For three years, four months and seven days, Cone's heart HAD been beating, of course. It's just that on a certain day, really not that long ago, he had determined that there were to be no more "blood roses" in his life. Blood roses, you know, when the needle's in your arm, when it's in your favorite vein, the one you called "Old Faithful" because it could always take a hit when the other veins in your arms, neck, hands, feet, penis, and legs were too bruised and too fragile to accept ONE MORE FUCKING ASSAULT with the sharp metal, but Old Faithful's there for you so you're leaning up against the wall in a dark room and you penetrate the skin and you pull back the plunger just a little, to make sure you hit the vein good, and...

whoosh

the reddest of red blood shoots back up into the rig and makes that beautiful fucking mushroom-cloud-looking rose, and then you slowly push down on that plunger and unwrap the tie on your arm... and all the buildings go away, and all the noise goes away, and you can see the electricity, you can see Mother Fucking Nature, you think, and there's a little "Saint"-like figure on a pushcart shoveling that blue electricity from nowhere to nowhere, and you crawl inside the petals of that rose painted with your lifeblood and know nothing can get to you there.

So no more of those, he had thought, and incorrectly as it turned out. It wasn't long after, in the grand scheme of things, in "geological time," if you will, that he encountered a rose that wasn't at the end of a spike, whose petals protected and who mighty fucking god himself, had he even existed, could not have fashioned out of all the clay in 100 Montessori preschools. At least that's what Cone believed. And he crawled inside, after a while, and got comfortable, which, by the way, isn't listed as one of the seven deadly sins, and ventured out, sometimes too far and sometimes not far enough, always thinking that he could come back, and the rose, his rose, would be there for him.

But roses, it turns out, don't last forever.