Kira Puru & The Bruise – Apple Tree
“You know who you remind me of?” she asked.
“Who?”
“I dunno. I guess you don’t, really. That’s just always something I imagine myself saying.”
“Oh.”
I didn’t know what else to say. She was always full of these odd little things; I don’t think she even needed a response. But maybe she did.
“You remind me of something, though,” I tried.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. But I can’t remember what.”
“Well, aren’t we just fine together.”
We were okay together. Sometimes great, but never consistently. Depending on how much we’d been drinking. We did like to drink together.
She offered me another cigarette. I’d already accepted the first offer so I guess I couldn’t say no. I guess I didn’t want to say no. I don’t know. I liked her company. You felt like you were picking up a conversation that was already underway. With her you could sometimes skip beginnings. I think we both appreciated that.
She had a birthmark that covered most of her right hand. She called it a port-wine stain. I’d stopped noticing it a long time ago. She said she could tell a lot about a person by their first reaction to it. She liked when people asked her outright what it was, because if they ignored it, it was usually because they were a little disgusted by it and didn’t want to deal with it, according to her. She had one whole red finger, which I guess was pretty strange if you thought about it for a while. What I liked most about it was how it changed colour when she was cold. It turned from red to purple, from the outsides first and then all the way through the core. The best was when it was cold around the outside but the centre was still pink. But you didn’t really see that that much.
“If I told you you reminded me of my brother, how would that make you feel?” she asked.
“Not that weird, I guess. Why should it?”
“Should it?”
“Not really.” I paused. “Depends which brother.”
She laughed and said, “Which would you prefer? I can probably guess.”
“No one’s like him.”
She dragged delicately on her cigarette and exhaled. “True.”
I looked around. Everyone else had gone inside.
She stubbed out her cig and beat me to it. “I guess we should go inside.”
“I guess.”
So we went back inside.