The attendant turns around with his back to the counter and asks Allen without looking at him, “What color?” “Oh. Uh… black, I guess.” The attendant turns around with the black lighter in his hand and tosses it to Allen. Leaving the attendant’s calloused and oily hand, the lighter begins its arc twisting in persistent rotations as it moves through the air and over the counter, its black color like a hole against the white of the counter, the lights, the colored packs of cigarettes. Moving upward and outward the lighter makes its way across the counter and continues up past the smudged and dirty glass where beyond and out of focus, Allen’s Buick sits waiting. With each one hundred and eighty degree rotation the lighter moves both up and forward, blurring it’s oblong shape into an out-of-focus circle, spinning rapidly and persistently. A semi drives past in the window behind the attendant’s head. The truck rushes by in a seventy mile an hour blur, wind invisible and all around it pushing backwards from the cab in tight pulled lines and dispersing at the end of the truck spiraling and flying off in a thousand chaotic directions; noise vibrating behind a thin black line bent into the infinite single side of a circle turning and spinning and hurling at Allen.

Read the whole thread: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson