The devil likes skinny girls best; he can get closer to them....

Entwined, they are—each in herself and both together—angular and serpentine. Sharp angles of elbows and knees throw complemenary shadows to the sinuous lines of neck and spine. Together, they two tall women mix and join these sweet contradictions like kudzu crossing a hopscotch chalked on a warm Georgia sidewalk.

And for all of the hours of this tangle and climb, Arts is—for the first time in ever so long—not weary as the first sap-scents of sunrise mist up out of the earth. She can scarce remember when that convenient diurnal sleep, even dreamless as it almost always is, has not marked the winning toss of the coin of her days.

Now, however, she lingers, safe behind shuttered glass, her eyes closed only to better grasp the details of memory; the thin blade of her nose painting recollection boldly with the small scents that linger on their sheets.

This unlikely lover, this outlandish elf-girl, touches her long after her hands grow still. The fearful intimacy that they have somehow shared, drunk on the air that grew still in the corner of each other's mouths, wracked to gasping with the driest touch of limb on limb, frightens and thrills Arts; its very inhumanity somehow immersing her above her depth in the waters of humanness. It is a baptism she has hungered for without knowing.

Morning burns outside, reeks on the air like a heated penny. Secure, deep in protective shade, a dream breaks the soil of her fallow mind, delicate as a sprouting peavine. Slowly, with motions as precise as they are artistic, it spreads its nascent tendrils tp the sky.

Trekking and carrying, it was a balancing act, just as they were. Keeping aloof, steady, uncompromising. Both in their bandaged-knee style gaits and wind-ruffled platinum tress, they were like two stalks, boney angels, descended upon this bare-track gravel road south, down the lane, to a very un-magical town, all coal eyed, leather skinned cowboy. Trembling hills and jack-knifed caravans, extending and looming towards their tall, beautiful figures moving with the still wind, they had a way, a melody, an encapsulating dehydration of the eyes; making all spectators sore of the sockets. These were the women to blister, because they were not simply women at all.

Caressing one anothers' hands they turned and off down a street, very 18th century mid-west colonial stake it out win the gold have a whore of a feeling, except the yapping in those trembled knolls, really not grass or hill at all, but mountains of coal, reminded them both of their darker days. Hedged bets and hanging out like edgy windsocks, catching the wind and lost in deep thought, miasma of illusions and wonky pills. Keeping them drained but dreadful, delicious but choking.

"Wher' was you' owsss?" She wondered where this too tall, too long, wet-bright eyed Starving, Stunner was at when she came unto the world. Did she come screaming" Or silent?

Evin turned then, her white tank top and shorts ruffled as their hair was, at the seams, fluttering. All ghost reflex. Pretty aparition. Wavering, teetering, a thing of brinks and light posts, to disappear and illuminate.

"Tell me theese thin's"

She bent over in the sudden windy walk-through between buildings, her whisper the only thing to lay still in this weather warmed town. Cold, dead, black eyed rangers, wearing hats at rakish angles and still appearing non appealing. Woman for woman here.

Shudders, tinkling fingertips met as they leant against the wall, this cropped alley, and kissed one another softly, only lips and soft, feminine, wispy breaths, as though making out with the mirror. Then a draught came and they ducked out, into the gravel road and down it they went. Two. Thunder and her Lightning.

Shudder, baby, shudder.

They were to find out what lured them back, to the darker days of She and She.

Lover Girl and the Stringbeam, resolving the distance, bleeding it to a tack at the edge of a boney thumb. To illustrate the past in tiers made of tears. To build it up, and watch it fall.

To lay seething and writhing in the debris and fourth-floor collapse. To be sundered at the mysteries of twisted histories. Where Bordertown met the Coal, and both were black.

Though Artsblood, she would ever be white. The kind of beauty when a woman takes off all her jewellery and it feels something is missing, a gleam minus, but it's because she is so much more beautiful without it, and it is the eyes and the heart adjusting to this raw compilation.

On their feet and away from the decolletage of sand, smut, grease and tired memory they scamper walked, jaunting elbow in elbows lock, trim by trim, cheek against cheek. It was child like and pretty, but scorching and dangerous. The unpresent murkiness in animation only hid by facial features, but very much propped up and snarling behind such devasting beauty.

Jewellery and manufacture, money money money as Evin thought, groping in kismet at her pockets; in both the rife poor, stale incredulity of the Town, her own seamless purse and that contented vibe here, now barefoot on the mid day road, continuing south.

When they had first met all our Stringbean could think was how much she wanted to run and head first her pillow and dream and wake up and not remember Arts. But that woman's moon-sized eyes were unavoidable, and with each blink her entire world faded out to black. She sighed as she looked away, her elbow jaunt loosening in its clutch to hers, and she studied the hills ignoring the cool, single bead of sweat to fall past her temple.

Turning suddenly, at Arts' pause on the gravel road and them burnt feet descended angels now, but serene faced without acid eyes, and she followed the fatal femme's line of vision.

They stood there a long while, staring at the sun.

Remembering the hills, those shacks and shanty-rambles.

One tried to forget, and one tried to recall. To forget what wasn't hers any longer, and the other what she had never experienced. Or rather, judging by the scraped knees and songbird drawn out tongue of worrisome illiteracy, endured.

The heat bore down in unrelentless streams across the outlay of factory, cattle station, coal mound, even the gravel shone in flickers of gray, fake road asphalt silver. The same flicker silver that lingered like a stray paper bag in Evin's eyes, That vacant, un pinpointed dot of concern.

What had brought Arts all pale leggy model wonder from this to That. What indeed?

But in that balmy, blurry, hazey sunlight, it didn't seem to matter. It was the atmosphere they had come to feed on, not each others binary. At least not tonight.

Moving off they sauntered towards a motel and like all lovers were eager to set up the bill, leave a committment, take their courtesy mint, chocolate covered, and run upstairs.

Against the door as they had the alley, stark flesh was pinned and released from willy nilly clothing. Boney limbs and intent eyes filled in desire, and a fear, crept to the surface as kisses her dashed and moans of "THIS IS IT. WHAT I HAVE LOOKED FOR" and it wasn't trite and it wasn't false. It was exploratory and exciting and fatalistic and all the fatality of a mortal wound. All red and explosive and dirty and unforgettable.

Evin let few tears fall, but she did let them. As all Elves have a hard time letting loose. It was the sunrays still in her eyes and it was the prettiness before her. The ugliness too, what the foreheads kiss had released to the tongue of her mind scape, to dervish and collatoral in a scalping of disorder and let open the mind from its square box to one undefined. This woman was as scared and as crippled as she is fundamental ways. Evin sensed this, sitting curled legged to the side on the orange, rough fibred carpet staring at her on the bed, and she clung to this feeling, this...connection.

The day had been revealing and subtle and lethargic. Lush Arts lay back on the pillow letting the evenings cool breeze wash over her erect knees and breasts, pert at the ceiling. Evin joined her, grateful for the sheets softness away from the burn of the floor. No longer itchy and detached, she snuggled towards Arts', now scratched and intimate. She moved away after her brief embrace to sit up, like some restless child on holiday, to stare past the damask curtains to the evening itself. To collide with it, feel what the Lovergirl had for years.

The shacks called out in recognition,creaking, groaning wood. Saying hello and saying good riddance or good bye. Evin turned to Arts and smiled. Silently she had coming screaming to both births, and screaming silently she had entered Rhy'Din. Evin smiled to that too. A look back to the window as the wind laboured at the foot of the bed and its bungled sheets. It drifted over her and she closed her eyes, in a lean to the side, awkward posture and ribs viewable at back below shoulderblade, hair all ruffled again on top. She wanted fairy floss and a lullabye, both of which she was sure the Lovergirl possessed.

Morning came like a splintered crown of thorns, the thickets narrow and damp as they creased the clouds in their downy weight. Arts was sun-shadow dappled glory, spread out and still dangerous. The joining and unfurling of some delicious petals, Evin queried she had only been witness too. Something sharp about her trumbone spell, dousing her ears in liquor sound and her velvety, secret places in a chorus rabid and read in braile rather than hymn-flicked pages.

The light seemed hollow, if that was how it could best be described, pouring from between the hall of clouds above, sunburnt roof tiles and hot coins on the conjoined alleyway and house, their motel standing sole and lone beside a wasteland, the one that fought with the meadow and ocean, prying at its slender locks with a painful key, the ivory thump of minor and an oscillating major, before the arid charms lost their bid, and the escalating sweat-dampened lore they surged pressured against the early dew and made it weep.

Sitting up after spread eagle, tight rope and polka at the horizontal slant, her groin ached and her eyes watered.

A glance to Arts and she left the bed to stare out across the town, pressing her stomach to the sill and casting that red eye to the quiet below. The curtains brushed against her, her hair wafting grey like white, a Marily Monroe curl or two, and she was weightless and impossible, disappearing into the white.

Even without make up and her trademark sooty-brows, she had a wrinkled-side-of-grin smile and a knowingness, haunting and resplendent that decorated her stark flesh in designs only pores could exhume of her; a burning recollecting of her Magic, of the Dragonstooth Hill, of the elegant and posture she was born with, but too, the tantalizing Fey touch.

Arts was a black and white semaphore, luxurating and palpatating, a carnal heartbeat, a throttle grinding drumskin. She followed a different scent, wind, feeling. Yet always back to the same path as She.

Thunder and her Lightning, riding the clouds of this infernal majesty, unhuman and yet not unloved, or, not capable of so. They hung their wet, cotton memories out to dry, and made fondue out of sex, tasting and savouring each creamy drop. In flesh, in eye, in embrace.

She walked to where the notably broken TV was placed, next to the rickety couch and gaudy throw over its back and arms. She sat down on it and stared out the window, suddenly craving pancakes, and for a sway in the meadow, a walk on the wild side...