Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology by ed. Pela Via Read Free Book Online

opening chords of the next nine minutes of her November Rain. 
    And how he doesn’t have to sing because by the time he reaches the second verse there are people at the doors singing for him, nurses and patients and a janitor tilting his life on a broom, knowing it’s his wedding and funeral wrapped into one. He shakes more sound out of the piano than the chapel can hold, his color coming back, his arms tightening up, pounding away at the silence with his own little hammers to show her what beauty might mean and how to get there.
    And then we’re at the 7-Eleven, and the cops are at the door, pushing the rest of us aside, working their way into the pews and up the aisle. It’s too late. He’s started his crescendo. And we all begin to sing. You’re not the only one, you’re not the only one. And he raises his hands like Christ on the cross, sprints up the aisle and into the hall with the .45 in hand, tossing the unsuspecting deputy through the gift shop’s still glass door.
    And I know my part because no one ever notices. I reach into the toppled gift shop rack and grab the magazines, rolling them under my shirt, already outside before someone doesn’t see he never stole the bullets.
    I take the crucible and begin to run, leaving our kingdom behind, take it the rest of the way to the tunnel beneath the road, the one that digs down deep where God can never find us. I hurry inside, descending, descending, and knowing right or wrong this is the only way I can hear it if I ever tell it all myself.
     
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Crazy Love
    by Cameron Pierce

    So you meet a stranger on the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about diminishing salmon populations, and that settles it. You will have a casual fuck. Two hours later, you float on the pillows that appear when the storms of good sex have ceased thundering. You’re both vigorous cuddlers, so it’s hard to tell in the half-light where your flesh ends and the stranger’s flesh begins. You fall asleep, very much in love.
    The stranger shakes you into wakefulness around seven in the morning and says, “You knocked me up.” You insist upon the eternal virtues of prophylactics and tell the stranger to go back to sleep. The stranger gets out of bed and paces from one end of your room to the other. This irritates you. You have always hated pacers and morning people. It seems you have fucked the wrong kind of stranger again.
    Five minutes later, the stranger yelps and gives birth to a child. Faithful to its strange origins, the child is a weird-looking thing. It could pass for one of those plush, cutesy-eyed hearts that pop up in grocery stores and boutique shops when February rolls around. You find it hard to imagine that your genes played any role in its creation. 
    “It sure is a weird-looking thing,” you say.
    “I think it is beautiful,” the stranger says, and that settles it. You make coffee and eggs and the three of you take the bus down to the courthouse. You get married. With a child thrown into the equation, you see no option but marriage. Still, you’re uncertain whether you really love this spouse-stranger. After all, the spouse-stranger is a pacer and a morning person. You return home from a honeymoon of takeout Chinese and an Italian horror film that the spouse-stranger claims to have seen precisely thirty-six times. “Once for every child born,” the spouse-stranger says.
    You think this is a lot of children for one person to have, but decide it is better to leave your separate pasts unspoken. You find yourself warming up to the fuzzy infant dozing between the two of you on the sofa. Family life might be okay after all.
    A month of swell fucking and many diaper changes goes by. Then one morning at the crack of dawn, the spouse-stranger asks for a divorce. You pull the covers to your chin and say, “I thought we were happy.”
    “I am happy,” the spouse-stranger says, “and I feel like I’m in Hell.”
    “How can