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Coin Toss

It was a year of dripping chaos. A flash. A burst. A dizzying whirl wrapped up in the stars. A dream caught by the wind and tugged like a balloon gasping for that bizarre taste called freedom.

It was a year humming with the intoxicating radiance of youth. Where eternity is a guarantee and oblivion that grotesque thing suffocating the Rest. A weed choking out the ordinaries.

It was a day when the sun leaked in and out across the grey, dry street. Its rays like matches striking asphalt. Lit up. Ignite. A hush. A whimper. Its golden hand crept up to the dark shadow, his body at once resting against the harsh metallic wall yet floating above it all. He stood with a stillness. Blonde strands of hair washing over his eyes as his head tilt ever so softly to the ground, watching his hands flip a coin without ever seeming to touch it. A soul wandering the world without ever really being in it.

He glanced up.

A smile like a rose met his gaze and offered him a coffee cup, sliding in next to his spectral body with the ease of a lung drawing in breath. Her sharp jaw cut the biting air, soft curls like curtains framing her face- a stage ablaze with the spotlight stemming from the cigarette tip caught between her lips. A frail body clinging to a chapped parapet.

Swept into the sun they walked along the sidewalk. That long thin road stretching off to the unseen, at once offering everywhere and nowhere as a thousand souls bustle with inflated importance to their own significant lives. Must make it on time to that office you despise with the people you hate. Can’t be late to the soccer game for the insolent pain in the ass costing you a fortune for the sake of college resumes. Breathless to beat the line for that thing you need because it’s pretty and satiates your incessant hunger to feel nice and pretty too. The unbound power of things, of stuff.

Sinking like a ship fractured by a storm the sun kissed the world farewell with color. The pinks and yellows and reds unfurling in ribbons across the blinded sky. The rose danced across the girl’s lips as her cheeks inched up as if by a string.

“When I was small,” she began, “I used to count the colors in the clouds.” The words left her at once with a breathless rush and a somnolent hum, suspended transience. Her voice an oxymoron.

“I would spread out on my back in the grass or the snow without a jacket, just to feel. And I would test myself to see how many tinctures I could find. It’s remarkable, the shades of blue and purple and green underneath the banal whiteness. Or perhaps it was however many I wanted to see and imagined into the real.”

They pulled to a stop and ducked across a threshold under a red awning and a single yellow light. A trickling of notes seeped through a black curtain. A wool fedora decorated with a spotted feather sat atop a scruff of a man behind a high table. His thick voice oddly pleasant despite its echo of gravel choked by tires. “Ten dollar cover.”

Bills passed through fingers and the curtain fluttered back and in a daze they were launched into the music now pounding in their heads like indigo fire raging with a shrill fervor. The air weighed heavy and hot against their still-chilled skin, shared by the entropic limbs like flames flickering across the floor to the beat of the drum. The bodies of the strange and foreign propelled into some cosmic symphony with the dark. Those souls like notes dancing across the measure.

“Care for a drink?” he leaned in and coaxed her toward the bar. On the rocks. Neat.

With hungry eyes they watched the ephemeral shadows surrender to the restless lust spiraling up from the music. A trumpet and a bass tossed into a duel of improvisation, each acquiescing and then dominating the other with an ebbing of crescendos as if caught in a tango. The sultry lure of a Billie Holiday voice pooling out like a drug to the whimsical crowd.

The alcohol warmed their bones and numbed their thoughts. He floated like an abstract stanza pining to touch paper and be real. And so her lips sought his and wrote him into word. A narrative to be read rather than a dream harboured in the clandestine corners.

She found herself looking back at her in his eyes. Her small frame wallowing in those hazel reveries spotted with flakes of gold. She liked the girl peering back through the boy who made that thing called love seem almost possible. Almost more than the promised trope of hackneyed fairy tales and songs.

They eased toward the rocking mass and were swallowed up into the tremor of noise and heat. Suffocating under the weightless roar. Ephemeral bursts of stardust pulsing in the grandiose and spectacular, those extraordinary minutia effacing the traces of their lives at the door and succumbing to the night. The starlit palm reaching in and clutching their hearts till they forgot who they were and what they were trying to be. The world dimmed into the reduction of a jazz bar tucked under some building on some street in the middle of some city belonging to somewhere. The moment ticked past a breaking clock as time sunk away like the dying sun and the dancers skipped round the edge of eternity. Or was it oblivion?

Time came back. What nerve this character has in its demanding avarice to be the epicenter of it all. Never gone for long. And when we manage to forget it we abscond like naughty children from the scrutiny of rule and flitter off into the deviant and dangerous. For it is there we feel most alive.

“Shall we?” she asked as her being blazed with a beaming wonder, stained by the static buzz.

Waltzing into the cool air of dawn, he pulled her in and drew out the coin, flipping as they went.

It was the hour before the world woke up, just as the light began to tap in a soft cascade on the windows of the dreamers. Hurrying away the criminal beasts of the fringe societies to give way for the proper and pristine who sold their hollow souls for a buck more just to say they were better.

It was his favorite time of day. A moment caught in the abeyance, struck still in the in between.

“Tired?”

“Not yet.”

“Home?”

“Not yet.”

His hand clutched her closer so they could forget for just a tad longer.

“Where to?”

Her head tilted ever so slightly as her mind flipped through all the places to set the opening on that morning’s story.

“The beach?”

A chill shuttered in.

“The tower?”

“You pick.”

“I don’t know. I always decide. I insist on abstaining.”

With a soft roll of his eyes a smile etched across his lips and he kissed her forehead.

“Obstinate darling.”

Her nose scrunched up and she pushed him gently. The rose skipped across her face and with a sort of sudden and scooping light her eyes jumped to his hand.

“Let’s flip the coin.”

Its silver body tumbled through the frigid air with the delight of a diver plunging against the wind and into the waves. Heads.

“To the tower then,” she said as if to an audience full of no one.

Into the city they plunged against the moon, who was now no more than a faint tattoo on blue skin. Skyscrapers spiraled up and away toward infinity like human hands stretching toward the ethereal, coveting the promises of a world better than the one on which they stood. Those edifices rushing and humming into a frenzied panoply of technicolor fervor, a vibrant chaos. The sounds of the city woke in a flourish as all the city’s people sailed into the day of the unextraordinary, a cacophony of honking and stammering and hollering and barking and crying and laughing and hearts breaking and rings slipped on and off and minds unwinding and tires screeching and white packets exchanging and Death creeping and lives happening. Suddenly with a burst it wilted, and the noise fell, fell softly away like a dying poet’s pen.

Against the opaline sky it stood. A needle like Atlas’s finger holding up the weight of a thousand constellations.

Their eyes traced its silhouette, at once brutal and lissome with grace, as the railing pressed like ice against their bodies, coaxing away the heat till it seemed all there was left in the world was a certain numbness.

His eyes slid closed with a shuddering breath. The tower imprinted like a wooden laser-cutting across his shut vision so that even in the dark it was there.

The wind pierced his skin and all was quiet in that rarefied beat.

“Quick! Open your eyes.”

They fluttered open.

“What?”

“You were missing it.”

“Missing what?”

“The world.”

She stepped onto the railing, that rose of a smile slipping up like a floating ghost.

“Careful, my dear,” he cooed with only the mild twinge of concern and furrowed brow.

“Did you know,” she began, “there’s a type of flower that sits high in the canopy of rainforests. Tucked away from the madness of the jungle seething below. It’s usually pink with pointed leaves. They call it a bromeliad.”

The railing seemed to crackle around her feet. Or perhaps it was the air.

“And in this flower live small little frogs. Isn’t that funny? If they live their whole lives never bothering to look down, then they’ll never know about the whole world waiting just outside. One peak, that’s all it would take.”

She glanced up at the tower. Trailing a drop of light from needle tip to the gravel pummeled into the earth right below her.

“I always thought that was funny,” the words dripped with rarity from her lips like fresh blood never before exposed to air. She whispered with a tremble seldom heard from another.

The world fell away and like a spool of thread she unwound, unwound. The rose petals shriveling under the weight of emptiness. Everything disintegrated and nothing was everywhere. Swirling, whirling, twirling in flight to the festering hollow. Her head a mist scattered in fragments. She lost herself. But perhaps it was never hers to lose, never hers at all. No. Her self was owned by everyone, everything but her. She felt her soul untether and shed itself of whatever it was and whatever it meant to the plastic globe swarming with all the creatures of purported value and worth and hope and dreams and all those inventions charged with the burden of mattering, of making something of the utter chaos all the poor, unassuming masses stumble into. She wanted to scream, she wanted tears to tear down her cheeks in red fury, she wanted the ice of the railing, the softness of lips, the wonder of a mind ignited by curiosity, the audacity to question, the swelling heart transcended, the tracing of delicate touches, she wanted to feel. But there was nothing. Less than that. Vacant eyes skittered a glance over the railing. Just a slip, a slight tipping in this balancing act, a peak over the edge.

How enticing Nothing is.

A small pulsing pulled her senses toward her ankle and she saw a hand slowly painting circles across her skin with soft tips of fingers. In intricate swirls it inched up her leg, carrying a warmth which seemed to imbue the most delicate whisperings of sentience to each part touched. Her eyes eased close and she sank into the hands, giving up the weight of her body, of her self and surrendering to exhaustion. She was submerged, all electricity surging through her enervated like a bulb gone out. But at least it was palpable, the exhaustion was real and tangible and heavy on her lungs and cast in a gray haze in her head.

He carried her away from the ledge and into the rising sky.

The year sighed and the great world spun. The stars plucked themselves up after falling and the sun stretched its arms with inveterate ease. Dark and deep glowed the ghosts and shadows of what once was and never could be again. And the day found itself amongst the humming memories harbored in the dream-state haze and coated in gold.

She floated into consciousness to the smell of frying eggs and roasting tomatoes laced with basil. Coffee coating the toasted air. The rose petals found their way to her lips and she looked to find him watching her.

“Good morning,” she smiled.

His face lit up in iridescence, washing away time and the world rapping at the the window. With a soft coo and hazel reveries flicked with gold he held out the pan. “Egg?”

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