11-25-2019, 06:58 PM
He studied the packet Jude tossed onto the counter, then picked it up and tested its weight in his hand. Well. He would have come across it eventually, digging around a few days from now, after he had exhausted the supply of what was apparently edible but before he worked up the resolve to leave. He would have opened the package with tamped-down eagerness because the label was incomprehensible and it might be anything and been disappointed by what he found inside. So there, he’d been saved some trouble and a letdown.
The smell when he tore the top away was dark, grassy, herbal, related somehow to what he imagined was the smell of the undead gin in the front room. Surely Daddy was never a tea-drinker? There was something too effete about it, little cups and old English ladies knitting. While Near might profess a sincere appreciation for “effete” in a variety of circumstances, his father was not one of them; he preferred a sharp-edged, order-barking Courtland with his Wall Street Journal in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other.
“Generic anomaly, huh?” The water was heating, and the edge in his voice was wearing away. Not a word the kid said made any real sense; it was all this thin skin of recognizable vocabulary, standard syntax and matter-of-fact delivery draped over something lumberingly preposterous, Frankenstein’s monster in a T-shirt -- which was the same general formula for some of the shit he used to read in school. Whatever; exploring why the past or present or future would differ from … rewinding reality, say, was beginning to feel less imperative than avoiding what would count as significant, if that last thing had been a blip. (Easier if you just relax, right?)
“Where'd you come from, anyway?”
The smell when he tore the top away was dark, grassy, herbal, related somehow to what he imagined was the smell of the undead gin in the front room. Surely Daddy was never a tea-drinker? There was something too effete about it, little cups and old English ladies knitting. While Near might profess a sincere appreciation for “effete” in a variety of circumstances, his father was not one of them; he preferred a sharp-edged, order-barking Courtland with his Wall Street Journal in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other.
“Generic anomaly, huh?” The water was heating, and the edge in his voice was wearing away. Not a word the kid said made any real sense; it was all this thin skin of recognizable vocabulary, standard syntax and matter-of-fact delivery draped over something lumberingly preposterous, Frankenstein’s monster in a T-shirt -- which was the same general formula for some of the shit he used to read in school. Whatever; exploring why the past or present or future would differ from … rewinding reality, say, was beginning to feel less imperative than avoiding what would count as significant, if that last thing had been a blip. (Easier if you just relax, right?)
“Where'd you come from, anyway?”