Re: [bookshop: ren & elijah]
Repose was layers. Layers and layers and layers of people. Their idiosyncrasies, their predilections, their habits scaled like a carapace of activity that was impenetrably a whole. Weird was one word for it. Liked 'unique', it slid off the tongue with a heavy dose of irony, sweet as honey. People were entwined. Observed this from street corners, his fingers up against the ridged seam of his pockets, fluff under his fingernails as he watched the back of a hand brush a shoulder, heft a bag, turn a cheek against a chest and smile. As if people were symbiotic, incapable of survival in separation.
Didn't know what it felt like. Read enough books about it, the budding sensation of something more, or else consuming self. Was how he thought about it, consumption. Lived in all the empty places absent of other, and survived fine. Hadn't a serious relationship among the tenuous strands that made up the birds at the garage, the pilgrims to the house in the woods, the faint, buzzy sense of abnormal under the nerve endings in his skin. Could snap every single one without them noticing.
Elijah canted toward a book-stack. Didn't know what he wanted. This fact was as restless as everything else, frustrating. Didn't know what he wanted, genre, author, and skirted a couple books of poetry and then some history without really giving thought. Turned into the biography section which took him near the coffee section. Proximity. Four syllables, a lot for a single word with singular meaning. Prox-im-it-y.
Didn't know the man hummed with something other under his rib-bones. Knew only that he was turning down a dimmer-switch from bright, bright light to nothing. Elijah felt it. Like the air needed to blow out a candle, there was something instinctive, from behind his lungs that switched things off that didn't belong. Had names for it in fiction, had read them. Nullification. Longer word, more shades of meaning, but proximity took him there.
The man breathed behind the counter and everything other about him was gently, determinedly turned off.