#* wendy

[bunburie-a-blog]

@deadrattle

     Not for the first time, he’s caught her crying. Wendy thinks sometimes about all the times she’s thought she was alone with her hands over her face and her eyes red and full, and whether Danny had been standing in the doorway or hearing something muffled through the wall. But he’s caught her outright now, and that’s no mistake. She wipes under her eyes with the heel of her hand and thinks about her mother saying that if you pull the skin under your eyes too much you’ll get wrinkles. People get wrinkles. 

     “Hi, doc,” she says and gives him a wet little smile. For a moment she wants to say something about this, the state she’s in, maybe lie that she’d had a headache or stubbed her toe, or just tell him sometimes people cry for no reason and it doesn’t mean they’re sad. She settles on something else. “You hungry?”

[bunburie-a-blog]

@traumade ( starter call / wendy )

     “I was thinking,” Wendy says, suddenly though not entirely abruptly, like she’s been building up to this for a while, “about what Dr Edmonds said.”

     She broke the silence, and what’s worse is that she’s distinctly aware of it. Is the set of his shoulders too square, she wonders. She can only see the back of his head and looking at it is far from enlightening; not for the first time Wendy wishes she had Danny’s uncanny ability to just know. So much of her life is wrapped up in puzzling things out, trying to decipher people, Jack most of all, that a million more hours in the day might open up if she didn’t put herself out wondering why who did what and when and how.

     “ — about Danny,” she clarifies after a moment or two, setting the clumsily-knitted scarf she’s been working on in her lap. (She’s never been all that good at it, a little too impatient with her own fingers and too unsure of how old it might make her look, bent double and clacking the needles together like a spinster. It makes the loops looser somehow, less solid, like they can sense her heart’s not quite in it. One Christmas she’d dutifully knitted a pair of mittens for Jack and had had trouble keeping her face straight while he unwrapped them, two lumpy bundles of yarn like navy blue lungs, and when he picked one up it almost immediately unravelled, sending her into a wild fit of hopeless laughter. The uneven-edged scarf she’s clinging onto now doesn’t seem quite as funny.)