Black squares pulled at the soles of my shoes, one unlaced. Brick-red fake bricks were wrapped serpentine 'round a solid cement beam, shimmeringly glazed by epoxy and daylight.

It shone white on the left half a bedraggled face. The other half smirked, sitting cross-legged under a wall-less window, eating carrot sticks with chopsticks.

There was dust in my nose, dust in my eyes, in the blank between us. How I ached to pull up my skin, burning under thousands of minute needles, and the diaphragm-tugging grip of "come closer."