new pastor at la iglesia del buen pastor [re: pan]

[mnemosyne]

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.