Re: Acta est fabula, plaudite!
If he thought it was a shame about the dressmaker, it was only because he wanted to see what all those crows would do if a magpie showed up in yellow. Probably squawk. Yellow was against the rules, and he didn't know if yellow was worth longing over enough for the girl to go breaking that one.
Breaking rules for the sake of them was fun and he grinned, irreverence even with the smeared out features. "There are too many rules," he told the girl with skirts down to her ankles and her waist tied in until it shrank, without a yellow ribbon to liven up all that black. "If this is a party, what do they do for birthdays?" He noticed everything. This town wasn't his, and the roads were small and made him feel like Gulliver, hemmed in. Itchy. He noticed the peaceful look on a woman who walked in step with her sister, who wore her misery in raw honesty beneath a veil, a sliver of her cheek stark white as the veil fluttered.
"You mean what it feels like to die." He hadn't understood. He'd thought she meant the inside, what it was for real when you didn't flap and you didn't cry and you didn't mourn in unison, like mourning was something you could take out of boxes and wear on alternate Thursdays. "How do you know what it feels like? You're not dying." He didn't think so. She didn't look like it, she wasn't thin and she wasn't pale and she grinned. He doubted anyone could grin like that in the face of oncoming death.
The church was very pretty, but it wasn't a sculptural promise at the edge of the town. Inside, the apple thief knew, it would be full of wood polish and sorrow and words that were meant but had lost all meaning. Outside, the heaving sobs and sighs didn't mean anything, they were funny. Inside, it had nowhere to go, the absurdity was lost and even if the dead were gone, death pressed in too close to say no to.
"Have you ever been bad?" He didn't believe it. For all her yellow ribbons, she knew the rules too well to be anything but middling at bad. But he dogged her heels, hands in both his pockets and whistling just to be defiant, and his walk cocky.