Late afternoon / early evening: quitting time if you work an ordinary job, and it's a winter day and the sun is painting the scudding clouds colors so plentiful that the wage slaves slip out of the metal boxes of their cube farms and hit that bright, brilliant air and breathe in and in and in and it doesn't matter if every fucking thing at work made you want to cry, hello, darling. The sky's always here awaiting you, vaster than you can remember.
Impossible, just waiting for you to inhale.
One of those winter days where the cold seems brighter, clarifying and somewhere on Corona Street is a certain blond-brick house's facade is caught by the setting sun, framed by it, lit by it.
No snow, just a muddy front yard and sleeping shrubbery and an assortment of flagstones, three steps leading up to this wide wide porch, an ashtray on the right pilaster, a roadbike with snowtires chained beside the door. Strings of Edison lights perhaps meant as a Christmas decoration still framing the porch proper.
Music somewhere inside.
Muddy bootprints leading up the stairs, too.
There's a bell, yeah, but the door's always open.
It is right now.
ElijahHe's been reacclimating himself with the feeling of air in his lungs. Thin, dry hair. Thin, frost-chilled air. He never remembered Louisiana feeling this cold, though he does remember having felt cold before. The kind of cold that makes your body seize and your lungs forget to work so he breathes in and in and in because he feels good. He breathes because he likes the taste. He breathes because it's necessary. He breathes because he likes breathing, not in a I like being alive sense. In the sense that there was something interesting about feeling one's lungs expand full to bursting.
The front door is open.
The door is always open in a figurative sense, but he walks in, knocks on it anyway to herald his arrival. Crosses the threshold because he is no vampire, and he looks nice. He looks like he's had a job interview, and maybe he has. Maybe he's given up printing at some crappy college copy shop and, instead, given up ont ehf act that his parents are paying ungodly amounts of money to teach him something he already knows, to get a degree he isn't going to do anything with.
They wished he was more nubmers oriented. That he went into accounting or something useful. The awkwardness of drunken holidays and the brilliance of bright exploding color and the idea of fireworks fromt he other side. His eyes wide, a smile on his face and his mother blissfully unaware, unaware that he saw somethign truly beautiful. She always saw the cracks.
"In
Sad times there.
SerafíneOh, Elijah. (Per + Awareness as empathy)
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (1, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 7) ( success x 5 )
SerafíneHere's the foyer and it is full of THINGS, glorious THINGS and Elijah's messenger bad joins them: a tumble of boots and bags and coats slung over a coat tree, old and wooden, a rattan bowl of mittens (perhaps including the one you've been missing for three long years) atop a neat little secretary desk circa 1860 and a page torn out of a coloring book - a frog scribbled orange and pink - framed in a wooden frame mounted on the wall above it. More and more and more tucked amidst everything and just as Elijah is announcing his presence this rather baritone voice calls back -
"Ining the kitchen!"
Yeah, humor in that first intonation.
Kitchen's all the way down this long hallway that cuts past the living and dining rooms, a narrow little half-bath that used to be a coat closet, many years past, past the wooden staircase rising into darkness (and towards the familiar feeling of a certain Cultist, if Elijah is reaching for that feeling now as he sometimes does. If not, well. He'll see her soon.) where the landing lands and turns 'round.
The place smells a bit like baking bread and a bit like pot and a bit like coffee and something sizzling, spicy.
The kitchen is white and warm and cozy. There's a view of the backyard from the sink and through these double-glass doors leading to the breakfast nook and the garden is bright right now, bathed in sunlight that creates these long, playful shadows through the reaching arms of the oversized oak that dominates the space back there.
There's Dan, leaning back against the countertop, the heels of his palms resting there, attending to something that looks like breakfast on the stove and a kettle rattling its way to a slow boil. Seated at the kitchen table, this derby-doll of a girl, red mouth and dark dark hair in a '50s rockabilly style, milk-white skin and a generous figure. That's Dee.
Soon as Elijah rounds the corner Dan cracks this grin that parts his blond beard and pushes away from the counter and the stovetop he's tending and takes the distance between them in two long strides and is reaching out for an embrace. Catches Elijah behind the head with a tattooed and pulls him close for a rough kiss against the younger man's brow. It's fraternal, welcoming, warm.
Lasts for a second before Dan lets the kid go.
"Elijah, good to see you. You know Dee?"
ElijahHe's wearing a vest, but he's always wearing a vest. He looks like a banker, but a banker from a bank in a time where there were no laws, no FDIC, and a time when he might have to grab a shot gun and defend someone else's money from Billy the Kid. Or maybe that's just the vest talking, the vest that's old but comfortable and made for a time when people were smaller, so it's okay that Elijah is slender because his clothing fits right.
His hair's longer than it was. He could probably stand to get it cut but who says that he actually wants to? But there is Dan, and his face lights up bright and pleased, and Dan grins and Elijah laughs and arms go around him and he revels, yes revels, because he missed Dan. It's one of those things he hadn't thought about, that there was a little Dan-shaped space in his mind, that he was rather fond of him. Fraternal, warm, welcoming, Dan. Some place tattooed and smelling a little like pot and understanding a world of infinite possibility and potential.
"I missed your face," he said into Dan's shoulder, and pulled back with a grin, "and the rest of you. It's worth the oxygen deprivation of being in Denver."
But does he know Dee? He turns, takes her in and smiles, smiles because he does remember Dee.
Does he know Dee?
"Not as well as I would like," he replies, "do you guys still need cheerleaders? Or is the derby season over?"
SerafíneElijah remembers Dee and, well, that makes Dee blush. Almost anything makes Dee blush and Dee blushes beautifully, this lovely pink flush spreading up her decolletee and up the column of her throat, warming her pale pale cheeks. It makes her blush and grin all at once and both go together on her open face with her red red mouth and her dark blue eyes. She's (more than) a few years older than Elijah, mid-20s like the rest of the housemates, with a useless bloody MFA and a job in a bakery, so she always smells like bread.
"Season's over, yeah. Starts again soon. Somehow I think you'll find a better offer before we start up again, but if you're really interested in pom-poms - "
Noise on the steps, then. The sound of an old house, the way a certain stair creaks no matter how slight the weight placed on it - someone descending and that someone is followed by some soft sufflating mass (that word is made-up, onomatopaia) that whispers whispers whispers against the floorboards, susserant and shifting, and if this were a horror story something terrible would be shuffling toward them,
but no. Just a Sera trailing her comforter behind her like a train.
It is nearly sunset and she has just awoken. There's still mascara on her face, smeared around her eyes, and she is full of the early-morning-sniffling-awareness-of-her-body, full of sleep and sun, vaguely animal still, languid enough that she puts her arms around Elijah, tall as he is, from behind, drawing the ends of her comforter around them both as she kind of communes with his shoulder blade.
Breathes in, breathes out.
Aches a little bit.
Then: lets him go.
Dan's gone back to the breakfast on the stove and it is clear now that that breakfast is for Sera and Sera kinda trails around Elijah and perhaps takes his hand as she saunters past him, dressed somehow both more conservatively than he's ever seen her and more vulnerable right - open, close to naked - in an old pair of boxers and a threadbare t-shirt from a bar in Macon, Georgia, takes his hand and pulls him after her to curl up in one of the seats at the kitchen table. Sera sits on the table.
So sleepy.
Still waking up.
"You eating?" Dan asks. He could mean either / or of them. There's plenty.
ElijahIt's not hard to be older than Elijah. He's not old enough to drink, yet, but he does anyway. There's a lot of things he shouldn't be doing, but he does anyway, but that was neither here nor there. He listens, nods, pays attention because Dee is talking and if he's really interestedin pom-poms...
The sound of creaking on the stairs makes him straighten, makes something run across his spine and he turns, turns slowly but doesn' quite catch a full look at Sera- just a face with streaked mascara and the early morning stiffness and his first thought was that the house was haunted, and that this was how his life ended. That Sera was some fabric draped apparition a la something from a J-Horror flick.
Except she wraps him up in a comforter, which he takes and her presence is on him, punctuated with the feeling of an actual human. SHe breathes in, breathes out. He breathes, and it feels strange, like the air isn't quite enough, like his lungs are greedy for it, like he might get a little lightheaded if he breathed any deeper but he would anyway because as we've said before-
Elijah likes breathing. LIkes the sensation. Likes the feeling of fabric and the comfort of another human, especially one he is rather fond of. Little Dan shaped cookie cutter places, a little Sera shaped zone that she takes up occasionally and bleeds over into other places. A little Alicia flavored corner never to be visited again, but remembered all the same. And slowly a space for Dee, like a place in the back of a closet where he kept his flyaway skirt and pom poms.
He takes a seat, puts his elbows on the table, and scratches Sera's head through the comforter, like the comforter was just an extension of her presence.
"When did you go to Georgia?" he asks.
And he nods, "I brought bell peppers if you need peppers, and I could go for food if there's food."
Of course there is food, Eiljah, there is always food.
Serafíne"We lived in Raleigh before we came to Denver," Sera tells Elijah. Her voice is rough and full of morning. She wants a cigarette. She wants a fuck. She wants a joint and maybe a shot of whiskey and definitely, an egg, sunny side up, on a plate beside her peppers and onions and potatoes. She wants a bloody Mary and a bearskin run. She wants a fire in the fireplace and she wants spring and winter and summer all at once. She wants other things too that she holds inside her like a secret. Sometimes they feel like seeds. Sometimes they make her shake.
Here's how close they are, these three: Dan takes up the narrative as Sera lets it go. It is a thread and there is a needle between them. God knows what she would do without him. It is best not to consider it.
"Went on tour - " Dan rumbles, he's laughing. Elijah has bell peppers and the eggs and everything are in a Good Place right now so he turns around and shakes a pan and continues the story. "All over the south, pretty much anyplace that would let us play. Got into a few scrapes. Got a few t-shirts, have a few stories.
"Did you - " this is directed now precisely to Elijah, more laughter behind it, "- really bring us a bell pepper? Or were you just on your way back from the grocery store?"
Elijah"I really, genuinely brought you a bell pepper. The orange kind, and one of the green ones because those are always fifty cents, and skittles vodka," he nods. Sagely, intent, as though the presence of vodka and candies is proof of intention. It must be, surely, because the store doesn't sell things that you can get from the Pinterest of a drunken college kid.
Dan rumbles when he laughs. Elijah still has his hands on the comforter and, for a second, he marvels at the feeling of another person beneath it. Doesn't know what she wants, but then again he doesn't ever seem to know what he wants either.
"So, you guys have crazy road stories?" he perks up, "that had to be totally weird, did you guys ever make it to Baton Rouge?"
Was that pride in his voice? A little hint of somethign delighted, somethign pleased, something that wanted, desperately, for there to be someone else to share the familiarities of what became his home with. If that made sense. Someone who wasn't Jenn that he could lament over mosquitos and the swamps and fireflies that always, always seemed to be out of reach, or were they just spirits long gone?
SerafíneSomething weird about that right? Another body down there. Discrete and whole and entire, wanting and waiting and dreaming and opaque, completely opaque, watching the world through two very different eyes, listening to some alien heartbeat, watching the blaze of a very different sun through the windows. That sun is setting now, and Elijah is still sort of scritching Sera's head through the comforter which makes her worm that head back back out. Her cheeks are a bit flushed, she's so warm. She smells like sleep.
"Naw." Dan's saying, "never made it that far west. North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, a few gigs in Tennessee, couple-three desolate towns in Mississippi. Played so many rinky-dink little honkytonks. You'd never guess how many bars are adorned by the heads of animals someone shot and killed, which are then adorned with panties from the more risque clientele."
"Gross fuckers," Sera mutters then, bumping her head affectionately against Elijah's hand. "They never got their hands on my underwear."
Dee: "That's cause you never wear underwear."
Sera, "Liar." Then more directly to Elijah, raw voiced and hungover. "Got better stories from the tour we did out here in the desert. Played this fucking, bowling rink - is it a bowling rink? Bowling rink / bar / truck stop / motel in the middle of the desert, Utah, full of these chicks with ridiculously long hair and prairie dresses, man. They looked like they needed something - any fucking thing - that might set them free.
"I think it's an alley? Bowling alley, roller rink? It might be a rink," he said, and at that juncture Elijah found himself thinking. Found himself contemplating. Found himself mulling over the word that he almost lost the thread while he was thinking about words and not their meaning.
It was back to the point soon enough, the reminder of freedom. The yearning for it in some place where you could live simple in a pair of rented shoes, and people wanting something, anything, that would let them out. Something that let them be anywhere but where they were, if for a moment.
"What did you play? Do you ever plan on going back?" he asks while his hands find her hair and it's impulsive, it's subconscious. He likes the texture of her hair, the subtle change between the dark and the blonde.
Serafíne"I don't fucking remember," Sera declaims, and she doesn't seem to mind Elijah's hand in her hair. Doesn't seem to mind much, or be aware of much, but it is sunset and she has: just risen, and she sees Elijah more from the corner of her eye because the rest of her attention is on Dan as he acts the part of a short order cook, busying himself with her breakfast, breaking away to catch the kettle just before the water within rolls over to a boil, and there's something about her smile that is both engaged and somehow just a bit disconnected that edges its way into a kind of unreality. More surreal and more intense that it appears on the surface.
"What the fuck did we play?"
Steam rises in billowing clouds as Dan pours the near-boiling water into the tea kettle. Settles an infuser down inside, filled with loose Darjeeling.
He glances back at the pair of them, over his shoulder, beard catching on the collar of his flannel shirt. Smiles, see. Fond. "I think you played whatever the hell you wanted, Sera."
"Mmm." Sera murmurs back. Primarily to Elijah. "I think we played the birthday song. Hawksley's birthday." Something a little bit sad there, or maybe it is just the edge that slips in between sleep and waking. The loss of it. "Got him a blueberry pie and a slice of cake from a diner and stuck in beer candles and took pictures and texted them to him. When's your birthday, Elijah?"
ElijahHe doesn't understand how she works sometimes. Catches the smile and doesn't understand where her mind goes (everywhere, nowhere, infinity and beyond like she's Buzz Lightyear and she's flying but she's not a toy. No plastic bubble over her head and no lasers to shoot because she doesn't seem the type)
There was something sad there, though, and he kept petting her hair, revels in tresses and tangles and textures.
"I fucking love blueberries," every word with its own weight. Blueberries and blackberries, and he smiles. Something pleased and small and pure at that. There was no profound meaning, no state of otherness. He just liked blueberries. "And I'm gonna be twenty-one August fifth."
A moment, and he reflects on birthdays and mirrors, his eyes flick from Sera to Dan to Dee. "What 'bout you, Sera? I think it would be kinda hard to throw you a surprise party."
SerafíneThis bright, herbal fragrance spreading from the warm teapot. Dan replaces the lid and sets the whole thing on a trivet. Tends to it with a degree of precision that never verges on the fussy. Checks the done-ness of the eggs and leaves the tea for a minute to slide them onto the plate. Yolk like a sun ready to run like a watercolor in the rain the minute she dips a fringe of toast into it.
"You hungry, Elijah?" This is Dan, voice low, and he's asking Elijah but he's watching Sera, her sharp profile framed against the background of the warm bright kitchen. A flickering glance to include Dee in the questions, but Dee is an astute creature. Sometimes she just knows things, and one of the things she knows is that she doesn't quite belong here. Not now, not yet.
Soon, maybe.
Soon.
She's slipping behind the kitchen table and back upstairs as they chat.
Sera breathes in, shoulders hunched, the comforter makes them look a little bit lumpen, vaguely misshapen. The aura of a refugee. Shrugs a bit. "I carry the party with me. Who needs a fucking surprise? I'll be twenty-five this year, though."
She doesn't tell him when. She doesn't think he'll notice. No one ever really seems to.
"God, you'll be legal, soon. What're you gonna do then - quit drinking?"
Elijah[Per+aware: is a birthday a bad topic, Sera?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 4, 8, 9, 9) ( success x 3 )
ElijahElijah. Food? Yes?
"Oh god yes," he replied with a laugh. He doesn't think of when he ate last. It was probably... uh... hmmn. Something. Sometimes he forgets to eat. Sometimes he forgets to do a lot of things. Living separately has been an... interesting experience.
"It's the ritual of birthday parties, like, pinatas and presents and rented baby goats, it's your own personal Christmas except there's not a pageant and nobody's wearing an awkward stick on beard," he said. Though there is something. He doesn't have a date- just that she'll be twenty five, and then something seems to dawn on him, something small and slippery that makes his motion slow for a minute. "After awhile it's... y'know... it's less for you and more for the people you're with? Like it's important to them to do something for you, so you end up with weird birthday cards and paper mache pears and at that Mexican food place you only kind of like but it's nice anyway because they're people trying to do a you are awesome celebration."
Was he going to quit drinking?
That really did make him laugh.
"Gah, the last birthday sucked, I'm probably going to burn my fake ID because nobody believes my middle name's Renee anyway," which was a shame, because that was true, "and other then that I'm going to sleep. Or do the obligatory gauntlet of free drinks."
A beat.
"Basically it'll be like any other day."
Serafíne"Elijah." Sera murmurs, lifting her chin, sliding her long, thin arms to resettle the comforter she's dragged all the way down the wooden stairs around her shoulders. The look she gives him is sidelong, but there is a steady sheen to her attention, "You can tell me that I'm awesome whenever the fuck you want."
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (2, 3, 4) ( fail )
Elijah"And you won't get tired of hearing it?"
Serafíne?
Dice: 3 d10 TN3 (2, 4, 4) ( success x 2 )
Serafíneand again.
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (4, 5, 8) ( success x 3 )
Serafíne"Never."
That's quiet, her voice. Raw as it should be, a morning voice, rought with the remnants of the night before. Dan sliiiiides another egg onto another plate and loads them up with hash browns, peppers, onions, sausage, nice thick slices of whole grain toast. Tests the tea to ensure that it is brewed, then pulls out the infuser and pours Sera a glass. She is in his periphery and she is quiet just now but he does not interrupt her to ask Elijah if he wants some Darjeeling because even though she is quiet, he can also tell when she is moving.
When something inside her is moving.
As it does now.
Sera untucks one of those long bare arms from beneath her comforter and reaches over and down to cup and hold Elijah's head. Cradles it, the curve of her palm fitted to the sweep of his cranium. Dips her head low and lower until she can press a dry mouth against his temple. Just her lips. She smells - close up - like sex and clove cigarettes, like sun and sleep, like Sera.
He can feel her drawing him in. Inviting him to share the pulse-beat of her morning hangover, the strange malaise of sunset over the room. That brilliant leading edge of the failing sun, the darkness that comes behind. And she is sad - just a hint sad - in the way you might expect lilies to be sad when summer is at an end, and maybe the resonant stroke of that emotion is deeper, really, than he came begin to imagine. He has this sudden conviction that it is.
And yet: lovely, lovely, this morning that is no morning, the pleasure and the ache of it, the way she spins her magic through him and in him so that he can share in her awareness, too. This communion with the world, that removes, slowly - assuredly - all the barriers, the walls and the ceilings, the isolation of a long day along, the furiously intense hum of selfishness. Here is someone, and here and here, coming home to houses, apartments, empty full, the susserant murmuring of their threaded lives, full of pleasure and ache and wonder all pulsing beneath layers or miles of calcification, all these ordinary days, all these lovely, ordinary days.
It is starting to make her cry. Can't he sense that too? The way her body shudders when she wants a breath. Dan's holding onto those plates with his thumbs on the rims just a bit too hard, watching them, watching them, watching them -
- until the moment breaks. She lets him go. She lets that thread of connective tissue go and sits back up, patient. Ready to accept her whiskey-spiked tea and breakfast plate like a good girl.
ElijahHe'd take anything, really. Darjeeling or earl gray or even jasmine if they had it. He didn't have preferences when it came to tea, didn'thave a palate for it save to know that it had a taste and they were different, left a different tingle on his senses when he drank it. Different was the only word for it.
And it was morning again, morning without being morning. Mourning, without being mourning, something sad but achingly, wonderfully beautiful and there he is, just letting it be, just being part of it, the world and every fiber, every piece of fabric, every tennuous thread connected and being and it was beautiful. How could he not think it beautiful.
He lost track of space. Lost track of time, but for once in a longtime it wasn't because of a blackout or the purposeful lapse of memory and judgment, it was that the specifics of it ceased to mater. It was 5:30 and it was morning, whether it was morning or not. There was the feeling of ceramic against his body even though it isn't technically his.
And it is back to breathing, back to the sensation of air in one's lungs and he can feel her shudder, he can feel the calm and restfulness of others. He feels everything and it's...
It fits. It's imperfect and perfect and everything and a singular point at once. A place beyond barriers.
When they break he smiles, earnest and more than conten, but without words. He takes his plate and with a thank you, he eats. Doesn't say another word. Smiles anyway.