26: After the Flight Comes the Fall
I.
She wore striped leggings and combat boots, laced to her knees. Fingerless gloves on her delicate hands and welder glasses as a headband, pushing back her hooker-red hair. She left imprints in the flowers and the snow.
He was lying on his back. His ink-stained fingers grasped her ankle as she walked past his hiding spot. She took a seat beside him and laced their hands together.
He grinned up at her and she admired his eyes. They were poison green and Atlantic Ocean blue, lined in charcoal and crinkled at the edges. Her breath caught in her throat.
“What do you see today?” She asked him.
His eyes flicked back toward the sky that yielded nothing to her, but ash and pollution. His grin grew and almost looked too big for his face.
“Today, there are sparrows.”
She wished that she could see the things he did.
His fingers tightened around hers and he spoke like he could read her mind, maybe he could.
“Someday.”
II.
Gray. Gray stairs leading into a gray house with gray rooms and gray people. She puffs on her cigarette and stares out the gray window.
III.
He was lying on his back in the snow and flowers. He wore what he always did, but he had a striped scarf in hand.
“I thought you would like it. It matches your stockings,” he said.
“They’re leggings and thank you.”
He wrapped it around her neck and she could smell him on it. Vanilla and something else.
“Today, there are hawks,” he said without her asking.
“I’ve never heard of hawks.”
“I will tell you,” and he did.
IV.
She smokes the entire package of cigarettes, moving only to bring the tip of the old to the new. Breathing only to draw the fumes into her lungs. She can almost imagine the sticky tar clinging to her insides and thinks that it might be nice to die.
V.
The next time she went to the field, she kissed him. Lying on their backs in the snow flowers, she moved her face and suddenly her lips were touching his. Her lips were chapped and so were his, but they were touching and there were sparks twining down her spine.
“I thought that you would like it,” she said.
“Your lips match mine,” he said.
VI.
She goes out to buy more cigarettes. She passes the field on her way to the store. Her boots clunk on the broken sidewalk and she tells her eyes to watch out for cracks, not flower petals sodden with snow.
VII.
She stared up at the sky from her place on his chest. She watched while he talked. His fingers, nails painted black, swept up and down her arms and suddenly she saw.
“Today, there are eagles,” she said.
His bruise blue eyes stopped watching the ash sky. She saw happiness there.
“Today,” he said.
Bitter happiness.
VIII.
She buys a bottle of vodka with her cigarettes. There is none left in the morning.
IX.
The field was empty.