Work Text:
1.
It is a low morning. The sun is down below the houses, and there between the rays exists a dull gray light from the kitchen. Pattadol wakes gasping in her flat.
The air pushes from her throat. Her torso whips up, the baggy t-shirt clinging to sweat-drenched bones. A flushed red hand comes against her chest, clutching the soft fabric thereon. Blue eyes blasted wide. Hair a mess.
There is nothing. A siren outside. Some pigeons. Yet she sits hunched and panting, a woman half-submerged between stone-gray covers and a Thanksgiving novelty tee.
She has woken in the long dark day of mid-September. The leaves are paddling and crossing like rotors down the length of two storeys, giving way to blanched concrete paths clouded with rainpuddles. At times Pattadol would look out through the window and see the darkened melanoma, the orange leaves, and the white clouds. In this city there can be no clear days. In this head there can be no clear days.
2.
Pattadol considers herself a woman of breeding. Women of breeding are wont not to find themselves clutching their purses close in rattling elevators, no doubt installed sometime during the Prohibition.
Pattadol suppresses a whimper. The maroon linoleum floor, a thin pane dividing Elf from gravity, shakes slightly as the little carapace tugs upward from floor one to floor two. The depressed bell, and the yellowed buttons, ring and blink in time.
A little tremor. Pattadol yelps, hand flinging out and reaching Marcille’s arm beside her, pinching her sweater. Marcille’s ear raises and she laughs. “It’s okay! Take a deep breath. It’s old but it holds up fine.”
“A-And you live here?” Pattadol asks.
Marcille nods, humming cheerily. “I promise it’s nicer than it seems. Has a window over the park and everything!”
Pattadol exhales, a tremulous stream, and nods.
The elevator finally hits floor three, and the scrimshaw doors rattle open. Marcille takes Pattadol’s hand, warm in hers, and gently leads her through.
“But really, I hope this isn’t too much trouble.”
“No, it’s alright.”
“Are you sure? Really, if you’d rather call it here.”
“I’m positive. I promised to take you to the Sea Center, and that is what I intend to do.”
Marcille giggles at that. They stop in front of Room 203, and Marcille takes a rather purple and glittery set of keys out from her pocket.
Pattadol cocks her head. “Did I say something?”
Marcille lets out a bone-deep, happy sigh. “You crack me up, you know that?”
“I-I don’t understand.”
“C’mon, stop being such a worry-pants.”
Pattadol’s ear flicks. Vari Pattadol, a woman of breeding, out on a date with a woman she met on Bumble, who has called her a ‘worry-pants’ on three separate occasions and counting.
The door whines open, and Marcille steps inside with the uncomplicated grace of a juvenile lamb. Pattadol comes in after her and looks around as Marcille flips the lights.
It’s a studio apartment. White walls, bland wooden flooring. The window is small, and the couch, the bed, the TV, and the kitchenette are in considerable proximity, contributing to one another’s genius loci with an eerie coordination. The bed covers take up the whole sense of place; pastel pink, embroidered with crossed red roses on green stems. Below the black headrest, a thousand throw pillows, sky blue and violet and pink and cream-white. The bed is easily king-sized, the most formidable shape in the flat. The couch and the baubles on the cabinets follow much the same tradition.
Pattadol uncrosses her arms. Her fingers unclutch by her sides. “I love your apartment,” she says.
Marcille looks over her shoulder and grins, blushing, eyes shutting and ears bobbing. “Thanks! My friends helped me decorate.” She removes her gray sweater to reveal her shirt stained with barbecue sauce. She sticks her tongue out. “Bleh. This’ll take too long to wash out. I’ll go shower and change. You mind waiting?”
“No problem at all,” Pattadol says, giving a stiff thumbs-up to nobody. “I actually might take a nap on your couch. I-If that’s alright.”
Marcille looks to her. “Of course. Work?”
Pattadol looks away, ears drooping. “Isn’t it always.”
“I feel you. Your boss, he sounds…”
“N-No. Mithrun isn’t cruel, he’s just…”
Marcille nods. Smiles. “No peeking, ‘kay?”
It hits Pattadol like a truck. “M-Marcille!”
Marcille giggles and wiggles her hips and stalks away.
Pattadol crosses an arm over her chest. She shrugs out of her blazer, hanging it carefully on one of the chairs at the dining table. Her purse goes on the hook next to the door, removing her shoes once there. She positions herself gingerly. First she sits. She fusses with her plait, loosening it just enough to lend itself to sleep. She lifts her legs slowly onto the cushions, arranging a throw pillow on the arm nearest her head, and lays there silently.
The hail of the shower commences in the only other room over. Outside, a tree, and the wind slowly pushes its little branches against the glass. The old heating system rattles above. She rests her hands on her chest like the dead in their coffins do, and closes her eyes.
Marcille hears her scream the second she gets her bra on.
“Fuck!” She bites her lip and grabs her clean shirt and frisks it over her head, rushing out in sweat pants, wet feet padding on dusty wood.
“Patty?” she calls. She rounds the doorway to the bathroom and finds Pattadol on the couch, upright, hand clutched on her heart, eyes wide. “Patty, oh my gosh, are you alright?” She runs over and drops by her side. “Are you okay? What happened? Did something happen?”
Her hand is trembling where it lays on her knee. Marcille takes it in hers, dragging it between her palms, but Pattadol’s blue eyes whip down, dilate, and she rips it away, curling it over her fist where it rests on her heart.
Marcille takes no mind to it and scooches up on the couch beside her. She places a hand on her knee and begins to draw close circles. Pattadol’s breathing is choppy, coming out in short bursts, and her head falls, falls to the floor between her feet.
“It’s okay,” Marcille says. “It’s okay. You can talk to me.”
Pattadol gulps. “I’m fine.”
Marcille’s ears droop. “You’re fine.”
Pattadol blinks hard, then straightens. She shrugs off Marcille’s hand and stands.
Marcille stands with her.
Pattadol's breathing steadies. Her eyes remain locked on the hook on the opposite wall, with her purse hanging. Slow, recompensory breaths are drawn out. Her fist unclenches, slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Pattadol says, clearing her throat. She turns to Marcille and smiles. “I’m ready when you are.”
Marcille frowns. “Pattadol, what was that?”
Pattadol shakes her head. “Nothing. Nothing you should worry about. Are you still up for the Sea Center?”
Marcille blinks. She nods. “Let me get dressed,” she says, looking down at herself.
Pattadol nods back and watches her go.
She stands by herself for a long time.
3.
There are three things that can be classified as the ‘most annoying’ about Fleki. Third, there is the voice, that tepid squeaking that comes from an undergrown Elf proud of her height over Otta. Second, there is, perhaps, the constant weedsmoke that creeps from beneath her office door, the product of a superintendent unwilling to sever their division’s most talented magician.
And then, firstly, there is the coughing.
The van rattles back and forth over the gray road. Down the coast, beneath the twisted cypresses in their black rookery, Pattadol grumbles to herself and sandwiches her head between course pillow and rough carseat headrest as Fleki and that tramp Lycion sit across the cabin competing at cards—Go Fish, Pattadol believes.
And Fleki coughs. She coughs with the aloofness and enormity of an old, haggard hound, or like an exotic big cat loping about the dark confines of its cage and distending its jaws, the coarse tongue blooming out, and yowling jaggedly, sickly into the stale air of its owner’s Florida mansion.
The smaller-than-average camper van contains in the architecture of its seating a small custodial table. This vehicle that aspires to the likeness of a proper American RV houses within itself, behind the thin walls to the driver’s compartment and across the inadequate, bench-like seating barring the western wall, a table big enough for two. A round plane, the size of a stop sign, evolved for gas station snacks and drive-thru burgers, now gives way for the barren waste of Fleki and Lycion’s cards, the Pyrrhic war of their Go Fish, and the bitter wind of her incessant, vexing, noxious, and altogether unnecessary coughing.
Pattadol shelters at the far end of the van. She holds her arms close to her chest and just watches.
Fleki doubles over, vampiric elbow raising to her gaping jaw and catching the monsoon of spittle and bacteria that expands from her blackened lungs. Pattadol’s eyes sear into her forehead with red double-sights in secret.
“—Yeah, and,” Fleki continues, surfacing the way one does from nearly drowning, “you gotta know when to double down. ‘Cause if you’re pressuring this kid into giving up Robux, the cosmetic’s gotta be worth it. Labubus or something, they love those. They hang on their avatar’s waist. Rainbow or some shit.”
“I didn’t know you could make that much money on Roblox,” Lycion says. He tosses two cards on the table, the intention of which is lost on all.
Fleki slaps down a something of hearts. “You can make so much money, dude. The high school roleplays are seriously lucrative. Beats drawing furry fart porn.”
“Why furry fart porn?”
“So many furries are doctors, dude. And they’re into that shit. Furry fart scat fat-fetish feet porn. Anal prolapse ‘n shit.”
“Damn. I’m a furry and I didn’t know that.”
Pattadol squints markedly. In fact, her eyes become permanent sniper nests, aimed solely at the thinnest section of Fleki’s skull leading to her medulla oblongata, which is the section of the brain, Pattadol knows from Falin, that leads quickest to death when punctured.
Falin, who is learning to dissect brains in uni, is currently collapsed in a great heap of dull blue wool along the two carseats at the back. She rests soundly, oblivious to the coughing. The older Touden mans the wheel, and while the van has slowed to a crawl on the trail to the camp site, his field of vision has been seized by the great expanse of the map acquired at the visitors’ kiosk.
“But it says we’re due east,” Laios tells Chilchuck glowering over his shoulder. “And if we don’t get to our camp site in time, the sun will go down, and—!”
“Please, you’re acting like this is some Bear Grylls stunt,” Chilchuck growls. “We don’t need to turn around. Just keep going, I’m telling you.”
“But the map says—“
“Listen to what I’m saying!”
“The boy’s right,” Senshi gravelly acknowledges from the passenger side. “There won’t be much time for much else but settin’ up our tent if we get there too late.”
“But we’re right there! I’m telling you, this map is garbage, if we just keep going…”
Pattadol hears and feels a thump at her right. She doesn’t need to look to know who it is. This is Marcille’s talent: sneaking away while the boys are fighting. She plops down with the grace of a young hen whose plumage is soft and plentiful and the color of a cloud. Her long arms, which Pattadol has admired before and now takes a second to do so again, stretch behind her head as she yawns nonchalantly, without care for the two conversations around her, eyes closing and the cheeks and tips of ears coloring. Pattadol has noticed these things about her girlfriend more often, the more they’ve dated, the year and the months in counting.
“Ahh! This place is so confusing…” Her arms fall to her lap, and she turns to Pattadol. “You look tired.”
Pattadol’s ears flatten. “I am perfectly fine.”
“Okay, well, it’ll be a while before we arrive, at this rate.” She leans further back against the seat, looking up at the ceiling. “And you woke up at, like, six in the morning, right? You must be so tired!”
“I’m not.”
“Come on, worry-pants, don’t be a grouch.” She puffs her cheeks, looking sad.
“I’m not a worry-pants!!! And I can’t go to sleep now, or else I’ll be awake all night!”
“Well, I’m gonna take a nap.” Marcille’s head falls back against the headrest and she closes her eyes. “Maybe I’ll stay up all night with you. We can take a night hike!”
“That’s dangerous,” Pattadol huffs.
“You’re dangerous,” Marcille grins.
“I’m not dangerous. You’re dangerous. You’re always—“
“Oi, shaddap over there, lesbians,” Fleki says. Pattadol shoots a sniper’s glare at her but Fleki simply turns back to Lycion.
“I was saying,” Fleki says, “I could fill up any cup with whatever I wanted because the material of the cup was the same, so Burger King couldn’t pursue it. But Misyl kept saying the cup was different anyway, which didn’t make sense to me. They were both plastic.”
“You sound like you’ve stolen from Burger King a lot,” Lycion says.
“Only professionally.”
“How does that work?”
“You know how it works, faggot, I just go in and—“
“Um!!” Pattadol perks up, “You can’t say that!”
Fleki sighs and looks at her. “Say what? Faggot? I can’t say faggot, Patty?”
“No, you can’t! That word is rude and offensive to the other gays in the van!”
“You’re telling the tranny she can’t say faggot.”
“HEY!!!”
“Hey, knock it off, guys!” Marcille beckons from her rest. Her eyes remain closed, and her arms cross over her chest. Fleki just chuckles and moves on.
Pattadol sits and looks at them and stews. Her ears bob, red at the tapered tips, and her blue eyes project unkindness in their direction. But the eyes loosen, the ears default, when the warmth of a hand finds hers on the seat.
“Aw, your nerves are all fried, sweetpea.”
Pattadol turns. Marcille is sideways on the seat, her head lounging against the headrest like a cat in the sun, long blonde locks trailing silkenly down her shoulder. Pattadol blushes.
“Get some rest, ‘kay? I’m worried for you.”
“It’s fine. It’s just Fleki being annoying.”
“No, I think it’s because you got up at six.”
Pattadol opens her mouth. But the hand at her side travels up, onto her shoulder, and applies gentle pressure. The pressure brings Pattadol down, her stiff spine ramrod straight as she tumbles to the seat below. Her head, hair tied up in a severe bun, finds Marcille’s lap, and for once she feels her eyes begin to close. Her hand finds the side of Pattadol’s scalp, and with long, manicured nails begins to sift through the long strands and gently touch the skin underneath.
“I’ll be here.” That’s all Marcille has to say.
Pattadol grumbles, and closes her eyes. She doesn’t have the nerve to imagine Fleki’s face, nor the fortitude to block out the boys’ bickering. But the hand in her hair is enough to bring her down.
It strikes her in the heart.
Pattadol’s hand darts to her breast. The pressure consumes her chest, radiating outward like a sharp cornerstone pressing down on her body. It travels to her throat, becoming lodged there, blocking the airflow that would soothe her nerves. As quickly as it comes, it releases, but the shaking is still there, the sharpness of the air, that clawing in the back of her neck.
Marcille’s fingers shoot into her scalp with the jolt. “What happened?!”
Pattadol grits her teeth. She pushes herself up, freed from Marcille’s lap, and rubs her eyes. Marcille yawns, but her green eyes remain ever locked on Pattadol, and automatically two hands come over her shoulders, one brushing her bangs away from her eyes.
Pattadol sneers and stands suddenly, shaking Marcille’s hands away. She takes a step to the center of the empty van, the dark outside, a soft orange glow from the fire where the rest have already made camp.
“Pattadol, what was that?” Marcille’s voice carries an undercurrent of demand. She stands quickly and reaches out again. Pattadol turns away, rejecting her touch. Marcille’s eyes widen, and her arms fall limp at her sides.
Shame. White hot, broiling, rising shame makes its way through Pattadol’s system. It turns her still, makes her angrier, angry at Marcille, at the others, at the world.
“It’s nothing,” Pattadol says. “Let’s—“
“No, no, Pattadol, it is not nothing,” Marcille worries. Just as Pattadol elects to leave her behind she steps in front of her, outmaneuvering her escape.
“Marcille—“
“You can’t just keep things from me! Please, Pattadol, let me help you!”
Her lip quivers. Her arms come up around her chest and she turns away, eyes falling to a place unseen.
“Let me help you,” Marcille repeats, softer this time. “Please, I… I care about you, Pattadol.”
Pattadol’s head whips back to Marcille. A quivering breath escapes her throat, and her knotted arms loosen, fall to her sides. They promptly recross, and she looks down at her boots, ears drooping.
“I… have…”
“Yeah?”
“… I have… nightmares.”
Marcille nods.
“And… I don’t know. I don’t know why I didn’t…”
“It’s okay, Pattadol.”
“I’m. Trying to get medicine. But you know how that usually goes.”
Marcille laughs. It springs a warmth in her.
“I’m sorry for being difficult.”
“It’s okay.” Marcille steps closer and takes her hands. Her voice is very quiet. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“… Thanks.”
“Mhm.”
“Th-Thank you.”
“I got you, sweetpea.”
Pattadol colors. Marcille sees this and laughs, resting her forehead on Pattadol’s. Her lips find her, and her hand comes behind her head to support her.
Pattadol separates slowly, eyes locked on Marcille’s. She coughs. “We should probably set up our tent.”
4.
Time had passed like birds in the night when she woke shaking in the flowery bed. This time she did not shoot up, her spine instead straightening and seizing, a single worried gasp issuing from her throat, but quietly, raggedly. Her hand came to rest again on the tremorous heart, that pulsing organ of emergence, bleating to sunder cleanly from between her ribs, to tear the flesh and mark the pillows red with her blood. But there was no more noise in the dark where she lay.
Now the quiet has returned. Now the small window to the north has shown no light from the clouded sky, no stars in this industrial port city. Only the scarcity of night sounds, the gentleness of a wind that blows coldly from the black sea, and the faintest asthmatic attack of a car lost on the roads passing, incidentally, beneath the eaves.
Pattadol finally sits up. The covers with the crossed red roses rumple at her waist, where the thin terminus of her tank top ends far below the waist of her gray sweat pants. The warm din of the boiler leaks from somewhere outside the flat. Internal heating has made the air around her flush. And she recognizes, for the moment, that this is not her apartment. These are not her stuffed animals, her useless trinkets littering the surfaces.
Pattadol looks to her side. There, beneath the cloth bed of flowers, the lush gold corona splayed about a constellation of pillows in pastel shades. There beneath the comfortable nape of a space designed to receive, she is at rest, the green eyes sheltered sound beneath the elegant lids, the provincial arch of her nose, the rounded half-blood ears. Nothing beneath her mouth is shewn beneath the covers, and her skin is flushed rose in the apartment’s dull heat.
Pattadol would reach out to touch Marcille. Her hand would come over her forehead, or grace the warm skin of her cheek, and she would worm herself closer to her beloved, to press her face into the soft cave between her chin and her collar, fingers tracing the bones that ride the rims delineating her chest from her shoulders, and breathe her in, eyes closing, perhaps surrendering to slumber once again.
But the tightness in her chest stops her. This is no place to intrude. In this place her trespass has been duly noted, permitted by a power yet more generous than the monarchs of Vari Estate.
Pattadol’s lips press together. Her blue eyes wilt, falling to the space between her hands splayed politely upon the covers. Then she pushes them aside and removes herself from the bed. She makes sure the blankets are still arranged over Marcille’s body, cocooning her as was her original design.
She stalks to the fridge. She is slow in the pale dark. Footfalls register muted on the wooden floor. When she arrives she opens it quietly, and she does not take anything. She just looks. She stands there for a long time.
There is the pitcher of coffee, half full, brewed the afternoon before. She considers the cabinet full of cutesy mugs above the stove. She considers the water dispenser, how it can dispense modestly hot water quieter than the whistling of the kettle. How she may pour herself a cup of coffee and rest for a moment at the cramped supper table, gathering her bearings, and get dressed and shrug on her coat and escape out the door. Take the rickety elevator down. Catch a Lyft. Leave.
But there, in front of the open refrigerator, she stands for a very long time.
She doesn’t feel the hands at first. Doesn’t feel Marcille enveloping behind her, the great flaxen curtain rivering over her chest and resting on her back, pressing through the thin tank top. But when it finally registers, Pattadol seizes. Marcille’s arms slither around her waist and come to hold her close. The small of Pattadol’s back is pressed flush against Marcille’s stomach, and her long fingers knot over her midriff.
“What are you doing?” comes the sleepy voice from the shadows. It is said with the predisposed certainty of a woman who has seen Pattadol flee before. It is said only because Marcille knows this is how to stop her in her tracks, that any question levied in her direction she must answer.
Pattadol breathes through her nose. Slowly, she lets the refrigerator door swivel shut. She says nothing.
She feels Marcille’s lips come into contact with her shoulder. Her face burrowing and nesting in the hollow of her neck. She holds her ever closer, and her skin warms Pattadol up, and she drinks it in despite herself.
“What happened?” And this time it’s said with the certainty of someone who knows. Someone who’s discovered, on her own accord, the internal mechanism of a woman wound tight.
Pattadol says, very quiet, very coarse, “Nothing.”
“Pattadol.”
“Nothing happened, Marcille.”
“Stop lying to me.”
Her heart stops. Her hands curl into fists. Pattadol feels her chest contract again, the residue of a nightmare vanished returning, the gears inside of her beginning to jam.
Her arms come around herself. Marcille continues to hold her, be the stone that grounds her through the wind, and Pattadol stands like a monolith to every lie that has come before, to everyone who has ever cared about her.
Her breath catches. Her throat works. A thin sheen of moisture covers her eyes, reflected by the light outside the window, and Marcille feels it, and she knows this because her palms blossom the way flowers do and rest over the thin fabric above her stomach and wander up the flat plane of her body and come to rest over her heart. And they cradle her. They cradle the heart. They don’t let go.
“Don’t lie to me,” Marcille whispers. The whisper is embodied of the dark that surrounds them. It is possessed of the very dark that shines in the heart she holds.
5.
She awoke this time in pain. Her heart was not fully in her chest, as if returning from a catastrophic voyage from above, and she felt the horrible rattle in her chest, the sudden tightening therein, how the architecture of her ribs would fail, and she buckled in the booth, this neon cavern suddenly looking so much more like a coffin, or a river sending her down, down the current, down the rumbling brook, and her hand went to her heart and seized there as it always did but this time sharper, and the nails dug into the flesh, and the heart fed on the blood it constituted, and she felt herself breathe the way one feels a tumor excised, and she stopped.
And she beheld.
Marcille sitting beside her. The rest—Laios, Chilchuck, Senshi, Mithrun, Cithis, everyone from either of their work—sitting about the booth in the bar that is lit up with cheap disco lights and the general malaise of beer about the air. Pattadol’s leather jacket over her body like a duvet.
Marcille is her wall. Marcille separating her from the outside of the corner of the booth she occupies. Marcille keeping her safe. Marcille, Marcille, Marcille.
Pattadol rises and grips the table before her. The hand that clenches the heart nails down, steels, grabs a fistful of soft cashmere and the gasp that surfaces. But the breathing has not steadied. The tightness has not evaporated.
Marcille is in the purple light with her beer, skin aflush, and she is looking about their fellows when her ear quirks toward Pattadol when she rises, and she turns, and she smiles, and she says, “Finally, you’re up! We were just about to head out!”
It’s too loud. Too much noise, her beloved’s voice made thin in the thick of the air.
“Wh-What?”
“I said we were just about to get going!”
“Okay.”
“Falin knows a place, it’s—”
“Okay.”
But the way Pattadol is oriented isn’t funny.
Marcille’s expression sinks like a dumbbell in brackish water, the weight of metal consumed by cold Atlantic seas.
“Pattadol?”
“Okay.” Her eyes are locked on the table. “I’m having a heart attack.”
“What?”
“I’m having. I’m having—Marcille, I’m having a—a heart attack. Marcille.”
“Pattadol, what?”
“Marcille.”
“You’re having a heart attack?” Her expression is severe.
Pattadol gulps. “I don’t know.”
“Pattadol.”
”I DON’T KNOW!”
“Pattadol, look at me.”
But she isn’t looking and her eyes are lost somewhere and the breathing, the breathing, the breathing, and then her hands are in Marcille’s.
So she looks. She drinks deep of the emerald eyes that call to her, openly, wantingly.
She gulps. Gulps in the air that is afforded to her. This air tainted with alcohol, with cigarette and cannabis and hookah smoke, the air colored red and violet and blue and deep green by the ravelights, the air divided from her. And the tightness resumes, and this tightness constrains her, and her body is a tomb, but she looks, she looks at Marcille.
“Breathe.”
Marcille’s voice. Honey-sweet. Soft. So, so soft.
Pattadol breathes. Wheezes. The throat constricting.
“Breathe…”
She strokes the backs of her hands. Slowly tracing their scant forms, up the arms, never ever letting go.
Pattadol breathes a second time, and she finds that this time the air commits itself to the passage of her throat.
“… breathe…”
The air permits itself into her. This air that is stained and rotten finally relents, and it is under the patronage of her most beloved, the lovely watch of a guardian who has chosen to surface her, to hold her, to protect her.
Her third breath emerges as a hiccup.
Her face turns red. From the tip of her nose up to the tips of her ears. And Marcille sees that transition, that transformation, from panic to the shielding of the eyes with water, to the face that becomes drowned, possessed of the water that defines the eyes.
”Oh, sweetpea…”
“Jesus. Everything alright over there?” Chilchuck says, looking at them incredulously.
Marcille instantly shoots him a look. His incredulous mouth suddenly flattens into a compressed line, and he looks back at Cithis as she explains her latest outings.
Marcille’s eyes arrest back upon her. She does not say anything. Only the hands communicate this longing, this gracing of her bespeckled flesh up and down the arms, dipping underneath the plush sleeves of her cardigan.
Pattadol feels Marcille begin to lift her away, first by the hands, then up upon her feet. They rise over the table, and they migrate to the end of the booth; Fleki does not nod, she does not acknowledge the two wayward souls beginning their flight, she simply moves aside to grant them access.
And they go away.
“It’s alright, sweetpea.”
Pattadol gulps, throat seizing as her face presses into the warmth at the hollow of Marcille’s neck. Her arms wrap around and behind her waist and her hands grasp for dear purchase at the thin fabric of her shirt, tied at the waist, the skinny jeans below, the black choker now stained with her tears. Her crying is quiet.
Behind the bar, the thin, sickly passing of cars on the road downtown serenades. The breaths that pass over them do so subtly, and in the dark moves of night they temper and fade into obscurity so much as Pattadol’s own breath, the gentle termination of thoughts expressed through the laziest approximations of morphemes, language neutralized in a throat that once thought itself incapable of receiving oxygen required to sustain the body.
Marcille cocoons Pattadol between her chest and the cold red brick at her back. Her arms, one hand at the small of her back and the other at the middle of her spine, resist the frigid touch of the stone, sheltering the girl from its attempts at robbing the warmth they share. And Pattadol is gasping, gasping, gasping the air that once had escaped, revels in the feeling of a chest miraculously released, unclenched, unrestricted.
“You’re okay,” Marcille coos.
She runs delicate hands through Pattadol’s hair, combing the straight curtains that run shoulder-length and easing her nails into the sensitive skin of her scalp. Her plait has been undone, and now her hair is messy, unkempt, and Marcille only adds fuel to that fire, and this Pattadol knows, and yet she leans into her touch, savors it because in savoring one is nurtured, one is fed.
Pattadol breathes. Exhales. The long stream of her breath falls down Marcille’s chest, increment by increment. She is whole. She is safe.
And she says, “I-I’m… I’m sorry.”
Marcille says nothing.
Pattadol’s breathing palpitates once more, but briefly, and Marcille’s hands press into her back harder, but softer, for that moment, and she holds her and grounds her until the short storm subsides.
And Pattadol says, once again, “I’m sorry.”
Marcille is silent.
“I’m so sorry.”
And Marcille replies, “It’s okay, sweetpea. I’ve got you.”
“It’s so…” Pattadol gulps. “So… fucking… embarrassing. I… I…”
“Ssshhh… It’s okay…”
Pattadol is smaller in the hollow of her neck. Smaller than the instance of a planck. The smallest thing that has ever been empirically studied, and Marcille’s science is the thing that preserves the knowledge of her, lets her memory survive. She is the smallest thing to ever exist.
And Pattadol says, one last time, “I’m sorry, Marcille.”
Marcille’s lips press together. Her eyes project down at her. The light she offers. Gratitude luminous.
And Marcille says, “I forgive you.”
Postscript
And now, she is awake in the cold.
This time there is nothing. This time, the night sounds have recessed out the window, and there is only a soft, snow-white glow from the lamppost. It climbs into the room and divides the space between her and the apartment, this thin strip of brightness segmenting form from occupancy.
There’s the tightness in her chest. There’s the blowing of the eyes, the intake of photons of a set of irises flushed and refreshed on the world. And there is the breathing, those shallow breaths that roll in like stormy tides. The flats of her lungs flood with dark seawater, and for a moment she is drowning, drowning, but the water lopes back to the basin, and the air rushes into the space unburied, and she is breathing, breathing, breathing.
She rises. The covers slide down her stomach, her hair fanning out about her head. Her hand has found her heart as it always must in times like these, and she breathes. Breathes because she is a woman who has learned that breathing is a right owed to her. Breathes because she has been granted it. Breathes because breathing is part of her.
And it recedes.
The tightness releases.
Her hand falls to her lap.
And she breathes.
She looks about the chiaroscuro of the room. Her hand severed in the dark where it rises over her breast. She lowers it, looking at the flushed palm, capillaries generating warmth. Then she reaches over to the nightstand and takes her charging phone.
12:34 AM. Past midnight. But the thought doesn’t weigh on her. Not like it should. Not like it matters.
She places the phone face down. Her hands resume their truce on her lap. From outside, the light of the car illuminates the space of her apartment: the modest white walls, the modest appliances, the single bookshelf of cream and stone-colored covers, the sensible oakwood dining table.
She thinks it’s shameful. She thinks it’s too late to even attempt. That going at this hour would be nothing less than a complete intrusion. That she should pick a different night to be pathetic.
She stands anyway.
The knock comes late.
Later than Marcille would have expected. Later than she usually finds herself waking, buried beneath the flower covers with her hair in a discordant bow around her. She groans, forcing herself up and over the mattress, bare feet slotting into slippers at the bed’s edge.
She lopes across the apartment in her sleepwear, rubbing one eye with a shaky fist. “Who is it?” she calls, voice husky.
No answer comes from the door.
Her ears perk up at that. The fist lowers from her face, and her eyebrows raise. She pads quieter now, storing herself stealthily at eye-level with the peephole in the door, gently sliding away the cover and looking.
Pattadol is outside. She’s looking off to the side, ears down and eyes baked over with the temperance of fresh snow. She has her nice coat on, the plush red scarf, cutesy mittens gifted by Marcille balled up at her chest as she keeps her hands together like a prayer.
Marcille breathes a sigh of comprehension. She opens the door.
Pattadol startles, looking at her. Marcille crosses her arms and she doesn’t smile. “Patty? It’s late, what’s going on?”
“I-I apologize, I just—” She pauses, clearing her throat. The beginning of a flush is making its way up what little of her neck is showing. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Marcille’s ears perk. “Is everything... alright?”
“Oh, no, everything's great! I'm great!” she says in a hurry, hands waving. Then her eyes fall down, ears drooping in shame. “It’s… It’s nothing. Nothing serious.”
Marcille’s head cocks.
Pattadol sighs. “I… I had a nightmare.”
Marcille’s hands drop to her sides. Somewhere in her eyes, something lights up.
But Pattadol doesn’t see. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice rising now, “it’s silly. It’s really late, I should be at home. I’m sorry. I’ll see you—”
The instant she begins to move away, Marcille’s hand taps the back of hers.
Pattadol stops. She looks down at the floor, eyes widening, and their hands slowly, inextricably interlink.
Marcille pulls her closer. “No… Thanks for telling me.” Lucidity has returned to Marcille’s voice. She holds Pattadol’s hand in both hands and brings it to her chest. “Thanks for coming. Really, I…”
Pattadol frowns. “I can go.”
“N-No, please, stay! I can make tea, and…” She’s breathless. Her eyes look to the floor. “Thanks for…”
She tests the words in her mouth. Pattadol looks at her, and Marcille’s soft gaze connects with hers. They stand looking at each other for a long time.
Marcille smiles.
“Thanks for being brave enough to come to me.”
And Pattadol, after a long, quiet moment, smiles back, and is gently led inside.