Watching the aphids snow down from the window through the window in his temporary office, Martin thought about drugs. New drugs, cyber drugs. It had started innocently enough; sober for 10 years, when his office mate suggested a drug free addiction in the form of online troll basing. It was simple, you typed in a different address emailed to you each week, and feasted your eyes on patterns and swirls that made your mind drip and drool into your cerebral cortex. It was heady, techy, weird ass shit. Martin remembers reading some story as a kid about this music you could listen to from this black market cassette that was supposed to do the same thing. So he signed up, paid his dues, and typed in the address. He didn't know how...but it worked.
So he checked it at work once in the bathroom, scrolling through his phone, getting caught up/high, then walked back to his desk and watched the aphids, covered in their own snowy sugar feces, fly around outside. It looked pretty until you had to clean off your car/grill/bicycle/deck. he could care less. He was high and nothing else mattered.

Smoked drifted up form the ashtray that lay on his belly. Sweat kept his leg glued to hers as he stared into the ceiling fan above him; spent. She halfway rolled over and kept trying to find a cool spot in the dank sheets. Marcel picked up his cigarette and took a slow, thoughtful drag. "I don't care that you are leaving," he joked scratching her calf with his toe nail. Music played in the other room where the evening started: half eaten food, plates; the kicked over chair. She reached over and thumbed the old Saint necklace that was his granddad's. "Assisi," she asked?

He wiped away the moisture from his beer and motioned to her to sit down on the tailgate of his truck. The humidity played tricks with her shirt; sticking to one arm, hanging freely from the other. They sat for a while listening to the loud cicadas calling back and forth from the hydrangeas and the little dogwood tree he had planted. The radio was playing a local baseball game.  She couldn't tell if he was following it or just had it on for something to listen to.
Do you even like baseball, she said grabbing his beer and taking a pull. 
 

"So we generally start by asking you tell a couple of lies about yourself."
"Um, ok. I am 5'9", I break dance.."
"Ok, stop. We need to calibrate."
Deborah pulled a long cigarette out of her pack and started patting down her pockets, looking for a lighter.  The room had a greenish tint to it but Deborah doubted she would call it "green."  She found her lighter and lit her cigarette.  Warm light flooded though the dusty windows and she took a small drag and then held out her hand with the cigarette in it, studying her fingernails.  She had used a burgundy sorta of wine color; malbac?   She tapped the cigarette twice with her pointer finger even though there was barely an ash.  She could hear a train somewhere in the distance, she thought about a movie she saw about squatter punks.  What happened to their dogs, she often thought?  And face tattoos?  Fuck that.
She pulled out her phone and started thumbing through photos of herself.  Mostly in black for the last several months all of the pictures looked the same:  sharp, black bangs, black shirt, black pants...black.  She read the black made you look thinner and that was all she needed.  She took a polite drag and blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth, setting her chin on her hand.  She was looking up with a "sigh" look on her face like she saw in a movie, or read about.  No one was even watching her.