by John Loeffler
Elizabeth kept talking long after Jeff stopped listening, not that he didn’t care. Jeff, once he sat down, knew that everything was going to change.
“Are you okay?”
Her words caught fire and began to smolder in his ears, his brain, his parching throat; leaving water lines in duotone, marking its progress into his gut.
There, he would have an inner well fire, a raging spout with an epoch’s worth of fuel ready to burn, below the surface, out of sight.
To put it out, he had to use something bigger than the flame. An explosion. Dynamite down the well bore. Words bigger than hers.
He told her how he felt about her.
All speaking ceased.
Then, she spoke in a different language.
