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The filmy, anorexic monochrome clouds started to drag themselves wearily across the overcast horizon.  They whispered secret silence, and it drifted down to him, telling him it was time to leave.  A barely perceptible, infinitely high-pitched note, the likes of which one hears in horror films, suspended itself in the humid air of the greenhouse.  The smudged panes faded in and out of reality, translucent and glassy like dragonfly wings.  His shirt stuck insufferably to his chest.  He struggled to breathe, sucking in musky moss-tinged moisture. Turning, rotating in slow motion, his skinny fingers found the metal knob of a door.  Rusty and coo

"You've never read it?" She looks up at me, squinting, from a stained page of an old mystery paperback that had been sitting by the door.  The sun bathes us in boiling buttery heat, baking my legs in their jeans and illuminating the bridge of her nose as she contemplates me.  Her shirt is the color of daffodils and her arms glow in the sun, bony and bent at the elbows.  "No.  I've been sort of caught up on history volumes and memoirs lately." I turn my head to gaze out onto the suburban street, knowing she's speaking metaphorically.  The glass door has fingerprint smudges on it, and across t

My memories of you are like delicate, feathery dandelions, springing up in every crammed corner of the garden where I grow my thoughts.  I remember your feet, those bony, awkward things that left prints in cotton-colored clouds and got singed on the heels when you strode onto the sun to see if it would hold you up in the sky.  You smelled like freshly laundered linen and the stubby, square-tipped crab-grass that we liked to walk barefoot through on sun-faded Thursdays with our pinky fingers linked.  The wind tugged at your flax-colored hair, tousled lightly atop your fine-boned forehead.   You were a f

Our story was told in the shared warmth of a bus that traveled through the vacuum of an autumn midnight.  Your mind was hopeless and barren, but I traced your palm with timid lines of ink and brought a long-awaited smile to your lips, placed so perfectly on your harshly sun-kissed face.   Your faded crimson t-shirt smells of clean soap and the spearmint gum that always laces your breath, and when you look at me I sometimes glimpse lightning crackling in your periwinkle eyes, chips of swirling gray-blue-green storm clouds. Your arrogance is like the vivid splotches of magenta that you can paint on my cheeks with your awkwardly craft

Your initial presence was merely a scent of sickly sweet black cherries followed by the shock of emerald eyes that left my balancing on my heels.  In my fantasies you carries a gilt dagger hidden in your vest and an aura of mystery, an invisible vapor hanging about your shoulders. You twined silken jet-black ribbons of paranoia through my hair and into the fabric of my thoughts with your elegantly dextrous fingers.  Your eyes studied me from the depths of every gemstone ring and your footsteps echoed through the empty hallways of my very veins.  I tried to lose you in the twists and turns but I lost my own conscious in the maze of my naive a

He contented himself with scorched tales in shades of burgundy fed to him as words on a page, and burnt shadows hung around him, holding secrets within the threads of their stitching.  His foes wore masks carved from the fading embers that were reunited in the distance of his past, twisting and growing into the the flame of his emotions.  It roared and churned and smashed him to obsidian shards that he picked up and kept inside his coal-glass eyes.  In his heart he hid the silken threads of memories, things-not-known guarded with the aura of a mystic fire-eater. She was a maiden that tread on water, her blood dr

Your eyes were a melted mixture of moonlight and dusty lavender that spilled from the sky and dried as the jet black of ink on my paper.  I smudged you out with the calloused pads of my fingers but you stained them with memories of humid summer air and freckles.  You were never a boy of wisdom, and your carelessness was like the washed out color of bleached plastic.  We explored a world of Macaroni & Cheese and pale green foliage and you kissed me quickly and awkwardly while the breeze wound through our fingers like unseen snakes and chilled our sweaty skin. Somehow I took a liking to the sharp, narrow angles and points that were glued toget