the end of our rope is a noose.

Ervin raised his hand up as he walked through the narrow door frame. Balling a fist, he looked so distraught as he told us that there wasn't any art left. "Saw the chalk outline myself. Dead is dead."

From across the room, smoking what was left of the spliff between her tiny fingers, Charlotte laughed, smoke shooting out her nostril like flamethrowers onto the backs of whales. "This isn't the first time we've heard this," she said flatly, rolling the spliff between her index finger and thumb. "They said this a long time ago and I still see art galleries popping up like trap houses."

"Maybe so, but I saw it myself. It's dead this time. Dead is dead." Ervin paced in and around a five foot diameter and then sat on the hardwood floor, crossing his legs and lighting a cigarette simulaneously. "It was like watching your own family move out of the house you grew up in because you kept pissing the bed."

"F**k that," Charlotte and I both said. Our parents both had divorced. "I wanna see this with my own two eyes. Both of them," she finished. So we went.

...

Sure enough, Ervin (with his fist balled and eyes crying witness) had been right. Directly on the corner of Maple and 16th, the scene set. Pigs were everywhere; some fat ones with clipboards and statements that reaked official. Other ones were tall and lanky and moved in predetermined paths, maintaining the outwards exertion of power upon the onlookers.

"Stand aside, this was not our doing. Just continue along," it sounded like their piggie voices said over the crowds. I jerked my ear left and right, trying to pick up the mythology of the crowd. The power circle rotated and I felt the crowds collective opinion change. In a matter of second, the revolutionary idea of salvaging what was left of art's ragged body (which was only covered by a sheet at this point; a mechanism which failed them in their attempt at anonymizing the dead, as the gusty midwest winds lifted the corner of the sheet ever so slightly) dissipated from the crowd and a blind, disjunctive lust to stare at the death art faced and scrutinize overtook the herd. "it's on YouTube already!" a date rapist frat boy shouted from one end of the crowd. He heard tweeting from a plastic bar tramp a few feet away, her orange and leathery skin peeling off onto the keys of her cell phone.

"That's a tall building." Charlotte was shading her eyes from the May sun and glancing up the side of the building, counting stories. "Think it was a suicide?"

I tried to light a cigarette but an awkward pig in riot gear told me it was a non-smoking outdoors. I scratched my chin and felt a five o'clock shadow coming on. It as 3:19 in the afternoon and I already felt like sleeping until I could rewake and see someone making use of color and shape again.

"Think it was a suicide?" she repeated.

Surveying the crowd structure I existed inside, I felt my wallet in my back pocket, tasted a little blood on the tip of my tongue (almonds and breaking my toe at the bottom of the pool). "Doesn't matter. Dead is dead."