4
beetee & wiress
He is holding you as you break down into the individually ugly things buried within your head. He is holding you under a canopy of sweltering tropical heat and sweating vegetation, the humidity so thick you can practically taste it on the back of your tongue - it tastes like overripe fruit. You are shivering despite the carefully calibrated temperature of the arena, cold in a way that is neither physical nor mental, but profoundly visceral, almost spiritual. Details, once laid out with surgical neatness before you, threaten to slip away into the rush of the salt tide, sweeping towards you to jettison you into the depths of the arena's ocean like flotsam. Insignificant. You are only Wiress, a small piece of a much larger plan. You are not so important.
But he gives you importance. "Wiress." Speaks your name once, voice very quiet. "Wiress." Gives your name meaning, definition. Makes the chemicals in your brain all pink and airy. Spatial, temporal, all things cease to exist. Speaks your name three times, and you try to say something back, something that will let him know what he means to you after a lifetime of hesitation, but your mouth will not allow even this, so you reach out and adjust his glasses and he smiles in a sad way at you, face framed by artificial sunlight-
-you.
