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#MilitantFactionsQuotes 22: Their fingers - his dirty white. hers clean brown - unwrapped each from
Their fingers – his dirty white, hers clean brown – unwrapped each from the others clutches like withered roots. Adam watched Zainab float up and into the drizzled morning with a puzzled look on her face, that same slender hand now searching her Kaftan for cigarettes, the other hand pushing long black hair from her gold face, her eye-whites shining but her eyes sad with loss or resignation as she rose towards the heavy clouds and the blue sky beyond. The burner breathed hot air into the balloon‘s mouth, an asthmatic dragon, like the way she had blown smoke into his throat at Disneyland.
As the balloon slowly rose the festival-goers around him stepped back for a better view, admiring its rainbow colours and peace slogans but mostly its enormity: shaped like a light-bulb the size of a cathedral, raw savage gases propelling it skyward, Zainab inside with her cigarette and tranquillity. Even at this height, fifty, sixty feet and rising fast, Adam saw thin trails of smoke from Zainab‘s lips drift over the basket‘s edge, disappear into the blue.
-From "Never Trust a man with Egg on his Face", first published by Prole Books (2011), and one of the stories in Mark Piggott's fiction/non-fiction collection "Militant Factions" available in paperback or Kindle from Amazon.