Waiting for Sunday

chapter 1 - every storm's keeper

There's something sticky on Lillie's dress, something besides sweat from the already sticky heat of leftover Georgia summer drifting through the bar's half-shut door. The place is as small and dark as a child's closet, a few tiny tables peppered around the floor like flat wooden mushrooms. No chairs. Tonight, like every night, is standing room only.

"Lillie," says Mira. "Your drink."

"Hm?" Lillie glances at the table between them, and curses to herself. Sometime between when she was talking to Mira and when she glanced up to see if her brother was here yet, Lillie's cup—truly a repurposed Mason jar—tipped over, pooling ginger lemonade across the table. A slow trail of it trickles over the table's edge, right onto Lillie's dress.

"You're kidding," Lillie says with a sigh of acute distress. Her eyes flit up again, searching the stage at the front of the room. It's small, more like a ship's plank than a stage. For now it is empty save for a single rickety barstool, but if the last minute e-mail she got from the event coordinator was right, it won't be in the next three minutes.

"Do you want my cardigan?" Mira suggests, already shrugging it from her shoulders. "Maybe you can cover it up."

Lillie eyes Mira's aggressively red cardigan, then her own dress, black and white silk. "You want me to go up there looking like Minnie Mouse?"

Mira puts her jacket back on, no ounce of hurt in her face. "Maybe I'm trying to help you find your Mickey."

"You're not funny."

Now Mira looks a bit disappointed. "I know," she says, passing a mindless hand over her cornrows. "I'm working on it."

"Someone requested a knight in shining armor?" says a voice, and Mira's eyes lift over Lillie's shoulder. Lillie turns to find her younger brother standing there, a wad of crinkled paper towels in one hand, a black coat draped over the other. Moses is smiling, wide enough for the dimple to show in his cheek, as if he really has just saved the day.

"I did," Lillie says, graciously accepting the towels, "but all I see is one wearing Dad's old college hoodie and the same beat tennis shoes he's owned since tenth grade."

Moses scowls. "It's a good thing they've lasted me this long. I value loyalty."

Instead of agreeing, she just pats dust from Moses's shoulder as he shimmies into place beside her at the table. "People are going to wonder why I'm wearing a coat in the middle of August," she says to him.

"People would also wonder why you have a suspicious stain on your dress."

Mira points at him with an eyebrow raised, a silent, He's got you there.

He does. So Lillie takes the coat.

A tap tap against the mic sends the buzzing room into a sudden hush, a swarm of bees silenced by smoke. A man takes the stage, wearing an oversized Arctic Monkeys T-shirt and jeans ripped beyond recognition, his arms decorated with tattoos. Hot yellow stage lights fix a glare to his wire-framed glasses. "Thank you all for coming to our poetry reading tonight."

He pauses for applause, and is awarded with a few scattered claps. Most of them are from Moses. Lillie's mind is elsewhere, simultaneously already on stage and off of it, so she forgets to clap.

"As a reminder, all of our poets tonight are local poets, from right here in Atlanta," the man goes on. "We're so lucky to have such diverse talent within reach, and thank you ahead of time to all the poets for sharing their work with us tonight. Shall we get started?"

"Lillie?" Mira whispers. "You're not gonna throw up, are you?"

"She totally is," says Moses.

"I'm not," Lillie says, firmly. "I'm fine."