jude. (thefixer) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-16 02:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | cassandra cain, rose red |
Who: Thea and Sera
What: Introductions and the occult
Where: Occult shop
When: Recently
The occult shop was cheerful in a way that immediately called to mind charlatans. Perhaps it was cliched, this belief that a person must walk into the tenebre to participate in a seance, but Sera felt this way all the same. She had learned of this place during one of her many Meet Ups, and she had learned of this seance there as well. The people had spoken highly of the woman who ran the store, and so Sera had come out of curiosity. This was her life these days, curiosity leading the way to many things she had never experienced before. Never, in all the years since her genitori had been lowered into the ground in pine boxes, had she tried to speak to them. And Carlita, she had never even considered it. Her sorella was lost to her, yes, but she did not seek her in a grave.
But Sera was here now, and perhaps it was the memories that had bid her come. Angelo's return and Daniel's presence, and she had woken up that morning and listened to her fratello breathing through the doors of his guest room. Yes, it was the past that had drawn her to this place, and it was skepticism that washed over her as soon as the doors closed behind her.
Inside, the shop was crowded with people who had come for the seance, and Sera did not linger around the edges. She nudged her way through the crowd, thin and small in cropped jeans and a white t-shirt with a v-neck. She didn't stop until she had reached the very front, where a woman was seated at a table draped in black and speaking to a woman who sat across from her. There was whispering in the crowd and no respectful hush yet. What an inauspicious place for the dead to come, she thought, looking upon the scene.
Thea had not come to summon the dead. She had no dead to summon, no wisps of memory for someone to spin out into guessed insights and would-be tales of the other side. She was slight, an angular and spiny sort of thin on the lip of where the crowd stood around in respectful silence and the kind of watercolor-pale that suited seances and sobbing, a skein of hair down her back and the kind of dress that suited a century ago or a drawing out of a book - except beneath the dress were Doc Martin boots and striped tights. Vegas had many places to it beyond the lights and the dancers and the casinos. The monied ripple of entertainment for the tourists had a back-stage and Thea (who learned cities from pamphlets printed in the 1970s, who sought out the strange and the weird) had been exploring the occult shop as it began to fill, like a cup brimming with tea until it overspilled.
She was nudged elbows tucked tightly to her sides, and the book she’d been looking at still in her hands - a history of witchcraft that was practically a work of fiction, and a candle that professed to be from the fat of a virgin but had ‘made in Taiwan’ stamped on the bottom. (Thea doubted Taiwan was doing trade in enough virgins to warrant a line of candles). She had been shuffled forward, to the front as people had crowded in behind her and she was the sort of frowningly critical that seemed better fit by corners, by places to watch instead of being watched. She was small, small enough that the shunt of people either side was encroaching; Thea had sharp elbows, leaned them casually outward until the pressing of attention stopped.
The women at the table began their dance, and Sera wondered that it felt so theatrical. Her best conversations with her sister happened outside, in the courtyard that surrounded water as blue as ricordi and just as sharp against her skin. She didn't know that she would want a crowd when she spoke and cried and laughed. She wondered if this was part of being American, something she associated strongly with Sebastian's strong jawline. In Ravello, life was quiet slaps of feet through halls and a life where everyone knew names and faces, could put them together like pieces of a puzzle. It was not like this, with strangers peering on while a woman asked questions that led, and while another woman gratefully followed. It was tristezza, she decided. She would not like it.
The woman beside her, older and too round of face, gasped at something occurring over the clasped hands on the table that wobbled beneath its cover of black. Sera looked at her, and the woman's whispered, "did you see that?" was so reverent that Sera almost wanted to say she had seen something. But Sera was not made of lies, and she did not respond. She looked back upon the scene, tears streaming down the woman's face now, and she glanced up when a man came by asking for volunteers. "Si," she said, though perhaps she shouldn't have. The man took her name, and he moved on to the girl beside her. Sera had not noticed her until then, until elbows and boots and tights, and she looked at the girl's face, curious as to what her reply would be.
Thea liked theater. She liked the way people spoke to one another, the way their faces shaped things, told stories that didn’t follow the words they were saying - you could read them, if you knew where and how to look. Thea was used to small, quiet places where you could watch, where you could look and learn and read. She liked people as well - most people - and she didn’t like the way the woman beside the one who was clearly in charge (the slant of her shoulders was entirely relaxed, whereas the woman sobbing was tight-knotted tension) was crying as if the world was being ripped down the middle in front of her. She was startled, as the man passed across the front, and she shook her head, no without speaking, before even thinking about it, a ripple of colorless-blond hair and attempted retreat, pressing further back against the unyielding wall of people behind her. Thea looked to her right, as if there might be an outlet there instead and she saw, instead, someone looking at her as though she was being seen, looked at truly instead of passing.
Thea stared back. Beneath the hair, (apart from the tights, the boots) she was not a great deal to look at. Sharp little nose and stubborn chin and the kind of wariness in pale blue eyes that was someone entirely unused to being looked at rather than looking. She looked at the girl - because she was a girl, not a woman - and she noticed things, from the way the crowd butted up behind her to the soft butter-warm color of skin better suited to Vegas sunshine. Thea wiggled the fingers of her left hand in a vague salutation, and then she shoved her hair back behind her ear with the same hand as if pretending the greeting had never been made.
Sera was used to not being noticed. In Ravello, her name was as common as the name of the local priest and the local police. There was no anonimato in a place where even the trees bore names. But here, no one noticed anyone. The tourists looked up, and the locals looked down, and she was not accustomed to waving fingers and pale bambine. She would have moved closer, because she was a thing addicted to anomalies, but the crying woman left the stage, and the man urged her forward.
Unused to crowds, Sera did not wilt before them. She took the seat, back straight and shoulders tugged back in a way that was entirely genuine to her. She was not born in this place where celebrity mattered. She was born to poor people who had died, and who had left her to an even poorer life once the smell of funeral dirt left her nose. None of these things mattered, and wealth only layered atop it to give a confident glint to her eye that extended to matters that weren't of the heart. The woman conducting the seance looked older close, but that didn't make Sera soften to her, and what proceeded was an uncomfortable give and take that was no give, despite the very obvious attempts to take.
Have you lost a loved one? and Yes, many.
I sense someone here, and Yes? Who?
Someone sad, and No, no one I know would be sad to be dead.
And it was all downhill from there. Misdirection, all, and perhaps that night, alone in her room and trying to decide if she could hear Angelo breathing from down the hall, Sera would wonder and feel regret for not believing. But then, she felt none of these things.
It was not as it should be. Thea knew this without knowing the construction of the theater, without guessing at what was beneath the table to make it rock and clatter and shake like someone had started an earthquake at very precise coordinates. The weeping woman slid past her, a brush of a heavy, rose-thick perfume and salt and misery clinging, and then the girl in the crowd who had stood close enough to look at, was up there instead. She was neat, controlled the way the woman hadn’t been, as though she hadn’t come to an occult shop at the wrong time for the show but she hadn’t come to be given false hope and fake goodbyes. Thea’s mouth twitched upward, pale pen-and-ink smile at yes, many and it broadened at no, and she lifted her head from looking at the floor the way of someone trying very hard not to be seen, and looked directly at the girl who sat as composed as if she weren’t defiant, as if she weren’t deliberately pulling at the threads that made it unravel.
Thea approved. More people needed to yank at broken things to show that they were broken. She pitied the crying woman who had fled, who had looked as if she’d cracked and everything inside her were trying to seep out. It was silly, to believe anyone could talk to the dead, as if they were even somewhere that could be talked to, after they were dead. She was bright-lit with amusement, one candle flickering-warm amidst so much muttering disapproval from the crowd who had come for the show.
Sera's moments on the stage were brief. The man from the crowd bustled her away like some small, pixie-haired embarrassment. For her part, Sera's calmness was unruffled. She was still too young of face and too old of eye, and she didn't duck her head as she walked. This was not a walk of shame. Vergogna had begun its journey out of her life with the first shrink who she told her that what she thought was wrong. It had been a slow journey, one that took place over a long decade, but she believed she was at the end of that road now. Shame was the last lamppost over her shoulder, and she would not look upon it during the light of day. Nights were harder, but not here and not now.
Considering, Sera hesitated at the door to the shop. She could find the woman who had choked on her own tears, but consoling wasn't something she did well. She'd had some practice young, beneath the bedsheets and listening to Carlita's tales of her lover. But, even then, she had been the wide-eyed listener. Too quiet, too observant, and lacking in the fiery meddlesome nature that made Carlita so well adored. She left the woman to her misery, secure in the knowledge that nothing she said would make the woman feel better. The dead were dead, and Sera knew this better than anyone. Her childish prayers for visitations had not been answered, and Carlita would have come and held her tight if she could have done. Carlita had been the type who would have cajoled Charon if she needed to; she had not come.
Outside, the sun beat down, and Sera breathed in.
“Hello.” The girl who had been boots and tights and flimsy dress inside the cramped, contrived dim of the shop was paper-pale skin and pointed chin in sunlight, seemingly ill-suited to Vegas stretch of sunshine overhead. She was thin, not small exactly (Thea stood with height enough, but she slouched, slanted bony shoulders and curled back until she was small to people who didn’t know how to look) and curious-sharp, her color bleached out to almost nothing in strong daylight, all eyes and nose and hesitant greeting. Propelled out by the heavy indolent incense crumbling to nothing in a holder, by the warm press of bodies and the lack of interest in the tortured sobbing on stage, Thea was booted foot back against the wall and bitten, purple fingernails shaking out a cigarette from a paper packet crammed into the bag slung over one shoulder.
She looked smaller than she had on stage, Thea decided, smaller and somehow different, interesting. Some kinds of people came to occult shops because they believed in what they’d find, some because they didn’t believe in any of it (Thea slanted herself into that camp, looped herself loosely around skeptics and agnostics, those who smelled candles and leafed through odd books because they could) and then -- some who didn’t clutch and sob and weep, but perhaps were outliers.
Thea struck a match, old-fashioned box shuffled between long fingertips - the smell of cloves was soft on fresh air.
Sera had always been small. Curves and height belonged to Carlita, along with vivacity and fire. Until Sebastian, she'd only believed herself to be lacking in these things. Since then, she had decided that perhaps she had other things. She didn't think these other things were as loveable or as coveted, but possession was something, and she had found it much better to be a something than a nothing.
The blonde's appearance didn't surprise Sera. In a country where the tiniest wave of fingers signified connection, Sera was not surprised. She watched with widely blue, curious eyes as the blonde lit her cigarette, and she inhaled the sweet scent like curiosity into her lungs, as if that alone could help her understand the girl in the tights and the dress. Sera would never have worn those clothes. She liked things snug, close to the skin, tangible and felt. Billowing things were too far away, not real in a way that she could close her eyes and picture. But she liked the uniqueness of it. Here, everyone was shorts and shirts and nothing that stood apart. She didn't like that very well. Though she did wonder if the girl was warm; she kept that to herself.
"I'm Sera," was Sera's version of greeting. Not ciao, but a name. Anonymity was pervasive, and she didn't feel like being a nameless thing in the desert just then. Her accent was thick, her otherness not yet shed. "I didn't think anyone still smoked here." In Italy, everyone smoked. In America, it was not the same.
There was no full-bodied sister, snake-hipped and charismatic for Thea to hold herself up against and compare herself to, negative to print, mirror-image an echo of what could-not-have-been. She was thin wrists and bird-bones and the sharp lines of collarbones where the dress scooped low over the neck, something old and bronze-colored looped around her throat - it could have been expensive, it could have been something dug out of the back of a thrift-store, Thea would have answered vaguely, memory failing, if asked. She did not think of clothes as things to feel real but as textures but as something other and something else. The girls in shorts and shirts at school - or skirts, tiny and flicky around the tops of their thighs, dry dislike worn over their faces like masks - they smelled like artificial vanilla and bubblegum; Thea was must and dust and the mothball-faded smell of old clothes dug out and worn again.
The girl looked as though bubblegum and fake vanilla didn’t follow her around. She looked maybe like the resin-thick smell of the occult shop might cling, like patchouli and ozone. Sera, and maybe it had come out of a book, maybe it had been meant to hiss sibilantly at the beginning and die away, maybe there was meaning to it but it was soft-accented like a breath of a world beyond hot, dead air and Thea’s eyes, the same pale as sunbleached bone and leached-away things, flickered to the ground, to the tips of her own boots and then up once more, as though looking too hard might wear her away. People who were interesting were infrequent enough to want to keep.
Thea looked, instead, at the way the girl’s - Sera’s - eyes tracked the smoke curl in the air, the paper twist between her fingers and the cigarette clotted her breath with sweet-herb dark, curled over her tongue. “Thea,” she said, breath-thick, and she picked at her right index finger’s nail with her thumb, scraping away a mess of silver-sparkled polish. “I don’t know that they do, anymore. But I’m not them.” A sharp smile, glinting mirrored - “Do you?” Crumpled packet held out, box of matches curled into the center of the palm.
Otherness was something young, and Sera had passed eighteen recently enough to know how it felt to not have years below twenty to call upon when blame needed to be meted out in spoonfuls. But she was still young enough to remember, to feel the part of the adolescente, and she saw it in the face of this girl with her bird bones and bleached pallor. She wondered, standing there, when it had come to pass that she had changed. Had it been Sebastian and the white dress, or had it been more recent? Was it this desert and the presence of a girl in her mind that did not even feel fear? She wasn't sure. She was only sure that something had shifted, and that she had willingly shifted along with it. Her doctor, the one who looked at her with concern that bored on something perverse, would have told her she needed to be calm, be accepting. Respira, Sera, he had told her, and she had breathed in and out, as if air would change anything at all.
"Thea," Sera repeated, the e hard and the a lifting itself out of the way and hanging there, suspended. "We are a pair, si? With our shortened names." And perhaps she sensed a kindred spirit, but friendship wasn't something Sera knew. There had been Peter, in her youth, but Peter accepted her oddness and kept it in his pocket. It was not something like friendship. It was different, this. "I do, but I haven't smoked these," she said of the sick-sweet cloves, and she reached out for the offered pack and tapped one cigarette out on milky skin. The match was lit with the precision of someone who lit matches often. No lighters, nothing so easy as that. She handed it all back, and she inhaled, the smell like decay and sweet flowers left too long to die.
Sera wanted to ask why Thea had come, but she thought of Lin, of the strangeness in this place that didn't allow for directness, and she took another pull off the cigarette instead, her gaze cast over her shoulder toward the seance and the anesthetized space. "You didn't wish to remain?" she asked instead, and the indirectness stuck between her ribs in a way she didn't like. "Why did you come here?" she asked, not waiting for answer or breath, dislodging the tightness and leaving that not-her on the sidewalk, where someone else could walk overtop the falseness.
It was approving, the lowering of pale lashes over critical-blue eyes as the match struck, caught with a flare of brief sulphur and soft licking flame; Thea did not like lighters, she liked old tangible things, the difficulty of the finger-flick that was demand against the air for burnt-ozone and spark. Approving, perhaps but the cast-aside gaze of someone who did not often make such things a naked, obvious one. Thea leaned scrawny shoulder blades back against the rasping brickwork of the store-front, dirty glass and faded gold letters, ‘ccult’ pressed up against the line of tiny buttons along spinal column and dirty smudge on soft cotton and she hissed out spiced breath, a look up at Vegas unforgiving sun.
“To Vegas? Or to the store?” The question made an assumption of the difference - of being out of place, of Vegas not-the-norm. A squint, the washed-out look of the world beneath so much stark light. Vegas - the town of neon, of nakedness, of cash walking around and the chatter-ching of casinos was a world of directness, of blunt laid down like a line of cocaine on glass for Thea. She’d left behind a world of whispers, of a mother who was cool breath and perfume and laundered-pressed linen, Thea’s smile was Wonderland-crooked. “I wanted to see something different. There’s always something different in occult shops. And sometimes they have good books.” Her voice was small, husky-low that was more than cigarette-rasp, was soft-scratch of an alto. Thea sounded contemplative, thoughtful. “Sometimes the people are interesting to watch. Why did you come?”
And another breath, the cigarette so much burning paper between thin fingers, “Do you like them?”
“To this store,” Sera clarified, looking at the windows when she said the words, as if the clarification was a necessity. This store, the one leaving marks upon your dress and carrying itself home upon your sleeve. This state, this city, it was a different manner of question, and it would tell a different story. And layers, because what brought a person to a città like this was not what kept them here. This city was vice, and it was permission, and Sera remained for these things. She came for a different reason entirely, but it was the potential that tethered her. Freedom tinted in neon, and she missed her home more than words existed in books, but freedom was the new sharp thing upon her tongue, and she would not spit it out for the warm blanket of Ravello.
Something different, and Sera shook her head. “I don’t think there is anything different in there,” she said, honesty. “But I too came for this reason,” she admitted, because she had. It was the reason she went to every odd Meet-Up she found on the computer. To learn, to experience, to find. And, in this, perhaps this place had not been a waste of time. She had learned, experienced and found; she had simply not found what she thought to find. “I think there is sadness, and people who don’t wish to let go.” And sometimes she forgot Carlita’s voice entirely. Her mother’s was gone. Her father’s had gone before that, though she could hear him in Angelo now that he was grown older and more brittle.
Sera turned the cigarette between her fingers, and she regarded it, as if this was necessary to answer the question about liking them. “I like them.” It was a declaration, and she knew she would buy them herself. They were strong, and they didn’t pretend they weren’t what they were; she liked that. “You are new to this city?”
There had meant to be. Something different buried behind books, in the spaces between candles that smelled like old things made new, like pine and churches and secrets. There had meant to be but there had only been faded paperbacks, the kind of out-of-date would-be secrets and sorrow that thickly coated the back of the throat, like the coppery taste of blood and tears. There was no quest for people for Thea, no seeking out and searching with intent, only the artist-distance of observation, of stringing together interactions like beads on bracelet chain, admiring. “Maybe they’ve not got anything to let go for,” and it was quiet, that voice, studying the cigarette rolling-rotating within the elegant fingers of the other girl; no bitten fingernails there. “Some people don’t.” It wasn’t wistful, but factual, the blunted statement of a reality in which there was nothing beyond sadness, dredged-deep. She was loose skirts and thin-sharp eyes and she didn’t look as though Thea meant it of herself, at all.
She nodded, instead and the smoke spiraled in a catch of wind against the dead-heat of the humidity. “I’m not from Vegas. Where are you from?” Sera’s words were syrup-soft, rolling like boat-on-water rocky, the linked-together formality of foreign words in strange tongue. Thea liked it, lined it up on her own like equations, like calculus formulae spelling out the rules. “I can’t tell, exactly.”
Sera thought it an interesting turn, that one needed something to let go for. As if anything could have that effect. "I don't think anyone wishes to let go," she said after another few long puffs of the cigarette, smoke like sweet severity clouding her too-old eyes. "I think it happens, but I don't think anyone wishes to. I think it's something, after first, that is fought." She shrugged her narrow shoulders, lifting designer fabric made innocuous in a desert where those things made no statement. It was another interesting thing about this neon-kissed place, that wealth and health and intent was not apparent. It was different at home, where the houses along the cliffs proclaimed things without their residents needing to voice them. It was a different world. "Letting go, it isn't for anyone," she finally added. "The dead don't care, and the remaining only require the pretense, sì?"
The cigarette was stubbed out, and Sera smiled a smile that was both homesick and not. "Ravello. Italy. It's a small place on the Amalfi coast." Home, and blue waters and nothing like this heat that made the bones feel dry beneath the skin, as if everything was sucked out of a person save flesh and the faded white. She liked the curiosity she saw in the other girl's eyes. It seemed much more curious than her own curiosity. Not at all powered by a gut-dancing need that wouldn't abate, an itch that insisted on going perpetually unscratched, even when the nail was upon the skin with enough pressure to draw blood.
"I will give you my number, if you like." Sera suggested, an offering made in digital, communication, or the offering thereof.
Letting go was a sigh of capitulation, an uncurling of fingers around something that refused grasp, a damp-silk curl around wrists that pulled at you even if you didn’t want to go where it would. Letting go was more than the dead, and Thea almost said exactly that, the turn of her head, the cant of it to one side and the breath out on dead-hot air was the pause before speaking. But Sera spoke and in it Thea heard more than hotels and room service, more than English spoken in clear-accented rhythms, more than a coast that rolled past the windows. It was a yearning, behind the words that meant wanting. Thea had never heard a place spoken of like a person before, and the talk of letting go, of things forgotten but not dead - that shuddered away to nothing in careful curiosity. Thea looked at the girl like a museum exhibit, like something that had to be studied before it was so much ash and dust.
She paused and she stopped and she looked, and then she pawed through the small bag slung over her shoulder, something worn and plain and utilitarian against so much loose-soft cotton. Thea palmed a phone that looked as though it had been bought from a roadside stand, something that wasn’t contracts and data but simple functionality and heavy plastic. It was cheap and it looked it, and she was cool fingertips against Sera’s hand as she held the phone out, a complicity and question at the same time.
And then she pulled out the packet of cigarettes and the matches as well, palmist trick ill-suited to the faded store-front, something too real for an ill-constructed occult place. “Here. Until the next time.” And Thea smiled, sharp-shy, and her head dropped until the hair curtained her off, kept her from seeing the look in Sera’s eyes.
Sera was accustomed to the way Thea looked at her, as if she was a strange and not understood thing. As a child, she had been odd enough that her parents had worried and wrung their hands in private, where they believed they couldn't be heard. Carlita had never done this, but Angelo had as well. She was the oddity, the girl who was never like the others, and she had become accustomed to the expressions that came with being this person. Only with Sebastian had she been able to cast this off. Sebastian, who had not known what people thought before he met her. Perhaps she had been different enough not to remind him of the woman he truly loved; she didn't like to think of it.
When the phone was held out, Sera entered her number into it, though she didn't expect to hear from this girl; she didn't take the number in the phone for her own. She did take the cigarettes, though she had no need of them. Money was something that grew on trees, as the saying here went. She could pluck bills from every branch, if she wished, and she had thought they could buy her happiness once. But she took the cigarettes, and she put them in the snug-slim pocket of her jeans. "Ti ringrazio," she said in thanks, and she turned and left, not forcing the girl in the dress and thin shoulders to reciprocate.