#llnnx

The night air was crisp and cool, the noise inside hummed in the still air outside as it was released through the open door. Other party goers relaxed out front the two story Victorian style house, smoking, chatting and cooling off from the heat of all the bodies that had crammed themselves into the house. A few heads turned to see a girl with pink hair stumble out of the house only to catch herself on the banister of the patio. Everyone assumed she was drunk and ignored her, going back to what they were doing.

But it didn’t help Tia’s embarrassment at all. She really wasn’t that drunk, she hadn’t been at this party long enough to be that drunk. She’d just made the dumb mistake of wearing new heels to this party before taking time to actually break them in. Now that she wasn’t dancing and surrounded by other people to help keep her standing up right she found walking in them more difficult then she originally anticipated. Still she brushed it off,  stood up straight and fixed her dress trying to save some face as she walked down the steps of the house.

Her eyes scanned the yard of the house hoping to catch either a familiar face or a friendly face she could strike up a conversation with. That was when her ears picked up on a familiar laugh and her eyes landed on a familiar grin only illuminated by the streetlight. Near the sidewalk she saw dark hair speaking with another boy. Her eyes lit up and a grin spread across her face. Despite the ache in her feet and the difficult walking in these shoes Tia picked up her pace, hurrying down the sidewalk towards the familiar face. Once she was at his side she found herself grabbing his arm as though he was an old friend. They weren’t really that close but this was simply how Tia treated everyone she considered a friend.

SONG: time out - interlude, rina sawayama

     “that’s a deadly guess for it’s purpose.”  gatsby’s voice breaks through the song lyrics as quickly as it sinks back into them, there and gone again like you could blink and miss it, not realize the young looking thing said anything at all beyond the words an unseen woman sings to bright bubbly beats.  just the humor lingers, tainting even the song as he joins voice to voice and, for moments, waves that knife along with the rise and fall of notes.  it takes a moment for him to still.  

then the knife is drawn properly downwards, slicing effortlessly into the flesh of the neatly sized pomegranate that he holds above metronome’s counter.  red liquid drips down the sides of it as, carefully, gatsby sets the knife down onto a paper towel. stains blossom there.  pinks and reds depending on their darkness, all beautiful as the very fruit that he twists with both hands and, unceremoniously, splits it in half.  he laughs.  taking in both the face of the human before him and the mess on his hands down, small rivulets that pool on his knuckles before preparing to drip away.  

gatsby hums and offers one half out across the counter.  the less messy of the two, with cleaner edges and juice glistening but not yet spilled around the sides.  it’s a benign offering.  just symbolic enough for anyone cautious to pause and check themselves, assuage fears that they have vanished from the modern times and modern buildings into something more decrepit and ancient in thought.  there is, after all, reason enough for pomegranates to survive through history as symbolism as much as edibles.  delicious and destructive.  that’s a tag line, gatsby thinks, the corner of his mouth pulling up.  more befitting other syrens he knows than himself.  

     “knives aren’t for guests,” gatsby says, “not in the store.  especially polite ones trying to spend their summer out of the heat.”  for it is hot, scalding outside enough to make the asphalt shimmer when he looks at it through the windows that make up the outside wall of the store.  a relief to be indoors.  he can already feel the call of that lake from so far away, a balm to the scream for ocean water licking at his skin and making him clean.  

for now he makes due with the liquid from the fruit in his hands.  picking at it, swallowing greedily at every bit that clings to his fingers only to run down his throat.  then, dryly, or perhaps with a hint of other things, “enjoy that one.  not everyone calls me pretty.”

SONG: vladimir’s blues, max richter

despite all odds, gatsby finds himself laughing.  a soft, reedy sound that’s there and gone just as quickly as though wind or great noise had swallowed it out of his mouth.  in a meager two months he’s heard a variety of requests whilst working in metronome.  difficult purchases, obscure titles, returns and refunds when the syren song wears off and natural bitterness returns.  but never this -- a soul brave enough to enter into his shop and, with sincerity when asked about his desires, requested quiet.  gatsby’s instincts are to retort.  point out the place they are passively, no sharpness for the customer to latch onto and use as aggression against him.

but in truth, he’s bemused into silence.  the only quiet thing in the shop perhaps, with the door cracked for a breeze and music playing through every hidden speaker.  some other customers in a far corner are talking to one another, murmurs nearly inaudible but still present as white noise.  gatsby takes a moment to lean chin to palm, elbow to counter.  looking past this young man at first, and then directly into his eyes.  trying to read everything written there and then some.  

a joke would be too obvious.  no one maintains a serious face this long with a joke played on strangers -- not without a camera pointed in gatsby’s face, barely ‘hidden’ out of sight for some sort of video on the internet.  with no such thing in sight there’s little doubt in gatsby’s mind that the young man is sincere.  he wants quiet for his browsing in metronome, quiet in a store that contains instruments and speakers and albums to be played upon both, either directly or as inspiration.

slowly, gatsby rises tall.  cracks his neck and reaches for the open container of gum besides his laptop to pry another stick free.  “i always play music here,” he says as it slides between his teeth.  ambiguous fruit flavors exploding across his tongue and lingering there.  “but if you prefer something less loud, i’ll change the song.  no promises on nothing though... it wouldn’t suit metronome’s soul.”

he wonders how ominous that is, the edge to his voice and the sincerity of life in the place they currently stand.  each speaker contains the heartbeat, no?  or the rise and fall of lungs?  depends on the song, my darling.  gatsby is a creature of his promises though.  scrolling through a seemingly infinite list of songs, organized absolutely nonsensically to the passing eye until he finds one.  clicks it to start, cutting through the former chaotic noise into something more delicate.  wordless.  

     “better?”

there’s a couple thoughts that run through her head. don’t be an ominous bastard is one of them, the instinct to push things down. another is challenging: yeah, like what? and the third, the worst of all and thus the most tempting, is just accusatory. how do you know that? got something to say? you know rumor and hearsay is a stupid fucking idea, right? so how do you know? or any similar configuration of the words. it’s more about the tone, and the main  question behind it, which is really just why. florence knows that that’s the paranoia talking. but at the same time, if there’s darkness, then she wants to know where it’s coming from.

and she has an idea, maybe. after what she saw. considering what she knows, and holds deep inside of her. the impulse and the feeling rattle around sometimes, bashing up against her ribs like it’s trying to get out of her. it’s the thing that causes her to freeze up whenever she sees that woman on the film; it’s the thing that keeps her up at night, staring up at her ceiling, listening to the sounds from the apartments around her. before she used to build normal stories about what happened to people. arguments. things going wrong. 

there’s nothing to be worried about; there is everything to be worried about. or both at once.

now the stories she makes up are different. darker, maybe, or at least less simple. danger comes in impossible forms. she kept studying, kept looking for an easy explanation, but there wasn’t one. her google search history reflected it for weeks, even if she’s begun to exorcise that recently in favor of more normal searches. now it’s things like “shadow of a doubt release year” rather than “what does it feel like to burn alive”. it’s an important shift. it isn’t that she thinks she’s going to be arrested or anything. it’s just that feeling of culpability. that silence means assent, maybe, or that she’s somehow to blame even though all she did was watch.

then again, watch is still a verb. so when he says something ominous, like that there’s darkness on the edge of town, florence’s impulse beyond the question is to calculate how close she is to the edge of hill city. not that close. certainly not close enough to qualify. besides, she isn’t anything so overwhelmingly gothic and edgy enough to be called dark. she’s not a good person either, probably, but she isn’t that bad. she’s doing enough to resoundingly be okay, which is really all that anyone can ask for.

“You know, I could build a few examples that’d prove you right.”  

If anything is a poem when spoken over and over and over and over and–  then religion is the longest running creator of thematic poetry that Noah has ever seen.  Not even the obvious examples, the great stories of war and returning home that the Greeks told to talk about man and the gods in two fold, now called epics, and read in high schools.  Nor the careful anthologies of psalms that remind her of slam sometimes, back when Noah was a teenager attending those kinds of parties.

Instead she thinks of the pagans, who were not called pagans.  The Buddhists who memorize patterns in their rebirth cycles, a poetry of their own.  

She thinks of norito, rhythmic like a song.

“Is that something you’re writing about?  Poetry in relation to religion?  It’s a good subject, if so.”