III of Cups

Hit the boombox and hit the fucking streets, he told me. There was a car waiting outside, and I crawled into the back with Marie, while he sprayed our flat with gasoline and set it alight. We left the cul-de-sac at high speed, and he asked why we hadn’t hit the fucking boombox. Then he turned on his music.
So there we were, foully hungover, with a dead man in our burning apartment, pelting down the Boulevard Ste-Germain at eleven in the morning, with Abba on the stereo and the volume turned up to eleven. It had been a good party, a lovely flat and a pleasant life in the city. Now back to the wilderness.
“How’s John these days?” I asked as we crossed the river.
“John went down with the Leviathan,” he said.
“Fuck. He owed me booze,” I said.
Jasmine had fallen asleep. She used to drop off listening to Abba when she was younger, she said later.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“Let’s go south. To Bilbao,” he said. “They’ll never catch us.” Not every party ended in us fleeing the country. Only about one in ten.