The Church of England broke its ties with Rome in the 1500s but it did not leave all of its traditions behind in its wake. The Episcopal Church is a direct descendant and still sits at the table of Western Christian Churches. This church in particular calls to all of the Western faiths and the parishioners consist of people from one end of the spectrum to the other and does not turn away those who would worship here. All who call the church theirs hold sacred the Scripture and Eucharist and expect the priest to baptize their children and oversee their marriages and hear their confessions.
He's here tonight to hear private confessions.
A few of the parishioners know that Father Echeverría smokes tobacco on occasion. He has been ordained in the Anglican faith and is recognized by the flock as an apostle of their Lord but he is human. When he smokes he rolls a cigarette from loose tobacco off church property and he
Fr. EcheverríaFr. Echeverría[Try not to be a dick, Jove.]
Fr. EcheverríaThe Church of England broke its ties with Rome in the 1500s but it did not leave all of its traditions behind in its wake. The Episcopal Church is a direct descendant and still sits at the table of Western Christian Churches. This church in particular calls to all of the Western faiths and the parishioners consist of people from one end of the spectrum to the other and does not turn away those who would worship here. All who call the church theirs hold sacred the Scripture and Eucharist and expect the priest to baptize their children and oversee their marriages and hear their confessions.
He's here tonight to hear private confessions.
A few of the parishioners know that Father Echeverría smokes tobacco on occasion. He has been ordained in the Anglican faith and is recognized by the flock as an apostle of their Lord but he is human. Sometimes he still smells like smoke when he crosses the street from his house to God's but most times he does not.
Tonight he smoked before services. He has not smoked before services since the funeral for the Gutierrez boy, 15, killed by a stray bullet. No such immediate explanation for the cigarette tonight but nothing so fleeting as a craving either. He's made of sterner stuff than that.
The church is new and lacks the adornments of European buildings but the auditorium where the rituals take place still feels holy. High ceilings and old pews and the crosses give it space and ground it at once.
A few older women light candles in the waning light and murmur to each other in Spanish but the confessional booth stands empty.
SerafinePer + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 5, 6, 6, 6, 7) ( success x 5 )
SerafineOur heroine does not look like the ordinary sort one finds attending confession on a Friday evening in May. She does not look like the sort one finds attending confession at any time, not particularly. But this house of worship turns no one away, so while the old women lighting candles give her surreptitious looks (that linger, then, on her profile, the long lean line of legs, the wild torrent of her hair, which is long and died a dishwater blonde over ebon-black roots) as she walks in. Alone, the shoulders of her worn leather jacket rain-spattered from an afternoon shower, the dampness in the air adding some extra kink to the long, loose curls of her hair.
Dressed in cut-off jean shorts, torn fishnets, a torn t-shirt/bra combo of some sort under that leather jacket, and a pair of combat boots with silver-stacked heels.
She wanders for a moment, takes a turn around the sanctuary, watching them back, though less surreptitiously. Glances upward at whatever representations they have on the walls. Catholics always have the stations of the cross in every sanctuary - in stained glass or painting or mosaic or relief, ritualized, familiar. when she catches one of the murmuring old women studying her while trying not to be so-seen, she stares back, steady and unbending until she catches the woman's eye. And grins, and winks, all raw confidence, all subdural swagger.
It's not just the church.
There's something in the air, here.
The light is on by the confessional. The door is open, the parishioner's side empty. She half-smiles to herself, and begins sauntering in that direction.
Fr. EcheverríaAnd the women know the way they know that Christ died on the cross for them that this girl is not here for any pure reason. They suspect though they do not know that she is one of Padre's projects for he draws strays to him the way that Christ did, like he can absolve them of their sins and heal them of their sores and fill them up with the water and the love and the light that they have not had all their lives. A skeptic would brush aside these claims but even skeptics who come into his presence feel the light.
Before she comes into that booth and sits herself on the other side of the partition she can feel more than hear the hum of recent casting, a chorus of hit notes vibrating along the strings of the Tapestry, and then she's there and the light is upon her, like the unreal wash of a road flare in the wake of a crash. Meant to illuminate and warn and keep safe the people within and beyond.
That intense brightness calms the faithful and frightens the skeptics, comes from a devotion strong enough to eschew reality.
There is something in the air, and it's on the other side of the partition.
SerafineShe is humming beneath her breath; not humming, precisely. Remembering the rhythm of a song and the shadow of the melody that fell over it. At the entrance to the (so-familiar) structure of the wooden confessional (which is carved and wooden and feels older, stolid with the ritual of cleansed vice) she pauses, fingertips splayed on the wood, which is cool beneath her hand. Her head is canted like a birds, the shaved third tipped upward to the ceiling, letting the echoes of the working drift over her.
A glance back over her shadow at the old women, who share a knowing glance between them.
She steps into the booth.
Pulls the door closed behind her.
Breathes in the smell of wood polish and beeswax and dust that always accumulates in the odd corners of cathedrals, great and small.
There's a grate between the confessor's and confessee's sides. It needs to be oiled, squeaks a protest, metal against wood as she slides it open.
"Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been three," Her voice is low. There's a pause like she's remembering, but then, the crisp whir of a flinted lighter. Tobacco in the air, or is that just the way it lingers around his fingers, in his hair, after he has smoked a cigarette? " - thousand seven hundred eighty-three days fourteen hours, and twenty-two minutes since my last confession.
"So I hope you have a nice cushion and you're fucking comfy in there. 'Cos this is gonna take a while."
Fr. Echeverría[perc + aware]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10) ( success x 4 ) Re-rolls: 1
Fr. EcheverríaIf this were a pious abuelita on the other side of the partition he would have gone through the motions that reminded her of growing up in a Roman Catholic diocese. Would have made the attempt, anyway, since everybody here knows his story. It's rough and it doesn't leave him awash in the light of the eternally pure but nobody really wants that, if you get right down to it. They want to know all the things their Father has done since taking the vows have been holy, not that he came out the womb that way. Anybody claims he came out the womb holy has a lot of things to answer for come judgment day.
This isn't an abuelita on the other side of the partition. Whole point of private confession is to keep the penitent away from the eyes of outsiders, to sit before God with the priest acting as a vessel. Only sign that it's a person over there and not the Boss is the silhouette behind the partition.
His silhouette doesn't tell her much. He's tall. He's dark. He's got a life-rough voice that doesn't require extra decibels to carry and beyond an ignorable liquidity on certain phonemes a person can't tell his blood is from Puerto Rico.
She can hear a soft huff like the priest almost laughed, and then he speaks.
"The Lord be in your heart and on your lips, that you may confess all your sins. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
SerafineShe has made her own comfortable next in the last 3.2 seconds. What matters sometimes is that you change your perspective. Look: she's not kneeling and her head is not bowed. She's leaning against the partition, her head tucked next to the grate, her long hair golden and gleaming against the glossed wood. Even if they do not use incense here, she can smell the heaviness of it, low and masculine and pungent, some half-surfacing sense memory of long ago.
Thud. Thud.
These are small thuds, (she's a spare creature, all want and muscle and bone. There's no room for body fat. The fat has been harrowed out of her by a driving, wanton sort of life) as she leans back, lifts her legs and props her booted feet high on the wall opposite the bench provided in the confessional for the most infirm of sinners. Which she treats like a chaise, like a fainting couch, like a divan.
An indrawn breath, audible that, when she catches the edge of the priest's almost laugh. She is quiet if not precisely reverent as he offers a blessing for the holy space.
"I'm sorry father," the skein of humor answers his own; silver, this, for all that there is nothing like sorrow in her voice. Just something rich and sure and perhaps even a hint regretful. No: wry. "I forgot.
"I don't believe in sin."
And also: nearly serene. No lost lamb, this, seeking absolution. A breath withheld, a moment's silence. Her head dips lower and she knuckles her thumb into her lower lip. Grins around it, all private, the smile edging its way inevitably into the bit:
"So, since we're in here anyway," with perfect cheek. " - wanna make out?"
Fr. EcheverríaKnowledge of the history of the church is not necessary prior to the entering of it. She has just proven that respect for the sanctity of the place isn't either but if she knew what he was before she refused to kneel on the other side of the grille then sure as shit he knew what she was when he heard her sauntering on down the aisle. Long before she kicked up the heels of her boots and made herself comfortable, made everyone else in the place uncomfortable.
Disappointment comes early: he isn't uncomfortable. He's patient. Not spineless, but willing to tolerate a certain amount of foolishness before escorting the fool to the threshold. Drunks and pranksters wander in more regularly than the abuelitas can stand but the fact that he suffers them only elevates him in their eyes. Like he's a saint or something.
He's no saint but at least he listens to her like she's actually taking this seriously. And then he realizes that she's not taking this seriously. It's entirely possible she has brain damage. Drugs do that to people.
He carries on like this is all part of the script.
"But God exists," he says. "Your family exists. Society exists. You exist. If you fail to honor these things, and you feel no contrition, you've still sinned. You still owe God and your family and society and yourself penance. You believing or not believing has no place in here."
SerafineThere she is on the other side, just waiting for it. Wanting to hear it again: that huff of a laugh, some suggestion of sentient humanity beneath the holiness she can feel all fucking around her. Her head is lowered, she reaches up unconsciously and pulls the mass of her damp and curling hair back away from her ear, threads long fingers through the well-defined part where the buzz cut stops and pulls her hand back and over and through her hair, gathering the whole of the mass into a thick, twisting tail that she tucks very precisely and very carefully beneath the ever-so-sensitive hollow of her left her. Her attention slants downward, she squints at the ends in the dim light. The briefest frown of concentration as she gives in for a splint second to the ever-present urge of a long-haired woman: studying the tips for split ends.
Then he responds. No huff of laughter this time, but there's an expectancy to her, a half-smile as she awaits his rebuff and his rejection, the liquidity of his consonants just as familiar as a reconstructed memory. Her mother was Argentine. She could respond to him in the language they share, but -
but
- something about his admonishment seizes her at the base of her spine. It is not an attack of conscience. It is something else entire: a cold, constricting dread that crawls up her vertebrae and punches its way into her throat. With nothing - nothing - behind it, but a blankness she cannot skin. Which takes her so immediately and by such utter surprise that she (who can talk her way into and out of anything) is fucking wordless.
Silence, on the other side of the confessional.
Her head dips. She looses her hair, and her boots slide slowly down the opposite wall.
Thunk. Thunk.
- against the baseboard.
She finds she isn't breathing, and presses her nails so deeply into her inner wrist until the pain makes her start again, breathing that is, until the pressure against her flexor tendons draws her open fingers into the beginning of a curling fist she shakes loose a moment later.
Her heart is beating fast. She feels like there's something just to her left that she cannot quite see.
"I forgot how much I hate these places, too." Her voice is sober now, abruptly so, sharp and spare and raw. A short, sharp laugh here, though there's no humor in it. "And why."
SerafineThere she is on the other side, just waiting for it. Wanting to hear it again: that huff of a laugh, some suggestion of sentient humanity beneath the holiness she can feel all fucking around her. Her head is lowered, she reaches up unconsciously and pulls the mass of her damp and curling hair back away from her ear, threads long fingers through the well-defined part where the buzz cut stops and pulls her hand back and over and through her hair, gathering the whole of the mass into a thick, twisting tail that she tucks very precisely and very carefully beneath the ever-so-sensitive hollow of her left her. Her attention slants downward, she squints at the ends in the dim light. The briefest frown of concentration as she gives in for a splint second to the ever-present urge of a long-haired woman: studying the tips for split ends.
Then he responds. No huff of laughter this time, but there's an expectancy to her, a half-smile as she awaits his rebuff and his rejection, the liquidity of his consonants just as familiar as a reconstructed memory. Her mother was Argentine. She could respond to him in the language they share, but -
but
- something about his admonishment seizes her at the base of her spine. It is not an attack of conscience. It is something else entire: a cold, constricting dread that crawls up her vertebrae and punches its way into her throat. With nothing - nothing - behind it, but a blankness she cannot skin. Which takes her so immediately and by such utter surprise that she (who can talk her way into and out of anything) is fucking wordless.
Silence, on the other side of the confessional.
Her head dips. She looses her hair, and her boots slide slowly down the opposite wall.
Thunk. Thunk.
- against the baseboard.
She finds she isn't breathing, and presses her nails so deeply into her inner wrist until the pain makes her start again, breathing that is, until the pressure against her flexor tendons draws her open fingers into the beginning of a curling fist she shakes loose a moment later.
Her heart is beating fast. She feels like there's something just to her left that she cannot quite see.
"I forgot how much I hate these places, too." Her voice is sober now, abruptly so, sharp and spare and raw. A short, sharp laugh here, though there's no humor in it. "And why."
Fr. EcheverríaFor all she knows he wouldn't mind making out but damned if he didn't throw down the Book in a hurry.
If she could see him she could start to form an opinion about him just based on his body. His body gives away his past and his past cuts through the incontrovertible truths he puts up the way and for the same reason cowboys put up fences. All she has in here is his voice and his voice is ruthless even as the rest of him exists now, here, only to grant absolution.
Examination of conscience. That's the first thing a body wants to accomplish before she shuts herself in a box with a man of God.
Where before he almost laughed now she hears him take a breath. The depth and timbre of it suggests a man of
Fr. EcheverríaHis sigh rattles low in his lungs when he lets go the breath and it is a sigh. Like he saw her shiver even through the grille and the shadow and the high high fence between them.
"Why did you come here tonight?" he asks and it's worth mentioning that his tone is mild like a breeze come in out of the south, no portent of rain or lightning, no hellfire, impenitent sinner in their midst or not he does not judge.
The question is open, the way How are you? is open, like she can tell the truth if she wants. Isn't like there's a line outside the confessional. All the women have lit their candles and said their prayers and crossed themselves and gone on their way.
SerafineThe memory is persistent but it will not take shape. It lingers, still, in her peripheral vision - wrapped in a perfect, oblique sort of darkness. She wants to stretch away from it; and she does stretch, lifting her chin as he sighs, pulling her shoulders forward in the stiff framework of her old leather jacket. Which is festooned with spikes and chains. She has a joint in her left front pocket, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her right front pocket, and three tabs of perfectly decent acid tucked in a thin skin of onion paper hidden in the lining of the small pocket above her left breast.
She will not take the acid tonight.
A bad trip is guaranteed.
"I don't know." Give her this: that I don't know is open too. Open in her throat, open in the frame of her body. She does leaves her boots on the baseboards now, tips the crown of her head back into the corner of the booth beside the grille. Looks up at the ceiling through the haze of her lashes. She doesn't know. Fuck, maybe he could tell her. "I was walking by. I felt - "
An abrupt cessation, a quiet breath - out.
Give her this, too. The bitterness about hating these places. That adolescent viciousness that underscored that sentiment is gone from her voice quickly as it entered. He will not bludgeon her with hellfire, and she will not stain him with history.
"Well," - a voiceless laugh. The edge of a reflective half-smile carves its way into her voice. "You're a hard man to ignore, aren't you? When you Work?"
Serafine(BRB)
Fr. EcheverríaSlight movement in this booth broadcasts itself as rustles and glints of light where before none shone. He turns his head to glimpse her through the partition or let her glimpse him and it accomplishes little other than to show his eyes are open, the whites white, but his features remain in shadow.
A hard man to ignore, period, even behind a wall.
She cannot give him anything another man would not accept though and the truth is another man in this place, in his place, would be charged with accepting her lost and harsh-tongued as she is, but if he were someone else she would not be here. Another incontrovertible truth.
"Mm," he says, agreeing without giving it a word. Then: "I'm going to go to my office. If you want to talk more, the door is past the pulpit, and it's open."
He says this, but he does not stand up and leave here there without a chance to respond. No sense dancing around the topic. She knows what he is. He knows what she is. This booth is safe for confession of mortal sins but not for much else.
SerafíneHer eyes flick up to the metal grille when he moves closer. All in shadow and the whites of his eyes. There was a wide arched window with clear glass and a view of the lake and palm trees green against the glass. Christ - crucified, somewhere between ecstatic and agonized on his iron cross. The chapel down a blacktopped road from the school, framed by what cramped trees could grow in such a hard-scrabbled land. Moonlight through the windows at midnight, all the tourists gone, the nuns asleep in their beds. The swirl of pot and tobacco smoke up to the ceiling curling around his head like a crown.
He can see the shadow of her nod against the screen. The push and pull of long hair, hear the creak of her leather jacket before she voices her assent. Simple as,
"Okay," and a moment later, "cool."
She stays in the confessional then, her forehead tipped against the wood frame, her eyes dark and focused on the curve of the grain in the polished wood. Listens as he opens his side of the confessional, and closes it after. Listens, oh, alert, to his tread, heavy or light on the floor. It may be wood or even vinyl, given the age and congration, but she imagines it as stone carved from the ribs of the earth.
Two or three minutes later, the other side of the confessional opens and closes and she emerges. Frowns as she searches the sanctuary for the open door he promised - and follows after.
Nevermind that he awoke in her a shadow that will remain with her all this long night through - in the corner of her field of vision, at the back of her throat, coiled like a serpent around the base of her swine - there's still something - call-it-swagger - in the sweep of her rolling gait as she follows his directions and in his wake to his office.
Her hair is loose, half-covering her face. One-third shaved and dyed black. She is wearing, remember: torn fishnets, cut-off jeans, threads dangling down her lean thighs, and a heavy, masculine leather jacket, black with silver studs, over a Public Image Limited t-shirt torn to such shreds that her silver-studded bra beneath is more modest a garment than the t-shirt itself.
Fr. EcheverríaAll of the doors in this space are oak and incongruous with the newness of the building itself, like they were carried here from a church no longer standing on the backs of builders no longer building. The one leading into the rector's office is no exception.
In the time she takes to collect herself he has removed his vestment if he wore one over his clothes at all and shut the door leading from his office into the receptionist's office. The office is large enough to comfortably contain half a dozen adults. The center is taken up by a floor rug and a battered teal couch and two armchairs flanking it. A cheap desk sits in the corner. Bookcases and portraits of Mary and the apostles and wooden crosses against and on the walls. Through the lone window shines the light of a stubborn setting sun soon to be replaced by the exterior security bulbs.
He almost does not need the light. He is not so proud or so delusional to think himself the light but the miracles he performs sure as hell leave a glow around the places and the people affected by them.
So she comes into his office and she sees him now, scratching his eyebrow as he stands before one of the bookcases. He's tall, well over six feet so, with the sloping posture of one who responded to childhood correction with invectives, fuck you Tía I ain't standing up straight, dark hair to go with his ambiguous origins. When he turns to face her she sees he's well through his thirties and somewhere in the next decade, clean-shaven and green-eyed.
Healthy as he is Serafine can tell just looking at him he's one of those people who when pressed will confess to being an addict even though he hasn't touched whatever stuff used to consume him since before the last time she claimed to have gone to confession. No obvious thing, but the skin of an addict serves as a fetter for the ghost of the stuff. It's nothing that will ever really go away.
"Oh, good," he says, dry, when he sees her. "You're not one of my parishioners. That's a load off my mind." He indicates the chairs by extending his arm. "Have a seat."
SerafíneAnd addiction is one of the things she knows. One of the things she flirts with, as determinedly as she flirts with a faceless priest of an unknown denomination hidden away behind the walls of his confessional booth. She traces the history of it in his skin; on his face. Blue eyes rimmed in black liner swept back in a precise and elaborated line, and heavy black mascara to darken her lashes. When standing, she has the upright posture - the strain-spined reaching - of someone who always wanted to be taller. Though she seems rather tall, with the platforms and stacked heels of her boots lifting her to within - well, shouting distance at least. 5 to 6 inches of his own slouched height. Her face is long and oval, her nose prominent, her red smear of a mouth curved faintly.
One expects a snear there, that's what that uniform demands to go along with it. But no - smiles come to her more easily than snears, and usually the cracking sort - exuberant, exhilarated, enlivened. Tonight, that half-smile on her face has a reserved and mildly haunted edge to it that is hard to put one's finger on. Perhaps it is just the reserve, the held-back way her eyes slide over the priests big frame, take in all the details of a life hard-lived before the calamity of celebacy befell him. The reserve does not suit her unless she's dreaming of the wind or the stars.
No matter, it's eclipses with his dry comment. She laughs aloud - her voice ringing bright a as a polished brass bell - and tips her head in his direction in a mock salute.
"But Padre - " and in that one word, the way she rolls the -dre altogether, her tongue tipped at the back of her teeth without making full contact, he can hear that they share a language. And may share it from childhood. Even through the specifics of class and geography. "I'm wearing my Sunday best."
Sunday best: whatever remains of Saturday night when the night turns to day and the hangover sets in.
He invites her to take a seat and so she does, oh, sauntering because that is what her body was made to do, over to the indicated chair. Sinking into it with an athletic ease, hands still in her pockets. Slouching back into the seat and crosses her legs, one long leg over the other, the stacked silver heels of her boots glinting in the dim light that he quite nearly does not require.
Or, in the light he sheds, sure as he sparks miracles all around him.
"You can call me Sera," she offers by way of introduction when she's seated, now taking the time to study not just him, but the room itself. The batter desk, the new wooden doors, the bookcases, then back.
Fr. EcheverríaSomewhere underneath the patronly exterior he's amused. Amusement was the first thing she heard from him even before she heard the recitation that would have started the confession were confession what she truly came here to achieve. Amusement gave her a glimpse of a human behind the ritual. Now that he does not lurk behind a grille he looms over her, her who is half-dressed and leather and metal and smoke and sharp edges, and he is none of those things but he is not soft.
She can read bemusement in the furrow of his brow, the muscles tugging up instead of down. Up implies a willingness to accept. In certain languages it implies an open question instead of a yes or a no.
If that's her Sunday best, she can tell from looking at him, he doesn't want to see what she wears the rest of the time.
He can call her Sera.
He wipes his expression and sits down across from her.
"Alright," he says. "Sera." He holds out his right hand. His left is bare and that's as loud a declaration of lack of intimacy as one will get without the white collar around his neck. At least Anglican clergy can marry. "My name's Francisco Echeverría. You don't have to call me Padre."
SerafíneThere is that moment where he looms; where his setting-sun cast shadow covers her. She's looking up at him, her head tipped back, the sweep of her hair covering a fair third of her features. Raw, implicit fucking challenge in her eyes that she could not bank if she wanted to.
(And, to be fair, she never wants to.)
Her smile twists inward, becomes nearly (though never quite) a smirk as she reads the bemusement lifting his brow plain-as-day. The bemusement and the skepticism about the rest of her wardrobe.
He sits, then, offers her his hand across the distance and she leans forward across the interval distance, the faint music of her spikes and chains a chiming counterpoint to the rustle of movement. Her fingers are long and fine, the nails are painted the colors fo the rainbow. There's a tattoo on her palm and inside right index finger, but others on her arms are hidden by the sleeve of her jacket.
"Serafíne Davies," she expands, her voice like honey, the r exquisitely rolled. They shake. There are calluses on the pads of her fingers more than the palm of her hand. Otherwise, her skin is warm and her bones are bird-wing fine. She is smaller, Sera, than the space she seems to take up, than the space she seems to claim for herself.
"Seems weird to call a priest anything else, though," she not-quite-objects. There's rue in her eyes, now. Because even if she doesn't believe in sin, some pieces of that old life are so deeply ingrained that calling a priest his given name makes her shift strangely inside her skin.
"Francisco?" she essays, testing it out, her dark brows raised in sharp, neat arcs above her dark-rimmed eyes. "Believe it or not," and this is at once visceral and wry, the deep, physical awareness of the fucking irony of it all, "I don't know that I can do it."
Fr. EcheverríaThe priest's physical appearance does not offer nearly so much to look at as does the girl's. Wearing dark slacks and a work shirt secured with a belt, the only accoutrements he sports is a watch around his left wrist. No golden cross around his neck. No anything around his neck. He sits with his feet flat on the floor and, once they've shaken hands, his fingers knit together.
Both of them accented if only slightly, both of them Awake and aware of what the other is. A chance she could be a Hollower, he a Euthanatos, but the chances are slimmer than the chances of Sera being entirely honest. As honest as she was in the moments after he lay down the only law he knows now, which was the sort of honesty reserved for dark places, no audience.
Priests are bound by the same confidentiality as any other counseling body. She could confess to any illegal depraved thing she'd ever done in there and all he could do is dole out penance. He is neither judge nor jury and executions are against God's teachings.
Exorcisms, though. Those are not fiction. The magic she works is as dark as the inside of the confessional but if the lingering feel of it makes him uncomfortable she cannot tell even now that she faces him.
"Well," he says, "whatever you're comfortable with."
Which is when he shifts gears so fast it's a wonder they don't grind.
"Are you lost?"
SerafíneShe could have confessed any illegal, depraved thing she'd ever done to him in the quiet of that confessional. Whatever seized her so thoroughly that it left her breathless with disease, whatever punched through her ribcage and diaphragm and corroded her sauntering self-certainty, and he would've blessed her. Removed the nail of the mortal sin from her soul. If she had the memory to confess it. But this: within the skin of her awareness, but wrapped so tightly, consumed so thoroughly by the skein of her consciousness that it is this: the shadow at the edge of her vision. The smooth black box she cannot and does not want to open.
--
"Do you think," a can of her head. Her eyes are so blue and so direct, and they gleam with the reflected light of the setting sun. " - that I want to settle for whatever I'm comfortable with," and there is a moment's hesitation. A breath drawn in that lingers shapely at the crown of her mouth, which she expels at last with a forced movement of her diaphragm to propel his given name, "Francisco?"
"Am I lost or am I Lost?" The subtlest of differences, as between work and Work. She is drawn back now, inhabiting her chair the way she must have inhabited the confessional, except that her legs are crossed rather than braced against the wall.
Without the boots under her to lift her up to a more respectable height, she seems smaller still than she did when she walked into the room. Oh, but she never seems small.
Look at that grin she carves out for him when she answers the question herself. With a, "Neither. Moved to the city a couple of weeks ago." A brief, eloquent lilt of her shoulders. "One of my bandmates inherited a house here, and it was time to move on from where I was." Another pause, then the grin widens into an open mouthed, lopsided loll.
"You should come see us. Next time we score a gig I'll put you on the list."
Serafíne"Get you a couple of drink tickets. Maybe even let you sup from my bottle of sacred Tequila."
All teeth, that promise / threat. Bright and sure.
Fr. EcheverríaThis church isn't exactly in the East Colfax area of town but the fact that it serves an underprivileged and oftentimes ignored population means that the priest has seen his share of malcontent youth railing against their elders and the system and convention. Probably spends most of his time tending to them. This church has a nursery school and a playground out back, bilingual flyers for Narcotics Anonymous and literacy tutoring tacked up in the corridor.
It looks like a rec center from the outside. It's close enough. This is a place of congregation not just for the Christians in the community but for the unbaptized and the questioning. From where she sits Sera can tell everything they have, possibly to include Padre Echeverría, was donated or scrounged for.
Long story short: he's not impressed or quailed by her fashion or her language. Doesn't dismiss her offhand but neither does he look like he hasn't got a clue what to do with her.
"Sure," he says, and if she can't tell if he's being sarcastic no one would blame her. His dryness at her entrance was a hint as to what she could expect from him in terms of his humor though. He sounds sincere. "Tell me when you score the next gig. I'll come."
Serafíne"Will you?"
She doesn't believe him; something raw in that question tells him that much. There's that speculative sweep to her gaze, a flicker up and down and down and up - taking in the priest and his office full of scavinged furniture. Back to the priest, then.
"I'll hold you to that." Her brows rise, that sense of challenge inherent in her voice once more.
Then, she's rising in one smooth motion. Hands braced on either arm of the armchair, the crawl of tattoo ink visible here and there. Standing she pulls a phone from an inner pocket of the leather jacket (not the pocket with the pot or the pocket with the acid or the pocket with her cigarettes). Asks for his number. Offers her own if he requests it. For all that she's young and seems like she should be tied to the device, she is not a skilled texter and curses, quietly as she typos twice.
"Thanks for the pow-wow, Francisco." The edge of that near-smirk, once more. " - but I need to run. There's a party somewhere with my name on it."
A party, or two, or three.
She'll drink. She won't sleep until well into the night. And even when she does, her sleep will be fitful and troubled and light, for reasons she cannot speak and will not name and does not know.
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