Work Text:
Briony often wonders if this shouldn't be harder, if the words shouldn't fail to come, if the ghosts of Cecilia and Robbie will ever sink down upon her pen and press and press and refuse to let another drop of ink fall. The writer's block, however, never comes. She describes an ancient vase for pages, the words slipping through her mind like dancers at a ball. The colors shift, the lights dim, but the musicians continue and the bodies twirl.
"I don't know if I have another in me," she lies to her agent, and he presses his fingertips to the table so the ends go white.
*
She dreams about Arabella at forty, learning the dial of a telephone. Arabella at forty-one, taking the Underground.
She conjures up the animals of the zoo, holding out paws and wings and claws. Breath huffed onto a close cheek, smelling of meat.
Trees scrape against her window, and she imagines a tired processional, a rotting building, a shooting star.
*
Briony always recognizes them later, in the re-reading and the re-vision, she finds the swirl of Cecilia's skirt, the cut of Robbie's jaw.
*
She's given up on church and instead, spends Sundays sipping at whiskey and thinking about fountains. She reads about water, watches droplets shift down a window. Briony washes her hair in a steady, warm stream that years ago swallowed her sister and clung to that lithe body. Briony swallows her pills with a cool glass of the stuff that Robbie dove into, his strong arm around her hips as she sputtered with laughter. She finds worship here, slipping into sleep, still damp with their blessings.
*
"Aren't there any themes you'd like to revisit? Ms. Tallis, we'd love to have anything you scrape together for us."
Briony bows her head and if he interprets it for a nod, she lets him.