Excerpt: Tahini

Ryba took everything with a grain of salt, and then she went home and analyzed that grain of salt until it broke under the sheer pressure of her supernatural, unblinking stare. Ryba had started training herself not to blink for as long as a minute, and not to appear blinking for longer, when she was twelve years old. The trick, aside from sheer will power, was to attract people's eyes elsewhere so that they couldn't see when she blinked, in a way that they wouldn't notice. She would move her hand for no real reason, after not moving for several minutes, which would break the other person's concentration and attract their eye since it was something she hadn't done in such an unusual period of time.
She would mention something in the room in passing ("See that clock over there?" or "I've been collecting spoons for twenty years now, boy," or "there are five chairs in this room. People have bled in all of them. I make a point of only buying chairs that the cellar says have blood stains. And if I absolutely have to get a lovely chair that's in mint condition, well ... I just have to make someone bleed"). They were almost always lies, thouh she did like spoons, but they would always get people to look away for just a second, and it would only take her less than that to blink.
And why didn't she blink? Well, that was obvious. It made people uncomfortable. It made them twitch. Making people uncomfortable by means of speech and action was hundreds of times better than torture, especially if you never actually threatened them. Ryba would never consider torturing anyone even if it was legal. It simply didn't work. It was like using a sledge hammer when you should be using a splinter. It was like throwing an entire bucket of wall paint against a canvas at random and passing it off as a masterpiece. There was no grace in it, no sense of art. Ryba generally didn't hold with the pretentious art you got in galleries, but she liked peope who were straightforward.
No "it symbolizes the constant internal struggle between the ego and the id" or "this piece portrays the feeling of hatred against a backdrop of love and tradition" or even "this is inspired by my feelings upon the death of my mother".
She liked when the artist just said what was true: "this piece is meant to show and make use of the fact that the harmony between the colours white and black and how minimalism, interspersed with lines of bright colour and with an untraditional use of negative space, can take the viewer just slightly outside of their expectations." That was real art.
She hummed something.

"What are you humming?" Stacey asked, and Ryba was pulled instantly out of her thoughts and back into the room. How could she had let her thoughts run away from her? She must be cracking up.

Ryba considered the question. "A Bach cello suite, I think, although I'm not sure which one."

"Bach? People still remember that old German dude? I mean, really - how many centuries ago did he die?" Stacey laughed. She still sounded unsettled, but she seemed to be trying to forget. Good. "Sorry. You're so classy, someone of my low taste can only feel better about themselves by making fun of you."

Ryba made a small noise into her mug of water that could only be described as a scoff. "Music is music. No taste is higher than any other taste, what matters is that people have any taste at all."

"Well said," Stacey grinned. Stacey was almost always smiling about something or other unless she had something to frown about, and it drove Ryba mad. "So," Stacey continued, "I've always meant to ask ... how long have you really been collecting spoons?"

"Fifty years," Ryba said. "I was given my first spoon when I was three months old. I chewed on it regularly, that's why I have such strong teeth."

Stacey nodded slowly. It seemed to spread across her entire body, a full-body nod. Ryba could tell Stacey thought she was lying, and for once Ryba was affronted at the implication.
She wasn't. Why would she lie about her spoons? Stacey knew how much she cared for her spoons. If Ryba could care for any living thing, that thing would be her spoon collection.