Pearls
The world is alive around him. It sings with summer. Birds cry and fly and motorcycles roar and there is a whiff of thunderstorms on the air.
"Cutter?"
It is Thursday, it is park day, it is Horatio day. Cutter sits with him and watches the trees seem to grow even more lush with each passing second. This is the way of Florida, all new life and growth. Children play around them, oblivious of the cop and the EMT, oblivious to all but each other and the ball or the action figure or the sand pail.
"Cutter?"
It always takes a least two repetitions of his name to get his attention, simply because he's too busy drinking it all in. The bubbling tide of children's laughter, the smell of hot dogs warm and pink and still the same wherever he goes, the green of the trees and the grass and the life all around. It takes two repetitions not because he disrespects Horatio, but because he likes it here, and words, like pebbles in a morning pond, might just shatter it.
"Yeah." He says. He kicks his legs like a little kid again, boots a marbled rubber ball back to a small boy. It's the cheap kind. He might've played with one at Highwater, if ever a Trackrat played. "Horatio?"
"Yes?"
"What's your family like?"
He always likes the family stories. He used to think of Horatio's family as the Norman Rockwell type, the mom and dad and brother and sister and dog named spot. He used to think so until Horatio told him the stories. It was a story in exchange for a story.
Cutter told one. How once upon a time there was a boy who lived with his mother and loved her very much, and loved her so much he had to leave. Because she was sick and hurting and couldn't give him food or shelter. Cutter told a story hung with strings of tears and falling leaves, told a story with locked doors and secrets and the simplest, truest plot he could muster.
The tears are strings of pearls but fragile, and you might not know they were grief until you tasted them and they turned sour on your heart.
And Horatio told a story. How once upon a time there were two boys who adored each other, and grew up together and slew a thousand dragons and rescued a thousand princesses. Until one day one boy died and the other boy almost did, not because he was hurt but because his heart was broken. And that was a story Cutter understood. It had happened and it was real and the story was drawn in crayon in a child's hand and written with a man's sharp, fast script. And it was real because the lines were all in black and sloped with grief.
"Most of it's gone."
"My family's gone. Or I'm gone. I guess I'm gone. To me they're gone, to them I'm gone."
"My father was like that."
"I think mine was too."
The lines of script are strung with pearls of tears.
"I had to leave, Horatio. I couldn't stay."
"I know."
The ink runs when the line stabs the pearls and the liquid grief runs out all over them, waterfalls of it, tumbling rapids of it, roaring and drowning.
"But now I'm here."
"Yes."
"Horatio?"
"Yes?"
"I think I belong here."
The strings are tied with the tightest knots, hung with the jewels and tin beads of memory.
The pearls glisten, even in the darkness.
"I think you do, too."