05-17-2014, 02:57 PM
The engine is still ticking, but a chill is starting to settle in the van. Dan in the driver’s seat, his voice low, the keys in his left hand, dangling from the steering wheel. He has yet to slide them in to the ignition.
That snow-cushioned kind of quiet, the world baffled in cotton wool, the way it feels both closely aligned and wholly separate, each other weighted by its own specific kind of gravity.
She is quiet. Barefoot. He doesn’t know what she is thinking, sometimes and he knows that she started off the evening with heels but the heels are gone, and maybe they are lost somewhere out there in the snow. Maybe someone hiking the north pasture will find them three Augusts from now, half-buried, tangled in grass, decayed past the point of memory, though not recognition.
But now she’s barefoot beside him, her legs drawn up, knees bent sharply, heels tucked on the edge of the passenger’s seat, arms wrapped around her calves, chin resting against the boney apex of her knees. Hair darker where it is damp from the curtains of steam that drift from the hot spring, pensive and distant and strange as she so often is.
Sera moves her mouth because her mouth is meant to move and says nothing and the cold sharpens and he can see the way her shoulders are braced against the physical instinct to shiver, how brightly red and then sharply white her exposed skin is from walking barefoot through the snow.
So he gets the heater going, while she watches the dusk fall into night.
--
“Do you want to go to the Church?”
Sera gives him a spare glance, then, the sharp cut of her profile in such clear focus against the spreading blur of the snowbound twilight beyond her. That strange half-light made all the more watery by the van’s salt-smeared window.
She smiles. This reflexive little curl of her mouth. Shakes her head, softly, no.
He loves the way she smiles.
Even when she seams her mouth like that after, as if she were sealing something in her throat – not holding something back because what the fuck does she hold back. Just keeping it to herself, allowing it to lodge beneath her skin.
“Hotel California?”
Another small shake of her golden head, that smile still a lingering mystery at the corners of her mouth. That’s not where she wants to go. She can’t tell him why. She doesn’t know why. She never asks those questions, of herself or anyone else.
Her arms tighten around her shins and her chin skids off her knees. She rests her cheek there instead, looking away now, and he thinks about how, beneath the skin, we are made of mystery.
“Remember the cabin?”
Of course he does.
“Take me there.”
That snow-cushioned kind of quiet, the world baffled in cotton wool, the way it feels both closely aligned and wholly separate, each other weighted by its own specific kind of gravity.
She is quiet. Barefoot. He doesn’t know what she is thinking, sometimes and he knows that she started off the evening with heels but the heels are gone, and maybe they are lost somewhere out there in the snow. Maybe someone hiking the north pasture will find them three Augusts from now, half-buried, tangled in grass, decayed past the point of memory, though not recognition.
But now she’s barefoot beside him, her legs drawn up, knees bent sharply, heels tucked on the edge of the passenger’s seat, arms wrapped around her calves, chin resting against the boney apex of her knees. Hair darker where it is damp from the curtains of steam that drift from the hot spring, pensive and distant and strange as she so often is.
Sera moves her mouth because her mouth is meant to move and says nothing and the cold sharpens and he can see the way her shoulders are braced against the physical instinct to shiver, how brightly red and then sharply white her exposed skin is from walking barefoot through the snow.
So he gets the heater going, while she watches the dusk fall into night.
--
“Do you want to go to the Church?”
Sera gives him a spare glance, then, the sharp cut of her profile in such clear focus against the spreading blur of the snowbound twilight beyond her. That strange half-light made all the more watery by the van’s salt-smeared window.
She smiles. This reflexive little curl of her mouth. Shakes her head, softly, no.
He loves the way she smiles.
Even when she seams her mouth like that after, as if she were sealing something in her throat – not holding something back because what the fuck does she hold back. Just keeping it to herself, allowing it to lodge beneath her skin.
“Hotel California?”
Another small shake of her golden head, that smile still a lingering mystery at the corners of her mouth. That’s not where she wants to go. She can’t tell him why. She doesn’t know why. She never asks those questions, of herself or anyone else.
Her arms tighten around her shins and her chin skids off her knees. She rests her cheek there instead, looking away now, and he thinks about how, beneath the skin, we are made of mystery.
“Remember the cabin?”
Of course he does.
“Take me there.”
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
And I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free.
- Phosphorescent, Song for Zula