Re: Cass & Burden: the Mean Eyed Cat
She knew each person in the bar had a story all their own, in which they stood neatly at the center and all the world revolved in satellite around them. They weren't all conventionally lovely, sometimes the worlds were small and confining and cruel but some, a few, were wide open and faultless. She could see a little, if she liked. She could feel the prickle of it under her nail-beds, the knowledge that she could if she liked. It felt like old aches kindled by cold winds or perhaps a limb long still waking up. Cass curled her fingers into her sleeves and kept them there, anchored on her own skin.
"It's a constant," music, and she needn't glance fingers at his wrist to know it. Everyone, all the world over, had music. She'd read once that the Puritans had banned it, had seen something devilish in it. It seemed mad, to Cass but the sane seemed mad and the mad seemed sane and it was all smooth and calm on the surface. "I used to have a camera. Many cameras. But I was never terribly good with a paintbrush," she observed in the dry husk of a voice seldom used.
His smile was neither conventional nor wide but she liked it all the same for it. It sang, singularly along with Johnny Cash and the odd lights wreathed on the walls and the warmth in the bar that was intemperate. Cass's own made her mouth more broad than her face truly made pretty, and it was slow bloom and lopsided. But she smiled it all the same, in answer. "Neat, please. I've never drunk it on the rocks and I'm not sure I'll begin with it today. I'm fond of new experiences but this bar is one all in itself."