BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! | ODIS WEFF ONESHOTS

IDEOLOGY OF PERCEPTIVITY--PT. I

//odis and rabbi content, hints of mike milligan and his corruption, and attic rooms.

━ IN WHICH RABBI OCCUPIES TWO ATTICS AND WEFF CANNOT DISCERN A JOKE

December 6, 1950

Kansas City, MO.

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It smelled like old glass, like the hints of beer or chocolate left behind, ghosts of some ancillary moment, some throwaway detail, some mug banged down against a crowded dining room table. Fabric stores should not smell like glass. Antiques smelled like glass, not needles and thread, calico and leather. Odis inspected, where he thought he was out of sight, the lining of his glove, stitched in black, medium thickness and messy. There was a hole tracing along the base of the thumb. The second finger of the opposite glove was scorched. It would annoy him, the two being impaired instead of just the burnt one.

But they were, in all honesty, his favorite gloves, and the leather would stretch back from where it would be tight with new stitching.

He was looking for a close enough match to the original thread when there came the harrowed creak of the door, and the following waiting silence. Being on the other side of the room, in the back, obscured by tables and boxes, he didn't particularly care to look up until the newcomer stepped nearer, and nearer, and stopped across the table.

Odis did not know Rabbi Milligan's first name. Perhaps he had been told it once, or he had heard it without meaning to, but now he just thought of him as a particularly sorrow-eyed man with fine hair and a shadowed look about his face in the way there were indistinct smudges on solid-colored objects.

(After Ardennes Odis'd had a period of visual incoherence, and auditory distraction, and general paranoia in which objects sometimes, around the edges, grew dark and blurred and distinct in their melting [which was the most manageable part of the experience]. The way Milligan's face was shadowed was like that. It was there but it wasn't but one could see it but one couldn't describe it.)

They did not look at each other. They were not supposed to look at each other longer than one or two seconds, that was the rule. Everyone was supposed to avoid each other, really, but when one was bid to retrieve another one did not look too long. Pass, circle back, inspect some other piece of the setting. But right now there was no layered look, no excuse. Odis retreated to the opposite corner and watched Milligan pluck up one small spool of red thread and leave and Odis watched from his inferior position, at an angle through the window, the figure walk down the street without a glance back. There was no message.

There was always a strange, melted quality between them. The knowledge that they were similar in universal ways. Neither deserved what they had gotten: for better or for worse. They could've, perhaps on one or two occasions, sat down and murmured anecdotes and incomprehensible questions over whiskey. It had never happened. There was something new and indicative in Odis's string of predicaments; something old and terse in Milligan's.

They had always just stared at each other the way each did everyone: with singular purpose, with outward distance.

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"So what I'm hearing is," Josto said as though Odis were trying to trick him, something he had no reason to do, "you think Cannon's to blame here."

There was a lot of responsibility in that statement; "I dunno." Odis leaned both hands onto the back of the overstuffed red chair. He thought of removing his gloves to touch the patterned roses in vertical lines stretching over it, but stopped himself. "You-You-You know the last thing I wan'ed was t' start any shit, but..."