Work Text:
VESPERTINE
[~ simple life ~]
The slate black sea dances like rippled glass, dappled in the late midday light. Little ships throng the water, some with sails, some without, and each steeped in salt-breeze and silence. Cars, meanwhile, roar at their back like false lions, lamenting the commute with every whir gone by. The city is reflected in that glassy calm, that spilled blue ink of a mirror. There, a dozen skyscrapers sit like false stars in a field of shifting sunshine bright, rays splitting like the points on a compass rose, and clouds so thick you might mistake them for smoke. Buildings so high you might mistake them for the lines on a face, but no-one inhabits it’s cheeks or the hollows of it’s many eyes. There, beside those church steeples to commerce, looms the shadow of a bridge; where tinted windows shade a thousand blank gazes stuck in another highway’s worth of traffic.
There, in that rippled dark, a reflection sits, with no-one else familiar inhabiting it’s cheeks or the hollows of it’s eyes either. Teeth occupied by the metal end of a hoodie string. Gnawed absently somewhere between the molar and the canine and then somewhere else again. It’s cheaper than gum. The smell of crushed roses mingles in with the air’s heavy salt. A prickling heat sweeps over their scalp.
The reflection is taller than they remember themselves to be, but everything must look larger in the mirror of the sea; that sea, though, is entrancing. It always had been. Entrancing like the inside of a liquor bottle. Entrancing like the sway of someone prettier’s shoulders, of someone handsomer’s hips, of anybody else they could be. Entrancing like the distant vista of normalcy or plasma behind a syringe’s walls. Entrancing like the edge of a knife, like a check cashed, like the taste of guilt-free fast food.
Their hand touches the railing, the only thing not out of reach. It’s metal is cold and smooth against the soft in the skin, up past where the sleeve sits overlong and looped around the thumb on one side. The hoodie string end falls from their teeth, and their other hand slips into a pocket on the jacket. Paper crinkles against their fingers, that ink-heavy flyer print. The wind blows, and where it touches them, they shiver despite or because of the sweat pearling against their forehead. They shiver so much that their heels almost yearn to lose balance and tip over the threshold occupied by their restraint.
To fall, again and again, into the murky midday dark. To fall down the lines of a face and through it’s cracks onto the webbed concrete below, like so many teardrops lost in the rain. Their eyes drift with the waves up to the bridge, and they find themselves mentally counting the lines of steel like the inches on a ruler, and in the counting find themselves unable to remember a time where they hadn’t wanted to know that number, and how much would be enough. Entrancing like the idea of a childhood unmolested by the tally marks that cling like sweat, and otherwise unstrafed by grief or otherness, mutilated by the mandate of love or a lack of any love.
Entrancing like nothing at all; embraced like nothing at all. In the horizon there is no silver-lining, only more reflections. In the sea, there are no prospects. In the traffic, there are only more dead-ends. The wind blows again, and beside the smell of trod upon roses and salt sits a nostalgia. A taste like vinegar, the wine-gone-sour vintage that pours from a wound, pouring from where their cheek is pinched between the teeth worth more in a bill than the smile they might otherwise provide.
There is no going back, and there never has been. There is nothing to look forward to, and there never has been. Only lucky delusion and daydream fantasy and the rich candlelight varnish of hope. The wind blows the wick into ash and the weather within is a holding pattern that, no matter how gentle the breeze, slices a little bit more off them. The choice between one survival or another, the drip within the body in the heartbeat symphony that douses out the tears. A ship tearing through glacial ice, that impossible wound, like trying to sing wax or believe water until there is nothing left, and there never has been.
The reflection’s hair, patchy like the rolling wash in the tumult of other waves, is as dark as that sea, and as messily blue, too. The eyes are wet pearls of sea-glass obsidian somewhere in the murk and the mangle, and beside those sit a thousand other specks of light that could well be the same; either them or someone else, as much the artist as it might be the spectator.
Paperweight reminder in their other hand pricks across the skin. 'Neurosena', or something like that; a clinical trial, and a thousand dollar bounty dangling like a carrot.
One survival or another. Guilt-free fast food for a little while—or rent. It was usually rent. Get dosed up on one medication to get rewarded with the salve for another problem; wouldn’t be the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Their hand falls away from the railing, and they step back from their reflection postured tall in the sea. When they walk, they walk with only their shadow for company, and in the shadows of others. Fingers shoved into their other pocket, wrapped around a pen and the bulk of their phone. Eyes cast a little down, a little to the side, tracing the familiar lines of the sidewalk until they reached the bus stop.
Waiting while someone else yelled at their phone in that draconian disposition, birch-wood flick spit to the concrete from the gum-line in that deadpan designer slow, and another person trying to wind back the film on the anxieties of the child sitting next to them. A stained sea glass variation of one another and them, ears covered on one and a mouth that couldn’t be shut on the other. Some whim smothered in divorce talk and business acumen. They stood half in the covered shade and half in the sun until the tell-tale reek of diesel drew them from their thoughts of the sea and the little ships thronging the water, the stars and the steel rising to sit beside them, and the rabbits that might eat that carrot.
The wheels trundled on after the brakes squealed their usual squeal and they stepped up the stair inside and paid their fare. The engine rumbled almost as if in warning, and they found a seat on their own toward the front of the bus. The window to their left was fogged despite the heat. They plucked the flyer from their pocket, unfolded it absently, and stared down at the scribbles of too-many-words.
Curling into themselves while the bus lurched, tips of their toes braced against the seat in front of them and their spine half bent down the seat at their back, they plucked the pen from their other pocket and drew with the press of their thighs together as a surface. Stars and snakes and rabbits and poses and whatever came to mind. Messier than they’d like, but it killed the time.
Just like counting the inches in the steel rising up from the sea to reach the edge of a bridge. Across the aisle-way mirror from them, another person was leaned against the window in similar shape, posture forgotten in modern day mangle, headphones on and glazed over to that drumbeat hum. Music enough to be a defibrillator shock to the boredom beside the pupil.
Daylight daydreams electrified in the passing window shop shine candy car coat vibrant in the passing traffic, in the quartz finished pedigree of a place they could never afford to dirty the doormat of, and then gone to cacophony in a turn, and another. The bus lurched on each one, breaking the ballads in their cranium for the song of aluminum and steel and squealing brakes. Glance out the window way for their stop, arterial stutter panic for missing it, but they’ve another turn to go, and another. Everything in fractions, and then they see the street sign and stand. Lash bokeh blur for the tiredness deeper than bone, seats giving way to the watercolor perfect of half-neon, catafalque signs above heat wave beige.
Glance at the flyer in their hand, halfway delirious to decipher where to go. Some caliginous sick moonlily smell, could’ve been trash, could’ve been sweat, could’ve been paint, could’ve been anything, from on down the windward side. They turn at the heel toward the other way, down past the cracked trail maps in the sidewalk until they stumble across the clinic front. A glance at the flyer, relief like sunrise ricochet beside their ribs.
There’s no-one inside when they step through, and not a name at a glance on the sign-in sheet. Dark blue woven carpet beneath their shoes, and linoleum light blue polished to that checkerboard sheen before fading into cheap carpet. A potted plant to their right, taller than them by half, and palm leaves as long as their arms. ‘Smile! You’re on camera,’ posted on the waiting room table, beside well-worn magazines from a few years back. Faux-denim fabric chairs like every clinic tended to have these days, a trash-can, and—of all things—an aquarium. Lit blue by the glass and contrasted like a light-house by amber molasses florescence from the ceiling, it was filled with fish, snails, and more than a few bright red shrimp.
They smiled a little, and saw that smile reflected in the water.
A painting—‘Jade’, by Ernest Kopf, they recognized—hung behind that. Emerald swatches depicting that pastoral utopia, that Arcadia of Kopf’s own divining. It sat between a heavy door on one side, the kind with a push bar and a joint above the hinges, and a much more normal door to the right, beside a bunch of posters steeped in medical jargon and far too many words. The receptionist’s desk was half shrouded by a plexiglass shield, and behind it sat a clock that they couldn’t read; all blurry lines and number apparitions. Tandem to boredom and curiosity, they step ‘round to where the filing cabinets sit to see the hands.
4:45—their shift was in an hour and change. The clinic would probably close soon, too. They stepped back around the desk and looked at the sign-in sheet again, and where beside it sat a sign, ‘Please ring bell for service,’ and with a one shouldered shrug, they did.
The door to the right of the painting opened, and through it stepped a tall, larger man with short brown hair and some stone soft chisel lines beside the set of his eyes. Another little speck of light in the rippled flickers of a stoic like the sea. Dressed in slate black shades from head to toe, that funeral color grace.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi. I’m Angel,” they replied, and then trailed off; “Um…”
“You’re here for the clinical trial.”