Re: Acta est fabula, plaudite!
He hadn’t seen an ocean any which way save from the side of a road. It was always blue then, blue and unending until it took a bite out of the sky. He didn’t know salt meant sea, it was just part of the town and the apple-thief smelled salt and thought of brine that ran down cheeks behind the veils and the handkerchiefs and polite misery. He wasn’t silent because of rules. He coughed when the dust flurried and he didn’t bother with matching his steps, because if they all trudged the same way, he wasn’t going to. She skipped, and the dust danced on the hem of her black skirts, and the boy with his hands in his pockets and his feet out of step with the surging tide of mourners, he noticed that too.
Wasn’t the point of birthdays everything after being born? There wasn’t much to celebrate when you were new, you were mostly just getting started. “People like parties all about them,” he stated doggedly, and you didn’t need facial features for that to be interpreted. Wasn’t she here, wanting yellow ribbons and the rest of them, celebrating the macabre? “Birthdays are just parties.” He didn’t remember the last one he’d had. It wasn’t notching years against the wall, in the span of height in pencil marks on wood, it was cake and candles that flamed out. Birthdays didn’t mean anything without people to know. Death was the same.
“What does bad look like here?” The girl with the waving tendrils and the piercing eyes dragged him in behind her and she hadn’t answered his question but the gloaming of the church sucked him in and tried to drown him in all that grief with a roof to keep it closed in. He didn’t like churches, wasn’t fond of them like all those grieving pietants clearly were. They sat like the seats had names on the backs of them, like it was a play with everyone in their parts.
Yellow bobbing from the ends of the seats and he looked at the girl who didn’t answer questions about death that weren’t manners. “Why’s the yellow in here?” He looked again at the coffin, a slab of good wood that was going to rot to nothing in the ground, and blinked lashes over gaze that slung low to the tips of her dusty boots. “Who died?”