Nov 14, 2025
The Drinker
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The Drinker
Time in a Bottle
Pairing: Emit Flesti x Female OC (not a well-established one, though)
Fandom: Faraway, So Close! (1993), sequel to Wings of Desire (1987)
Summary: A fallen angel bargains with Time for immortality after realizing how beautiful yet transient life is.
WARNINGS: explicit sex/smut. But it's the most poetic smut I'm ever gonna feckin write WC: 5677
This fic is a part of my Willem Dafoe Challenge.
Tag list: @glitter-and-gasoline, @giona45-5
Read on AO3 if you prefer. Otherwise, story below cut!
Time is hunting me.
An old, cadaverous woman collapses from her electric throne beside me, eyes glazing and thin lips stretching pale, crinkled skin taut over bony cheeks and hollowed eye-sockets as she wails her final, silent words.
I was taught to see the beauty in everything of Father’s creation – even death – and although, now that I’ve fallen, now that my world is a wondrous palette of colour, and I can feel the kiss of the sea against my skin and the warmth of a fire when my bones ache from cold and fatigue, I still cannot seem to find the beauty in the absence of life. Maybe that was really why I fell, perhaps to learn a lesson.
The woman is barely clinging to life – life, that is beautiful, that is fleeting, yet potent; life, that is the kindest gift and the greatest curse one can receive. She is afraid, she is weak, she is crumpled in a ball on the unforgiving concrete like a fetus that has never left the womb.
I do not see the beauty in death. I do not see the poetry in its inevitability or its balance.
Half of the crowd around me carry on their way, casting no more than a quick glance at the dying woman. I cannot blame them; I would not want to waste a second of my life on death, either.
The other half converges, like a tide crashing around me, their shouts tangling thick into the air as they scramble to aid her. Don’t they know, it’s useless. Don’t they know, this will be them in twenty or thirty years and they’re wasting those years ordering coffee that doesn’t have enough sugar and reading the front page of useless drabble and diving to save a stranger whose last breath has already left her withering lungs.
A glimmer winks on the ground, and catches my eye; I bend to pick up a compact that fell from her purse, and everyone is either too unconcerned by the tragedy or too deeply-swallowed by it to notice.
I flip open the compact to reveal a polished mirror as clear as the crystals I’d spotted in a shop window not even five minutes ago, and in its clarity I glimpse the pockets of grey that have formed beneath my vessel’s bottom lashes, the furrow of a brow sewn by stress, the eyes that, in life, are so absent of it.
I am left standing in the midst of the crowd, suddenly feeling numb, and I roll my head back to glimpse a figure emerging from around the corner of a shop, his shoulder leaning against the brick.
His eyes are a cold blue that pierce my soul. His suit is black as death. His hair is a deep brown, like when people soften their coffee with a dash of cream. His gaze is haunting, eviscerating, lingering.
Someone jostles my shoulder, and I swing my head to regard them. They are rushing to the old woman’s aid.
When I look back, he is gone.
Time is running from me.
I follow him down the long stretch of the alley, the black of his suit blending with the drab colours the passerby citizens wear, but I keep my eye trained on the glimpses I catch of his shoulder bobbing in the crowd. There is a festival being set up in this alley; paper lanterns brush my cranium from where they are loosely strung from the side of each building, vibrant hues of violet and red and blue. A man, with tangled dreadlocks and tattered clothing and nails imbued with grime, plucks away at the metal strings of his guitar, casting wonderful notes to the air that smells of scented candles and exotic food; if I had a dime, I would stop for a moment to listen and plunk it in the tin that sits in front of him for change.
If I had the time, I would also stop by the railing that borders the sea, let my fingers curl around the metal railing and suppress a shiver as the ocean breeze caresses my skin and blows the hair back from my shoulders. The man in the black suit leads me out here, along the bricks of the pier. The crowds are thinning now, but I cannot seem to keep pace with him.
He effortlessly traverses the uneven steps of a small bar. SALLY’S, 1029 BLEAKER STREET. The black of his suit is swallowed by the door that swings shut with a chime of shrill bells.
The same bells announce my presence as I pull open the door, the tang of seaweed and the sharp bite of the ocean winds blanketed by the bitter notes of rum and whiskey, and the slightest trace of smoke that is expelled by two candles sat either side of the bar.
Tick.
The cruel, piercing sound of a clock drills itself into the marrow of my bones, the synapses of my mind. It nearly makes me flinch. Why is it so loud?
The bar is silent, but not even the creak of my boots against the flooring is enough to cause such a great stirring of unease. It is silent because it is empty, void of even a bartender, despite the neon OPEN sign I read outside its window.
At least, it would be empty, if it weren’t for the man who turns to face me, steely blue eyes meeting mine and his expression passive, until the slightest quirk of a smile pulls at his lip, creasing a sharp cheekbone.
Tick.
I take another step forward, and the floorboards creak as if to warn me, but I didn’t know fear until I fell, and I’m not about to start bowing to it now.
“You’re – “
“Emit Flesti,” he says, and outstretches a hand for me to shake. His blue eyes come alive, glitter like how the sun dapples the surface of the waves on the ocean.
I eye his hand cautiously, and, after exactly three more ticks of the tenebrous clock, finally reciprocate, finding the exchange awkward. I don’t know how long to hold his grip, or how quickly to move my arm, but his flesh is warm against mine, and he guides me through the motion as if he’s done this a million times.
Emit straightens his suit jacket once our handshake breaks, and eyes me with that sea-gaze. “And I know exactly who you are. I’ve been expecting you.”
“Is my kind really that predictable?” I ask, tilting my head to the side.
His eyes narrow a fraction as he studies me, and he says, “You’re lost. Scared. Confused. Trying desperately to cling to a world you have only just discovered, a life that has only just been birthed.”
Tick.
I swallow, and say, “You’re right… but how do you know? You’re not able to read minds.”
“I’ve been around a while. Learned to grow observant. And you angels are all terribly easy to read. You want something only I can give. That’s why you’re here.”
I rake my gaze across him, across that polished suit, that matching black tie, that neatly-styled hair that retreats primly over his ears and teases the line of his neck, that ever-so-slight twinge of a smirk that curves his lip upward as if he knows something I don’t. Dressed and presented more like one of Satan’s glorified businessmen than one of the ancients.
I meet his gaze again, and step forward. “And if you’re smart…” I say, chin high and tone imbued with confidence. Angels are threatening when they want to be, and though I have fallen, I am certain I haven’t lost my edge. “… you’ll grant me my wish.”
Emit mirrors my stride, bringing the two of us closer. His scent is sweet, and irritatingly familiar. The smirk disappears from his features, and he says, “Your very existence here defies the natural order, causes an eddy of disruption and chaos in the cogs of a machine that are designed to function without your interference. Why would I bend the natural order for one fallen angel?”
Tick.
The cruel incipience of wrath begins to bubble in my stomach, and I bring myself another stride closer so that I am only an inch or two from him now; mousy lashes flick down, those steely blue eyes studying each groove and ridge of my face, before landing in my own, piercing through them and wrapping their icy tendrils around my soul. I swallow, a weight inexplicably forming in my throat, and glare up at him.
“Because if you don’t…” I growl. “I will get my wings back, if only to spite you. And I will rain all of Heaven down on you – or all of Hell, if I have to.”
The corner of his mouth curls upward again, creases his sharp jaw, and he speaks around a gleeful smirk as his eyes remain latched to my soul, “You angels are always smite first, ask questions later. But you, you’re only human now. You’re only bark, no bite.”
My nostrils flare, and my wrath churns in my gut, effervesces into the pockets of my chest that have been stripped bare of what I cannot define, nor can I find.
“I think you’ll find my bite to be equally as vicious,” I hiss from between clenched teeth, my gaze darting madly across twin blues that are so still frustratingly still, so disconcertingly locked onto my own. Does he even blink?
His smirk broadens, those twin blues glitter and narrow, and he says, “In the long run, I’m usually the one that does the biting.”
Tick.
His breath is hot against my face, flutters my lashes, and I swallow again as a new sensation – foreign to me, peculiar, rather disquieting yet strangely exhilarating in nature – tickles at my ribs. For a moment, I am lighter; I am free of the wrath that chains me to the earth.
But then I am heavier, as the weight of his words sinks in; I deflate, my shoulders sinking along with my exhale and my chin dipping, dragging my eyes from his. I am reminded of the transience of time and of my limited opportunity to experience my father’s beautiful creation.
Time is poison.
I turn my shoulder and start towards the wide, spotless windows that frame each side of the door. Outside, I glimpse the ivory of the seagulls cutting the pastel blue of the sky, the sea frothing at the hull of a sailboat, the tides that glitter like diamonds below the warm caress of the sun.
The final pillars of my wrath topple, and the pockets inside of me erupt into an abyss that aches to be filled with something anew. I am hollow. I am lost. I am helpless.
My disconsolation strings itself thick into my words as I breathe, a tear rimming my eye, “The world is so much more beautiful down here than it was up there. I don’t ever want to part from it. I want to paint it, limn its happenings into magnificent stories, to traverse its every mountain and canyon.”
My fingertips brush the glass of the window, and the tear rolls down my burning cheek. I am called by the restlessness of the waves, by the warmth of the sun, by the freedom of the gulls that ride the air currents.
“I have been rebirthed,” I tell him. “And I will not let this slip away. In Heaven, I was a soldier, a cog. Here, I am…” I shutter my eyes, and bite my lip; the saltiness of my tear on my tongue tastes like the ocean. And then I turn back to face the man, and I finish, “… alive.”
He is silent. But he blinks.
Tick.
I step forward again, though without the same portent weight, and I say, “If I do not bring you terror, do I at least stir in you some form of pity?” I am begging, pleading with my words now. “Do you have any ounce of humanity? Or do you just make sure that the cogs keep turning in the clock?”
We are maybe an inch apart now, and as I stare into those eyes, so swathed in steel-blue mystery, I wish that I could read minds again, if only in this moment, to read his.
And then, as if my wish comes true, a dash of sadness, streaking so fleetingly across them like a shooting star, manifests, and I seem to hold my breath in my chest, surrendering my soul to their intense stare.
“You’re forgetting that I have always seen in colour,” he says, his pride vanished along with but a vestige of his smirk. His face seems to soften around sharp features. “I have witnessed the joy of a doting mother. I have glimpsed the turmoil of loss. I have felt the cold on my flesh and the sun on my face. But it is not my job to pity. If I did, the clock would cease to function, and the order would fall into chaos.”
Tick.
And then suddenly it feels not as if I am searching for the answers in his gaze, but he in mine; his countenance is unnervingly solemn, his eyes no longer of impenetrable steel, but of a feather: delicate, wandering, listless.
And he says, “Have you considered, little angel, that I too am as much of a cog in the machine?” A challenge washes over the somber blue of his eyes, sparking something between us that is so suffocating palpable, it threatens to crush what little thread of hope there is in my chest, constricts my throat so that my disquieted swallow must be audible to his ears.
Tick.
The clock must surely be mocking me. I cannot seem to find my words, cannot seem to find a solution in the maelstrom that is my mind, cannot find solace in my florid thoughts or the life that is passing so pointedly one second at a time.
And I find myself with no solution, no wrath, no hope – lost, to a reality that I cannot smite. All I can do now is string out this one word, so feeble in its whispered impotence,
“Please.”
Time is cruel.
He doesn’t have to speak to tell me my answer, and I choke out my next breath on that crippling absence of hope, gaze lowering to the aged floorboards as if in submission. They too have become a victim to time, and must rot in debility.
“I cannot grant you immortality,” he says. “It would cause too much of a disturbance down here, upstairs. But perhaps I can give you something -- a token, for your will.”
My head rolls back, my eyes seeking his in confusion and wariness. His visage glimmers past my shimmery veil of unshed tears.
“Tell me…” he says. “… if you could stretch one moment into a thousand, if you could relive it as many times as you desired, what would it be?”
I blink, and the tears fall, and his visage sharpens. “A token? Minutes ago, you were mocking my will. Is this some cruel trick?”
He shakes his head. “It’s not a trick. Now, answer my question. What would it be?”
Tick.
The clock is drilling deeper than my mind or my marrow now; it is burrowing itself into my soul, withering its light, and past its deathly pursuit I cannot seem to find an answer to his question. I want everything that I described to him – I want to live, want to be eternal. How can I possibly choose one moment of my barely-beginning and so swiftly-ending life?
“You seem to be the expert,” I say, my tone so bitter in contrast to the sweetness of his cologne. “What would it be?”
Perhaps only time will tell.
The curve of his mouth pulls back into his smirk that could rival the Devil’s, and his glittering eyes drag across my face as if he is painting it into his mind for eternity. A thread seems to materialize between us, pulling taut and drawing me closer to his warm breath and toothy grin. I recognize his scent now – vanilla, the bean they grind in the coffee shops for their specialty brews with exorbitant prices.
A sharply-pitched sound snaps me from my heady trance, and I flinch, my lips parted in a silent gasp as I watch his lip curl over his teeth in a whistle.
And the world falls silent; the relentless ticking finally ceases, and out of the corner of my eye, I see that the clock’s hand has frozen.
His warm breath is mingling with mine now, his lips soft yet burning hot as hellfire against my own. Blackness coats my eyelids as I shutter them, and though tentative, I melt into him, drawing my vessel closer to his by that thread that I discern now to be desire. I move my lips against his in an uneven rhythm yet insatiable intensity, and I draw my hand up along his suit, fingers grasping insensibly at his tie. He is much more assured with his touch; one hand is fastened around my waist, while the other explores my breast through the fabric of my shirt, dragging a thumb across a perked nipple and stirring an unbridled breath from my lungs. He turns me like the hand of the clock, and presses my lower spine against the edge of the bar.
When we draw apart, I am weightless again, and that foreign feeling once again teases my ribs, flutters my stomach and pools magma between thighs that squirm against the hardness of his slacks. Lust, I ascertain; I have never experienced it because I have never been kissed, or touched in this way that seems to electrify every nerve and raise goose-bumps along my flesh – or even think, really, about this element of humanity. Life is so full of surprises, so faceted in its pleasures that I fear I may never uncover all of them.
His eyes are half-lidded, blue tides turning darkly with want that mirrors my own, and his warm breaths come swifter, panted against my flushed cheeks. The effulgence of the sun, as it had just begun to dip into afternoon, washes the finer strands of his dusky locks in a buttery, chestnut-gold, and shadows the sharp features of his face, every line bold, purposeful, sculpted as fearlessly as an angel’s blade. And in our proximity, I find a flaw in his design; his teeth, at first distractingly white, are gapped, slightly crooked, but it makes him more human than a cog, completes the artistry of this moment in such a way that makes my heart ache with yearning.
Time is beautiful.
“Is that it?” I ask him, raising a brow as my tongue darts hungrily between my lips and I let my hips rock with explosive impatience against his. I am as greedy as I am wrathful.
He smirks, and takes this as his cue to continue, for he lifts me onto the bar, both hands now cradling my waist, his body gliding between my legs; I part them in eager acceptance, hips once more seeming to have a mind of their own as they rut against his. I link an arm around his neck and pull him to me in a kiss that I have every intention to deepen to its farthest limits. My other hand slips from his tie and reaches for the buckle on his belt; I yank the leather past its loop as fiercely as I would shed armour after a battle.
He breaks our kiss, my teeth snagging his bottom lip as he pulls back, and I expect him to chastise me for not being more careful with what is likely an expensive belt, but he grins at me and says, “There’s no rush. In this moment, time is all yours.”
If this isn’t all some cruel trick, then he is right; I should savour this, relish in its sordid bliss.
My fingers reach almost instinctively to his jaw, brushing the sharp line of bone in reverence, my touch more delicate than it had been even with Father’s most treasured artifacts. They linger there for a moment, before dipping below his chin, running down the lines of his throat and thumbing the ridge of his clavicle beneath the collar of his shirt.
But I find myself blocked by the fabric, by the tie around his neck, and so my fingers thread through the weave of the tie, tugging gently as I swallow, almost ashamed, my cheeks ruddy and warm.
He smirks, but says nothing, and loosens his tie in one fluid motion, undoing the two ends so that they fall around his neck. He knows I’ve never done this before.
I unfasten the first few buttons of his shirt, my fingers now gliding across flesh that burns hot, that burns living – flesh that thrums, steady, with the beating of a seemingly-mortal heart.
Though fascinated, I let my hand travel some more, leaving the volcanic veneer of his flesh and letting it slip back over his shirt, running down the thin fabric until my fingertips tease the hem of his slacks, and I notice his eyes flutter, irises darkening with ink black, as I begin to grope at him through fabric that is frustratingly denser than his shirt. I feel him twitch beneath my palm. I bite my lip, a jolt of electricity shocking me from the depth of my core to the top of my skull, and a demur smile quirks at the line of my mouth as he moans out a beautiful sound, hot breaths fanning my already-burning cheeks.
Fingers tighten around my waist, and he leans in again, our lips brushing and our breaths panted fervently against each other’s teeth before I pull back, only half an inch or so, to smirk and say, “What happened to ‘no rush’?”
“That was before you decided to take advantage of the situation,” he huffs, mousy lashes shrouding those ocean eyes as his gaze darts to my lips to the line of my breasts to the hem of the fabric that he thumbs above my hipbone. For someone who can command the clock with a mere whistle, he is surprisingly impatient in this moment that he can stretch to eternity if he so desires.
“I’m only making use of my token,” I tell him, a thread of mischief entwining itself into my tone, and I notice him catch his teeth in his lip. Our noses are brushing, breaths still entangled, and I bring my hand up to undo the slacks that have been forgoing my descent into debauchery.
He is eager to shed my clothing; my shirt comes down at my elbows from buttons that may have been popped, my boots clatter to the floor, my trousers are slipped from the bare of my legs and goosebumps raise along the flesh, the lacquer of the bar colder than I had initially thought.
He looks me in the eyes as he sidles my panties down my hips, oceans seeming to catch fire, surely turning mine to molten rock.
I shiver, not from the cold, but from the light fabric that brushes the crest of my toes, and then he has all of me before him – all of my vessel, in her battered, bruised flesh and her sunken eyes but her purity.
Long fingers pry my legs apart, and he breaths his question down the nape of my neck, setting the fine hairs on end, “And you’re sure you don’t want your wings back?” His voice has dropped into something husky, something dark. But it does not bring me fear. Only want.
I swallow, tongue dry, the moisture perhaps evaporated from the magma that bubbles from the very core of me to the top of my head, and I spare the thought only a moment of consideration.
I never want to go back. To go back would be to live an eternal nightmare. And would that be any better than a fleeting dream?
And his touch, it feels too heavenly to be a sin, the sharp, sun-kissed lines on his softened face too angelic to be of Hell.
“Yes,” I breathe, running my hand down the bare trail I had revealed of his chest, fascinated still by the faint thrumming of his heart and the flesh that has become volcanic as mine, still burning to the touch.
His lip twinges into a smirk, the flash of gapped teeth and sparkling eyes in my vision before it undulates, seems as if I have been thrust underwater, staring through the surface of the waves and catching the glitter of two suns tinted by blue.
I am no stranger to pain, but even I gasp as he seems to split me in two; the magma in my gut seems to solidify, crack, fragment into fiery ropes that slice through me.
I grasp feverishly at his loose shirt, but it only tugs him closer to me, his shattered breath fanning across my collarbone and the strip of hot flesh down his chest meeting mine. I am whelmed by fire, thrust into the deepest pit of Hell only to emerge above the highest clouds of Heaven as new sensations begin to race through me, from where he buries himself inside me all the way out to my forearms, up to the crest of my tingling skull that falls back as lips part in panted, ardent breaths.
His warm lips are on my neck, his hot, shattered breaths coming against it, the graze of his teeth against my flesh as his fingers brace my hips, the chafe of my thighs against the lacquer barely a fragment of the entire innervation.
My muscles seem to tense, my legs kicking upward to engulf his waist, currents of electricity pointing my toes and my loins burning hot as they tuck around him, as if to pull him closer into the inferno that is our lust. My hands have resorted to gripping his shoulders now for stability, though one slips to cradle the hammer of his heart against his ribcage, as if it is mine to hold, if only for this moment.
Though there are no words spoken between us, we create music; there is a rhythm to our fevered breaths, a beauty to our moans that seem to echo their yearning for more, voracious yet elegant.
That is until I am plunged into rapture, my soul grasping at my ribs as if begging to leave my body, my head lost in the ether, my spine a gateway for the streaks of bliss that envelope every nerve, every fiber of my being, and for a moment I am almost afraid that I will combust; my insides burn hotter, and I collapse over the man’s shoulders, my chin settling limp into the groove of his neck.
The guttural sounds that are cast to my ear seem to ground me, bring me back down from my blithe, though I am undone; and so, it seems, is he. I am not sure which one of us is trembling, but despite our plummet back to Earth, we are alive with a hum of energy, and that ethereal thread that had once pulled us close seems to tether, knot. My soul is not reaching for the sky at all, but for him, for the beating of his heart, and for what may as well be an eternity, I let the remnants of what I have been reduced to remain captive against its pulse, let him remained buried inside of me so that that thread never frays.
When he does leave me empty, I ache; my own heart freezes in my chest, and as I pull my head back, strands of messed hair cut my vision as I seek out his eyes.
They are there, their tides finally calmed, but still alive and glittering, still entrapping my soul. His thumb comes to brush along my jaw, and I can feel the tease of his lips against mine, feel the way my soul reaches for his as I sink into the kiss eagerly.
But he pulls away with that gloating smirk, and his sharp whistle stirs the unruly strands of hair from my face. The light moves again across his features, and the faint lamentations of gulls echo in the backdrop of our little, seemingly-separate existence. But it is not the high pitch of his whistle that instills dread heavy in my gut or animates my spent body with a horrid flinch, but the tenebrous note of the clock.
Tick.
---
Humans talk about Heaven as if it is an escape from life, some craved destination that they are all too eager to reach. But they don’t know what they have.
I wouldn’t trade the sunset for anything, the brush of magenta beneath the darkening clouds, the soft glow of fire as the sun melts into the ocean. I wouldn’t trade the touch of a man, the warmth that seeps into every pore, the elation of mind and body. I wouldn’t trade the tinny yet resonating notes of the vagrant’s guitar, the way your soul leaps at every note, the way they become your lifeblood if you allow yourself to sink into them.
I linger a while at the festival in the darkened alleys, trying to mimic some form of dance beneath the glow of the paper lanterns as I bump shoulders with people of all shapes, sizes and energies; once a concrete sea, the city is alive, bursting with colour and music and heady aromas of perfumes and spices.
But as much as I attempt to sink into the lovely notes of the song, the buzzing of life, the lurid yet enchanting lights strung in the air above like pigmented stars, the weight of Emit’s token seems to lift me above it all, the incessant feel of it in my pocket. He had given it to me before I left the bar.
I freeze in my languid motion, my body and soul snared by the steel-blue gaze that peers at me from the sea of bodies. Still swathed in a black suit, he would be almost invisible if he were to step from the glow of the lanterns and into the shadows of the alley, but against the colourful robes and costumes of the crowd, I am amazed that no one else seems to notice him.
A sigh of air crashes from my lungs like a tide, and my shoulders loosen, as his gaze flits down to a pocket-watch that he holds in one hand, the brass winking in the glow of one of the lanterns.
Past the soothing notes of the guitar, I can almost hear the faint yet drilling sound…
Tick.
I blink, and he is gone, and I wonder if he was ever there.
Time is haunting me.
I leave the festival, enter once more the wasteland of the drab streets lit by simple, white lights; I pass by the shop in which I had glimpsed the crystals, know that I am close to where the old woman had perished.
The sidewalk where she fell is empty. The crowd, having dwindled in the absence of light, pass by, as if she had never even existed. The only semblance of her left are the bitter threads of fear that slither across my heart.
I never want to be emptiness, never want to be gone.
The thought is enough to make me look around, casting glances at the shadow of each alley, seeking out the blue-eyed man as if in comfort. But he, too, is gone. And his remnant lies in my pocket.
The air is stale, though the fresh yet salted kiss of the ocean still lingers on my tongue; the sweetness of vanilla seems to have seeped into the fibers of my clothing, and as I settle into the abandoned building I have been subsisting on, hear the patter of the crying roof, the creak of the rotting boards beneath my boots, I keep these gifts with me, bringing my nose to the fabric of my shirt once I free it from my body, roll my tongue in my mouth as if to savour that kiss of the ocean forever.
A storm had broken the dark clouds of the evening, and the patter of rain against the floor seemed to grow louder each minute, seems to mimic that wretched clock in its perfectly-timed beat.
At last, I dig Emit’s token from my pocket. It is a bottle, barely the length of a small dagger. I can just faintly catch the reflection of my vessel’s hollow eyes in the dull sheen of the flickering candlelight that dances across the glass.
The bottle itself is empty, save for a small, folded note.
“Take this,” he’d said, his hot breath raking down the side of my neck as he slipped the bottle into my pocket, that sea-gaze catching mine once more. “Open it whenever you wish to relive the moment.”
I look out the cracked glass of the window, at the newspapers and wrappers that swirls, rampant, in the storm, in the deadness of the street. My soul aches; it yearns to become alive as it stares into the empty.
So I open the bottle, popping the cork and letting the note fall into the palm of a hand I hadn’t realized was shaking until now.
My heart is in my throat as I unfold the note, my breath trapped in my lungs. The unending rain patters against the floor.
It reads:
SALLY’S, 1029 BLEAKER STREET.
Something in my soul stirs, quirks my lip into a smile, and my breath is released from the cruel cage of my lungs, and the pockets of my chest that have been stripped so bare begin to warm with the faintest trace of feeling, of hope, of what I have sought ever since my fall.
Time is mine.
The Archer
Bike Ride
The Drunkard
The Hunter
The Con-Artist