Back in the days before cancersticks polluted the landscape, before boring grey deathtraps overpopulated thinning rainforests, when vast abandoned fields were blank canvases for pure imaginations of innocent youths.

Battlefields, and castles, and oceans full of paper swans.

In her hands lay her father’s expectations, small doves fluttering in a steel cage, longing to glide along the lukewarm summer currents. It’s only surface, it’s only skin, it’s just a girl, it’s just the world. Sharpie tattoos and scabbed elbows swam on seafoam as she traced the mountains of her collarbones with delicate fingertips.

Blue beach glass scattered in a preserve jar that held the shells of dead fireflies hung over her pillow from the night her kissed her, kissed her in the tawny field of railroad grass. The morning after, she stroked the white silk of daisies, writing ‘he does; on the petals that softly spoke kindly to her, and tearing off the ones that disagreed with her secret wishes, her smile as warm as the wax-melting sun peering through off-white clouds.

He had blue crystal intentions, coupled with the cold smile of a Vegas shark, skinny fins and cartilage ribs, a puppy’s heart wrapped in a pelt of jackal’s flesh. He was cynical and bitter, sneering through a broken jaw, and wary of compassion, a hand brushing the limp hair from his milky eyes.

She grabbed his clenched fists, and pulled him into the field, the field where she danced faerie circles as a girl and pretended that she was pretty in real life, and not just in photos. His eyes started to clear, colour showing from behind the dull cataracts that looked like touchdown tornadoes.

That day, his Grinch’s heart swelled three sizes too big.

They danced, like black plaster silhouettes in a pebbled ring, like a plastic bag caught in a gust of energetic wind looking for teenaged kicks.

He saw her lips whisper, her eyes singing as she spun off like a tire rolling away from a car crash, twirling and ascending upwards into open arms bathed in a soft yellowing light. He dropped the Polaroids they had dug up from a secret 1990’s time capsule hidden under her front steps, and dashed after her blindly like a rabid dog.

That’s where they found him three days later, lying with his arms outstretched in a Zoloft Zombie trance under a smirking Cheshire moon, a snow angel in a minefield where the scattered flower petals were bombs.

They questioned him, probed him, all the while he clutched the one remaining photo of her in his sweaty palm until the colours bled into the sticky floor.

All they found were gaps like grease burns in his mind.