"Hey, you fuck! Careful with that thing!"

The head thrower laughed. He and the receiver kept running along the dark expanse of the warehouse roof, making for the elevated tracks of the commuter rail. The soles of their sneakers slapped against the cheap asphalt roof tiles, and the sound echoed from neighboring buildings.

"Hold on!" said the receiver. "Let's look at this thing." The two kids came to a halt, caught their breath, and dangled their legs over the eve of the warehouse.

"What do you think it is, anyway?" asked the receiver, a stocky kid wearing a muscle shirt stamped with the red, white and black of a heavy metal band's logo. He cradled the head in his arms, and looked into its blank plaster eyes. Behind them lay nothing. The effect was disconcerting when combined with the distant noise of birds.

The other teen shrugged. He was tall — well over six feet. He had been the one to originally remove the head from its resting place on top of a cabinet full of similar plaster creations. The boys had visited a college, and found the art department. They had burgled the art department and found a head. Now, they were on the run from no one, and enjoying the chase.

Apollo's curls were crude, and almost abstract. His dark, hollow eyes seemed exhausted. His mouth was open, as though he were about to declaim a poem.

The receiver put forth a theory: "Maybe it's some Greek guy. You know, a god."

"I think it's some French fashion model. You know, a faggot," laughed the thrower, snatching the head from short boy's lap. He lofted the head into the air, experimentally. It was difficult to hurl, but it had momentum. It looked fragile against the dark grey of the city's night sky.

"Seriously — what do you think it is?"

The thrower stared at the rough, human details of the head, and let his fingers slide across the plaster. "I dunno. It's just something that someone made, I guess. It's actually kind of cool."

"Yeah," said the receiver. "Hey, let's throw it at the ground and watch it break."

The thrower hesitated, and then stood up. He made a break for the train platform, leaping balletically from the edge of the warehouse roof onto the platform's edge. Cradling the head in the crook of his arm, he scrambled over the fence and onto the platform itself, followed closely by his friend.

There was a quiet moment, and then the thrower gripped the head tightly.

"Heads up," he quipped. He put his thumb into Apollo's open mouth, letting his middle and index fingers grip the interior of the god's eyes. In a motion that was both graceful and semi-circular, he swung the head up into an arc that caused it to plummet gorgeously toward the pavement below. The arc recalled artillery shells, or lawn darts. It was a geometrically beautiful curve.

The boys ran to the edge of the platform.

A woman stood on the curb.

The thrower spotted her.

The woman carried a cardboard box of fresh cannolis under one arm and two different translations of Dante's "Inferno" under the other. She wore a summer dress covered in embroidered roses that was as ridiculous as it was fetching. Her earings matched her dress, and she wore a backpack containing a notebook, some silver coins from Turkey, and a bag of trail mix.

The thrower had only enough time to make the beginning of a noise — it sounded a little like a bird, or a screaming squirrel. It was high-pitched and desperate; the plaster was moving quickly now.

The woman looked up, slightly surprised. She almost had enough time to brush her dark hair out of her eyes.

Apollo's lips made contact with the woman's forehead while sailing along at roughly 45 miles per hour. The thing was in gravity's thrall, and it behaved appropriately, diving downward with an ever-increasing velocity. The head's arrival brought the woman a blunt trauma, a massive cerebral hematoma, and an almost instant death.

Her human head lay next to Apollo's plaster head. Both were shattered.

The woman would later become an intern.

chapter two: the notion of motion >>>