Re: Cass & Alex: the (bad) diner
Couldn't it? Repose was odd. It was in the soil, the air, the water. It was baked into the walls and bricks of the buildings and it ran through the woods. It wasn't ancient and knowing, it was wispy and thin and slippery. Cass couldn't get her palms around all the ways in which Repose was odd. Under florescent light the boy looked more ordinary. His hair was flaxen, like wheat and his smile thinner, less substantial over the coffee cup. Repose didn't sleep, Cass supposed. It dreamed, restlessly and incompletely. She'd never been somewhere that slept all the time.
"I like to think places know what they want you to make of them," she said. She tipped her chin into the cup of her hand and regarded him from within it; her nails weren't polished or elegant. They had been clipped close to the quick and the cuticles were ragged. There wasn't much to do when it felt as though the walls were closing in, in spasms rather than slowly. But she'd no immediate inkling of how the place had curdled Alex's thoughts, or what it had done. Cass longed for unreality. For it to be truth, rather than memory. Memory was terribly faulty, you see, when you'd no mind you could trust.
"I've never met anywhere that didn't have some sort of personality. The people are good? Really? The church is occasionally empty on Sundays, I like to think of it as wicked weeks, when even the habit can't keep people in the walls."