The news plunges like a stone into the pit of his stomach, the clatter of it echoing loud in his head. With his own strange grief interrupted by a fresher batch of the same, Stephen is momentarily rendered silent. But there's no uncertainty when he does answer: it's not an imposition. ]
I'll make sure they're fed.
[ He doesn't promise I'll feed them. He doesn't know that he will. But the chickens will eat. After that, stuck between the rock of empathy and the hard place of knowing how little he himself could tolerate a sorry in this moment, a heavy, awkward kind of nothing is left to hang between them. It's colored with the loosest flecks of unmoored feeling: sorrow, hatred, anger, guilt. ]
no subject
The news plunges like a stone into the pit of his stomach, the clatter of it echoing loud in his head. With his own strange grief interrupted by a fresher batch of the same, Stephen is momentarily rendered silent. But there's no uncertainty when he does answer: it's not an imposition. ]
I'll make sure they're fed.
[ He doesn't promise I'll feed them. He doesn't know that he will. But the chickens will eat. After that, stuck between the rock of empathy and the hard place of knowing how little he himself could tolerate a sorry in this moment, a heavy, awkward kind of nothing is left to hang between them. It's colored with the loosest flecks of unmoored feeling: sorrow, hatred, anger, guilt. ]