I clocked her first in the gloom of the back alley, an interplay of a jagged stencil slapped over splintered plywood, fluorescent green letters daring any sober mind to read:
“only fuck the smart ones.”
It thrummed in my skull like a tuning fork gone mad, that slogan. The smell of damp concrete curling around it, the distant roar of the city’s late‐night traffic droning like a restless beast in my chest, and the grit of pebbles under my boots all conspired to lure me in.
I lit a Dunhill, the flame flickering off a half-rusted iron railing, and squinted at her silhouette. She lounged against the wall, thighs crossed, eyes pinning me with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. I should have recognized the danger in those cold, amused, calculating eyes, but I was halfway through my “Molly” trip and looking for trouble.
“Like what you see?” she murmured, voice oily and low.
“Depends,” I said, exhaling smoke that stung my throat. “Are you smart enough?”
Her laugh rippled through the space like broken glass on a tile floor. It was a sound that made your skin itch and your gut twist in delight. She pushed off the wall and leaned in close. Her breath tasted of peppermint and something dark, raw ambition, maybe.
“I’m poison, sweet‐talker,” she whispered. Her fingertips ghosted down my arm, leaving a trail of static. “But I’m worth the risk.”
I should have walked away then. Hell, I almost did; my instincts rebelled at the lunacy. But I was already deep in her orbit. The air vibrated with possibility, with the thrill of something unspeakable waiting to explode.
Two weeks later, we were tearing through the city streets at three a.m., half-naked in the back of a murdered-out van. She’d hacked the driver’s console with a grin that said she knew every backdoor in existence; I just held on, ears ringing from the hum of the motor, heart pounding like a tom-tom in a war zone.
Our destination was an abandoned printing press in the printing district. Inside, paper stacks sagged under decades of neglect. We poured paint into battered tins, acid yellow, radioactive blue, and started tagging. First came her signature: a snarling raven’s skull. Then mine: a crooked heart stitched shut with lips burning through its soul.
The sharp crack of aerosol against rusted steel, the way the old machine’s gears sighed beneath our boots. Every stroke of that spray can feel like a confession.
Between splatters, she pressed her lips to mine, her tongue cool as ice, urgent as a vice. My senses looped on themselves: the perfume of burnt cardboard, the grid of her laughter, the heat of her skin searing through my jacket. I lost track of time, lost track of everything but her.
We called it art.
We called it love.
The tabloids would’ve called it a circus of psychosis, two self-destructive geniuses dancing on the edge of oblivion. But in that warehouse, under olfactory fluorescents, it made perfect sense. We were wiring our hearts into a bomb, soldering each other’s secrets into the fuse.
Then came the night of the ultimate stunt. We trespassed onto a rooftop overlooking the still-lit downtown rooftops. With a drone buzzing overhead like a manic firefly, she strapped an old Polaroid camera to my neck and handed me a bottle of absinthe.
“Take a picture of me,” she said, voice thick with promise.
I did. She looked no, glared into the lens, her hair whipping in the wind like vultures’ wings, her lips curled in a dare. And as I clicked, the flash burst, illuminating the city’s glow beneath us, every window, every silent life going on, unaware of our little apocalypse above.
I saw every particle of paint on her cheeks, every lightning-bolt vein at her temple. I saw the fire in her eyes, raw and unblinking. At that moment, I believed she could reshape the world with her bare hands.
“You ever wonder,” I slurred, my brain humming with booze and adrenaline, “what happens when the smart ones fuck and somebody survives?”
Her laughter erupted, a sound like shattered glass catching the midday sun, sharp and dazzling. Before I could even register the shift, she lunged, pulling me into an embrace so sudden it stole the breath from my lungs. Our mouths met in a fevered kiss, a desperate communion that set my senses ablaze. It was a kiss so fierce, so consuming, that I could taste the very essence of what lay ahead on her tongue, a future both achingly bitter and brilliantly, terrifyingly bright.
The air crackled around us, charged with an unspoken understanding, a silent promise of the tumultuous journey that stretched before us. In that breathless moment, time ceased to exist, suspended in the raw, potent energy of her touch, the taste of fate a visceral reality against my own.
Morning broke like a promise, unkept, a jagged tear in the bruised canvas of the night sky. I woke in a familiar disarray, a pile of shattered canvases serving as my unwelcome mattress, shards of discarded inspiration digging into my back. My jacket, a once-proud shield against the biting city air, was torn, a gaping wound revealing the threadbare lining. One shoe, a solitary sentinel, lay discarded somewhere in the debris, a testament to the chaotic exodus of the previous night.
The oppressive smell of sin, a thick, cloying miasma from last night’s rituals, mingled with the acrid scent of dried paint. It had settled into the very walls of the olfactory, a lingering ghost of forgotten debauchery and desperate creation. Each breath was a taste of stale rebellion, a reminder of the boundaries that had been blurred and the lines that had been crossed.
I blinked, feeling a dull ache behind my eyes from the effort, and focused on the door. There, a stark stencil with a cynical mantra: “Only fuck the smart ones.”
A wry, bitter laugh escaped my lips, a sound swallowed by the oppressive silence. But then I noticed the amendment, a furious, defiant act of vandalism.
Someone, in a moment of rage or insight, had crossed out “smart” with a thick crimson line and scrawled “crazy” in furious red underneath. Only fuck the crazy ones. A more fitting credo, I mused, for the lost souls who haunted this forgotten corner of the city, for the artists who poured their souls onto canvas, for me.
The weight of the revised inscription settled heavily in the air, a silent judgment, a mocking prophecy. It was a promise, perhaps, but one that felt as unkept as the morning itself.
I staggered outside. She was gone. No note. No farewell. Just the echo of her laughter drifting off into a sky too pale to mourn.
I checked my pockets. The Polaroid hung in my hand, her grin frozen in white-edged film, eyes still daring me to chase her. Beneath the photo was scrawled, in her neat cipher:
Tonight at midnight, somewhere, we can burn the world.
My mind pulsed with every hint of that warehouse: the clank of the press, the splash of paint, stencils., the tang of absinthe, the drone’s manic hum, the electric crack of her kisses. I could feel it all spinning me back to her. So I smile, fold the photo into my breast pocket, and light another smoke. The city hums around me: cars, voices, the distant scream of an ambulance. And I know I’ll be there.
Because when the truly deranged fall for each other, survival isn’t the point. It’s a macabre dance, a dangerous waltz where the music is the shriek of tearing fabric, and the beat is the frantic thud of a heart refusing to surrender. The point isn’t to build but to dismantle, not to nurture but to consume. The point is to keep the fireworks alive until they swallow the night whole, an unending pyrotechnic display of self-destruction and co-destruction, each dazzling burst a testament to their mutual madness.
It’s a love story penned in gasoline and lit with a match, a desperate, exhilarating embrace of chaos. Next stop: midnight. The hour when shadows lengthen and the rational world retreats, leaving fertile ground for the twisted and the unbound. Next stop: what remains when two twisted souls, forged in the crucible of their own unique brokenness, decide that burning everything down is the only real way to feel alive.
It’s a radical act of self-immolation, a defiant middle finger to normalcy, a shared descent into an abyss where the only light is the inferno they’ve created.
And in the ashes, perhaps, they'll find a perverse kind of purity, a stripped-down truth of their own making, where existence is measured not by breath but by the intensity of the flame.
- jspc ] The Artists’ of Wanton [
"Love’s Last Fucking Joke..."
