This is probably a one-shot; yet never-the-less, enjoy!
Today's someone's' birthday: Autir Tlavrr Slavic! Can anyone tell me who he is?"
Violin music drifted from the small, black radio- Stravinsky? He wondered. Someone he had once met. Someone he had loved.
Maybe.
Had he? But loved wasn't the right word, not… not, as some would argue that he was not capable of love. But he had loved the music-had loved the bow with white dust racing across the strings and call, pour! Pour from an ever-filled cup the music to make him almost regret. But he had loved only briefly.
Yes-he loved. He loved every soul in this room. Loved them, pitied them- loved them with every fiber of his being to not remember what they had done as he did. Hated them and envied them because they did not.
"Yuca?" Her voice was so soft, so soft as a kitten's? Like kitten's fur and the warmth of ducklings…
-the duckling beneath his boot-
That was in another life. So hard to keep them all in order! Such a bitter game he played.
"Yes Madame Utalanie?" She smiled softly, barely resting her hand upon his hair then rising.
"I wanted to know if you were with us. That's all." The smile, fading from her eyes like the last light across the sands of another time.
"Today is not the same as it was." He too said so soft: silk whispering on skin. "No, that day is a week from tomorrow."
The words were innocuous enough but her smile faltered, slipped a few molars, and some more sunlight- golden searing and damning to a million golden deaths in the sun- slipped away.
"How Yuca?" She was not questioning his words, merely asking how he knew. He inclined his head to one side.
"Your friends didn't do their math right. There was an anomaly 600 years ago and a week, just a week, was lost." She smiled uncertainly and patted his hand again.
He hated her pity- or was it love? He hated her.
Hated how she made him feel and memories! Yes, memories of another life and sweet cinnamon skin and fingers along flesh… no, it wasn't her particularly, but how she looked.
She must have been descended from another lost world. Hibini, the Isles to the Redin Sea? Or those toward the Indian? Perhaps, perhaps; the warmth in her eyes would suggest such.
All people in that time had sunlight in their eyes, in their being! Across their long light hair and glistening skin, laughing and playing in the warm costal waters like many schools of brown fish.
He wished he would forget.
Again, he hated her.