To glimpse another

or, a fragment of Precipice

A further slice of Precipice has been carved into the page.

If this is your first time here (Hi! 👋) then these posts are each a piece of a larger story, ones that will be some day woven together into a whole. I hope …

Everything so far can be found in that link above, should you wish to venture there. It's non-linear, so you can dip in and out.

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Having walked the streets and alleys of Siridan, Jisa and Cloud find themselves in a darkened bar, exchanging words in a necessary moment—a prelude of what will come to pass.

That’s my episode synopsis for this fragment. Entirely spoiler-free! And by episode I mean the chunk of text that is inscribed below, written almost exclusively to Rüfüs du Sol’s Innerbloom¹ on repeat. There’s something about that track—an artist and genre I rarely listen to—that stirs something within. Even though it has lyrics, they become distant enough that my brain doesn’t latch onto them as I type.

I love the intensity in this. I can feel it. It seems Midjourney can feel it, too.

16 minute read?! Heck no. [Closes app. Deletes email]².

Yes, so I’ve fretted over the length of this and whether or not to cut it in two. There’s no good spot, though. It’s unhalveable. So it’s here in full. I hope you’re OK with that. Settle in, perhaps with a Shiraz in hand, swirling the deep red as you weave into the scene and let it play out.

///

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In the near-darkness, Cloud turns his drink with an absent fondness.

Together, we are alone. Almost alone. Between us, brooding like the charged atmosphere before a storm, something hangs palpable and tangible, as though ready to be touched.

We had danced a small dance of uncertainty when we sat, laughing as we took our place. But I like it this way, letting things draw out. I will move to that other side and next to him, I am sure. That time will come. I will stand, slink off to go pee—and maybe whilst there I will drop some rush, scoop it out of the packet I keep tucked within my hood, inhaling quickly and letting it flood me with brilliance—and when I return I will shuffle up to him, and let what will happen, happen.

But not yet. I can wait these moments longer. There are questions. Words and answers yet spoken.

We have said little until now. Small, insignificant chatter, aided and encouraged by the rootdrop that pervades the air, the motions of a routine alien but already so natural. It has been the soft and idle talk of long friends. Easy talk. That is what it is: easy talk. I don’t have to think or scowl or drift with boredom, wishing I was elsewhere. This is someone with whom I feel calm in the quiet gap of no-talk, yet can so easily stir up new strands of conversation, pulling them from my mind like twine or accepting them from him to be woven into my own consciousness.

Now, though, we have shifted. Our conversation moves to new grounds, flowing forward on its path like a current tugging on a boat unable to be swayed by the efforts of its crew.

“Tell me,” I say, the final sip of hot zirosh thrumming in my throat. I catch the attention of Juke, motioning for two more, then my eyes cast down to my hands, pausing there for a few short seconds, analysing the pattern etched along the inside of my right forearm. The engraved ink swirls to the base of my palm, mirroring the way thoughts swirl in my mind. I stare a little longer, then look up and lock my eyes back into his.

“Why didn’t you want Zinn to know?” It is an obvious lead-in of a question, but I ask it anyway.

He scratches at his chin, the stubble there a black shadow in the low light. “We needed to talk. Alone. Zinn would complicate things, he’d ask too many questions. I,” he pauses, swallows air, “I didn’t want him here. He’d be the fool, much as I love him.”

I nod. “He’s a fuckwit. Much as I love the guy.” And at this we both release a short little laugh, as though even in these few moments we had built up a pressure that required venting.

Silence falls back between us, cut only by the ambient synth that plays throughout the bar. I shift sideways in my seat, press my back against the wall. The slow and steady pulse of deep bass whomps against my spine—an unwavering, second heartbeat. I pull my legs in, hug my knees and dare to speak, almost not uttering the words, almost biting them back so as to not say them aloud. But they come out anyway, in a soft, whispered croak. “You got me alone.”

Secret, guarded words—an exchange, a contract forming—and as I hear my words a wave of something sweeps through my body, settling itself to sit heavy in my lungs.

“I do,” Cloud says, looking at me, lips a fraction apart. “Part of this,” he motions between us, “part of it … I need you to know that this is dangerous. What we are asking of you. What I’m asking of you.”

I scoff, an automatic thing I immediately hate. “All jobs are dangerous. I’ve done a thousand dangerous jobs.”

Cloud nods, smiling in spite of my arrogance. “Yes,” he says. “But this one. I worry. I—” and instead of speaking his eyes ask their own questions in the darkness. They move along my body and across my knees still tucked to my chest, down my legs. There they pause, and I can feel them as readily as though his searching gaze had fingers, tendrils that could ignite. And then in a flash those eyes are back on mine. In mine.

“What do you know of Zinn and I?” he asks.

“You and Zinn?” I laugh, thrown by this new question. “Nothing. You are Zinn’s great mystery. You must know that?”

“I do,” he says, smiling. “But I wanted to be sure. To see what you do know.”

I make a zero with my finger and thumb, holding it up to eye level. “Zip,” I say, reasserting my point. “You’re going to tell me? This is why you didn’t want him here? Am I going to finally find out who the great Cloud is?” I look around with frustration for where Juke is with our drinks, but catch him still bent over the bar.

“Something like that,” Cloud says as a couple walk in and down the steps, settling into a recess two away from us. It is dark enough that soon their faces become nothing but shifting smudges, yet their mere presence—their intrusion—bothers me.

I turn back to Cloud. “You like that phrase.”

“Something like that,” he repeats.

I want to speak. I want to say a hundred things and do a thousand more. I want to smile and pick the near-melted ice out of my empty glass and throw it at him, jump over the table and land next to him; I want to motion to the spot next to me and pull him into me; I want to stand and take him from this place to somewhere darker, somewhere infinitely alone.

Instead, I settle on freeing my legs and hooking a toe into his shin.

“Hey!” he exclaims. “What was that for?”

I shrug, stick my tongue out. “For being an idiot. Continue though, please. Do keep talking.”

Now it is Cloud squinting, eyelids two fissures in the earth of his face. And below those eyes, as always, his smile. Higher now on the right than the left, it is a private smile; for me and no-one else.

I shudder, but whether Cloud notices or not I don’t know, as Juke is here now next to us, sliding another two drinks along the table. He takes the empty glasses, looks at us both, says nothing, then walks away towards the couple who arrived moments before.

“I’m ready,” I say. “Spit.”

Cloud steeples his fingers under his chin. “So demanding already,” he says, coy voice, sly smile.

He coughs, rights himself as though he were about to give some speech.

“Zinn and I grew up together,” he begins. “Brothers, in all but blood. Probably not much different to how the two of you see each other—pseudo-siblings, I mean. Least, that’s what I can gather.” He raises an eyebrow for affirmation, and I nod. I could tell him it’s true, how it grew so rapidly to be that way with Zinn, how we fight like siblings, share all (almost all) with each other like siblings, seem to love each other unconditionally like siblings. But I don't. Not now. I just wait and listen.

“We met when I was eight. Zinn was seven, turning eight. A little unlikely, perhaps. My parents were wealthy; strong ties between upper and lower. We lived in Sinju district. His were, well … not so wealthy.”

Again I nod. I could add that Zinn’s older brother—half-brother, if we’re to get technical—was imprisoned for something at age 13, sullying their name and forever tying their family to Siridan; that his own father left before Zinn could say Papa and his mother turned to whoring herself in Jont just to put food in Zinn’s mouth (“She put things in her mouth, little squirrel, so she could put things in my mouth”—Zinn’s own words). I could even add with blunt bitterness that at least Zinn had some semblance of parents, that he could find his own father if it so willed him. Not that it ever has. I could say all this, but still I keep silent, letting Cloud go on.

He continues, telling me how it all started when he caught Zinn dismantling electronics at the back of a recycling lot. Cloud was there with his sister, playing hide and chase through one of the city’s many dumping grounds, scurrying through all the alleys of jumbled and broken equipment, transports, engines, endless things the city discarded all too easily. Cloud had slipped and skidded down a broken shuttle wing and when he had reached the edge, almost but not quite going right over, he looked down and saw Zinn.

“He was tearing this thing apart with incredible speed”, he says. “Undoing screws and snipping wires with swift little fingers, his head down, sneaking furtive glances as he worked.”

I cannot help but grin at the image of a boy Zinn doing this; doing an act he has carried into adulthood.

As it transpired, Zinn never spied Cloud, nor his sister once she’d carefully worked her own way down the wing to stand by her brother.

“Well, not until it was too late. We stood and watched for a few moments. I remember the way the rain slicked down that wing and poured over the edge. I remember thinking he was stupid for not looking up and seeing us. I remember a lot of things from that day.” Cloud pauses and stares at me before continuing, a longing look in his eyes. “Then my little sister,” he coughs again, taking a short sip and closing his eyes. “My little sister,” he smiles, eyes open again, “she crept up to me, cupping her little hands to my ear, and she whispered, ‘What is he doing?’”

And so Cloud just shouted out that very question. Zinn had jumped, looking left, then right, then finally up to see two young figures above him.

And that was all it took for it to begin, he tells me. Zinn talked his way into their hearts in a matter of minutes, as he is wont to do. As it turned out, Cloud let him continue this little act of theft, jumping down from the wing and then helping his sister. Within two minutes the relay—as Zinn informed them with total, and no doubt false, confidence—was dismantled, valuable components snatched and tucked away into a satchel he slung over his shoulder. They spent the rest of that day playing, the three of them, with Zinn professing his knowledge of every piece of scrap he laid his hands upon. Cloud and his sister—he doesn't mention her by name, I realise—lapped up Zinn's words like eager cats as they walked cluttered paths, until finally a patrol spotted them and they were shooed out.

“The next day, we met again. And then the day after.”

They continued to meet, and they played; they raced and chased their way through back alleys and across the dense myriad of Siridan’s streets, through recycling lots where Zinn would continue his illegal salvaging, through the shuttle networks, the hubs and transports, across the gangways and underbellies of the city, traversing the districts of wealth and poverty.

“We did all the things a growing group of friends did,” he tells me. “That time is a blur. We aged. But we aged together.” Cloud looks up, but I cannot catch what emotion lies hidden. He remains like that for some seconds, staring at me, his face absent of smile.

“It happened gradually, I suppose.”

“What?” I ask, attached to his words, this story. I fidget, glance at my drink and see that, like always, it is nearly empty. I would order a third, but Cloud’s is barely touched.

“Zinn and my sister,” he says, drawing me back.

Realisation dawns like clearing fog.

“You mean?”

“Yes.” Cloud picks up his glass and drinks, a long intake that he holds in his mouth before swallowing. “We were inseparable. But after a while I realised sometimes we weren’t. I was blind to it, at first, you know?”

Zinn has never spoken of this. Has never even mentioned Cloud has a sister. That they were … together.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—,”

“It was a sort of jealousy, I think,” he cuts in. “On both parts. My sister … I felt a strange thing, as though my bond with her was being torn, shredded. And Zinn,” Cloud looks down, clenching his jaw. “Asked to choose between the two of us, it would always be her. I began to know that.”

Cloud closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall.

“And then it just became a thing, a matter of fact,” he continues, eyes still closed. “It was never sealed through words; it was just sort of assumed, accepted. They tried to minimise it when they were around me. I suppose that was good of them,” he trails off.

I don’t know what to say, don't know what I can offer in response.

“Is it weird to be jealous of your own sister? To feel you’re losing a friend through love?”

I have no siblings and, try as I might, I struggle to understand, to know how it could feel. “I—”

“Sorry, that didn’t need an answer,” and Cloud leans forwards, makes as if to reach out to me, but I am too far on the other side and instead he ends up fondling my glass in an awkward manner, pretending it had been his intention all along. My lips curl into a small smile and he turns the glass twice before letting go and leaning back against the wall, eyes unmoving from mine.

“I was full of teenage jealousy back then. Their relationship grew. Mine—with both of them—seemed to dissipate. Become less important.”

“I’m sorry,” I manage.

“History. It’s history, I suppose. Maybe it doesn’t matter,” he trails off again.

I squint. “Why did you tell me that?” I lean a little forwards. “I don’t mean that to sound bad. It’s, I’m, I love that you told me. Really. I didn't know any of that.” I pause. That didn’t feel right. “I feel somewhat honoured, is what I mean. I—” and I shake my head, not really knowing how I should continue.

“Honestly?” he asks, looking at me and laughing.

I nod, give him permission.

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s that, well, after last night, after we talked over this errand we are asking of you, I felt somehow compelled to tell you. Like you had to know. I wanted you to know. But Zinn would’ve stopped me, cut me short.”

“I understand,” I say, feeling that something build within, that wave, the crest of it having formed.

Cloud takes a deep breath.

“Also,” is all he says.

“Also?” I ask, already sensing the words, the end of the sentence, the start of what it will open.

“Also,” he repeats, and now my heart thrums madly in my chest like the zirosh in my throat. This is idiotic, to feel this, but any rational, conscious thought is battened down by the chemicals that surge through me. Fuck this, I need no rush, I manage to think. Fuck this anticipation and dance of words and looks, gestures and tension. I need no rush, I think again, as I stand and shuffle out from my seat; as I walk, never once moving my eyes from his; as I lower myself onto the seat by his side, shuffle myself in and along; as I edge close to him, closer than I have ever been.

“Also,” I whisper, placing a finger on his lips, then move it to the point where that smile lives.

No more words, not now.

My finger trails along his cheek, his stubble the prickle of a million tiny needles.

Cloud doesn’t move. But as my hand unfurls and my fingers walk across that stubble, move down towards the nape of his neck to where my palm settles perfectly behind the back of his jaw, I feel his pulse racing against my skin. It beats against the flat of my hand like a miniature hammer.

I look into his eyes and they are dilated. Deep and accepting, the green diminished by expanding blackness.

Threads; that is all I manage to think. There are threads between our eyes, pulled taut. Threads that tethered us the moment we met. And finally—not-finally, for this has been so short—we are reeling them in, a slow handle turning in our minds until we get so close our eyes might touch.

We remain for one long moment, everything forgotten, the low beat of the synth the only sensation that reminds some unconscious part of my mind as to where I am.

Then I pull Cloud towards me that little bit more. The movement is gentle, easy, without restraint.

His fingers move along the shaved part of my hair, before he too pulls.

The reel turns. The thread winds in.

Our noses touch, skin on skin.

I can feel his breath on my face as his lips near mine, the beat of his heart ever-quicker against my palm.

His eyes—those green and inky pools—stare.

And I stare back.

This is right, is all I manage to think as my lips begin to part.

This is what I am meant to do.

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—x

Thank you, dear reader. I love that you’re here, finding the time to read this. That means a lot.

Was the Shiraz from Heathcote, Australia?

Your comments and thoughts are, as always, the sunshine that Jisa can only dream of.

1. Link, if you wish to pop it on. Possibly a splash of Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek, too. Gorgeous. PS thank you Brennan for the excellent The Deer Hunter track suggestion last week. I’ve listened to The Flame (Is Gone) many, many times since.

2. Obviously I hope you don’t :)