Would you say that you wish you were worse than you are?
See, you made up a list of your luckiest stars
And you made me familiar to you in the dark
When you said that you wish you were worse than you are
Hey, you, with the gold
Which you keep (or which keeps you) in place
Do you recoil from its jailhouse green-and-copper taste?
Or do you love to dance
With it hanging like some hula dress
So lightly off your waist?
Was it magic or Midas that touched you?
And by magic, I mean trickery
And by Midas I mean faith
But the sister speaks of trickery
Is your work the work of the Midas touch?
Do you close your eyes while you’re dancing the same way
You close your eyes in your lover’s clutches?
How dare I speak of trickery
When the wild things in me are pulling their sham
You can follow the lead of the jackal to see where I am
You can follow the lead of the jackal
Who waits for the kill to be made by a mightier hand
And you made up a list of your luckiest stars
And you made me familiar to you in the dark
When you said that you wish you were worse than you are
[sunset rubdown, magic vs. midas]
There was another message from Marius about me coming to the guest house. He makes an elaborate explanation about how I won't need to see Jill, see Antoinette, but I don't call him back because then I'd need to tell him that I need to see Jill. And Hell -- maybe I'd like to see Antoinette, too, and violence and an old pain move in my belly as I swallow them down, the same breeds of dark nostalgia that stirred tonight when I was with Milla.
"You're really hurting my neck," says Mona underneath me. I forget myself.
With Mona living here, this is exactly what I didn't want to happen. She starts to absorb the things that radiate off of me -- that little flu she had in the last week at the same time I overdosed, so that we spent the day in bed together burning up and numb to one another. Fear of Intimacy is a quaint dime-store novel way for me to explain I don't want my bad soul to kill you.
It isn't kindness. It's pragmatism.
The laudanum is really kicking in now, the Ten and I are at the breaking point where we must sleep because we can, finally, sleep or break, but Mona's knees digging my ribs remind me that she's here, Mona in my lap and I think about Phin's Mama (in the summer, of course) and how she died suddenly --
And was that my bad blood, too? Was it my ill will? Did I engineer her sudden passing in my sleep so that Phineas would have to come back? I remember that day in Hungary, just after Thanatos joined me, when I walked past a field in the rain and watched the cattle drop dead as I passed, one by one.
Back when I couldn't control Thanatos. Of course, now I can, better than I ever expected. Mastery. At this point I feel nothing but a strange fascination at the idea that I could have had something to do with Mimi's death, without even knowing it.
But then, I'm a paranoiac, I know. It could just be a coincidence, as if such things ever happened to me.
Mona gets off, and I can't really hear her over the sound of the Ten's noise, their laughter, their celebratory-warning.
--
Have I told you lately that I love you
Have I told you
That there's a sword hanging above you?
[destroyer, a dangerous woman up to a point]
I'm probably quite dangerous to Milla.
But I can't help myself, you know -- never can help myself from the girls, of course, I long ago accepted the Ten's grand sense of humor. This is the fashion in which they prefer to put a noose 'round me gently, to drape a snake 'round my shoulders. To give me a sense of power, to serve me, to serve themselves, or to prepare to choke me -- and of course, they're doing all of these things simultaneously, always.
I don't want you climbing trees, Mercedes' mother used to call to us from the Veranda. You'll get hurt. And yet I'd carry her on my back up the branches of the orchards anyway, and when the stepmother scolded, I just liked it more.
Milla says her voice goes quiet when I'm around. Honestly, I can't explain why -- that depends on who's talking to you, I told her, and it's quite true. Maybe she really is just a poor, mad thing, like a girl named Madeline I met once whose name I took away to give her a new one. Or maybe she's as cursed as I am, maybe her beast has a name.
I've called ten names on my snake's climb up the Tree of Life. If there is a beast here in her, whether named or nameless, I aim to be the one to call it out. It's a compulsion I can't help -- to master. Show me, she says. Help, she says, in her way. And I will help, but let's not start calling me the Christ-savior. I'm just trying to save myself.
Of course, when she talks about gardens, when she talks about coming back in summer, it's all I can do not to laugh -- not at Milla, of course, but at myself, at the Ten's sense of humor, you could call it. I have dared to see Mercedes inside of every woman I've ever met, even Phineas, whom my madness convinced me was my own blood-born baby girl. I know, I know the name of Milla's voice is not Mercie or Phina but when she talks like that, ha, oh, I'm a fool, let's embrace it.
The arcana are circular for a reason; this is not a straight-up journey that I take, we wind around the rings of the seasons in cycles, and the winter recalls the summer, this place recalls the last, these people recall the ones who are gone. Cyclical fate, the Ten's manner of riding me or being ridden.
Three or four a.m and I, nearly stupefied with the medication, am trying to explain this to Mona.
"You're not making sense," she says, staring at me with her lined eyes, but I can tell it thrills her when I talk about the occult, turns her on, and I pretend for my own benefit that that's why I'm doing it, because I'm caged and I want her in a certain condition such that she can let me out.
Mona wants to know, as she always does, if I'm talking about Phineas, and I wasn't, but I say I am, because then Mona becomes jealous, Mona becomes angry and insecure, and she wants to scratch me with her black nails (she has these lovely little Gothic fishnet gloves today, black as her nails or her poor little heart), she's more willing to do what I say, she quits discussing and just does it.
--
Go inside
Going somewhere
Hopeless tag time
And no one's for me
Open wide
You're like New Year
Nobody warned you
That I could just walk through
And shake up your style
[interpol, wrecking ball]
Dear Phina,
My condolences on the loss of your mother.
I --
You --
--
if you're still there when it snows
will you still be there when it goes
will you still be there when it's time to fill the pools again
will you be coming back here?
will you be coming back here?
and please is not a word
that i ever said quietly
[swan lake, are you swimming in her pools]
I can tell the house is empty when I get home before I get in the door -- funny, especially in my laudanum daze, I haven't yet gotten over expecting Persephone to be by the door. The shadow cast in the dark house seems to contain her shape, and then I realize my eyes are playing tricks on me. Or my mind, more likely.
I wanted to talk to Mesteno tonight, but I just didn't quite have the words. I can't abide being too near that angel, either, or rather, it takes effort, and the place was just so crowded, there was just so much noise.
And the Tower. Her presence pulls at something in me, the pulling of bloody meat through the water where sharks are circling, slow, slow. I can feel the dark shapes of want moving in me, in spite of myself. I am sometimes not in control when she's there, and right now, when the Ten and I are so drained, that spire's compelling.
Damn me, but I gave her this address. Marius' phone calls have been conspicuously absent. I wonder.
Milla. The girl who hears voices; how strange to speak with her tonight. I thought, of course, that it was just that she was my type, unadorned little thing, and oh, braids, but as I drove her home -- we were never going anywhere but to her home, of course -- I felt anchored. It's good to know that look in the eye of another, a certain understanding.
She made me laugh. I laughed until I felt a wedge under my breastbone, something I've knit shut since Phina's been gone, and I can't say it felt good, and I had to dose heavily after that just to close myself, to settle them. My fabric is thin, and I need it knit tight so that They don't come gasping through the opening, rending me, so that I don't -- what, weep?
The tears I don't have, anymore.
Mona is not here, but she's left her leggings twisted on my bed, left her unpleasant shopping mall perfume in my bathroom, left her school satchel on my floor that she'll need in the morning. These things left behind, her Dalton stuff on my floor if I look at it, divorce myself from context, I feel that old ache opening, and I dose again.
It's not about Mona, of course. Since her satchel's here, she must just be out late, probably with someone else, and I feel leaden, I feel nothing about that. If I were a better man, I could at least hope that she is happy somewhere, with someone safe, that she's healthfully growing away from me, but I can't bring myself to care.
The Tree is shaking, and I am climbing again. Mad as Milla, I whisper into the dark, for Mercedes, I tell myself, for me, for all of us -- we'll be fine. We'll finish this.
However it ends.
I was sick of the rodeo
I was sick of the farm
I was stuck inside of dreams, coming off something pretty strong
And you could've been fair
You could've been ruthless like the other girls
You know the ones
Down at the summer fair in heartswarm
Dearest darling, no one's in it for the long haul
If you're kidding, no one's in it at all
I was coming off something particularly strong
You had your gloves on
They looked fucking brutal as a storm
[[swan lake, heartswarm]
there's a hand at dusk
in the wake in the water, it's mine
can you take the palm of it
for every time you change your mind
you are the flesh of skin
seen through the leaves of anxious trees
the summer's touch just above the knee
just above the knee
there's architecture here
and there are mountain peaks
and places dwelled upon by those
who climb much higher than me
like so many miles you are compiled
into books of maps by men with hands
can you believe that we will all get old
it's getting old, i know, i know
i'll hold your hair back when you're sick
it's getting old i know, i know
you still look good to me in that knee-length checkered dress
it's getting old, i know
i k n o w
you still look good to me
in that knee-length checkered dress
it's getting old
it's getting old
[song's "a hand at dusk" by Swan Lake and is new obsession. just added it to aden's playlist, so play it. it's item #1 so if you don't see it in the box, just hit >> a few times]
I know that I've just been waiting for an immediate reason to be rid of Mona. She knows it, too, so I'm not sure why I hesitated to bring that blonde home tonight. What was her name? Didn't catch it. Am I becoming like Marius, that I just don't care?
I watch this distance in myself; I watch it from far away, and when I close my eyes and try to see Mercedes, it's like looking at a glossy Polaroid on an angle, its colors stained with time, and the photograph cuts off her head, her shoulders, all I can see is her sundress at her skinny knees, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, my sister.
When I come home, it's late, late; the house is gray and black and white where the moonlight touches it, and the draped furniture in the sitting room looks like ghosts. The Ten follow me, whispering loudly, and my own long shadow bleeds indistinctly into the others. I feel aware, awake, like a penknife slit in the air, and I'm knotted in my gut with want, and yet the way I move is muted, swimming under a blanket of snow and white opium. Took such a stunning dose in the car that I can hardly remember driving back. For all I know I walked, walked all the way like this, and left the car behind.
Something aches in a capsule far back in my body, something needs, the Ten or me, and maybe I've just compartmentalized them now, so well, so well, secreting them from my consciousness like I've done with my heart. Yeah, appetite gnarls in my guts and I notice it academically, but I don't exactly feel it.
Mona is here; I can see the black bergamot outline of her in my bed, lying still, having given up waiting. Had I stumbled through here with that blonde's clothes half-off, what would Mona have done? I would have liked to have found out, I think. And yet, I am alone and the damn girl is asleep.
Do blondes have more fun? What's-her-name asked me. I don't know, really. I have always loved dark-haired girls. Mona, over whom I'm now standing, watching her sleep the way my sister and I used to watch our dragonflies die under the needles where we pinned them to the glass.
Akina. Phina, Phina. Even Jill, whom I tried not to love, no matter how funny the Ten thought that was, the Tower. Payton -- ah, poor Star -- Marie, a blur of a Hungarian daughter, and that bitch of a wife, and my love, my love, my Mercie. Something rolls over in me, something stirs like a lead tongue, and I'm unsure why I'm recalling this.
And the Sun, always just on the horizon. I think of Shannon and why I chose to stay away from her, and of all the time I spent with her, for some reason in this moment it's those five minutes of ours off-course, in bed, that come to mind. I wonder if she's still living. I feel like I'd know if she'd died, but then again, maybe not.
Do you forget things when they're buried? Mercie whispers, a ghost-impulse of my sister close to my ear and it sounds like she's saying when you're buried.
"Why are you here, Mona?" I ask her as she sleeps, although of course she doesn't have the answer I'm looking for.
But she hears me; she's sleeping lightly, she rolls over and I can see her eye makeup's all over the place, the ribbons of this silly little drugstore lingerie she's wearing are rumpled. She tried hard, although she thinks I believe she always looks like this. She thinks I believe she's a lady. And she wants to smile, and she starts to, but then she scowls, and she thinks I didn't catch her. She thinks I believe it.
"You're late," she says softly, still half-asleep, "where were you?"
I don't answer.
"You smell like someone's perfume," she murmurs achingly, all sleep-laced and fluffy although she's trying to sound tough, and it's like a knife in my gut the way she sounds her age. The way she would have said this to me even if I didn't. I don't want to see this.
I tell her, "You've gotta go, Mona."
She thinks I mean tonight; she thinks I mean how she isn't supposed to stay over. She rolls over, still mostly sleeping, seizes onto my pillow and locks her knees around the blankets as if she thinks I'm going to drag her out of bed, like I'm her father trying to get her to go to school, or something.
She murmurs into the pillow, sullenly, resistant. "No-oo, not yet."
For the first time, I wonder about her parents and why the hell they don't come after me to find out where she's been, to find out what I've been doing to their daughter. She once mentioned she had an older sister who ran away, and only now do I wonder why. Academically, I wonder. I feel nothing. I wonder if my eyes look Luciphon-red to her in the dark.
"You've got to go," I tell her again, and the voice she hears isn't just mine, and so she opens her little dark eye and frowns at me.
"Not yet," she pouts. And clings there.
Softly, she says, "Just a little more."
I go to bed with her, but I don't touch her tonight, white clouds pressing me down through dark dreams of Mercedes with a million faces, none of them her own.
Mona is in the kitchen when I get home, and so are more empty liquor bottles than she could have drank by herself. Must've had friends over; the glasses are lined with fruit punch and the sick-sweet rime that young girls leave behind. She knows she can't hide anything from me, so she doesn't try.
Two a.m and I'm out of my head, and I fancy a phone call to Ray -- "hello, I'd like to report underage drinking. My girlfriend."
"What are you laughing at?" Mona, standing in my kitchen in fishnets and a black nightgown that she thinks makes her look mature. She's got a bruise on her neck that I'm not so sure I gave her, but I don't give a fuck right now.
"You," I tell her. There's no Persephone here to clean up the kitchen, and if I think on that too much I'll start to wonder about Shannon, and so instead I take another dose.
When she comes up to stand near me, I'm looking down through the whitehaze at her black toenail polish through her stockings. When I don't kiss her, she takes the flask from me and sips on it herself. Suit yourself, Mona.
"Where were you?" She says. She sits up on my counter kind of like Phina used to do, and I go to the window so I don't have to look at her violating the space like that.
"I was with a woman," I tell her, and she knows I'm not serious because I can't say it without laughing just a little. It's not completely untrue, though, and she can tell that, too, and she's quiet.
"I invited Audrey and Cassandra to come and meet you," she says. "But you didn't come home, Daddy-O."
Like hell she did. I have a vague memory of those girls -- the underweight redhead with the fairisle sweaters who Mona bullies, and that diplomat's daughter, the transfer student. Saw them when I used to wait outside Dalton for Phina. I imagine Mona enjoyed being the queen bee, having a space to throw a party in, and the idea of meeting me with which she's trying to guilt me is manipulative. Mona uses me just like I use her, and probably I couldn't abide this arrangement if she didn't.
I briefly entertain the idea of Mona, Audrey and Cassandra drunk on vodka kool-aids in my house, but I'm too tired for a comment.
"I was with an old girlfriend," I say, which is not exactly a lie. Funny.
"You were not," she says. I don't answer.
"Was it Phin?"
"If it was, you'd be able to tell, wouldn't you?"
She doesn't know what to say, and she frowns. That funeral for Mimi is only a few days away. We are both thinking about it.
"Your cousin called," Mona reports, swaying a little on her feet. She looks at the dirty kitchen like she isn't sure whether she wants to clean up the glasses or smash them. "He left a message."
Sure enough, the light is blinking. What does the Vega want this time?
Beep.
Hey, you fucking Brande -- he's drunk -- are you still alive? Get your head out of the toilet and answer the phone, asshole. What are you doing over there? On reflection, I'm vaguely pleased that nosy Mona didn't pick up the phone and talk to him. That would have been an event.
Listen, I'm sick of you living in that empty apartment doing god knows what. I told your father I'd look after your ass, and you're doing fucking terrible.You're wasting -- oh, he's very drunk, pauses while his stomach settles -- wasting your fuckin' life over there, and it's not too much to ask for you to do a little bit for your family.
Why don't you come stay here for a while? Antoinette is out of town, promise --
Live at Vega's? Is he insane? Well. I consider the state of my kitchen and the fact that I am not about to rehabilitate its state of organization, and wouldn't it be nice if some young professional thing was going to clean it up?
Of course, he's not asking because I need him. Perish the thought. He's asking because he needs me. I'm not sure I could look him in the eye now, knowing what I think I know about Luciana.
But we'll see. It's worth thinking about. It's true I'm losing my mind in here, although I don't much mind.
"Are you going to leave me?" Says Mona in a small voice. I hadn't realized the room had fallen silent, that the message had cut off with some kind of get your ass over here, sister-fucker, and that she's staring at my back. I can feel it, and They can, and it's good they were able to be placated a little bit by the Tower because. Well. They want things, they always want things, and I am so, so tired. Again.
I feel sorry for her. For Mona Dahl, I mean. She's a bad girl, and she asks for the trouble she's in, but no one ever gets that way on their own. Reminds me of another woman I saw tonight. And she didn't pick up the phone; she didn't talk to Marius. Something that resembles contentment, as temporary and restless as it is in me, stirs from behind my sternum in Mona's direction like the halfhearted contraction of a black, bleak, tired muscle.
So I tell her, "Not quite yet."
--
How long, how long did your estuary run?
Did you call yourself a father?
Did you call yourself so dumb?
[frog eyes, new soft motherhood alliance]
Two a.m outlines the figure of a pale, slender beast, a vicious riot of sinew knit around the graceful arch of a spine, sitting at a desk in crumpled slacks. The low lamplight burnishes the hollows of his body, sends them black and feral, and the Sefirotic sprawl of vivid green, edged in blue and haloed in gold, seemed to breathe in his skin, to undulate, living ink.
The girlfriend-accessory, a girl in black tights and an unlaundered sweaterdress is named Mona Dahl, but at present, he has forgotten she was there. Never told her she could start spending nights here; in fact he'd told her not to, several times, and that's probably why she started doing it, taking advantage of his lengthening laudanum binges, his fractured attentions, the fact that he spent enough time in the throes of alchemical trances that he lost track of time, and it became midnight, it became two a.m, and Mona Dahl is still here.
"Your eyes look weird," she tells him. "You should have another dose."
And he ignores her; he knows, and doesn't particularly care, that she is engineering her own fortunes now, jockeying to end up on his pillow in the morning. Knows and doesn't particularly care that she has co-opted his Tarot deck again, and is playing with the cards, just playing with the faded little pack as if she were inventing solitaire.
The alchemist is writing a letter, and it is taking him some time, and Mona blames his soporific stupor. He's so strange, so dissasociated late at night, with insomnia, with his medication, with all of it, and when he says things like Mercedes in his restless sleep, she pretends that he's just speaking nonsense.
"RK," Mona reads over his shoulder, sibilantly. "I'm sorry it's been a long time since I've written. You know sometimes I don't feel well because of work, and I've been especially busy."
Brande pauses with the pen on the paper, and looks at her as if he's only just realized she's there.
"You've been busy?" She says, smoking. "Can't you put something about me in the letter? Can you write, 'I'm seeing this girl, Mona?'"
"I'm seeing this girl, Mona," he says dryly, as he writes what he is instructed with a certain breed of hollow obedience; it's a venomous tone that Aden Brande has cultivated as a skill, and it gives Mona no quarter.
He doesn't write anything further about the reality of Mona Dahl not because he is too kind to do it in front of her, but because he is too tired to fight with her, and after all, he has a reason for writing.
RK,
I'm sorry it's been a long time since I've written. You know sometimes I don't feel well because of work, and I've been especially busy.
I'm seeing this girl, Mona. It is very much a non-story.
I imagine Marius must be officially a father by now. Have you heard anything? I haven't spoken to him about it since he found out, and it's not exactly a sowing ground for joyous news. My cousin has certain ideas about family, and having what is for all intents and purposes his first son arrive to a woman he feels betrayed him is not likely how he was hoping it would go.
It's not my intention to be especially sympathetic for Marius. How a man who's as smart about people as he is could have gotten in this mess is beyond me.
Speaking of my cousin's family, there was something I wanted to ask you about. Do you have any memory of Marius' mother, my aunt Luciana? When I was working on Eurydice, I brought her to see Luciana; I was interested in seeing her response to maternal figures.
Luciana called me by my father's name, which is not especially surprising given how mad the poor woman is after the life she's had. She called Eurydice Mercedes, too.
But let me just imply that since I saw the way she tried kissed reacted to me, thinking I was Marshall, I have been wondering several things related to the parents of Marius and Antoinette and me.
And so I ask, do you remember Luciana? Do you have any thoughts of her?
As an aside, I don't expect you to be especially sympathetic to Marius, either. I'm sure you'd love I would ask about your situation, but you and I have an understanding that I must remain dumb and blind to it, with all respect to you and your wife.
All the respect, and whatever I can muster that resembles love. There isn't much of that left, I confess. Sorry, Mona who's reading over my shoulder as I write this.
Fidelis,
AMB
"You didn't say anything at all about me in the letter," says Mona, now sitting in his lap, somewhat placated, however, by the glimpses she gets into the life of Brande, into the equally intriguing Vega family. Just a few lines in the letter have given meaning to the dusty insignias she occasionally finds when rifling through his moving bozes whenever he loses consciousness late at night.
"What is there to say?" He asks, looking at her for the first time, his eyes wan.
"You're a cold son of a bitch, Aden Brande."
And he knows that sorry would be a worthless thing to say even if he felt sorry, and so he says nothing, and lets her spend the night because he's too tired to fight her.
--
Honey honey out on the sea
In the doldrums thinking of me
Me on dry land thinking of he
Honey honey not next to me
Tell me why did you go
I carved your ever fading figure
Into the ever dying snow
He hadn't done much with the place; with any of it. The furniture was still in drapes, the paintings still wrapped, and it otherwise had all the functional trappings of dissolution, of callous wealth like powdered porcelain underfoot. It was all white like that, heaven-white, the curtains basic muslin, everything liquid gray, and he was currently making a black line of his frame against the curtain he faced as if he could look right through it.
Mona Dahl strolled into the ghostlit, plaster shell of a house on Central Park West as if she owned it, called Dad three times, quite pleased with her own sense of humor. She came into the kitchen, and when the man that stood at the window didn't answer her, she snapped for his attention.
"Brande."
He didn't shift his hands from his pockets, didn't turn toward her, but made a sound like mm as if to assert he was listening.
"I'm putting your card in your wallet," Mona said, flicking a plasticine tune with the edge of the Amex, making broad motions when she picked his wallet up from the kitchen counter, the way one communicates intention, deliberately, to an animal to avoid starting it.
He made the same sound once more, didn't turn around, and Mona watched his back when she opened the worn, cool leather. Mulled his composure with a twist of her lips, as if debating a phrase like thanks, Daddy-O and deciding against it.
He just stood there, the crumpled jacket draped loosely over the hardwire line of his shoulders. His hair was uncombed, and he hadn't shaved at all, and Mona found him much more handsome this way because she fancied she was undoing him, liked to pretend she was, even though she knew, privately, that what was eating the alchemist was far, far beyond her. She knew she loved a snake; knew it was eating its tail, knew she couldn't understand it.
She thumbed quietly through the contents of his wallet, watching him sidelong at the corners of her blacklined eyes to see how much violation he'd let her get away with this time. He was the most unsettling, seemed possessed of the most insight, when he wasn't looking at her, and with the way he'd been lately, it was always impossible to tell whether he was letting her get away with things, or if he really was so absorbed in his darkness that he didn't see what she was up to.
Whenever she went in the alchemist's wallet, she peeked at the photobooth pictures of Brande with Phineas Gage. The strip always transfixed her, absolutely -- first, because it was ugh, Phineas, the little... and why is it her that can make him look like that, not like it matters.
Second, of course, because he ruined pictures. Once, after making a mischievous little parade of herself in the gearwell of Brande's new silver Benz, she'd decided to perform the appropriately bad behavior of taking a cell phone picture of herself with him; the result had been a picture of Mona with a smeared smile, and an indistinct, bestial sort of yellow-eyed blur lurking over her photos. In the sepia-printed photo strip of Brande with Phineas Gage, the ghosts seemed different, somehow; subtle, haunting, as if they were making expressions of their own.
And the photo strip; it was sad, like a pre-war memory, like something that somehow was of momentous importance to the world, or maybe Mona was just jealous or sensitive or getting her period or some shit like that.
"You're going to get rid of me as soon as she comes back, aren't you, Aden Brande," said Mona softly, and she had the words out before she was even aware of it.
Long silence, and she thought that maybe he was in one of those trances, reveries, and hadn't heard her at all. But then, unmoving, he replied.
"Possibly."
Mona laughed, a little bit, a complicated noise. She wouldn't have liked him, after all, if he wasn't this cruel. Just like me, she thought, and didn't it figure.
"Possibly?" She prodded, watching him carefully to see whether he noticed her digging, with her chipped black fingernail, at the edge of the photo strip.
"If she ever comes back," he said, and his lips were chilled, slow-leaden, although there was a certain opiate undertone, warm languor, manufacted into the back of his throat.
"So you're gonna go to that funeral, then?" Mona's tongue made a slow, calculating little ring around her dark lips, wondering whether he'd notice if she just ripped the whole little picture set in half. Fucking Phineas.
"Which?" Brande said, with a certain stillness Mona hated, because it was the tone he used when he wasn't actually listening.
"Phin's Mom's," said Mona, impatient, with an eyeroll, because if he hadn't even known about it then perhaps she really ought not to have brought it up, and did she really need him to look at her that badly? Like, c'mon.
And he did. Look at her, turned just a little over one shoulder with those feral yellow eyes, their color sharp sulfur, pupils pinpoint, sick and listing, in a way that curled her toes and chilled her to the bone and made her panties stick with how badly she wanted to run away.
And he said, "...Phin?"
He'd said it in such a surprised, disassociative way that it prompted Mona to ask, startled, "What did you think we were talking about?"
Silence, for a moment, and he said, with a modicum of further wakefulness, a weighting of his lids. "Mimi's funeral?"
The readiness with which he pet-named Phin's mother made Mona scowl; like the little photo strip she was worrying between her fingers, it was evidence of entrenchment, evidence of a Brande that had been different than the one who snarled into her neck, who slept without embracing her.
He looked vaguely awake now, focusing his eyes on her. And Mona knew if she hadn't said anything about Mimi, then he'd still be comatose, still have his back to her, and Mona dug her nails into her hand, ambivalent. But she couldn't escape that gaze, that black look, and all he did was look at her, and it was like he pulled the words from her mouth, her frowning little mole-crowned mouth, her sulking little lipstick kiss.
"Phin will come back to town for that, don't you think?" She let it come out like bitten flowers, drew her shoulders up tight, let her eyes drift shut, because she could feel him stalking toward her, stirring the air, feel the weight of all his ghosts pressing hungrily through the air and why didn't I notice this when he was just a playboy in a car?
Was like being preyed upon, when he stood so close to her, when he pulled the photo strip from her hands, his own dead cold leather; taking away with one hand, resting five chill fingers from the other on the edge of her hip without quite embracing her. She kept her mascaraed eyes tight shut, she waited for the guillotine of his breath.
"Possibly," he said, and she hated, hated, hated how the possibility thawed him, just a little, quickened his breath, bestial vitality, before he left her standing alone in the kitchen.
And you were dreaming of Los Angeles
While I was singing songs you wrote
You quietly gave away the winter clothes I made for you
While I made angels in the snow
I would have left if you just asked me to
Or come to me before the preacher
Now you’re surviving
And I think I mighta heard you on the radio
But the radio waves were like snow
And I think I mighta heard you on the radio
But the radio waves were like snow
