Glass(Dana H) The smoke of cigars wafted heavily through the damp air as he hunched in the cheap metallic bar stool, with his chin on his hand, tickling his blooming five o’clock whiskers. He never had tried it, for he was not most men. Bullets of gelatin rain dotted the glass inches away from his face. A solemn face. Rung out until all the life in him was splashing down the cracked city streets.

A certain power is needed to do that to a person. A man, strong in fact. A force powerful enough to rip apart even the most solid, glued man.

The other side of the glass proved different. Faces danced in and out of view. The precise lines of every face always enthralled him, the pasts of many were stamped into the creases of their brows. And then they were gone. Just like that. Such detailed craft of the human face only to be seen for a moment. Wasted art.

In the middle of the blur, one stood still. Her porcelain skin glowed; the darkness of the sky envied her. She was behind another sheet of glass. How far? He couldn’t tell. Maybe a few feet, maybe a mile. It’s been a while, but he can’t remember that either. Years, though. The blurs kept intruding on her beauty, as they bobbed carelessly through waves of foreign objects.

He knew who she was. In another life, he may have actually executed his feelings. But the glass separated them. The glass freckled with the sky’s own tears of sorrow.

He watched her nervous hand slowly reach to melt the glass with her fiery skin, and reach into his chest, which sizzled. Pain pulsed through his body, until finally she extracted her hand, now cold with hatred, full of his heart. She sealed the glass with her glare, and floated back across the street, dropping his heart in the middle. Soon it was destroyed.

His eyelids slid open slowly, weighed down with icicles formed on the tips of his lashes. She was forty feet away now. Across a street. She looked weak behind the frosted glass of the building she was inside. Her cascading hair piled over her shoulders and on top of her arms. She made sure it covered her arms. She had always hated them.

He used all his strength to unhinge his knees from their molded state, as she did the same, careless and easy. Bells jingled, a horn sounded in the distance. She rounded the corner. And just like that, she was gone. Just another color melted into the brown blur that would surround him until the lights turned off.

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