Interlude - A Toast

Serafíne

Hello to the failing moon, crescent and waning now below the horizon, drifting somewhere over the Indian ocean, forgotten by absolutely everyone in the outdoor bar at the Larimar Lounge on a Monday night.  There is a band on stage and maybe that's why Táltos is here.  Not because he's a fan or has even heard their name (they do not have one.  So the singer has avowed three times throughout the set) but because he felt her from a block away.  Four of them on stage, two guys - the drummer hidden behind the set and the guitarist, who is good, who is fucking great, but has a certain starched stiffness that tells you that on some level he is Very Fucking Serious about this music thing - and two girls, the bassist, who sports pin-curls and a pin-up style make-up and a rockabilly vibe, and the singer: who is Serafíne. 

And rather as her name implies, on the stage, she absolutely burns. 

The set - outdoors, despite the autumn chill in the air, despite the fact that it is a fucking Monday night, lasts a solid hour and a half.  They play originals and covers from the whole spectrum of music history.   With, admittedly, a rather heavy focus on punk and post-punk.  The last song is a revved up New Pornographers' cover that Sera sings like a torch song surrounded by a wall of goddamned noise, to which she contributes, quite occasionally, when she decides to set down her bottle of vodka and actually play her fucking guitar.

When the set is over, Sera surrenders her guitar and microphone to her bandmates, allows Dan to physically unplug the guitar from its amp and then lift it off her body.  Her arms are open wide and she's grinning and they don't have fucking roadies, they are already starting to break down their gear, but Sera does not and will not help.  She has better things to do, like jump down easily from the edge of the stage onto the concrete patio that serves as a dance floor and wander through the rather sparse Monday night crowd carrying her vodka bottle by the neck, searching, quite unerringly, for a goddamned shaman.  To whom she lifts the vodka first in toast and then in offering. 

The world absolutely spins around her.  She loves the way it moves.

Taltos

Táltos is the kind of man (thinning away [vanishing, pared to skin and bones, a lean lankster rabbit of a man]) who is so full of energy that he'll draw people in with that energy. They don't have to like him. They don't always. But they're fascinated by the quick movements of his fingers -- the expressive flick of his eye-lids, the expansive shaking of his eyebrows, the generous curl of his mouth, the occasional stroke of his mustache (un-curled today, but still quite nicely combed and shamelessly big, big, BIG, like he is), even the glint of copper on his wrists, the sinuous rill of light on his rings. Which is to say, he's not nursing a drink in a corner alone, but rather when Serafine finds him is leaning against a pillar in the wall, something dividing this space from that space, and he's surrounded by a little crowd of people who he didn't know before now, but can laugh with as if he's part of all their in-jokes. It's not comfortable, it's just living, and he tells them, I know that singer, and answers questions about the singer with whatever strikes his fancy, and then she lifts vodka in a toast and he grins bright canine-tooth like a wink at her, and lifts an empty shot glass, lifts (in the sense of steals) another empty shot glass, and says to Serafine, "You sing like the wings of the holy seraphim burn, honey." Genial. "But it's your gifts that make you divine."

Serafíne

"I sing like I'm drunk and having a good time," Sera counters, her mouth a quick and certain slash of a grin.  Some of the people in that crowd around him she knows and others she doesn't and some she has seen and others she never will, becomes something strangers just drift through the world and you only feel the the rippling movement of the passage against your skin.

"So if that's what it's like for the fucking Seraphim," he has a shot glass and steals another.  Sera has been drinking from the mouth of the bottle all night but is not averse to pouring shots.  Likes the way those feel, too, the hard curve of the glass between her thumb and forefinger, the give-it-all-away of a bottoms-up toast.  So: he has the glasses and she has the vodka and she pours them both shots.  Then takes his arm and does not seem to care which one: malice or no-malice even if the malice when she feels it makes her skin crawl and maybe even her eyes burn with unshed tears.

" - sign me the fuck up for the heavenly host."

Taltos

He laughs. He laughs not full-in-his-throat but full-in-his-chest: it dissolves into coughing, because it hadn't decided whether to become even louder or to while away into a satyric snicker. He laughs, 'cause he's amused. The hell other reason do you need? But he laughs also because it's good to laugh (to Lust [to Lust- it's always wanting]), the glasses are lined up carefully on a slick of banister, something that has that gummy age-old feel you get at places like the Larimer Lounge, something that remembers being new-lacquered, and as he laughs says Táltos the shaman, "The fucking Seraphim are singing about the creation of the world, and that's a damned good time. You'd get bored but it's nice to know that some things won't."

And once she has poured, he holds the glass up and searches for a toast, settles on- "To things second to last."

And drinks.

And of course Táltos is warm, warm as things in spring beginning to kindle.

Serafíne

(le pause!)