Re: Cass & Burden: the Mean Eyed Cat
Cass didn't think the man with the odd eyes was in much of a hurry for anything. He had the quiet, still quality of someone who needn't and who didn't want to, either. Contemplative, a little penny philosopher behind the bar. She'd met one once, a similar kind of soul who dispensed truths and homilies and plaintive contemplation while wiping the grease from the dishwasher clear of glass and liked him all the better for it. He had been old, though. Old and his skin looked lived in, the kind of creases that spoke of very hot sun and long days and little sleeping in them.
"You mean they record them instead of seeing them?" She understood him now, and Cass smiled with her cheek in her palm and her elbow on the bar and her glass at her lips. "I don't believe you can see anything with a lens. You have to see it to know that it's there to capture, but it means nothing. I remember an old tale, of photographs taking pieces of people's souls with them. I don't know if I believe a lens has it in it, to steal. Perhaps a look."
Her smile spread broad, she breathed like laughter hadn't quite made up its mind whether it ought to be laughed or not. "Your decades are safe. I sold things to rich people who hadn't the knack of being happy," she told him, unreservedly, and Cass looked around the bar herself, entirely interested in where his eyes settled as much as where her own fell. Seeing things through other perspectives was more interesting than one's own, much of the time.
"I think it's a gimmick. I'd like to believe someone loved him enough to build him a living shrine, but I think you must get sick of it, or fall out of love eventually. It's not the man," Cass said with the wisdom of knowing she could touch the bar and read it truly, if she idled long enough. But she preferred not to divine its history but to guess, a little. "What's your name? Mine is Cassandra. But I'm Cass, on a good day." Her smile darted slyly, as if she'd any control at all about good days or ill.