N I N E S E C O N D S

-irishais-

"Did you know," she says with a cheerful grin on her face, "that dreams only actually last nine seconds?" Her words tumble in his ears like pitchy poetry, the sentence tripping over itself as it falls through his ear canal and rattles about in his skull.

(Nine seconds?)

He schools his voice into a vocal equivalent of a disaffected shrug, the tone easy with practice; he's had plenty of time to prepare it. "Really."

(Seventeen years, and all you get is nine seconds.)

She smiles and nods, taking a deep sip of iced coffee with too much sugar, the liquid colored so pale a brown that she may as well have just bought milk. "Yeah. Your brain shuts down for the rest of the night, and because the images are kind of...burned into your subconscious or something, you think the dreams last longer."

(Waste of time.)

"That's messed up."

"Nah, not really. We only use ten percent of our brains anyway, so it kind of makes sense. It's just kind of hard to comprehend."

He looks away as she swirls her straw into the ice, ignoring the dull clacking as the cubes smacked against plastic. She pauses at a lavish window display, eyeing a pair of shoes with mild interest before turning away from them and walking on.

Still, he isn't sure that he quite believes her, and lengthens his stride a bit to catch up. "I still say it's messed up. There's no way they can only last nine seconds."

(Seventeen years, nine seconds. The dream is gone in the blink of an eye.)

"I dunno. That's what I heard. Don't they teach you that at Garden? Aren't you supposed to be taking some super-advanced psych class or something?"

"That's next term."

"Oh." She drains the end of her drink, slurping up the last droplets caught around the half-melted ice cubes. The cup gets tossed into an overfull waste bin as they pass, performing a precarious balancing act that he is certain will end in failure. Her palm meets his, twining their fingers together, her hand cool and damp with remnants of condensation left over from what had beaded on her drink. She squeezes his fingers, a little chuckle sliding out from her lips.

"What?"

"You're thinking way too hard."

"No, I'm not."

(Nine seconds and that's all you're ever going to get.)