Pulse

The repeated chill slaps of wind dove and grasped locks of hair in their talons, attempting and failing each time to carry away the prize. Iron railing thinner than the blood that crawled hot and labored throughout dysfunctional veins bit into the tender flesh of bare feet spaced precariously around one another. One minor miscalculation of balance would send them over an edge more palpable than that which they had already dropped from. The thriving burn of billboard lights and streetlamps lay languid and opalescent before them, a starry scape of smog and over-population. Distant, surreal, as the murals of heaven's complexity displayed in the aged ceilings of Florence. The span of the world had been slain and presented upon a table for their last meal.

Fingers wrapped tight, without constriction, twined together and slowly (achingly so) sliding against one another as bodies making love might. Cherished, embraced, fortunate in many a thing. But not quite fortunate enough. The scents mingled and became the singular signature of their unity; strawberry with melon and chocolate with sweat. Fragile and soon stolen by the gusts of air only to be reclaimed when lips touched like the passing of a love note from hand to hand. Tears of defeat caught and broke into a fine sheen of glass between discolored cheekbones. Spreading over skin like the decay of human organs. A disease. Pure droplets that held the unpleasant sharpness of sodium falling, wasted. Arms so tight ('stay with me, stay with me') were bony and brittle inside their sleeves of flesh. Time tap tap tapped like a leaky facet's discharge. We are all dying, aren't we?

Forever had never been more finite. So like an axe dropping to sever two exquisite heads and spill the blood that bore their damnation. The ships in passing had met their untimely demise upon the salt-scored rocks with naught but a taste of the otherworldly shores beyond. They were doomed before their time with such lofty aspirations unfulfilled. Bitter irony sunk in its teeth and shook like a rabid dog until they both had begun to fly apart from the motion. How curious that the ultimate bliss would be their bullet to the back of the head. They had taken their sentence in stride, of course. The second of the lives ruined would have been spared only in body, not in heart, and the decision was to proceed to the pyre to burn. This was the ultimate 'I love you'. This was the best/worst display of a homophobic justification ever to slide through the cankerous open legs of its close-minded mother.

The drop was a purposeful, no-nonsense distance below. Tugged taught and imposing between the ground and the sky, for it was not excessive enough to give the illusion of a flight without end. To jump would be a long drop and a quick stop with a fleeting thought that this would hurt. Lips chapped and blanched pressed a kiss to the shoulder of his animated saint, blessing a sharp nub of bone that he thought should have born a wing.

“They'll make us martyrs.” Said one to the other, golden lashes whispering sweet-nothings against the cheek of his partner.

“How can an angel be a martyr?” Was the response, embrace tightening with the dearly departed strength he once wielded.

“Angels have wings. Martyrs are given flight only by remembrance.”

“All they will know of us is what we’ve done wrong.”

“No, it was what we did right that caused this. It’s called irony; God’s way of making a statement.”

“Wherever I go, I want you to come with me. Don’t leave me.”

Eyes pleading justice, mercy, acknowledgement of an agony paid in full. Cheek to cheek, softly nudging as if they could guarantee something uncertain.

“I came for you once. Twice. I’ll do it again.”

“Remember me?”

“I promise.”

They exchanged a smile and the murmur of what might have been (in the gravity of conventional romance) a kiss… and they flew.