Black

  “Secretly Wishing for Rain” previously appeared, in slightly different form, in Fishnet (July 2004); The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 5 (Robinson 2006), edited by Maxim Jakubowski; and The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica (Robinson 2012), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “She Watches Him Swim” first appeared in The Back Alley, vol. 2, no. 2 (December 2008)

  “Diptych” is original to this collection

  “Dead” first appeared in Chilling Tales: Evil I Did Dwell; Lewd Did I Live (Edge 2011), edited by Michael Kelly

  “The Beginning of Time” previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge #27 (August 2007) and, in slightly different form, in Lost Myths, 1 April 2010

  “What to Do with the Dead” previously appeared, in slightly different form, in Shimmer #10 (March 2009) and Lost Myths, April 2010

  “The Four Elements” previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge #16 (April 2006); The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 7 (Robinson 2008), edited by Maxim Jakubowski; and Lost Myths, February-May 2011

  “The Secret Seduction of the Subtle Serpent” first appeared in Fiction Inferno #2:006 (January 2003)

  “Someone to Watch” first appeared in Twilight Tales (June 2003)

  “The Triumph of the Autosomes” first appeared in Fiction Inferno #2:006 (January 2003)

  “Anew Day” first appeared, in different form, in Twilight Tales (June 2003) and, revised, in The Virtuous Medlar Circle (January 2006)

  “The Return of the Low Bunnies” previously appeared, in slightly different form, in Fiction Inferno #2:006 (January 2003) and Lost Myths, 25 August 2011

  “The Family Portrait” first appeared in Lost Myths, 14 July 2011

  “Manit and the Nightmares” first appeared, in slightly different form, in Lost Myths, 3 June 2010

  “Different Flesh” previously appeared in SciFiction (November 2005) and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 6 (Robinson 2007), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “The Flowers of Katrina” first appeared in Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I (Edge 2013), edited by Michael Kelly

  “Being Here” previously appeared in Tesseracts Nine (Edge 2005), edited by Geoff Ryman and Nalo Hopkinson, and Year’s Best Fantasy 6 (Tachyon 2006), edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

  “Scenes from the Skoobie Revolution” first appeared in Chiaroscuro #47 (April 2011)

  “Sexes in the City” previously appeared in Reflection’s Edge #34 (April 2008) and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 9 (Robinson 2010), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  “All You Can Eat, All the Time” first appeared in Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (Edge 2010), edited by Nancy Kilpatrick

  “Our Love” is original to this collection

  about the author

  Claude Lalumière (lostmyths.net/claude) is the author of two previous books: the collection Objects of Worship (2009) and the mosaic novella The Door to Lost Pages (2011). He has edited or co-edited twelve anthologies in various genres, including Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic (2003), Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love (with Elise Moser; 2006), Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction (2008), Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories (with Camille Alexa; 2013), and Super Stories of Heroes & Villains (2013). With Rupert Bottenberg, he’s the co-creator of the multimedia cryptomythology project Lost Myths (lostmyths.net).

  about the cover artist

  Marc Tessier (likeanacidtrip.blogspot.ca) is a Montreal author and art photographer. He has designed and written four photo-novels and various graphic novels, including Mac Tin Tac (Conundrum Press, 2004) and The Theatre of Cruelty (Fantagraphics, 1999).