If I was there, I would have felt the burning sensation on my shoulders.

Periodically, I search for short clips of gasoline explosions. I like to watch (with volume muted) the results of the leak; the thick red smoke as it propels forcefully upward and outward, and the flames which lay beneath the surface, waiting to puncture it and seep quickly out. The sky is slowly eaten up.

I don't think that this habit stems from some sort of carnal lust for destruction. I think it's more about the finality of things.

Every Thursday

There was something dark and cruel and cold and wholly terrifying about the way Peter loved Andrew. When they had coffee together, in a small, clinical chain cafe, he could feel the twisted emotion rise above the cracked porcelain and place itself, slowly at first, but with increasing strength and dexterity, around his neck. The threat of asphyxiation hung thickly over the ground black beans. Andrew felt dead already, and it was only just past midday.

Terminations

At the beginning of Autumn
Timothy Proctor hated everything about his wife. From the offensive upper curvilinear of her tired mint spectacles, to the fact that slowly and surely, the cancer was spreading, like a voracious beast, through her brittle bones.

At Autumn's close
He wept bitterly when she died amongst the stiff grey sheets of a public hospital bed.

On the same afternoon, his blurry eyes watched re-runs of Burgo's Catchphrase on a sleepy small screen television, whilst he tried to recall the acrimonious leer in the dead woman's voice every time she guessed a phrase before the shiny-faced contestant.

What happens when the weather wrecks your plans

Owen T liked to see that things were always in their proper place. There was most certainly a proper place for everything, even things that did not initially appear tangible enough to manifest themselves in a concrete physical location. Whilst he walked through Bristol’s streets (in the St Pauls vicinity) - on a date most likely just before the 18th of January, but just after the 16th - he noted that the communal bins introduced for household waste were not quite evenly spaced and made a mental note of it. Later that day, he placed all the people that passed him in a coherent and logical order, according to the hue of their woolen jumpers. The problem occurred, of course, when it began to rain, and everyone’s laniferous garments, which were tied up to their necks, wept deeply down their bodies, until the pavement was a multicoloured frenzy. Everyone was left standing gray. Then Owen T sighed and began the whole business again. This time he ordered people by height, which he thought was much more sensible.

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.