The carnival: Rae & Nel Who: Rae and Nel Where: The carnival Warning: TBD
The carnival lay beyond the limn of the town edged in light as the dusk crept in and chased away the heat. The earth had been baked and the smell in the air was dust and scorched grass and the cars ran like beads on a necklace along the length of road that took you from town to the carnival. Rae did not drive. She walked. She wore loose white linen in a nod to the heat and a jacket of soft, heavy silk over that in a nod to the evening and one of her own cuffs twisted around her wrist. She was not made up, not heavily. The carnival was not an audience and Rae didn't know yet what she wanted from it except the keen whetting of appetite. She didn't care which appetite, she wanted the edge of hunger, an ache and the carnival, she imagined, produced aches or it tried. It was a novelty and Rae enjoyed novelty madly, particularly if novelty had absolutely no chance of coiling a tendril around her own carefully-constructed stability and yanking. Repose was a work-in-progress. The Gem was cool, dark paint and a glassed in front, the workshop behind contained her tools and shipped-in supplies. She didn't feel like creation yet, perhaps she wouldn't.
The walk was long. Grass brushed at her ankles, and she rolled the cuff around her wrist between finger and thumb in an almost-thoughtless-but-not-quite gesture of distraction. Rae's distractions were rarely un contained, although they needed letting off the leash now and again. She was holding herself back until the borderline of dust and strung blown-bulb lights overhead and the ooze of music that had escaped, trickling from the carnival's grounds over the rush-rush-rush of cars when they slunk past on their way out of town. She hadn't acquired a car yet. It was probably a necessity, but she liked the anonymity of a car summoned out of nothing, driven by someone she could talk to if she felt like it, and in thick silence if she didn't. It was an encumbrance to keep, a car. It implied stasis, the need to convey oneself from a place you lived to elsewhere rather than being in a perpetual state of motion. Rae liked motion. She liked uncertainty and she enjoyed the subtle flex of anticipation on the edge of the carnival's grounds. It was expectancy without any knowing of what lay within.
She had a knife at her thigh. It had a pretty and chastened silver hilt and it had lived there for long enough she no longer felt its weight. Rae had enough memory of situations in which the knife had been useful, practically necessary, that she wore it often enough that she missed it when it was not. The linen was loose and the knife was small, if wickedly sharp and Rae stood on the dusty borderline below the string-lights and waited for Nel as she ran a hand into the nape of her neck and loosened the waves there, distracted. Nel was, even if Rae refused to acknowledge it as such, a compass. A tempestuous compass, but weren't all the best compasses ever thus? It was not an anchor, merely a sense of direction and she still remembered Chicago, snow-slush in the streets and her hair tangled and snow-damp around her shoulders and a sense of turbulence that had swallowed the whole until life was dark and thick and stormy.
She did not look turbulent now. The earrings in her ears were not Rae-made, they were too clean a design. She looked cool and clean and untouched by dust, even as the earth eased heat into the dusk and Rae waited without an iota of expectation written on her face.