Indie,
Do you remember the first time we hijacked a perfectly civil Tuesday at 3-something a.m. and treated it like a stolen patrol car, sirens squealing just because we could? I was marinating in motel fluorescence out on the edge of Tulsa, sweating under a busted AC unit, when your name crackled onto my screen like a rogue transmission from a pirate station.
You said suburbia had sanded your teeth down to nubs; I confessed the courts were grafting more lawsuits to my backside than a stray dog collects fleas. Ten messages later, we’d already declared war on reason, swapping secrets the way smugglers swap currency: fast, untraceable, probably radioactive.
Those early calls weren’t conversations so much as jailbreaks. You’d hurl a razor-tongued riff; I’d answer with typewriter artillery until the keys stank like spent matchbooks. Dawn peeled cheap wallpaper off the walls, the whole room smelling faintly of scorched vinyl and regret. We only acknowledged other frequencies when someone’s phone battery had the gall to die.
Fast-forward to Manhattan. My calendar was stacked with depositions uptown, but I detoured into the Hell’s Kitchen dive you picked, a shadowy joint rib-deep in sawdust, where the bartender wore an ankle monitor as a fashion statement.
You swaggered in wearing that apocalypse red trench and a grin sharp enough to cut barbed wire. The wedding ring was stashed under your blouse like contraband. I swear the air between us tasted like hot copper and unkept promises before I’d even ordered us the rye, darker than our reputations.
We detonated half the night in that booth: sketching outlaw business models on cocktail napkins, trading conspiracy theories about why cabs never stop when it rains battery acid. You raised your glass to “creative arson.” I toasted “sensible destruction.” If the building had caught fire, we probably would’ve argued over whose idea it was first.
We split on opposite curbs, as if pretending to re-enter our assigned realities. Your cab fishtailed into the February sludge, taillights dripping neon blood. Thirty minutes later, I was back in my hotel, gnawing on a minibar Snickers, when a text blinked from you: “Volume down, Stiv kid asleep.” The words scraped my ribcage like a fork on ceramic, but I looped your voice in my skull until sunrise bruised the windows.
You once said our vanishing acts were “necessary trench warfare,” that the silence kept us potable. Sure. But trench warfare is still warfare, Indie. The longer we bunkered down, the more we mistook shell shock for normal conversation.
You ghosted for multiday stints, reappearing, speaking some suburban dialect I couldn’t decode. I answered by pulling my own disappearing trick, same grenade, different shrapnel. You called it sabotage; I called it symmetrical damage.
Tonight I’m done lobbing explosives into the void. Let’s pin the evidence to the corkboard, red string and all:
1. Pathology: Dopamine-heavy co-dependency seasoned with just enough guilt to taste exotic. We cranked the volume past eleven, mistaking decibels for durability.
2. Odds of Another Ride-Along: Single digits. Unless we redraw the map so nobody has to smuggle their identity across state lines, or bedtime stories.
3. Wreckage Report: Minimal civilian casualties, just two burnt egos and a chat thread fossilized in amber. Keep it as a cautionary museum piece.
4. Rx: Controlled burn. I’m distilling the residual ache into a spoken-word rant that’ll rattle the speakers of my rust-bucket pickup until the cones beg for mercy. You might braid it into a lullaby no one else hears. Either way: transmute, don’t pickle.
I’m not feeling regret, Indie. That wildfire torched the deadwood I’d been hauling since law school, cleared space for newer, weirder growth stories with fangs, ideas on parole. You’ll harvest your own crop, perhaps at 4:07 a.m., when the dishwasher hums like a distant generator and you realize that normal is a con you never signed up for.
If some future night you catch a rogue riff curling through your kitchen, one laced with my fingerprints, let it finish the solo. Then send it back into the static. No encore. No apologies.
Here’s to the sparks that lit clean, the ones that left scars worth tracing, and the ones still ricocheting in the dark where we both feel them but neither needs to claim them.
No curtain call, just the last chord buzzing against the amps long after we’ve shoved offstage.
— Stiv ] w a n t o n Street Artist [
The Neon Dirge of Stiv & Indie
Stiv Calibre—born Stefan Kalibrian under a sky the color of migraine—never planned on outrunning the Midwest. But controlled combustion was his only marketable talent, and Kansas City kept shrinking like a cheap wool sweater in July. By twenty-eight, he’d racked up two exes, three class-action-surviving lungs, and an expensive habit of dictating avant-garde manifestos into melting cassette recorders. No one bought the tapes, yet the hiss of magnetic decay made him feel archived, maybe eternal.
Indie Rookwood entered the picture the way detonators meet blasting caps: casually lethal. She’d once framed counterfeit landscapes with real blood just to watch a curator sob, then married a dentist for the sedation script. A decade later, she ghosted the suburbs in a serpentine Tesla rental, every traffic camera in Omaha still buffering.
Their crossing point: a half-lit motel conference room in Tulsa, repurposed for “Anarcho-Defamation Law: Beyond Libel.” Stiv was there because a pro bono gig required him to brief punk collectives on avoiding bankruptcies; Indie because she’d burned down a gallery (conceptual act, insurance still undecided) and needed “fresh jurisprudence.” During the lecture, she doodled rifle sights around the statute citations while Stiv hallucinated an extra exit sign blinking Morse code for escape. When the seminar ended, they collided at the vending machine, wrestling over the last foil packet of wasabi-flavored almonds. One accidental finger-brush; two hearts misfired. They split the snack, traded business cards they both knew were fictions, and reconvened at 3:06 a.m. by text: “Wake up, the city’s bleeding neon.”
Act I — Feedback Loops & Fingerprints
1
The initial nights blurred: Skype calls stretched until dawn’s pale bruise. Stiv paced a borrowed apartment in Overland Park, cigarette embers flicking off the balcony like dissenting votes. Indie whispered from a Lincoln motel where the air tasted of chlorine and conspiracy. They swapped ruinous childhood trivia the way back-alley pharmacists swap syringes: brisk, reverent.
“You first,” she dared.
“I clipped my own ear with an X-Acto after a teacher said self-expression had limits,” he replied.
Silence. Then her giggle, low and feral.
“I once grafted my diary onto the art-room hamster using collage gel.”
“Outcome?”
“It kept squeaking my secrets for weeks. Administration called it performance.”
They understood each other the way sinkholes understand spelunkers: appetite meeting recklessness. By the seventh call, they instituted a ritual: five minutes of brutal honesty, five minutes of hallucinatory fiction. Distinguishing which half was which became the blood sport.
2
Stiv’s pending lawsuits swarmed like horseflies. He’d leaked a corporate whistle-blower dossier to twelve media outlets, then found himself subpoenaed in four states. Indie’s subplot was no softer: insurance investigators sniffed around the ashes of the gallery she’d “repurposed into negative space.” Each carried their legal baggage the way 18-wheelers drag sparks on steep grades—molten, spectacular, impossible to ignore.
They decided to meet physically, test if the voltage could survive analog translation. Neutral territory: a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen known generically as “Jack’s” on the marquee but “The Erasure” among locals, because the owner wiped the CCTV every dawn. The bar’s only real décor was condensation, but the whiskey sat brooding in the backlight like a jury you’d never sway.
Act II — New York Interlude: Static & Scalpel
3
The reunion detonated before the first pour. Indie arrived in a trench the color of arterial spray, ring hidden, grin weaponized. Stiv wore a thrift-store three-piece tailored by desperation. Two barstools between them burned invisible. They bantered about the ethics of stolen art until the bartender, ankle monitor blinking green, asked if they needed bail money.
“Not yet,” Indie answered.
“Give it an hour,” Stiv deadpanned.
They scribbled outlaw business plans on coasters: an underground press where every edition is simultaneously a confession; a sneaker startup injecting micro-poetry into the soles—walk on a stanza, leave ink footprints. Each proposal less feasible, more intoxicating. They toasted “sensibly destructive ventures,” choked down rye so dark it threatened to collapse into a singularity, and laughed until their throats rasped like busted amps.
Outside, February sleet needled the avenue. Indie’s phone pinged—her spouse sending a grocery list. Stiv glimpsed the screen, tasted ozone. They parted on twin curbs, each certain the other’s path was paved with alarm bells.
Act III — Vanishing Acts & Echo Chambers
4
Distance re-entered like a creditor. Indie retreated to Omaha, toggling silence for three-day stretches under the banner of marital obligations. Stiv mirrored her absences, burying himself in depositions and late-night micro-cassette confessionals. Both called it strategy, but the parallels looked suspiciously like fear.
5
When communication resumed, it bore hairline cracks. She spoke of PTA meetings with undertones of hostage notes; he countered with legal war stories pitched like bedtime tales. Yet the signal persisted, braided through shared persecution complexes. They agreed to a second rendezvous—this time Stiv’s turf: a condemned warehouse near the Kansas River slated for “cultural redevelopment,” which he interpreted as before the condos swallow it.
6
They met at midnight under a halogen lamp emitting hospital-corridor vibes. Inside, the warehouse echoed with emptiness deeper than theology. Stiv had set up portable speakers and a generator scavenged from a carnival graveyard. He cued up analog hiss: samples of interstate traffic, heart monitors, punk-rock sermons. Indie prowled the concrete like a panther wearing ankle boots. They each painted slogans on the walls in neon chalk:
EVERY MAP IS A FORGERY
PROPAGANDA IS A LOVE LANGUAGE
Then they danced until the generator sputtered. When the music died, they heard only pulse beats and the river’s distant churn. For a lacuna’s breadth, neither spoke. They just inhaled each other’s exhaustion, exhaled someone else’s courage.
They sprawled on the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder but not touching, trading psychoanalytic theories. Indie argued intimacy is a heist: you case the joint first; Stiv countered that intimacy is chemical warfare—no real winners, only survivors cataloguing symptoms. At 4:07 a.m. her phone buzzed again. Grocery list, revised. She smashed it face-down. He traced the spiderweb fracture with his eyes, saw their future mirrored.
Act IV — Litigation & Lullabies
7
Reality’s invoice finally arrived. Stiv’s whistle-blower suit advanced to federal trial; his lawyer needed him in Chicago. Indie’s arson investigation thawed from “curiosity” to “felony.” She faced depositions, child-care logistics, and the moral equivalent of a five-alarm hangover. They promised “see you soon,” but both knew soonness was an endangered species.
Stiv spent Chicago nights in a rented loft above an unregistered body-art studio. The artists used bone-white walls as punchlines for existential jokes. He recorded rants about corporate hypocrisy until the neighbors threatened a noise complaint. Indie leased a barren apartment downtown, pendulum-swinging between PTA potlucks and clandestine polymer-paint experiments. She mailed burnt Polaroids to Stiv—artifacts of corners she hoped never existed.
8
Their texts dwindled to Morse-length blurts:
Stiv: “Trial date set. They’re weaponizing boredom.”
Indie: “My lawyer calls arson ‘expression.’ Might skate?”
Radio silence followed each exchange like a hungry dog.
Act V — Controlled Burn
9
Winter mutated into a spring that felt counterfeit. Stiv’s trial pushed to July; Indie’s grand-jury hearing dissolved into a plea for restitution plus mandated therapy. The punitive glare of daylight revealed new dents: Stiv’s caffeine quiver, Indie’s phantom burns along her wrists.
One night, both found themselves wide-awake—he in Chicago, she in Omaha—phones inert. Independently, they opened the attic of memory: first jokes, neon chalk, orgasms of laughter. And a thought intruded: maybe they’d been co-authors of a single ridiculous novel, now overdue to shelve.
10
Stiv recorded one last cassette: a spoken-word dirge over cracked-speaker static, describing a man setting his paperwork on fire to see shadows dance. Indie painted a triptych titled “Collateral Joy,” each canvas a gradation from radioactive pink to soot. She shipped the art to a Detroit show; he mailed the cassette to her PO box with no note.
Weeks later, she texted: “Played the tape. Speakers beg for mercy. Thanks.”
His reply: “Saw your canvases online. They pulse. Stay nuclear.”
Neither promised more. In that minimalism lay mercy.
Act VI — The Last Chord
11
July scorched Chicago. Stiv’s trial collapsed when new evidence surfaced—corruption so brazen the judge all but applauded. He emerged debt-soaked but free. Indie’s probation counselor signed off early, calling her “unconventional yet rehabilitated,” a phrase she lacquered onto her studio wall in gold enamel.
They didn’t reassemble, nor sever. Sometimes a riff ricochets out of the ether—his voice reading legal jargon like apocalypse scripture, or her laughter catching on static. They let the echo finish the solo, then fade.
12
Stiv drives west these days, lecturing at community colleges about “anarcho-ethics.” Indie curates pop-up galleries in rust-belt churches, baptizing pews with ultraviolet graffiti. Both maintain an unspoken policy: if they cross paths, they’ll toast to the telemetry that once spiked their hearts into arrhythmia. They’ll raise glasses to sensible destruction—and leave before the building burns or the suburbs call.
Until then, the wildfire remains archived in amber: fingerprints, frequencies, and a single cracked phone screen. No encore required. The chord still hums where the amps once stood, stubborn as a postponed confession, proving some love stories refuse applause but never quite stop reverberating. -The END
