Cocaine flame in my bloodstream, sold my coat when I hit Spokane, bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes in the early morning rain.

I went sniffing around that old flat we used to share and it was hollow and dank, birthing darkness from it's center that the light from the windows could not overcome and your smell had long since melted away.

I walked outside and looked at the river and let the rain have me and I don't know for how long, all I know is that I am…

In the late night study sessions, the ones with the beer and chips and giggling and without the books, she had proudly maintained that he was the one professor she would screw for a grade, if it came to it.

So here she sat, intentionally his last appointment on a Friday afternoon, her jeans like some sort of additional membrane, blouse cut low enough to see all of the poor decisions that had lead to her 68 average in his class, feeling vaguely reptilian as his wife and…

7AM: In the maudlin and gauzy light of dawn the promontory draws itself into the sky above me, the old jigsaw stone peering down on the broken mess of me like a disappointed father standing over a son who's just fallen off his bicycle again.

8AM: The pain is like something out of a medieval fable and I'm cold and the world is getting smoky and thin.

9AM: I can't know when they might find me under the mantlepiece but I pulled the thing on the box and the blink is…

She laid the blankets and the sweaters in the old pine chest and then arranged them, shuffled them, took some out and moved others and replaced those removed, as though they were school children requiring deliberate placement lest troublemakers be seated together. Above the lid of the chest a window to the west, the sun bleeding the last white daubs off the spines of the Smokies, a choir of wildflowers in the nearer valley fields swaying in synchronous chaos, each hearing a different band…