Answer

I drew the pitch from the sky, sucked it out of the night sky, and I let the black pitch of the night run, thick and heavy, down the walls of my throat and I drained the black into deep blue. And from a great yawn I released, the sun spooled from my mouth, a flaming shriek that boiled into the heavens, blistering the blue of the sky, smoldering like diamonds, and dripping from the sky. Liquid white metal fell to the sun baked ground, and is it fell, it formed crystalline bones, bones that moved with an eerie harmony. The bones heard the voice from the sky. Each of them dreaming a dream inside of its marrow. And they fell, loathsome and cruel and base, a bloodied drift that became a riot of doom and red sky bleeding; the child of the sky burning aside, raging aside, the star drift of a million days that fell into the mourning chasm of the end of the universe. The eyes that spilled forth from it dried into a million bloodied flakes that rained through the heavens like crimson snow. Harmonics sound like the royal dream, the royal dream of black... black... black... what I long for is the profundity that is granted to the strangest amongst us, a sort of knowledge that I cannot begin to fathom in the current state of lucidity. In the twilight between dream and wakefulness I can sometimes feel it, sometimes it crosses over from the chasms I want to map and describe. There should be some museum to it, some museum in the corners of my brain, all the knowledge of the earth and the second earth is that there is SOME purpose to it. Some belief that transcends the cold logic of fact and breeds into a world of chocolate doves and rain that burns through the metals and woods and concrete and shale of a world ruled by numbers and cold physics. And deep in those secret moments, etched into the sidelines of the universe, the secret names of the black, the secret names of the void, I will find the scraps and clues that are stitched into something approaching genius, something approaching profundity. I CRAVE ANSWERS. Like a sickness or a hunger laced with the yellow jaundice of worry and anxiety, I let it crawl into me, a crawling thing, a crawling thing of yellow fingers and thick yellow nails. There is an answer. There is an answer. There is an answer. Amongst the differences and variations in things like tone and grass and lightning, I can see them, the stitchwork holding the various bits and scraps of the universe together; and the backwards eyes and ears of nothing scream those answers into my ears. I will find them. There is an answer. There is an answer. There is an answer.

Train Noise

Holding my head in the mists of twilight I feel the walls of masonry rise up around me, cold, gray and wet with the fog. And there are lights overhead, the fearsome lights of a million dead worlds all converging like ancient space faring vessels, all converging overhead and shining down beams of blue-white luminescence that run across my face like sun rays. I bleed from my ankles and wrists. There are words built into the blood, drunken words that spill out in drunken rambles, and I curse them, I curse the rambling, I curse the words tumbling from my wounds. There is the sound of freight trains in the back ground, a horrid whistle that signals the great motion of the bulky machine. It moves closer and the ground under me shakes. The walls rise up around me, sheltering me from the sound, from the movement of the train. The world gives way under me, and I drop, as if into a great shaft in the earth. And in that chasm all the faceless members of the human race stumble in the darkness, their chalk white skin crackling with blue lines, with throbbing blue lines of fear and worry, and I am afraid of them. High above, the spacecraft still hover and the train still runs, an infinite extension of rolling steel off into the abyss of an endless horizon. I can still feel its motion down in this pit, down in this pit of faceless men, and I hold my breath and I see them change in the pulsing lights coming down from above. They melt, their white skin sloughs off from their frames as the train whistle blows. And the melting, faceless men line up in front of me, orderly, in rows of fours, and they link their melting arms as the slowly boil into bleached skeletons with grinning death's head skulls. Beneath the faceless, taut white skin, is a face of cavities and teeth, a skull face unseen through the white flesh now melting from the men in the elevator shaft. In their ruled lines of fours, the men, now a chorus of skeletal wraiths, all solemnly dance in unison. Their is a xylophone quality to their steps, an echoing steel sound that mixes with the train noise so far above us and creates a symphony of the empty industries. The skeleton men dance so solemnly that it whispers away and sense of joy in the movement. In their teeth, tiny diamonds shine, and in their eyes, diamond pupils sit so deep that they are only visible in brief reflective moments as the lights from above shine down. And the rows of four surround me in my cavernous tomb, still in eerie time with the train noise above us. It seems endless. The lights are hypnotic. The walls begin to turn to dry plaster and the cracks echo the drunken sounds from my wrists and ankles. Further below, there is an old library, a library of dusty periodicals and sepia toned funny books. I will find those librarians and I will make them read every word they've curated. I will not stand for anything less.

Ashes

And in the morning I woke to mist, and from the center of it appeared a great face, a face of brilliant blue pouring from the steam and glowing like the center of the sun. And about it there was a halo of death, of dead children, a ring of mummified remains in orbit around the great face. And the great face opened its mouth, a giant mouth, and it summoned me inside. And in the mouth of the great face there stood the expanse of a forest, a forest of the tallest pines reaching up to a sky of molding yellow. In the spires of pine, at the tip of each colossal tree, a halo of fire burned, and the whole of them together formed a web of fire in the sky. And as I stared into the web of fire burning into the hazy yellow sky, filling the hazy yellow sky with the thick inky smoke of ink diffused in dirty water. And the web of fire burnt out, slowly and the ashes that rained down from the sky filled my lungs. And those ashes were alive with some otherworldly spirit, some animating spirit and from the inside of my lungs the ashes, full of diminutive mouths, devoured me from the inside out. And as those living ashes, the ashes rained down from the sky's web of fire, my flesh began to gray and shrivel on my bones, and I was filled with all the terror of dying. And in the dying, I saw a ring of flowered eyes lord over my spirit, and I was afraid, for each eye was transparent like glass and filled with blood like a crystal of wine. And I whispered my fears to each eye, my secret fears, and each eye was imbued with the word of one fear. And from that word, each eye grew tendrils like an octopus or squid and those tendrils from each fear-instilled eye wrapped the last moments of my beating heart.

The Black Sky

The Black Sky goes by a hundred names. To begin with, we list them, in order of their relevance, in order of their power; when the Black Sky can hide from us, during the morning of Oros we can call to it with its Great Names, the first ten names, the Great Names. During the great night, the night of Aura, we can call to it with the last ninety names, names that were written in the Dream of Mariacallow. The Great Names were the first on her tongue, the tongue that spoke in the Dream and informed the mind of Genevieve, the tongue that spoke out the Plans of Mariacallow to the mind and the hand of Genevieve. And before Genevieve had built the lights of Oros and Aura, before there was day and night, there was the Black Sky, the First Night, the Long Night of Beginnings, the Open Sky, the Primal Sky, the Genesis Sky, the Void, the Starless Night, the Night Before Nights, the Secret Night. And those were the Great Names for the Black Sky; firstly "Black Sky," but "Black Sky" is not the proper name, but it is the Common name, and the name that Mariacallow herself would name it. She would say it, over and over again, in the Dream and she would know it, if she would speak it, as The Black Sky. It is the tongue of Mariacallow that breathes out the first ten names, the Great Names: The Black Sky, The First Night, The Long Night Of Beginnings, The Open Sky, The Primal Sky, The Genesis Sky, The Void, The Starless Night, The Night Before Nights, The Secret Night. These are the names by which you can call the Black Sky during the daylight, during the morning of Oros. You will call it, try to call it, and you must say each of the Great Names, in order, to call down the spirit of it. The spirit of it, the blackness of it, is not that of a man or a woman, but of space. It is darkness and space and it breathes and it thinks like a man or a woman. In the night time, in the night of Aura, there is an ease in the Black Sky, but it does not respond to the Great Names; it will ignore them in the darkness of Aura's dim light. And so to call it, you must call it by the Lesser Names; the Ninety Names. They are, in order, 11. Ira, 12. Iras, 13. Ita, 14. Itas, 15. Irasita, 16. Irasitas, 17. The Bell, 18. Oroauranox, 19. Noroauranox, 20. Belistas, 21. The Silence, 22. The Silencis, 23. The Silent Bell, 24. Hora, 25. Horanox, 26. Belis, 27. Iranox, 28. Expis, 29. Maria's Worry, 30. Maria's Dread, 31. Maria's Canvas, 32. The Heavy, 33. The Silent Scream, 34. The Colorless, 35. The Expanse, 36. Isora, 37. Isoras, 38. Isorata, 39. Isoratas, 40. Goldenleaven, 41. The Ebon, 42. The Waste, 43. The Beginnings, 44. The Chapter, 45. Cora, 46. Coras, 47. Corali, 48. Coralis, 49. Sitro, 50. Sitros, 51. The X, 52. The Loop, 53. The Empty, 54. The Great Empty, 55. The First Empty, 56. Orosnox, 57. Auranox, 58. Orosnoxaura, 59. The Shrill, 60. The Dreamscape, 61. The Dreaming, 62. The Dreamt, 63. The Dreamer's Panel, 64. The Dreamer's Canvas, 65. Nothing, 66. Notori, 67. Nortis, 68. Nortoris, 69. The Dreamer's End, 70. The Dreamer's Begin, 71. The Grand Begin, 72. The Grand March Empty, 73. The Grand March Beyond, 74. The Beyond, 75. The Black Elsewhere, 76. The Black Elsewhen, 77. The Black, 78. The Great Elsewhere's Beginning, 79. The Great Elsewhere's End, 80. The Great Elsewhere's Closet, 81. The Great Elsewhere's Stop, 82. Irifis, 83. Irifist, 84. The Unspoke, 85. The Silent Carol, 86. The Elsedark, 87. The Elseblack, 88. The Drift, 89. All In All.

Stuck On You

It is Sunday night, two nights after Sean met Athena, and the encounter has stuck in his playing, playing over and over again like a skipping record. He has never experienced such a tangible memory. It's a drug. He is addicted to the memory of her. He is addicted to the vision of her in the smoke filled room, bathed in the effervescent green and red and purple light of the concert hall. Every detail is stitched into his brain. The way her shirt hung off of her porcelain shoulders and dipped, low-cut and perfect, in the front. He remembers the brown thread stitched delicately around the collar and the wide bell cuffs. He remembers the natural frowning shape of her mouth, the glossless pink of her lips, the smattering of light machine gun freckles near her nose, the gorgeous length and blackness of the lashes surrounding her shock green eyes. He remembers the complex highlights and shadows in her hair, the way it hung over her ears and parted over her forehead and how a rogue wisp of it fell across her eye. He remembers her shape, her almost criminally curvaceous figure, her lack of height, and the defensive stance she had when he introduced himself. He remembers the inadvertent flinch she gave, the surprise of being approached and the wariness that crept into her initial smile. He remembers her so vividly. He remembers the sharpness of her chin, the breadth of her face, the slight rose in her cheeks and the almost unearthliness paleness of her white skin. He remembers her voice, especially, how it was the perfect complement to her, how she was the form he'd envision if he'd only heard her speak on the phone or the radio. He remembers the slight crookedness of her teeth, the dissatisfied calmness of her demeanor, and the cool economy of her language. She wasn't wordy. She answered his small handful of questions in a way that was efficient without being terse.

Athena lived nearby and she was a year younger than Sean. She worked as a receptionist at a high school, which is she loathed, but she was putting herself back through college after having dropped out a semester prior to getting a degree in graphic design. She was single and hadn't had a boyfriend in a while. And, yes, she would be interested in having dinner with Sean some night.

She didn't have any paper with her because she never took her purse to concerts. Sean had accidentally left his phone at home. He did have a silver Sharpie, however, and Athena scrawled out her number on the palm of Sean's hand. The silver was barely legible on against his own white skin, so she wrote the number, again, on his forearm. Sean was embarrassed by the way the sensation of her hand on his arm shocked him, and how the force of it fanned out like downed wire electricity through every nerve in his body. It was at that moment he sadly took note of how long it had been since any girl had touched him.

She was very explicit in her instructions. He was to call her on Monday, because to do so earlier would make both of them feel very desperate. And then she left. She didn't stay at the concert. She didn't hang out with Sean after their brief, wonderful little meeting. She just disappeared. It was probably for the best, because it allowed time for Sean to reboot. The anxiety of the moment had pretty much caused every major system in his body to up and shut down. Sean didn't mind, though. The silver permanent ink on his hand and arm more than made up for the cardiac arrest.

And now it is Sunday and he is waiting. The ink is still clinging, stubbornly, to his skin, but he has transferred her number to multiple sources in a prudent act of safe keeping. He is laying on his bed, listening to songs shuffle on his laptop. Every song seems to be about love, and it is torturous. He has spent the last two days fabricating his first date with Athena, mapping out potential sites, creating mental flowcharts of potential disasters and missteps. He is excited to find out who she is. His gut is telling him that she is amazing, that she is brilliant and as dispassionately interested in everything as he is. His gut is telling him that she is cutely misanthropic and that she has great taste in music and movies and books. His gut is telling him that she hates all the same things he hates. His gut, he knows, could be dead wrong, but he can't wait to find out. He contemplates breaking her rule and calling tonight. He wonders if she would find that annoying or endearing.

Somehow he knows that she would find it annoying. And he loves that. He has been a model of self-control for years, now. He can wait another day, even if that waiting leaves him feeling twitchy and pathetic.

As song after song relays the horrors and divinities inherent in loving another person, Sean realizes how long it's been since he's looked forward to anything. Nearly every aspect of his life had been something to endure, something to slog through on the slow march to death. He didn't tell people that very often, as they tended to take a dim view of him and his dreary outlook, but it really was how he felt. Usually. But he was actually longing to call Athena. He wasn't looking past his dinner with her to the point when it was over and he could return to the solitary lair of his apartment. In fact, the time approaching his call was interminable. He felt as if it had been weeks since they'd met. He wanted so badly to be sitting across from her, talking to her, getting to know her. He forgot what anticipation was really like... before Athena, it had all but been replaced with dread.

He was worried, of course, about the impression he'd make on her... about the impression he'd already made, but it wasn't the crippling anxiety to which he was accustomed. Instead, it was the sort of thrilling worry that goes along with a roller coaster ride or a good scary movie. He was ready to be scared.

The vision of her was still there, and he tried to shake it. He didn't want to obsess or deify her. Although, with a name like Athena, it might be completely warranted.

Hey Pretty

It's loud, even away from the speakers, and there's a non-stop parade of sweat soaked drunks winding through the maze halls that flank the stage. There is revelry and joy and music and Sean is irritated by it all. He knows he is a curmudgeon, and he hates that about himself, but as another plastic cup of beer slops onto his sneakers, he realizes he is overly tired and just wants to leave. But he's stuck. His ride, Glen, is chatting with a girl, and so he has to listen to another song. He hovers at the periphery of the crowd, cringing at the feedback and the tin squeal of the guitar, but otherwise nearly enjoying the moment. A teenager careens into his back and Sean loses his footing and bounces into a leather-clad man mountain in front of him. He gets a glare and backs up. The teenager is laughing. The band, at least, is pretty good.

The whole of the room is slightly, but blandly, disorientating. The twisting colored lights blazing along rafters in the ceiling play out weird kaleidoscope effects on the dark walls, but the effect is more cheap than trippy. The noise is overwhelming, and each drum kick reverberates through the wood of the converted gymnasium floorboards and rattles through Sean's shins and all the way up to his chest. It's incredibly hot. Sean worries that he smells, but decides it wouldn't be detectable in this odious pit. There is cigarette and pot smoke everywhere, and he can feel it clinging to the fibers of his overpriced t-shirt and infusing into his jeans. He catches snippets of inane conversation, the pseudo-philosophical ramblings of the intoxicated fans, and he sneers. And this is the most fun he's had in weeks.

He sees people enjoying themselves, dancing, moshing, singing along with the slightly banal lyrics of a decent group well beyond its prime, and he wonders if he's even capable of joining along. He feels silly giving himself up to a moment of abandon, but he's not exactly sure why. A little ways away, a high school girl disperses the crowd with a seemingly ceaseless stream of foamy vomit. She falls on her ass and starts to sob. Nobody helps her up. She just sits there, dangerously close to the colossal milky puddle on the ground and cries her eyes out. And Sean wants to help her. She looks so sad and frail and stupid, and he feels bad for her. But he worries that he'll seem like some old pervert trying to take advantage of this poor, blitzed little girl. So he just watches to make sure nobody else messes with her. For now, at least, she seems ok. Sort of.

Glen is still chatting, saying God knows what, to the girl who goes to the nearby college. She seems kind of ditzy, but it's a snap judgment made from a few overheard sentences. Sean chastises himself for being overly critical, but then gives himself a pass since his criticisms are usually spot on. He knows, too, it doesn't matter to Glen if this girl is smart or interesting. All that matters is that she's willing to converse, and a lack of explicit rejection is all Glen really needs to strike up a short term relationship. Sean sometimes envies that ability, but, far more often, he finds it repulsive. And while he's had weak moments, Sean would say that he was not willing to trade loneliness for meaninglessness. If he's going to devote his time to someone, that someone better be worth the time devoted. A warm body and lowered expectations are not enough.

Glen tells Sean all the time that Sean is too picky, too rigid in his demands. But Sean is fine with that. He doesn't need anybody. He doesn't require a companion. He's had girlfriends in the past (four, to be exact) and he enjoyed being with them, but his lived fine without them, too. He's good at being alone. Glen is terrible at being alone. There's nothing wrong with that, Sean would say, condescendingly, but there's nothing wrong with solitude, either. Not that it doesn't sting, sometimes, to see loving couples holding hands or putting their arms around one another or making out. And not that it hasn't been rough to spend two and a half years alone in bed. But it's better than settling. It's better than passing time with anybody who's available. Glen and college girl don't have a commonality amongst them. There's nothing tying them together besides loneliness and desperation. Sean would rather be alone than tethered to some fellow desperate anchor.

The opening band leaves the stage and a smattering of applause goes up from the crowd. It is a weak thank you to a group that most of the kids in the audience have never heard before. There is a window of noise reduction, then, as the clamor of electric instruments dies and the muffled roar of a hundred conversations buzzes over the smoke haze like the thrum songs of locusts in the summer. It is a sort of relief, like when aspirin finally starts eating away at a headache. The lights come up for a bit, revealing the wilds and chaos of the room. There is trash everywhere. Fliers, cups, random bits of detritus from who-knows-where coat the floor in a layer of filth and sediment. It makes Sean sad, but he would not be able to accurately describe why. The puking high school girl is back on her feet, now, and she seems all right. She looks tired and embarrassed. She'll probably be sicker in the morning. She's with a large group of friends, but nobody bothered to help her when it was needed. Now that she's fine, she's been adopted back into the fold. That makes Sean angry and he wonders if it's just a byproduct of youth or if her friends will grow up and carry that indifference into adulthood. He wants to believe the former, but thinks the latter is probably true.

After a while, the lights go down again, and a roar goes up from the crowd. The stage is still dark when a crackle spits out of the amplifiers and something like music spills out of randomly strummed guitar strings. The audience intensifies their commotion and suddenly spotlights blaze from a balcony and illuminate the rock goddess on stage. And she begins to play a song called "Hey Pretty." It's one that everybody in the room knows. Shouts and whistles shriek out of hundreds of mouths and, almost as quickly as it began, the cacophony dies down as the song kicks into gear.

Sean does not believe in fate. He believes fate is the name given to coincidence that is neither unpleasant nor inconsequential, a way to elevate happenstance to something that infuses it with a deeper meaning than it deserves. However, as the chorus of the song rings out, "Hey pretty... don't you wanna take a ride with me," Sean makes eye contact with a girl who happens to be quite pretty herself. And he is stunned. It's not the prettiness that stuns him. There is no shortage of beautiful women at the concert. He is stunned by how taken he is with this particular girl for no reason that he can logically discern. He feels an immediate need to connect with her, a driving impulse to tell her who he is. And he doesn't know why. He doesn't know a thing about her, except that she has big green eyes and long, dusty brown hair and she is short and wearing a white top that looks like it is made of crepe paper. But there is something about her face, or more accurately, her expression, that seems to spell out her entire personality. The chorus hits again, and Sean, surprising himself with his decision to act on impulse, walks with purpose toward the green eyed girl.

And he tells her his name. And she smiles. And she tells him that her name is Athena.

Kyle & Jasmine

Kyle and Jasmine have a wall between them. There is a wide gulf that separates them despite their physical proximity in the small automobile that Kyle is maneuvering slowly and precisely through red-tinged mountains. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, loves the other, but they are unable to say it. Each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, is unable to actually spit out the words. Kyle is afraid that Jasmine has forever placed him in her in the sheer-walled confines of her friend bucket, a fate few men are ever able to escape. Jasmine is afraid that Kyle must have issued his affection to someone else and has taken his utter lack of forwardness to be an obvious sign of disinterest. Kyle knows that Jasmine is the perfect girl for him and Jasmine is well aware of the rarity of the chemistry they share. There is an undeniable bond between them, but the rift that drives them apart seems wholly insurmountable. As the car radio plays softly and the sun sets behind them, Kyle and Jasmine are both experiencing the same confounding mixture of contentment and lightning fork agony.

There have been few words spoken on this trip, but it hasn't been an uncomfortable silence. The space is filled, instead, with the flutter of Jasmine's eyelashes or the quiet serenades that Kyle has hummed along with every appropriately longing song. Every now and then their eyes will meet and each of them, Kyle and Jasmine, thinks they feel something spark, but then it's quickly dismissed as a product of their own desperation and the spark is extinguished and the hollowness of their mutual supposed unrequited love rushes back in to fill the void. Kyle and Jasmine are writhing inside, dying to spill their guts and gush over this person next to them, the boy or girl that they adore so very much. The drive is killing them. Neither of them ever wants it to end.

The mountains, now, are stained violently crimson and indigo by the spectacular sunset flowering behind them. There is an aura of magic enveloping the world, the sort of mystic glow that comes from a scarlet dusk, the sort that wildly intensifies the romantic tension that is driving Kyle and Jasmine straight out of their minds. Jasmine's lovely profile is lit up by the dying sun and she looks more perfect, more divine than anything Kyle could ever imagine. Kyle looks distant and lost as he thinks of her, and Jasmine is drawn to his distance, imaging levels of depth dwelling in her friend that she has barely begun to plumb. And it is absolutely maddening. The red mountains are fading behind them. Kyle and Jasmine have descended from the craggy heights and are driving along a winding, whispering path in the middle of a desert wasteland. The purple sky will soon be bleeding stars. If this magical dusk has been difficult, then the night will be practically unbearable.

The universe is shuddering around them. There is a sickening fluidity to it, a dreamy quality that the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, take in amazing stride. Their preoccupation with each other has left insensate to anything outside of their hermetic mobile world. The desert is resculpting itself around them. The red baked clay of the earth is rising up in twisting, finger-like spirals, wrapping around themselves before dissipating and falling to the ground like cinder-block meteors. Pyramids shake themselves loose from the dirt, and great, steaming fissures open up along the roadside. Kyle and Jasmine do not notice the changes. Kyle is hoping to hear Jasmine laugh and Jasmine is drunk on Kyle's eyes. Pale green and bright blue moons fill the darkening sky, maybe a hundred or more, and they detonate spectacularly and ceaselessly, brilliant celestial fireworks overhead. This does not phase Kyle or Jasmine in the least.

The road scuttles beneath their car like a treadmill and soon they aren't going anywhere at all. Gas is burning, exhaust is spewing and Kyle's foot is held fast on the accelerator, but there is no forward motion, no progression. Kyle and Jasmine are so lost in thought, though, that neither notices or cares about their stagnation. As the hours pass, however, they do begin to grow weary and as they yawn, the ground does too, and the earth spits up a little white building made especially for them. It is squat and its walls are windows and it glows from within with a sort of pale ivory that makes it stand out like a beacon in the bloomed darkness of the desert. The building is nondescript and utilitarian and it has a parking lot and a blank marquee sign standing tall at the road's edge. Kyle and Jasmine give a passing inquiry to what, exactly, the little place might be. They agree, then, that it is enough that it is a shelter and they'll stay there for the night. In any other circumstance, settling in a strange, solitary building would be illogical. But they are both so tired and the building is right there. They haven't seen another structure for hours after all. Kyle parks the car. They go in.

Inside, the place is bigger than it should be. It is immense. Cavernous. An echoing giant chamber that could have been a church or a wedding hall or the hollowed out remains of some uncomfortably baroque and ornate theater. But to Kyle and Jasmine, it doesn’t seem to be anything at all. It is a room, an empty room, with its glass window walls and worn cream carpet. The ceiling seems to lower as they delve deeper in. The floor seems to likewise drop beneath them, as if they’re now half underground. It is cool in the building, pleasantly cool, and softly lit in a way that could be thought of as eerie or comforting dependent wholly on one’s particular point of view. The darkness creeps in through the window walls and Kyle and Jasmine eventually find themselves walking in the black beneath a dim spotlight. It follows them through the emptiness. They’re blind to everything outside of it, and the wide open building suddenly seems very small and cramped. They huddle together, as if being outside of the light could somehow do them harm. They move closer and brush against one another. Each feels a sputter-shock run roughshod through their nervous systems. It is infuriating and exciting.

The spotlight comes to rest upon a small lacquered wooden bench in the center of the mysterious building. They can’t see a thing beyond it, beyond the little bench that will barely seat them both. They exchange a weary look. Both of them are so tired, so spent, that they instinctively collapse, in tandem, into a heap on the little wooden bench. Their backs meet at the shoulder blades, and they sit still for a moment, propped one against the other, breathing in the antiseptic air of the building. It is embarrassingly thrilling, this basic, gentle touch. There is sort of pulse numbing pause to the moment, a hard stop on the careening vault of time, and the two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, hold their breath and try to make this tiny porcelain moment last forever. But, of course, the clock eventually unspools again and they're forced to come up gasping for air and the bit of crepe that tied the whole of it together has been ripped. Minutes tick on and there is the shrill worry of ending looming over them. Still, there is something so sweet and so utterly unspoiled about this miniscule connection that they each give in, grave and cautiously, to the idea that things between them may have, just maybe, slightly possibly changed. In the lock of the moment, there is a significant boost in ego, in confidence and in passion. And it's Jasmine that takes advantage of that shift in the pair's demeanor.

Jasmine unlocks her position on the bench, twisting herself forward, and moving Kyle like an interfaced sprocket as she does. They are both facing front, now, and Kyle is surprised and a bit unnerved by the change. Jasmine acts quickly to capitalize on this novel orientation, and she softly lays her head on Kyle's shoulder. The effect is immediate and it is explosive and it is indescribably wonderful. Rockets fire between his temples and Kyle is close enough to her now to feel the oceanic tidal rhythm of her breathing. He matches his lungs' cadence to hers after letting out a long, whalesong breath to denote the inimitable pleasure of her present company. Emboldened by her act of affection, Kyle wraps an arm snugly around Jasmine's waist, and he pulls her, subtly, slowly and assuredly closer. She smiles and she lets out a half whispered sigh and he just melts. Exhausted, she shifts again, this time sliding herself down, stretching upon the wooden bench and laying her weary head in his lap. He moves a hand toward her hair and runs his fingers between her locks as her cheek heats up his thigh. It's more calming, this new intimacy, than the hope of any prescription pill or silvery meditations. There is a tenuous, nervous and overly glass-like happiness shared between them; a quiet and luscious release that would verge on catharsis if it weren't still bottled up and in danger of shattering them both from the inside out. They still want to say it. More so, now, than ever before. The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, still desperately want to tell each other, to vent it, to whisper it lovingly and frighteningly into the other's ears. But the wall is still there. It is crumbling, brick by brick and slowly, but it is still there.

The bench changes. It softens and it widens and becomes a davenport while she lays and he sits and there is a plushness to it that lets her body sink into a cloudy abandon. Her tired bones and muscles float on a sea of luxury and the comfort of it flows through her while her mind unhinges from conscious thought and loses itself in a vivid morass of lovelorn dreaming. And Kyle watches her drift off and he smiles. She looks so perfect and so peaceful that he cannot help but love her. He adores her. He feels her every tiny movement rack through his body and the soft tone of her sleepy murmur cuts into him like a knife. His heart balloons with want, but what he wants is here, next to him, and he is terrified at his current surfeit of satisfaction. He is afraid of losing it, and so he tries to etch the feeling into his brain, like a treasure map, so he can find this memory again when things have spun out of control and gone horribly, horribly awry. It'll happen. Somewhere beyond this beautiful night is a future of sickness or hardship or loss or fear. And when he is lost in something bigger and more wretched than his meager faculties can handle, he will find himself, he knows it, right here.

As he tries to pull it all in, he too succumbs to the new softness of the bench turned couch. He gently moves her warm body and slides himself between Jasmine and the sofa's back. He nestles up next to her, wraps his arms around her and squeezes tightly. He plants a quiet, hushed kiss on the back of her neck and he falls asleep.

The two of them, Kyle and Jasmine, dream of each other as they slowly turn to ash and crumble away, now commingled in dust forever.