“What’s your name?”

            “I’m Fran, when all is said&done. Fran Fowler. On the surface anyhow. I’m a Steph too, for today, but she’s kind of asleep fornow. I’ve taken over, she’ll be back when this conversation is done. Can’t stay here long though, it’ll feel like blackout otherwise”.

            “The fuck that means?”

            Fran Fowler doesn’t reply. She fixes Sister’s hands instead, intensely, magnetically. Sister grunts: it’s as if she were abruptly being… split in two, her mind and her hands eachfighting. As if there were a current, a pulling force at the tip of her finger, crossing over to Fran Folwer’s extended palms. Some sort of unseen, inevitable elastic bonding magic. Her breath catches somewhere around her throat and she watches herself meeting these hands with hers, moth to bulb, snake to charmer. Mouth to apple. And something happens. Something urgent, molecular. Automatic. Atomatic. Something huge, unconstrained, weightless but dense, meaningful though opaque.

            Uncomprehendingly, her elbows spasm as her hands are released. Knuckles hit the counter. Her vision tear-kaleidoscopic. It lasted a mo, max.

“You can mix him fu’real now”. The voice is tender, the inflexions soft. Maybe wisdom, or even fucking love, Sister feels. “You wanted this”.

And the voice is right. She wanted that.

            Later, when Vincent is back from the funerals, she’ll hold him and touch his face. She will have no words, just bottomless eye-wells he tumbles in. Soundlessly, she’ll distil him from bottles around her hips and plucked down jars on shelves, as bee extracting me-flower essences. She will present him the brew the way she would present a chalice: Vincent will drink his core and crux, and then Vincent will weep.