InsaneJournal

Week Nineteen: Tuesday -- Late Afternoon
Who: Mircea and Sasha (and Dreizen)
When: Tuesday afternoon
Where: Library
What: Sasha’s got blackbirds on the brain; Mircea’s got trouble in the wings.


Libraries, Sasha reflected, were harder than a bad habit.

Even the worst nicotine urge never bit as deep as the familiar bouquet: glue and cold dust, the musty, antique smell of well-worn pages, a whiff of worn leather and wood polish, and that last ghost of inimitable sweetness that marked a mature library.

It was heaven. It was torture. It was—utterly ridiculous. God help me, I’m turning weepy over the reek of mildew and magazine ink? How the mighty have fallen, indeed.

From a mercilessly objective point of view, Sasha could appreciate the irony of her condition—and the slice of humble pie it served. Certainly, her abilities had allowed Josiah’s precocious protégée to be a world class know-it-all more than once. Making her godfather’s jumpy apprentices cry in the book stacks had been a beloved childhood pastime. But humility was one thing; being outright handicapped was quite another.

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth, Josiah once quoted. He was right then as always: books had opened up a new universe for Sasha. What’s more, they showed that universe to be workable, coherent, a sum of things possible to record and understand. For a lost cause kid like Sasha, perpetually mired in a swamp of disordered memories and incomprehension, it had been more than a revelation: it was salvation. Sasha looked down at the open book beside her, seeing nothing intelligible in the rows of text, and wanted to cry—shout—anything—because it wasn’t fair.

It just wasn’t bloody-God-damn-fair.

A brusque rip brought her attention down to the notebook under her hand—and the small tear newly dug under her pen. Annoyed, Sasha smoothed the ruined spot, tender with ink, only to stain her thumb in the process. Really, why was she even bothering with pen and paper, when neither was of any true use in her condition? She carried a notebook in class for appearance’s sake only. All relevant “notes” went through her digital recorder or simply stayed in her memory banks. Though Sasha’s alexia didn’t erase her ability to write, she distrusted setting down her thoughts when unable to review them.

Which isn’t to say they didn’t find a way to leak onto paper regardless…

I was of three minds, wrote the poet. Like a tree in which there are three...blackbirds.

They littered across the page, a noiseless gale of rough wings and beaks and claws. Crow, rooks, jackdaws, and ravens with jagged crowns sketched atop their heads. The designs varied from elegantly simple to lovingly grotesque, wings spread and wings folded, some flying, some hopping, some without legs at all. Only the coloring was consistent: black.

Nigredo.

Caput mortuum. Though caput corvi, she admitted, would be the more appropriate term.

“One for sorrow, two for joy; three for a girl, and four for a boy.” Sasha’s lips quirked in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Five for silver, six for gold, and seven for a secret that's never been told.”

At the sound of his keeper’s voice, Dreizen raised his sleek head. That was one of the (very few) advantages of her current disability: if there was a library sign prohibiting animals, Sasha could claim blissful ignorance.