Tales from the Apocalypse .. stop, look, listen

A big smile cracks open his face as the wind sears hot-jets steaming past.

"We're on the way, baby!"

The vintage grey Suzuki Hayabusa pans metal to the road.  It smears rubber-scorched tarmac and he flies helmeted toward the city with the film safe in camera. What an affair! It's sure to make his fortune, easy as cutting open a Chinese New Year cookie.

The sun burns deep scars to the the motorway while she waits patiently for him to arrive at the very end of the road.  Stretched taut and thinking of those photos, pin-cushioned.  Oh yes, she's waiting! She's just waiting for you, baby.

It was a hot, torrid night, tossing and turning against the dying embers of the day.  She squeezed fresh lemon into the cusp of the glass and pulled faces.  He contemplated a liquid-cooled, inline-four engine with sixteen valves driven by double-overhead cams. It was a very strange mixture indeed, fuelled by lust and power and longing and a secretive oil-based recipe known only to the inner-few. It was, truly, an image to behold.

The final course was cheese, Italian and accompanied by two deep glasses of crimson wine. They gorged on salted Pecorino Romano, thin-waxed Provolone and a deliciously oozing Caciotta, saving the Grana Padano to last in contemplation of the fruit-sweet pleasures to come.  She reached for the cheese-wire and drew it across the hard, thick rind.  A sharp pull and it split open revealing its savoured core.

He reached out to take her hand, carelessly up-turning his glass in the process. The dying dregs spilled across the crumbed white table-cloth.  Blood red stains.

"Easy, boy … there's lots of time."

Prime metal and flying!  This sweet sensation of passing time, gliding hard-core past the stalled traffic and on the way.  A cookie fortune hand.

They left the restaurant full, ripe and ready to the night. And then he came upon them with a mighty, mighty …

"Flash!!"

Two lovers, endless lovers captured forever in the celluloid frame of a paparazzi camera.

The crescendo builds ecstatically and she waits so patiently for him to come.  One mile, half a mile, three hundred yards and there he spies the opened entrance!  Home and a warmed chemical-bath awaits.

An operatic voice wails and in slow-motion he guns the Suzuki Hayabusa onward. He sees the stretched wire too late as it draws across his throat severing the flesh and tendon and bone like a knife through butter.

His severed head prescribes a parabola and in that very instance it is stop, look, listen …. to the wailing diva voice and a million taken photographs spewing back in the wind until his head bounces once, twice, three times to the feet of the lady who waits so very, very patiently at the end of the road.