Re: Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
Cass was odd. She recognized herself in the old man who had shuffled under the underpass, sang to himself in the spaces between the trains rushing in the subway in the cities she had lived. The people who heard things, who saw things. She looked sane: she was clean, her eyes were clear, her face held the impression of thought, of clarity of purpose. But sands could shift, winds could turn and nobody was horribly, entirely sane as if it were inseparable from themselves. Loss drove people mad. She'd seen two people, man and woman both, old, sit parallel on a bench. The lady rested her head upon his shoulder: Cass had seen the way he turned out the lights in his house one by one, the determined way he had lain upon the floor of the kitchen and breathed in the gas.
"Strange is like salt," she said thoughtfully, in the vague, low scrape of her voice which lacked sweetness. Cass wasn't sweet, she never had been. "It puts the rest of living into context. How it ought to be, how it isn't." She darted a sliver of a smile, like silverfish at Alex, at the boy who lived despite, and put her hands into her pockets
"I would like to." She looked at him directly now. Invitation advanced and accepted. There were requirements, for invitations. Cass made for the counter, instead. The coffee was poor. It suffered from a lack of imagination, from start to finish. The beans were poor, and the coffee burned, and then kept lukewarm for the rest of the night. Lukewarm was how Cass imagined people died: barely anything but not cold enough to be.
She fetched the pot, and she turned his cup over as she stood at his knee, and she poured a river of unimaginable sludge into his cup before she poured her own. She set the pot down, neatly turned the handle into the space of the booth table and sat folding her smock under her bottom until the hairs on her arm crackled.