Jacob More (cont.)

the first glimpse of her was a shred of white, greedily sucked away by the wind. she was engaged in a flailing rescue, momentarily off-balance, grasping for her hat. unlike him, moments before, she was unsuccessful, and stood still for a second, watching it shear up, up, and away. an infinite patience settled into her eyes, as though this had happened before and would happen again, as though she had stood in that very position and had found herself comfortable there.

(lightning!) her pale skin, three shades paler by the electric light, but only for a moment, eggshell turned to alabaster, and her so frozen there, sodden - she was an ice floe in an Arctic night. he watched her melt, shielding her face from the rain as she made her way quickly towards the cafe. he heard the sound of a sizzling, and the collapsing, deflating noise of a power outage - he turned to glance indoors, and the cafe had gone dark. within, the scrambling silhouettes of its occupants, as if clumsily enacting a farce.

i remember his father, sitting at the dinner table with both utensils grasped in his meaty hands. he had been assembled from these things, by chance, from both his sire & dam, some drunken hand of chance selecting properties, traits, addictions, habits - and, though inebriated, wisely left room between those things as one would leave space between creeping phlox and the other flowers, to leave it room to spill out, to grow -

and the shoddy clapboards of the storefront vibrate in the ensuing thunder, chattering like teeth. the quick sound of plastic against glass - they have CLOSED the cafe, and she is there now, running up against the door, pressing her cupped hands against it, peering in for refuge. they, the hard-hearted purveyors of caffeine and pastry goods, are not allowing anyone else inside, like a full bunker against the insidious whisper of nuclear fallout.

he is surprisingly dry. a few insouciant droplets of rain have spattered on his shoulder. he begins to call to her, but his voice fails in his throat, like a gramophone not properly wound. delicately, he coughs into one hand. he can feel his lungs expand like fists inside of him.

his father, Jacob More, was a scholar with eyes given to him by a devil - black holes bored by a gimlet. sometimes light shone through. it was more likely that they would slurp in the light from the exterior like black holes in deep space. nightly, his bulk could be found bent over the desk he’d made himself, in his study upstairs. if a storm were coming, he would not be found - his mother, Emily (nee Rabinovitch) would fret in the kitchen, wandering from the counter to the table, adjusting lightbulbs in their sockets. re-arranged the silverware from the tangled mess he’d deposited them after drying. stared out the window, pale eyes reflecting an invisible sea. eventually he would return, suddenly within the walls of the house, dry as bone - somehow a touch wilder, electric at the fingertips. all of it was worth it then, as she fell into his arms and let him pluck the head off of her like a dead marigold.

“may i?” she was indicating the chair beside him, wind-whipped and thin like a reed at the shore. her eyes reflected the rain, darker than his mother’s, speckled with filaments and scars of gray.