I pass a building. Dull greystone, four police cars our front. No ambulance yet, and the police cars are devoid of sirens. A void where a happening was once. Closed windows. Shuttered doors. No one is looking out. No one comes outside. I glimpse a few faces, of people pretending to be unseen.
I pull up my jacket and walk on.
The streets slowly become crowded. I find myself wondering if the vehicles outnumber the people. Not my thought. Not me. I buy a bottle of bottled water, which Ed’s mom says is the only sin.
Drinking it helps, or I convince myself it does. Where does a talisman even begin?
Sam is beside me. I never saw her arrive. She is ruby in a world of dull red. I don’t see wings, when I look over. Her eyes are onyx today, her clothing fit only for a blonde in a b-movie.
“You look better?” she says.
“I don’t know how I feel.”
“Even those who are not people?”
She smiles, in a way that seems victim and pretends to be kind. I don’t see fangs. She doesn’t need them. “We are all people, unless you’re definitions are too narrow?”
“I don’t –.” The water bottle is crumpled slightly in my grip, an origami construct formed after a nuclear attack. “I don’t know what is happening to me.”
“Godwin knows that, perhaps, of those like you. Say, rather: he makes what happens become his world. The distinction between the shaper and the shaped, the seen and the un. He makes a narrative.”
“So far. You could surprise us, Brodie.” She continues to walk easily, a waiting.
“It’s not the same. I can see behind the curtain, but that’s – not as important as knowing who made the curtain, or why it looks like it belongs in a house from the 1970’s.”
Sara pauses, mid-step, staring at me.
“The sixties tried to open the world. The seventies closed it. Metaphor, but not much of one.”
“Perhaps,” she replies, and between a moment and another she steps somewhere else. A curtain of another kind, or perhaps a door.
I am playing with fire, trying too hard to be burned.
