The Smoke And Flowers

THE SMOKE AND FLOWERS R.A BEA Copyright © 2022 by R.A Bea All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. The names of characters, places, incidents, or events are the product of the author’s own imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, or events, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Published by R.A Bea Cover art by Kelly Chong ISBN 978-1-7782371-0-2 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-7782371-1-9 (paperback) The room was not a mess. It just felt like one. R.A BEA For Ally, You were my first reader, and this book would have never been written without you CONTENTS Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Acknowledgments 1 SATURDAY 6:00 A.M BRIGGS “Okay hear me out, raccoons are kind of scary right? I had a dream once as a kid where one chased me around with a screwdriver, but ever since then I’ve always really wanted one as a pet,” Briggs said. Val leaned over the railing, his mouth doing that complicated thing where he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to laugh or pretend he was above it. He was usually above it. “Soooo,” Briggs said. “What are we doing here?” It was wretchedly cold. The biting frost crept under his collar and into his bones. They were standing on the broken remnants of the old monument. Down below the quarry stretched on for miles. It was a shadowed landscape, little more than indigo waves and crooked boats tied to the end of a red-stained dock. Everything looked the same in Breka. Especially at night. “Scouting,” Val said. “That’s a weird way of saying stalking.” Val hummed noncommittally, reaching for a new box of smokes, and ripping the plastic off with his teeth. It always went like this. One-sided conversations fading into an afterthought. Briggs didn’t know when the lines had been written, but at some point in their friendship he had learned how to pretend to be okay with Val’s indifference to everything. And Val had learned how to pretend that he didn’t know Briggs was pretending. And it was too late to rewrite the rules now. But here was something that wasn’t pretend: sometimes the feeling of being unwanted kept him up at night. He joined Val at the railing and peered into the sheer drop below. The Gorge was a collection of casualties. During the war a few buildings had toppled into the chasm, and the rubble and debris had never been entirely cleaned up. The result was a gaping long chasm that started by the old carousel and ended close to the shops. It had become somewhat of a dump with locals tossing in their trash, but Briggs liked to think of it as a Museum of Oddities. “Oh, look,” Briggs said. “Someone threw out a chandelier. What kind of monster does that?” Pavel was particularly fond of collecting heavier stones further down the chasm, and then tossing them back into the Gorge weeks later: spider cracked and red. Down below an old man hobbled around on the main platform overlooking the Gorge. “What would I do with a raccoon you ask? Easy. I’d build him a little bed, and he’d sit at the table with me, and eat whatever he wanted, and all would be well. I’d read him a story before bed, something happy to try and sate his bloodlust.” Val perched the cigarette in his mouth. “You’d piss yourself every night listening for it in the hall.” “After he murdered me would you come to my funeral?” “No.” “Okay well, he was going to be your godson, but now I don’t think I want him growing up around that kind of negativity. I could train him to be a hitman and you two could team up as a hitman-detective duo,” Briggs said. Val leaned over the railing. “Come here. What do you see?” Briggs sidled up along the beam, pressing up close to the metal containers bordering their little platform. The rust had eaten the steel nearly clean through and becoming one with the chandelier below was a possibility, but his fear of death always seemed to vanish when he was with Val. He took hold of the small telescope and held it up to his eye. Their target was the old man. He looked grandfatherly with sparse white hair and spectacles. “Are you sure he can’t see us up here? And we’re not going to hurt him, right? Because I already can’t sleep at night.” Val tapped ash off the end of his cigarette, gaze hard and molten over the curl of smoke. “Do you want to go home, Briggs?” “No.” A Harbor Boy came lumbering down the steps into the upper level of the Gorge. The man’s hair had been cropped so close to his head that even from here, Briggs could see thin jagged nicks in his skull. Briggs had had close run-ins with some of the Harbor Boys in the past. They were unruly and perverse in that they liked catching things that ran and making them go splat. One spring, one of them—a man with ginger hair—had nearly