Hands littered across the shaft and holding tight, embracing the subtle caress of indents, cheek lines that drab themselves over wooden sheaths that dive down like birds into the ocean of greenery, into the waves, into the brown earth that swells and churns from a celestial rhythm that draws around that placid glow.

The breath that escaped his maw took a long pause as it searched the fleece of his pockets, flanking its innards for a notepad with aged yellow paper where the sun filtered between sketches and words that floated on the lightness of its flesh, leather bound and married to the scent of sweat and dirt that marred the color that hung on his clothes.

“Buy groceries”

A gilded world whose skin was bore of steel and glass, where scaffolds drew lines like fingerprints over glazed windowsills and in those callouses cracked the fingertip rays that groped them. The sun shattered against their flesh, these buildings, and showered Sam and Anne in a pale glow, not warm but stale and tepid, stagnant light that did little to illuminate and just gnashed its teeth at the back of ones eyes like the first crack of light past yellow-custard eyes on a late afternoon’s nap.

Barely a flinch is what perspired, his skin taut like the grin of a bow, Sam moved forward while Anne chased behind him, her eyes exploring the foreground as if independent, a tourist in this home of hers of which she loved in a way best described as confectionery. As you can imagine the same skywards gaze that is often plastered on tourists was just as plainly stapled on her face, nimbly dancing in the wind as her legs followed in the wake of Sam, or more so his shadow as he had a characteristic gait that left even these words too slow behind.

If only they might catch up they’d find themselves at a field where the grass stood no higher than the crook of a deadpan face that sheared the heads off vacant graves, headstones for the many that died today and waited patiently in lines in a row beside him, not in chairs and without appointment he’d bury each stranger beneath him at irregular depths depending on the tempo of his work.

You see, this is the case for Sam and Anne a week from now…because in a week from now or the first beckoning of my story, both will have their breath stolen away, not by each other but by whatever might fill the narrative at that moment, whatever might occupy the scene will pour its hands into the vacancies of their lungs and steal it and wherever or whatever it does with the myriad of bottles and jars of empty air is beyond my capacity for story telling.

Perhaps that scene might litter the ground with their last breath or let it hang for a second on the garbled syllables that run out and trip over each other like theater patrons over satin trains and broken banisters, where a tongue might fold up on itself like a carpet at an entrance hall and with it herald all the echoes of a chamber orchestra.

It was a strange question but not out of the realm of interpretation where she once stood and where her seat now stands with four legs planted down in the checkered linoleum. “Nothing.” She sat there for a second, staring at the word, naked and decided against it; decided to drab it in something more decadent where clothes might sheathe her words from judgement, where boredom couldn’t land like an ugly broach to decorate her countenance.

“I sent a few letters out the other day.” Still, her words seemed blank and uninteresting, “to my sister from across the ocean, she lives in northbrook, ya know, where the windmill refinery is or where they put all the retired windmills to sit.” She didn’t know what she was saying and to be fair in the analogy should her words have actually been draped in any suit or tie they would’ve illustrated an ugly hash of colors like that of a girl too haphazard in waking the day to think of what to wear.

“Nice.” Hardly so, he said, “You should try lying more often.” His eyes left hers and fell onto his hands, widdling away the time like needles against yarn. “I try to lie if I have nothing interesting to say. It kills time at least.”

“But what’s the point in telling stories that aren’t true.” She muttered. “It’s not like you need to impress anyone and what if they find out you’re lying. Isn’t it embarrassing to talk about yourself like that?”

“There’s plenty of ways to look at things to make em’ more positive. I mean, yeah, of course there lies, but you can still learn things from them.” From any vantage point in that room, you could tell from the effervescent lights that despite the deadpan that made a characature of his face, he had a passion inside. “You look strong and inspire me to do the same. Maybe you’re not and maybe you’ll tell me stories of wrestling with lions and bears. Maybe all you are is a lie but to me you’re so much more. Why take that away from someone?”

“Wouldn’t it mean more if it were true?”

“How would you tell? How do you know that I’m here for the dentist? How do you know that I just don’t come here to chat up pretty girls because the dentist office is one of the few places where everyone is quiet for no particular reason?”

“Because the truth is. I don’t have an appointment.”

It was true these words that escaped his maw and in those brief moments that skipped along the syllables of his words the two found themselves outside where curtains dovetailed to the shadows of the sun through the canopies of skyscrapers and billboards.

And she looked back perturbed with the constructs of her face dancing in odd rhythms as if to say where words might not be appropriate-stop looking at me. To be fair, one could only imagine the words linger in that room for sometime where high ceiling let them rise and fall to the ground, stale and austere.

He leaned in forward, not to her, but to the portrait, a moderator whose framed countenance did not blink at his forwardness but beckoned it as she soon resigned to the back of her leopard print chair and into the scenery of its canvas.

“What’s your name,” He asked, with a smile, half empty with the disappointment of something more interesting failing to part from his lips where so much more waited, swelling and heaving like a wave kissing the shore, not ready to crash and dock its sails.

“Anne.” It came shyly, a brush stroke that measured itself, startled on the parchment and far from where he stood. But all the same her name stood silently, quietly in the air.

And with that he grabbed it and swallowed it whole, spitting it out with untold gusto where narrative simply ignores how frivolous this man must be to take that name and say it aloud. “Anne.” He said it again, “that’s a nice name. What have you done with it?”

It’s fair to say that the dentist would surely do more with a name whose vowels might be fudged with the sound of spittle and backwash, where iron curtains might reel back cheeks and turn Anne into something else, perhaps a garbled “Arrgh”, because that’s what dentists do besides removing teeth;they remove vowels.

Warmth beneath the veil of white freckled my cheeks. Too long have I enjoyed this feeling of bliss and I can’t help but wonder why I can complain; Because surely that is what it is—complaining. To justify such a frivolous tantrum where it seems to be that we live in paradise.

What a difficult place this is for me to describe. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Other women cloy the appetites they feed, but she makes hungry where most she satisfies. That is this place, a place confused by the lips and the words that cascade out of a dead man’s maw.

But enough of this, I could never tell a good story and it’s been such a long while since anyone bothered asking. If you don’t mind I’d feel a level of comfort if I spoke outside of myself.

It’d been a few day since his last check up and to be fair the virulent scent of nothingness that baraged Sam’s senses were a curious comfort. Fluorescent lights and the passing caress of perfume from an open magazine; a slight window adjar with the tapered curtain of a woman’s narrow eyes;chairs courting more chairs and one holding the weight of a stranger.

At a meager 5’9”, his height had his neck courting the brochures nearby and the placid color of his skin did compliment the setting. Not sickly but with the company of a few scattered wrinkles that framed his face and the shade that the past few days had colored in. Looking past the portrait in front of him to the reflection of that stranger, he smiled.