Re: log: flower delivery - ella g/mason j
Ella wouldn't call God benevolent. Her talk of prayer and din, that was her being a wise head. She'd lived through people dying with hunger-bellies bloated and their ribs like the exposed beams of ships dying in shipyards. She knew the hunger that came of cabbage water three days old, and she knew of being grateful for it. She knew how hope died with the rumble of bellies, and no one could judge her, no one who hadn't been there. It was easy to think life some fairy tale written by a long-dead author and reveled in by little girls with corkscrew pigtails, but Ella knew better. There'd been wooden kimonos stacked at the ready in her youth, the expectation that they would be filled unargued. She didn't believe in a benevolent God, but Ella said things without meaning them. She wasn't a liar precisely, but she was certainly something.
Let's just call her a product of her age.
Which could account for that raspy voice that was nothing angelic. No wings fluttered to provide accompaniment. She sounded like too many drinks in a dark speakeasy, and she sounded like too many cigarettes in a room filled with smoke. Pitch perfect, but more dirt than that.
He touched her, and she didn't startle. The weight was familiar, and she didn't mind it. She didn't mind him. She minded the sounds of the damned, and she minded no sky, and she minded the Hellish torment that breathed constantly outside her gilded cage, but she didn't mind him. She didn't blame him, though perhaps she should.
"Always," she said of her fella, the one that had tried so hard to get her gone from that place of flames. "I never did know how to sing chaste. But he hasn't been around to listen in such a while." She turned on her stool, and she looked at him, regarded this new face that wasn't crowned with blonde curls and perfection. "You've come."