As the afternoon started to threaten to slide right into evening, Motes took her leave and left A Finger Pointing and Beholden on the couch, canoodling. Clearly that had taken precedent over whatever they had had planned at the auditorium for the rest of the day. That they had come home for her, for Motes, was the base of that warmth that had begun to grow within her.
She made her way out of the house and wandered to the center of the neighborhood. She left the automatic chalk lines going, letting them be the fuel that propelled her forward, left their flowering shapes fit into this perception of herself as a flower child rather than simply a child, a gentle reframing that allowed her to have this thing, this gentle goodness.
The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a ‘U’ that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street — in accessible to anyone who was unwelcome — sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve most commonly performed at. Just homes and beloved workplace dropped into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
-In the bowl of the ‘U’ sat all of the common areas. A pool — one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seeing a hundred as easily as an Olympic pool — a few tennis courts for the few — who? — who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills — everyone had a favorite — for cook outs, a “community center” which had long ago turned into a movie theatre-cum-cuddlepit…
+In the bowl of the ‘U’ sat all of the common areas. A pool — one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seeing a hundred as easily as an Olympic pool — a few tennis courts for the few — who? — who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills — everyone had a favorite — for cook outs, a “community center” which had long ago turned into a movie-theater-cum-cuddlepit…
And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the ‘U’ sat a playground. What was initially intended to be Motes’s haunt, hers and her friends, had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one’s face beyond even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
It was not dark now.
There, on the swings, sat a child, a girl, looking to be perhaps twelve or thirteen with brown hair cut into an unruly bob, pale skin shining in the sun, swaying lazily back and forth as she faced away from Motes. She looked mostly down, skidding the heels of her shoes through the gravel beneath the swings, scooping the pebbles out of the way and then smoothing them back into place with her toes.
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@Perhaps she ought to hug Dry Grass extra-tight next time she saw her.