The sounds of rain and the short, sharp tinkling of bells.
Somewhere in the distance, an old woman swept the dust and the rain water from the first two terraces of her rough hewn, concrete front door step. The gentle sweeping noise, grating and creeping, scraping like nails across cochina shells, silencing the cry of five million dust mites residing in the first stomach of an ancient termite, lying dead in the crevices of distaste and misuse. It's not like the old woman could not see, it's that she could not be bothered to do anything about the righteous burial of the dead gone damned.
Arthritis does terrible things to the master of his own fate.
Sometimes.
We just have to accept our spaces, our losses, and the unification of rain dancing and drought pours.
Two shot glasses, spaced fourteen inches apart. Placed on a diagonal across politely matted table settings. Perfect, cordial, all in its place.
Cauliflower blood growths, like flowers, splattered the off red mahogany wood grain, much like bloody handprints in so much sand. The butterfly, kneeling before said place, calmly poured out 151 versions of fire. Perfect to start a meeting. Perfect to begin the desecration, annihilation, and the slaughter of just so many words. Perfect for an evening of all out war.
An evening of fire versus fire.
Somewhere in the distance, fire scorched across the broomstick, an invisible wind picking up the embers and depositing them where they did not belong. In the hands of a demon, a daughter, and a distinct aversion to the creeping scalpel of time: cutting the skin, rifting the soul, and shredding the body to its final components.
Skin and bone.
--bones and heat, FIRE and pain--
We only realize what we are when we see ourselves for the final time. We only see what can be when we see only expanses of absolute nothing. We only cope when we are disenchanted.
And we only live once we have died.
It was a nondescript location. Neutral territory. Neither fire nor water reigned here. A distinct lack of supremacy. A lack of metal. Wood had lost its way, and spirit was in ultimate hiding.
A locale, hidden from the elements, the elements hidden from the locale. One or the other. Both at once, perhaps? It was always a possibility. It wouldn't be long before something cropped up. After all …
Two flames in a lantern will always start a fire.
Long legs waltzed in. It was always the long ones, wasn't it? The long ones found success in their path, success that they stopped to reach for. Success like the ultimate fruit on budding trees, ready to be plucked by the man whose neck has stretched so far, so far, so far enough to even think about the ultimate -pluck!-ing of fruitless desires. Long legs and designer cloth, woven to perfection by small Cambodian sweatshop workers, paid a quarter for their eighteen hour efforts and salt stained brows, white waterfalls falling down dark garb when rainwater and tears have dried.
A rush of cold air. That meant the time was now, the time was nigh, right? The songbird straightened up as a demon showed himself to the phoenix awaiting his presence, movements like a slow southern drawl, lazy and elongated, exaggerated to a point of irregularity.
Real red on black eyes greeted fake, mismatched yellow and green ones.
"Zhang Xiao Hieu Vu." Swallowtail.
A polite bow made impolite by implication. The demon kneeled, as it seemed was expected. But expectancy was the last trailing thought on ghost tails as perfectly folded hands settled across perfectly placed settings.
--?
The door slid shut, and the world was dead.
?--
"T'sai Xiao Rive Vu" My Rival.
Swallow nodded curtly, sleep and MAC shadowed eyes falling like the stock market, then rising again in the manner of Japanese imperialism.
"I trust today finds you well."
Parted, glossed lips breathed two breaths in, three breaths out. Carbon monoxide poisoning on the liquid insides of the cerebral cortex. He was absolutely breathtaking. Magnificent. A glorious creature. Egotistical with every right to be so. Proud, strong, poised with the right set of intimidation tactics and unfaltering heat waves, pouring from skin so strongly that the butterfly's own folded hands fought not to recoil from the burning of the first ten witches in Salem.
Long days and longer nights were beginning to take their toll on the complex of sheer, saffron perception, but it never really affected the butterfly anyways. Armani suits and personal tailors were all that were needed for a good, solid, grass-root impression with most men.
Of course, this was different.
This was a double entendre, an innuendo in its most highly respected form. A jean dressed baby with a big blatant F U C K inked and spaced across its shiny, amniotic fluid drenched forehead, clad in its own amnion with a half rotted chorine, ripped from its rightful place, acting as some Mongolian accessory that all the girls were dying for.
Umbilical chord?
An offering
across the slab of the scarification board.
One virgin down. Negative eight billion to go.
Starting the countdown from positive point oh-seven.
But even for a blastocyst, the elder had to admit, the boy was pretty. The boy had charm. And the boy had wits, guts, and maybe a couple of nuts somewhere in his physique to take the title of dragonhead at a mere twenty-one years of age.
"Today, it is raining." It was plain, like an avocado seed, an apple core, the pit of a peach. "Today, it is raining, so the homeless have no fire over which to huddle."
"It's an unfortunate occurrence." Of course, the butterfly was unaware of the actual meaning behind the statement.
If it weren't raining, I'd be out sacrificing the damned. Sacrificing them to fire. Sacrificing them alive.
...too weak and old and hopeless and maimed and drunk and despised and -- dead -- to live any longer.
"Hopefully, the weather will clear up with some eventuality. I would hate to see this island flood." The inadvertent phoenix, a beacon in his own way, nodded to the shot glass before the demon. "If you will."
A quirked brow, eyes glancing over placidly over ever frameless lenses.
"One fifty one?"
"Correct."
Fingertips found the black glass. Black tinted glass, blown to perfection, the perfect blow for the perfect amount of alcohol. One gulp. One Swallow. One shot in the jaw.
"To what will come..." A pretty, frosted, glossed smile-- frosted like glass on a window that can't be seen through.
A similar smile in intent. Differentiated by crooked contours and a wolfish knife glint, trailing to the base of a natural human canine. "...and what will never be."
Shiver. Chime. Burn.
Tracing to the pit of the shrunken half stomach, where the warmth started first. Swallow's shot glass, strangely, was the first to hit the table, the Dragonhead looking up at his dead born companion, noting the way that black glass lingered on slanting lips, wannabe blonde messy over ringed eyes and pulsing temples.
Xiao closed his eyes, his hand moving to the side.
Pause.
Open.
s h a t t e r
--against the open crevice, vacuum sealed hardwood floor stretching for miles in all directions.
"We came here to do something, did we not?"
"Indeed, we did."
The ghost canted his eyes down to the short stack of snow white paper, residing, perhaps even cowering, to the left side of the table. It was a natural tendency to cower, to recoil from the power of truthful words and nonchalant glances. Dirty hands and sordid ink.
Dirty minds and sordid lips.
The demon smirked darkly, sardonic glitter glitz spilling from his left eye and shooting back to the seventh star in the back of his mind that he'd forgotten this night.
"Will you start, or shall I?"
The songbird, feathers ruffled for dire warmth in a room full of cold, cold fire, heated and destroyed by icy disdain, claimed the rights to the first demure gesture of the evening, slowly reaching down to pull the sheet of paper up onto the tabletop. The first victim. The first weapon. A pen placed perfectly in the center of paper, quivering under the assault of acid wind and heretical heat alike. Felt point. Thin tip. Like a brush with more control. Like a flame without the movement, scorching lines of perfection into paper that was less than such.
Ballpoint pens leave valleys and rifts in the pages to come.
We wish to avoid foreshadowing. We wish to never write the same thing twice.
A hint. It was. Indeed. A hint of the most subtle variety.
Xiao thought the younger man's demure nature was kind of cute, to tell the truth. Nothing bad to say. A respect for the humble nature of the Dragonhead. In times of peace, we can tell the truth. In times of peace, we can think what we feel.
The demon was well aware of the brilliant mind that was housed in the butterfly's frail, if not ever returning, brightly colored frame. And so, he wrote.
We always start with the number negative one.
Even if it is not our choice.
We always start with our left foot forward.
Even if we are dominated by our right.
We always learn from the beginning to the end.
Even if nonlinearity is the key.
Though we are often under the charge of disrupted melancholy melodies, rapture by the hybrid differentiation of grey and black, it's impossible to chain events without the solidity of the sequitur, the timeline, the chronological goddess that reigns supreme over the ticking of the second hand and the backtracking of hours. We skid across a timeline we know nothing of, content in the concept that we are always moving forward, to an event which we cannot alter, escape, change, or repress.
Except.
Anomalies are not so common in the human species. Anomalies are the variance, not the norm.
Anomalies are a higher step on the evolutionary ladder, preparing for the future of the species...?
Unlikely.
Dark, slowly pulsating eyes glimpsed upward as heat shock hands pushed the paper to the butterfly, who immediately accepted, pulling in words with hungry eyes.
The demon continued to hold the marring pen in his overheated fingertips.
One moment. Two moments. Two blinks and a discharge. "The pen. Give it to me."
A slow, lazy smirk from the demon. Fervor. Pure fervor and maybe a little bit of favor were given to the boy as invisible flames licked at clean, clear fingerprints, the warmed pen dropping into the swallowtail's palm.
What we find to be true it not always right. What we find to be ordinary is sometimes extreme.
And what we see as fire is sometimes pure ice.
It's the sensation of boiling water. The sensation of a shower turned too hot. The cold, the shivers, and the shakes that come with the burning of water boiling the skin along the spinal cord. An inadvertent spinal tap. Where skin and meat melt off bone, exposing the vertebrae for the heretics they are, destroying all sense of love, valor, and duty in the second crossed mind spring of differential equations and the time-space continuum. A maggot ridden horse is the first born son of the human psyche, or so Alan Strang told us in his final dying monologues. Chewing gum is the ultimate escapism, but only the enlightened are aware. We comfort ourselves with the fact that we're in possession of eyes with which to see and tongues with which to feel, but we never seem to appreciate the fingerprints that allow us to trace and the dilation that permits us to remove ourselves from the dissociation in our own heads.
I find that the differentials are off the charts, but the charts don't seem to agree.
I find that at the same time everyday, the clock strikes three chimes and a half, stopping before the cuckoo can find its way back into its mechanical nest.
I find that if you tear out the eyes of horses with an ice pick, reveling in the viscera of disconnected orbs bathed in the copper purity of what's on the inside, inside, impaled upon the sharp hook of a tool unfit for the use of flesh removal and skin stripping, you're bound to feel just a little frozen.
I can't begin to close my eyes.
... I can't begin to close my ...
… I can't begin to close …
..
… close …
--&&&--
"You know why I'm here.
Betrayal.
"Don't you?"
Is the.
"Yes."
Most.
"Did you do it?"
B I T T E R
"No."
… pill.
"All the evidence points to you."
Swallow could be just as sneaky. He smiled; a small, Nao smile, hydrofluoric liquid dripping like rat's blood down his face, flooding the floor, burning everything. Fire the desire. You put a prize behind your hands and let decide your opponent yet you do not know of his recreational malevolence. Dusty hand prints leave your mark on it when it snatches itself from you, with your scent, with your death written all over your face.
"You're the officer, aren't you? It's not my job to figure it out."
"You have a reputation to live up to. A multi-million dollar contract."
He shrugged, letting the responsibility slide off his shoulder like semen-wet silk. "They all have reputations to live up to, Rive. It's been long ago destroyed and yet they still have eyes looking up at them, from the slums, without a second glance, like dirty diamonds. Steroids fire in their system like cancer and no one ever cares."
A
small silence filled between them.
Brothers. We're
brothers.
Not anymore.
"They're only cutting you slack because you're famous. You'd have been in jail by now."
"I know."
Silence again. Cold fire with a poison core.
Swallow spoke again, suddenly, with grace to his words, slick along the sides. "Sur le fil."
"… what?"
"Sur le fil."
"I don't understand."
"I'm dancing on wire, Xiao. Dancing."
And when he came to, metal bars dotted his vision. There wasn't anything he could do about it.
151 ways to say good day …