Welcome to Gaia! ::

She sat cross-legged in a papasan chair under a mosaic sign spelling out THE BROILER hanging among some other assorted decorations--metal lizards, a lined-up collection of bottles, one of them sporting a single long-dead flower stem--and a few houseplants. The house number on the door hung askew by a single nail.

The truly awkward thing was that they were on, you know, familiarity terms. Like she knew his name but wasn't sure he knew hers, but they knew each other by face, and she had been working at Marmalade Sky long enough for them to have exchanged a little bit there, and, OK, she'd more than once had to tiptoe around him crashed on the couch*, and so it felt wrong to just--abandon him on the porch. Especially since she'd been sitting there immersed in her phone when he arrived, and so it would clearly be a Flight Away.

"Yeah," she said. "She's here. She must've forgot you were coming 'cause she's, uh."

The living room window was open, and through the fluttering and clicking of a beaded curtain there was audible a certain unmistakable soundtrack of vigorous activity taking place in some distant bedroom.

"--occupied," she finished lamely. "But I know this guy, so, uhm. If you wanna wait it probably won't... be long. At all. I don't have any cash or I'd, you know." She makes a vague movement of her hand. And then, valiantly: "What's up?"


* Much like the papasan chair, the couch was ancient, and its flatness had been "repaired" over a great deal of time by adding more blankets to it that were vacuumed but otherwise untouched, resulting in a strata of ancient textiles compacted with dust, smoke, and general time, resulting in a certain patina that could be found, unfortunately, throughout the rest of the house.

She waved the offer away, her nose wrinkling as she considered why anyone would want sex noises on a white noise machine and came up entirely blank.

"No thanks. And: work," she answered. "Blog." There was a pause, and the sense that she was gulping down further commentary on that front. There was still some shyness there. That was, after all, part of the point. Talk to people. "Cute bag," she added. "Marilyn's tryna get a hive going in the backyard but there's all kinda, like, zoning bullshit or whatever." She reached down beside the chair to procure an ashtray--it was not, shockingly, lumpily made out of clay in someone's pottery class, but plastic and ancient--and push it towards him with her foot before folding back up. "We got all these new change purse things in at work shaped like foxes and owls and pandas and s**t, you oughta come look and I'll give you my employee discount."

"Ha. I haven't even made back what I paid for the domain," she said dourly, and then caught herself. "Not that that's the point. It's a creative exercise," she added, diligently attempting to believe it. "And it gives me a reason to talk to all kinds of interesting people. It's not a commercial enterprise."

Be nice if it was, though.

"I dunno... mostly the only people that wanna talk to you are old people. And, like, don't get me wrong, old people are interesting and, like, have s**t to say, but it's not much for--um. Diversity." She handled the word with care. "If this is exercise I'm skipping leg day," she added darkly. "I'm gonna end up with the blog equivalent of one of those guys that does nothing but bicep curls."

A pause. Working up the courage was 90% of the problem.

"You uh--you could..." A vague wave of the hand. "If you wanted."

"I gotta like--take your photo." An awkward beat. "I can do that after, though. Uh. Here." Some thumbing through her phone. "I normally, um--carry a notepad. But I can record you and do it later." This felt like a betrayal, somehow. Cokie was almost certainly the sort of person who, tasked with writing a novel, would think that the biggest step would be procuring a suitably impressive typewriter; one with a ribbon and everything.

She placed the phone down on the arm of Wil's chair. "It is, uh--W-I-L-L? What's with the backpacks?" she prompted. "It helps if you do complete sentences so I don't have to fill it up with a bunch of brackets later."

She had meticulously not reacted to the announcement that his name was Wilbur besides a very slight sympathetic look. Perhaps with a name like Alacoque this was to be expected.

"It's totally cute," she assured him. "Are you used to people using it as a conversation starter or was I the first obnoxious jerk to do that?"

"I'm very good at editing," she assured him. "What kind of artist?"

She paused, holding up a finger and tipping her head to the side at the sudden ringing silence.

"Give them a minute and I'll go yell at her," she said. "But anyway--" she prompted.

"Do you have like--" she paused, considering how to phrase it. "If you have a blog or something I could link to it. I mean, not that you're gonna get much traffic," she added darkly. "But still. And also like... I wanna see it, to be honest."

She said "to be honest" in a way that you could hear her mouth translating her brain's supply of "tbh."