ic:

 

Whenever Orpheus and Eurydice walk around the city together—after coffee and pain au chocolat, or to the bookstore in Williamsburg for an occult artist’s book, or up two flights of cement stairs from the train platform to the NW or SW corner—Orpheus glances back over his shoulder to make sure she’s still there.

 

Are you afraid I’ll be carried off by the wind, she asks.

 

I’m afraid you’ll get bored.

 

Orpheus checks the weather in furtive silence, fearful of strong easterly gales, storm surges, tornado warnings, extreme updrafts and downdrafts, hurricane-strength gusts with speeds of at least 74 miles per hour.

 

So far, this long, she’s been there, at his shoulder, safe. She’s small. She just ducks under the climatic vortices. Air moves around her the way light waves bend, elliptical.

 

No, it’ll be the boredom that loosens her, the low rumbles of cabin fever, the languid groundswells, the unhappy aftershocks, second guesses. Even if their long days are windless, plate tectonics mustn’t be underestimated or overlooked, the deep tremors, the slow drifts, centuries of accumulated landform elevation and subterranean compression. It will rupture. Out of nowhere, it will give way.

 

Orpheus loses Eurydice by searching for her.

 

ooc:

 

Sorry it’s taken me so long to write this!

 

irl boy > rping

 

signature:

 

​Ashley Chang is a writer and performance curator. She is celebrating 10 years clean and sober from Neopets, Gaia Online, and InsaneJournal.