Two Long Breaths

They pulled up in fronts across from each other. The hand brakes were not engaged; feet hovered above stop and go. His face was nebulous, changing in quick factoring fashion after every interaction. Her face was captured thunder in a Mason jar.

He first offered up a memory. It was a tickling electricity meant to probe everything and prove nothing. It failed on both accounts, for she was never unready and had already grasped the foreseeable path of their conversation and knew she could shuffle and deal his emotional flash cards quite easily. To her, he had never been a challenge. His nostalgic words crashed down with gravity, and then silence snuck between them like a speeding chariot – and was gone again with the next hush of winter’s unwinding exhale. It was now mutually understood that this fight was taking flight; he turned off his cart’s engine.

He crossed his fingers and legs in opposing patterns, trying to present to her a complex figure – a helix or an unsolvable proof – but she remained uninspired by his neutral advances. She launched unabashedly.

Thus spake the grey lady, each word a cube of iced, laconic invective, “Don’t will yourself to and fro, for you are not itinerant. You are static in a dynamic universe. I share this changing world with the rest of humanity, but you are not here with us. We don’t even see you. Your invisible existence creates eddies of misinformation, swirls of lost communication, and a complete loss of loquacious fidelity.”

Here she turned to pause her front.

“To put it quite simply, I am in a changed state. While once we shared a common playing pitch, I have sharpened to a fine point and you have gone flat. I can command the recent history of the near future, whereas you know nothing past your own nose. I can change the air around you before you can change that look on your face.” Remember here that he has proven repeatedly that he can change expressions faster than melted silver can reflect mere ire; that’s quick silver. She continued, “You have a penumbral instinct to crescendo in increments of unfortunate. This will be our final exchange, and this my final word.”

She sparked her cart and receded out of the shadows and into darkness. In his chest suddenly existed a steel vacuum, pulling artfully his heart into his stomach into his stainless stolen soul. Her words remained; a sculpture staring at no one in particular, certainly not him. He picked out a tool, turned it over in his mind, and began to chip off phrases. Off came static. Misinformation, he chiseled into twenty pieces. In increments of unfortunate, he slowly succumbed to despair. She was gone. He was then struck; bolted to the floor in an undistinguished seizure of indefinite length.