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Nails
We stood on a grassy hill next to the bridge's overpass, the dawn light slowly marching across the pavement towards us, an army of Day at last come to overpower our remaining bastion of Night.
"I guess the thing is- can you do it?"
His question broke my reverie; I had been staring at the undercarriage of the bridge deck. It looked not unlike a gothic castle, dark and forbidding in tones of iron and stone, with the river it straddled providing the metaphoric moat. I smiled slightly.
"A castle and moat for our last stand against the light," I muttered absently. He quirked an eyebrow at my cryptic pronouncement, but was too used to the frayed edges of my mind to bother plucking at loose threads.
I continued. "Can I do it? Well, sure. Not really a problem, I should think." I pulled out another cigarette, absently passing one to him as well.
"You know I respect your intelligence..." he began.
"That's a sentence pregnant with the promise of a conditional clause if I ever heard one," I interjected.
"...but I've never seen you handle anything this complex before."
The delivery had been a success, a bouncing baby but.
"Well, I guess that's true, if you want to look at it that way," I conceded.
He shook his head, though I couldn't tell if it was in anger or despair. The Night gives birth to conditions of her own. "I mean, yeah, you're smart, but I need something to judge, you know? Something...measurable." He waved his hands to indicate a vague shape, his cigarette tracing little fiery smudges in the flat predawn light; demonic fingerprints on a freshly-cleaned television screen tuned to a channel nobody was getting.
"Hmm. Measurable." I thought about it for a moment. "Well, if I told you my next words were totally without bullshit and as honest as possible, would you believe me?"
The orange firefly stopped and hovered for a moment as he considered my words. "I guess so," he conceded grudgingly.
"Ok. What's the most 'complex', as you put it, job you've ever known me to do?" I snuck a peek at him out of the corner of my eye, but smothered the urge to look directly at him. It wasn't time to pounce, yet.
The light twittered from its perch between his lips. "I guess that thing with Marco and the Mexicans, and that Bulgarian. You know, when you did that thing with the nails?" I could see him smiling slightly, now, as the bastard Sun poured it's treacle into our fort.
I pretended to give his words some thought. "Ok, in that case, what if I told you that I judge my work at that time to have been, oh, about 40% of my total capacity in such matters?"
There was a pause. He coaxed the ember to flare briefly, a last ditch effort to compete with an unwelcome dawn. "Forty?"
"About that."
Another pause. "As in, you could be twice as smart, or work twice as hard, or whatever, as the thing with the nails?"
I squinted into the ever-brightening horizon. Echoing out from beneath the overpass came the harsh laughter of a newly-woken crow. "I never work hard, actually. Call it twice as smart, if you want."
"Hmm." He dropped the forlorn cigarette to the earth and gave it a military burial courtesy of his heel. "That's pretty good."
Sensing my moment, I turned to face him. "Good enough for this job, anyway."
He looked past my shoulder at something only he could see. "You sure?"
I smiled. The victorious dawn pooled around our ankles, a tide of photons come to wash away our futile sand castles.
"Trust me."
The sun wasn't the only winner that day.
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