When she smiled, Sarah St. Claire, she became the gleaming milk white splint of the Cheshire Moon. Her eyes, a pair of heartaches throbbing desperation. From her throat: nightingales and baby’s breath flowers. An exhilaration worthy of deeming creation.

I could not live without her.

[[**]]

In my car, John Lennon through chinsy speakers, moaning about the man and the bullet and their vile confrontation at a stoplight.

This was my day in the life.

Two nuns in polytechnic garb crossed the walk, schoolgirls in tow, knee high socks, pleated skirts and rosaries. The Cathedral of some thick-tongued Saint lay in delicate ruins up the block.

These women knew not of divinity.

The tiny grey smudged pyramid of my ashes shifted in the wind and transformed a speck onto my thigh.

John Lennon rolled into Paul McCartney, the lite switched Green and behind me a car backfired like a bullet from a gun. I hit the gas, and accelerated past the post pubescent icons wrapped in holy glory and leering men’s dreams.

I wondered, finger on the trigger of a Zippo, "Had she ever been such a child? Had she ever dealt with a confusion of her own fate?"

The flame, orange crush and violent licked the end of my Lucky Strike and I saw the angel glow of her smile in it’s cherry tip, I saw the gleam of her eyes in it’s burn, her hair in its golden hind.

The Ugo shrieked and vomited a haze of black smoke into the windshield of a Volvo behind me. The ashes scattered in the series of hesitant lurches, and no evidence of the consumption of three packs that morning was known.

"Temmy," said her voice, soft and sucklovely in the slickest whorls of my mind. "Temmy, come home," licking from that razor pout.

I jammed my index finger against the volume, John Lennon Vox now in jive, lulling: "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire and though the holes were rather small they had to count them all."

Beside me on the seat lay an unlikely orgy of paperbacks. Of Mice and Men, The Glass Menagerie, Slaughterhouse Five, Dandelion Wine… Anything to swallow my memory, to pull me from her suction love and block the soft, incandescent sweep of her skin. Anything.

The song ended, clicked in the player and again the dull thrum of applause and fade in of guitar. One Hundred and Twenty minutes of the same song. Was it my fate?

She had created this tape, in the dark, waning cheeks and alabaster breasts and whispers across the opal expanse of bedroom: "So as not to forget me," she’d said.

And how I’d tried. It was easier to walk through 3 a.m. with her by my side. Watching her sleep, my private effigy. She was the slate of a being to scrawl my own definition of perfection upon. And how I loathed my adoration for her.

"Temmy," she was singing from the 13^th floor of the CrossCorner apartment building, minutes away.

I’d been driving for forty-five minutes now. Forty five minutes and I’d made it only blocks away, circling the same art deco, 1920’s circa coffee shoppe on the corner, with the swag couples in brown and leather. Bumbling past the same Minority market of finger dented fruits and sweltering fish bodies.

Forty-Five minutes and no matter how hard I tried, I could not block her out. I could not exit this infinite figure eight of traffic, I could not leave without another glimpse of the Catholic Schoolgirl congregation in the park, with their crucifix kites and giggles and pink ribbons in limp, shiny hair.

I could see the headlines now, "Man dies of Traffic exhaustion, 36 consecutive hours of driving." Would they exhume my body from the rambling green beast? Would they put that awful drivers license photo in the paper, under the obituaries for Tem McCracken? Would they catch me in women’s satin pink panties like James Dean? Would Sarah St. Claire attend the wake, and bend her swan body over the casket, and sob whitewash tears from those massive auburn eyes?

What glory those eyes beheld.

I question nothing when looking upon those eyes. Because, at that moment and time nothing exists, no divinity, no superior power, no doubt. Just faith.

Faith in purity.

Once again, John Lennon crackled and spat through the speakers, whined into a roll of discombobulated voices and the cassette clicked three times into a grinding halt.

Dead Silence, no outside noises, no car noise, nothing but the sharp inhale of my breath and slam then of my foot to the brake. This was my escape route.

The Ugo tossed itself into a horizontal slot and I cut the ignition.

Beyond the creaking, two toned door the scent of mangos doused in Chili Powder, Salmon sweating in the Miami heat, beautiful robust Cuban women speaking to me in thick tongues of twirling Latin origin.

"Pretty Flower for a Pretty Lady?" said a child in patchwork pants and a naked torso. His eyes as black and shiny as cold marbles, rung in yellow. Inside his baby pink palms, the soft green stem of a Lily, cocked sideways and staring at me.

Staring, with its needle, pistil, stamen and stem. Staring with nectarian eyes hell bent on optic penetration.

I paid triple its worth, without a word and wrapped the lily in the threadbare caress of a red flannel handkerchief.

[[**]]

In the elevator, down the hallway, and to the front door, the number 777 in black wrought iron letters. I bow my head and step inside.

"Temmy…."

"With our love we could save the world, if they only knew."

And the Lily writhes in its glass casing, nursing crystalline clean water and regenerates.

Bees only thrive when the honey is there.

And I could not live without her.