Breathe Fire

She stood on the fire escape, fingers clutching the railing, cigarette at her lips. Navy eyes stared out at the night, looking over rooftops, scanning the dark for a familiar something, anything. It was there, in the space between moments, the moment between heartbeats, the heartbeat between awake and asleep. He was there.

Somewhere.

“You’re out there,” she said, inhaling, exhaling. “You’re out there, far away,” she whispered, pulling the cigarette from her mouth and putting it back, licking her lips and tasting the sweet of the cloves there.

“Can you hear me?” she wondered. “Can you hear me, wherever you are? Tuned in through some kind of fucked up radio? Is it in your dreams? Am I? I know this isn’t easy for either of us, but you have to admit, you didn’t think it would be this hard, did you?”

She looked at the cigarette for awhile, in her long-fingered hands.

“This is me,” she murmured.

Then she flicked it away from herself, watching it sail, in a whorl of bright red-orange sparks, to the alleyway floor, where it seemed like a miniature fireball, an explosion that burned itself out in less than a moment.

She turned away from herself, and was gone.