The house: a brick foursquare in a hip neighborhood near the downtown core of Denver, densely populated, residential. Leafy, tree-lined streets and difficult parking and all lights ablazing at 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. or Ish, even midnight, if he shows up that late. The porch furniture is old, 1950s style metal, but has been repainted in an abstract expressionist manner. There's an old fashioned porch swing too, which has been left alone. The garden's overgrown, but was lovely once, and there's a bicycle chained to the pilaster and a unicycle propped beside the door.
--
The door's open though perhaps Rafael doesn't know that. Doesn't understand that that is how this place works. People wander in. They wander out.
There's a bell though and a door-knocker and either a knock or a ring are answered by a rather tall girl with a rather ample figure and skin like milk and a distinctively rockabilly style.
If he asks for Sera, then: oh yes, she's in the garden.
Directions follow: down the hall, through the kitchen, through the sliding glass doors.
The back garden is as once-loved and now-overgrown as the front garden. There's a massive oak in the middle, and a patio away from the house. With: a cabana bed, a mismatched set of patio furniture and lounge chairs. A hammock set away from the patio, on a wooden frame in the grass. Moonlight and starlight and also light from the cherry of a joint that two people are smoking, sharing bath and forth in the darkness, seated on the cabana bed.
RafaelHe does show up later than late. He shows up on his motorcycle, a trim figure in black, featureless in a helmet that is liquid black and like the water hovering over the surface of the dark heart of a lake just reflects the city back. He has one of those duffel-bag + backpack combos, worn with sturdy seams and an air of travelled, professional wander-the-fuck-around gear, and it has everything he needs to do everything he wants to do. Maybe Serafíne feels him coming before he's there, feels him on the street: that wide-open air of auspiciousness, of good fortune, of the other side of mischance coupled with this sweeping and expansive taste of clarity, the kind that makes everything clear and visible and could see forever and ever, the opposite of obfuscation. Or maybe she does not.
And he doesn't wander in. He rings the bell and that tall girl answers and sends him toward the garden. Rafael nods -- he'd left the helmet back on his bike -- and wanders through the hall and the kitchen and the sliding glass doors. He looks around as he does, taking in what he sees.
He leaves his backpacker's backpack on the floor near the sliding glass door, and for a man wearing motorcycle boots he's remarkably quiet, remarkably light, when he walks.
Cherry of a joint two people are smoking. This is the kind of people dad hangs out with: well, of course. Awakened.
"Hi," calls he, heading straight over: an assured young man, hair matted from travel, eyes as clear as his resonance but a color that doesn't give anything, "Which one of you is Serafíne?"
But by then it'll probably be obvious to him which one is Serafíne so he smiles at her.
SerafíneDoes Sera feel him?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 4 )
SerafíneOh, she feels him half-way down the street, Sera. Feels him from far enough away that she clears out the garden of her mundane friends and keeps only Dan by her side. Sends Dee to answer the door and Rick to do whatever it is Ricks do in the kitchen and:
so on.
Sera sitting up when he opens the glass sliders, comes out quiet onto the damp but dying grass, climbs up the faint slope to the flagstone patio at the center of the garden. Skinny girl, striking in the moonlight, dark eyes, rather closely and deeply set in an angular face framed by expressive brows and a quick curving mouth. In the moonlight, it is difficult to see the shadows beneath her eyes.
And not hard to tell which one is Serafíne. First: the other person is a tall, bearded guy with tattoos on his neck, up and down her arms. Second: yes, he can feel her resonance, which is both gut-wrenching and physical and immediate and entrancing and tangled and mesmeric and see, she doesn't rise from where she's sitting, cross-legged, the mingled scent of marijuana smoke and clove cigarettes strong in the air around them, but she does lift a hand.
"Rafael, right? I'm Serafíne. Call-me-Sera. This is Dan. He's Cool." She's looking up at him, chin high, her tangled blond curls spilling down her spine.
"It's good to meet you. Would've recognized you even if I hadn't felt you, down the street. Your dad has a picture of you two on his fridge, you know?"
Sera shoots a glance at Dan, who is already getting up from the bed, waving both hello and goodbye and passing the joint back to Sera. Who offers it, companionably, to Rafael.
Rafael"Yeah. I think I know the one," Rafael says, the smile he'd worn as greeting crinkling the corners of his eyes, touching them with a mellow and melancholy sense of immanence. His lashes are long the way boys are sometimes, just to piss off girls, and the hello and goodbye nod Dan who is Cool gets is a simple one, mostly expressed by a side-tilt lift of the chin. He doesn't wave, but Rafael doesn't make a lot of unnecessary gestures. He wasn't ever a fidgety kid and he's in the process of turning himself into a purpose.
He shakes his head when she offers the joint, and he doesn't sit in departing and now departed Dan's spot, but he does sit in one of the other lounge chairs or maybe on the ground, whatever's nearest. He's had a long day, but it's not dragging him down. It's just long, and it really happened, so it's there.
"Does it look like we just fell in a lake? Rosa sends me pictures of him sometimes officiating at weddings." Rosa likes to hint that Rafael should get on it. "It's good to meet you, too. Can you talk about what happened?"
SerafíneThat has her drawing in a quick, sharp breath. Sharper than the breath she uses when taking a drag from the joint, and more quickly exhaled. When Rafael waves it off, she drags over an ashtray, perches the remnants on the edge, and pinchs off the cherry with a degree of expertise that speaks of long practice. Smoke rises in coils from her nostrils as she exhales again, the deepest threads of her last deep breath.
"Yeah, sure." Rather more quiet than she usually is. Subdued as she's been all week. Still looks worn around the edges, Sera, if you know what she should look like and how to look at her in the moonlight in the middle of her garden, on a Sunday night, late going on later. The joint's not the only intoxicant out here. There's a bottle of whiskey he can see as he takes a seat in one of those lounge chairs, tucked in the shadows on the flagstones at the base of that bed. "Did you want something to drink or something - "
Sera starts to ask before launching into the story. But: the glass sliders are opening and then closing again and she looks up, over Rafael's shoulder and there's Dan. Emerging from the house with a couple of bottles of beer and a couple of bottles of water. Sera gives him this flickerflash smile as he sets them down pretty wordlessly close to Rafael, so he can just take his pick, and is still quiet until he's mostly out of earshot.
"Your dad and I were in the park, Garfield Lake Park. It's near the church, not far. It wasn't too late, around sunset, but the place was pretty abandoned until we saw this other chick. Lena.
"Anyway," this quick curl of her shoulders. "I was telling him about a dream I'd had, when pieces of it started to come true. There was blood on the sidewalk, smeared, this sense of rage in the air, right? And a cloud of fucking mouths, so thick they were almost choking - and these noises from the bushes.
"We were attacked by these dogs. I mean, they looked like dogs, right? They just came charging out of the bushes at us, hungry and all, except they weren't actually alive.
"Four or five or maybe six of them, I don't fucking remember. It was all so fast?
"Your dad got in front of me and Lena - so that's - that's why he was mauled so badly. I was scaring them away, and he was just, calling down fire and we sent them running before they killed us all.
"He was still standing right after, you know? I mean, it was bad He was bleeding like - " Sera's eyes are shining, and this is where a few tears start to leak from the corners of her eyes. " - but you know, the backlash hit him and he just collapsed."
Because she can't help it. Because she isn't turning herself into anything like a purpose. Because it still makes her sad and when she's sad enough: she cries. Simple as that.
RafaelHe doesn't want anything to drink either though if he judges it'll put her at her ease he'll take a bottle of beer, pop the top, and circle the glass uselessly with his thumb and forefinger like he's always in the moment just before he takes a pull of it. "Thanks, man," he tells Dan, and then Dan is going away again, a considerate shadow loping back into the house, and Rafael makes a face and resettles himself so one arm is over his knees which are up and he's leaning forward, his legs spread and stalwart and rooting him to the ground, while he listens to the story Sera tells.
He scoots closer and reaches over and takes her hand or her foot whichever's closer, and it's either silent compassion for her, or because he, upon hearing how his father went down, is moved toward a human connection, or maybe it's a mixture of both.
"Did they feel like anything? Did the air have a taste before they appeared, or even afterwards? Did the fire do anything to them? And do you usually dream true dreams?"
Serafíne
"No problem - " Dan tosses back, right? when Rafael thanks him for the drink he doesn't really want, which he opens because yeah - it seems like it might put her at ease, or at least give her the excuse to reach for her own bottle. Which is not the second beer Dan set down on the table, but the whiskey in the shadow of the bed.
And it is her foot that's closer, not her hand. There are heels kicked off on the flagstones somewhere and fishnets cover her feet and legs and there's a reason the old women in his father's church assume that Sera is a prostitute. The fishnets, the cutoffs, paired with a cropped t-shirt sporting a picture of some old punk band, a spike-haired man slamming a guitar onto a stage.
"The air around them, it felt like anger, deep and old and sour, curdled rather than aflame, sour enough that you could taste it in the back of your throat. I felt that in the dream, too, and saw a figure covered in owl feathers, on the stump of a broken tree.
"And yeah, sometimes? That thing a few months ago, I dreamt then, too."
With the contact, Sera gives Rafael a squeezing sort smile and sniffs again to clear her sinuses and her senses. "Your dad's really awesome, you know?" And naturally, a few more tears fall, and she takes in a breath that is deep and quick, and looks at him, then drops her gaze to his hand on her foot.
Flexes her toes.
"I feel like a fucking heel, here I'm crying and he's your dad. And me, I haven't even asked you how you are. Are you okay?"
Rafael[PAUSE--and to email!]
No comments:
Post a Comment