stale ambivalence (prose)

They stood hardly a centimeter's breathe apart. Close enough that the hairs on his hand swept lightly over her knuckle. A sensation that left him impressions that they might actually be touching.  Rationally, he disguarded this as some laughably cruel neurological red-herring. His synaptic passages falsifying sensory documents and telling him with ear-to-ear grins only what he wanted to hear.           "yes sir"           "definately touching, sir"           "We've got hand-to-hand contact"           "spineless yes-men" he muttered.           "What'd you say?" she suddenly asked.  He was feeling neither the need nor the desire to expound on his own interior metaphorical mishaps, so he grumbled "nuthin," in a breathey half-enunciated expulsion of condensed carbon dioxide.           They both had their eyes out over-looking the neon matrix of the Los Angeles Skyline. The sight left so much to the imagination that one could've constructed a child's library of the most fantastic fairy tales to do it justice. But neither of them said a word.           "How was your day?" she asked.           "innocuous" he replied. She looked confused. Our protagonist here, had always understood "innocuous" as a term implying a lack of meaning rather than a lack of harm. Although in this instance, he was referring to her question and not his day.           She smiled as if he had said "fine."  A few seconds passed.  They were so silent that he could almost hear the world ticking by some oh-holy metronome.  If only masks could drop.  If only some irrevocable force could swipe them from their greedy fingers and send them like shattered shells into orbit.  Then there would be sights to see, and ways to sing of these sights.            "I'm cold" she whispered as she let out her own obscene belch of billowy mist. He chortled. "aren't we both?" echoed loudly enough in his head that he blushed in case she'd heard him. And as if the oven-timer to this whole scenario had counted down to it's final "BING!" she whispered, "Well....this was fun." and slid on a harp's thread off into the fluorescant diamond mine.  With his mouth half-open as if to commence some royal savior's soliloquy, as if he were about to stave off this stale ambivalence with some prize-fighter's prose, he watched her hum the whole way down until she dwindled into one of the electric pock marks dotting the valley floor.           "uhhhh..............huh" was all that eventually made it out of him. Bewildered. Perhaps amused, he let a long sigh seep out from him.  He cast a thin, fragile stare over the city. The city of Claremont looked, for lack of a better word, innocuous.  From this elevation just about everything seemed benign.  Not quite beautiful, but benign. He coughed up a "heh" and reluctantly turned his back to the scene. He hummed to himself while walking into the woods forever wondering what other tricks she had up her sleeve. Written August 15th, 2001 © on Aug 15 2001 11:20 AM PST   0 • 10