(A piece of short fiction I've been working on. Hopefully, this posting will foster further ideas and directions for these characters. What's happened? What's happening next? I'm looking forward to finding out.)
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They met up again, under the bridge this time. There was no other place as familiar anymore. Tension now twisted her everywhere, warping her sense of comfort and ease. There were no more easy moments left in her life, no sense of stillness. Only constant movement, as though she were being spun around, caught in a centrifugal force, her stomach perpetually afloat.
The rain had been intermittent for most of the day. On her walk over, along the cracked sidewalks and wild grasses, the skies began to darken. She caught herself being comforted by this, which surprised her. Perhaps it was the air swelling with potential, and the sure arrival of that potential. She thought of the ease of nature, to shift into its next state, not worried about its outcomes, its savage powers of equilibrium.
...
Safe beneath the bridge, they watched the rain come down on either side in curtains of white and grey. There were dark smells down there: piss and mildew, the rawness of the river, the scent of wet pavement from above. His smell cut through it all. His sweat still clinging, the cool air chilling his skin. She ran her hand along the rising bumps on his arm, put her nose in the crook of his neck. Her finger and thumb loosely gripped his wrist.
...
"How long have you been here?" she whispered.
"Not long," he replied. "I thought I had been early, but I guess you were too."
"I was looking at the time all along, but I found myself lost in it. The hands of my watch weren't making sense...like I had forgotten what they meant."
"Like when you say a word over and over again?"
"Yeah...kind of. Though it's not like I was trying to make sense of them. I knew when I was going to come, like how I sometimes wake just before my alarm clock. You ever done that?"
"Not for a while, not since everything's changed."
The sheets of water were breaking up now. Her head on his shoulder, she watched the dappled patterns of rain upon the river rocks. Fat raindrops and their chaotic spray, water leaping into the air, water coming down.
"I don't have many patterns left either," she said, placing her nose back into the crook of his neck. "It used to happen to me so often. 5:59 on the dot, just enough time to reach over and hit the button before it could screech at me."
He laughed and she could feel him smiling: an interruption in his gentle strokes, up and down, between her shoulder blades.
"Leaving the house to come here--it was a like a notch in my day...My days now so much like dreams. Stepping out of my door not because my watch told me to, but because the time finally slid into place and I slipped on my shoes."
I love this James!
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