Individual stones are not heroes - any

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife “What about you?” Sleaze asks. He shouldn’t ask. He should leave. The conversation as it stands is idle, words passed between strangers. There doesn’t need to be more to it. He should walk on, and let this man be, with his strange form and odd colors and all the other things Sleaze will never know. Oh, but he is such a stupid boy. He asks. He prods. “Do you pray?” It might be enough, this question, on its own. “You knew my words for a prayer, or…something close enough. Most don’t.” Most don’t know him at all, their eyes skirt uncomfortably over his purple skin, over his dull eyes. He is not a man who drives others to converse with him. He is skittish, and odd, and full of too many strange and complex memories – too many strange and complex realities - to do well in most conversations. (She knew him, that girl, indigo-dark. She knew secrets even he had hidden from himself. There was a girl, he said. There were two girls, she replied. A shared reality, or a shared delusion – what matters is it had been shared. What matters is he might have loved her.) “My name is Sleaze,” he says. He shouldn’t share his name – shouldn’t share anything else – but something keeps him here. Something grounds him. Perhaps it is his loneliness finally making itself known, crying out. Perhaps it’s something else – or nothing at all. After all, they are still strangers, a brief connection made over a prayer that wasn’t. sleaze cancer x garbage