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Elodie crossed her hands against one another and lay them to rest on the flat of her stomach. Above her stretched a high cathedral ceiling of dark wood, arched in the centre by several worn beams, spotted with texture. The square cushion behind her head was appropriately firm, as was the chaise that her body was reclined against, covered in a fabric tight knit but not coarse against her skin.
The air was pleasantly cool, and smelled faintly of citrus and clove, courtesy of a diffuser on the coffee table to her right. Somewhere in the distance, birds chirped and the sigh of machinery whirred. They had been building another high rise nearby for quite some time, but she had always neglected when leaving to see what state of progress it was in, and so the building itself remained a mystery.
"What are you thinking about?" Cyrus said, his voice warm and crisp. She could hear his pen pausing on his thick notepad and wondered what he had been writing, given that she had been silent for five minutes or so.
"I'm thinking about the construction site." She said honestly, closing her eyes.
In her head, she could see it, though only as a faint blueprint. This was how she thought about most things, as their structures and skeletons constructed against a grid, intersections of thin crisp lines plotting their scale and components. People came to her in this way as well, though their insides looked something more akin to diagrams in a medical textbook, organs and gristle and bone.
The first time she'd ever opened up such a book, people had started to make a lot more sense to her. Seeing all the pink and red things layered upon each other helped to justify all the irrational quirks that saddled humanity. The unpredictability of others, the unknowable.
"Does the noise bother you?"
"No." She paused. "It preoccupies me."
"In a bothersome way?"
"No, just in a way that means I can't ignore it."
She could tell Cyrus had nodded but she didn't know how. Again the scribbling on paper began.
"Would the noise have preoccupied you before the accident?"
Elodie had to think for a moment. This was a common line of questioning, it almost felt like the accident had been her point of conception. Indeed, she had never answered such searing questions about herself before it. Elodie preferred shallow talk, even as it made her itch (truly she preferred no talk at all). Divulging about herself in-depth did not interest her, not because she harboured some deep seated contempt for herself, but rather that she felt she didn't have all that much to say.
