Done.

Audrey Rose loved hurricanes beverages, something tumultuous under such a calm façade. Something deceptive. When she drank hurricanes she loved dark hair, so different than her own, maybe some place deeper to discover. Wrapped around a beer was the hand that had seen her butterflies that had reached out to her so long ago. His voice, soft, was hard to hear. Communication came between one body and the other. Words were merely a distraction. His head was covered in curls that held stories of women spread out before him. Audrey Rose reached over and plucked the hair that held her story. She swallowed it and chased it by peachy sweetness.

As soon as the hair began to slide down her esophagus she realized their story was over before it had even begun again. Still, he watched her, but there was distance in grey eyes. The storms had passed from them and now they lay flat as stone. The hair in her throat had worked its way further into her body, causing her to belch. It wasn’t a loud belch but it had the very distinctive sound of ‘done.’ Audrey Rose jumped back. Her body belched again – ‘done.’ She tried the word on her lips. The motion spread her lips apart, opening them, closing them. Freedom in the words. Time for good-byes but had there even been hellos?

Audrey Rose moved away from warm memories that were from another time, another life. If she stayed, time would not move. An eternity would pass and they would still be standing at opposite ends of the world.

As her behind shimmied back, she bumped into more dark hair. This hair was straight and long. This hair swished along Audrey Rose’s shoulder, pulling her in. The eyes laughed before the mouth did, but when the mouth let out the sound of sheer happiness, Audrey Rose began to giggle. They looked at each other and at the same time yelled “Giddy-up.”

Roxy had no parents. She was hatched from an egg. White rimmed Elton-John glasses covered eyes that had seen too much but still not enough. Her mind held stories that flowed in waves mixed into crevices held deep inside. When she laughed smiles spread like veins with something vital flowing through reaching, holding. Roxy’s adventures carried her into labyrinths, through the river and eventually always to Sunpie’s. There was no doubt that Roxy and Audrey Rose would meet surrounded by sweat and hurricanes.

Before them two jaeger bombs were placed and disappeared within seconds warming their throats, their bellies. The Elton John glasses were never lifted, the only things the girls lifted were their hands to their lips. In this way passed a night, several nights. And somewhere lost in dreams, in a haze of friendship, something else disappeared too, as if it had never hatched. The only reminder was a curly hair that occasionally tickled her insides.

-Do not attempt to recreate the events of Audrey Rose’s life. They will result in internal and/or external death or at the very least a yeast infection.