Felltree Marsh sunflower silence

the stranger said hello back and owlglass was content to sit there, his fingers tapping out an old heartbeat, ruminating like so many other people in the bowels of a train, an airplane, a subway's rattling insides, looking intensely at nothing.

cloudy trusswork is pierced by daylight, mullioned windowpanes cast a sickly glow through the fog. they were in a smoking lounge. the air was blue with it. he emptied his mind, took his sweet time. what happened to your eye? 

aerasha and her bear-- that sounded like an old greek myth. the two people he'd met so far had parts of them missing, filled up with scars by blue-collar working-class cells. his stomach jolted as he entertained a shivering thought: what if, with every new person he'd met, more and more of them was missing? what if the next person he met was missing a tongue? and the next, a leg, and so on, until,

until nothing was there at all? 

he bit back a smile. inside his brain there was a shambling wolf, more scar tissue than actual flesh, hairless from the eyebrows down, eyeless toothless tongueless earless. then he lets go of this fantasy.