pieces of one of my favorite short stories.
"...no matter the season or the weather. I've seen her barefoot in snow. I asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I brought her a pair and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes make her claustrophobic. I find her sitting there alone on the park bench near the old fountain, and I always ask before I sit down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of course you can sit with me. You can always sit with me.
...she smelled of fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odour that I have always associated with late October. Yes, she smelled of fallen leaves and her own sweat and, more faintly, something that I took to be wood smoke. Her breath was like frost against my skin, colder even than the long winter night. .....and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither understand nor recognize.
...and she's left me these strange dreams in return. I have begun to think of them as a sort of gift, though I know that others might think them more a curse. Because they are not entirely pleasant dreams.
...she has made me superstitious and given to what psychiatrists call "magical thinking", misapprehending cause and effect, when I was never that way before we met.
I play piano in a martini bar and, until now, there's never been anything in my life that I might mistake for magic. But there are many things in her wide burnt sienna eyes that I might mistake for many other things, and now that uncertainty seems to cloud my every waking thought."
-ode to edvard munch; Caitlin R. Kiernan
