Who: Ella Dean What: Some resolutions & then dust. When: Recently. Warnings: None.
The dust began, thick and choking and she thought it might be like sand-storms read about in books, Vegas finally sick of all the money and the pleasure and cavorting across its back, rising up and shaking them off, no more. They had sung things once, girls in lines with their hands folded and the lights pure-white above them on a college stage, the Dies Irae that felt like this, like the world was getting itself ready to end and Ella sat with her knees pressed up close to her chest and Beth playing with something that made noise, flashing lights and listened to old CDs, dug out in stacks from the boxes never unpacked from New York.
She listened to Latin, as it bounced around the walls that felt like they were still soaked with it, with all that fear, like nicotine staining paint yellow and she listened to the sharp-struck tension-melancholy of the words, like stars going out one by one in the sky until the music had curled its way back around her bones. She didn’t think of Max, she didn’t think of war and army-green but the once. She studied it, careful in hands that held on to a cup of tea, warm breath blending with steam and the paper drawn up close, she’d studied it enough to fold it up like clothes that didn’t fit anymore, like a fight that would never be over. The Rabbit itched, in the back of her head, Ella had brief thoughts of clockwork delicate as tissue paper, tension-strings drawn tight as silk at the back of her neck, but she turned her head and she looked deliberately out as the dust skirled along the streets and Rabbit was silent. There would be no hotel.
The baby on the rug clapped her hands, glee in her own cleverness and Ella’s smile was reflexive. She’d drawn the newspaper up close, the adverts in the back ringed around with red, and struck through one by one as she’d called places with lines like ‘no win, no fee’, and their names in capital letters like a brand all by itself. There was just the one and it had had smaller letters and a date of the office’s founding that went back a hundred years which made her think of New York again, of buildings and history thick enough to taste on the tongue. She’d called and she’d put a hundred and fifty dollars of her last paycheck into a transfer account and he’d called that ‘counsel fee’ when he’d heard that was all she had - the man with the quiet, apologetic voice and maybe Max had been right.
There were jobs circled along with the red ink, places that would maybe let you loose an afternoon, if you wanted to go on and see if there were stages in Vegas that would take you. Little places, nothing fancy; a handful of diners and a bar - and she’d stopped right then with the pen in her hand, because there wasn’t a list of names in the back of the paper of people you could leave a baby with. The Dies Irae went then, because it was climb-in-the-back-of-your-throat miserable and she picked out the next, because there was a little more comfort in a Psalm her mother had liked above every other and notes high and liquid that had stung in the back of her nose.
Before the lights began to flicker off, she called the last one on the list, a place that seemed like maybe it would be quiet, like if there was any music at all it would be the kind you could think in, instead of going far away from. It was close to the college and maybe it was when she said she wasn’t a student at all that the woman on the other end said fine, when she said she didn’t mind buses to get there and she didn’t mind idle time and she didn’t mind being busy. Before the buses began to stop, she made it over there the once, the place with its walls of old things, and the new things put out right front, and the old dog that lay down behind the counter with a gusty kind of sigh like it could taste the dust. And maybe she’d work Caesars, and maybe she’d pick up work somewhere else, but the soft sound in the background said if she got it, she’d be home for a little while.
And maybe once the dust calmed and the world set itself back down again, when the buses started running once more, the long breath she’d been holding like the painful-high note of the Irae would drop.