Re: Cass & Burden: the Mean Eyed Cat
Hope. She'd read the parable once, the old one from Greece about the box and the girl and the tiny, fragile thing that crawled from a crack to restore all that went before it, strife and anguish, hunger and need. It was, Cass supposed, something that kept alive in spite of itself. But lives could be terribly hard and some, she'd thought once, unsustainable. It was, after all, why she was there, why bars were on the windows and the promise of punishment beyond lights out. She remembered the hot oily feeling of blood on her palms and shivered.
"Music," she confirmed, her smile warming like the heat simmering from the massed bodies around the pool table. "We've a name for it, a place for it all over the world." He said as he did, and Cass thought him not at all conventional, the young man with pale, pale eyes and a throat full of liquid silver. "You mean people get lost in what came before, instead of now? Memories can be moments or they can be eons. I sell the eons and keep the moments," she said, accepting the glass and rolling the lipid of the liquid against the surface of the glass just to see it catch the light. "Sold," Cass corrected. The world felt very familiar, to be in once again and yet it had been a year and a while still.
"New, and old." She smiled at him with the understanding it was beyond comprehension. "I've lived here a little while but I've never come."