Sometimes it felt like she were backstage watching life play out around her. All the colours, faces and conversations as rain droplets down a window, and she behind the pane, watching them all run into one another. Synchronicity was a funny mistress to court, and she recognised that she was dancing with it, closely, from her unusual vantage point, as a living dead girl, an animated miracle of necromancy. Was she just a vessel that somehow behaved like the rest of them, knew when to smile and laugh by some uncanny synapse that relegated her whole being into Normal Behaviour? So much had played out perfectly, despite the difficulties of Artsblood and her threats of tragedy, that Madi had begun to wonder if she was paying more attention than she thought - did the mystery of her new skin have some sonar, some synthesis with the inner workings of existence?

So many questions!

Mostly, they and cousins of such questions lay aside, like dying dogs. She hardly tended to them but let them waste as she went about her unlife as best she could, without thinking too much on the uncertainties, even though they were everywhere. However, what it all had conspired to help her recognise, was how vastly important it would be to walk through the shuttering, flickery silent screen of this surreal personal era (as fledgling), where all was blacker than black and whiter than white, and reach beyond the pale, the set... She did try.


Walking Orlan around the yard, testing his reflexes with the gentle aid of a crop, she waited for Janey-girl's arrival. Lunch promised. The sun was bright and shining, it was a beautiful day and one perfect for basking in. There were no patches of sun but giant quilts of it that swanned over the fields and spread out for golden miles - out there a picnic blanket awaited them. With a gaze at that giant star and its position, as one might check a waxing candle, she saw the time to be just on Noon. It had touched its apex.


A glance to the fenceline where she expected Jane to be coming from, and she dismounted, walking the horse over to the others where he was locked in paddock.


Friendship with a mortal was the last frontier, the final bridge between herself and a sense of humanity. She didn't have many friends, for all the folk who claimed to know her. They didn't, not now. Some in time would, perhaps again, but she was not the Older one. Those she did feel in kindred with, now, the ones who sought to understand and love, they were blessings. Treasured and not lost on a girl like Madi. Whoever Madi, the Younger, was.

Jane always was so honest. You couldn't claim the girl to be anything but. No matter who she spoke with or what she was talking about at the time, she was honest. So even though Jane was all spritely like usual, Madi could sense an otherness to her friend as she embraced her, her frame dashed lightly, redolent with hay. "Just walking the horses, long morning. They're being such pains in my toosh this week." A laugh, and she leant back, searching those bespectacled eyes, "How are you Janey?"


Her hand filled Jane's and she began to lead her towards the fields, out through a large wooden gate that surrounded an unused paddock, filled with weeds and flat, graded dirt. Even though there was only the two of them, the dirt gave up into great big plumes, whirling at their backs after only a few steps. Just ahead was the picnic blanket, arranged with a basket and two plastic cups, no doubt with flies and smaller insects exploring them. Thistles and barleyheads surrounded. It was picture perfect, considering it was so close to the city. One might feel they really had escaped the city once and for all, if they allowed themselves to get carried away with the lush landscape that rolled off in the distance, the sky that seemed to press low, so low that one might think clouds could sail across your shoulders. The sun beating, warmed and clear.


"I got us a couple cheeses to try, the grocer said they were awesome. I got the fanciest hams too. And a few vegies, like tomatoes and cucumbers anddddd I made us each a small fruit salad."

If Jane felt pensive and Madi looked sad, maybe a relaxing lunch could salvage the better feelings. A bond to be boundless forged over food.

Everyone said she was faraway. And in days to come, older, assured, they'd still describe her the same way, with eyes that looked out for lonesome miles. Or miles that stretched to a place, behind the curtain, where the reel of existence snapped and curled and fried. That's where her eyes were going, even as a kid. Kind of happened when you saw too much too soon.

"It was pretty yummy. So what are you going to tell me?", blunt from the start when she got to knowing someone, she piped up, behind flyaway hairs touched with souvenirs of grass from the afternoon sprawling that two stuffed young girls would take. From behind her small hand curling around her mouth as though in shame for diving in with questions. Janey Girl and her could be revealing with one another, but limits were limits and shyness still played its part in a young Madi's interactions. Often, most ferociously.


"You don't have to tell me, but you .... ", she breathed a smile, "look like you're bursting at the seams."