I met Viv at a bookshop, so you’d think the anthologies would have been my first warning. I forget what edition she was reading when I stopped beside her at the bookshop to ask—how do they churn them every year?—some fantasy thing. She’d lifted it to show me the cover. It was so damned generic.
“That’s cool,” I said. “I just tracked down this title from my favorite urban fantasy author. Actually, she has two series with the same vibe that somehow don’t overlap and—” Viv listened and I sat down beside her and she listened some more.
We went out for coffee first; I had no idea Starbucks had tasting samplers. Second date was at some low-risk chain restaurant. I got the steak tips, and Viv got a combo platter. We went to a taco bar next and she got the variety tacos. Steakhouse? They had a mixed meats option I never noticed before she ordered it. Never just one flavor of beer or seltzer, always a variety pack.
It bled over into her yard: long flowerbeds, not even straight, all flowers and seasons intermixed. “So there’s color all year long,” Viv said when she saw my face.
She didn’t listen to albums, or even particular artists. When anything had a theme, it was playlists with the weirdest names—sea shanty something, cryptid something.
“There’s no time to build up a theme, a world, characters,” I told her after she’d asked for another short story compilation.
“Sometimes there’s a theme,” Viv said. Her sharp chin rested on my shoulder as we browsed a book site. “That one is about haunted houses, or people haunted by houses. And there’s something... clean, about working with what you have in the space you have. When it has to stand alone and be enough in itself, it has to throw you into the plot or decide whether it’s about plot, or if it’ll focus elsewhere.”
“There is no focus, no...” Dedication, I started to say, but her nose and breath were against my ear. “No problem, paper anniversary, your choice.”
And then we cheated at the wood anniversary and did books again, and by then...
“It’s okay,” Viv told me, “I don’t need to know, whatever it is. If it distresses you, I don’t want to know.”
But I hadn't been able to bully her into picking a lane. After five, six years of her unswerving dedication to variety, I hadn’t driven her off by harshing her choices. Viv was charmingly, constantly inconsistent...
It’d been so long I’d almost forgotten how to shapeshift.
Comments
Post a Comment