She flipped through her textbook, and visions of binary and C danced in her eyes. The pages began to pile thick as they fell away from her fingertips - a folded scrap of paper shot out and drifted down to the cool autumn concrete, another love-letter on the downward spiral. She leaned over and picked it up, unfolded it with delicate fingers, and read it aloud.
“I hate you.”
She folded it and tucked it into her breast pocket. It was not the strangest letter she had ever received. But it’s the only one I’ll ever keep.

It had been a long time since the last city gave up it’s blood, a crimson answer to the law of nature - his nature. He remembered that, vaguely, like the hazy static of a satellite transmission breaking up. His mouth shaped into the slash of a crooked smile, baring long canines at either corner of his mouth, the instruments of their destruction - and ultimately, his own. He pulled the slide back on an old semi-automatic pistol and leaned his head against the wall. He had seen the savaged corpses of two antelopes at the foot of the hollowed out apartment building he had taken refuge within. Then he had heard the guttural growl of countless wolves in the darkness, seen the spectral gleam of a hundred pairs of eyes. He knew, for the first time in a thousand years, that he still had something to prove.

When he saw her next, in a shopping mall outside Rio, her fingernails were painted black. She wore dark eyeliner and darker lipstick, and he, in faded jeans and stained t-shirt, felt out of place. The moon, she said, had disappeared - but when he stepped into the parking lot with her he saw that it hung low in the sky, as pale as ever.
“There’s moonlight.”
They stood between a railing and a row of shopping carts. She shook her head and slipped her arm through the crook of his elbow; she called him a liar and pulled him out onto the rain-slippery asphalt.

This is me, tired. Sometimes I wonder why it seems as though there’s no more stories left in the world - and how many stories I’m missing, sitting around and thinking like that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003 at 5:51 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.