Work Text:
TRAGEDY IS SOMETHING Mari is intimately familiar with. The first time she meets it is when she's two or three heads shorter: she's standing at the entrance to an old, wooden church, enveloped in the sounds of humming insects dissolved within the foliage around her. Her mother takes her right hand, nudging the doorway open and guiding her through the creaky floorboards of the church's interior, where she slides into one of the many pews—her mother pats the spot next to her, to which Mari takes a seat.
With the groan of the pew, she notices how quiet the church is when it's only the two of them. Gone are the low, rolling notes of the organ, and the occasional stifled coughs of a middle-aged couple that sings two-and-a-half pitches off during their hymns. The only thing she can hear is the sliding of a book from the seat ahead of them; then, the rustling of thin pages. Once that stops, it's her mother's voice: "Mari," she murmurs, tapping her finger on one of the many bolded titles punctuating the page, "can you read this for me?"
Her eyes narrow, trying to make out the words which the book's small typeface presents. "Book, chapter, verse," her mother reminds her, touching the title again.
Mari coughs. "Job… Chapter 1," she reads aloud, looking up as her mother nods with a smile. She looks down again and continues. "There once was a man who lived in the land of-" She stops, squinting harder at the words on the page.
"Uz."
"Uz," Mari repeats. "His name was Job."
MARI HAS HAD her fair share of tragedy—she's thumbed through pages of Shakespeare's works, eyes narrowing at lines with dated language; she's watched people come and go like the changing of ocean tides; she's stared morosely out her car's window, watching buildings pass by and blur into shapes after a lost boxing match more than enough times.
She stares at another passage of text, where diamonds of light from the window's patterns fall onto the small-print letters in front of her. Her eyes shift back and forth between the book and the paper to her right; it's empty save for her name, the class, and the date at the top corners of the page. Her hand slides over to pick up the pen again, scratching a quick line into her palm to test for its ink. The pen comfortably settles into the crook of her hand, resting there as her eyes scan over the passage again—she flips it back and forth, scouring the lines on each side.
Mari sighs, leaning back into her chair and staring out the window—the sky is lush with neon orange as she listlessly traces the specks of dust illuminated in its light, waiting for one of them to eventually land on her papers and bless her with divine revelation. If she's lucky, the words will jump out of the page and call to her—this line, Mari! This is the most important!—and all she'll have to do is wait, but as the clock's thinnest hand ticks again, the printed ink stays stuck to its page.
Instead, Lara calls from the front door with the clattering of her heels against the floor: "Mari, can I see the homework for…?" Her voice trails off when she walks into the dining room, and she coughs into her sleeve before continuing. "Oh. I guess not?"
Mari glances back to her, clicking her pen once to retract it. "You wanna give it a try?"
She shakes her head. "Didn't we both get a forty last time I had to try?" she asks, walking over to Mari's seat and looking at the paper from above her shoulders. "I don't get how you do these things…"
"Me neither," she agrees, leaning into the table and tracing her finger over the start of the sentence again. "Well, usually, they aren't this bad."
Lara hums and taps the third line down. "What about that one?" It's another one of the many sentences describing the character's bleeding heart, wrought with overly elaborate prose describing how the character's faith has been ripped in half; her eyes pass over it twice before Mari decides to click her pen again and scribble down the line onto her paper. It's a start, so she snaps the book's chipped paperback cover shut and places it over the sheet.
She tilts her head up, looking at Lara, who plants a kiss on her forehead. "How was work?"
"Ugh. You make it sound like we're an old couple," she groans, continuing nevertheless. "It was… fine. You know, Luca–"
"Do I have to talk to him about the painting stuff again?" Mari asks, the end of her pen tapping against the table in a steady rhythm. "Thought he'd get the message by now."
"No," Lara blurts out; whatever Mari means by talk to him will include a broken nose and apologies when they'd see him the next day, which is something she doesn't want to deal with. "No, it's nothing like that. We've moved on from that."
"Then what is it?"
"He visited the bakery today—" Mari huffs. "—you should be nicer to him, you know, but he bought something. For someone that's not himself."
She raises an eyebrow and looks at her, unimpressed. "So he bought something for his brother?"
"I think it's for someone else," Lara says with a knowing grin. "I think… he's found someone," she says, wrapping her arms around Mari's neck and nestling her head onto her shoulder.
"Get a room!" Yoshiya barks from the neighboring room, sprawled along the couch with a half-finished bag of chips. Mari bites back with a half-hearted shut up, but she gingerly melts into Lara's warmth seconds later.
From Lara's hand comes the trill of her phone's vibrations and the gentle melody of a grand piano, the screen lighting up with the name of Rowan and his picture. Lara pulls away, checking it, before bringing the phone to her ear. "Hi, Father. Yes, I'm at Mari's. Mhm, she's right next to me right now," she murmurs. Whatever words she hears over the phone cause her to raise her eyebrows, but she nods at Mari and walks out to the hallway, hiding behind the wall.
Lara's soft murmurs from the room across and the harsh, obnoxious orchestral music in the background of what Yoshiya's watching mingle in the air, broken only by the occasional spoken word—she's not sure why news reports would ever need to have more music than actual news, but when the headlines are made up of titles like new flower species found in water and weather will be sunny, she supposes that there's only so much one can talk about—and yet she still finds herself staring at the television with Yoshiya. Just as the television wraps up an interview on a man whose claim to fame is being born on January 1st, a quiet sob slips through the air.
Mari reaches for the remote, lowering the volume, before walking out into the hallway. Beneath the voice of the reporter, Lara mutters, "Yes, Father. I love you too," and then pauses before breaking with a wet sniffle.
"What's wrong?" Mari asks tentatively, staring at the black screen Lara holds.
Her face twists with emotion—grief, sorrow, frustration—as she drops her phone askew on the shelf nearby. "We're moving."
Moving. It echoes in Mari's ears, over and over again. Her mouth opens to ask to where, but whatever answer Lara has is enough to make her hesitate, and so her heart sinks deep into itself like a pit of quicksand. All she can do is hold on to Lara as she chokes out sobs, telling her it'll be okay.
"IN SPITE of everything, Job didn’t sin by blaming God for doing anything wrong," Mari reads aloud, pausing. "Wha—that's not fair!" she yelps, looking at the book again to see if the letters would change; shuffle around and turn into a better chapter.
Her mother hushes her, holding a finger to her lips. "We're still in church," she mouths, "so you still need to be respectful."
"But—but he just lost everything! Even his family!" she whines, pointing three or four verses back—it's hard to aim for a specific sentence when half of her focus is dedicated to complaining about Job and his dead kin. "How is that fair?"
"Well, you're right," she agrees, lifting the book from Mari's tiny hands and dropping it into her lap. "It's not fair. But even so, he didn't blame God. That's the important part, isn't it?"
Mari scans the book for a third time, huffing when she reaches the ending and it's still the same. "That doesn't make sense. Why did bad things happen to him if he was good?"
Her mom hums, contemplating, before snapping the book shut. When she gets up, she takes Mari's hand again. "Follow me," she says, leading her back out of the church and stepping back into the grass covered by buttery sun. She points up. "Why's the sky blue?"
Mari thinks, her eyes following the pointer and dodging the sun. Eventually, she shrugs. "I dunno."
She asks again, pointing forwards to the deep-blue that stretches to eclipse the boats in the distance. It pushes and pulls; submerged in it, little blips that Mari knows to be people swim from one end to another. "Do you know why water's wet?" She shakes her head. "It's because of God."
Her mother takes steps off of the grass and into the dirt path ahead, her footsteps crunching into the loose pebbles of the trail. Mari follows closely behind, still clasping her hand with her own as she tries her hardest to step in the footprints left behind. "Maybe He chose to make it blue because it looked pretty when you stared at it from here," she says, stopping at the transition between dirt path and sidewalk. "Maybe God wanted us to feel what it was like to get rain in our hair. He works in whatever way He wants to, but it's because He knows best."
Mari frowns—the house fell down on your children. Now all of them are dead—and makes an irked noise. "It doesn't look like Job's doing his best right now."
Her mom breaks with soft laughter, before handing the book back to Mari and patting at an old stump, seventy-something rings inscribed onto its skin. Mari sits down on the stomp, her mom looking over her shoulder. "Don't worry. It gets better for him in the end."
THE ALARM BLARES at 5AM, a constant in life for Mari like death and taxes. Her finger moves to lift her sleep mask upwards, and only when she finds it in herself to roll over does she see Lara, hunched over and pulling dusty books out from the blue shelf nearby. "Good morning," Mari groans. "Can you stop the alarm?"
Lara looks to the Hal—its black paint is chipped and the wire mesh that covers its body has been dented, no doubt in part due to her, but it's one of the few things in the room that hasn't been moved out for something else. On and on does it repeat its few melodic chirps before reminding the listener to do their daily training; Lara promptly shuts it off before it gets too annoying, turning back to the shelves. "Good morning," she says to one of the heavier chemistry textbooks—dark brown, titled Essential Chemistry, 7th Edition—as she blows off the layers of dust on its cover.
"How long have you been awake?" she asks, sitting up from the bed and taking off her mask.
Lara gives an absentminded hum in response, still stuck on sliding unopened books into her bag. "Not sure. Thirty minutes? However long it takes to get all of the books—" She gestures to the sack slumped against her knee. "—in here."
She walks to the shelf, crouching next to her and filing through the lopsided stack of books in the bag. "Getting ready to return them?"
"Yeah." Her fingers curl around the spine of the last one—a red one, the words The History of our World punched in bold text at the top—and stay there for a second, before Lara pulls it out and lets it drop into the bag. "I guess I just didn't think I'd have to return them this soon," she mumbles, swallowing down the choked, strangled noise that threatens to reveal itself at the edges of her throat.
Mari frowns. "Does anybody?"
Lara can only offer a tentative laugh as she pulls back on the bag's drawstrings, its neck snapping tightly shut. "You're not that good at giving comforting advice, Mari. Has anyone told you that?"
"You do," she says, grabbing the sack by the neck and lifting it up. "You still stay with me anyways."
Lara walks outside with her, the second floor creaking with each step the two of them take. "That's different, though. You're just kind of comforting. As a person."
The stairs are much the same, groaning as they descend them until Mari sets the bag against the wall. "Uh huh," she says, unconvinced. "I thought you just liked me for my hot chocolate."
She snorts. "Maybe when I first met you." She spares a glance to the now-emptied can of hot chocolate that rests by the windowsill; anywhere the fragmented shapes of sunlight are able to reach, there's a can with a flower stem slotted neatly inside of it. It's become tradition.
Mari follows her gaze, the world halting for those few moments before spinning again. "I wish we had more time." Mari sits down on the stairway, knees bent. Her gaze falls to her hands and stays focused on the two of them stuck in the other's embrace. "I'd like to have at least graduated with you."
Lara squeezes into the space neighboring Mari, placing a hand along the other's wrist. "And you think I don't? I want to stay here forever, Mari. I want to be with you forever."
"Then stay," Mari blurts, her hands tightening around each other even as she knows what she's asking is an impossible favor. She offers an apologetic glance at Lara. "…sorry. I know it's not up to you."
Lara spares a thin smile in return. "It would be nice, though, wouldn't it?"
The only thing that fills the silence is the quiet hum of a running fan—it was one of the more hasty purchases in the household, something the two of them decided to get when the heat of open stovetop flames during the summer became finally unbearable. "It would," she agrees. "But I guess we'll have to settle for this."
"This is a pretty good thing to settle for," Lara says, the curve in her lips fixing into something more real than before.
The two of them lean in for a soft kiss, and then they pull away; the fan, once again, is the only sound that settles in the air.
WHEN THE DOORBELL rings, Mari opens it to find Luca standing outside, looking down at the twiddling of his thumbs. His bag is slung on his shoulder, hanging dearly to it in face of blowing wind. "What do you want?" she asks; the words come out harsher than she'd like, but Luca's face doesn't even change when he hears them.
He sighs instead. "Do you have to be so cold? I just heard about her moving away."
Mari squints at him, deciding it's not worth it to be so distrusting. "She told you?"
"Yoshiya did," he answers. She doesn't remember when they got so close. "I wanted to give her a gift."
She steps aside as Luca walks in, closing the door behind him. "It's the painting," he explains, sliding his bag down to the crook of his arm, where its open zipper reveals a canvas. "I was never able to finish it." Regret tinges his voice as he takes the canvas out and lets the bag slump empty onto the floor. "But since she's moving away, it'll just be stuck in my shed forever if I don't give it away."
Mari hums. "You're pretty thoughtful," she comments, grabbing the canvas—much to Luca's dismay, as he tries to grab it back—and turning it to look for herself. The art is nothing like she expected; it's painted in hues of green where there should be red, and the face seems little more than an afterthought tacked on to convey the shape of a human.
She decides to put it bluntly, for the sake of both of them. "This doesn't look like her."
Luca grimaces, but takes the painting back with a flush on his face. "It's not—it's not supposed to look like her. It's meant to capture all the things that make her her."
"So the green?"
"You're asking me to describe my entire thought process," he laments, tapping the painted sections of the canvas. "The colors just comes to me, okay? Some look right, and some look wrong, you know?"
She nods along as if she understands him. She has her doubts on whether she'll ever be able to. "Are you gonna bring it to her?"
He stops, halfway in the process of prying his shoes off with one foot stepped onto the heel tab of the other. "Well, yeah." Mari points him to the living room, and follows him when he treks into the room with the painting in hand.
Lara blinks in surprise. "Luca?"
He clears his throat, setting the painting down on the table. "This is for you." It only takes her a few moments to recognize what it is.
"Wasn't this unfinished?" she asks, eyeing the silhouette of herself sculpted in the canvas. "That's what you told me, anyway. That's why you always wanted to work on it."
"Yeah, well." Luca shrugs. "Some things just don't work out, I guess. I heard about you moving." In the painting sits hours of work, each stroke made with a careful hand and the colors layered over each other again and again. For a moment, Mari doubts that even now, he isn't content with the color picked for the lower-half. He hunches over and stares intently at the piece. She doubts that he would ever be content with it, even if he had gotten his hands on the paint tubes of pink lemonade that colored sunsets and pulled his blues from the sky itself.
Lara smiles to herself. "It's good."
"You think so?" Luca asks, looking up at her. "But—the face, and the shape, and—"
"—does that really matter?" she replies with.
He peers at the artwork again, face crestfallen. "I… I guess not?" His response is more unsure than anything, like an answer he'd come up with when a teacher asked if he was truly confident with what he said. "It matters to me."
"Well, none of that stuff is important to me," Lara says, her voice tender in a way Mari knows she's heard plenty of times before. "I'm glad you brought this to me. I liked it."
Luca smiles for the first time in their entire meeting. "Thanks. I—I didn't expect much. So thanks."
When he leaves out the front door, Mari sits down next to Lara and lets herself lean on her. The television, thankfully, is not the news channel she'd been entranced by when watching next to Yoshiya. Another romcom, she muses, eyes glued to the screen as it panned to a girl running late for class with a stack of papers jumbled loosely in her hands. "I don't think I get the painting yet," she decides to mention.
"It's hard to describe," Lara says with a shrug. "Well. I guess that's why they say a picture's worth a thousand words?"
The male lead—some generic, handsome teenager clearly not paying enough attention to the outside world—bumps into her and knocks her papers over, apologizing profusely as the two of them quickly sort the papers back. "All I know is that you could see how much effort he's poured into it, and it was beautiful in its own way."
They both reach for the final paper on the ground and their fingertips ghost the hand of the other, briefly and yet ever-present. "Do you think I'm too mean to him?" Mari muses, watching the faint blush fade in their cheeks. Both of the leads quickly swipe away from the paper and mumble their sorries, until the girl picks it up and runs away with a wave.
"I think you could be kinder," she murmurs. The man watches her become a blip in the hallway, until the bell rings and reminds him that he has places to be. He scurries away in an instant, and then it's a smash cut to him anxiously tapping his pencil against the desk.
"I can always be kinder. That's what you say," she retorts.
"And that's true, isn't it? It's not like there always has to be some grand reason to be kind. There doesn't have to be a grand reason for a lot of things." Mari raises an eyebrow at her. "You can just… be it," Lara finishes.
Mari makes a hum of acknowledgement. "Like how you always watch these romcoms?"
"They're way better than you give them credit for! I swear!" Lara pouts; looking at her, Mari breaks into laughter, and Lara squawks something like come on, don't laugh! before smiling along anyway.
"SO?" MARI'S MOM asks, gently shaking her around. "What do you think?"
"I still don't like the story," Mari gripes, looking away from the book. "Things just keep on getting worse for him every single time."
"Not about Job. About his friends."
She blinks. "His friends?"
"Well, you were asking about why Job had to go through all of that, right?" She stops for a second, nodding slowly. "Each of his friends have their own ideas on why. What do you think about them?"
Mari hesitates, before looking back at the book and thumbing through the thin pages—a couple of them stick together and she has to pry them loose with her fingers. When she her eyes gloss over the names of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, her lips curve into a frown before she decides this: "They're wrong. He didn't do anything bad!"
A car passes by them. She thinks of Eliphaz's accusations that Job did something wrong; she thinks of Bildad, who blames Job's children; she thinks of Zophar, who points a finger at Job for believing that he was innocent. Is that what she's supposed to believe in? "We know that," her mom says, "but none of those four do. They don't know about why this happened to him."
"So they say that he did something wrong," she concludes.
"Mhm." Her mom nods as if that's a satisfactory answer. Mari makes a petulant sound when that's all of the answer she gets.
"Mom, why'd you show me this? This isn't a good story."
She give a knowing smile to Mari, pinching her cheek. "To you, maybe. But I think you'll understand when you get older."
"What am I supposed to learn from this?" She's no stranger to her mom helping her read through verses and asking her to look for a moral, but when she looks back on Zophar—but sinful people won’t find what they are looking for—the only thing she can find is that Job has wronged God in a way that nobody mortal, not even the readers, can comprehend. She doubts that's the message.
"Well, you still have a couple more chapters to read, don't you?" her mom reminds her, flipping the creased page corner over.
Mari sighs. "This is a lot of reading."
"That's good. Reading is how you exercise your brain."
"Can we just do the rest another day?" she whines, and her mother pats her head with a smile.
"Well, if you insist…" She takes the book from Mari's hands and starts her trek back to the church. "Another day. Maybe you'll understand what this means then."
LUCA IS, once again, leaning against the guardrail of an overpass. The wind, brisk and cold, jerks at the sweater he's wearing, blonde hair hitting his face over and over until he pushes it to the side of his head. Mari walks up to him and nudges him, a loose windbreaker zipped up along her body. "Hey."
He jolts and stares at her for a second. "Oh. I didn't think you'd actually come."
"You must take me for a pretty rude person." Mari decides to settle into the spot next to him and watch the cars pass by, blurs of metallic black, red, and white rushing down the highway. When she squints, she can make out some of the license plates—a few are short-lived puns before they roll below her and out of sight.
"Well," Luca says, "I know we're not on the best of terms. And—and I get why, but… you can understand, right? Why I wasn't expecting much?"
Mari nods. Lara's words ring in her mind—you should be kinder to him—and eventually, she swallows, saying, "I'm sorry."
"Eh?" Luca turns to her with an open mouth.
She repeats it again, this time more solid. "I'm sorry. For treating you badly."
Luca's face shifts between emotions as his eyes glaze over the cars and he swipes more hair out of his face. Eventually, he responds in little more than a whisper. "Thank you."
Does sorry cover the little half-acknowledgements that Mari would make of him? Does it cover the way her face would shift when she met him in the bakery, blabbering something about if he could see Lara? Mari looks down at the street and contemplates at one of the cars passing by—a minivan, more specifically. Even now, when she looks at him, his eyes avert her. Will sorry be enough for that?
After a few more groups of cars go down the road, Mari asks, "Luca? Can I ask you something?"
He tilts his head at her. "Sure? Go ahead."
"How'd you feel when you heard that Lara was moving away?"
Luca blinks, eyes widening. His mouth opens preemptively before he settles on a response. "That's, um, a lot to answer. I guess bittersweet? It's—I don't like the fact that she's moving away, but it got me to finally show her the whole artwork, you know?"
Mari looks at him inquisitively. "You're a weird person, Luca."
"I get that a lot," he says and skirts past the topic. "What about you? How'd you feel? I think you're a better representation than me, after all, since you're her girlfriend." She knows that. She knows that; she knows she should be able to put her feelings to words.
But the only thing she can muster is a shrug when he asks his question. "I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Luca looks at her like she's got three heads.
"It means I don't know. I don't know what I'm feeling," Mari says. She's tried, and tried, and tried to conceptualize it, but each time she ends up asking the same questions of why.
He hums. "Have you tried painting before?"
"Once, probably. When I was a kid," she muses. Back when she had tried stamping her fingers—fingers stained with some murky maroon combination of paints—onto endless sheets of paper and smeared them from edge to edge.
"What about writing?"
"For school, yeah." She still does—there's a stack of essays she hasn't thrown out yet somewhere in the house to prove that.
"A lot of people do things like that to show how they're feeling," he explains. "You just pick whatever comes to your mind and put it down. It doesn't even have to make sense. There's an entire style based on the idea of not really making sense."
"Is that what you do when you paint?" she prompts, remembering the confusion of the painting's red-green colors. She asks herself if Luca, too, had thought of smattering the canvas with heavy strokes of an ugly color—it wouldn't be particularly difficult, and it would get the painting, still unfinished to this day, off his mind.
Luca nods his head and smiles. "Yeah—something similar to that, I think. But—but I'm not saying you have to, but it's helped me, at least," he sputters quickly, before sinking back into his usual pose against the railing.
Mari hums, drumming her fingers against the rails. "How does it work?"
"I don't know." Luca's eyes narrow and he mimes a paintbrush in his hands, the sky his canvas. "It's not something you normally teach. It's not something I can teach, even if I tried my hardest. You just… do whatever you think is the most fitting. And you paint, or you write, whatever you're thinking about. It doesn't even have to be in writing, really. You can just say whatever you feel like is the most important."
She supposes that'll be the best answer she gets. "Do you think I can do it?"
"I don't see why you couldn't," he coughs out, after a while. "Anybody can."
Then, he walks away, mumbling a thank you that gets lost in the harsh winds.
IT'S THE MORNING after a quiet, rainy day, where the earth smells of fresh dew and petrichor, that Mari's soft footsteps across the grass reach a certain place. She slips off the metal cross off from her neck. She had spent the entirety of last night explaining to Lara—she had done that a lot in the past couple of days, introducing her to the people in the house and getting to know what she had liked—what the cross meant to her, and Lara had suggested shouldn't you speak to her? Crouching down next to a tombstone, she places the bouquet against it, humming to herself. Eventually, when the flowers find a position where they don't fall, she speaks. "Hey, mom."
"I'm sorry I haven't been able to visit you more often," Mari starts. "I think you'd like to know I met someone recently. Her name is Lara."
They had met back on the beach—she had saved the other from drowning, and Lara had blabbered on about a lost ring—and Mari had taken them to a place indoors, where she had brought Lara a can of hot chocolate from the vending machine. They drank in silence from there.
"Shouldn't you be going back to your home?"
Lara put down the empty can next to her and sighed. "If I do, then I'll have to explain to Father why I'm wet, and that I lost my ring in the ocean."
Mari shrugged. She wasn't sure how that had anything to do with her, so she finished the last drops that came from the can and tossed it into the garbage. "You can always just lie."
"But I'm a horrible liar!" Lara whined, collapsing into her own hands. "Especially when it comes to him!"
Mari stared at her owlishly, her brows furrowing until she had given up on trying to figure out whatever Lara's problem was. "If it's really that important, you can come over to our house for the night," she offered.
"Really?" Lara asked, jumping up from the bench. "That would be so much help, pleaseeeee—"
"…sure," Mari had said, and had explained the situation to her family; the next day, she assumed that would be it. Except then Lara started asking more, and more, and more, and Mari wasn't going to say no—she was odd, sure, but the glimpses she got of Lara's father were unflattering at best most of the time.
Mari thinks to herself. Did they even let her stay for reasons like that anymore? When Lara asked today, she hadn't said anything about her father, and yet Mari had let her stay anyway. She wasn't sure if that was a sign of her growing softer.
"She's…" She pauses, stuck in thought. "She's interesting, to say the least. She's kind, but she doesn't really understand boxing that much. You know, she tried to break up one of the sparring matches I was in, and I had to explain to her what was going on. I'm pretty sure she saved me in that match, though, so I can't complain."
Mari pricks at one of the rose-colored petals. "I don't think I really get her yet. She comes to our house often, because she doesn't really like hers, and I don't argue too much with that. It's not my place to say if she gets to stay or not, and she helps with being a little less lonely."
"I've been lonely without you. I think I said that before, but… yeah. I still have. I don't want to be ungrateful for what I have, but it's hard not having you remind me about things. I liked sitting in the seat next to you while you drove with baumkuchen in the back of the car. I liked showing you how I was doing with boxing."
It's early enough for birds to sing their shrill, delicate selection of hymnal from the trees. The sky is a shade of greyish-blue, storm clouds and scattered sunrays melding together like how they always have; how they always will. "You always asked me these questions I thought were weird. You asked me about reasons, which were way harder to answer than any other type of question. 'Why'd you attack that kid?' 'Why do you think the the sky's blue?' And I never had a good enough answer for them."
"You said it was okay whenever I said I didn't know. You put a lot of things up to God. Were you able to say that it was okay if I didn't know because of that? Were you like Eliphaz? Or like Bildad? Or Zophar? Or were you none of them?"
Mari traces the name carved into the tombstone with her finger and tries not to let her voice betray herself. "It's not fair. You're not fair."
When she looks up, eyes teary, she sees a rainbow, infinitely distant and yet there all the same.
And she gets up eventually to take the same, worn road that she knows like the back of her hand.
IN THE NIGHT, they sit in the two seats of the train nearest the door; Lara rests against Mari, her head slumped on the other's shoulder with closed eyes and her arm wrapped around her girlfriend's sleeve. In front of them reads a display whose words slide in and out of the screen—one more stop until their own. Her breathing is steady, bobbing up and down with the blood threaded throughout her body and the constant vibration of the car.
Back when they had taken the train from the way to work for the first time, Mari had listened to Lara as she talked her ear off about the most insignificant things. She had listened to her complain, and then perk up, and then fall into excitement when she described Luca in the way romance novels would describe their leads, albeit far less flattering at points—he fell on his face again, Mari! I swear!—and she had kept the violent tug in her heart from interrupting the moment.
"Lara?" Mari asks.
"Hm?" she croons quietly in response, keeping her eyes closed. "Is this a moving question?"
Mari strokes her fingers through the other's hair. "You ever wonder why things like this happen to people like us?"
Lara stares at her, waiting for an explanation. When she doesn't budge, she answers. "Well, who hasn't?"
Mari responds with little more than a noise of acknowledgement before she looks out to the window, where the world outside is carved in shadows and the squares of light that sit centered along the middle of each of them. In this rectangular, scratched-up window, she can see the city at the dead of night—even now, silhouettes of people dance with each other.
She sighs, pulling at Mari's cheeks with an exasperated look on her face. "Didn't the Bible teach you about all of these questions already?" Her eyes fall to the cross-shaped necklace kept in Mari's palm, its edges peeking out from beneath her fingers.
A tunnel covers the outside world for a few brief moments, caving it in pure darkness as Mari faces back to Lara. "Once, maybe?" she asks, like she's not even sure herself.
"But?" Lara prods, her words prying at Mari's nondescript non-answers with however many questions are necessary.
"But the answer was that it was always because He knew what to do," she continues, words sitting on her tongue like bitter candy; the sentence is bluntly spoken and yet the growl that lays beneath them sits pointed and sharp. "And it's just—" She pinches a breath, letting out a slow exhale as her eyes sting with tears. "It gets hard to believe. When your dad's forcing you to move so far. And for what? So he can get whatever he wants?"
The train whistles to a stop, and the doors hiss open again. Groups of salarymen, dressed in black suits and sitting stressed on their phone, get up and briskly walk off to the station. An elderly couple makes their way off the doors in front of Lara and Mari not soon after, and when the train doors lock shut they can see the two taking the elevator up from the window.
The voice of the announcer rings over the train, announcing their next stop—their stop—and it starts again, pulling them back into their seats with the inertia of movement.
Gingerly, Lara swipes away the drops that dapple the corners of Mari's eyes with her thumb. "I know," she whispers. "It's not fair. But what can we do?"
SOON AFTER, when Mari opens her eyes to the alarm, she sees a mess of red hair, illuminated in the candescent sunlight that rises moments after. Snug between her arms rests Lara, who breathes gently without wake; for these moments, all Mari does is watch the contours of her body nod up and down, letting her rest after the days they've spent doing nothing but moving. "Hal," she mumbles lowly, "shut up."
When the alarm quiets down and the only thing left in the room is the billowing of curtains from the gentle wind, Lara wakes up soon after. "Good morning," she murmurs, rubbing her eyes as she shifts in Mari's embrace.
"Morning," Mari replies. "Can I take you somewhere?"
She whines, letting her arm loll off the edge of the bed. "This early? Really?"
"Yes, this early." Her arms pry loose and she lets herself rest until Lara, bemoaning about how she shouldn't be awake at 5AM, rolls off the bed and stumbles onto the floor with her eyes closed, feeling around blindly for the dresser. Mari follows suit, guiding the other's hand to the handle of the drawer and opening her own. "It's important."
When the two of them get dressed and they walk down the stairs to the front door, Mari takes Lara's hand and says, "Follow me."
Opening the entrance, they see the sun, its lower half bathed into the citrusy oranges reflected in the breaks of the ocean. From where they stand, the faraway colors of sand and burning ocean mix and blend, pulling the division between land and sea back and forth in tug-of-war.
They follow the road, and then when a path up an unassuming hill reveals itself off to the sides, they switch to that instead. "Watch your step," Mari reminds her when they pass the bump. Eventually, they stand in front of an old, wooden church.
"Here?" Lara asks, looking at the building. "We've been here a thousand times, Mari."
Mari turns back around; she can see the rest of the world from here. "You can see the sky from here, Lara, right?"
She nods. Mari continues, "And you can see the ocean? And the sand? Do you know why they exist?"
Lara gives a small shrug. "Four billion years is a lot of time," she answers with. "Why the questions?"
"It's one of those things you just start to ask yourself." Mari offers her hand, and her fingers, and Lara intertwines them between her own. "I don't know. I just want an answer for these things."
"Never thought you'd be the type to get into geology," she chirps.
Mari frowns. "You know that's not what I mean."
"Then what do you mean?" Lara gestures to the rest of the world, vast and unknown, where Lara will eventually find herself crossing through. "Because… I can't help but wonder if we even need answers for these things. Maybe the sky exists because it wanted to. Isn't that reason enough?"
"Besides," she continues, "if that's not enough for you, then don't you think asking about all of this is kind of wasting your time? If I said that there's sand because of erosion, that wouldn't be enough for you. You'd just know how it's made."
"Sorry," Mari says lamely. "I know asking about this probably doesn't make much sense. And I know reminding you about everything here's just gonna make you miss it more later."
"I've asked a lot of dumber questions to you," Lara says, matter-of-factly like how someone says I think the power's down or We accidentally bought extra food. Sorry! "I'm just a little worried. Who'll be the one to stop you from killing Luca when I'm gone? I can't be on a call with you all day."
"Wait—that's your biggest concern? I don't even have anything against him anymore!" Mari sputters with an incredulous look on her face.
Lara laughs, unfettered. "Well, it's easier to think about that than anything else." Her words sting like a dull pain. "I'm happy you two were able to make up."
Mari clears her throat. "He told me about how I should try making art to express how I feel."
Lara looks to her, surprised. "Did you?"
"If I did, I would have given it to you," she says. "I was gonna figure out something to say here, but all he said was to speak from the soul and I don't really know how to… pull words from that. So you'll just have to settle for this." For the silence, she thinks, even if that's not enough.
She smiles. "This works. I don't think you have to speak from the soul right now. I mean, don't we do that every day?"
Mari sighs and thinks to herself that she should have gotten a translator for this. "You're just as confusing as Luca. Both of you guys start waxing poetic whenever you talk about this stuff."
"'Waxing poetic' is fun! Don't say that just because you want to have a fancy speech, too!" Lara cries, shaking Mari back and forth until she grows tired of that, and then she turns to the rest of the world.
The two of them stand and watch as the sun climbs its way out from the ocean. If Mari could grab these moments of silence and keep them clutched in her palm, she would. But like hot sand, they would bleed from the gaps in between her fingertips, and so all she can do is ask, "You'll come back, right?"
"Of course I will. I'll be watching the news one day, and I'll see you on the TV, and I'll come to wherever you are and be there with a gigantic cake," Lara responds, the wind brushing her cheek.
"And then what?" she asks.
"Obviously, we start living together again. And then we'll take it from there," she says.
Mari nods. "That sounds nice."
They watch as the world passes them by—as cars drift along the street, as people begin to trickle their way into the sand and lay down their blankets, as the ocean pushes and pulls and reflects whatever it chooses. When they kiss, the warmth envelops them tenderly as they know nothing but each other for these brief moments.
"Don't wait too long, okay?" Mari asks.
"Don't worry," she says. "I won't."
THEY MEET AGAIN, for real this time—not across the world connected by phones but face-to-face—in a coffee shop. Mari incessantly watches the clock of her phone tick up with each passing minute, sitting alone in a table meant for two. The city breathes with the blaring of horns; of screeching tires and street merchants yelling to find another tourist to sell cheap, plastic $7.99 souvenirs with cheesy lines carved into them. The sun, from here, breaks through the clouds of smoke that hums through city like blood in veins, casting light onto the wood veneer of the tables.
Curled in her right hand is a paper cup, the name MARY written in black pen—she's not sure how they manage to misspell a four-letter name, but she's never chosen to question it. Steam billows from the top, whipped cream already beginning to melt into the drink. She's only halfway through her drink when a girl with red hair walks into the shop. With the jingling of the bells hung onto the door comes Lara, who takes little more than a moment to reach her. "Mari!"
They pull in for a kiss like there was never a time they were apart. "Long time no see?" she manages to murmur when they pull away, and Lara laughs, taking a seat.
She eyes the cup of hot chocolate Mari holds. "You say that like we didn't call last night." Mari slides the cup to her—careful, it's hot—and only then does she see name loosely scribbled onto its side. Lara looks up to her and raises an eyebrow. "How do you misspell—?"
"No idea," Mari answers, watching as Lara takes the first sip and flinches. "What did I say?"
She groans, sticking her burnt tongue out. "I take all this time to meet my girlfriend and the first thing she does is make fun of me!"
She laughs, finally, for real this time. "It's not making fun of you, Lara! I'm just saying I did tell you it was hot—"
"That's not the point," Lara wails, shaking Mari back and forth by her shoulders. "I thought you'd be happier to see me!"
She doesn't see a point in responding when her body's getting shook around, but when it dies down, Mari's voice quiets down to something that almost gets lost beneath the chatter in the coffee shop. "I am," she says. "I missed you, you know."
Lara smiles. Her voice is tender, delicate like the promise they'd made so long ago. "I missed you too."