The Q

by Beth Brower

“Staying with someone. Companionship is one of the great arts of the human soul.”

ruined pile of rusted thoughts and sharp emotions torn up and left in her empty chest.

Anonymity suited Quincy; she knew how to keep it close.

“Because dreams are what stretch you to find more, to be a better person, if you will.”

“Is that all improvement would be to you?” Crow’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed Quincy’s face. “Is that the pinnacle of where you would like to be?” “Is there anything wrong with it?” “No.” Crow shook his head and shifted so he was facing Quincy straight on. “But is there anything right with it, love? Now, that’s another question.”

Montjoy was the best, and he simply had no compunction declaring the fact.

even Quincy—who was accustomed to thinking about walking only as a means to an end or as a means to calm herself down before someone else came to an end—looked about her and came close to granting the walk some kind of virtue in itself.

“You certainly are,” Arch said. And his words sounded like a dictionary entry that had more than one meaning.

knew how to walk quickly without looking like he had any hurry in his body, or in his schedule.

“Only that I believe”—Arch lifted his shoulders, and the look on his face was so unguarded Quincy surprised herself by listening—“that each one of us has times when what we need most is someone who is willing to sit quietly by, waiting for us. Not interfering, just being.”

June came in sticky and damp. Unexpected rain joined forces with humidity like it was their business to fill the streets of Rhysdon, making the city a strange combination of unbearable and interesting.

“We will talk business, and poetry, and whatever else we find interesting.” “I don’t care for poetry.” “You will. Not as much as I do, but you’ll learn to appreciate that I appreciate it. That’s part of maintaining connections with people. You give yourself a little to what they give themselves to a lot. And they do the same for you.”

She kept thinking that a time like this required words—one million lines of type, laid out perfectly, with no ink stains, no backward letters—to say what should be said. But that couldn’t happen, and she didn’t know what else to put in its place.

Swallowing, Fisher turned his eyes towards Quincy, and she tried to smile in a way that told him he would get everything he ever wanted out of life.

Now, after a few weeks of establishing the habit, both seemed to take it for granted that they would begin the day in this butter-flaked, fruit-filled, peppermint-steeped sort of manner.

“There are few things more tedious than a friend who will not graciously receive.”

“I’ve often wondered if our greatest strengths are, in turn, our greatest weaknesses—which is what makes them so hard to temper.”

“I do want things to be clear, to be understood. I also wonder if I’m terrified of apathy.” He did not say this in his usual tone, rather something quieter, the voice one kept tucked in their vest. “I worry that if I don’t fight to give the clearest picture of myself—who I try to be and what I believe to be true—I’ll grow indifferent to what that vision is. A moral lethargy will set into my comfortable life, when all I want is to be afire with the cause.”

“Because the fall is when all good things are made manifest.” Arch waved his hand as if he were the beneficent spirit of the season. “The harvests are come on, rolling into the city, a message of bounty and abundance. The trees are turning, their color revealing their most beautiful intentions, kept to themselves all year long until now.” He paused, turned, and looked at Quincy with a directness she now understood to be tied to his strongest feelings. “I always feel I might be my best self in the fall; I wish to pen my best essays, listen to the purest music, taste the best fruit I can find.”

She did not hear the words this time, for she was watching the movement of his face while focused on something he loved. It was, she admitted, beautiful.

Quincy always thought such intense, honest discussion—clearly based in trust—was like a wild animal: a foreign thing she saw happening but could never understand…or begin to know how to tame.

what he had said was not what she had thought, but the echo of it was strangely familiar: as if she

had an indefinable taste in her mouth and he had told her what it could be.