Dress Rehearsal 

Claudio places the flower gently on the stone slab and takes a step away, as if he was attempting to dress the area before him like a visualised scene from inside his head. He lets out a slightly stuttered sigh as he steps forward and picks the flower up, then lies it back down again, this time angling it slightly to the left before stepping back once more.

“Are you going to still deny your feeling for her?” Marcus asks as he lies outstretched across a bench that sits a few feet away.

“When you are attempting to send a specific message, you must dress the foliage to suit,” he says as he casts a savage glance his way. “I recognise someone from your linage could not understand how important a little artistic flair is in this situation, but surly by witnessing what I have done here, you can see the value in the piece as it appears now, compared to how it was when we arrived.”

“My linage? Are you fucking with me old man? Are you forgetting where I came from?” he barks back as he grabs his nut sack and squeezes tightly.

He sighs deeply and turns back to the bloody collage that sits before him. “Sometimes child, DNA is not the linage we must call back to, but the environment your dear mother kept you contained in.”