136
“Goodness.” H-san let out a low hum of amusement at the slit in her friend’s usual placidity, resting her chin on her knuckles. ”Such a dangerous character.” Her golden eyes found the question in my face. ”To say everything with that smile on his face.”
130 - 135
He peeled a second clementine, fingernails and tips now coated with torn bubbles of rind. Bitter to taste if he licked them, stained as if jaundiced in the flash of passing headlights. It all came off in one piece, and he picked the flesh clean of the leftover fibres that hung like clumps of spider’s silk.
“Would you like some more?” he asked softly, offering half. Plump and sweet, like lips. The driver made a sound of assent in his throat and held out an open palm.
His grey-brown eyes flicked back at the others. They were all asleep, silent and safe, heads and dreams nodding and rolling to the rhythm of the road.
Their hands met above the gear shift and the emergency brake, the fruit like a seal, a handwritten note. He let go almost too quickly, afraid, at the last moment, that he would touch skin.
It felt oddly intimate, this exchange. He chided himself, at that, and flexed his fingers. It was common courtesy to keep the driver awake on the long ride home through the country, where darkness enveloped the land too quickly. As if it were rushing to hide some treasure, a stolen thought with a shot of malice, or glee, or apprehension.
He couldn’t let himself sleep. Self preservation, self-consciousness, altruism, whatever — pieces of each surfaced and sank away into the sediments of his thoughts with every few words that rippled between them. He was the last one awake should anything go awry. Besides, it would show too much. No, he couldn’t sleep. He pressed another piece of clementine onto his tongue, chewed, and watched the night come down between blinks. Like a series of slides on an old projector, stop-motion with the timing just slightly off.
The dark made everything seem so still. Yet even silence had a dynamism of its own. Lulls in conversation, utterances worded, deleted, forgotten. The pause between the crest and trough of a sigh, the dream behind it.
135
The dark made everything seem so still. Yet even silence had a dynamism of its own. Lulls in conversation, utterances worded, deleted, forgotten. The pause between the crest and trough of a sigh, the dream behind it.
134
He couldn’t let himself sleep. Self preservation, self-consciousness, altruism, whatever — pieces of each surfaced and sank away into the sediments of his thoughts with every few words that rippled between them. He was the last one awake should anything go awry. Besides, it would show too much. No, he couldn’t sleep.
133
It felt oddly intimate, this exchange. It was common courtesy to keep the driver awake on the long ride home through the country, where darkness enveloped the land too quickly. As if it were rushing to hide some treasure, a stolen thought with a shot of malice, or glee, or apprehension.
132
His grey-brown eyes flicked back at the others. They were all asleep, silent and safe, heads and dreams nodding and rolling to the rhythm of the road.
Their hands met above the gear shift and the emergency brake, the fruit like a seal, a handwritten note. He let go almost too quickly, afraid, at the last moment, that he would touch skin.
131
“Would you like some more?” he asked softly, offering half. Plump and sweet, like lips. The driver made a sound of assent in his throat and held out an open palm.
130
He peeled a second clementine, fingernails and tips now coated with torn bubbles of rind. Bitter to taste if he licked them, stained as if jaundiced in the flash of passing headlights. It all came off in one piece, and he picked the flesh clean of the leftover fibres that hung like clumps of spider’s silk.
129 [an excerpt]
In the next breath, the world began to move again as the carriage rocked violently back onto the tracks, slamming me and everything else to the faux wood floor. The burners that had kept the food heated tumbled; the short cloth that covered the counter caught and gradually began to light up in flame. I tried to rise when the ground quaked with an explosion up ahead. Slivers of glass and the shrieks of the other passengers raked the air, and the acrid smell of the train’s burning insides seared my lungs, my eyes, my stomach.
128 [an excerpt]
Suddenly, there was a hard jolt, and I found my hand in a tart when it failed to find a solid grip. The entire car tilted on its left wheels, and in that quiet moment before falling, the carriage stood still on that angle. Plates that had begun to slide and tip slowed to a halt. Dimly, my ears registered the horrid cry of metal against metal, a groaning that you could feel in your teeth.
127 [an excerpt]
I was stumbling on the frozen uneven cobbles jammed into the foothills of some town on market day, jostled along by the deluging crowd, senses pulled here and there by the heckling of vendors and hagglers, shrieks of children, dry coppery dust that mingled with melting ice and trickled and stained the gaps in the ground as if the city were bleeding beneath my feet. Pungent fruits and animals and wines, the clandestine slitherings-in and out of pickpockets. Too loud, too strong, and utterly stifling. It didn’t help that I had drunk something potent and blue the night before — a concoction the town was known for, apparently. A dull ache persisted in my temples and behind my eyes; sourness crept up the back of my throat.
