#*eurostar

<<What do you mean you don't smoke? They allow you in with two hundred, and they say some come with five or six hundred. What did they tell you about Moscow?>> He is running to keep up. <<These are five years old I just suck the tips.>>

Spectre has a glass quality. Seethrough, uncanny, but now the water sinks into their hair, causing it to reach downwards like the wings of a drenched, drowned bird. Eurostar watches him through the door, sitting up in sheets - Bloodboiler's sheets - with elbows over his knees, feeling a heaviness and a weariness, like the suitbag still hanging over the window's lintel. It didn't arrive til two weeks after the funeral: and its shape covers the sun on his right side.

He unzips the bag, unfolds the trousers, and finds the shoes. They share an inseam, he did not consider that, as he finishes attaching the cufflinks.

Why? The impulse: he would say a game and he would believe it. They both understand the need to remove the man without removing him from the principle, removing the talisman by keeping it covered to your chest.

And the welcome he gets is not totally disapproving. As each of the dead man's clean, sharp edges start to warp and destroy in the steam.

-

Lotion will do. Around the puckered hole, his index finger's tip slightly enters him and stays there. He feels him go. Shuttering back open again as the shower surges, wrapped in silence like a reactor with its gold core giving off brief hues of life. Finally the rest of him is thick, mineral-coloured flesh, solid only as human limbs are solid.

He slides in slowly, everlasting seeming. Testing. Waiting. Then the hilt of his curled knuckle. Gentler than the night before. This is a truce. He doesn't say something smug back. It makes feel him too young, and wondering: