Waiting for Sunday

chapter 6 - a promise or close enough

"Why?" Lillie asks. "Do you know where it came from?"

Felix shakes his head. "It's just a curse as old as time."

"If it is a curse," Lillie says, "it's beautiful."

The word unsettles him, like it's a joke, like it's in a place it doesn't fit. He sits back again, gaze straight ahead. The parking lot they're in is mostly empty, a bleak expanse of gray asphalt, fringed by fields. "It's not," he says, and he's surprised at how staunch his own voice sounds. "I can't really see at all out of this eye, and rain follows me around everywhere. Believe me. If there was a way to get rid of it, I would. I'd do almost anything."

"What have you tried?"

"There's nothing to try," Felix says. "There's no way to get rid of it. No one ever has before."

She pauses for a long time, as if she's expecting him to elaborate. When he doesn't, she says, "What do you do for a living, Felix?"

"What?" he glances at her in confusion, perplexed as to how they made the jump from there to here. "I'm a researcher. Natural medicine, broadly speaking."

"That makes sense," Lillie says, and Felix pauses a second, unsure whether that's a good or bad thing. "Then you should know better than anyone that no one's ever done it before is not a good or even a logical reason to not try. They teach you all that science stuff starting in like, second grade. You have a question. You make a hypothesis. And then you experiment."

"That's grossly oversimplified."

"I disagree. I've just cut out the bullshit."

Felix looks at her squarely this time. He expects her to flinch—even his own siblings flinch when he looks at them without his eyepatch on—but her face is still calm, as still as the glass surface of a pond. "Something doesn't make sense to me," he admits. "We're strangers, practically, and yet you've accepted all this like it's nothing. Then you make a big deal about trying to, what, break this curse—which by this point is centuries old, maybe older than that. What's going on, Lillie? What's in it for you?"

He has her. He can see it in the way her expression changes, the smallest of shifts, worry a small dot of ink bleeding onto the page of her eyes. She seems smaller then, shrunken beneath the weight of something. Felix softens his voice. "Oh God," he exhales. "There really is something going on, isn't there?"

"I think it started the night of my reading," Lillie confesses, her eyes low, trained down at her feet. "I don't know why, but lately...the things I write in my poetry, the images I describe, the metaphors I create, whatever—they're actually coming into existence."

Felix keeps looking at her, his shoulders turned in her direction even as something deep in his body wants to pull away. Perhaps if it were someone else it would be a joke, some tone deaf poke at his outrageous existence, but not Lillie. He doesn't know how he knows, but he does. "What?" he asks. He coughs, clears his throat. "What exactly does that mean?"

Instead of answering, Lillie pushes a soft little breath through her teeth and drags her purse up onto her lap, digging around inside of it. A moment later she pulls out what looks like a jagged shard of glass, like the remnants of a shattered mirror.

"You might remember from one of the poems I read," Lillie says, gesturing at Felix to hold out his hand. When he does, she places the glass upon his palm, whispering to be careful with its sharp edge. "I talked about rain slicing something, I believe. The next morning, my brother found this next to my bed."

Slowly, Felix's gaze shifts from Lillie's wary face down to the stone in his hand. Through the constant fog of the storm swirling about his vision he must squint to see it, but once he does it's like his breath stops in his chest and for that moment he is simply existing rather than breathing.

"Lillie," Felix starts, before he knows the rest of what he's about to say. "I—"

"Don't," she says. "It's not—there have been other things. Terrible things. I can't keep doing this, Felix, and I don't know how it started or how to stop it."

The picture reveals itself to Felix then: stunning and clear, undeniable as his own reflection. "Lillie, you...you have to understand. Our situations aren't the same. Yours happened suddenly, didn't it? This curse—mine's been going on for years. The depths it reaches are much deeper. There's no way to know—"

"There's no way to know anything except for the fact that neither of us know anything, Felix. Something strange, something...I don't know, supernatural is going on here, and it might be related and it might not, but we can't figure that out by not doing anything," Lillie interrupts. She takes the stone back from him, dashing it in her purse again. "You won't even try? You're telling me you've never even thought about trying?"

Felix turns away then, facing out the window again, through which the sky is almost clear. He tries to picture it, a life without the storm, without the need to constantly hide it, but he can't. He can't even picture his own face without the eyepatch. It belongs to a stranger, not to him. "I don't think I can, Lillie."

Felix glances at her; her round eyes burn with intensity for a moment, something on the brink of explosion inside her, before the fierceness settles again just as suddenly. "Think about it," she says. "For a few days, just sit on it, sleep on it, whatever. Will you at least do that?"

At this point Felix thinks all he does is think and overthink and overthink again, his mind a steep and complicated terrain of thought he still doesn't know how to navigate. The idea of traversing it, and for something like this, is terrifying.

Still, there is something earnest in Lillie's expression that Felix hasn't really seen, not for a while. It looks like energy, like hope, and he must admit there is a big part of him that is craving it, that would hate to see it die.

Felix leans his head against the window. Outside, the rain has finally stopped. "Okay," he tells Lillie. "I'll think about it."