Re: AHS: Sam A & Cris M
It felt to Cris like a Stephen King novel come to a formaldehyde semblance of a life, which was bad enough, but one where the details didn't line up with the Should-Have-Beens, like a lens crooked in a camera catching focus on points meant to blend. It was an interpretation of a time, embellished with cranberry red ink and wrung godless. The word occurred to him: grotesque. Here, el Colombo, Joselito Carnaval was buried unnoticed, sins seeping into the bloodless colors of a sun-bleached world like they had every right to be out in the open, before God and man.
Yeah, he noticed the kid's straying hand. Home, he would have stopped it, flaco, get your hands off the girl and go home to your parents. Here, he looked at them with clear, paternal disapproval beading in black eyes,—there may even have been the slightest shake of the head—but he turned when Sam brushed past him. He followed her, the drawing scent of clove oil heavy in her black-washed wake.
The car was a green Cris associated with gum or shampoo. He was a New Yorker second, so the detective in him instinctively made the car's make and model, noted the wheedled chrome and the pristine white-walls. Sam clambered in in that same childlike way she'd slipped from her chair to the floor the other night, spryness accompanied by that grin. He opened the driver's side door and slid in.
No seatbelts and the thing was huge, the front a leather bench seat wrapped up in shining accouterments. Closed door, hat tossed into the backseat, and engine turned over by a jolt of keys, and he reversed out, tires crunching over the fairgrounds, the carbon of an amused smile on his face as he did nothing else to react to the dusty feet on the dashboard, the downward spill of her skirt. The colors—stark black and white—lost some of their austerity on her.
The roads were white in the sun, shell-paved, he thought, until the tar of asphalt creeped in through the swamplands and took over. South she said, and south he went, the globe of the sun high above them. Houses bloomed from the marshes like the star-faces of swamp lilies, wrought and huge.
He wasn't a man who talked to hear himself, so the drive itself was quiet. The turn of the earth, the counter spin of wheels, freshly-laid highways departed, a string of a road moving them like mint-coagulated blood into the ventricle of Miami proper. Few signs poked from the ground, and a stale wind blew in.