Last time it was winfry’s time to put his arm around a quivering and teary isa. Holding isa was like holding your most favorite stuffed animal from infancy, with a splash of sexual teasing. But like all wonderful things, isa eventually looked up. For a moment they smiled at each other and winfry foolishly felt he had to talk.
“So are there two quilaire? The one you have now and the one with your dead body? … Oh why did I just say that?! I’m so sorry, isa, so sorry. I’m so socially awkward. If I were normal, I would have said how sorry I was or at least tried to be comforting. Oh god. I am such an idiot.”
Contrary to winfry’s pained expression, the world was not falling over and in fact isa’s face slipped back into a smile. But winfry wouldn’t have even dared notice; he had pushed back in his chair, arms folded and still felt he was too invasively close to isa.
“You are too sweet mr. winster. You know that?” isa replied in a voice that should have warmed winfry up to himself if he weren’t so stubborn.
But when winfry did chance a glance to see isa smiling, he saw her smirking, in his eyes, which made both his eyebrows and self-esteem sink further.
isa, on the other hand, had regained at least some of her confidence and composure because she stretched out her fingers to winfry’s shoulder saying, “I’m serious winfry. You have certainly been extremely kind and comforting to me just now. Sincerely.”
When winfry first felt isa’s fingers on his shoulder he instinctively tensed but as she spoke, he eased up his eyebrows and let down his shoulders.
“Thank you. Thank you, winfry, for listening to my story, - for listening to my story without laughing in my face. Thank you for putting your arm around me.” For a split second, the two looked at each other’s lips before, isa continued, “And most of all, thank you, thank you for believing me.”
Wait. Did he believe her? My guess is that until just then that question never crossed his mind. But when he did think about it, he knew questioning his belief in her would have been like questioning why there is something rather than nothing, which is to say possible but a real mind-twister and an utterly futile one at that. But how did she know before he knew?
“How else? The quilaire.”
“You mean you’ve been reading my mind?!”
“Well, not exactly. Right now I am very much a novice, and a novice without an instructor at that. So I can’t really do much and it’s not so much mind-reading as seeing through time. Ever since we left the library, the idea that you would believe me nested in my brain. But it’s definitely not my own idea; it feels very foreign and I can never, well… yes, never completely accept what the quilaire puts in my mind.”
“So you can always distinguish between your thoughts and the quilaire’s?”
“I suppose so, if you can call what the quilaire does thinking, but it took me a about four months of dissociative fugue, before I started figuring it all out. From how you looked this week, I imagine you went through something similar this past week”
“You mean you had to deal with that for a month? Oh god. How did you not go insane?”
“Well, I was crazy… I… I lost it. It wasn’t until I met the first, well third, person I was sent to help and I finally convinced myself that I was a guardian angel that I started to regain a bit of sanity. I mean that’s what my parents thought I was but it is only now that I can recognize how much I helped them. At the time it was too traumatic to latch onto anything.”
Of course winfry’s head was a buzz of questions all trying to fly out, but he was actually much more socially adept than he gave himself credit. Instead of falling into that inquisition, he leaned in, took isa’s hands in his and said, “isa, I’m so sorry for everything you’ve had to go through. Even knowing I would believe you, it must have been extremely stressful to tell me all this. Thank you. Thank you for trusting me. I’m honored; really I am. And please know… please know that I care a lot about you, isa, and, and that you can tell me whatever you want to get off your chest.”
isa looked up into winfry’s eyes and this time he did not feel he had to talk. Maybe the quilaire was helping, maybe.
“Well, I’m sure you must have a zillion questions for me. What else would you like to know?”
“Well, hmm, where to start? Well, how similar is you quilaire to the ones in the phylanx saga? Do you have to eat with your quilaire? Is your stratus in the sphere of the psyche, the physique or the temporal? Will you die if you lose your quilaire? … Sorry that was a lot.”
“Don’t worry about it. I get annoyed with people who aren’t curious. I suppose my quilaire is like a cousin to those in the phylanx; there’s some overlap but it has quite a lot of its own unique quirks. So I don’t have to eat with it (having it around my neck seems to be sufficient); it never talks to me; it doesn’t absorb moonlight; I’m actually able to divine, not very well, but still a little bit, in all three spheres; and I’m not planning to find out what happens if I lose it.”
At this point even if winfry remembered the rest of his tea it was far to cold to drink.
“So what kinds of things can you do? How did you figure it out? Has anyone ever seen you?”
“Well, like I said before I can’t do very much right now and I don’t exactly know how I figured what I can do out. Generally, the first time I do something new, I have to have a very strong need for it – like, when I was having severe menstrual pains in the woods and really needed ibuprofen, yeah… I was crazy remember. Anyways I just do whatever it is without thinking and I can sort of remember how I did it afterwards and then I try to retrace my steps and do it again. Sometimes it takes months for me to refigure something out, like changing other people’s minds, but other times it only takes a few seconds (controlling earth elements was practically instantaneous) . And please don’t ask me how I do any of it because I have no idea how to explain that. So like I said, I’m really good at getting earth elements to do what I want, like creating quicksand, causing minor earthquakes, bending trees and…” isa picked up the vase with a wilting tulip, glanced around her shoulders and stared at the poor flower. And slowly, slowly the flower picked up its head, smoothed out its wrinkles and redid all of its make-up: complete rejuvenation.
After recovering from the magical realism and closing his mouth, winfry chuckled. “That’s pretty cool. I’m sure it would be real popular at parties, granted I don’t go to many of those, but that’s kind of the point… What else can you do?”
Surprisingly, isa seemed to follow winfry’s sense humor which is saying something because I still don’t get it, and I’m winfry’s maker. So she was grinning when she responded, “well, I can sometimes see through time and space but I still can’t really do that on command. Everything else I can do is a lot more shaky than my earth bending. I can also do some stuff with wind, air, fire and light. And I can dabble in the sphere of the psyche, like changing people’s minds, but don’t worry not yours,” she must have seen winfry’s face drop, “and seeing people’s souls, which is really hard to explain by the way. And I guess lastly, I can create things out of nothing but that’s extremely exhausting. The best I’ve managed is a necklace and I had to take a 12 hour nap to recover. So I guess that about sums up all I can do.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of things to keep track of. So I guess I’m back to my first question, which you probably can’t answer but I’m still curious; are there two quilaire?”
“I honestly have never thought about that. I’d guess that there’s only one quilaire that transported itself to my new body and I don’t know why I said new body because I don’t really know about the body thing either. But that’s what I’d guess, I guess.”
Actually, she was completely correct. And this is one of the things I actually know. You see it was one of my personal curiousities. To make a long story short, I found out that at isa’s wake there was much commotion caused by the mysterious disappearance of her quilaire. Moreover, in pictures I recovered of isa, she had a mole on the left side or her neck, which my sources say caused her much distress during her early adolescence. Curiously the isa winfry knew had no moles on her neck. So my conclusion, from this and other quilaire lore, is that isa’s soul fled into the quilaire before her body died. Once inhabiting the quilaire she was able to use it to transported herself, during her wake, into the stratus where she reformed her body and then swam back to reality. My conclusion is flawless.
“So, what are you supposed to be helping me with?”
“I was hoping you would be able to tell me. It doesn’t really matter, it’s probably better if I find out myself because generally the help I give is different than what the people think they want. So even if you feel up to telling me what you need help with, it’s probably better if you keep it to yourself.”
isa looked back to see the owner returned to sweeping the front half of the room for the third time. “Well it looks like the owner is trying to close up. So we should probably head out.”
“Yeah I guess we should.” winfry looked out to see the dark street as he pulled on his tweed jacket. “I’ll walk you home, if you don’t mind. With all these murders in the news lately I don’t think we can be too cautious.”
“Thanks,” isa said as she finished buttoning her jacket and then leaned forward to take the flower out of the vase and put it in winfry’s jacket’s front chest pocket, “your such a gentlemen and these days they are such a rare commodity.”
And with that they left café luminot into twisty old frambigue alley.
Yeah, that first ending, from that last post, I lied.
What? Haven’t you learned to stop trusting me.
No comments:
Post a Comment