NYC.
A curious connection unfolds between us in a hot summer spell, as we sit on your grandmother’s back porch. My mouth settles itself in the pit of my stomach, while cicadas quell the fear of silence.
He only speaks in harsh vowels and compliments them with the smacking of his chapped lips, that always find themselves wrapped around a cigarette. Puff-sigh. Puff-sigh.
The distressed chair groans under him as he curves closer. We drink from lukewarm tin cans that peel like velcro from the powder blue, plastic lined table. Each slurp makes conversation more fluent, creating a certain cadence with each exchange, as the crunch of time ticks by.
Our chorus eventually becomes exhausted in the early hours of morning, when the air becomes stagnant. He’ll lean back and brush his hand against his beard, like the scraping sound of sandpaper. We mute our tongues, and dull the embers of our cigarettes, that fizzle without light.
