Folie à deux.

She always wanted to believe him.
She was the strong one, the one who saw the threats before they emerged, fought them away, and he was the one who sat in their victory's wake and dreamed.
“Darling,” she screamed, shaking him one day as he traced fingers over blueprints of disaster, “you’ll turn the air so that our lungs won’t take it!”
He looked at her very calmly, grinned a soft lunatic’s grin that she loved so.
“Oh, but my darling,” he kissed her forehead. “Oh, mydarling-mydarling-mydarling-” He smoothed her cheek. “We won’t need lungs to breathe.”

Tox.

Argus did not come to nightlife-sectors to mingle; he came to these locales for one reason.
For girls with blue-black skin, glittering slick as oil skimming all those innocent rivers on Baseworld.
Toxic hosts to the organic narcotics their employers paid them handsomely to administer.
And it was simple; just the smallest kiss, her mouth soft against his eager lips.
He snatched an extra hit before she could move away.
“Not a wise choice, sir.” She laughed.
Argus opened his mouth to say something smooth, but he could taste her overdose on his tongue before the temporary dysarthria even set in.

Return.

I am a reluctant host to the Color.
It’s never fully realized, ever mercurial;
Just dying to seep from my pores and eyes and flow from my mouth
and escape, far away, to places I’ve never been able to see
To sink through the floorboards of the homes owned by sensation.
Maybe, just maybe, tonight, when I close my eyes against the pulsing music
The Color will break free and leave me and my dull life behind,
because if there’s one thing it deserves, it’s to be rid of me and my inhibitions
and leave me monochrome.

Unplug.

Echo desired nothing more than to drop off the grid; she wanted to remove herself from a labyrinthian network of relationships, dramatized romances, and malcontent sermons of the white-suburban teen.
A step back, so that the important things might reappear. It had been so long since she had truly known what was worth chasing after.
She wanted to breath.
And so she shuffled out from under her bindings of necessity, ducked beneath a thin, silver leak of actual merit, and grasped with both hands the doorknob of the only portal out of this place.
She slipped out into a mundane reality.

Promise.

Summer's so close she can taste it, soft on her lips; an insect's little kiss.
It tastes salty, and a little like disappointment.
It tastes like an eternal whisper of, "look what you've done now."
You screwed it up again.
All you do is screw it up.
Summer is replaced by a promise of familiar failure.
She won't meet those people, won't make those friends
Won't ever share passionate words with a stranger on the subway.
Complacency, her old friend and playmate,
with whom she passes the hours, staring out the stained glass panels of her life
ever breathing, "What if?"

hunger.

We demand everything, and in this gluttony, reject all good things, laid before us as a feast.
Thankless, thoughtless, we throw the nourishment far from us, pursuing instead the raw, seething flesh,
and while the blood is still on our lips, we cry out for more, and hunger eternally for what we have refused.
To the heavens, we scream our hatred.
"It is not enough for our world to spin us along," we cry, "we must turn it beneath our feet, and bring our desires to our outstretched hands."
We demand motionlessness, fostered by convenience.
He bears understanding, fostered by Love.

Snatcher.

There is something deeply alarming about waking up in a body that does not truly belong to you, no matter how many times you’ve experienced it.
It’s the deep, sinking nausea when I moving another's limbs to remove the Velcro straps that hold me to the practitioner's table.
This body was not mine.
I stare in the mirror, twist a lock of someone else's hair, and remain silent.
"She's gorgeous," Iris says, sliding a latex-clad hand across her shoulder.
I don't have words for her tongue to spill.
Iris fills the silence with his own words. He laughs. "Damn, I'm good."