04-08-2025, 01:41 PM
Pause. Regroup.
Near shakes his head slightly, eyes narrowed and mouth cramped into a lopsided frown as he arranges the pieces of this exchange thus far in order and reviews them one by one like trying to decode a sentence spoken too quickly in a half-familiar language.
After a few tries he’s able to conclude that the words make sense syntactically. Come with me as a request, not a hostage-taking demand. And: tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. Not now. Whatever has triggered this is not, then, an emergency. Or it is one of Jude’s slow-moving emergencies, like his end of the world. Not with a bang, but – Still, it all fails to connect in the way that Near’s brain needs it to to craft a coherent response. After the last time they were together, and the time before, an invitation to give it another go seems like the worst idea either of them could come up with. Perhaps it is a strange Jude-ese idiom he’s never heard before, which literal translation will never serve. But what other methods of interpretation are there to try?
Back in – probably – elementary school, everyone learned the however-many Ws of journalism. He has already covered what and when. Who feels intuitive enough, barring surprises. That leaves –
“Why?” he asks, still hopelessly confused. If he sounds like he suspects that underneath it all is a trap waiting to be sprung, that’s because he does. “And where?” (An afterthought. “Come with me” is vague enough to mean feet or miles or anything, really.)
Somewhere on the street-side a car alarm begins blaring.
Near shakes his head slightly, eyes narrowed and mouth cramped into a lopsided frown as he arranges the pieces of this exchange thus far in order and reviews them one by one like trying to decode a sentence spoken too quickly in a half-familiar language.
After a few tries he’s able to conclude that the words make sense syntactically. Come with me as a request, not a hostage-taking demand. And: tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. Not now. Whatever has triggered this is not, then, an emergency. Or it is one of Jude’s slow-moving emergencies, like his end of the world. Not with a bang, but – Still, it all fails to connect in the way that Near’s brain needs it to to craft a coherent response. After the last time they were together, and the time before, an invitation to give it another go seems like the worst idea either of them could come up with. Perhaps it is a strange Jude-ese idiom he’s never heard before, which literal translation will never serve. But what other methods of interpretation are there to try?
Back in – probably – elementary school, everyone learned the however-many Ws of journalism. He has already covered what and when. Who feels intuitive enough, barring surprises. That leaves –
“Why?” he asks, still hopelessly confused. If he sounds like he suspects that underneath it all is a trap waiting to be sprung, that’s because he does. “And where?” (An afterthought. “Come with me” is vague enough to mean feet or miles or anything, really.)
Somewhere on the street-side a car alarm begins blaring.