I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He watches the other move deeper into the water. He wonders how deep the other man will go, if he will watch the stars submerge beneath its depths. But no, he stops, looks at Sleaze, who fights the urge to shift beneath his gaze. And then he speaks – a returned greeting, his name, which is foreign and Sleaze pauses for a moment, repeats it to himself in his head, trying to get it right.
“I’m Sleaze,” he says. Not a foreign name but not a good one, either, but what can you expect of a boy born to fathers named Cancer, named Garbage.
Ruin all the way down, it seems.
Isakov moves, then, but only slightly, the river still moving about him. He asks his question and Sleaze feels a foolish moment of hesitation at the offer. There is something to Isakov, something he cannot decipher, and it makes him wary – but also curious.
After all, what does he have to lose?
So he answers by stepping into the water, letting its currents move against his ankles, then his knees. He’s never been much for the water – he still remembers drowning, in that past life, the one that was real but not-real – but he moves closer.
“It’s nice,” he says – banal, stupid. I’ve told you, Sleaze is not a born conversationalist.
“What brought you to the river?” he asks, because it’s better than it’s nice, if only barely.
Sleaze
