A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
He loses himself in watching her eyes the way he used to watch the sky, as a boy, lying in the sand as his father searched the beach for the little treasures he would later try and sell. (But oh, he knows now the man didn’t care at all about letting them go, or making money for them - only for finding them, that thrill of discovery, of holding something beautiful). The clouds would tear ragged across the too-blue expanse, racing patterns of shadow and light, and Abel would feel held close by time, like the only still thing in a universe that turned and turned. He watches the same shadows move across her gaze now, and he holds very still.
Until she begins to speak; and then his breath sighs out, and he is ashamed for how clearly it sounds like longing. Almost he says I know that feeling - it is finding a shell in a tide-pool with ten shades of purple, it is counting all the clouds in an hour but he stops himself just in time. But he has to offer her something, for the way his heart has picked up in his chest, the way when he blinks he forgets, for a moment, the scouring heat and the dread, oh, thick and heavy. So he nods, and says “I remember that feeling. I didn’t know it at the time.” And maybe, for a moment, they might be just a boy and a girl, and look up at the right time to see a swallow make an arc across the sky with the sun on its wings and it would be enough -
But they are not just a boy and a girl. Abel has known it, and it is proven again when she speaks. Okay is not a feeling for them, and a feeling like a laugh begins to build inside him, pressing on his throat, something desperate and mad like a jackal might laugh, knowing how darkly all the world fit together. But Abel swallows it down, and does not take his gaze from hers, and thinks (without knowing her at all, really) that she is brave and he is a coward and when they leave one another, he will still be thirsty, no matter how much water he drinks.
And then he thinks of all the things they call Raum - traitor, murderer, madman - and how all of them are true, and how Sabine must have heard them, too.
“Your father saved my life,” he says.
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