"Before the Fire" by Christopher Raley

That night lightning flickered over the foothills.Thunder clouds suggested rain and then denied it.

What terrain was laid down between us? And how? No two could ever maintain such a distance as in the rumple a sheet makes between naked bodies or the sound of promises rolled across the canyons or the flashes of erotic revealing only two people staring at opposite walls.

On the last clear day spirals of smoke stabbed the range and their plumes drifted south like signals of blindness.