I'm getting there.

Tucked under the unconditional love of rotten barley, I determined experimentation was in order to figure it all the hell out. The story isn't the hard part, the events are churchgirl easy, but it's the style that's effing hard. And here's my experiment. It ain't perfect by any taffypull of the psyche, but I discern some Lewis & Clark in there, not to mention rampant neologism.
********************************

"All sorts of things are unraveled," Wake Moses chuckles between slender blue smokewisps. His bent, ripped cigarette is a thin dry stick and a beacon to any thinking mind in a dark lot. There are probably few, he figures, fewer than creekbed fish swimming on gloaming asphalt to overpriced cars, ridding themselves of groceries and offspring. He swigs coolly from a bottle delicately swung from chopstick fingers. "In fact, actually," he slurs aloud, "I sincerely grasp the clarity of every subject left unconjured. I might very well be Jean Valjean, for all we know. Quantum physics has yet to prove otherwise."

Lennon laughs silently, his head nods vigorously in catechismal reverie. "Right on, Finny-Fin-Finnegan, you absolute dick. Red's the blood of angry men for sure. Pass the Jack, freak."

Wake swirls an amber revelation around for gesture and measure before tossing it over the hood to Lennon Pilate, the fargone measure of some other Eve's seed that happened into his yard one day and became blood. "I could've had epiphanies galore if it weren't for your incessant mosquito bitching, Lenny. Seriously."

Blank turns to viciousness, carousing on a steel hood and elbows clanking against the quiet black expanse of tempered glass. "Wakey, you goddamn short-dicked pansy, I saved you endless times around from meanderings that'd lead you nowhere but endless snowbanks and endless self-deprecation. Christ, you're a pretentious prick, and I love ya for it." Lennon tries to tackle him but there is an expanse of softly ticking, barely warm metal between and Wake evades him with a wary glance.

"Reeee-suckmydickulous," Wake mutters, swiping futilely at the quickly diminishing carafe of straw-coloured bravery. "You love me because I'm not you, and that's the blessed be-all end-all of the situation" (and now he's shouting), "or by the prose of my betters I'm in a Russian poem! I'm goddamn Onegin waiting for my blessed Tanya to shoot me back! Musketball through the sternum, thank ya ma'am, and I'm on a combustion-powered handbasket to the Fields!"

"You know what your scenario is, brother?" Lennon asks. There is a pause, a deft martial silence of the parking slots where no crashing carts interrupted, no offspring, no soaped-up couples. "You, friend, are Too. Fucking. Curious."
Wake waits, watching for sudsy offspring and champagne footsteps, but all is dark. Lights go off. Trees stop whining. He knows, knows Lenny to an unstruck tee, knows there will be something and feels marrow churning like rivers around crayfish.
"I could say it would proverbially kill you," Lennon continues while Wake waits with held breath to match whispering concrete, "but I know it will ironically... karmically, even... let you live beyond the dreams of monks and scientists."

The sky screams dimly and spreads tentacles of pastel-ridden foam across an otherwise bleak and Taggartesque silhouette. Wake Moses's skinny glowing stick dies without screaming and he drops it into a puddle beneath a wheel, an American landscape, a memory for archaeologists. Most everything is gleaming in an unwet fashion. Dry fish in an overpriced lot. Lennon is practically giving birth to a hysterical epiphany, something gut-wrenching enough that he stands on the hood and howls at constellations.

Wake forgets everything immediately. "You know why, Lenny, my brother from a different hyphenated slit?"

Lennon ceases his simian ritual and cocks an eye downward, offended. "And so? What of it?"

"Because," - and for a second Lennon thinks this will be Wake's only answer because it's so fucking him, except you can hear the pause, the ellipsis of unresolved chords and blackholes waiting to be connected - "because I'm included in all sorts of things."

The wind barely whistles around lamps and the groves between off-ramps. No headlights are out; no neon welcomes either. Lennon winds up, a great American landscape, and airmails the slickridden fifth exactly where an offspring-laden couple once hated the fact of groceries. Punctuation, Wake thinks.
"But is it a question mark or an exclamation?" And he realizes only afterwards, when the glass has been cleaned and the car is elsewhere and footsteps have been assumed by different-but-same shoppers, that the question continued aloud days too late. He'd already left riding on the back of crayfish sounds and whiskey, and Lennon is the kind of brother who will listen and let his tilted head and furrowed brow be the answers.