At the counter with fish lips

The time was two o'clock. Evidently it was in the afternoon, because no one writes about things in the morning.

There were two, and the counter stood between them. As she (her) made with him (he) that calculable verbal interchange; some nouns mixed up with verbs and adjectives, he wondered if these varied articulations were discharged just to fill up empty space. What else was there to fill? Her salmon lips routinely lunged open and shut; the tongue and jaw acted their parts in the way that one expects them to do so. Across the glass that thing, some ordinary thing, was exchanged for paper money. There were more words to be had.
"See you later," said the fish lips. "See you some other day."
"Yes," he said. "See you then. See you sometime that day."

He had thought about telling her she was pretty in that uniform, then had decided she was not.

Phosphorescence

There was pointing at buildings and a knowing glance, a nod and a smile of shared knowledge, as if a few years of sitting passively behind a stern, fractured desk had imbued us both with an infinitely superior depth of perception. There was a box of used paints and some good firm brushes. You, the previous owner, had only made abstemious use of them and had little appetite for dilution. There were measured steps, taken arm in arm, down a rocky road. There were no figures of speech, just literal rocks scattered across gravel.

There was the story of an American teacher whose heady southern voice was as thick as the austral inner of her thighs. She liked porn and Italian high renaissance art. Her elbows cracked with the weariness of repeated gesticulation, after nights begging austere security guards in earnest for permission to bend the rules. She had done it for a whole year and was just about to relinquish, until one night she was ushered in quietly through an unassuming doorway. She lay on the cold tiled floor of the Sistine chapel, worn well by the tired footprints of check boxing tourists, and watched Michelangelo's frescoes light up like candles over her head. There was no other sky.

He and I, we both, we two, we came to a doorway amongst the night's blackness. There was a lock and a key and a staircase that wound around just as far as you would expect. There was a studio and thirty seven abandoned easels.

I took a break. I had a breath. I breathed it deeply, until my lungs capitulated. I went outside. I came back inside.

Then there were we two and nothing at all. Us in the studio, us on the top level; where layers of semi congealed paint caked on top of one another, and eventually collapsed under the weight of the Mississippi bordered midwest. The air was clogged with the cries of fractured completion and disbelief at the lead transferral making its way from the wood of the desk tops to us. There was morning and foggy air thick with residue. There was a man with his pigeons and it was done.