The start of something else.

Steamed

Her thigh piston wheezed, coughing out a trickle of grey smoke and dripping lubricant onto the tiled floor.  She was pressing an oil rag to the hole, roughly stuffing the damp cloth into italicised chasm with a long finger, cursing in short, hard breaths.  Frank wandered over from behind the counter and set down the espresso she’d called for twenty minutes ago, shaking his head at the mess but standing in it all the same.  He left greasy prints of his left boot all the way back to the coffee machine.

Masey wasn’t paying any attention to her or the whining limb, holding the battered shall she’d pried out of her leg close to his eye.  Squinting at the inch long, copper-streaked shell, he whistled through the fine gap between his front teeth.  “I bet this would’ve hurt if you had any nerves left.  You know, if you hadn’t sold them all, already.”

“Still a damn inconvenience though,” Liddy replied, pulling her grey lips back in a grimace.  Her teeth flashed with misdirected neurons.  When she spat she forgot something, so she swallowed everything.  “Rain’s gonna get in here now.”

Pocketing the bullet to make into jewellery later, Masey cracked his neck and looked for Frank to see where his eggs were.  “Nuthin’ wrong with a bit of rain in your boots.” 

Liddy shook her head and flared her nostrils, cutting up the skin on her fingers as she forced more and more of the rag fabric into her.  Her fingers sealed up in white lines so fast that they came away covered in a new pattern.  “Boots is one thing.  Ma knee is another.  There, that’ll do it until I can get a patch job.”

He nudged her tiny porceline cup at her to make room as his eggs finally arrived.  They lay like scales across the back of a roasted piglet, and he covered it all in heavy grains from the salt shaker.  “I gotta say, Lid: this ain’t exactly what came to mind when you hollered having breakfast at me.”

Setting her leg back down to bend it experimentally, Liddy gave him a half shrug and hooked up her expresso with her two most used fingers, balancing the rim between her knuckles.  “Yeah, life’s funny like that sometimes.”

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