“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
She sips, and Michael can hear her chains rattle, the rumbling of coals deep down. She glows where Michael is cold, damp wood and the things that crawl along the ocean's floor. For a moment he looks at her and wonders what it's like to be both fire and ice. He wonders what it's like to be molten rock inside so much dry, yellow clay. He wonders what it's like to be anything at all.
She sips, and Michael feels himself breaking open in some way he doesn't expect, cracked like her clay, spilling and spilling until he has become his own sea. He is drowning. The water fills his lungs, he sinks like a rock, and--
--and, Michael picks up his own drink, downs a mouthful, and then uses it to scoot his empty mug closer to the edge of the table, where the light on its rim reminds him of a night at the end of autumn and the hum of the people sounds more familiar than his own heartbeat.
Her voice pulls him to shore. He looks up at her and his heart is gasping. He smiles like it's nothing, smiles with his tongue caught between his teeth and his lower lip, smiles and smiles and smiles.
"While I do a fair bit of bluffing, and while I'd argue that storytelling is mostly bluffing in the first place--" Michael closess his mouth, purses his lips, and draws a breath that is so shallow and quiet it may have never been drawn at all.
"The thing about stories is time, I think. There's nothing interesting about time. It passes. It passes and passes and passes and--what? I don't think in straight enough lines for most stories."
What brings them here, to this bar at the edge of the market, cluttered with strangers and strong drinks and distant music? Whatever it is, it rolled in on the winds of a time he's forgotten, settled in his ribcage and the pit of her heavy, waiting eyes--eyes that judge, eyes that almost laugh, almost sigh. It winds in and out of Michael's veins before it crawls up his throat and clean out of his mouth when he asks, as he's watching her, "Tell me what you want to hear a story about, then. Try me." like it's a dare.
He doesn't know who he's daring. Him? Her? Them? He smiles. He smiles and smiles and smiles.
@morrighan
