The front of this building brickwork is old and dirty and dirty with age. Nobody's coming to clean the age from its face and make it bright again and there it is almost gray, almost black, smutty sooty stained ingrained in a darkness that is as much a filter as any instagram nostalgia filter meant to lend a moment a glow except this is real life and this is the opposite. The building is an apartment building in the heart of Brooklyn where ever the heart happens to be tonight (it moves) and down one block there are liquor stores and meth labs and down the other block there are crooked cops and a bowling alley and a small Ethiopian restaurant and a dead orange cat and at this building, the brickwork building with its two 1910s stained glass windows gleaming with tired amber and red above like a benediction, the winter-starveling remnants of vines, there is a party going on inside. Two apartments are open on the second floor and the hall is a-wash with bodies and the woman whose apartment is principally responsible for the party has every sort of booze you might imagine (this woman might be a Verbena) and a lot of the furniture is grand and a mishmash of Art Nouveau and Eastlake and it is real wood and the bedroom smells like cardamom.
In the bedroom is a woman who is (Awake [Sorcery, Will]) lounging like a tiger across the Verbena's bed, a notebook balanced on one thigh and in her hand/balanced atop her other knee a tumbler of something that tastes like fire going down like the corrosion of copper the fusion of heat to tongue and there is a smoke wreathing her head but it is from a cigarette (she rarely smokes) held between her ring and middle finger the same ring and middle finger belonging to the hand holding the tumbler. There's a pen in her other hand, as well as the fine balance of notebook. Her feet are bare but there are a pair of golden sandals on the ground which look about her side, be-leafed things not quite ridiculous but not weather-appropriate. The woman is in a moment of half-languorous half-rousing-to-fierce meditation, a smile just beginning to tempt her mouth into wickedness or joy or something unexpected.
Orpheus sat gloomy in his garden shed
Wondering what to do
With a lump of wood, a piece of wire
And a little pot of glue
O Mamma O Mamma
Nick Cave comes thumping out of the bluetooth speakers somewhere. Maybe this is a take-over, maybe it was always in the mix but there it is, slithering out of the windows, seeping through the mortared walls, and it must be the music that pulls her in tonight, along with her goddamned dog, because it sure as hell isn't the party. No one attending it can see her. So the place smells of cardamom and pot smoke and there are drinks, with gin and blueberries and rosemary, refreshments scattered here and there. Those cocktail Samosas from Trader Joe's and an enormous bowl of heirloom popcorn and on and on and on and there must be cocktail weenies, somewhere, too. What's a hipster party in a brownstone without cocktail weenies? What's a party anywhere ever without cocktail weenies?
Ghost in the machine, spare creature made spare-er by want, by privation, by absence that is not now a choice but which she wears as if it were - not armor, no but perhaps, ceremonial robes.
White t-shirt over a black-bra and beneath a gray hoodie, beneath a leather jacket. Denim cut-offs and fishnets, which no longer smell like the back third of a greyhound bus, but instead are still warm with that hot, clean, linty-smell of the inside of a landromat. This dog hunting at her heels.
She snags a couple of cocktail weeknies and breaks one in half and feeds it to Sid, grease on her hands.
Slides through the strangers unseen. Finds a corner and lifts herself onto the spine-of-a-couch and allows the low hum of voices to wash over her, trolling through them like she's looking for the little thread she might pull to unravel the whole of it.
mercuryThere are (at least) two people at this party who will see can see may see such strange-wisp ghosts as Serafíne. The apartment-owner who is in the kitchen, re-filling a bowl of snacks and watchful with a level lodestone inquiry because everybody's gotta have drinks or snacks or something and the Verbena is going to make it so and what the fuck is wrong with the bonfire in the backyard Steve and fuck okay fine and the bonfire in the backyard needs tending which is a lot of heavy boots pounding on stairs to get out again. The woman who is in the bedroom, yielding to the smile the smile gone to a scimitar sharp thing a delighted-with-herself surprised-by-herself ah hah thing the color of the smile as red as her hair. Neither is placed to easily espy a drifter with a dog, dogs welcome!, a striking young woman on the spine of the couch (leather [cowhide] burnt colors caramel tea colors) with an expression that might dissolve -
But let's say that pleased with herself and triumphal, the woman in the bedroom finishes her notation and rubs the callused heel of her left foot up and down her right calf, then stretches one leg and points her toes, cracks them, and they are painted a pale gunmetal blue which has a sheen on it like the sheen on a sword - and then the woman in the bedroom finishes off her scotch in one gulp, then her own eyes (also the blue of a sword, the gleam of metal) scrunch almost-closed to-glittering-slits as they water and her throat protests and in her chest there blooms something hot -
and the woman takes a drag of her cigarette, tucks the notebook under her arm, light shudders across the fabric of her dress (ruddy, like an autumn leaf dipped in blood and turned into some fey-made thing - handsome color) like the idea-of-a-snake trying-to-be-born, and there is a ring on every finger, a necklace on a chain hangs low below the cinch of her dress's waist, but the light shudders when she gets up to replace her temporarily empty glass with one all-the-way-full -
and that's when she notices the dog and beautiful woman; perhaps that's when there's a tickle, the first thread of awareness, or the woman (formerly of the bedroom and currently of the where is more scotch grailquest for fire fire-for-mankind persuasion) cocks an eyebrow at Serafíne for no reason other than that it happened that way; the flex of some subconscious sense of her surroundings, of somebody new.
Awareness and alertness are both things hard-won, so: become aware, check back. Past the Serafíne, into the kitchen, she knows where her drink is - decides to take the bottle and tuck it under her arm along with the notebook; gone a spare half-minute before she's on the verge of striding back through the main room with the couch and the is Serafíne still on her perch?
No, the woman's eyes are not the color of a sword. They're the color of a gray river-light day, fog rising from the water. A certain slant of pewter-blue.
SerafíneMade as she was to see and made as she was to be seen she is sitting there on the spine of the couch in a stranger's apartment quite entirely alone (but for the dog) and it isn't simply because no one else can see her. The posture, the presence, these things are separate, apart, like a double-exposure with the creature superimposed upon the party, or perhaps the party superimposed upon the girl.
--
The lift of her eyes. The marking-of-a-passing, that stitch of awareness as the apartment owner cuts through the shifting crowd falls away as she disappears. Releases her as easily as a child does a balloon, as anyone does anything.
When the apartment-owner returns, the Serafíne remains on her perch. Peels apart another cocktail weenie and holds it up-up-up while the dog looks-looks-looks, then lets it go, tosses it high enough that the dog (an adolescent, still, youthful and brawny and affable for all her size and strength) leaps up to snap it out of the air.
"I hope I'm not - " A beat, an orientation. " - overstepping by popping in. I heard the music."
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