The slow saunter of charcoaled amber courage slithering down my throat, the old familiar burn of a love gone wrong and one too many nights spent staring at the city lights, wishing for that ******* pool of darkness to finally overtake the senses. It never happens. This place may as well be a brilliant hell-bent flame never dying out. Some broken swing jazz plays in the background, left over from an alternate time-line where life never progressed from the fall of the roaring twenties. A depressing state of depression, lost in gloom. Smoke hangs in the air like meat at the butcher shop, thick and over-powering, the somber stench of stale Camels, American Spirits, and matches burning down to the tip. Even the cool night air filled with the falling rain does nothing to move this smoke or smell away from the nostrils or eyes. It’s getting late but still the lights shine, the eyes burn, and the whiskey continues to be pored and drunk. A phone rings somewhere in the distant room, I barely make it in time before the last ring. I shouldn't have picked up. Not on a night like this...

My heart is breaking as I hear of her footsteps lightly walking away from the door, knowing the end of her walk was not much farther down the line. It’s too late to save her. A cop tapes off the scene of the ******, rain drenched and keeping reporters at bay, miserable in his line of work. But a man must earn a living in these modern times. A man must earn a living in these modern times. Her lifeless corpse lays uncomfortably on the floor, traced in chalk, with her scantly clad black dress slightly as-cued of her earthly surrogate, she looks like an angel of broken memories. Blood from her wrists and a suicide note that just doesn't seem right. The bruising on her neck looks fresh. Too fresh to be from any day or time but the present. Heavy boot prints lead on the concrete towards the streets, washing away in mud and continuing downpour. The world is on fire as the flame in my heart dies out knowing what must be done...

I sit lonely at my desk, scarred by broken glass and endless wars, sifting thru notes of tragedy that all blend into one bad noir movie repeating some forgotten enchanted quote about life and death and everything not meant to happen in between. It is what it is. It’s always what it shouldn't be. She wasn't old, just shy of some milestone birthday, but she lived hard I'm told by the few that knew her...

There's a barely audible knock on the door, heard only by the quite constant repetition of flesh meeting hardwood. I stand to open the door but before I can pull myself together to walk the some odd number of feet towards it, the door slowly opens and in steps someone I knew from a past life. There is not enough whiskey left in my glass for this encounter to be of any good...