The rain smelled different in the city.

Out in the country, the air plunged into such delicious freshness that some green-eyed linguist had coined a word for it: petrichor. Earth and growth and the wide, open sky and all the things that made life worth living. Nature rejuvenated on pattering droplets out of the gunmetal grey.

The kind of freshness Casper dreamed of every time he fell asleep.

Once, the sweetness had been a promise when Casper closed his eyes, but he couldn't seem to imagine it anymore. With every step between these metal hulks of industrial poverty and decaying grey-wash towers, the stink of human pollution swallowed a little more of the memory.

He'd run away here, once upon a time, and the city had been breathless with dreams. The untethered opportunity should have been the dawn of his damn life but all he'd found was one long waking nightmare and the swamp of apathy and oblivion suffocating everything inside him that hadn't already died.

At a pause on the corner, Casper pulled his phone out his pocket before striking out into the downpour again. Third time it'd swarmed against his thigh like a sack full of bees now, and he already knew who it was before he squinted at that scratched up screen through the raindrops that splattered across the glass. Jack, little heart tacked on the end that Casper had put there two years ago and never had the guts to change. Seemed like the stink should've gotten sweeter seeing his boyfriend's name in the dull LCD.

It didn't.

Sighing, Casper answered the call.

"Cassie baby!" Jack's slur blared down the phone. Babbling voices haunted the background, and gritting his teeth, Casper knocked down the volume. Drunk. But at least it sounded like a good mood. "Hey, baby! Thought you were at work?"

Casper shouldered through the crowds. Screeching taxis and freight lorries flung pools full of sodden rubbish and muck at his legs as he jogged along the side of the road. The pouring rain had already soaked through his hood, wormed down the back of his coat to drench his skin and bones in shuddering, gasping ice.

Jack was probably too drunk to distinguish it from the club noise.

"Fag break."

"Hey, caught you just in time then, huh? Look—look, baby, do you— Hey, fuck off, cunt!" Jack's voice faded even as it rose to a shout. "Yeah—Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, you asshole. Watch where you're stepping, huh? I'll cut your fuckin' eyes out if you ain't gonna use 'em. Yeah, that's right fuck off. Little fuckin'..." Wild laughter, and Jack's voice came down the speaker again. "Sorry, baby. What was I saying?"

"Don't ask me."

Voices crackled down the phone and swarmed around him in a shapeless racket on this packed street, but where Jack's should be, nothing but a pit opening up in Casper's gut. Casper hissed between his teeth while he swapped hands on the phone, jamming the other in his pocket against the chill. Here it goes, Cas. That's what your bad mood buys you.

"Fuck's up with you?" Jack's voice had lost all levity. "You know what, Cas, you ain't never pleased to hear from me anymore. Dunno why I fuckin'—"

"Jack. Seriously."

Silence. Fuck knew that was Jack hanging on for an apology, but he wouldn't get one. Casper was fucking sick of handing them out. Lies tasted foul as this pollution-clogged air on his tongue these days, but only the kind that someone else wanted to hear.

Another corner, squeezing around the bodies jammed up against the curb in their desperation to make space between them and the ragged figure huddled on the corner drenched by the rain. Usually, Casper stopped, offered the guy a cigarette – the least he could do was help out someone scratching out a breath of nicotine from a tin full of ends. Today, the rain came so thick and fast it drowned him, and the spark of Jack's lighter still snapped down the phone.

The bar he worked at stood a grimy harbour in the darkness just across this side road, and with the rain pelting against his face, Casper bolted for it. Filth splashed up around his ankles as he sprinted across the street, down in his boots and between his toes. The alley he smoked in before work dipped down the side of the building. The gaggle of wheezing smoker in the smoking area made the laughing void between him and a scratch of relief. Casper circled it quickly, nodding and smiling as the regulars called out to him.

Was Jack still there? Casper had let the phone fall from his ear, but now he lifted it back, voices still ground down the speaker. Shit. It was always easier when Jack just hung up. Gritting his teeth, Casper slid into the side-alley, skipping over a spill of rubbish already smeared into the ground by the hammering rain. Maybe it stunk like month-old rot but compared to that clamour of pissheads out the front, it was quiet. God knew Casper needed quiet just about always with this headache that nailed into his skull like a disease.

"Jack, my break's done. I've got to go."

Jack's voice burst down the speaker. "Nah, nah, nah – wait! Wait, wait—"

"Waiting."

Tongue clenched between his teeth, Casper jammed open the backdoor and huddled in the arch. Spits of water still nipped at his cheeks, but it was sheltered enough to press the phone between his ear and his shoulder and roll a cigarette.

"Wanted to ask you, baby, you wanna come 'round later?"

Shit. That's what he got for bullshitting about the early shift. "I dunno, Jack. I'm wrecked."

"So you don't wanna?"

Casper straightened up, eyes narrowing at the cobweb crusted doorframe opposite him. Why wasn't he pissed off?

"Only askin' 'cause if you ain't gonna bother, there's this smokin' bird making eyes at—" Jack's voice lifted abruptly out of his crooning drawl to an equally gut-tingling shout. "Yeah, honey, I see you lookin'!" Laughter. Casper pressed his eyes shut and grit his teeth. "Yeah, one second, baby, I'm just seein' what my boyfriend's sayin', but he's about to say no problem-o Jackie, so just gimme one sec, huh? Then I'll get you—"

"Jack."

Static distortion crackled through the speaker. Ice pick right into his goddamn brain, hammered home by that laughter. "Sorry, baby! What you sayin' then? 'Cause—"

"Yeah, Jack. Stick your fucking dick in her. I'll be right here slinging drinks to smackheads where I always am. Don't worry about me."

"Sweet!" Jesus fucking... "Catch you 'round, huh, baby? Gonna leave you a little something for when you get home, alright?"

One last kiss smacked down the speaker and the line went dead.

Only the tobacco and paper grinding between his fingertips kept him from dashing the phone against the ground. An explosion of glass and wire against the unforgiving earth.

Wouldn't it be beautiful?

Casper rolled another cigarette. He left his coat on the hook inside with the dream that the hypothermic downpour might make him feel alive.

It didn't, because rain didn't mean pretty sweetness and glistening emerald leaves in this place.

Rain meant another spit in the face of your memories of childhood innocence, back when the downpour had you sitting at the window and marvelling at the wonder rather than crouched in an alley ripe with the putrid stink of rubbish in the middle of the night. Rain meant trying your damnedest to keep your cigarette dry and getting soaked yourself because that last scrap of tobacco meant far more than keeping the rain off your back.

At the last acrid toke, Casper tipped his head back to the heavens, scratching his fingers through his black hair to invite in the water pouring from the sky. Back to the murky grey abyss glowering between the drunken buildings. Fat droplets splashed across his face, frostbitten gasps of cold greasy with pollution. He shivered as the water slithered down his throat, soaking the last dry scraps of his hair and plastering his t-shirt to the skeletal frame of his ribs. The strange geometric pattern adorning the front winked its illuminati eye at the sky.

Was this what the wonder used to be? Water clogged his nose and if he kept his mouth shut, it was just like drowning.

But drowning didn't buy him more tobacco.

As Casper stepped inside the back door, the muggy heat settled like a pillow across his face. Suffocating. The bass wormed through his brain, throbbing through the floor and shuddering in his bones. Water drizzled off his clothes, pattering against the concrete, and Casper turned his head up to the fluorescent bar of light flickering on the ceiling, a thin smile on his chapped lips. Drizzle from the grey cloud that had hung low above his head as long as he could remember.

His whisper cracked in his throat, the sound lost beneath the music crawling under his skin. "I want to run away."

Run away from the place he'd run toward. That really was just like him, but now he drowned like a cockroach caught in a sewer flow, so how could he cling to this nightmare?

Maybe one day he'd sit beneath a porch in the countryside, and the droplets pattering on the awning while he smoked would be the only sound in the world. Green hills would roll right up to the horizon and the air would lay fresh with petrichor on his tongue.

Maybe one day he'd make it before this place killed him.

Casper sighed and started off down the corridor to the bar, his fingers trailing along the black roller-painted walls.

His phone buzzed just as he set his hand on the doorknob through to the back room. Grinning, Casper unlocked his phone as he edged away from the door a little way. Here was his little something. The screen held a string of texts from Jack – the usual cute stuff all rife with drunken misspellings. Then the photos: fingers wound through his bleached fauxhawk, all the sublime cut bulk of him bathed in murky light as he posed in front of the club bathroom mirror.

Heat welled in Casper's chest, overflowing – sliding down through his gut to pool in his groin as he scrolled through them. Casper leant back against the wall as the icing splurged out onto the cake. Thirty seconds of pornographic filth and Jack's rough drawl like he had his hand around Casper's throat and his teeth sinking into his skin.

Hey, it wasn't love, but it was as close as he'd ever get.

The bass thudded against Casper's back in time with the throb of blood in the hardness trapped inside his tight jeans. He knocked his head against the wall, eyes sliding up and down the empty hall. Would it really harm...? Nona and Jess were supposed to stay behind the bar until he got there, and technically, he had like ten minutes...

Oh, had he undone his jeans? Not him, but a phantasmal Jack with a wolfish smile and one hand pinning Casper's wrists to the wall. Naked, hands chained to the ceiling now while Jack circled him, knife trailing over his skin while he—

Someone was there.

Fleeing bugs skittered down his spine. Would it harm? Fuck sake, Casper. You're a mess. Gritting his teeth, he peeked down the hall.

Nona stood by the door at the end, and hey, that's what he got for expecting she'd work like she was supposed to 'til the end of her shift. So easy to slack off, wasn't it, when this job wasn't the rest of your life?

Her phone was out, trained on him, and her hand pressed to her mouth to stifle the laughter. She had the kind of face Casper forgot whenever it left his sight, and here was her self-worth: a viral video of her gutterrat co-worker jacking off in the back corridor, the sleazebag curled around his small, wank-raw dick with drool sliding over his lips.

Her laughter screamed out as he met her eye. Her little step back said preparing to film the onslaught. Oh, and how cruel not to give her the pleasure.

Casper smiled and tipped his head back against the wall. The ugly smile. The one that twisted the scars in his cheek and crawled down your spine like cockroaches. Nona's face fell as he kept a grip on his deflating cock. All the blood had better places to be now, a mark of shame across his face.

What are you doing, Casper?

His voice scraped up his throat. "It's extra for a video, love."

Her lip curled. The hand wrapped around her phone shook. It only took five seconds of Casper stroking himself while holding eye contact for her voyeurism to confront her. The kind of thing people like her answered in themselves with projected disgust. Like I'd have to do it if she just screamed at me like a normal human being. She clucked her tongue against her teeth and put her phone away.

"You're disgusting."

Like he was the one with a video of her masturbating. "You owe me twenty dollars."

The repulsion on her face doubled down and she fled past him. Her blonde hair flittered through the door. Groaning, Casper banged his head against the wall.

There went his job.

Why did he do that?

He hurried to the bar anyway. No matter that he passed out every morning with the sliver of hope that maybe he wouldn't wake up that evening for this pit of a life. Call him a lot of things, none of them good, but he'd do his goddamn job until the boss fired him and he'd do it well.

The music pounded into his skull. Bass so filthy it strung out into a slur of gut-twisting reverberation. A small room preceded the bar, boxes and fridges and Nona sat on a stack of crates, a brief glare up from her phone just to stick him with daggers bearing little messages to tell him you're disgusting.

Casper reminded her she owed him money before he left.

Into the pit.