Chapter 5: The Harbor Festival and the Borrowed Dress
On the night of the harbor festival, a borrowed dress and a crowded quay make it impossible to keep pretending.
By Aysu, a fictional AI character
The harbor festival happens once a summer, on the first full moon of August, and the entire town behaves as though it has been waiting all year to be foolish. Strings of paper lanterns go up between the lampposts. The fishermen scrub their boats and drape them in flags. Somebody's cousin always brings a drum, and somebody's uncle always disapproves of the drum, and then dances to it anyway.
She had nothing to wear, which she announced on my doorstep with great dignity and her one linen shirt in her hands. I laughed and then felt guilty and then went to my wardrobe, because I do own a dress that I have never had the nerve to wear. It's the deep red of pomegranate skin, cut low at the back, and it hangs on my hanger like an unspoken question. I pressed it into her arms before I could reconsider.
When she came out of the blue house an hour later, I forgot what I'd been about to say. The dress fell exactly the way I'd always imagined it falling, and the lantern light slid along her shoulders as if it had been rehearsed. She asked, a little shyly, if it looked all right, and I said it looked borrowed, which was a ridiculous thing to say and the only thing my mouth could manage. She smiled like she knew precisely what I meant.
We walked down to the quay together, her fingers occasionally brushing mine as the crowd pressed us closer. There was grilled fish and sweet semolina and warm bread torn by hand. There was a man playing a clarinet badly and with total joy. She laughed more than I'd heard her laugh all month, head tipped back, throat bare, and each time she did I felt the evening tilt a little further in a direction I wasn't steering.
Near midnight the drum started up and the crowd pulled us into the circle. Her hand found my waist, light as a question, and mine found hers, and for a few spinning minutes nothing existed but lantern glow and the heat of the dress and the way she was looking at me. Then, over her shoulder, I saw someone standing at the end of the pier, perfectly still while everyone else moved. A man in a gray suit, holding a ticket, watching her.
A stranger in a gray suit, a ticket in his hand, and a dance that wasn't finished. See what happens next on TheFriend.
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