The sky dawned green. Underneath it, her, aloof. She’s sat at the core of a dense mesh of wandering high-season spectres that travel and intersect each other almost blindly. From beneath the shade in the café balcony she scoffs at the sight of the frantic fast-maturing morning that starts to take shape. A few drops of light filtered by the row of parasols land flabbily on the table, then cascade down her legs and trickle towards her feet to form tiny puddles of greenish sun-shards.

 

For a lazy while she removes her eyes from the world around and compels them to focus instead on the thoughts that linger on this side of her sunglasses. The subconscious fingers are left to fiddle with a piece of lime she just pinched from the forgotten half-empty glass which lies on top of a numb book.

 

He. Comes on stage set on dismantling it. And what a cracking stage this one is. The whole spread of jagged coast from Cala de Volpe to Porto Rotondo, imposing Tavolara beckoning in the fuzzy background included. But he’s had his share of sceneries. Sits down on the first clumsy chair at hand and imposes himself in full stark silence, fixing on her his dire eyes, sullen bearers of a maze of pent-up nausea, repugnance, revulsion, abjection. Waits for the impact to feel absolute. Will be callous, blunt; will be righteous, unmerciful; will be acrid, intense, thorough.

 

She. Attempts the sketch of an inept smile, staggers and falters through a few sentences which are ditched almost immediately and is left experimenting with a couple of half-words too frail to have ever existed. Then her urges all at once pelt down from within her sunglasses to go after the remnants of lime strewn about. While the locus of her gaze rests on the table it is increasingly blurred by an emerging compulsion that she makes a point of articulating as neatly as she still can. You despise me so much. Rightly so, of course, I know, rightly so. But I’m at a loss for words to keep on begging you. Guess I’ve used them all too often, haven’t I?

 

He. Curtly shatters her wave of vacillation with an ominous blast fired from the pair of caustic eyes. She almost meets them when she rescues her own from playing with the bits of fragmented lime to the cosy relief of the inside of the bottle-green lenses. He. Set on being unmoved by the advent of the wet furrows that seep down towards the corners of her lips, compels his mind to jump over the frame of the scene and hides in Tavolara for some timeless enormous seconds, and doesn’t return until his espresso is brought to the table. He. Immersed in the brown froth that spins around. Bitter, dense, fiery. Supping it up purposefully, firmly, unswerved.

 

She. Ventures. Perhaps if we… If only… You know, couldn’t we just…? He. Leaves behind him meticulously balanced on top of the cup, paired with the coffee spoon, the terminal three-word farewell and deserts to blend instantly with the plethora of kinetic spectres that flutter around. Just drop it.

 

She. Dropped. A continuous flow of emerald scintillation dripping over the edges of the table. She. Engrossed in the opiate image of the glass, revelling in the dull rolling of tears through the vertices of her mouth, relishing in the savouring of their saltiness. She. Laying the sunglasses close to the book and drying her eyes with some kind of mechanical deference. Freeing the shape of a smirk to stem and expand. Taking a few sips from the glass and hinting at no other plans other than expending all the time in the world doodling with an atom of lime. Her feet immersed in a viscous stream of green light.