Wet cement doesn't feel, it doesn't care where you step, and you can sit there and insult it all day long, and it is still just wet cement. When the tall, muscular, yet lanky figure had seated himself down on the stoop, the cement had been dry, and the people inside the house had been alive just minutes prior. He didn't sit on the stoop with his arm entwined and hanging from the iron railing because he was praying for the traveling souls, he wasn't feeling remorse or waiting to be arrested-no, Mikhal was just sitting. Mikhal hadn't noticed when it had started to mist, he hadn't noticed when his cell phone rang, he hadn't noticed when the mist turned to rain, which turned to torrential downpours that put out his cigarette before it burned down to his fingers, or even when the rain had stopped. The thing that brought him back from being a gargoyle was her.


Standing at a respectable 5'9', Mikhal had often thought that this was the only thing about this woman that could be deemed as 'respectable'. Of course, that didn't mean that he wouldn't mind having her take a closer examination of his sheets, so to speak, for this woman was in every young man's dreams. She would drive you crazy, in every single way. Mikhal needn't look up to know that his brother's wife was approaching as the loud, obnoxious sound of her stilettos on the wet cement, the smell of over-done over-priced perfume covering up cheap vodka and cigarettes, and of course, the sound of her gum being chewed were molesting Mikhal's senses so much he felt he could hurl. From that mouth that Mikhal would bet had been quite busy, Anastasia asked him, with a few Russian explicative words thrown in for good measure, where Mikhal's brother was. Dull green eyes slowly worked their way up her figure to meet hers.


Her impatience only made the silence Mikhal created even sweeter as he shifted his gaze from her and gave a pointed glance to his left, where a dumpster lay open. With one last haul of a black bag, Dimitri set the inside of the dumpster on fire with the strategic dropping of a lit $1 bill on some gasoline soaked rags and bodies. Dimitri appeared not to have noticed his wife as he yelled to his younger brother, 'You could have helped, you know! It's not like you get to do the fun part and I get to clean up your messes for the rest of my life, little brother'. Mikhal never understood why Dimitri felt killing families was fun, not that it bothered Mikhal in the least, he just didn't find their pleading, begging and tears as 'fun'. In the end there was just exsanguinate skin and bones and hair left on the ground anyway, and there never had been anything more, at least not according to Mikhal. Mikhal never suffered from something called 'humanity'.


This quality of Mikhal's often led to him doing something just for the hell of it, without care of consequences. He knew that there would be consequences of course; Mikhal wasn't stupid after all, quite the opposite. The difference was that Mikhal didn't care. It was this method of thinking that allowed an aloof grin, the first visible emotion to have crossed his face in quite a long time to appear on his face. In a calculated movement, Mikhal reached out, wrapping his pale fingers around Anastasia's wrist and pulling her forward, kissing her while his brother's cigarette fell from his mouth and was extinguished on the wet cement. It would have been one thing if Mikhal forced her further into it, or if Anastasia had pulled away, but when Mikhal's hand released her, she wrapped that hand around his neck.


With a sickening sound, the kiss broke as Dimitri's fist collided with Mikhal's jaw. 'Now that, my dear brother, was the fun part.' Mikhal smirked, rubbing his hand along his swelling, red jaw, which was not broken-not yet anyway. Mikhal had always found his one and only love in confrontation. Anastasia's horrified shriek was causing more of a headache than the blow from his older brother, and as Mikhal looked challengingly on at his older brother, Anastasia had backed up. Having grabbed a gun from her purse that didn't even look big enough to hold a wallet, let alone a gun, the cold metal heated up quickly in her panicking, sweaty hands. She, however, was not the only person with a gun clutched tightly.


Mikhal merely lit a cigarette, taking a deep inhale, and enjoying the wonderful burning sensation. Eyeing the barrel of the gun in front of his face warily, Mikhal looked just past it at his brother's face. Dimitri was never one to hide or control his anger, but there was something else in his eyes. Dimitri was the only one that knew his gun was void of bullets, much like his brother was void of emotion. Part of Dimitri just wanted to see Mikhal show some real human emotion for once in Mikhal's 23 years, but alas, it was of no use. Reaching for the trigger slower than he normally did, Dimitri was just beginning to look like he was about to squeeze when a popping was heard, followed by a thump, and then the 'clack' sound of an empty firearm hitting the wet cement.


'Is he dead?' Mikhal imagined himself grabbing her recently fired gun from her sweaty hands and squeezing the trigger. The massive stupidity of the question itself was even one hundred times less stupid than the questioner herself, and his sister-in-law was not noted for her intelligence. Anastasia had never really noticed when Dimitri was alive, it was ironic that she was asking if he still was. When people were shot by their wives in the neck and start bleeding, typically they're dead. As the disgusting liquid oozed, mixing with the water in the cracks of the pavement, seemingly magnetized to her Manolo Blahniks; Mikhal couldn't help but notice how fitting it seemed as the soul once confined within the auburn iron had previously clung to her feet, worshipping her every move. The poetic injustice of this confined man literally pouring himself out to her was almost enough to make Mikhal start to chuckle, but instead, Mikhal continued to smoke. Anastasia, luckily for him, was easily tuned out, as her shrieks, and apologies, and explanations, and tossing of the smoking metal in some direction Mikhal couldn't recall was enough to make Mikhal picture two bodies on the wet cement. Lovers lying peacefully as they finally intertwined themselves for the last time.


Liquid, as you know, tends to mix, and the blood mixed with the water on the cement, running down into the dirt, grime, slime, and gum on the ground. Finishing his cigarette, Mikhal rubbed it out on the wet cement, enjoying the 'szzzt' noise that accompanied it. Finally standing up for the first time in hours, Mikhal left his brother and sister, like the plague of humanity that Mikhal had always detested, and walked away. She watched him disappear, as if he had melted in with the wet cement and becoming one. Wet cement doesn't feel, it doesn't care where you step, and you can point a gun at it, and it's still just wet cement.