smoke;
ft. @heatstrobe march twenty-ninth, 2015. hong kong.
beside her, the flame of a lighter flickers like the last sigh of a soul lost in the night. she watches the knuckles of his hands pale into a grip around the plastic, the side of his face outlined in the fuzzy neon lights. it’s distilled photography. too much bloom. his lips are chapped red from nervous chewing and the bottoms of his nail beds permanently marked with nicotine tar. so much she can tell.
she computes that she must have been staring, because he shifts into the leather seat of their rented car, his cigarette dangling loosely like he means to say something, another puzzle forgotten in the residual smoke. their world is made of constants and variables. her. him. the car. the 9mm baretta laid neatly over her thighs.
she lets her hands run over the curves of it, feeling the metal ring cold against her body heat. “it’s fifteen past eleven,” a mare constitution, neither skittishly impatient, nor flimsy with a sense of nervousness, “the files said he should be here by now. at least in the surrounding area.”
of course, it had never been meant to be as simple as that. she had been created with a predisposition for composure, even now back a straight arch over the bend of her seat, fingers fumbling with the magazine of her gun, safety-on, safety-off. somebody who knows what to look for would point out the lack of a watch on her wrist. it’s ok. she seems human enough from a distance.
