(no subject)
Writing snippet, from an APA I was in several years ago. I miss this girl; she was a synchronicity magnet, describes people in similes and metaphors outloud, and is just a tad crazy. I may dust her off and play with her somewhere else.
Sympathy Pains
I wanted it to be cold.
I wanted it to be really cold, cold enough to dry the sweat coating me from toes to fingertips, cold enough to dry the hundreds of little bolts scattered like tiny metal flowers scattered over the floor of the bike shop. Hundreds and hundreds. I'd sweep them up but that would make noise. I don't want to make any noise right now.
I could make it cold. Really cold. Cold enough to snow. Snow up to my knees, not the powdered-sugar dusting northern Florida gets maybe once every decade or so that evaporates by nine in the morning. Pristine snowflakes drifting down, covering everything, roads and trees and houses. The swamps would freeze over, and the canals. You could see your breath. The oranges would wither like ... well ... blighted fruit. . I could make a snowman in the parking lot and put a helmet and a Wolf's Cycle Shop t-shirt on it.
No one knows how to drive in snow down here. People would die. And the manatees.
I didn't make it cold.
Instead I focused on picking up the little bolts, one by one, sometimes two or three, never anymore. I might see something in the pattern they make in their hundreds, and if I scooped up too many at once I might miss it. I want to see something, anything, that would put my boss back in a good mood. So I picked up the little metal flowers, slowly, oh, so slowly. They stuck to my skin.
I did see something today, something in the dust raised by the mailman's truck as he pulled into the parking lot. Ugly and vile, like rotten meat left too long in the sun. So I threw his drinking problem in his face, and one or two other little secrets. I don't know what they were -- I didn't see that, just the correct buttons to push. His daughter and the shotgun, and the washing mashine. He won't do what he'd half-decided to do now.
And then the bikes, the new bikes that a lovely young couple wanted to buy and I scared them off. Funny how words like “mechanical failure” and “amputation” will make people change their minds about anything.
George was Not Happy.
Normally George feels like clothes fresh from the dryer on a Wisconsin winter morning. Not today. Today he's a rusty nail.
Maybe I'm trying too hard. Maybe I shouldn't try at all. Maybe then I'll find what I want, not what I don't.
I'm scared.
I didn't used to do this. People's private lives shouldn't leap out at you from the last of the Cap'n Crunch in your cereal bowl. You shouldn't see two kids fighting in a playground and know that a doctor is going to get shot in New Mexico. I'm seeing too much one day, not enough the next. See-saw, see-saw. Back and forth. Up and down. Is Doris' mind her own today or somebody else's?
I used to read omens. Now I read everything.
More and more of the little bolt-flowers are in their box. Still, nothing in them of what was wrong with Tod. Or Jonathan. Or Sophie. Jonathan is easier to touch -- easier to hold back the wind than to overlook him. I miss him; we don’t see each other as often as we used to. Without him, I feel like a book with the first few chapters torn out. Tod is a familiar scent temporarily forgotten. Sophie is ... difficult, cupping water in your open hand, only to have it trickle between your fingers. I don't know if I want to see her. But for George, I tried.
Sophie frightened me the most. She's a taut wire ready to snap; all it would take is one little push and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Sophie Black back together again.
She reminded me of me. I was like that once. But she doesn't realize that breaking only hurts for a little while. Your pieces don't fit together the same, but you feel better afterward. Sometimes the new arrangement is a better fit.
My throat itched. I grabbed the Allen wrenches off the shelf where Rand had tossed them last night and headed for where George was working. I detoured long enough to take two Arizona Ice Teas out of the little icebox George won in a IHOP raffle. Dogs need a lot of liquid.
He was still on his back, staring up at the guts of a Roadster and still angry, though not quite as much as he was earlier. The grease made a raccoon's mask around his eyes; his hands looked like palmless gloves. He didn't look at me, but he knew I was there. Despite his anger, the air felt more sane. This man is so disgustingly normal.
I walked over carefully, and set the Allen wrenches down and one of the teas by his left hand, then skipped back a good ten feet. His fingers were just beginning to scrabble around inquisitively. They closed around the wrenches and froze. A sigh welled up slowly from his chest like a bellows; he rubbed his forehead with the heel of his other hand. The smear left behind reminded me of Ash Wednesday.
“Hon...”
“I don't want a tetnus shot, “ I said.
He turned his head to look at me, one eyebrow flicking his hairline like an dancing caterpillar. Carefully he inched away from the bike and sat up. “I coulda used the five grand,” he said. “This is a bike shop. I sell bikes.”
He was being cautious in his tone, his motions, and I appreciated that. Sometimes -- not often, not always when he's angry, either -- he moves like Setanta. I can't explain more than that. It's a posture, a way George holds himself. During those times it doesn't matter that George is my boss, that I like him, that he's never, ever done anything that could even be remotely considered threatening to me -- I want as much distance between us as possible. Likewise, I can't have him standing behind me.
Sometimes I wonder if he and Setanta are the same ... kind. But it doesn't really matter, I guess.
George was still looking at me. I shrugged. “Faulty switches in the brakes. They'll be recalled in a year, after approximately eighteen people are dead and seventy-three injured.”
“Cars have recalls. Not bikes.”
“These will. And one court will allow the survivor to sue the store the bikes were purchased at.”
“And the mailman?” George asked.
God, I don't want to answer that. It was vague, that glimpse I got, but now it's becoming clearer. If I don't push, if I don't push ---
“He wasn't going to deliver the recall notice here.” George's shirt is smeared with grease and dust. There's something .....
“Oh?”
“Someone offered him money not to. A lot. Nearly half his salary.”
“Who?”
The smear is a bird, a parrot, a parrot's head, and that leads to-- “Jimmy Buffet,” I blurted.
Now both of George's eyebrows were kissing his bangs. “Say again?”
No, not Jimmy Buffet, but one of his songs. It's there, suddenly, and I sucked in my breath. It didn't make sense to me, but maybe it will to George
“Everybody has a cousin in Miami.”
George crossed his arms. “Doris, can’t you once give me a clue that makes sense?”
“The world doesn’t make sense, George. Chaos to order to chaos.” I curled a strand of hair around a finger. “Miami. That’s as close as I can get.”
George’s eyes narrowed. Then a wrench ricocheted off the far wall. “Priestly. That son-of-a-bitch. If I meet him again, he’s dead.” He ground out the words as if he were snapping bones. He looked at me.
“I don’t suppose you could do anything about him, huh?”
I didn’t know how to answer. See and know, yes. Doing? That…I’d never even thought of.
“Do you want me to?”
George has been very good to me. Some debts can’t be repaid with money.
We stared at each other. “Let me get back with you on that,” he said.
x-posted from my JF, because I'm lazy.
Sympathy Pains
I wanted it to be cold.
I wanted it to be really cold, cold enough to dry the sweat coating me from toes to fingertips, cold enough to dry the hundreds of little bolts scattered like tiny metal flowers scattered over the floor of the bike shop. Hundreds and hundreds. I'd sweep them up but that would make noise. I don't want to make any noise right now.
I could make it cold. Really cold. Cold enough to snow. Snow up to my knees, not the powdered-sugar dusting northern Florida gets maybe once every decade or so that evaporates by nine in the morning. Pristine snowflakes drifting down, covering everything, roads and trees and houses. The swamps would freeze over, and the canals. You could see your breath. The oranges would wither like ... well ... blighted fruit. . I could make a snowman in the parking lot and put a helmet and a Wolf's Cycle Shop t-shirt on it.
No one knows how to drive in snow down here. People would die. And the manatees.
I didn't make it cold.
Instead I focused on picking up the little bolts, one by one, sometimes two or three, never anymore. I might see something in the pattern they make in their hundreds, and if I scooped up too many at once I might miss it. I want to see something, anything, that would put my boss back in a good mood. So I picked up the little metal flowers, slowly, oh, so slowly. They stuck to my skin.
I did see something today, something in the dust raised by the mailman's truck as he pulled into the parking lot. Ugly and vile, like rotten meat left too long in the sun. So I threw his drinking problem in his face, and one or two other little secrets. I don't know what they were -- I didn't see that, just the correct buttons to push. His daughter and the shotgun, and the washing mashine. He won't do what he'd half-decided to do now.
And then the bikes, the new bikes that a lovely young couple wanted to buy and I scared them off. Funny how words like “mechanical failure” and “amputation” will make people change their minds about anything.
George was Not Happy.
Normally George feels like clothes fresh from the dryer on a Wisconsin winter morning. Not today. Today he's a rusty nail.
Maybe I'm trying too hard. Maybe I shouldn't try at all. Maybe then I'll find what I want, not what I don't.
I'm scared.
I didn't used to do this. People's private lives shouldn't leap out at you from the last of the Cap'n Crunch in your cereal bowl. You shouldn't see two kids fighting in a playground and know that a doctor is going to get shot in New Mexico. I'm seeing too much one day, not enough the next. See-saw, see-saw. Back and forth. Up and down. Is Doris' mind her own today or somebody else's?
I used to read omens. Now I read everything.
More and more of the little bolt-flowers are in their box. Still, nothing in them of what was wrong with Tod. Or Jonathan. Or Sophie. Jonathan is easier to touch -- easier to hold back the wind than to overlook him. I miss him; we don’t see each other as often as we used to. Without him, I feel like a book with the first few chapters torn out. Tod is a familiar scent temporarily forgotten. Sophie is ... difficult, cupping water in your open hand, only to have it trickle between your fingers. I don't know if I want to see her. But for George, I tried.
Sophie frightened me the most. She's a taut wire ready to snap; all it would take is one little push and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Sophie Black back together again.
She reminded me of me. I was like that once. But she doesn't realize that breaking only hurts for a little while. Your pieces don't fit together the same, but you feel better afterward. Sometimes the new arrangement is a better fit.
My throat itched. I grabbed the Allen wrenches off the shelf where Rand had tossed them last night and headed for where George was working. I detoured long enough to take two Arizona Ice Teas out of the little icebox George won in a IHOP raffle. Dogs need a lot of liquid.
He was still on his back, staring up at the guts of a Roadster and still angry, though not quite as much as he was earlier. The grease made a raccoon's mask around his eyes; his hands looked like palmless gloves. He didn't look at me, but he knew I was there. Despite his anger, the air felt more sane. This man is so disgustingly normal.
I walked over carefully, and set the Allen wrenches down and one of the teas by his left hand, then skipped back a good ten feet. His fingers were just beginning to scrabble around inquisitively. They closed around the wrenches and froze. A sigh welled up slowly from his chest like a bellows; he rubbed his forehead with the heel of his other hand. The smear left behind reminded me of Ash Wednesday.
“Hon...”
“I don't want a tetnus shot, “ I said.
He turned his head to look at me, one eyebrow flicking his hairline like an dancing caterpillar. Carefully he inched away from the bike and sat up. “I coulda used the five grand,” he said. “This is a bike shop. I sell bikes.”
He was being cautious in his tone, his motions, and I appreciated that. Sometimes -- not often, not always when he's angry, either -- he moves like Setanta. I can't explain more than that. It's a posture, a way George holds himself. During those times it doesn't matter that George is my boss, that I like him, that he's never, ever done anything that could even be remotely considered threatening to me -- I want as much distance between us as possible. Likewise, I can't have him standing behind me.
Sometimes I wonder if he and Setanta are the same ... kind. But it doesn't really matter, I guess.
George was still looking at me. I shrugged. “Faulty switches in the brakes. They'll be recalled in a year, after approximately eighteen people are dead and seventy-three injured.”
“Cars have recalls. Not bikes.”
“These will. And one court will allow the survivor to sue the store the bikes were purchased at.”
“And the mailman?” George asked.
God, I don't want to answer that. It was vague, that glimpse I got, but now it's becoming clearer. If I don't push, if I don't push ---
“He wasn't going to deliver the recall notice here.” George's shirt is smeared with grease and dust. There's something .....
“Oh?”
“Someone offered him money not to. A lot. Nearly half his salary.”
“Who?”
The smear is a bird, a parrot, a parrot's head, and that leads to-- “Jimmy Buffet,” I blurted.
Now both of George's eyebrows were kissing his bangs. “Say again?”
No, not Jimmy Buffet, but one of his songs. It's there, suddenly, and I sucked in my breath. It didn't make sense to me, but maybe it will to George
“Everybody has a cousin in Miami.”
George crossed his arms. “Doris, can’t you once give me a clue that makes sense?”
“The world doesn’t make sense, George. Chaos to order to chaos.” I curled a strand of hair around a finger. “Miami. That’s as close as I can get.”
George’s eyes narrowed. Then a wrench ricocheted off the far wall. “Priestly. That son-of-a-bitch. If I meet him again, he’s dead.” He ground out the words as if he were snapping bones. He looked at me.
“I don’t suppose you could do anything about him, huh?”
I didn’t know how to answer. See and know, yes. Doing? That…I’d never even thought of.
“Do you want me to?”
George has been very good to me. Some debts can’t be repaid with money.
We stared at each other. “Let me get back with you on that,” he said.
x-posted from my JF, because I'm lazy.