<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'">Embers drew hushed ambers across the sharp edges of Volk's face. Smoke settled in his hair, and in the obscurity he looked solemn, as if the ash softened the razors in his glare, in his growl. The smell was poignant and harshly juxtaposed against the floral odors that plumed, a shield, around Reno. Two separate realities, existences, tangled up in one breath of air, one moment. <br/>
<br/>
She wondered when he had picked up the habit. The filter rolled around in his knuckles, occasionally finding itself in his lips, his molars gnawing at it- it was a routine, nearly a nervous tick. Perhaps some divebar darling had offered him a cigarette, end painted red where it had once rested in her own mouth- and perhaps he found solace in her, in the taste of her lipstick. Or perhaps Volk was just predisposed to bad addictions. Reno wondered if he had found one to replace mother. <br/>
<br/>
In the nights she lay restless in bed she often tried to piece together images of Volk in her head. As a child, when confusion still smudged her perception of him, she always saw him en route home, gallant as he always had been. But she didn't understand that he wasn't a knight on an temporary adventure. When she finally got it, when his true colors were no longer silver but rather charcoal gray, the pictures got darker. Flits of him would appear on the backs of her eyelids, and he was no longer gleaming. Reno had never been to the city, but she began to picture him there, a rat caught in the alley mazes, kept only in the company of garbage. She pictured hazy bars and him fitting in with the people there, finding more comfort in the wicked faced than in her. She pictured dingy apartments and the girls who washed up there, night after night after night. Replacements. <br/>
<br/>
Perhaps he was here because he got sick of them- the replacements- perhaps he needed the real thing. Reno felt the pit in her stomach churn as she thought he might have been happier to have found mother here rather than her. <br/>
<br/>
Though she doubted Volk thought of her often, Reno couldn't help but imagine how he might have pictured her, laying in a bed a world away. <br/>
<br/>
He probably saw her through the same lens she had been trapped behind since they met. He probably saw pictures of a girl doodling in her notebooks, sleeping with her stuffed tiger, sucking her thumb. But Volk didn't understand, either. Reno didn't have a bed time, anymore. Once or twice she had delved into all those habits he thought belonged only to him. She bet he never pictured baby bird in the backseat of another boy's car. She bet he never pictured baby bird torching the end of something shitty rolled up and coughing her way through the inhale. She bet he never pictured baby bird growing up. <br/>
<br/>
It must have been jarring to have it all come back to him. The nostalgia sinking its teeth in deep, its ache seconded only by the startling realization that Burning Bear was no longer  woodland wonderland. <br/>
<br/>
Reno's head spun with it as well. As she left the cemetery she felt as though she were leaving much more than a corpse behind. She had gone into the graveyard alone and was leaving it with company. It was as if she had stolen a ghost from its crypts. Though he had made his presence very real, nailed it through her skull, Reno still saw his leather-clad figure and his shadowy grimaces and thought <i>ghost</i>. Stupid girl had never learned from horror movies- she had always been too fearful to watch them with her eyes open- and her naivety, the only constant in her life, was urging to her to follow the spirit. The undead. The demon. <br/>
<br/>
At the edge of the parking lot he faded into the fog. Reno never thought she'd see <i>this </i>picture- Volk propped up against the truck just as he did in adolescence. She remembered him well, waiting for her to finish school on the opposite side of the street. Oh how <i>cool </i>she felt, skipping out of class not to be met by her parents but by <i>him</i>. And how close they had sat, side by side on the bench seat, her frantically beating heart insisting that she sit in the middle, shouldering him. Stupid girl had never learned from romance movies, either. Kid crushes are just that- <i>crushed </i>by bigger boys who have no interest in doe-eyed little sisters. But she misinterpreted his remarkable patience for returned adoration and now she felt sick thinking she had ever thought of him that way.<br/>
<br/>
That somewhere in her much duller, bleeding heart she <i>still </i>thought of him -or rather, the memory of him- that way. All the misguided attempts at finding new messes to get knotted in were useless. Every boy she had kissed, every secret she had shared, every foreign sheet she had anxiously curled up in all ended in tears. Tears because she was being used, and tears because she was used to be being used. Tears because being used was the closest thing she could find to Volk's warped affection. She was fucking cursed, she decided. <br/>
<br/>
Reno shut her eyes tight. Maybe if she closed them for long enough time would slip and things would be <i>normal </i>when she came to. Maybe if she dug her nails deep enough into her palms, and bit hard enough on her tongue she would open her eyes and see Volk outside her school beside a much less rusty truck. His face less worn and his shoulders less tense and his grip much more gentle. His mouth not full of cigarette but full of all the excuses as to why he couldn't be around her after eight o'clock. Witching hour. <br/>
<br/>
It was nearing, now. The funeral had begun in the evening and her unfaltering desire to make herself miserable kept her cemented in the dirt much longer than anyone could have anticipated. A five o'clock burial had turned into a seven o'clock haunting and eight o'clock waited eagerly for its turn to pick at her feathers, pluck poor baby bird of her defenses. She had few left.<br/>
<br/>
With a final goodbye Reno crossed the boundary that separated asphalt from earth. Brother from dad.<br/>
<br/>
She had missed Volk's blip of anger, but she could tell that he was still seeing red. Unfortunately for both of them, red looked awfully good on little Reno.<br/>
<br/>
"You took my keys." Her voice was void of the blame it had not minutes ago. Her fit had quieted into a sort of surrender.</span><br/><br/><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'">They were close again, far enough that he couldn't hear the throb in her chest lurch into her throat but close enough she could hear his heavy breaths weighing down on his ribs. Exhaustion paired with anger paired with whatever other emotions he was still capable of feeling swam around his head in a cloud. She could see it in the circles beneath his eyes, in the way his knuckles reddened. <br/>
<br/>
"It's almost eight o'clock, Volk." She turned away, wisps of white-blonde hair falling in front of her glassy gaze. "You're not going to disappear again, are you?"<br/>
<br/>
The blood in her mouth found its way between her teeth and stuck like a film to her gums.<br/>
<br/>
Reno had never known anything good to happen after eight o'clock.</span>