Coming or going?

Serafíne

Eight p.m., this summer Saturday night. Lights on in the church and none in the rectory and dusk falling all around the corners of the street and the sun splitting the sky falling as it does in the west behind the front range mountains.

The sky is still all bright but there are long deep shadows on the sidewalk, the belltower cuts a slanting line all the way across the bright center of the street and the porch of the rectory is entirely lost in shadows. Which means he cannot see her from across the street as he emerges from the sanctuary of the Church of the Good Shepherd but still probably feel her resonance, the familiar gut-twisting, entrancing beat of her presence against the slipping dusk. Soon as he's across the street he can smell the familiar aroma of her spiced cigarette too. The curl of smoke in the air.

Hasn't seen her since the day she hugged him tight in the shadow of the church in view of the preschool playground and also: all and sundry, because she couldn't help it. She was gaunt and sober that late July morning and she is still rather gaunt but even though it is barely eight p.m. -

she is not fucking sober now.

But she is: on his front stoop, something in her lap, a cigarette in her right hand, her bloodshot eyes half-closed. Because she doesn't need to seem him, she just wants to feel him. The gathering brightness as he crosses the street, that light he sheds-without-shedding, that sense of immanence that never leaves him.

Pan

From the porch she could see the cars pulling out as families and neighbors leave the Feast Day celebrations for San Lorenzo and go back to their homes. None of the parishioners drive a single body to a car. Those who came alone unlock bicycles from the fence or go to meet the bus or just walk back to their houses and apartments. With her eyes closed she can hear the chattering and the laughter and the calls of ¡Cuidate! and ¡Nos vemos! and ¡Hasta mañana!

At the sidewalk Rosa and Francisco are the last to leave the place. Her little car is the last one at the curb. He walks her to her car and embraces her and then he walks across the street and sees the girl with the half-shaved head and the long legs and the starry-eyed appreciation for substance in her life up on the porch, head tipped back like she's sunning herself though the sun is calling it a day and the only light comes from the big black-clad priest come across the street towards her.

He is dressed in tan linen slacks and a short-sleeved blue button-down shirt today. Shirt tucked in and slacks secured with a belt. Cowboy boots because they're black and are not ornate. Watch on his right wrist, no sign of the pager with his entire congregation expected to be present today. A wound on his left arm that she did not notice in her sobriety is in the last stages of healing and if she's looking at his arms she'll notice it now. Not a bad wound but Pan is not getting any younger and his skin does not forgive the blows it weathers.

"Hola," he calls out to her. Forsakes his English for he hasn't spoken it all day. He mounts the steps and waits for her to rise. "You coming or going?"

Serafíne

See, she listens to the departing parishioners all call and response like music. Her head is tipped against one of the porch supports so that the shaved half of her head is up and her hair sweeps down in long curls around her shoulders and torso, longer to the illusion created by her canted head. There's something in her lap, cradled between her thighs and she inhales as he opens the front gate to the little postage stamp yard and then takes another drag of her cigarette and tips herself upright and opens her eyes and fixes them on him or rather: up and on him because she's a little fucked up already and she likes looking up at him.

Then he's close, closer, climbing the steps on which she's sitting and waiting for her to rise and she remains stubbornly in place for a moment before offering him her cigarette with a weaving arm, like there might be two Pans or three Pans or half-a-dozen Pans in the foreground of her vision who might take up the cigarette so that she can take up the thing cradled between her fishnet-clad thighs -

- and they are fishnet clad. And she is wearing short black skirt that would earn her a charge of public indecency if it were a quarter inch shorter and a pink push-up bra festooned with lace and sweet little satin bows beneath a black hoodie with white impressions of bones over the arms and spine and she has a bicycle chain wrapped around her neck by way of jewelry.

Smells like the sun and sweat and does not stand up until he takes the cigarette and then: she does stand up, palming the roundish thing between her thighs carefully, shifting it from her left to right hands when the motion of her body to pull him in for a hug is interrupted by a sharpened flicker of awareness.

Sera grabs Pan's left hand, left forearm, pulls it close and closer, brushing the edge of her thumb along the healing scab.

"Coming. What happened to you?"

Pan

Because she offers the cigarette he takes it and takes a modest drag off of it. Enough to taste the smoke and think of the people who tended to the crop and brought it up out of the earth and like as not were not given their due in compensation. The sweat and the blood gone into the crop the reason he does not smoke tobacco for recreation and the reason he has gone down in local mythos for fighting so hard as he did for the legalization of cannabis.

Francisco Echeverría does not belong to any social media pages but he pings on the Internet all the same. Local news networks found him interesting a decade ago and he did not grant interviews but they reported on him all the same. The ex-convict gone Anglican shepherd to the neglected and the needing.

An embrace dies before it's born because she sees the dead-dug scars on his arm and he lets her take his wrist and does not pull it back from her. Nothing to hide and no need to try.

"It's a scratch," he says. "Had some trouble getting Eduardo to rest. You want some tea?"

Serafíne

"That was a fucking month ago," Sera informs him with a doubtful flicker of a glance: his eyes to his arm and back again. Her grip loosens, shifts, curves loose as she makes her own survey but it is: healing and not festering. And Sera has the absurd and suddenly urgent desire to kiss the healing scratches and see, he's standing down a step or two below her perch at the top of the stoop and so she lifts his forearm and bends her head and touches her mouth to the claw-marks lightly, like a benediction rather than a kiss, then looks up at him again, right? and her eyes are bloodshot yes and her pupils are a little bit fucked, not quite enough to convince him that she's also tripping or floating about on molly or her adulterated cousin E but: not quite responding properly to the stimuli of light and dark but even so, her eyes are so very clear when they focus on him.

And just as suddenly, Sera wraps her arms around his neck. Hugs him tight, "I'm glad you came back," then hugs him tighter and there's something firm and round in one of her hands when she does this but then she lets him go, all at once.

Steps back and tucks right hand against her body, cradling that thing against her body, still sort of concealing it from him as she reaches for the cigarette from which he took a social rather than recreational drag with her left.

"You can make me tea," stepping aside to let him precede her into the rectory, " - but if it has lemongrass or fucking what is it. Wheatgrass or chia seeds or any of that hippie shit in it I will not drink it."

Pan

He thinks nothing of the collision of lips and flesh. Lips go to the forehead all the time and he gives hugs so freely and he knows if Sera had known what he went down there to do she would have wanted to go with him. Shoshannah still cannot grasp that sometimes he has to do things on his own because they are not of the same cut though he has woven his cloth to theirs.

Necessity enables a man to ignore constraints if he cannot obliterate them. And he could not take those who wish to see him walk without scars into that country with him.

Not even a month gone but he does not correct her. If she has taken pains to learn the topography of his visible flesh then Sera has already seen the ghosts of needle bites in the coves of his elbows. Hard living and progressing age have taken from him the ability to heal and go on without showing signs of the damage done and his skin is darker than hers besides.

Pan laughs a low laugh at her parameters for tea consumption and slings an arm around her shoulders to steer her towards the door once she's released his neck. Opens the storm door and the inner door and escorts her over the threshold before taking his arm off her.

"I don't even know what a chia seed is," he says as they move. "Don't think you gotta worry about drinking none."

Serafíne

Sera is: so pleased by the warmth and weight of his arm around her bony shoulders that she allows herself to be steered. Allows herself to be steered despite a willful streak tonight that has her watching his smearing profile in her peripheral vision with a gaze that is steady if more than a little bit unfocused.

Listen, she does not bring the cigarette inside his house with her. Pinches off the cherry with a familiarity born of long practice even if she practices this on her joints rather than her cigarettes. Lets it fall and spark and stamps it out beneath the soles of her too-high heels before it does anything more than flare in the darkness. Then allows him to steer her inside, to get the doors and walk her into the living room before he unslings his arm and she is sorry for its loss.

But: she follows him into the kitchen as he starts the ritual of tea making. Turns on the kettle, right? Putters around his bachelor kitchen. She cuts a glance at his fridge, looking at the familiar postcards. Wondering if there might be a new one tucked up there.

"Chia seeds are basically fucking shit. Grass or something they grind up with kale and watermelon rind. So fucking gross."

She leans back then, elbows braced against the counter's edge while he fills the kettle and puts it on to boil.

"Oh, hey. I got you a present while we were gone."

Which must be why she hasn't stumbled into his home at four-thirty in the a.m., properly fucked sobriety a long-lost memory, not once since he returned to Denver.

Because it sure as hell isn't anything else.

Pan

[LE PAUSE]

Pan

He remembers her telling him that her band was going on tour. Their conversation lived a short life that night she found him back from Mexico but that much he took away from it. Maybe she can hear the priest preparing to ask how the shows went as he fills the kettle with water from the faucet and sets it on the stove. Flares up the flame high before turning it down again.

She got him a present while they were gone.

This makes him laugh the sort of modest laugh that finds escape through his sinuses but he is not laughing at her. By now this noise is familiar to her. Despite her vulgarity and her immodesty and her wantonness the priest is charmed by her. An irony in his choice of profession given that his people were conquered by Europeans guided by a Christian moral compass. Now he finds himself acting as the lone needle as he walks through a city filled with degenerates and deviants. He does not judge them. If he judged them they would know.

That parable he told her the night he felt feeble anger at the death of one of his parishioners is applicable here. No point trying to convert those who Awakened into other tribes. Wills don't bend quite so easily once they've set so.

"Is that what that is?" he asks, indicating the object in her hand with a flick of his eyes.

Serafíne

On tour is the loosest sort of name for it. They played second-rate bars and third-rate bowling alleys and a flea market somewhere in the dusty expanse of Utah, full of sister-wives and fish-eyed men and then a bar that evening, somewhere in the desert, a solid dozen patrons and all their fucking eyes on her.

You know she loved it.

Oh there were bigger shows in bigger towns but what's better than the spark in a strange girl's eye, marooned in prairie dresses and drudgery, that hint of life-beyond and not-this but-that.

Now she's back and following an Anglican priest - the loose sort, the liberal sort, but still the believing-to-the-marrow sort - through his modest home into his modest kitchen, leaning back against the formica countertop all familiar and immodest and wanton yes: look at the way she dresses.

"Mmm." She hums her acknowledgement and agreement, lifting the object, balancing it in her palm. It is curved and it fits neatly in her hand, it has a certain weight but it is not particularly weighty. Her eyes are dark and there's that trick of her pupils, a little bit too large, not quite adjusting to blooming light in the kitchen as he flicks on the overheads. "Found it in a truck stop in I-don't-know-fucking where. Stopped there to grab showers between shows.

"Played at noon and then at midnight. Flea market, dive bar. Three hundred forty-two miles in between, Rick said, but I think the odometer on the van's fucking broken.

"Made me think of you, though I have no fucking idea why."

Holds it up to him, for him to take it from the palm of her hand.

It's just a snow-globe, and I-don't-know-fucking-where was likely in Arizona since the blue-and-black snowglobe says ARIZONA along the bottom. The shadow of a cactus and a cowboy and rugged, mountainous skyline, against that deep and impossible blue that comes about only at twilight, and - sometimes - just before the dawn.

Her gaze lingers on his profile as he turns away from the stove, but once, maybe even twice, it drops to his forearm.

Pan

No idea as to why it made her think of him comes to him either but Pan leaves the kettle on the stove to give her his attention and when she holds it out to him he takes it. Smaller in his hand than hers. He holds it like an artifact, something dug up out of the earth from another civilization, and examines it in the setting daylight. Breathes out that laughter again and furrows his brow in thought.

He has to have seen a snow globe before but it takes him a moment to sort out that that is what it is. ARIZONA doesn't have snow. He tilts the globe to get the plastic flakes drifting over the cactus and the cowboy. That is what gives her his profile.

It isn't as if he doesn't know she's staring at him. After the night she tried to help him with his suitcase he's had the flash of insight branded on his retinas but there's nothing to be done for it. Sera has to contend with Jesus as the love of his life. Hard to lure a truly good man away from his shepherd.

Before he speaks again he smiles and glances over at her. He places the globe on the windowsill where the light changes the colors inside the dome.

"I like it," he says. "Very much. Thank you. Gonna put it in my office tomorrow."

Serafíne

"Dan said maybe it's supposed to be like, fucking sand instead of snow. Rick said that they must just make them en masse and then put the names in but a fucking cactus I don't think so." See, yes - the way her gaze hangs on him as he takes the little plastic snowglobe and examines it. That sense of something expectant or withheld about her countenance. The way her dilated pupils are affixed on him for rather longer than necessary, though in truth the priest is also: the only other thing moving in the room.

The kettle pings; it hasn't heated to boiling yet, but there is that first quiet sound of heat-in-water. Sera's dark eyes do finally leave Pan's features as he puts the snow globe on the windowsill, something unfocused about her half-smile as she watches the colors in the cheap souvenir change with a pleasure that seems physical.

"Dee," the cut-edge curve of her smile, a little bit distant, fond and loving. "Bought one for herself. Hers was green though.

"I like the blue better. Feels more like heaven than the earth."

Maybe that's why it made her think of him.

Pleasure in her eyes when he tells her he's gonna put it in his office tomorrow. The sort that is both simple and deep. Sera has the urge to kiss his cheek, but she swallows it, see. Allows it to slide quiet down her tongue, and glances away, back over at the fridge. Those old postcards.

"Oh, hey. Did anyone tell you about Grace?"

Pan

Pan turns away from the window and slides his hands into their pockets. Hasn't taken off his boots yet and even if he had he'd be the biggest thing in the room. Would be the biggest thing in the room at the Chantry too though their numbers have swollen since he left and came back.

So he turns from the yard towards her. Lifts his eyebrows and in this light even more so than the light at dawn and the artificial light of the world pushing back against nighttime he looks older than a man in his mid-forties tends to look. If he were born into a higher socioeconomic tier or had had a father growing up or hadn't done time in prison, hadn't done drugs, had studied Life.

It's easier to trust a priest who doesn't have a smooth face and young eyes. Their deacon is a tiny Mexican man with boyish features and boundless energy. Of course the women love Deacon Zavala but they don't think he understands things like abortions or the decision to pull the plug on a dying relative or getting a call in the middle of the night because your kid washed up in the emergency department.

So Pan doesn't say anything. He just looks at her and waits for her to go on. She can feel the No hung in the air though he doesn't open his mouth.

Serafíne

"Shit, seriously?" A sharp look back toward him then as he turns around. The light isn't good in here, and isn't good for him in here but the edge of his smile lingers around his eyes. Those few breaths of laughter too. This quick and sudden grin, the edgy sort, breaks across her mobile mouth like a wave but it is still somewhat disbelieving. "No one else told you? Fuck."

Rare that Serafíne gets the gold star for Most Responsible Magi in the Room.

"Well, Grace is new. Grace is New? Like last Wednesday kind of new, except last Wednesday is I guess Wednesday a fucking month ago by now.

"I oughtta give her a call or something? Uh, she's into computers and shit. Said some power station talked to her and she thinks we're all data and whatnot. Told her a little bit about the Traditions and put my recruiting hat on you know but I'm pretty sure she's not an Ecstatic.

"Took her to the chantry, too. Introduced her to the library. I know she's met Sid and Justin, Shoshannah and Hawksley. Still need to introduce her to Jim. Haven't seen him since - that fucking rite, man. You ever do yoga?

"Don't try it in fishnets."