Let your slender French fingers press tight to the trigger. No need to fire now but hold in absolute certainty you will. Press the cool steel to my temple. What is that? German? I can smell the labor on it – that stench is not from you, for you are only of flowers.
I cannot focus, Ms. Sagan. Even as I kneel on the rug, the fibers brittle with a thousand spilled drinks, and stare out over the smokestacks and ornaments of the Paris skyline. It ails me just as it ails you; I know by the sour look of your lips that you tire of my talk.
You have been more than a friend, Ms. Sagan – may I tell you that before I go? You have been a comfort all along, a tender heart on which to steady my own. I wish I could only chew on your beauty for a second, ingrain it in the cave walls of my head and the empty chambers of my heart. But alas… And that is the kicker of it all, don’t you know? You see and know beauty all your life, but then it vanishes and you soon forget it. That stimulation, that ignition of the mind: it fades and leaves a void in which only some new thrill can pour itself in.
Some have found the thrill of speed. Some have found the thrill of love or lust or sex itself. Some have found their work – or their dead-dream work, their art that will never see the appreciative eyes of another. Some die without anything filled in them at all.
I cannot say you filled me, Ms. Sagan. You come and go like all the rest, and yet your name rings in my head over and over again like some haunting melody. It comes as a religious tune, a hymn that echoes off the cathedrals paintings and gains more from those dyes than anything else. Maybe God lives only in color, and everything is color.
Even space is a color. It has to be: we proclaimed it so.
The colors of Paris sing with a pulsating, nauseating melody all their own. You must be an addict of some kind to live in this city. You visitors, you must either turn into one or get the hell out. Luckily, I have been addicted to more than you may ever know, Ms. Sagan. And I will not say I am addicted to you, because you are not my mistress and you are not my wife. You are a stranger, and I am a fallible man who needs to learn from strangers instead of mentors. I have seen little and been quiet all my life; that makes for a terrible combo at this age.
I will say, Ms. Sagan, without giving too much away, that I have been addicted to addiction, to the high and low, the speed of it all. I live on speed, Ms. Sagan, and it tires me out in the day and keeps me up in the night. It keeps me up pricking my fingers on your thorns and knowing your gilded palace along these rooftop apartments is where I would like to die. It tells me you would like it very much to see me on my knees with an open heart and a gun pressed to my temple. It smells of oil, but when it fires, it sounds like you.
Michael Koch is a writer working out of the American Midwest. He has been included in publications such as The Mind’s Eye and Wingless Dreamer.
Modern Flash Fiction 