Finally Never Again
Heartbeats were rare in the city. The alleys teemed with lumbering shadows, moonlight catching kisses and threats on sharp-toothed smiles at every corner, but hardly a heartbeat to be found. Fresh meat just didn’t run like it used to. All the streets were empty. Even the pigeons had gone home to dinner, little fleshless wings gnawed and bloodless, bones scattered to runes and ruin, abandoned on the pavement.
He was hungry. Always hungry, always dying of hunger, but always already irreversibly dead. He used to be something great — something to be proud of — but these days there weren’t enough rats and pigeons floating in the gutters to feed a cat. He heard the city’s silence echoing in the hollow, empty cavern of his chest and he missed the noise there, missed the feel of something living pressed against his ribs. Missed the feel of someone else’s something living shuddering in the endless, abyss pit of his stomach.
