As they wandered, hand in hand, the twin city complex of Poe and Lovecraft – much like a hybrid Leeds and Bradford – Jawn and Softie each gripped like grim death a copy of the city guidebook, loosely threatening to flap from their free hands in the intermittent dips of gaseous breeze.  They hadn’t checked whether the books were identical.  They had simply assumed that to be the case. It was the same things they saw, after all.  The same city, if made of two separate parts merged by the crazy double joke of each municipal planning department.

Overhead, banking choppers fanned the breeze into gusts of thankfully clearer air.  Beneath cantilever bridges and between vast storage behemoths, the couple plied their haphazard course.  There were no maps in the books.

They knew there was no point in thinking further than the present impulse.  Quests, they knew, should have a purpose.  And all they wanted to find was the love of each for the other.  Any other concerns went hang.

Not a novel, after all, but a story.  A mishandled chopper crashed and crushed them like an egg with a double yolk.  Whisked from life into the oubliettes of spent imagination.

A white vulture banked into an empty sky and crossed the yellow-steaming city, seeking yesterday to fang for today.