Jumbling Towers - "At The Cashier's Station"

Thor ground a pill into the counter, and his watch alarm went off. One-fifteet-teet-teet. He quickly inhaled the pill and took a needle from the drawer. He squeezed a section of his stomach like a sausage and shot it in, cold. He had been chatting with an eighteen-year-old, twelve years his junior, in a sexually explicit way for days. His neck ached and his vision seemed to have a gradient to it, like faded sunglasses, the tops of everything seemed purple. Today seemed to be a comedown day for the two unlikely lovers, no more talk of fluids or empty pillows or swollen anything. She was talking about the pain in her feet from working co-op at the hospital for five hours on a Saturday. She had an adolescent flare for poetry, and typed: "pain is like a story." He thought about his heart, a strained ka-tha-bump, and his left leg like a meteor or a thousand summer sparklers, and typed: "pain is like a story the way a song is like a hallway." A pause, the sounds of children too young to know who Bruce Springsteen was, or is. She replied: "...identical?"

"unrelated."

[5$]