Hours at a time

He sat there staring, not seeing, the flutter of a guttering candle to the tick-tick ticking of a broken faced clock. In the distance a lone violin keened, music wrenching through the cracks of the rotting floorboards.

He'd always hated Mozart.

For a second his vision clouded, soothed beneath a blanket of blue smoke and spent needles. Faraway, time tolled by.

Seven

He'd buried her deep, beneath the brown mako infested soil, under a wilted rosebush that only kept its thorns. It was cold. It was always cold here, on the upper plates, and wet and damp and empty. And when it came down to this, empty was good.

Seven fathoms deep, drowned in Memories Sea something stirred, then was drowned again beneath a cascade of nicotine. A sigh, his breath seemingly rattling through his lungs as his digits twirled with the stubbed out end of a cancer stick. It wouldn't last, this fading velvet haze of calm, and he knew it.

Eight

Oblivion beckoned with mother's arms and the metal at his temple felt like sanity, a beautiful caressing escape. The spin of the barrel whirled time into a delicious delirious slope and beneath emerald poisoned eyes something lovely died. He never felt himself pull the trigger.

Nine

Outside, upon brown naked soil, through the midst of thorns and angry rain, something beautiful bloomed, withered and fell.