Yours Truly 2016 / Cascadia College / Bothell, WA | Page 62

scent of it—set beside a still-smoking pipe
full of opium. The air around him smells
sickly sweet and very dark, but he is brittle
and paler than she, the veins prominent in
his cheeks and beneath the clear white skin
of his wrists.
“You are being unbelievably stupid,” she
replies.
His eyes snap open to glare at her, and
they manage a familiar simmering fury
despite the cloudiness obscuring the blue.
But he cannot hold them open for very long.
They can both hear the slow, unsteady thud
of his heart against his sternum. He cannot
feel it, though; he cannot feel anything
except the thick air of the room close to his
face and her standing very still beside him.
Even the sounds are muffled, sighs and cries
of other users lost in pipes and darkness.
“What do you know?” he mumbles. He
cannot even feel his own lips brushing
together as he speaks. Few things have ever
been more enjoyable.
She blows delicately through her nose.
“Plenty more than you.”
She reaches under her coat for a thin
silver knife, and with an elegant flip of her
wrist drives it into his shoulder.

He feels that.

1870
The song reaches its highest crescendo,
which is not very high at all, and dips gently

60

back down. His fingers tap the keys like rain
now, but the sound of the song is becoming
lost in the noise of the fuse. It is not really a
single fuse now, but dozens. The flame has
split amongst the single strands, inches from
the tips of the explosives. He does not watch
the sparks leave scorch marks in the thick
lacquer on the piano, does not listen to them
buzz louder as the larger fuel draws closer.
He just watches his hands as they pick out
the next section of notes. The fuses do not
end all at once, in fact moments after each
other. But he hears the explosion in nearunison, a hard blow to his ears as he strikes
the lowest note in the song.
The flames swallow him, hot and vivid
orange rimmed with deep, dark smoke. It
grows and grows and grows around him.
And then it is gone, and he is sitting crosslegged in front of a pile of ash and a row of
charred ivories like broken teeth. The marble
floors are still white between starbursts of
ashy black. The walls, though, are no longer
white and cloudy and intangible, but brittle
and crumbling and black. The door collapses
with a soft, defeated crumble.
He sits unchanged in the middle of it all,
studying his hands in his lap. They are clean
and gold, with black only on the wrists. His
fingers pass through his hair, pushing the
heavy locks off his forehead.
Only the thinnest edge of his sleeve is
charred.