"I wanna go someplace."
Not really morning, or something like morning. Her morning and it is September already. Somehow she slept away the first few days of it, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade, sometimes swinging in the hammock in the backyard of the blond-brick house at 719 Corona Street. Edging a toe now and then onto the teak-wood frame to send herself a-swinging again. Something cold cradled on the concave sweep of her stomach in the heat of the day. Something warm when the high-plains chill crept in at night.
The roommate are out. Dee caught an extra shift at the bakery, strange how many weddings there are in September, and Rick's moonlighting at his friend's comic book store, why not? Sera is curled up in one of the straight-backed chairs at the kitchen table wearing a worn-thin Echo and the Bunnymen t-shirt and panties with an afghan wound right-round her legs. Has her leather journal open on the table in front of her but she's mostly doodling and drinking tea and tap-tap-tapping her pencil against the wood, then the paper, then the wood, then the paper.
"We could go to Estes Park. Spend a few days camping and hiking before the first snow falls." Dan smirks there at the end, just a tiny bit though because really: one never knows. "I heard Vita has more of those shrooms you were raving about."
"Naw. I want an ocean beneath me. Let's go to Thailand."
--
Why the fuck not?
That's how they end up in LAX two days later, Sera wearing sunglasses so large she looks vaguely insectoid, an arm looped through the crook of his elbow. He has charge of the passports, she's got a skull-studded clutch slung cross-body by a gleaming chain and a plush panda-bear backpack, because fuck you, and another eighteen hours or twenty hours and somehow it is tomorrow or yesterday, because certain lines were crossed, and they are checking into a beachfront villa at an exclusive resort in Phuket. He tries not to think about the luggage fees or the cost of the first class tickets or the work schedule he had to rearrange in order to come with her ("five days, Sera. tops.") because he's not like certain Hermetics with whom she used to travel. Can't disappear for a day or a week or a month on a whim, chartering a private plane to take him wherever the fuck he wants.
As self-directed and fulfilling as his work is, Dan still has a fucking day job. Obligations, expectations. Responsibilities other than her.
--
But god the elegant dislocation, the maddening colors of the ocean, the rhythm of the ocean, the warmsand between his toes. The disconnect between the lush chaos without and the understated serenity within. Everyone assumes they're rock stars. Or, well: she's a rock star. He must be a member of the band.
--
She's the one who's sober. He gets smashed, pretty on the regular. Starts this flirtation with a British architect working in Singapore that first delirious night they get there that turns into one of those torrid vacation affairs for the three remaining days of the architect's Phuket vacation. The dude's name is actually Eustace though he doesn't look like a Eustace, not at fucking all. Sera's lovely, indulgent, strangely reserved right but: happy for him. Drinks tropical green-tea smoothies on the beach, soaks up the sun, topless. Turns golden.
Has all of her bikinis tangled together in a twee hard-sided hatbox and only ever untangles the bottoms.
--
Then the architect is headed back to Singapore and there's another day or two before their return tickets and Sera tells him she wants to rent a scooter like the locals and head inland, head upriver. Hit Bangkok or something, see some goddamned temples and he points out that none of her goddamned luggage will fit on a scooter, does she remember that it took three luggage carts piled precariously high to get them from the baggage claim through customs?
What the hell are they gonna do with that shit?
Eh. They can leave it.
She rented the little villa for a fucking month.
--
"Fuck, Sera. I said five days, tops."
--
He packs a green army duffle he brought along for dirty clothes, she packs that stupid panda backpack, which fits more fishnets and leather skirts and short-shorts and tees than you think. Wears her combat boots and her cropped leather jacket and that's how they get back to Bangkok. Two days in a cheap rooming house near the nightmarket, windows open, the thrum of the crowds constant, that slow-drone of neon from the clamor of streetsigns outside. He's pretty sure that foamy red soup they had was blood. Sweet, lemony raw fucking blood, and god knows what the Chinese liquor they served along side it. Smelled like feet with the raw kick of rubbing alcohol that sent the whole world tumbling, end over end over end.
No idea what came next or how they ended up back in the rooming house, but he's pretty sure that Sera and magick are the reason he didn't wake up with the world's worst hangover the next day.
--
She practically pushes him into the taxi, come morning.
Kisses him on the temple, tender.
"Go home, get your work done. I'll be fucking fine. "
"Be home soon."
"Five days, tops."
--
Two and a half hours later, he's back on a plane as it banks and climbs into the sky, Bangkok scattered beneath him. That same sense of dislocation, though everything seems emptier, right? grayer now. After all, he's alone.
honest godsThough the night markets maintain their posts through the daylight they are shells in the wan gray of a rainy season afternoon. Tables bare of wares and the foot traffic diverts itself to find the places still open. Roasting meat and half-dressed women swarming out in the streets and the languages all swarming themselves little songs all dressed as transactions and Sera can hear the world going on whether she returns to bed after Dan leaves or whether she mills around her room deciding what she wants to do with her solitude.
Buses chug down the road beneath the window. Temporary neighbors return home long after late and their voices laugh out in the corridor.
Can she remember the last time she was hungover? Is she hungover now? She does not lose time. She is time.
When she opens her eyes the next time maybe from a nap maybe from a groan maybe from a blink the world outside her room has not changed. The night market still slumbers. Holds its breath even holds onto the promise of what dusk will make of it but the sounds of the city the buses and the bicycle bells and the soup made of speech all of that comes to her as if through a curtain. Not muffled. Out of focus. Bleeding away and soon to leave her world exsanguinated.
On the other side of the door she can hear two voices but not their words. Just as muffled as everything else but constant. Steady.
She cannot feel her hands. The time on the bedside alarm clock is LED and red but she cannot make out the numbers. They all blur together.
SerafíneThat was an early flight or a late flight or god-fucking-knows but there was sun and strange-bare-streets. An old man sweeping the sidewalk with a palm frond. Last night's mascara smeared beneath her eyes made her look like a raccoon, some little fucking bandit. She caught a glimpse of her reflection against the bullet-proof glass of the clerk's enclosure on her way back and then back in the room sat for a few minutes at the open window, one bare leg tucked elegantly beneath her, forehead against the window frame, attention drifting as she watched the gray-morning world drift by, not-thinking, simply be-ing.
Until she had to pee.
--
Gets up, pads to the bathroom. Empties her bladder, washes her hands, scrubs her face clean.
Does a shot of something, who knows what it is, then grabs a bottle of filtered water and crawls back into bed. This bed: a strange bed, the world all around. Buries her head in the gray, deflated pillows and slides back into sleep.
--
For a while.
--
"Mmph."
Makes that noise when she wakes up in maybe the exact same posture because she likes making noises, we were meant to be and to sound and to listen to the hum of the organs in our skin. Cough and scratch and startle-awake (whatisthis/whereami) except she's listening and aware and Aware and alive to shit and the world looks like it did and feels like it did and breathes like it did and bleeds like it did before - right?
Wrong.
Erect in bed she listens like this to her heartbeat and watches the frame of the window but only from its periphery. Glances at the clock, looks away, rubs her eyes with those numb hands. Looks back.
Breathes in, a little sharper now, her heart beating and slides out of bed. Bare feet on the dirty tile. Takes her three seconds to pull on her garter belt and shimmy into her leather skirt, another two to pull on an old concert tee.
The voices outside the door.
She grabs her combat boots and thigh-high stockings but doesn't pause to put them on, just kinda sweeps them with her like she's going to manage it while hopping on one foot and stumbling own the stairs.
Never was the sort to look first, she always just leaps, right? But there's this moment when she's in the little alcove, the little vestibule, spine sharp against the wall and hands too full to reach for the knob so she drops the boots and pulls on the stockings, one by one. And she's listening not for words outside but the rhythm of her heart in her chest, all the strange little noises her body makes. Then she picks up the boots in one hand and reaches for the knob with the other.
Opens the door.
honest godsAll of the light has left the corridor.
The thing about her corridor and the thing about the absence of light: this is not an internal structure. The rooming houses this close to downtown are many of them open-air structures not unlike cheap western motels with airways connecting all of the rooms rusting wrought-iron rails meant to keep the drunk and the uninhibited from tumbling off the first or second floors to make a mess down below.
When she steps out onto the corridor call it an airway when she steps out onto the airway the concrete is dark as night for the fluorescents are off as one would expect the fluorescents to dim themselves in the daylight and she can see the grayness of day beyond the airway but the sun's light does not penetrate a dense and unseen curtain drawn across the railing.
She opens the door. Warped perception. A yawning sensation perhaps. Everything shifting sideways a bit. The voices reveal themselves to belong to two figures that are not right outside her door as the decibel level ought to suggest. If she stands still long enough her eyes will adjust to the dark. If she does not stand still she has her other senses.
One of the figures is tall and solid. Dark in wardrobe and dark in coloration but not dark in spirit. Somehow Sera knows this. This figure wears a watch on one bare wrist but she can make nothing of what it says without light. The other tall as well but not so tall as he. She does not need height for what she seeks. Darker skin and leaner more powerful limbs and her hair hangs in thick healthy ropes around her shoulders. Gold bands around wrists and biceps have no light to catch.
It smells like loam out here.
Will she follow? she asks. Sera hears it in her head. Her ears have nothing to do with it. Underwater telepathy.
Sera cannot hear the words he supplies in answer. Only that he answers.
The bands around the woman's wrists and arms change color in the darkness. Transforming. She plants her hands on her wrists and Sera cannot see her eyes but she can feel the shift of her gaze as she turns to look at the Cultist in the dark.
SerafíneIt smells like loam out here.
Last night it smelled like cat piss and rotting cabbage and that sort of vomit that is mostly-alcohol and patchouli and pot and roasted fish and lemongrass and heavy, resinous incense and diesel fuel and rust for some reason a bit like coconuts, god knows why, but mostly like cat piss and rotting cabbage.
Now, it smells like loam.
And here's Sera coming out of the room into the airway carrying her boots but already shifting her grip to start to step into the first one as she hip-checks the swinging door open when it tries to closer itself on her, inhaling in a way that has her perk her neat little head like a hare that has caught-scent of a whole damn field of carrots even as she stomps her way into the first boot. The second.
Nothing elegant about the way she fumbles her way through tying the long laces while walking down the breezeway toward them but there is something: eager about it. Lively, sort of clattering, and then both boots are on her feet and tied enough that they will stay on and she is not likely to fall over the laces and she's no longer half-bending over but rising upright, reaching to pull her curls back from her face. Somehow she always has an elastic band when she needs one. That's not even magick, it's just the kind of girl she is. So: ponytail.
--
It's not that she takes specific time to let her eyes adjust so much as the fact that still-getting-dressed gives her that time and she's looking eagerly from one to the next. She makes her heart seize, this little fillips, and he - well.
"Following isn't really my fucking thing, you know?"
Although: right now, she is. Following, right? Striding toward them, wondering if the way is peeling dark-streams and pinpricks of light all around her like it does whenever spaceships wanna go fucking fast in the goddamned movie. Wondering if she has a tail, like a comet.
Which makes her want to wiggle her ass.
Though she refrains.
Will they let her join them? She wants to. Wants to through her arms around his neck, though she's a little more wary of her. Sharper, brighter. The ropes of her hair. The thunder of her own heart.
--
"But I'm pretty down to seek. Where the fuck are we going?"
honest godsHe knew Sera wasn't going to follow.
She knew Sera was here to seek.
Attuned to everything even in the absence of light and Sera knows the way she knows they speak though she cannot make out the sound that an air of acceptance blows out of the female figure's lungs with that question. Acceptance in the cant of her head. Watchful eyes though hidden Sera can feel them on her face. Acceptance sure but in the next beat of the drum in Sera's chest she is moving one bare foot forward to jut herself in front of him. Reduces him to shadow.
Sera does not wriggle her ass. Sera does not throw her arms around his neck.
Somewhere in the distance a young throat screams with a voice like broken glass. Distant very distant and it has nothing to do with any of this.
"Where do you want to go?" she asks.
SerafíneYeah, she's sliding out, hipslung. And she never was tall and she didn't pack even a single pair of heels for the trip from Phuket to Bangkok because the first pair she tried the spiked heels looked like they'd tear right through her poor panda-backpack's faux-furry skin. Here she takes up space because she needs to, because she does, because sometimes it feels like something inside of her is the edge of the horizon and the storm beyond it, the bright, mysteriously-lit expanse of it. The strange, elsewise promise inherent in it.
And sometimes she just wakes up and wants a cup of tea-and-whiskey.
And it's all so fucking hard to fathom, that she doesn't really try.
But see: wants a cigarette, wonders if she has them, wonders if it matters, wonders if they would appear if she decided that she wanted them. How physical and how ephemeral and how much does it really matter.
She has gone out ahead of them, see.
She has turned around and is walking backwards with hands in her pockets rummagerummagerummage for the case-and-lighter.
Where do you want to go?
And fuck if she has time to answer it. Or, even really hear it.
That scream in the distance in the very distance that has nothing to do with any of this has her turning, listening, rising to the balls of her feet, fingers curling inward to skim her palm. Another sense of dis/location, a sort of un-doing.
(Gonna call it: Correspondence 2/Mind 2. More mapping than scrying but using the emotion in the scream to isolate the source and get an impression of - where/what?)
Magick Stuffs! Er. Coincidental: difficulty 5. (-1 focus)
Dice: 3 d10 TN4 (3, 4, 4) ( success x 2 )
honest godsThough he speaks in a language Sera understands the words do not reach her. They are meant for the female figure accompanying him and the female is no more of a mind to answer him than Sera is to answer her.
By now he has become little more than the impression of a figure stood in the shadow cast upon shadow by she. The bands around her wrists and biceps taking on a darker cast as if they are absorbing the darkness changing it though the darkness adjusts to nothing else but Sera.
For now the darkness holds.
I thought she was, too, she says.
The effect commences a stitch. Sera can make nothing of its source or strength unless she focuses and tugs.
SerafíneIt is: less that she is not of a mind to answer (she is of a mind to answer, though her answer is like as not to be her almost universal and at-least-to-Hawksley nearly always unacceptable I don't know. Everyone else she knows in this time and this place and this position except maybe sometimes Dan accepts her I don't know, which is often a cipher for her specific brand of bullshit. But hey: Sera does not think they would accept it. Knows they wouldn't.) and more that she is distracted by the scream. Hooked by it.
Caught.
Between.
Feels that like a hook in her spine and a vague, unsettling chill.
There is a sort of bristling about her except she is focused. Pushing. That shout has nothing to do with any of this. She hasn't answered them and doesn't know.
Some piece of her wonders if the door she's been trying to shove her skinny ass through is already starting to close behind her.
The rest of her, though, is everything/nothing.
Everywhere, and no where at fucking all.
(Extending. Dif +1)
SerafíneRoll!
Dice: 3 d10 TN5 (4, 5, 5) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
honest godsThe door is a metaphorical door. No whine of hinges or swatch of light cut through the shadow to tell her that it's opened or that it's preparing to close. A door only present in that piece of her wondering about it. Not even the same door perhaps. The door is whatever she wants it to be.
As Sera focuses on the voice without the voice she cannot fathom into solidness takes its form and he disappears. The she meanwhile works a kink out of her neck and the rolling of her spine rattles little metal bands securing the ends of her braids. Small symphony.
That scream is come up out of the night market. The streets comprising the night market. Empty but not dead. That scream has the strength and character of a woman in distress but she is drunk and Sera can make nothing of the strength or character of the person or thing that made her scream nothing of the trajectory of her distress or the immediacy of it only that there is a woman in this city and that woman screamed once and then fell silent and she could search for others who are screaming but this one particular woman is screaming for no reason other than she is drunk and something agitated her and it is nothing to which she needs attend.
An echo. A blink.
The next Sera knows she is back in her room. She is where she was before she heard the voices. Her boots are where they were before she went to collect them. She still cannot feel her hands. She still cannot make sense of the numbers on the face of the clock by the bedside.
Outside the voices are talking again. The same voices in the same place with a different cadence. A different tone. Still as if they are inside her head though she can make no sense of the actual words.
Serafíne"Oh my fuck."
--
The strange feeling like a compass needle inside her has become demagnetized. There's no more north, there's just the bath of glycerin in which to float.
--
She wakes up like she woke up before and this time it is: changed. Altered.
A knot of something she cannot quite name ties up her viscera. This time she doesn't reach for her fucking clothes, just the bottle of Chinese liquor on the nightstand, through which the fuzzy, nameless, formless should-be-numbers shine. Stands up with the worn-thin sheets unspooling from her body. Doesn't bother getting dressed. Keeps on going, barefoot, barelegged. Black lace hipsters and an oversized Duran Duran t-shirt with Simon Le Bon's peeling face over her left breast. Every single one of them is wearing a fedora.
Picks up the bottle and unscrews the cap and takes a slug and screws the cap back on. Carries it by the neck as she walks barefoot to the door to her cheap little otherwise-mostly-empty double.
Except maybe there's not a fucking door:
that's what she decides.
That's what she tries to walk right through.
Maybe she just bloodies her nose.
honest godsIf she were a mad scientist or a reality hacker that door may have proven itself no more than a momentary distraction. She could have willed herself through it. That is not the card that Sera holds in hand as she stumbles out of bed for the second time that day or at least the second time within the span of her own cognizance for all she knows it isn't the same day at all but she does stumble into it though she does not stumble into her clothes or her boots. Does not stumble into anything other than a bottle of liquid that smells heavy of metal and rubbing alcohol.
That and the door.
To her credit she does not collide with it hard enough that she cracks the cartilage or ruptures the tiny blood vessels in her nose. No blood splatters the floor. But she does feel a rush of stars and the white-out of her vision. Not enough to stun her really. She could keep moving if she wanted to.
When the door opens Sera cannot hear the click of the latch releasing or the keen of the hinges. It opens and what light she has afforded herself spills gray out into the airway. She cannot hear the voices because they are not speaking. One of the forms crosses in front of the threshold as a shadow and keeps moving. The other is an unknown variable. The other could be behind the open door or waiting on the other side to where the first first crossed. Where they were before.
Light beyond the airway. Darkness contained to it. The only difference now is Sera is wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear. The lingering burn of ethanol in her throat.
Serafíne"Fuck."
Vulgar, yeah. So she collides with the door that she had briefly decided was a goddamned metaphor, but a door but a whatever, some of that bullshit the counselors always tried to pull out of their asses. Sunlit exteriors, dark shadows within. Blinds slatting in these bands of light. The institutional burn. (Let's explore what the barrier here is to - )
- the barrier here is the fucking door. The barrier here is the darkness and the strange silence and occluded shift of light and dark. She takes another shot right from the mouth of the bottle, still holding it by the neck. Saunters down the narrow dark airway following if not the cadence of voices (because: silence), then instead the strange unnerving deja-vuness.
"I guess I want to go to the nightmarket," she remarks, conversationally, to no-one. Or, perhaps: to Her. "I mean, unless that question was supposed to be rhetorical or metaphorical or like, some kinda songwriting prompt for a vision board, in which case, I have no fucking idea. I was thinking about Wat Umong, too. But if we're doing that now I should probably go put on some clothes."
honest godsWhen Sera steps out of the room to address the darkness and the shadows within she sees the taller of the two the male of the two is stepping back into shadow again. As if he has been in motion this entire time. Maybe he was the one who opened the door. It doesn't matter. Sera is talking to her.
Unless Sera is talking to no one. No one is here.
"Should you," she says.
Sera only has two choices. She can stand and talk to the shadow-swathed woman or she can turn back towards the door. With her back to it Sera has no assurance that the door is where she left it.
SerafíneThe shadow-swathed woman then. The man gone, that edge to her, that presence.
And now: blocking her path.
Serafíne stops, just then, on the threshold perhaps. Between never and now, and she could turn around and go back in the room, right. Close the door or put on clothes or find the window and dive out of it, into the street. Crack her head open on the sidewalk. She wouldn't be the first Western girl with half-a-dozen substances swimming in her blood-and-fat-and-sweat who broke her face or at least her leg that way.
Wouldn't be the last, either.
"I don't care too much for shoulds, either."
Studies the woman. Her own eyes dark, ticking back and forth over her features. Hard to tell if she's looking up, or looking down, or eye-to-eye.
"And I don't know if this shit's really real or just real, but either way, I can go now.
"If I need clothes maybe I'll find some on the way."
--
"The last time I saw you, you pushed me off a cliff."
honest godsClothes. Neither the fading man or the shadow-swathed woman have any opinion on the state of her dress. One of them is used to seeing her barely clothed. The other is barely clothed herself.
It would be an easy thing to say it does not matter to the shadow-swathed woman whether Serafíne comes or not. The easy thing is not the door through which a person achieves enlightenment. Stasis will kill the hardiest of machines. Even machines require maintenance and upgrades and machines do not bleed but Serafíne is not a machine. She is flesh-and-bone. She would survive the impact if she were to jump out of the window but didn't she turn back time to stop a Quiet-wrapped young man from doing that just a few weeks ago?
Rhetorical questions have no place in this world. She isn't sure if it's real or not. The last time she saw this woman she pushed her off a cliff.
Hard to tell if it's his voice or her's. Either way:
What now, querida?
The light reaches the staircase. The world beyond fogged as the faces of the clocks and the watches and the two figures come to call on her. The motel room door as clear and real as anything she could feel with her hand. If what she wants is realness she can walk through that door sure she still has free will but if what she wants is realness that door will not open once it has closed again. Not into this world.
SerafíneWhat now, querida?
--
That's his voice.
No, it's hers.
And Sera stands on the threshold, mussed and half-dressed, bottle-in-hand and nothing else. The door behind her. The fuzzed out world in front of her, spare shoulders set at an angle that is stark and slicing. She has been harrowed. Hollowed. And she watches-them with a slant-wise look, trying to pull the threads of his profile out of the shadows into which he has disappeared.
He makes her feel: safe. Wholly and entirely, safe, in a way that makes her want to cry.
She makes her feel like there are wings being carved from the muscles framing her spine. Like air's leaking out, and light in. So: not-safe.
That's cool too.
--
What now, querida?
Sera kisses Her, if She allows it. Full on the mouth, breathing in, the way you do sometimes.
This neat little shrug, then-and-there.
"Fuck, I guess. Let's go."
Takes a moment then to close her eyes, to center herself. To find a spark, a thread, a tug of sensation. Once it was an iron needle with a golden thread stitched through the meat of her thumb. Now she looks for another thread, spark, sensation, tug, urge. Turns and follows it:
down the airway. Down the steps, maybe. Out into the streets. Out into the city. Whereever it leads.
Last time She allowed it.
She is the goddess of transformation. Of change. She takes down dead timber to make room for new growth. Watches over the newly dead as they shuffle off to what lies after life. Bringer of violent rainstorms to keep the rivers flowing. She is praised by the Yoruba and the Guanches and the Lucumí and the Candomblé. People who have seen their lands taken over and their waters staunched.
Last time She allowed it. This time she takes a step back. Pointed sure but this is not the end. A certain turn of her body and Sera can see the sheathe of the machete strapped across her back.
Fuck, I guess. Let's go.
So Sera closes her eyes. That scream again or another scream and she is not listening. She is feeling for a thread that isn't there. No one has stitched a tether to her. She is her own tether. She can go wherever she wants to go. She is time.
When Sera opens her eyes again the shadows have gone. Beyond the airway the entire city is dark but the light has come back into her world. Neon lights a herald of the life come back into the night market and the music come up from tinny transistor speakers and the throng of shoppers native and foreign alike. Laughter. Laughter more than screaming. Someone is still screaming. She will stop eventually.
So: down the airway? Down the steps? Out into the streets.
It isn't going to lead her. She has to know what she wants if she's going to go anywhere.
SerafíneSo. She opens her eyes and the shadows are gone and there's no tug and no thread and no guidebook. Just herself. Her Self, in the filthy airway.
And Sera stands there for quite a long moment, mouth seamed, shoulders tensed.
Alert, waiting. Searching her periphery for the places where the seams of the world are starting to rip. The tick-tick-tick of her eyes. The first pleasant punch of the shots she took from that bottle of cheap god-knows-what-it-is liquor wrapping her spine and warming her belly.
--
So not-out. Not right away.
--
Sera goes quite deliberately back into the room and puts on her goddamned clothes. Among the things she wants is to: not get arrested or picked up by paramedics and taken away by who the fuck ever. Gets dressed. Cut-offs and fishnets and a crop-top. Leather jacket over that. Feet stomped into her boots and the boots laced up. All the shit left in the room bundled back into the panda-bear backpack. Passport and a credit card and some cash in the skull-studded clutch slung over her body. Leather journal and her pens wrapped up with underthings and bikinis and thigh-highs and t-shirts in the panda-pack, with a book of Mina Loy poems. iphone in her right front pocket.
Puts on some lip gloss and mascara and lines her eyes and when she leaves the room is as empty as it was when she arrived.
She isn't coming back.
--
Hot in the city today. She has her hair pulled back. Barters in broken Thai for a silk-screened sarong she wraps around hips and a handful of gum-and-paste bracelets and an old iron ring with a chip of rich red glass in the center as saturated crimson as a burmese ruby. East some khanom krok piping hot from the pan and buys some strange, prickly little fruits on a stem and another bottle-of-booze and some hashish. Drinks three beers in a open-air cafe, two of them sitting on a stranger's lap. Never catches his name, but she didn't really want to, anyway.
Is kinda fucking lit but still manages to make it to the station for the night train to Chiang Mai.
Buys a second class ticket and kicks back, feet up, head cushioned on the panda-pack. Buys some larb and flatbread and luk chub through the open window as they are passing some station, somewhere in the dark. Shares the luk chub with a toddler who gets it smeared all over his face then falls asleep in his mother's arms.
The train lurches and rattles and heaves and shudders and squeals and jerks. Sometimes it stops, for no reason, in the middle of nowhere. Dark land sleeping, stars so goddamned bright in the sky.
Drowses, wakes. Chats with strangers in her stumbling Thai - which is, magick. Everyone has a story.
--
Who-knows-how-long-later (there is: a sponge-bath and a face-scrub and a pit-wash and a change-of-clothes in the cramped W/C and beer and sticky-rice for breakfast and then takes three of those seeds she bought back in Bangkok. the gods only know what they are, but there are already tracers framing her vision as she packs up her toiletries and exits the W/C, mouth all minty-fresh, thank you, Listerine) and she stumbles off the train in Chiang Mai.
The sun's up. She has no idea what day it is.
All these guys on moped and tuktuks lining up to earn a few baht as taxi-drivers. She sees one guy on a bike balancing a wicker cage with chickens on his head, a child on the handlebars and a woman behind him hiking a suitcase up over the backfender. Picks a guy with a little red scooter and haggles for a ride to Wat Umong. Ends up paying four times the going rate and she'll give him an even-better tip on the other end. Climbs up behind him and wraps her arms around his waist and rests her chin on his shoulder. Lets the world warp itself around her, her long hair flying out behind.
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