Besides that, there were better things to be doing, like watching people try on clothes that they couldn’t really afford. It was an easy sneak for a skinny little girl to get past the sales clerks. Even easier for a shadow. If she closed her eyes so that her father’s baby blue didn’t betray her, she blended right in with the dark spaces on the wall. Back and back, into the fitting room which Gisela normally haunted, the one by the mirror. She sat on the bench with the curtains drawn just a touch so that she could see out of them. See the people peacocking for their own reflections.
Hardly anyone ever noticed her. And even on the rare occasions that they did find her, the little black skeleton in the corner of the cubicle, they usually left her alone. Probably not wanting the fuss of ejecting her.
City life felt entirely too foreign to a man who spent all of his years among a town that barely qualified as such. It unnerved him to meander among strangers whose names and faces he didn’t know, and might never see again. The extent of anonymity inherent in that recognition alone felt all too easily abused to the hunter, who paused amongst the sea of crowds bustling about on such a crisp winter day. His gaze drifted between countenances, all engaged amongst friends or cell phones or newfound purchases, while they never took heed of the black-haired boy watching their motions.
I could be in uniform about now and half these people would be none the wiser. The Negaverse should have a surplus of energy given how blind they are to their surroundings. Don’t they ever wake up?
Business of that sort was pushed away, however, in favor of concentrating on preparing himself to be ‘interview ready’ - a term he lacked familiarity with. However, Porsha graciously supplied him with the curt note that his tattoos barred him from many a job, if he found no means or reason to cover them. The hunter found himself endlessly confused over how the city so loathes an art form that took place over thousands of years, but found no reason to question her over it - she likely never held the answers.
Rather than dwelling on the bizarre new world,Shale slipped inside the nearest clothing store that offered styles relatively benign (or he estimated so, given what the rest of the populace was wearing). Some colors stood glaringly obnoxious to a man who spent most of his former career blending in, and those were immediately shunned. However, a rack tucked more toward the side of the shop featured a few long-sleeved henleys in benign taupe that might cover just enough of his tattoos to get by. Holding it up atop the loose sleeveless tee he now wore, Shale glanced down with little opinion over the choice.
There has to be a rhyme or reason to this. What qualifies as ‘interview ready’? I can’t even tell who works here to find a rough estimate. Everyone seems dressed the same. And if that’s any indication… Then I’d better forsake all this bone jewelry if I am to get anywhere in the world of employment.
No one had come to visit Gisela, or rather no one had come to the mirror to visit themselves. And Gisela and eaten all of the muffins that she had brought along, leaving her with nothing to occupy her time save for the traditional biting of the nails and cuticles. Not that she had anything better to do. What was she going to do, go home and take a nap? Gisela’s skin crawled as she remembered her last “nightmare” if it could even have been called that. She could still feel the bones of knees pressing into her sternum...
Rustling saved Gisela from her own memory. She looked up at the man with the strange accessories from her corner, sucking the blood from a cuticle she’d bitten too hard. Gisela had rules for this past-time. She didn’t speak to anyone, she didn’t move, and she didn’t draw attention to herself. Basic rules that kept her from being detected. Not that detection mattered, worst case scenario she was escorted from the shop, but it was all so much hassle… Not to mention people were shifty at their best and horrific every other time. Drawing the attention of any one of those monsters was probably not the best choice in the world.
Gisela regarded him for a long moment, moving on to the next finger once her thumb was sufficiently chewed. He was trying to be something else. That much was clear. But why? His tattoos would go beautifully with a little silver bar through the skin above his jugular. Maybe something connecting his nose to his ear. Gisela twisted the little bar in the bridge of her own nose thoughtfully. What did those markings mean? Long bright red tears across his skin like wounds. Secrets to her and maybe to everyone else.
Maybe it was the ink in his flesh that jarred Gisela out of her normal carapace, or maybe it was just that last night was the most real a nightmare had ever gotten, but before she could stop herself, Gisela spoke up.
“You look awful.”
And suddenly she was very aware that she was a dark-skinned bony little girl crouching in a circle of muffin crumbs.
The voice, however small, jarred him from his considerations. Shale looked up abruptly and surveyed the area - the clusters of young women orbiting the racks, the length of mounted displays against the walls, and the set of dressing rooms with curtains drawn - where he spotted a shadow among shadows. A fleck just dark enough to look peculiar, a trace of being, maybe, until he recognized the shy scleras hidden within. Someone lurked.
Someone hunted.
Initially Shale made no attempt to respond. This girl among the dressing room may never have seen such outlandish garb, and Shale himself knew that it held no aesthetic significance. Her opinions may well be warranted in this entirely different society. Instead he quirked a brow. It’s hard to say if she’s talking about what I’m wearing or what I’m looking at wearing. Her opinion, however scathing, would be useful if she knows about interview clothes.
The black-haired man returned the shirt and hanger to its rightful rounder before approaching the set of dressing rooms. Oblivious to etiquette, Shale drew the curtain aside to reveal the girl sitting among the debris of her own lunch, fully clothed, and entirely too curious of others’ behaviors. She looked almost emaciated given her size, and sported cuticles chewed to bleeding that she still worked on furiously. She lacked hair, a trait unusual given his encounters with people of this culture.
“You’re brazen,” he said at last. His graveled voice carried well enough to draw attention from one of the shop staff, who immediately started in their direction, sensing a potential conflict. “Help me find some clothes.”
Well that had been rude. Gisela narrowed baby blue eyes up at the man who ripped aside the boundaries of their two provinces and remained crouched in her own domain. There was nothing she hated more than someone encroaching on her territory. Her world existed in boundaries, in lines that she drew in the sand to keep her far apart from the people around her. From anyone who would do her harm in her waking hours. Fear snaked down Gisela’s spine at the memory of the twisted man crouching on her chest. She might have closed her eyes to shield herself from her own terror, had hollow eyes not been hiding behind her lids.
Instead she kept her eyes locked on the stranger who had so inconsiderately thrown aside her wall. Absently, she sucked blueberry seeds from her molars as she watched him, not bothering to mask the sounds of the action. This continued for about a minute before she finally spoke again.
“Communication,” she hissed, “is not an invitation to invade.”
Still, she stood, if only because there was little point in remaining. The man would likely remove her if she stayed crouching. Even if he didn’t, she’d given her position away, so someone would probably come by and evict her when he left. Might as well play along this time. What did she really have to lose anyway?
Gisela stood in one fluid motion, drawing energy up from the earth to propel her ascension. Head over heart over pelvis over heels had long since become automatic for her. Balance aided her quick advance and kept her level as she snatched the man’s hand from his side. She pulled the skin to lay flat on the back and shoved the appendage into his face.
“Your skin has olive and yellow undertones,” she explained simply, “that means earth tones and warm colors.”
She dropped his hand and pushed his aside, moving briskly along racks and counters to pick up appropriately colored clothing. Size didn’t matter at this junction. Right now it was about narrowing color pallets to specific colors.
“Luckily your eyes also work with that color pallet. And your hair is a neutral” she continued, loading her arms with metallic shirts and deep colored blazers. The staff watched her carefully, very familiar with her fondness for spying on other patrons. Normally, the only time she was seen out in the shop itself was because she was being escorted out, and never before had she spoken.
“Roll up your sleeve,” Gisela demanded, approaching the man once more, arm laden with colors. “Even within the color pallet that your physiognomy has provided, there will still be colors that make you look sick. This is how to rule them out.”
”Interfering with my personal affairs was the invitation.” He loosed the curtain from his grasp when he offered a step back, watching her as she finally emerged from the safety of her hiding hole. Earth tones and warm colors? I suppose that qualifies my officer’s uniform as aesthetic. I hope that was not the sole intention, but with such light cloth…
Shale banished the thought when the girl finally returned, sporting a myriad of warms from sun-baked browns to burnt oranges to deeper reds intermixed with other earthen tones. It reminds me of hunting in the eve - the way the sun overwrote all the colors with its own. Those days always felt powerful. The hunter held out his arm with the sleeve tugged upward to reveal the long stretches of tattoo overlying tanned skin. However, he kept his fist closed to avoid revealing the tattoo of an animal skull therein.
Most of the colors looked aesthetic with his skin tone, yet a few particularly loud ones caused his complexion to look washed out. “Is this how you’re supposed to shop for clothes?” He asked, uncertain if this was a common affair in the city. It didn’t look to be the case, given how many milling patrons simply wandered toward clothing that pleased them and soon held it over themselves for a better gauge on their appearance. None seemed to gather up their wares with the intention of checking each one at once.
Glancing back to the wares offered, Shale’s gaze alternated between a particularly attractive muted red and the burnt orange button-up in her grasp. Some of the metallics he didn’t care for, and the blazers looked particularly heavy for wearing inside a building, but he couldn’t argue with a longstanding custom.
“Thank you,” he returned. The help was much appreciated, given the daunting task of predicting acceptable wear in a culture he wasn’t fully familiar with. She seems put out by assisting me. Am I supposed to offer her payment then? Compliment her for this? Chastise her for her behavior? I don’t know this city well enough to gauge my options. “Where I am from, someone is thanked for their assistance with a gift from the other person’s occupation. Is there a similar tradition here?”
Given some of the meals I’ve seen, I’m not certain that everyone eats meat. Offering venison steaks may well be offensive.
“Here’s the difference between our situations,” Gisela hissed, “if I were left to my own devices, I would still be sitting in the cubicle, watching people go about their affairs. You, however, would be sent into the world wearing something that would ensure that you wouldn’t be taken seriously.” It might have been harsh, both in message and delivery, but if Gisela noticed, then she didn’t give any indication that she cared. Instead she stood, holding the fabrics while the man tested one color after the other. It had been shocking, Gisela would admit later, to see such violent streaks of red running down his arms. As her eyes traced the lines up and under his sleeves, Gisela forgot to be angry about her interruption. The skin on her face softened gradually while she waited patiently, playing the part of clothes hanger without complaint. Maybe she should get a job at a clothing store, she wondered vaguely. Watching people up close is so much more fascinating than sitting in a corner waiting to get caught.
It was a moment before Gisela answered him, having not even heard the question at first.
“Sometimes, when skin tones change or someone wants to try new colors. Mostly people look for sizes and cuts that flatter figures. Which is going to be your next step. I just grabbed colors, I didn’t look at sizes.”
The thank you gave pause to her speech. Thank you? People didn’t usually say thank you to her. People told her to get out. It was new and… kind of nice. Again, however, her expression betrayed nothing save for a softening in the lines of her forehead.
“No one says thank you here unless they have to.” There was no small measure of remorse in her voice. “But… you’re welcome.” And then Gisela seemed to recover herself. She knitted her eyebrows back into the center of her forehead and shoved a hanger up to Shale’s shoulders. “Mostly people just expect that things are done for them. As for this, the sleeves should come to the tops of your hands, and the sides of the shirt should wrap to the middle of your side body. This probably won’t fit, but once you know how bad it is, you can guess the next size to try.”
”You’re bitter,” he responded simply. He bore no acerbic inflection to his voice; he merely maintained conversational tone as if relaying a fact to the girl. I wonder what led to that point of view. How much scorn must one endure before the poison sets in? Perhaps she hasn’t tried to clear her mind. I’m not one to know for certain. “This culture encourages the use of thanks for customs expected. It’s foreign to me.”
But I don’t know if that will make a difference to you.
The hanger was accepted and Shale temporarily shelved it on a nearby rounder while he set to stripping his upper torso free of shirt and jacket. The revealed tattoos sprawling his body attracted more attention than he would’ve liked, but no one made any efforts to put a stop to his actions. The bold circle encompassing the majority of his chest bore a peculiar symbol within of a language either not known or far too old to be read any longer. Perhaps it was nothing at all - Shale himself never knew for certain. But soon it was covered as quickly as it was revealed, with a brilliant red shirt to match the streaks that it so well concealed.
The shirt itself constricted to shoulders, binding movement while sucking up into his armpits. The remained clung fast to his chest and offered a measure of breathing room around his stomach region, where toned muscles prevented the accumulation of fat seen in most of his age group. Ultimately he gave up on the shirt before fully buttoning it, and stripped it away to hang on its rack once more before he donned his typical wear.
Thus, he learned that M was not his size.
“What makes people so interesting to watch when they shop for clothes?” Shale asked while he plucked a larger size of the same shirt from its rack. The shirt and jacket came off again to make room for a far better fitting shirt. He arched arms up above his head to test the shirt’s forgiveness for movements, and when satisfied, checked for length. The sleeves themselves ended a negligible margin above his wrists, but he figured it of little import. “You do not engage them from the sound of it.”
Gisela didn’t exactly have time to stop the man she’d only just met from stripping his shirt off in the middle of the store. She didn’t bother looking around, she knew they were receiving strange looks from the surrounding patrons. But a small dark girl notorious for explosive outbursts and a very strange, very large man were unlikely targets for slender-waisted counter clerks. So, without threat of ejection, Gisela didn’t make a move to correct his actions, and instead retorted, “Yeah. And you’re not from around here.” She mirrored the man’s tone, even if a little acidity filtered in from her lingering temper. “No one is ever really grateful, but no one wants to be called rude either. So they say things that they don’t mean to save face. Everyone has beautiful skin, you could say.”
Maybe he didn’t deserve her retaliation. If the tattoos weren’t enough to give him away, then his behavior certainly did. Chances are Gisela had given him the impression that her actions were normal. Why else would be have reacted so calmly to her presence in the dressing rooms? No, he didn’t deserve her temper. Gisela, if she was being honest with herself, did feel a little sorry for snapping at him, though she probably wouldn’t apologize. Partly because of her own pride, and partly because he didn’t seem wounded. Don’t fix what ain’t broke, right?
Gisela barely choked back a snorting giggle as the man struggled with the too small shirt. He was sort of… endearing… in a foreign sort of way. Sort of like some alien that crash landed on earth without knowing anyone even lived there, much less how to act like them.
“People usually perform in front of mirrors,” Gisela answered, allowing for more cadence in her voice than before. Only a little though. “And they do so even more when they think that they are alone. I like watching people when they think no one else is. It’s how I can see people as they most truly are.” With Shale distracted, Gisela loosed a yawn that was, regrettably, longer and wider than she had originally anticipated. Maybe she should have stifled it, but it was too late now. Gisela tried to recover, scrubbing the dark circles under her eyes for just a second. Thank got her complexion hid the rings.
“If I give myself away to them they tend to react poorly. I’ve been evicted from a lot of shops many times. I think I’m still banned from a few.”
Shale seemed to find a size that worked for him, meaning that Gisela was no longer needed. Maybe she’d go home and take a nap… who knew.
We show who we truly are when we don’t think anyone is looking. Maybe that’s true for most, but not for the few who lie to themselves. And it’s not the only instance, either. “People demonstrate their real selves in more situations than that.” Conflict. Fear. In the face of death. But such heady topics are not for regular conversation, are they?
Her comment following his origins was warranted, if snarky. “I am aware. I came here a week and a half ago.” Plainly I haven’t had time to learn every nuance to this culture. Assimilation feels… Counterfeit. Keeping up with these customs is tiring. Facing lack of acceptance nonetheless defeats the point of it all. I only know from context that your behavior is abnormal. Granted, the eviction comment renders that plain for anyone with the mental capacity to process words.
Shale’s gaze lowered to the sprawl of shoulders from their hangers momentarily, where they hung in contemplation. After a time he shifted his attention to Gisela, who suffered a great yawn. “Your culture sounds troubling to navigate, then.” Truth holds no value here. It’s disconcerting.
“Consider me grateful or not, it is not my place to convince you.” Shale stripped the shirt from his torso and hung it abruptly before switching back to his typical wear. The shirt and hanger came off its rounder to land in the crook of his arm while he searched for others of similar aesthetic. “Your help is appreciated nonetheless.” I don’t know if this culture has a custom for demonstrating thankfulness beyond its typical gratitudes. A bow? Handshake? Kiss of hand? It demands much more research than I am willing to attempt in one sitting. If Slate were here…
Tightening his jaw, he brushed the thought from mind.
Gisela snorted again, repeating ‘troubling’ for the understatement that it was. And this poor man had only been here for a week and a half? No wonder he was acting so strangely. But what place so so far removed that he had literally no idea how to even dress himself? It wasn’t any of her business, and time soon revealed that the man wouldn’t be telling her anything further, so she didn’t ask. And she thanked the lord that he didn’t question her sudden show of fatigue. She was tired of explaining that no, she didn’t sleep well, and no she didn’t need advice on getting more. He was okay. More honest than most -- hell all of the people Gisela knew.
“I believe you,” she assured, face knitting thoughtfully. She watched him for a very long moment before she finally decided what she would do. She nicked a pen from a counter with signups for some raffle and flipped an entry sheet over.
“This if for when you go shopping for pants,” she teased gently, scrawling down 7 numbers underneath feathery script spelling her name, “or if you need help navigating the minefield of our social structure.” She didn’t shove it at him, didn’t even hand it. Instead she left it on the counter beside the pen and turned, waving over her shoulder as she left.
Sweenys_Revenge
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