"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
The sky is smeared in long red lines that cut across the dusky blue like roads laid out overhead. It filters through the window in muted orange and honey yellow and Michael thinks he might remember the shadow Moira and her tiger cast as they sweep through the open door for the rest of his life, played on repeat until he cannot remember anything except for the sun on the curve of her back.
Another toast, to sunsents, to commerce, to good music and good friends.
Michael says "Hello Neerja," before answering.
Time is always strange in a fog. Time is always strange with ghosts. Michael walked out of the woods as if he had never been there at all and he hadn't stopped walking, not until he was high in the hills and the pines grew as wide as his hair was long. If he had suffered any pang of regret, any hard rock of duty in the pit of his stomach, it does not appear to slow him in his haste to go.
He had watched Isra rip the maze at the seams, had stood on a ridge as the crowd started to creep out en masse. He had felt like a beast at the tabernacle, praying with his mouth in the curve of the horizon and his knees on the hard stone. He wonders why watching Denocte turn feels like church. He wonders why he crawls, headfirst, onto its altar.
He knows. But he doesn't say.
"That's a good question," Michael says while plucking his drink from the table. It it something that smells like rum and vanilla and tastes about the same when he takes a thoughtful sip on his way to the table. "A while, I guess." Michael says over his shoulder. If he sees Moira's face as she orders her own drink, or hears what she says, he does not say so.
(He does see - watches as the phoenix whirls away, drink in her graceful grip, with the unmistakable undercurrent of enmity. When Michael meets the bartender's eyes again (a reflex) she looks away.)
Michael rounds the table and sets his drink down with an enthusiastic plunk.
"I'm alright," he says, and does not mention the things he thinks on the trail up the mountain, does not even begin to hint and the endless suffering of being alive, or the sting of page after page of poetry written about the same four stars, the same shining wave, the same beast in the bottom of a deep, dark lake. "I got turned around, I'm sure. Which might be for the best, as ghosts and I don't often see eye to eye--speaking from experience."
Now he leans over the table, sipping his drink conspiratorially, curved over the rim of its glass. "Tell me your story, then."
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