OC Blabber
The water at the bottom was very still. She had laid it there herself, a little every day. Each day it settled and held, and the stillness had grown so complete that she had stopped noticing it, the way you stop hearing a sound that never ends. Then, without anything...
The shop closed its doors for them for an hour. For most of that hour the girl who worked there was very good at her job. She brought dresses in the right size and carried away the wrong ones without being asked. When Naru came out in something green, the...
Slice of Life intermission. The tomato had stayed. She had now eaten three sandwiches with it and said nothing, which Theo took as a verdict. He had moved tomato? to the top of his notes and deleted the question mark. It was the third week of August, and already hot...
The water was warmer than the night. She had waited until after three. Theo had stayed over on the sofa, as he had a few nights since the stream, because the press had found the building and the building had found the press, and someone had to answer the phone...
Slice of Life intermission. Theo let himself in at twenty past eight with the code he'd used for four years. He was carrying a paper bag that had gone see-through at the bottom. The blinds on the east side were already up. She had never touched them before the hospital....
Theo sat down. He did it slowly, the way he had sat down in hospital waiting rooms four times in four years, and he brought the laptop with him without thinking about it and set it on his knees, open, the blue light from the screen on his hands. Forty-one...
The ring light has three settings and Theo has tried all of them twice. He stands behind it in the penthouse living room with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, and the phone is on speaker, and the voice coming out of it belongs to...
The bathroom light in Calvin's flat had a buzz in it that came and went, and it was going now, a thin electric whine above the mirror like a mosquito that would not land. He had showered. He had shaved, carefully, twice along the jaw where he always missed a...
She discharged herself at dawn on the fifth day, against advice, with three cracked ribs strapped under a black hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. The doctor had told her to rest for six weeks. The label had told her to have a statement...
The first thing she learned was that a body hurts all the time. Not in the way the deep had hurt. The deep had been one pain, whole and everywhere, so complete that it had stopped being pain and become the shape of existence. This was different. This body hurt...
