#bot1

[momo-de-avis]

Wherever the mad man had burned himself alive, seventeen years before, his mark had entirely been cleaned away. No wonder, she thought; if his name was forbidden, they had to pretend he never really existed. Though everyone in the Sunrise City knew, of course. In there, names didn’t simply die, only people did.

[momo-writings]

She turned her head back when she noted a strange presence behind her and smiled. Mateo sat down next to her, but she was sucked into the phrase on the wall again:

When in a crowd or alone you perceive impatience disappearing, and you know just where you are or where you’re meant to be.

He couldn’t understand it, and he suspected neither did Tania. He admired her for her mind – always so big, so willing to step outside the box and be bold, say things capable of causing as much uproar as delight, but never an insult, just a thought-provoking statement. But he had come to learn that, whenever he found her sucked into her own daydream or fixated on one particular detail, it meant there was something about it – a riddle – she couldn’t undo.

“When we moved in here,” she said, fingers still tracing the words on the wall, “I chose this room because of this phrase. I don’t get it. I’ve read it a thousand times and I still don’t get it. I feel like there’s a piece of it missing. Maybe it’s a poem, or a line from a play. I wish I knew what came next.” Her hand fell on her lap. “I wonder who wrote this and why did they leave it here.”

[bengedraws]

WIP design and concept, might make some different changes to them yet, The burred writing to the side are its upgrade logs and notes

[momo-de-avis]

As expected, the damn Clair de Lune wasn’t as vivid in his memory as he had predicted – he stopped and started over, twice. Flustered, he cracked his knuckles and began a third time, thinking hard on the sheet of music he had been forced to memorize from the age of six – and decided it was best to simply fill in the blanks with improvisation. From the corner of his eye, he could see Nina – conscientious, serious, fingers softly touching her chin, her cheek, analysing his every movement, focused at times on his fingers, considerate of his concentration – or lack thereof – moving carefully, not to make a sound, not to distract him. She didn’t smile, and he wondered why – was she absorbed into it?, was she thinking about the melody, studying his concentration? She reminded him of the judges of his recitals, as a child – stern, haughty, peremptory even. But not Nina – the coldness of it didn’t exist in her, she merely listened, she merely studied, perhaps even tried to learn.

When he finished, he drew his fingers away slowly, suddenly panting as if he was exhausted – and he truly was. Nina didn’t speak for a while, didn’t move either; when he looked at her, she had her hand closed in a fist pressed against her lips – tore into a wide smile, cheeks carmine in excitement.

“That was really beautiful,” she said.

Unexpectedly, she stood up, paced slowly towards the keyboard and stood behind him. When she leaned over, Tyler could feel her hairs touching the back of his neck, and a shiver ran up his spine – she smelled of chamomile. Her finger hovered above the keys, like she wanted to press them but wouldn’t dare to. Tyler told her to drag a chair, sit down next to him; come, he said, I’ll teach you a few things. She did.

Her fingers felt smooth to the touch – light, velvety – long and delicate. They were cold and moved slowly, and Tyler guided them, placing her hand in his, whispering careful indications: this, and that one, and then these – and the sounds came in accordance to her movements. The notes, played slowly, one by one, with intervals of seconds between them, rang a pang of desire – her giggling merely completed the melody, a chirping of fresh waters in a forest, or of a singing nightingale in the morning. Tyler watched her profile as her eyes concentrated on her repetitive movements – the curve of her nose, the tip of her upper lip. She turned her face around, eyes facing him. They glowed in amber, stars in a dimly lit and messy living room, his very own night sky. When she smiled, she bit her cherry-pink lips shyly.

Tyler’s finger touched her chin; he thought she’d run away, like a scared bird, that nightingale awoken in the night, disappearing into the distance. But she merely flinched, licked her lips and tilted her head – as if expecting. It took more courage than he was willing to admit to himself – to lean forward, to touch her lips with his, to feel her breath merge with his, to feel her hot skin in his – she tasted of rum and let out tiny, embarrassed gasps – excited, contained, he couldn’t know. Her body, however, was rigid, one hand gripping her seat, the other falling still on the keyboard – lost, like a spider, feeling its way somewhere, uncertain where to.

When he drew away, he felt out of breath. She moved her lips, tongue tasting whatever was left of him in them – and hid behind a hand, embarrassed, giggling. Tyler cleared his throat, scratched his nose – he didn’t know what to do – what was one supposed to do, after kissing the girl he’d stared at for days in a row, coming out of a bus, in the distance?

[momo-writings]

He looked at her from the corner of his eyes, thinking she was strangely silent that day – almost as if she could read his mind. Vanessa was naturally talkative – just a natural propensity for long, thoughtful conversations and a glistening tenacity in her eyes. She had the looks for it as well: slender, always well-dressed, always so careful with the right type of makeup to apply to her warm brown skin. Caring deeply for her appearance was something Vanessa basked in on her own, a pastime rooted in her confidence: making a point of bringing out her golden undertones, black makeup highlighting her green eyes and bronze tones outlining her cheekbones along her heart-shaped face. And around her neck, as always, she proudly flaunted her thick cross – fake silver, of course. Looks always mattered to Vanessa, but her physique and her passion for talking somehow went hand-in-hand – it simply made sense.

The fact that she was so silent that night made it all the more eerie.

[momo-de-avis]

Concentrated, he did his best to forget about Nina’s eyes; Melodie gave him a nod, propped her violin in position after tuning it, and he pressed the keys. The swiftness of the touch felt more natural than anything he had played at home, and for as long as his fingers pressed on, he felt glad Nina was being given the chance to listen to the true beauty of a grand piano – I hope I’m enough of a decent musician to express it, he thought. When Melodie’s violin entered the melody, it was so perfect he nearly missed a key – the way she played was entirely effortless: a memorized song, practiced for so long she didn’t even need a sheet, and her fingers so agile it revealed her true musical nature – a child prodigy from the Musical Youth, a talented violinist who had once stood at the top. But more than that, it was her facial expression: the way she channelled the emotion of the song through her faint smiles and closed eyes, as she bobbed herself slightly to the undulating tune of every chord – a passion that revealed itself so intensely, Tyler was certain it completely erased his existence from Zamir’s shop.

When Melodie lowered her bow, she huffed an amused laugh – and Zamir clapped only once, his eyes lighting up in real, palpable tears he didn’t bother himself with wiping away. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “You must play more, you two. Perfectly synchronized, and you—” he waved his hand at Melodie, eyebrows arched in marvel, submissive to her talents, “—it was like listening to an Angel cry.”

The blonde girl exchanged a look with Melodie, her eyes gleaming in pride and – Tyler was certain, at last understanding the nature of their relationship – pure and bristling love. He giggled to himself in a boyish embarrassment. Quite the afternoon, he thought, two lovebirds playing a duet for their better-halves.

[momo-writings]

He was pensive still, furrowed brows, deep into thought, lips moving as if he was ready to speak, and the particular tick that always told Rudi what sort of drivelling was he about to get into: finger pointed at nothing in particular, waving in the air. It was a habit developed every time Matias smoked good weed. Not that the kid was stupid – far from it – Rudi actually thought he was rather smart: insightful, perceptive, the kind to look at things most ignored and to pay attention to details. It was just that he had a peculiar habit of saying something that always struck others as idiotic, even stupid, but a few seconds later the listener would be struck by a sense of inadequacy, as if they felt the completely wrong feelings, or something inside their minds wasn’t right, and before they knew it, Matias’ words made a lot of sense. That ability to say something stupid and insightful was rare.

(...)

He leaned back, fingers brushing past his lips. “You wanna know what I think?” Here it comes, Rudi thought with a smile. “When you look at this city, it’s like… It’s like: imagine you grew grass on a toilet. And then there’s this cow, and it goes about grazing in the toilet – cause that’s what cows do, right? Listen!” Rudi was already laughing, rubbing his eyes as if to wake himself up. “I’m serious. Imagine you got a cow grazing in your toilet. Now we’re the dumb fucks who allow our cows to graze on shit and then complain that the milk is spoiled, you know?”

Rudi’s frowned face turned to Matias. Frozen, he actually had no idea what to do or what to say – it was as if the world swirled around him, confusing, distant, and Matias, at that very moment, was the crown-prince of all wise idiots. “What the fuck, Matias,” he murmured, and within a second, he broke into laughter. “That is a strangely… Accurate metaphor, I guess?”

[momo-de-avis]

Armed with a bottle of incredibly cheap rum, they made way to the docks, a desolated place where only its anonymous wanderers gave life to. A graveyard of the past, where once a blooming business had thrived, long before there was even a border to begin with: luxury hotels and harbours built for cruise ships to dock in, resorts opening up to what had once been fancy beaches with straw umbrellas and women clad in beautiful dresses serving colourful drinks. The vastness of it was so grand, it went beyond the business of leisure – in the northern side, tall warehouses now left to their own emptiness, hollow inside, with decaying zinc roofing, rusty gates and leftovers of their past utility, indicated what else had once bloomed gold in the pockets of the Sunrise City – undivided – a shipyard, meant for fixing yachts and, some said, construct them from anew.

The stories were many, a fairy tale told through time, as if one could not find it possible that such a sad, desolated city – left to poverty and survival, walled in by the beautiful, superimposing Sunrise City – had once held anything luxurious at all. Some said the businesses had decayed when the migrants arrived – starving, poor, begging for money, for help, for caring. The attendees of the fine restaurants and expensive shops did not compute – the shock was overwhelming, they felt threatened. Some spoke of armed militaries setting a boundary, but then violence had erupted – riots and pillaging, windows being broken so the contents of its stores were stolen.

Eventually, the owners of those businesses saw a decline in their profits. The once luxurious beaches fell abandoned – lounge chairs replaced with swirling garbage, rolling across the sand, ignored; the rich customers of the stores disappeared; the beggars sat at every corner, the restaurants closed their doors so they wouldn’t have to fill their garbage cans with leftovers – it might attract the poor, they said – and one by one, the tourists left – shocked, outraged, terrified of living side-by-side with who they deemed savage – the migrants who settled in the nearby neighbourhoods, who cluttered their windows with plastic bags and always had a ton of laundry flapping in the wind outside – visual pollution, they claimed. With no commerce, no clients and no tourism, business shut down – and the owners simply left. Behind, stood a graveyard of their past conquests, now occupied by the wanderers – the warehouses made their home when they had none, the decaying buildings saw their materials being stolen, reused for good purposes – whatever was left, it found life anew, and in the rubble of a distant past – unachievable, too glorious to believe to have ever been real – the local kids built their home.

Many still disliked the docks – especially the deported, the rejects and renegades who trusted no one and lived with fear inside their hearts. But Tyler didn’t – he enjoyed the view, the sound of the waves slapping against the walls, swallowing what was left of its beaches – nothing but a thin strip of land, more desolated than ever – a tall mesh of rusty metal with holes cut into it – legend had, the military had set it up so kids wouldn’t go swimming in the ocean. It didn’t work – they always found a way. And one could see it torn to pieces, holes big enough to fit a whole family through – occasionally, floaties left forgotten during the summer, and the okupas from the warehouses sunbathing.

Nina seemed familiar with it all, he noticed – she barely spared an eye for everything around her, but a smile of familiarity appeared in her face. She watched everything silently: eyes focused on the darkened seas ahead, or maybe uncovering whatever shape drew itself in the nightly shadows in the distance. The lights were little – mere lamp posts here and there, casting a white light on the rubble, but not deep into the docks – beyond the tall buildings, near the seas – rocks and gravel alike their only landscape, graffiti the only hint of colour amidst the darkness.