The Fire and the Street

The golden evening sun was shooting its empty rays through the crisp November air, the light was glowing around sepia leaves and autumn trees, and Jack couldn't help but notice that everything was dying.

It seemed too strange to keep walking in such a curious stillness, so he sat down, and She sat down next to him.

The air was still, and now She was still too. The sky's pale blue was becoming swallowed by orange and the city below the hill was beggining to eclipse the sun. Jack had a song in his head that he'd heard years before; he stared across the road and listened.

Jack turned his head and glanced at Her brown eyes, those woodland eyes, that looked forward, always forward, and never to him. How could he know what was behind them? They had once a warmth, a starry smile that would speak to him across a room. They used to conceal a passion, an intensity, a fire, and sparks would fly from them into himself and the fire could spread. Jack new he hadn't done anything to extinguish it, it had just burnt out.

He continued to stare across the barren street, and wonder how somebody could sit so still for so long.

He watched a leaf dance its way down to the roadside, and his mind stung from the afwul, crippling, inevitability of it all, and the leaf twirled and twirled and the record in his head spun faster and faster and he felt sick, but the world remained still, stagnant, hauntingly sterile, and he realised, She wasn't sitting next to him anymore.