Re: Webster's: Holly & Elijah
Played the radio out back, at the 'station. The birds wanted something syrupy-sweet, with a strong bass line and a twiddled voice that swooped and fell with auto-tune-diddled perfection, bang on the notes. Didn't, as a general rule. Elijah played whatever music came on, smoky blues or folk, bright, buzzy music or the kind that played at the back of your ear like fingers stroking away at your ear-bones. Elijah hadn't amassed self to stand contrary to everyone else. Banked it, the knowledge of himself, like the coil of a fossil within cracked, solid earth-made-stone. Curiosity won more battles than his own taste.
It would have been curious, to catch nails on what made Holly Holly. Time receded from the door of the house in the woods, like waves settling further and further back, white scurf on sands. It wasn't literal, time did not put itself in Elijah's palm to squeeze or manipulate. That might have been moderately more helpful, to himself. But without comparisons to stretch himself against, without possession - normality, taste, consumption was absorbed. It added variety.
"For me," Elijah clarified, with a sly-shy smile dipped into his shoulder as he moved carefully toward the record player. "I don't do crowds." Which was said truthfully, the statement obvious and the wry cadence made clear Elijah knew this was understatement. He un-sleeved the Richter with careful reverence and looped the headphones over his ears.
Elijah's face was a permanently changing composition and he pulled faces the birds found challenging to manage with the customers. His eyes half-shut and his mouth curled and he let it run. Tension oozed from between his shoulder-blades and it was, a little, like finding a sea-shell on the beach when he had been small. Before: Elijah's face tilted toward Holly.
"That's magical." He didn't mean the kind of magic that trickled through Repose's woods.