In Milan.

The lightbulbs are moths dancing through the bars and streets. There are too many words in between our orders. Cappucino stained khaki killers stalk the streets with amber looks and black locks, soft mirages of love.

The hotel room quavers like a voice on Sundays, singing hymns. When I lock the door the key is heavy with trust. I trust the key. I don't trust men or women. How can we still live in a world where we don't trust anything with a heartbeat? If it is alive it will like to you and I understand that idea as well as I will ever understand it...I knew from the beginning that even our eyes will lie to us when they can, when we let them, when we cajole their condolences.

I count steps to the Duomo and the numbers click through my head with the precision of a wristwatch, of a sundial without numbers. The Church is silent on its own and no matter what we do it will stay that way. I want to scream, facing stained glass windows that must have tasted like they looked, raspberry kisses left on marble pillars. We are forgetful but God forgives us. It is important that we forgive God at some point as well. Morrissey knew it first, or last.

Montenapoleone is bursting with wealth, numbed sincerity that smears across the face like a cream. Everything is a cream. Everything can be rubbed into our pores until we believe it, until it is part of us. Italy wails unrepentant and I wish I were a bag of coke, swallowed up by a group of beautiful faces, lit fires under a brick oven.

It is Sunday but I wonder what day it is anyways and that, that has to be the meaning of life.

-Rich and I won't come down for anyone

The Sterling avalance.

Emile walked out of the wake that evening just as the dew was getting tired. The air was wet and cold, and when he breathed out the cloud of grey air that escaped was peppered with moisture, like seeds on a fresh loaf of bread. Emile tightened his jacket around him and turned the collar up, shivering momentarily when the collar brushed against the back of his neck. He was warm and it had nothing to do with fireplaces or women and everything to do with whiskey.

His father had left the wake early, perhaps sensing the mood changing towards raucous appreciation for life, and wanting nothing to do with it. His boy was dead in a way that is different from the death that followed Emile, black and brittle like glass. Emile watched him go and then turned to the people gathered to celebrate his brother's life. They stood arrayed in front of him, waiting for him to begin the festivities. Emile felt like a murderer does when the first light of day crests the horizon and colors his hands red. He raised his glass and drank down a glass of wine, turning away as he did so. The crowd followed suit, and as the flush of alcohol threaded itself across the room, Emile allowed himself to blend into the feelings that surrounded him, pale vinegar stains on wallpapered rooms.

A girl was weeping across the room and nobody seemed to notice except for Emile. The girl was his brothers's girlfriend or so he assumed and he made his way through a jostling crowd to say something. He stopped in front of her, her eyes facing his shoes, and realized only then that he did not know what to say. He did not offer any condolences to her at all, even when she halted the flow of tears long enough to look at him, perhaps to vaguely recognize in him the features that she recognized in Mason's face. Perhaps his cheekbones were as prominent as those of a skull. Perhaps he had the same ring of grey around his irises that faded into a tired blue during the winter months. She looked at him and nodded a hello and then walked away towards the bar. Emile wondered why his brother had dated her at all - he saw nothing in her that traveled well with beauty. She smelled like lemons, Emile noted.

-Rich
the beautiful damsels watch television

the coldest air lives longer.

Three days later the weather was unnaturally warm. The trees began to show the sprouts and bulging backs of leaves - tentatively checking to see whether it was safe to bloom. Sunlight no longer reflected coldly against the water of the harbor. Emile was wearing all black and standing with one hand crossed under the other in front of him.

Emile's father was not Mason's father and yet he mourned as one would expect from a father whose son is dead. His silence was broken by heavy breathing throughout the viewing of the body. Emile could hear his breathing, and would turn sometimes to look at his father who wept single tears at a time, each tear carving a path down mottled skin and next to an insurmountable nose. Emile stood at the other end of the coffin from his father and watched the crowd with his hands pressed together and he did not move them. He did not want to shake anyone's hand and he did not give the crowd any opportunity to do so - his eyes seemed focused on something above and to the right of the approaching mourners and he had stepped back a few steps towards the back corner of the coffin, on the side where Mason's head lay on a silk pillow.

Emile would look down at his brother when there were breaks in the stream of well wishers. His brother, despite the heat, looked so cold. The cheeks were ashen but with livid spots that looked like the aereolae of nipples. The hair was carefully brushed and the eyes were closed gently, as if only setting down for a nap. Emile thought he could smell a subtle note of chemicals and decay but he wasn't sure and he did not want to ask anyone else. He wondered if the body was frozen inside, to the core. The funeral home had taken great care to make the body seem alive, but this seemed only more distasteful to Emile. His brother was dead. Let that be the truth of it.

Emile stood and watched the sunlight move along the length of the coffin until it was almost at his brother's face. It worried him that the sunlight might hit and suddenly the face would melt, it would dredge away and the bone would stare mockingly back like a white canvas. He realized that his brother was dead and that he could no longer think of him as a person. He realized that the entire day, he had found his position tedious and that he wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep for as long as possible. He realized that he had not thought of this body as anything but a collection of parts and the realization tired him - his body sagged forwards as if his spine had lost all of it's resilience. Emile looked towards his father and not a single tear escaped his eye, even as he watched this man still crying, still mourning, still howling silently. The funeral progressed as quietly as before, the sound of shuffling feet and quiet condolences a roman candle in the bell jar of the day.

-Rich

sometimes it isn't you

In the gardens of a dream.

At around the same time that Emile was helping an old man load what seemed like an inappropriate amount of luggage into the back of his car, Emile's brother Mason who was standing a bit behind him on the curb of the sidewalk was shot three times in the chest. The three shots echoed as if the bullets had been thrown against the rock walls of a canyon, and their dull reverberations were the loudest thing Emile had ever heard. Emile turned just in time to see a look of soft surprise fix itself to his brother's face, the eyes wet as polished marble, the lips a curious mix between bemused certainty and sudden embarrassment. Emile did not see the shooter; he saw with very little clarity(and even less after shock had chipped the edges of his memory) a khaki colored overcoat and the thin trickle of smoke that came from a brutish length of iron - surely the barrel of a gun. In the middle of his focus he saw only the three red roses that blossomed over the flat, canvas-like texture of his brother's trenchcoat. Later, Emile would recall that image as if the scene had been a painting from the Romantic period - every part of the body an icon and bearing as little relation to reality as the geometric boundaries of the human body, with all of the humanity clasped desperately to the face, the upturned face of sinful naivete. Emile would always see the roses blooming and a peculiar scent would tease him from the depths of that moment - a smell like that of rain soaked leather turned old by the color of water and the salt taste of perspiration. Emile's memory felt like a riverbed covered by the kind of pale sun that is almost certainly indistinguishable from the moon. By the time Mason's body had fallen to the ground, rigidly, unlike what one is accustomed to seeing in movies, Emile had noticed nothing and had not moved at all, not even to breathe. When he did breathe it was a sharp exhalation that felt like a soundless shout. Emile had held his breath for the few moments in which the shooting had occurred and only now did the air escape his lungs and only now, by the act of breathing, was that long, terrible moment ended. Emile mechanically placed the large parcel in his hands along with its brothers in the back of the old man's car. The old man was not looking at him, and it was doubtful that he was looking at anything at all - the shock had carried over to him as well. The old man's mouth was partially open and Emile noticed the space where one of the yellowed teeth had given in to time and decay, and had long since fallen out. It sickened him and a wave of yellowed disgust washed over his forearms, leaving him elbow deep in it's rubber texture. Suddenly he regretted having ever helped this old man. Emile blamed him, he blamed this old man's presence for what he had not yet fully comprehended...in assigning the blame to something, to anything, he understood, clearly, that his brother was dead and that he was dead because of this old man, this stupid old man who hadn't asked for help but who had received it and in doing so had taken Emile's brother along with Emile's good natured largesse. Emile looked at the old man only briefly and then stepped woodenly across the few feet of pavement to where his brother lay on the ground, unmoving. Emile noted that his eyes were still open and that the same look was fixed not only in the features of Mason's face, but also in the depths of his eyes. Emile closed his brother's eyes not because it was the right thing to do but because he could not bear to see that good natured surprise frozen deeply within the departed soul of his brother.

-Rich
the ember is full of you