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15-minute drabbles from the Writing Chat!
"So..." Liam squinted at the little bottles lined up in front of his feet on the floor. "I'm going to hazard a guess and say that one makes you bigger and one makes you smaller?"
"Either that," Mary snorted, "or they're both filled with cyanide."
"... you know, that's what I love about you, Mary. Your optimism." He blinked. He still wasn't quite used to the sound of sarcasm coming out of his own mouth.
It wasn't lost on Mary, either. She arched an eyebrow. "Stop that. You sound like Thom."
Well, with Thom at Cornell, Liam supposed someone had to sound like him.
"G-Guys, let's focus." Another thing Liam wasn't used to - their would-be third Musketeer. Georgie raised a hand to catch their attention. "We know one of these bottles is the key to opening the door."
"Actually, we don't know that." Mary glared at the source of all their bickering: a single door, floating in front of them, wrapped in a chain. "Cyanide, remember?"
"Maybe we should just try one?" Georgie picked up a bottle and shook it ever so slightly, then blanched when it changed from green to pink. She set it down carefully. "Or maybe we should think about it more."
"Liam." Mary rubbed her forehead. "This is the last time we play hide and go seek with Jack, no matter how much you guilt me."
"Aw, be fair," he sighed. "You should trust her a bit more."
Mary's glare, if possible, grew even flatter. "You do remember that period when she tried to kill you."
"Yeah, well." Liam shrugged. "Water, bridges, etcetera."
Tuyen probably should have known it would end up like this - at least, she should if she's half as good at reading people as she thinks she is.
She remembers how it was: he always had that intensity about him, even if that strong undercurrent of clingy kept him from doing much about it. He was always ready to declare himself as the knight, the protagonist, the hero of the story, even back when she was better at that kind of thing. (If she ever was better at that kind of thing. She's starting to think that entire part of her life was a hallucination, anyway.)
She should have seen it coming, even back when they were playing Mr. and Miss Most Likely to Succeed, when they weren't so much popular or respected as they were known about. Back when she had all those same opportunities, those same ambitions, and it wasn't so much a question of if she would get there, it was a question of when.
She doesn't even get it when she's lying there and telling herself I don't get sick, even though she's forced to concede the point when she can't say the words out loud.
But at the very least, she has lots of practice staying stoic in the face of pain, though it isn't usually her own she has to contend with. She puts on a brave face for the tests, all the poking and prodding, and she lets him clutch her hand and, half-crying, declare that she's going to be okay. I don't think it's me you're trying to convince, she wants to say, but she still can't quite do it.
When the they assistant comes looking for him, he's the one that sounds upset, even as he protests, "I can't just leave her alone," and he squeezes her hand as if her heart is going to stop again if he walks out the door.
As if. She's more of a control freak than that - at least, she thinks so. She can't speak for this new, invalid Tuyen. She can't speak much at all, really.
But she manages it, for him. "Get the hell out of here," she whispers, and manages a smile. "You're driving me insane."
"You're welcome." She's never met anyone else who can look so put out and so happy all at once. He grins and kisses her forehead. "Be right back."
That's the last time she sees him for four months, and when he comes back, he doesn't smile at her like that. And only then - but not a moment before - does she see where it started.
"Oh, no." Catalin's voice couldn't have been flatter if he tried. "A papercut. Whatever shall you do."
Kite opened his mouth to comment on the wisdom of taunting a man on the verge of a complete panic attack, but it looked like he was too late for that, too. The man curled up in an even tighter ball.
"It is not a papercut," the man declared, his voice muffled by his arm. "They got me."
Catalin looked up at Kite long enough to raise his eyebrows, silently asking why a veteran soldier would have a complete breakdown over the tiniest knife wound either of them had seen. And then, making sure everyone heard his sigh, he knelt down. "Really. Sounds terrible."
"It is," the soldier quavered. "It's over for me."
"Sounds like it." Catalin nodded. "Bleeding out very, very slowly is such a common cause of death, after all."
"Not now," he snapped, and he looked up at Catalin this time. "This is the first time, you know. I've been doing this since I was fifteen, and this is the first time. It only gets worse from here."
That flat, long-suffering look finally vanished, and Catalin regarded the soldier with something like thoughtfulness. "You've looked at me before, right?"
"... yes," he said slowly, eyes narrowed with confusion.
"So you get it," Catalin said as he stood up. "If I can do this, so can you. Easily."
Later, once the chaos had died down, Kite bridged the subject: "You don't have to do that, Cat."
"Of course I do," Catalin said absently. A few seconds later, he added, "Do what?"
Kite shifted his weight, uncomfortable. "You don't have to make it sound like you got this far by accident."
Catalin smiled - one of those patented Cat-smiles that never looked very happy. "You have another theory?"
Kite did. Though he was damned if he was going to share it.
After a moment's silence, Dev cleared his throat, glancing from one classmate to the other. "Um. So. Should we talk about that?"
"And say what?" Kalinda asked as she sank into the chair. Dear diary, she narrated in her head. Today I punched an upperclassman in the neck. It was satisfying for about two seconds.
Even worse, she had been trying to punch him in the nose, but she hadn't been quite tall enough. That was just the delicious golden raisin topping on the rice pudding, wasn't it.
It was a year before she would visit the city of Xiandra - and a few days before she was told, in no uncertain terms, that girls weren't supposed to have a temper.
"Well, I would start with 'wow,' and then, I don't know, maybe move on from there?" Dev shrugged. "I don't have much experience with you savaging random upperclassmen. I sort of love it." He turned to Isha, who seemed to be shrinking into the wall. "I should mention, though, that I was totally going to do that. She just sort of beat me to the punch. Pun totally intended."
"I don't need you punching anyone for me, Deva," Isha mumbled.
"Hey! Don't give me that look," Dev said, pointing to Kalinda. "She was the one who actually did it."
Kalinda got the sense that Isha had been trying not to look her in the eye for the past five minutes. And even then, he only managed it for a couple of seconds. "Um. It's not that I'm not grateful, but." He shrugged. "If you punched someone every time they insulted me, you would... probably... just go around hitting everyone. There are sort of a lot."
Just looking at him then, Kalinda seriously regretted that she wasn't the type to go around, as Dev put it, 'savaging random upperclassmen.'
"There's an upside, though." She managed a smile. "There's one less of them, now."
Isha paused for a long moment, digesting that, before smiling back. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone's eyes go so wide."
"Well, look at that." Dev beamed. "I'll make savages out of you two, yet."
Isha's smile instantly dissolved into a thin line. "Should the one who didn't do anything really be saying that?"
Dev wilted. "Ouch, man."
On nights like this, Jasper sometimes wondered if she would live out the rest of her life in Gillian’s Irish Pub, serving drinks to and breaking up the fights of the only people in Boston who were more miserable than she was.
And then, of course, if that were the case, she’d probably die in some little, quasi-ironic way, like getting hit in the neck by a flying shard of beer bottle, and then her boss would be completely useless in identifying her corpse, since she lied to him about her age and he seemed to think her last name was “Merlot” instead of “Marlowe” and her parents would never find out, but her mother would always think that she eloped with a rich man and had to hide her background, and her headstone would be a cheap little plaque that read “Here Lies Jasper Merlot, Killed by Beer Bottle.”
Not that she was a pessimist or anything.
She’d tell herself often that she was too young to be jaded, but she didn’t understand how she could be optimistic, either. Not after what must have been the fourteenth rejection for an interview. Not even for the job, for an interview. She was “too young,” “had no professional flying experience,” and even if she’d had a chance with the latest one today, she had to rush over from work, and still smelled like alcohol and cigarettes.
She had walked out from that rejection calmly, only to break down crying in a little North End pizzeria when she didn’t have enough money for extra toppings, just in case she didn’t feel like enough of a crazy person.
At least she had plenty of company. The little ten-year old who kept telling her he’d forgotten his ID. The constantly mumbling older man who yelled “Mazeltov!” every time something got smashed in a fight. The young, clean-cut man at the end of the bar who cried “She’s gone! She’s gone!” every few minutes or so. The man in the rumpled suit who kept calling her “Lass” and demanding she speak in an Irish accent, even though she’d already told him she was from Illinois.
It was one of those steamy, humid days that she kept hearing were rare for Boston, except every day since the beginning of June was like that. Nights like these back in Illinois were so perfect for flying, she’d found: hot air rose, but you could rise above that, too.
“So, how about this heat, Mr. Davis?” she cheerfully asked one of her regulars, cleaning out a glass.
Mr. Davis’ face crashed to the bar, his arms covering his head like he was in a fallout shelter.
“… uh-huh.” Jasper set the glass back under the bar. “Tell me about it.”
It wasn't until I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck in that 'you're being followed' way that I realized someone was in the backseat. I really should have gotten the hint from the broken car CD player that wouldn't stop playing Lady Gaga. So dreading what I would find, I turned around in my seat.
The woman in the backseat was wearing an obscenely short sequined mini-dress and a paper mache zebra head. She also happened to be missing both of her legs below the knee.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I tried.
Raaaaa-raaaaa-ra-ah-ah, was the only response I received.
"What?" Felix asked, the car jerking sharply to the right as he turned around to look.
"I don't know what it is about you," I said, reaching over to set the steering wheel right. "First your house, then your VCR, now your car. Everything you own gets possessed eventually."
"Crap. I hope they don't get into the ice cream maker. Who knows what they could do with that." Felix shot me a side-glance. "Boy or girl?"
"Girl," I said.
His eyebrows waggled. "Is she hot?"
"Can't tell," I said. "She's wearing a zebra head."
"Kinky." Felix nodded approvingly. "But anyway, Allie, you're overlooking the good news, here."
"Which is?"
Felix's grin was bordering on evil. "Zebra Girl!" he called. "Give us some Telephone!"
"Yeah, bitches!" Zebra Girl crowed.
As the first auto-tuned lyrics poured out of the speakers, Felix started to scream-sing along, loud enough to drown out Zebra Girl's howls. Horrifying as it was, I started to tap the beat against my jeans.
Felix took a break just long enough to crow, "Admit it. You love it."
"Fine," I said. "It's catchier than it has a right to be."
"Yeah, well." Felix lowered his voice. "Let's just hope our new friend doesn't discover my sister's Adam Lambert mix in the glove compartment."
"Adam Lambert?" Zebra Girl gasped, and she lunged forward to dig through the glove compartment. "Oh my God!"
This is a disaster, Beyonce informed me. And right then, I was inclined to agree with her.
I'm going to bed so that I may be up early to meet *~SUZANNE COLLINS~* tomorrow. YES.
"So..." Liam squinted at the little bottles lined up in front of his feet on the floor. "I'm going to hazard a guess and say that one makes you bigger and one makes you smaller?"
"Either that," Mary snorted, "or they're both filled with cyanide."
"... you know, that's what I love about you, Mary. Your optimism." He blinked. He still wasn't quite used to the sound of sarcasm coming out of his own mouth.
It wasn't lost on Mary, either. She arched an eyebrow. "Stop that. You sound like Thom."
Well, with Thom at Cornell, Liam supposed someone had to sound like him.
"G-Guys, let's focus." Another thing Liam wasn't used to - their would-be third Musketeer. Georgie raised a hand to catch their attention. "We know one of these bottles is the key to opening the door."
"Actually, we don't know that." Mary glared at the source of all their bickering: a single door, floating in front of them, wrapped in a chain. "Cyanide, remember?"
"Maybe we should just try one?" Georgie picked up a bottle and shook it ever so slightly, then blanched when it changed from green to pink. She set it down carefully. "Or maybe we should think about it more."
"Liam." Mary rubbed her forehead. "This is the last time we play hide and go seek with Jack, no matter how much you guilt me."
"Aw, be fair," he sighed. "You should trust her a bit more."
Mary's glare, if possible, grew even flatter. "You do remember that period when she tried to kill you."
"Yeah, well." Liam shrugged. "Water, bridges, etcetera."
Tuyen probably should have known it would end up like this - at least, she should if she's half as good at reading people as she thinks she is.
She remembers how it was: he always had that intensity about him, even if that strong undercurrent of clingy kept him from doing much about it. He was always ready to declare himself as the knight, the protagonist, the hero of the story, even back when she was better at that kind of thing. (If she ever was better at that kind of thing. She's starting to think that entire part of her life was a hallucination, anyway.)
She should have seen it coming, even back when they were playing Mr. and Miss Most Likely to Succeed, when they weren't so much popular or respected as they were known about. Back when she had all those same opportunities, those same ambitions, and it wasn't so much a question of if she would get there, it was a question of when.
She doesn't even get it when she's lying there and telling herself I don't get sick, even though she's forced to concede the point when she can't say the words out loud.
But at the very least, she has lots of practice staying stoic in the face of pain, though it isn't usually her own she has to contend with. She puts on a brave face for the tests, all the poking and prodding, and she lets him clutch her hand and, half-crying, declare that she's going to be okay. I don't think it's me you're trying to convince, she wants to say, but she still can't quite do it.
When the they assistant comes looking for him, he's the one that sounds upset, even as he protests, "I can't just leave her alone," and he squeezes her hand as if her heart is going to stop again if he walks out the door.
As if. She's more of a control freak than that - at least, she thinks so. She can't speak for this new, invalid Tuyen. She can't speak much at all, really.
But she manages it, for him. "Get the hell out of here," she whispers, and manages a smile. "You're driving me insane."
"You're welcome." She's never met anyone else who can look so put out and so happy all at once. He grins and kisses her forehead. "Be right back."
That's the last time she sees him for four months, and when he comes back, he doesn't smile at her like that. And only then - but not a moment before - does she see where it started.
"Oh, no." Catalin's voice couldn't have been flatter if he tried. "A papercut. Whatever shall you do."
Kite opened his mouth to comment on the wisdom of taunting a man on the verge of a complete panic attack, but it looked like he was too late for that, too. The man curled up in an even tighter ball.
"It is not a papercut," the man declared, his voice muffled by his arm. "They got me."
Catalin looked up at Kite long enough to raise his eyebrows, silently asking why a veteran soldier would have a complete breakdown over the tiniest knife wound either of them had seen. And then, making sure everyone heard his sigh, he knelt down. "Really. Sounds terrible."
"It is," the soldier quavered. "It's over for me."
"Sounds like it." Catalin nodded. "Bleeding out very, very slowly is such a common cause of death, after all."
"Not now," he snapped, and he looked up at Catalin this time. "This is the first time, you know. I've been doing this since I was fifteen, and this is the first time. It only gets worse from here."
That flat, long-suffering look finally vanished, and Catalin regarded the soldier with something like thoughtfulness. "You've looked at me before, right?"
"... yes," he said slowly, eyes narrowed with confusion.
"So you get it," Catalin said as he stood up. "If I can do this, so can you. Easily."
Later, once the chaos had died down, Kite bridged the subject: "You don't have to do that, Cat."
"Of course I do," Catalin said absently. A few seconds later, he added, "Do what?"
Kite shifted his weight, uncomfortable. "You don't have to make it sound like you got this far by accident."
Catalin smiled - one of those patented Cat-smiles that never looked very happy. "You have another theory?"
Kite did. Though he was damned if he was going to share it.
After a moment's silence, Dev cleared his throat, glancing from one classmate to the other. "Um. So. Should we talk about that?"
"And say what?" Kalinda asked as she sank into the chair. Dear diary, she narrated in her head. Today I punched an upperclassman in the neck. It was satisfying for about two seconds.
Even worse, she had been trying to punch him in the nose, but she hadn't been quite tall enough. That was just the delicious golden raisin topping on the rice pudding, wasn't it.
It was a year before she would visit the city of Xiandra - and a few days before she was told, in no uncertain terms, that girls weren't supposed to have a temper.
"Well, I would start with 'wow,' and then, I don't know, maybe move on from there?" Dev shrugged. "I don't have much experience with you savaging random upperclassmen. I sort of love it." He turned to Isha, who seemed to be shrinking into the wall. "I should mention, though, that I was totally going to do that. She just sort of beat me to the punch. Pun totally intended."
"I don't need you punching anyone for me, Deva," Isha mumbled.
"Hey! Don't give me that look," Dev said, pointing to Kalinda. "She was the one who actually did it."
Kalinda got the sense that Isha had been trying not to look her in the eye for the past five minutes. And even then, he only managed it for a couple of seconds. "Um. It's not that I'm not grateful, but." He shrugged. "If you punched someone every time they insulted me, you would... probably... just go around hitting everyone. There are sort of a lot."
Just looking at him then, Kalinda seriously regretted that she wasn't the type to go around, as Dev put it, 'savaging random upperclassmen.'
"There's an upside, though." She managed a smile. "There's one less of them, now."
Isha paused for a long moment, digesting that, before smiling back. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone's eyes go so wide."
"Well, look at that." Dev beamed. "I'll make savages out of you two, yet."
Isha's smile instantly dissolved into a thin line. "Should the one who didn't do anything really be saying that?"
Dev wilted. "Ouch, man."
On nights like this, Jasper sometimes wondered if she would live out the rest of her life in Gillian’s Irish Pub, serving drinks to and breaking up the fights of the only people in Boston who were more miserable than she was.
And then, of course, if that were the case, she’d probably die in some little, quasi-ironic way, like getting hit in the neck by a flying shard of beer bottle, and then her boss would be completely useless in identifying her corpse, since she lied to him about her age and he seemed to think her last name was “Merlot” instead of “Marlowe” and her parents would never find out, but her mother would always think that she eloped with a rich man and had to hide her background, and her headstone would be a cheap little plaque that read “Here Lies Jasper Merlot, Killed by Beer Bottle.”
Not that she was a pessimist or anything.
She’d tell herself often that she was too young to be jaded, but she didn’t understand how she could be optimistic, either. Not after what must have been the fourteenth rejection for an interview. Not even for the job, for an interview. She was “too young,” “had no professional flying experience,” and even if she’d had a chance with the latest one today, she had to rush over from work, and still smelled like alcohol and cigarettes.
She had walked out from that rejection calmly, only to break down crying in a little North End pizzeria when she didn’t have enough money for extra toppings, just in case she didn’t feel like enough of a crazy person.
At least she had plenty of company. The little ten-year old who kept telling her he’d forgotten his ID. The constantly mumbling older man who yelled “Mazeltov!” every time something got smashed in a fight. The young, clean-cut man at the end of the bar who cried “She’s gone! She’s gone!” every few minutes or so. The man in the rumpled suit who kept calling her “Lass” and demanding she speak in an Irish accent, even though she’d already told him she was from Illinois.
It was one of those steamy, humid days that she kept hearing were rare for Boston, except every day since the beginning of June was like that. Nights like these back in Illinois were so perfect for flying, she’d found: hot air rose, but you could rise above that, too.
“So, how about this heat, Mr. Davis?” she cheerfully asked one of her regulars, cleaning out a glass.
Mr. Davis’ face crashed to the bar, his arms covering his head like he was in a fallout shelter.
“… uh-huh.” Jasper set the glass back under the bar. “Tell me about it.”
It wasn't until I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck in that 'you're being followed' way that I realized someone was in the backseat. I really should have gotten the hint from the broken car CD player that wouldn't stop playing Lady Gaga. So dreading what I would find, I turned around in my seat.
The woman in the backseat was wearing an obscenely short sequined mini-dress and a paper mache zebra head. She also happened to be missing both of her legs below the knee.
"Excuse me, ma'am," I tried.
Raaaaa-raaaaa-ra-ah-ah, was the only response I received.
"What?" Felix asked, the car jerking sharply to the right as he turned around to look.
"I don't know what it is about you," I said, reaching over to set the steering wheel right. "First your house, then your VCR, now your car. Everything you own gets possessed eventually."
"Crap. I hope they don't get into the ice cream maker. Who knows what they could do with that." Felix shot me a side-glance. "Boy or girl?"
"Girl," I said.
His eyebrows waggled. "Is she hot?"
"Can't tell," I said. "She's wearing a zebra head."
"Kinky." Felix nodded approvingly. "But anyway, Allie, you're overlooking the good news, here."
"Which is?"
Felix's grin was bordering on evil. "Zebra Girl!" he called. "Give us some Telephone!"
"Yeah, bitches!" Zebra Girl crowed.
As the first auto-tuned lyrics poured out of the speakers, Felix started to scream-sing along, loud enough to drown out Zebra Girl's howls. Horrifying as it was, I started to tap the beat against my jeans.
Felix took a break just long enough to crow, "Admit it. You love it."
"Fine," I said. "It's catchier than it has a right to be."
"Yeah, well." Felix lowered his voice. "Let's just hope our new friend doesn't discover my sister's Adam Lambert mix in the glove compartment."
"Adam Lambert?" Zebra Girl gasped, and she lunged forward to dig through the glove compartment. "Oh my God!"
This is a disaster, Beyonce informed me. And right then, I was inclined to agree with her.
I'm going to bed so that I may be up early to meet *~SUZANNE COLLINS~* tomorrow. YES.
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no subject
Date: 2010-09-25 03:04 pm (UTC)From:THAT LAST ONE
"THIS IS A DISASTUH"
I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU EVEN
PFFFFFF that is golden
And Jasper's death imagery is amazing and I love her
and Cat is so compassionate I can feel it from here
AND FFFFF LANH :'[
AND I APPROVE OF THE GEORGIE