For pookiechick.

Frank/Bob
Tangerine
Crawl
Gun powder


there are

The circlets on Frank’s fingerpads are buzzing with nicotine like lightening-strike victims. He thinks they might wield power; a temporary ability to hold cars aloft by spreading his digits, like Magneto. He’s almost alone in this stripped apartment in Paris. Gerard and Mikey are drinking coffee on the Seine, talking about weather in their strange brotherly code. Ray is.... at a whorehouse, for, he said, the novelty of it. A cabaret in Paris.

Bob is in the kitchen, potting dwarf tangerine trees for the owner of this place. It’s a kind of exchange: his gardening skills for the use of these hardwood floors that are close to the Eiffel Tower, as arranged through a mysterious connection of Mikey’s. Frank, he doesn’t think about details like that. What he cares about is work. Fine work. The twisting of thick wire by delicate white fingers and fingerprints in ruby soil.

“Can I help?” he asks from the doorway, a teacup in his hand.

Bob smiles luxuriously, taking the time to look up and stretch his friendly face. “Yeah,” he says, “taste this:” he holds up a tiny fruit so bright it might glow in the dark. Frank takes it, setting down the teacup with a click against old tile, and splices it down the center with his Salvation Army knife. Bob beams in encouragement. Frank brings it to his lips, whole, not bothering to seperate the sections, and bites.

The taste is like fresh glory in the morning. The taste, he can’t describe.

Bob says, “There was only one. It’s too early in the season.”

“Thank you.”

He grins. “I think it grew for you.”

Suddenly, the cracking scream of gunshots, coming from outside. They hit the floor in synch. Frank’s immediate thoughts are shoot out, shoot out, and then he laughs because they’re in Paris, not New Jersey, and then laughs harder when he thinks it might be terrorists.

Bob looks confused but not afraid. He asks, “What’s the date?”

“July 14th.”

“Oh,” he says through pursed lips, “it’s Bastille Day.”

He crawls to the floorlength windows in the drawing room with Frank following, trying to remember what those words mean. There are men lined up outside in Revolutionary fanfare, firing muskets into sky above the main street, sending clouds of gun powder through every open window. When the scent reaches them, it is solemn and familiar.

Bob reaches for Frank’s sweet, sticky hand and says, “Look at them: how free.”

in your angles.