Regards From La Voisin
summary: Mal drives and drives, down roads, down highways.
warning: vague AU atmosphere. (if you’re expecting an On the Road-esque backstory...well, i’ve never read Kerouac. so uh. this is probably not it.)
disclaimer: references to the works of Erich Fromm, Gus Van Sant, and the KJV Bible.
Dom/Mal peripherally, but mostly just Mal.
For as long as she can remember, she has always hated France.
Born in the heart of Paris. Raised on cobblestone roads and the air of the Seine.
The acclaimed fount of romance. And they flock to it in swarms, in throngs, but it’s never been her Nazareth.
She watched them searching, searching, always searching. Fingertips outstretched, over tops of towers and along fog-lush streetlamps.
Happiness created in their belief. Even if they find it, what they think is it, and cup it in their hands - it will wither before their eyes.
Some things are simply meant to stay where they are. But not her.
She remembers sitting at a plain writing desk, when Dom asked a question. An innocuous one, she is sure, though she can’t recall it exactly.
He had been standing in the doorway, hand on the frame, leaning in. And she had looked at him, tired expression, shoulders curved downward.
“I have to get out of here, Dom. Please understand that.”
A kiss, warm and dry, pressed to her mouth. A quiet acquiescence.
Leaving behind protestations and a mother’s coldness, they fell into a continent an ocean away.
+
“Los Angeles?”
“What’s there to think about?”
“It’s Paris in a different skin.”
“So we’ll peel it all off and do things our way. Nostri generis, Mallorie.”
+
There is the being and then the having.
She once thought the two were separate from one another.
But a long stare at the wooden nooks and beams of their new enclosure makes her think twice. Reconsider.
A singular dinner and beer. The faint stirrings of night just beyond glass doors.
She pulls down long sleeves and presses a cuff to her mouth, staring blankly at the television.
Dom comes home with a silver briefcase - on loan, he says - and places it under the bed.
She can’t sleep, knowing it’s there, and returns to the couch. Watches infomercials until she closes red-rimmed eyes against the light of dawn.
+
A slim band of titanium rests on the kitchen counter.
She picks it up after drying her hands.
Turns it over and over, though its features have long been committed to memory.
+
Late evening, exhausted after a night of affected elegance at an academic soiree, they sit in silence.
A tear in the hem of her black velvet dress, a cut from a crushed wine glass. It had not been her best performance.
Unspoken concern, from Dom.
“I’m going to go wash up,” she says, voice worn down.
“I’ll go with you.” A little too loudly.
Hesitation, before she inclines her head. A tired smile.
They shower together, heads bowed. Breathing softly against bare skin.
Allowing steam clouds of heat to waft between them instead of words.
+
She doesn’t tell him that she still has natural dreams.
Sometimes color, sometimes monochrome. Sometimes quiet, sometimes violent.
Years of poring over texts and research can’t teach her how to unravel the entanglements of her own mind.
There’s nothing more disconcerting, she thinks, than to know there are parts of herself even she cannot access.
That night: images of collapsing highways, bodies strewn around her. The exsanguination of everything thrown into the sharp relief of greyscale.
Doesn’t understand why it feels like it’s her fault, because she knows it’s not. But she screams in grief anyway, and begs for mercy, kneeling in front of each corpse.
In the morning: wakes up exhausted and lies in bed a minute longer, looking but not seeing. Eventually, she gets up to start her morning routines.
If Dom notices that she takes longer than usual, he doesn’t say it.
+
Her expression causes a tremble to start from the base of his spine. She seems too distant, too far from what he knows.
“I have to go away…for a while.” She looks past him and continues faintly. “Maybe a few months.”
He sits down, hands braced heavily on his knees.
“I don’t-” A sigh. “I don’t know what goes on in your mind sometimes, Mal. But if you tell me, maybe we could-”
“It’s nothing that I can explain. It’s something within that I need to deal with.” Her face remains pale and studiously blank.
“Within.” He frowns slightly. “Does this have anything to do with the PASIV?”
The settling of silence. The weight of different expectations, hovering.
An exhalation.
“No. Don’t blame yourself, Dom.” Brackets his face with slender hands, cold to the touch. Meets his eyes. “I’m not leaving you. You know that, right?”
“I know,” he says softly, voice barely audible. Lifts his head. “What about your work?”
She brushes fingers against his hairline. “It’s already been taken care of.”
+
At the edge of the driveway,
“Wait for me?”
“You already know the answer to that.” A hitch in breath, from the effort to tamp down a sob.
A beatific smile returned, no words of goodbye. Dark eyes reflected in the rearview mirror and the flash of tail-lights when she leaves.
He feels the slow burn of an ache, realizing that he has lost something, though he doesn’t know what.
+
She drives eastward. No destination in mind, no map on hand.
Only the hum of an engine that carries her along the vines of roads and highways.
The radio is left untouched.
+
When the gauge needle edges too close to E, she stops for gas. It isn’t the same name printed on her reward points card. But she doesn’t really have a choice there.
Heads into the small convenience store, staring at products washed out by overhead flourescents.
“Anything else, ma’am?” the young clerk says placidly.
She hasn’t eaten for a day, but the line-up of candy bars and flavored gums in front of her induces a kind of faint nausea.
“No, thank you.”
Pays the bill and leaves, the tinny ring of the doorbell causing her to wince.
+
She prefers driving at night, despite the steady wave of bright lights that leave faint halos wavering in her vision.
The world outside her four doors seems quieter. Less urgent.
Sleep has become something of an uninvited guest. When it drops in and lethargy slows her thinking, she takes the nearest exit ramp.
Parks and hides anywhere with a substantial number of cars. Curls up in the backseat and rests, face turned into the seat cushions.
Awareness of days and weeks slips out of reach, as if caught fast in blind spots, unable to escape.
+
Lank and uncurled without sheen, her hair hangs down, drifting in no direction.
She’s leaning her elbows on the edge of the bar, measured breaths causing strands to flutter and still.
A glass with faint circles of dishwash residue doesn’t deter her from draining the whiskey in one neat go.
Secondhand smoke drifts into her airways, but she can’t be bothered.
A neon sign hanging above mirrored glass flickers erratically.
It draws attention away from huddled bodies who don’t want it.
“Another.”
“Look, lady-”
“Don’t even start. Here, twenty for one fucking shot. You won’t get that from anyone else.” She slams down on Andrew Jackson’s face to make her point. Then slides it across insistently.
The bartender reaches over and pockets the bill without a word. Pours heady liquid once more, avoiding the sharpness in her eyes.
+
The reflection of herself in the glass refrigerator door is startling, and maybe that’s the reason for all the strange looks cast in her direction.
Self-consciously, she brushes her hair back behind her ears and wipes ineffectually at the black circles beneath her eyes.
Grabs stacks of microwavable meals without looking at them and quickly makes her way to the checkout line.
A child tearing up the aisles with a toy shopping cart nearly trips her, and she has to shut her eyes to stave off a sudden sense of vertigo.
Out. She has to get out of here.
With a trembling hand, she passes a fifty to the cashier and snaps up the bag as she leaves, ignoring the confused cry about change.
Nearly gets hit by an SUV as she rushes forward, and finally breathes when she shuts herself inside her car, shoulders hunching inward.
She leans against the wheel, shaking, fingers clenched tight around peeling leather. Lets out a choked sound and cries silently, in the middle of the parking lot.
+
The motel is a decent one, the kind that looks like it at least repaints walls every so often.
She wonders if she looks like a divorcee, or a discarded girlfriend, with her unkempt appearance and beat-up grey car.
But the receptionist barely spares a glance before counting the cash and letting her know she’ll be staying in room 262.
“Where am I?” she asks, her palm closing over the key.
The girl stares at her, brows furrowed, and points to a laminated map tacked onto the wall beside the desk counter.
Once in front of it, she traces a finger over the smooth surface, like it’s not in her to believe. Has she really come this far?
“Don’t burn the place down.”
The sudden imperative causes her to step back instinctively.
“What?”
The receptionist pointedly raises an eyebrow at the plastic bag of Lean Cuisines in her hand.
“I wouldn’t do that.” A faint reply.
Offhand shrug. “It’s been known to happen.”
Later, when she sits cross-legged on the dust cover, holding a steaming casserole, she realizes she never bought any forks.
+
She meanders along the balcony, barefoot, just to see what sun-warmed concrete feels like.
Eyes down and on the lookout for stray tetanus-laden nails, she nearly misses the presence of a stranger.
A man who reeks of diesel and sweat sidles up, throwing nervous looks around him. The smell of desperation; the call of the lonely.
“Uh,” he mutters. “How much? I gotta tell you, I only have maybe fifty or so-”
She stares, as she concludes that this is exactly what it sounds like. Then breaks out in laughter, doubled over until she can’t make a sound, tears stinging her eyes.
The man takes his hands out of his pockets and stammers out apologies while backing away.
She decides now is probably as good a time as any to check out.
Heading back to the lot, she overhears the propositioner, who is huddling in a pay phone booth.
(“Hey, I never sai- no, no. I mean, is fifty not enough? It used to be.”)
Slanting an elbow against the car window, she presses her head into the heel of her hand and turns to hide a grin.
+
A traffic jam, lanyard-thin lines of immovable cars that stretch past the point of tension.
The frustration of the afflicted has ebbed into a weary sentience. A lifetime of waiting, or so it feels.
She breathes out a sigh into the crook of her arm, currently angled atop the steering wheel.
Then kicks off her shoes and pivots to stretch her legs out across the passenger seat.
Leans against the headrest and shifts to curve the side of her body against the mold.
With a patience she knows is finite, she succumbs to the temporary interlude.
+
She swerves sharply to avoid the wavering semi, its driver drunk with either sleeplessness or moonshine.
“Shit! Fucking piece of shit.”
Her knuckles are bone-white, and she can’t help envisioning skull fragments and limbs broken beyond repair.
Wills her heartbeat down and leans her head back, as she regains her calm.
Merges her mind slowly back into the stream of passengers, who follow each other without knowing where the rest are headed.
+
The road, once black, has faded to a sun-bleached charcoal. Yellow warnings, no longer bright with purpose, seem resigned to the endlessness of their days.
Far ahead, flickering behind waves of heat, two trees on either side. Together with the long curve of asphalt, a grinning face.
You are not closer than you appear to be, she thinks. What makes you so happy?
As the car hurtles down the empty and infinite stretch, embers somewhere in her core begin to wake. The corona of the sun encouraging them to rise.
Unconsciously, she turns toward the warmth of beams piercing through the windows. Allows it to suffuse her skin. Seep beneath it. If only for a while.
This is a strange place.
The etch of a smile along the curve of her lips. There’s nothing to stop her from drifting between lanes.
She closes her eyes and releases the wheel. Lets the accelerator fly.
+
The megachurch is white, as all megachurches are.
More so, in its emptiness.
She hadn’t been to church in…a while. Much less one so close to the freeway.
A slant-eyed glance at a larger-than-life cross, held aloft in center stage by chains nailed in roofbeams.
It draws her eyes to the massive vaulted ceiling, designed in an all-purpose gothic manner.
Her hand drifts unthinkingly to the worn bindings of a King James edition, before she catches herself and draws it back.
It never stops being about choice. That’s what it all comes down to, is what someone told her once.
She wraps her arms tightly around herself and backs into a wall lined with switches.
A recording blasts out, voice deep and ground-shaking in the vastness of the space.
“Trust in Him, for He had said, ‘I am with you always.’”
The words seem to cascade across and over pews, overwhelming her, even from a distance.
She exits in haste, doors closing behind her without a sound. Shields her eyes from the sudden glare of light.
Breathes hard and swallows down the bile that threatens to rise.
She leans against the side of the building, bent over until she is sure she isn’t going to pass out.
Counts seconds carefully before pushing herself away from the wall, and angrily wipes off the residue left behind on her hand.
+
Low hushes of thunder in the canopy of the sky. Agitated winds pull frantically at her hair, crying leave, leave.
She huddles into her coat and stares at vicious waves the color of steel, tipped white, lashing again and again at unmoving rocks.
Had never been to the coast of Maine before, and it feels like she’s standing at the edge of the world.
Escape, some might call it. But only to those who are running away, trying to leave the notion of self behind.
There exist hundreds of thousands of words in all the languages she knows. None come to mind for the pull she feels.
It is neither the need to seek nor the need to flee. It is not made of external means or ends. Of that much, she is certain.
Dark clouds swell to mask the shadows of gulls, and the air grows sharp.
She looks behind her to see tall pine trees bow fearfully, as if to say, we are no-one.
The rasping of dry knuckles against cloth, and she moves to leave, head inclined in deference.
The car sits in the distance, quiet and compliant in its age. Covered in thin layers of dust that flies from ivory cliffs.
+
She orders a cup of black coffee at the diner, and uses the pay phone by the bathroom to place a call.
A number, nearly forgotten in the wake of timeless days upon days.
“Dom, it’s me.” Glances at a fading clock on the wall. “I’m coming home.”
+
When she rings the doorbell, as if it isn’t her house, she hears the clatter of a chair knocked over.
The frantic swing of hinges, and Dom is there - wide eyed, relief flooding into his gaze.
She smiles weakly and, and-
Hadn’t realized just how much she missed him, until warm arms clutch her close, in love, in fear.
It hurts when she breathes, and she wishes they didn’t have to move from this moment. That it could be buried in sands, protected by an immortal capsule.
A suspended space where only the two of them exist, unbound by time.
warning: vague AU atmosphere. (if you’re expecting an On the Road-esque backstory...well, i’ve never read Kerouac. so uh. this is probably not it.)
disclaimer: references to the works of Erich Fromm, Gus Van Sant, and the KJV Bible.
Dom/Mal peripherally, but mostly just Mal.
For as long as she can remember, she has always hated France.
Born in the heart of Paris. Raised on cobblestone roads and the air of the Seine.
The acclaimed fount of romance. And they flock to it in swarms, in throngs, but it’s never been her Nazareth.
She watched them searching, searching, always searching. Fingertips outstretched, over tops of towers and along fog-lush streetlamps.
Happiness created in their belief. Even if they find it, what they think is it, and cup it in their hands - it will wither before their eyes.
Some things are simply meant to stay where they are. But not her.
She remembers sitting at a plain writing desk, when Dom asked a question. An innocuous one, she is sure, though she can’t recall it exactly.
He had been standing in the doorway, hand on the frame, leaning in. And she had looked at him, tired expression, shoulders curved downward.
“I have to get out of here, Dom. Please understand that.”
A kiss, warm and dry, pressed to her mouth. A quiet acquiescence.
Leaving behind protestations and a mother’s coldness, they fell into a continent an ocean away.
+
“Los Angeles?”
“What’s there to think about?”
“It’s Paris in a different skin.”
“So we’ll peel it all off and do things our way. Nostri generis, Mallorie.”
+
There is the being and then the having.
She once thought the two were separate from one another.
But a long stare at the wooden nooks and beams of their new enclosure makes her think twice. Reconsider.
A singular dinner and beer. The faint stirrings of night just beyond glass doors.
She pulls down long sleeves and presses a cuff to her mouth, staring blankly at the television.
Dom comes home with a silver briefcase - on loan, he says - and places it under the bed.
She can’t sleep, knowing it’s there, and returns to the couch. Watches infomercials until she closes red-rimmed eyes against the light of dawn.
+
A slim band of titanium rests on the kitchen counter.
She picks it up after drying her hands.
Turns it over and over, though its features have long been committed to memory.
+
Late evening, exhausted after a night of affected elegance at an academic soiree, they sit in silence.
A tear in the hem of her black velvet dress, a cut from a crushed wine glass. It had not been her best performance.
Unspoken concern, from Dom.
“I’m going to go wash up,” she says, voice worn down.
“I’ll go with you.” A little too loudly.
Hesitation, before she inclines her head. A tired smile.
They shower together, heads bowed. Breathing softly against bare skin.
Allowing steam clouds of heat to waft between them instead of words.
+
She doesn’t tell him that she still has natural dreams.
Sometimes color, sometimes monochrome. Sometimes quiet, sometimes violent.
Years of poring over texts and research can’t teach her how to unravel the entanglements of her own mind.
There’s nothing more disconcerting, she thinks, than to know there are parts of herself even she cannot access.
That night: images of collapsing highways, bodies strewn around her. The exsanguination of everything thrown into the sharp relief of greyscale.
Doesn’t understand why it feels like it’s her fault, because she knows it’s not. But she screams in grief anyway, and begs for mercy, kneeling in front of each corpse.
In the morning: wakes up exhausted and lies in bed a minute longer, looking but not seeing. Eventually, she gets up to start her morning routines.
If Dom notices that she takes longer than usual, he doesn’t say it.
+
Her expression causes a tremble to start from the base of his spine. She seems too distant, too far from what he knows.
“I have to go away…for a while.” She looks past him and continues faintly. “Maybe a few months.”
He sits down, hands braced heavily on his knees.
“I don’t-” A sigh. “I don’t know what goes on in your mind sometimes, Mal. But if you tell me, maybe we could-”
“It’s nothing that I can explain. It’s something within that I need to deal with.” Her face remains pale and studiously blank.
“Within.” He frowns slightly. “Does this have anything to do with the PASIV?”
The settling of silence. The weight of different expectations, hovering.
An exhalation.
“No. Don’t blame yourself, Dom.” Brackets his face with slender hands, cold to the touch. Meets his eyes. “I’m not leaving you. You know that, right?”
“I know,” he says softly, voice barely audible. Lifts his head. “What about your work?”
She brushes fingers against his hairline. “It’s already been taken care of.”
+
At the edge of the driveway,
“Wait for me?”
“You already know the answer to that.” A hitch in breath, from the effort to tamp down a sob.
A beatific smile returned, no words of goodbye. Dark eyes reflected in the rearview mirror and the flash of tail-lights when she leaves.
He feels the slow burn of an ache, realizing that he has lost something, though he doesn’t know what.
+
She drives eastward. No destination in mind, no map on hand.
Only the hum of an engine that carries her along the vines of roads and highways.
The radio is left untouched.
+
When the gauge needle edges too close to E, she stops for gas. It isn’t the same name printed on her reward points card. But she doesn’t really have a choice there.
Heads into the small convenience store, staring at products washed out by overhead flourescents.
“Anything else, ma’am?” the young clerk says placidly.
She hasn’t eaten for a day, but the line-up of candy bars and flavored gums in front of her induces a kind of faint nausea.
“No, thank you.”
Pays the bill and leaves, the tinny ring of the doorbell causing her to wince.
+
She prefers driving at night, despite the steady wave of bright lights that leave faint halos wavering in her vision.
The world outside her four doors seems quieter. Less urgent.
Sleep has become something of an uninvited guest. When it drops in and lethargy slows her thinking, she takes the nearest exit ramp.
Parks and hides anywhere with a substantial number of cars. Curls up in the backseat and rests, face turned into the seat cushions.
Awareness of days and weeks slips out of reach, as if caught fast in blind spots, unable to escape.
+
Lank and uncurled without sheen, her hair hangs down, drifting in no direction.
She’s leaning her elbows on the edge of the bar, measured breaths causing strands to flutter and still.
A glass with faint circles of dishwash residue doesn’t deter her from draining the whiskey in one neat go.
Secondhand smoke drifts into her airways, but she can’t be bothered.
A neon sign hanging above mirrored glass flickers erratically.
It draws attention away from huddled bodies who don’t want it.
“Another.”
“Look, lady-”
“Don’t even start. Here, twenty for one fucking shot. You won’t get that from anyone else.” She slams down on Andrew Jackson’s face to make her point. Then slides it across insistently.
The bartender reaches over and pockets the bill without a word. Pours heady liquid once more, avoiding the sharpness in her eyes.
+
The reflection of herself in the glass refrigerator door is startling, and maybe that’s the reason for all the strange looks cast in her direction.
Self-consciously, she brushes her hair back behind her ears and wipes ineffectually at the black circles beneath her eyes.
Grabs stacks of microwavable meals without looking at them and quickly makes her way to the checkout line.
A child tearing up the aisles with a toy shopping cart nearly trips her, and she has to shut her eyes to stave off a sudden sense of vertigo.
Out. She has to get out of here.
With a trembling hand, she passes a fifty to the cashier and snaps up the bag as she leaves, ignoring the confused cry about change.
Nearly gets hit by an SUV as she rushes forward, and finally breathes when she shuts herself inside her car, shoulders hunching inward.
She leans against the wheel, shaking, fingers clenched tight around peeling leather. Lets out a choked sound and cries silently, in the middle of the parking lot.
+
The motel is a decent one, the kind that looks like it at least repaints walls every so often.
She wonders if she looks like a divorcee, or a discarded girlfriend, with her unkempt appearance and beat-up grey car.
But the receptionist barely spares a glance before counting the cash and letting her know she’ll be staying in room 262.
“Where am I?” she asks, her palm closing over the key.
The girl stares at her, brows furrowed, and points to a laminated map tacked onto the wall beside the desk counter.
Once in front of it, she traces a finger over the smooth surface, like it’s not in her to believe. Has she really come this far?
“Don’t burn the place down.”
The sudden imperative causes her to step back instinctively.
“What?”
The receptionist pointedly raises an eyebrow at the plastic bag of Lean Cuisines in her hand.
“I wouldn’t do that.” A faint reply.
Offhand shrug. “It’s been known to happen.”
Later, when she sits cross-legged on the dust cover, holding a steaming casserole, she realizes she never bought any forks.
+
She meanders along the balcony, barefoot, just to see what sun-warmed concrete feels like.
Eyes down and on the lookout for stray tetanus-laden nails, she nearly misses the presence of a stranger.
A man who reeks of diesel and sweat sidles up, throwing nervous looks around him. The smell of desperation; the call of the lonely.
“Uh,” he mutters. “How much? I gotta tell you, I only have maybe fifty or so-”
She stares, as she concludes that this is exactly what it sounds like. Then breaks out in laughter, doubled over until she can’t make a sound, tears stinging her eyes.
The man takes his hands out of his pockets and stammers out apologies while backing away.
She decides now is probably as good a time as any to check out.
Heading back to the lot, she overhears the propositioner, who is huddling in a pay phone booth.
(“Hey, I never sai- no, no. I mean, is fifty not enough? It used to be.”)
Slanting an elbow against the car window, she presses her head into the heel of her hand and turns to hide a grin.
+
A traffic jam, lanyard-thin lines of immovable cars that stretch past the point of tension.
The frustration of the afflicted has ebbed into a weary sentience. A lifetime of waiting, or so it feels.
She breathes out a sigh into the crook of her arm, currently angled atop the steering wheel.
Then kicks off her shoes and pivots to stretch her legs out across the passenger seat.
Leans against the headrest and shifts to curve the side of her body against the mold.
With a patience she knows is finite, she succumbs to the temporary interlude.
+
She swerves sharply to avoid the wavering semi, its driver drunk with either sleeplessness or moonshine.
“Shit! Fucking piece of shit.”
Her knuckles are bone-white, and she can’t help envisioning skull fragments and limbs broken beyond repair.
Wills her heartbeat down and leans her head back, as she regains her calm.
Merges her mind slowly back into the stream of passengers, who follow each other without knowing where the rest are headed.
+
The road, once black, has faded to a sun-bleached charcoal. Yellow warnings, no longer bright with purpose, seem resigned to the endlessness of their days.
Far ahead, flickering behind waves of heat, two trees on either side. Together with the long curve of asphalt, a grinning face.
You are not closer than you appear to be, she thinks. What makes you so happy?
As the car hurtles down the empty and infinite stretch, embers somewhere in her core begin to wake. The corona of the sun encouraging them to rise.
Unconsciously, she turns toward the warmth of beams piercing through the windows. Allows it to suffuse her skin. Seep beneath it. If only for a while.
This is a strange place.
The etch of a smile along the curve of her lips. There’s nothing to stop her from drifting between lanes.
She closes her eyes and releases the wheel. Lets the accelerator fly.
+
The megachurch is white, as all megachurches are.
More so, in its emptiness.
She hadn’t been to church in…a while. Much less one so close to the freeway.
A slant-eyed glance at a larger-than-life cross, held aloft in center stage by chains nailed in roofbeams.
It draws her eyes to the massive vaulted ceiling, designed in an all-purpose gothic manner.
Her hand drifts unthinkingly to the worn bindings of a King James edition, before she catches herself and draws it back.
It never stops being about choice. That’s what it all comes down to, is what someone told her once.
She wraps her arms tightly around herself and backs into a wall lined with switches.
A recording blasts out, voice deep and ground-shaking in the vastness of the space.
“Trust in Him, for He had said, ‘I am with you always.’”
The words seem to cascade across and over pews, overwhelming her, even from a distance.
She exits in haste, doors closing behind her without a sound. Shields her eyes from the sudden glare of light.
Breathes hard and swallows down the bile that threatens to rise.
She leans against the side of the building, bent over until she is sure she isn’t going to pass out.
Counts seconds carefully before pushing herself away from the wall, and angrily wipes off the residue left behind on her hand.
+
Low hushes of thunder in the canopy of the sky. Agitated winds pull frantically at her hair, crying leave, leave.
She huddles into her coat and stares at vicious waves the color of steel, tipped white, lashing again and again at unmoving rocks.
Had never been to the coast of Maine before, and it feels like she’s standing at the edge of the world.
Escape, some might call it. But only to those who are running away, trying to leave the notion of self behind.
There exist hundreds of thousands of words in all the languages she knows. None come to mind for the pull she feels.
It is neither the need to seek nor the need to flee. It is not made of external means or ends. Of that much, she is certain.
Dark clouds swell to mask the shadows of gulls, and the air grows sharp.
She looks behind her to see tall pine trees bow fearfully, as if to say, we are no-one.
The rasping of dry knuckles against cloth, and she moves to leave, head inclined in deference.
The car sits in the distance, quiet and compliant in its age. Covered in thin layers of dust that flies from ivory cliffs.
+
She orders a cup of black coffee at the diner, and uses the pay phone by the bathroom to place a call.
A number, nearly forgotten in the wake of timeless days upon days.
“Dom, it’s me.” Glances at a fading clock on the wall. “I’m coming home.”
+
When she rings the doorbell, as if it isn’t her house, she hears the clatter of a chair knocked over.
The frantic swing of hinges, and Dom is there - wide eyed, relief flooding into his gaze.
She smiles weakly and, and-
Hadn’t realized just how much she missed him, until warm arms clutch her close, in love, in fear.
It hurts when she breathes, and she wishes they didn’t have to move from this moment. That it could be buried in sands, protected by an immortal capsule.
A suspended space where only the two of them exist, unbound by time.