There's a thin sheen of sweat licked across his upper lip and clinging to his cheekbones, and you're hypnotized by it.
You can't look away.
You can't look away, and he's asking you questions like where the fuck are their faces, they used to have faces right, but your eyes are too busy catching the flash and burn of sweat draped across his gorgeous angles. The dusk blows orange sherbet and melting bruises, it makes the edges of his hair and jacket light up golden and you think it's appropriate, painful almost.
That's when your thoughts finally coalesce, at painful, because that's a sharp shiny word that tends to make an impression, and you fill up with a black breath that crushes your body further down on the wall.
Your lungs are so loud it even drowns out the sound of his moving lips and it becomes all you can hear, you think maybe you could derive the universe from the thick clatter of your ribs. The roof of the neighbor's house seems to loom upwards as the rest of the world slides into glassy out-of-focus, mailboxes into parched grass into faded asphalt. It would be nice to stay like this awhile, drifting crossways.
Rattle in.
Rattle out.
Hands, big ones with short square nails, shake you and try to bend you back, they make you feel rough and wrong against the brick. More words bang out of him and land across your collarbone, you breathe like you're dying. Maybe you are, that would make sense, and you feel a little furl of pleasure at making this man worry because it's the prettiest thing you've ever seen. Eyes wide and brows pressed close, the cut of his mouth bent down and moving furiously. In the strange scrappy light his irises look like they're a lucky green and suddenly you want to reach out and tear them out of his head.
Swallow them down 'cause nobody deserves eyes that scald quite like his. You stare at him and it's like sticking your finger in a light socket.
The sound comes back, bad radio reception at a limpid wavelength, and he's just saying hey, hey, hey over and over again shaking you back and forth. Your head lolls like a rag doll and crashes your hair into your eyes, spider's fingers.
Your mouth opens and lets out a low moan and it surprises even you because it's the sound of a ghost town, all banging empty doorways crushed in slow grey dust. It croaks out of you.
His hands are gone in a second and you look down at your own, which is not a great idea.
They're itchy slick with drying blood, red and black and clayish brown caked over nearly every plane. Salt-copper buckling, shoved under your nails and embossed into every soft nail bed that's impossible to wash away, and worst is you don't know how it got there. There's a sick little inkling, but you ignore it because you know it's bad. Thinking about it will batter you until your veins burst so you choose not to.
This isn't right.
You still don't know why there's this man squatting before you, hands dancing in front of him because he's not sure if he can touch.
You have blood all over your hands and it hasn't quite hit you yet, you're not crying yet, they just rest like shadows in your lap and rub off stiffly onto your jeans.
You okay, he asks slowly, and you don't answer him. You're still trying to work this out.
Listen, this isn't, he starts, this isn't your fault but can you tell me what happened? Anything. Anything at all would be great.
His voice sounds like someone doing a Brando impression and you don't like it much but that's all right. Your throat is still a little fossilized at this point so you just shimmy-wriggle shrug, seated at the bottom of somebody's low garage. It looks pretty funny and he gives you a half-baked attempt at a laugh.
He seems nice.
Then something happens so fast you're left reeling and you blink and the man who smells like gunpowder and warm leather is on the ground, facedown in the dirt.
You replay the moment in your head because your eyes are too slow. You see shapes and edges and dark negetive spaces that blur together in your conciousness, but something stands out. A hand, no, a claw, ripping out blue-pale terrible and flinging him to the ground. Just flying so fast you couldn't wrap your mind around it.
You're stuttering but now his heavy green eyes are peeling up from the dust, staring right at you like a live wire. He's already quickly standing up, spitting out something dark that could be blood but looks a little too sinister, smashing fissures into your vision with his glare.
Geddup, he says and you hear your stomach bottoming out.
He repeats himself with a languid cock of his eyes, then turns away and draws a silver pistol like he's breathing. You never noticed the gun before and then he's leaving inferno tracks under his boots, he's sprinting away faster then springtime and leaving you further behind with every stride.
The brown of his jacket weaves between a few fences and then that's the last you'll ever see of him. Slick leather smothered in refracted sunset.
You desperately want to stand up because it's the last thing he told you to do so it's monumentally important now. But there is an incredible amount of mysterious residue all over your insides. Something lived there. Inside you, where it had no right. Your chest awkwardly rises tight, heavier then half the earth, and you can't think so you just let the rough prickle of the asphalt walk stretch in front of you forever. You're not sure what's out there but you're gonna find it.
When you hear the sirens, long graceful wails shimmering under the sunset, he's already a decade gone.
Hands pulsing dirty crimson, you stand in the driveway.
Mouth breathing slower then God, you stand.
'cause he told you to.