The drowning flash

No guns or knives? What kind of story is that!

A kiss as sweet as a blowtorch. A touch as gentle as an acid trip. Burning sensations and hyperbolic hues are lovely, if rare, blooms we deign to pluck out of a wasteland of dull aches and infinite shades of matte grey. Those interior states always remain after such transient perfumes scatter at postmodern speed.

Finding one at all, now there's the rub of steel wool, the same color as the pavement saturated with witching hour rain, perforated by neon shards and blood quickly sheathed by a fresh splash.

Watch your step, you tell yourself, or you'll drown.

Turn your head and imbibe the first act of a thousand simultaneous plays staged in a gilded glass cabinet, another thousand each and every block. These actors and actresses, having rehearsed their lines to the point of nausea, restart their wandering through that greasepainted matte grey, warding off those dull aches with loose cravats and spirited abandon until the inevitable awareness that they failed to garner applause once more and so venture forth into the witching hour rain.

Watch your step, they tell themselves, or you'll drown.

Slipping around a streetlight's oval glow, you stalk past carnival minuets and shadow puppet theatres left in the dark, a solitary blossom caught in a flurry of breakdown. Though how long the former will last, you know all too well. They'll find out in a whirlwind, a rushing, redolent scent soon stale. You laugh, for a moment.

Then, as the others, venture forth nonetheless, infused with unspoken promises borne on that hallucinatory soupçon, the tableaux of her abstract, arcane hydrocarbons demanding that we heed her one and only command, that we search for a touch as gentle, a kiss as sweet.

We didn't watch our step, and we drowned.