Re: Cass & Burden: the Mean Eyed Cat
She admired the sturdy. People who knew themselves and liked themselves, or perhaps were at peace with who they were in a deep, knowing way. Cass even admired belief, she'd seen it in countless places, the folding of hands, the fervency in eyes. Faith, belief could be reassuring even in the eyes of a godless girl whose matronal line was fucked by the gods, if everything written down was believed. She'd an old soul, or perhaps one that had been handed down over and over until it was tired and Cass was not, and the drugs and the locked doors were the conclusion of soul and heart at war. Perhaps, perhaps. She sipped the drink that warmed her through, and smiled at the man behind the bar who was steadfast, or at least he looked it.
"I don't think I knew them. The way their friends would or their families. But I knew a little. Who says what's real?" Said the girl of contradictions, and she smiled her contrariness until it was warm and coppery and intimate. "I don't know what famous people do, I've never taken their photographs. I've taken family portraits, when I needed to make money. But I never saw all that I wanted to. I liked solo portraits."
He shifted and moved and Cass had almost forgotten the young man was working but not entirely. It was conjured intimacy, the bar and the drinks. It implied, it took up space that had been made for it until it skipped the work of days and weeks. In the glance of fingers at his wrist, she could take decades, if she liked. Cass kept her hands quiet, and she shrugged to his question. "I'm locked away. In the Quiet Home," she said with the candid, clear-eyed honesty of the mad or the extremely sane, somewhere between the two. "I get out, sometimes. But it's a place for people to put other people who are untidy. I'm very untidy. I like mess."
She wondered what it was Elvis would think, and whether it would be the man or the mythology that thought. "Bell," she said, and smiled once again, taking the name for what it was, a keepsafe. "It's a good day. I've got a drink, I've got a full hour of running away left, and I don't think I'll care when I'm dead. The only thing of any import is to die without passing the bad things on, and taking a little of the good around so that I don't forget it when I'm dying."