Ella Dean is a (chanteuse) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-08-03 14:51:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, ella dean |
Who: Ella Dean
What: Neighbors moving in
When: Recently.
Where: Marvel
They came in a van. Two of them, although she didn't see how either of them could fit. The place across the hall was small. It was Manhattan rents high enough to make a place like that gold-dust but she'd figured the hotel magic had worked it somehow so Max could come on home if she ever did. There were two of them, and there was a white van out front, dusty on the sides and someone had drawn a heart with a finger in the dust on the back window. They were noisy in the hall too. Curtains were probably twitching over these two, her arm twined around his waist with her hand in his back pocket. Something dizzy-happy sounding about the beige walls out in the hall and the clatter of keys and her heart turned over something brief and awful behind her ribs, just the once. She had Beth on her hip, Beth who didn't care a bit for neighbors moving in but who wanted the park and the swings and didn't understand why they were stopping, Beth who said, 'Mama why?' plaintive as if she had said no swings at all. But she had to. Just then with their keys, and their laughing two-as-one happiness, to see that door open. Just once. She recognized it from the hallway. It looked the same as last she'd saw it, except the furniture what little there was, was gone and she couldn't figure out if that was the hotel or the property manager after months and months of mail stacked up in the hall. It looked the same as the last time, making sandwiches stood at the counter, detente warmed up to something like sisterhood and she turned without saying hello, without introducing herself because her throat was filled with dust. It took the park, Beth squealing on the swings and kicking her legs like she could pump her way to the sky to work out why. Somehow, sometime, she'd figured Max would come back. The hotel had stashed them all real close together, a smattering over doors and she'd figured if the apartment across the hall remained empty it was waiting, just like she was, for Max to come on back home. The new people, they meant even if she did, she wouldn't be there. It was best for Amanda. Her mother was home raising her. The hotel could un-close its fist and let them go and she'd had a sister short enough that she'd forget a little of what it was like before long. Bethie wouldn't even remember she'd had an aunt who'd saved her life once. But she waited in the park long enough that when they got home, the van was gone and the door across the hall was shut tight. |