jude. (thefixer) wrote in repose, @ 2017-01-14 14:02:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, jude coleman |
Narrative
Who: Jude
What: Narrative, post boom.
When: Evening at the Cat / fuzzy
Warnings: Nada.
Once, when he'd been small in what passed for an education in a mausoleum all small boys with too much knowledge crammed into narrow faces, he'd found a book about fire. About the perennial consumption required, that fire once begun could not burn in perpetuity without fuel, without air, without space. There was a place beyond the town, a place near Bethseda, a place he'd read about only in books where beneath the town, the bones of the earth burned. Veined with mineral, and with the wide open sky above, it burned forever like a tomb of whatever it might once have been because there was fuel and air and capacity aplenty. Centralia and he'd thought about the way it would look long after he'd read it, a fingerprint of a memory in so many that had been about people instead. The way they moved, the way they thought, the way they dreamed and how you might loop a thread around all three and pull it tighter until all three did exactly as you would. It wasn't fire, the boy who trudged toward the Cat for want of anywhere else to settle like the snow persisting down his collar, but it was a little the same.
But he was out of fuel. The cupboard had been bare months and two sticks rubbed together provided an illusion of fuel. When had it begun to storm, 'neath the surface, Jude couldn't say. Only that in the absence of the man who'd been nominal father and also the law for decades, he'd expected the triad of requirements to burn themselves out, for Oliver's need to consume to burn itself to ash. No fuel, just air and boy's own needs subsumed in survival dug out from expectation to be shaken into the space created by freshly-singed capacity. But there had been nothing, not pause or remittance in the whole. There was no room, no air and all at once, drowning man swum mark short of safety, Jude didn't know how to keep on going.
Brutality, oh, he'd expected that of Oliver. Vein of cruelty ran beneath the surface, flashes like fool's gold but so too ran sweetness, and that had been reason enough to wrap himself around a boy who looked as if he might not learn everything forever, that the clay of him might not be molded and fired for infinity but space and time might have him uncurl, reset. Except here they were, miles of space, of people and Jude's head ached in all the ways that nothing had changed. Demand, rolled out like a carpet leading back to the house in the woods and Jude didn't go back. Not for books, not for the room under the eaves which was the one with the door that locked, that kept lynchpin between Jude and the rest of a house full of expectation.
The truth of it was he'd not seen any of it before. Oh, he'd circled Repose for possibilities, people lined up like ninepins who didn't need a scrap, but the ugly swirl of secrets taken out for reasoning with, scattered with the sand as Oliver demanded centrality, Centralia burning, Jude had waited eons now. Eons and angels, and boys and Jude headed t'ward the Cat for not-a-shift because he could and the swelter of people that kept the place jammed gave good excuse to hold his tongue.
He'd never been drunk before, served them plenty, if you please. Poured enough pints with secrets served like nuts in little bowls along the length of it, but never yours truly, ugliness spilled out like hari-kiri with knife-blade turned inward instead of neatly out. He sat, bill-fold of papery green taken no doubt out of the register in question and sifted into envelopes marked with their names and shift patterns, and he drank one by one and by degrees with the experimentation of trying on new clothes.
It mothed thought. Bilged it beneath the sway of liquid, until the scraped-raw at the back of his throat and the thickness swelling his tongue was booze instead of sadness, until his head was so crammed-full of empty that it hadn't capacity for Centralia burning. He had a pocket full of tools that had long since resided on the dresser in his room, a twist of leather around silvered instruments better used in cities where anonymity was second nature and doors were meant to be open. And when the liquid glut reached saturation point, when there wouldn't be scrap of air left tonight for setting fire to, Jude took self off to where the houses were blank against the lake, the rich occupants elsewhere for the winter (and oh, not a look toward the land where a friend used to be and was now gone) and where a few minutes with fingers numbed with cold but taught past forgetting, might find an alternate bed for the night.