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09-10-2013, 08:51 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-10-2013, 08:55 AM by jamie.)
Anyone who's been by the Church of the Good Shepherd on West Florida lately has noticed a few things.
The name of the associate pastor is no longer Francisco Echeverría but Manuel Ruíz. Deacon Martínez announced at Mass beginning last week that Father Echeverría was taking an extended leave to convalesce from his stroke last month. Father Ruíz moved into the rectory this past weekend and has taken on all of the tasks and effects previously assigned to Father Echeverría, including his pager.
Rosa Salazar is still the office administrator but she is even more closed-lipped and unfriendly towards the Awakened than she was before.
In time the pervasive aura of godly light and wrath will fade from the rectory and the church itself but the parishioners conduct themselves like Father Echeverría is coming back. He isn't dead or gone. His fate's just in God's hands now.
[OOC: Since it's super up in the air how long it's going to take Pan to recover from the zombie dog/Paradox backlash combo-breaker I've decided to remove him as an active character. I don't want to occupy the Disciple slot when I know other people have concepts they want to try out.
Sorry to anyone this negatively impacts We have a Whitney now though.]
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She mean to check on him every fucking day, but. She didn't. Missed someone the transit between here and not here. Time is her plaything yes but it also slips away. They went back to Utah over fucking Labor Day to play that goddamned bowling alley again. It was madness, Sera loved it. All those poor fucking sister wives.
The tubes were out of the priest and the priest was out of the hospital and she told him to stay put and she told him that she would call her but no, no, Sera could feel the work around him and the fucking stubbornness all in him and he said no. He said, Don't bother calling her. He said, I know where she is.
And Sera trusted that: he did.
And: he would.
And: it would all be all right now.
And she was so fucking happy that the weight of those weeks and the pressure of her fears and her fucking semi-regular thoroughly rational thoroughly irrational breakdowns - which happened when she was alone, standing in the lee of the building stacked above her, pushing back against the sick and throttling panic that was like to strangle her every time she walked into that place, which she kept to herself, because because because - just melted away from her and hey,
everything seemed better.
--
So this is how she finds out that he's: gone. And who knows where. No one knows where and fucking Rosa is not going to tell her and there's a stranger - but wait, that comes later.
Four a.m. and a locked door and a tightrope trip that has her wanting to see him or be near him or feel the peculiar atomic-brilliance of his resonance against the back of her mind. Illuminating. Sometimes she needs that: lacerating brilliance without heat. Just light light light. And there was something she wanted to tell him about something she cannot remember but the words are inside her all swirled up. Yes, darlings. Swirled.
Like a soft-serve ice cream cone.
With curving lines and a tucked-over peak.
She thinks of the way they fold together - words and so fucking strange, especially when you are tripping and they feel like solid things, external, and thinking about that and about him pulls her back from some edges that she doesn't know she's traversing or rather: yes. She always knows that there's darkness and a swift deadly plunge on the other side of this. That's the awareness. That's the thrill but:
words, see. She feels them drilling down inside her and that's making her half-smile as she stumbles out of the yellow cab and shoves a generous fistful of cash at the cabbie who cannot precisely imagine what a girl dressed like that wants at the Church of the Good Shepherd at four eighteen a.m. on a Wednesday morning. She'll just let herself in and curl up on the couch and be there in the morning. Even his orange juice glows. She's thinking of that as she opens the latched gate and thinking of that as she wanders up the sidewalk and it is making her more than half-smile because this is so familiar and so necessary to her somehow. This ritual.
It feels like a ritual.
But see: one locked door.
Maybe it is because he's sick, right, and maybe it is for other reasons, and maybe it is something else entirely and maybe maybe maybe he's in there even though all she feels is the baseline nuclear-waste glow of his lingering presence. This is what she's telling herself. Sera has always been remarkably good at lying to herself. Still she knows:
things are already starting to go wrong.
--
Because the front door is locked.
And there's someone fucking new living in his goddamned house.
--
An hour or two or three later, the new pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd finds a rather striking looking creature whom the League of Mary now believe is a call girl sitting on the front stoop of the rectory, the shaved line of her head tucked against the peeling paint of one of the support beams. Thinks she's passed out maybe because she's not really moving but she's not passed out.
She's just quiet.
She's just tripping.
Dark eye makeup smeared like whoa. The world banked and bounded in shadows that feel both rising and steady, that hollow out her chest and curl up inside the cavities they make.
That drift from her skin, smoke made visible as the streets give way to morning.
Her eyes are open, pupils hugely dilated.
Sera dropped the acid hours ago. Hours and hours and hours and hours ago. Was starting to think that it was bad shit and kept bugging Dan to check her pupils are they dilated yet I think this is bad shit its all speed it's not -
- so she went out and started drinking because what the fucking hell. Making Good Choices is really something other people do.
The most intense hallucinations have faded to a sort of afterglow burn, but every light is ringed in rainbows and the tracers are like the promise fireworks in the sky, just before the blast, the rain-of-fire. And she knows, she knows, that dark things lurk just at the edges of her field of vision.
She has dreams, sometimes. She has such vivid dreams.
--
Sera takes one look at the new priest and instantly hates him. Hates him and everything about him. Hates the bulk of the church and the stupid confessional booths and the dead-eyed statues of the saints thinks of other saints saints with their eyes boiled saints with their bodies riddled with arrows and roasted over coals and torn apart.
Thinks of: a leaded glass window arch, smoke rising, the silver light of the moon cutting through at midnight and then later, the green morning, after the sun has risen, before the mist has lifted from the land. The statue of a dead god, splayed open.
They always cover him up but she knows he would've been naked when the Romans killed him.
Why the fuck can't these assholes face that?
--
And maybe he says something to her but she ignores him and will ignore him until and unless he threatens her with police and/or paramedics. She ignores him ducks her head and works through the motions of her fingers and the way they open a phone. Swipes the bar on her iPhone the wrong direction seventeen times before she gets it right and then thing wakes up all happy to see her and after three or four wrong numbers (sorry guys! just another random call from Sera at 5:30 in the morning) she gets it right and tries calling him and what the fuck this asshole's pager rings.
Which takes the breath out of her, all over again.
She wants him to be there. She wants him to always be there. Wants him to call her m'ija and give her a fucking bottle of water and sheets and a blanket and put her to bed on his stupid cheap scratchy couch. She wants to go to sleep or rather: not-sleep, that drifting not-sleep that comes in at the end of a trip where everything merges into a dreaming landscape of presence and absence that seems to radiate out from her spine in the half-light shrouded by cheap curtains both thinking and not-thinking about the stupid religious iconography on the wall. Wants to wander out of there around noon, not really having slept but having rested, all smeared sandpaper eyes and toussled hair and last-night's bruises on her body the straps of her stupid heels tucked in the curl of her index fingers and - and - and - bring him pan dulce in his office and scandalize the congregation and then drift out and wander home in the afternoon light and and maybe find someone to fuck or just curl up in the messy nest of her big bed and sleep until it is time to do this shit all over again but
this asshole's pager rings.
"What the fuck did you do with him?"
[We imagine, this does not end well.]
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
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09-10-2013, 07:19 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-10-2013, 07:20 PM by CourtCat.)
How Shoshannah finds out is no one's fucking business, thank you very much. Maybe she showed up at the church on one of her jaunts to the city (but that doesn't make sense, does it, since she at least knows more or less where he is - and even who he's with, to an extent, someone who can help him heal), or maybe she called his pager and got the new priest who doesn't know who Shoshannah Mitchell is, who just gets rolled eyes and mutters from Rosa when asked about the girl who says she used to live in the rectory and helped clean out the basement - which is a beacon of organization and tidiness now, with labels written in a rounded, curved, looped, slightly exotic script.
It doesn't really matter how she finds out, or why. What matters is that, while all her self-assigned chores are taken care of, there's now an addition to the 'Shoshannah is . . .' wheel on the fridge that says NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, and a note next to it that says 'If you want library access, leave a note by the computer and I'll deal with it.'
And then she's gone, at least for a couple days - but not far, because her bike and all her instruments but the ukulele stay where they are. And if anyone looks? Somewhere on the property, at the very furthest corner, there's a tent. But she's not talking to anyone. No tears, no drama, just radio silence.
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Rosa is fairly warned about her visitor, who arrives later that afternoon after a sketchy nap and with a certain blasted, rather wild-eyed look to her. Bright eyed, sand under her skin, her awareness of all things still altered though now those changes are memory more than fact, a certain halo around the edges of her vision, some immanence to the world all around: oracles and saints see the world like this, wrapped in light and mystery, truths slipping in through the skin of things and and what is she if not both, fallen sometimes, always, every time she can but both.
Rosa is fairly warned because the new pastor could not help but mention the morning visitor (he almost had to call the police, he mutters, in passing) and because Serafíne spends a solid twenty minutes in the sanctuary beforehand, sunglasses over her dark eyes, doing something that the consor can perhaps feel, like the afterburn of Sera's acid hangover in the air.
Sera is: can't-take-your-eyes-off-her compelling.
Rosa is still: tight-lipped, angry beneath it perhaps, having none of this.
So, one more time and it does not end well.
--
There is this knot of raveling panic coiling beneath her left breast. Dan is waiting on the street at the wheel of the old Jeep she bought all those many months ago. It has Colorado plates now. Sera thinks they should get rid of it. What do they need except the van? Dan says no, aren't you always threatening to go rock climbing again? Do you want to waste the band-van's last few good miles in the mountains?
She says, naw. Justin left and she doesn't know anyone else to threaten to go with. Which is not true, she knows so-many-people, She says, she doesn't think she remembers how.
Dan thinks it's like a chord, it stays in your fingers. They have this conversation while the low-rise development of Federal is flying by. Vietnamese groceries and cheap taquerias. Car washes and strange little dress shops promoting matching ensembles for the attendants at quinceneras. Liquor stores and liquor stores and liquor stores and it is the world of darkness: more prostitutes out here at midday than you might imagine, wandering the weedy, broken sidewalks, the trashy parking lots, the graffiti-covered bus stops, looking like hell.
Sera is not-really-talking but her hands are shaking and even though he has work to do Dan follows her out into the garden when she goes there and everything is wet and things that are supposed to be green actually are and that dying rose bush esplanaded over the west garden wall will probably survive 'til next year may even bloom in a few weeks, this sudden blush of color but now mud and churning skies. No flooding here but sodden ground, mudmud mud mud mudlicious mud everywhere and standing water on the patio, pooled on the water resistant cushions no one bothered to think to maybe drag inside.
First she tries pacing but pacing-and-calling she can't make that work so she sits her ass down on the cabana bed and her ass gets wet and she can hardly work the phone can hardly think can hardly, hardly function except she can: beneath it all she can. And there are a half-dozen numbers that she works her way through and a half-dozen or so unhelpful answers and if she knew the magic for it if she had Jim's mad sense of space she would take another hit and down the rabbithole after a disappearing priest nevermind that she's still coming down from the last one but: she has a phone. Finally she hits on another number, which she cannot text because the texts disappear into data into nothingness. Which is a landline. Which rings to a corded handset somewhere.
And: she has an answer.
It is not quite the relief you'd imagine it to be. Some part of her feels so <i>wrong</i>, hollowed out and peeled back, aching but: it is an answer.
Sera calls Rafa again after that. Tells him what she learned and gives him the number, too. Then allows Dan to lead her out of the rainswamped garden, up the stairs, into her room. He doses her with Nyquil to help her sleep, and stays with her, a soothing hand in her hair, bantering quietly about lyrics, about anything, about nothing, until her breathing regulates and her eyes close and she is as peaceful and still as she ever is.
But my heart is wild and my bones are steel
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula
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