Re: promenade
She had long since stopped expecting people to drop their bats. Bats, bibles, crosses, hands, all of it was the same once it was boiled down in water so hot it scalded. She swayed, ruddy and poppies and so little faith in the world and its creatures. This man was no different than any other with his medals. He believed dead bones and words scrawled in a book by unkind men who ran a word that was a reflection of their bias. He feared without reason the things he didn't know. She didn't like him, even before he said it didn't do him much good to be friendly. "It's always nice to be nice," she told him with a child's artlessness. "It's safer too," she added, because she'd learned in her girlhood that a glare worked better than a kind word.
She knew nothing about apocalypses, and she knew everything about apocalypses. As far as she was concerned, the world was always ending. It had been ending her entire life, and it continued on in its annihilation of self. Everything was dying, and that was merely the backdrop of existence. Eternal life, they said, but it had been a lie, and it had never been meant for her. Her grave would be nothing splendid when she died, because the entire world was dying with her, only it didn't know yet.
"Why should I tell you I don't plan to, when you've already decided that I shall?" she asked. It angered her, the fact that he demanded she prove innocence. He was not the deck. He was not the clouds. Her anger rose like bile, and she waved a hand and sent the bat clattering across the wooden deck with the petulance of an oncoming storm.