New FIC: "This is Not Ironic" (Veronica Mars)
My current re-readable book of choice is Amy Tan's The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life (you know, the author of The Joy Luck Club), and in it she talks a bit about what inspires her to write/where she gets her stories from.
Her method is to ask herself questions. (What is truth? What is fate? What is its opposite?) Not really my style, exactly. I usually have this one line - and it can be anywhere in the story - and I'm so fucking in love with this ONE LINE that I build a whole world around it.
But so I thought - what the hell? I'll try anything once. Okay, no line. Only questions.
I walked over to Weevil, right smack at the start of good ol' Veronica Mars 1x1, and asked how the hell he got there.
First dip into a new fandom. *crosses fingers*
This Is Not Ironic
by Silvia Kundera
It started out as a joke, because (honestly) could it ever have been anything else?
Eleven years old, and the TV snapping and crackling in time to the bug zapper on their tight backyard porch. Low hanging, time weathered wood that showers down splinters and two feet of grass -- not the sort of yard for summer, even at dusk, and it’ll be years until that’s a place for beer and glossy scrap metal.
Better, instead, to be crouched down low and peering up at the television. Knees tucked up tight to his stomach, and a crick in his neck, and he’s getting ideas.
Abuela’s in the kitchen, and then she’s not. She’s behind him with a large hand pressing warmly from one cheek to the other, and a mug brushing the tips of his toes. Thick hot chocolate, with bitter cinnamon flicks, and the warmth in his stomach curls up to the top of his head. When he calls Chardo he can feel the red in his face; it glows.
He says, “They won’t know this from nothing, they won’t -- No, see, just us. Only we’ll get it.”
---
Consider:
Eleven years, and you can remember maybe half of them. Yellow and big soft red tinged flickers of memory - everything in primary colors. Kind of blurry.
They’re not bad; they’re bright and shining and absolutely fucking gorgeous in that way things can only be to you when you’re young enough to have the answer to everything.
It’s not a Lifetime movie.
You have no mother to beat you.
You truly, sincerely, don’t miss your father. You don’t really think of him.
You think of spindly legged lizards that drop their tails when you catch them, and the spiders making drawings in your bushes. You think of high speed chases on the news, and all the things that didn’t actually happen but could’ve.
You dream that you are the fastest cowboy of all cowboys, and you hold hard onto to that bucking bronco in your sleep. You have more cousins than you can possibly count, and at some point during each week you will be able to track back and know you’ve given them one hug each. You sing along with family to the radio, with terrible laughing voices, because that’s what you do with family.
You don’t know how to break a nose. You have never stolen a candy bar. You are both polite and cutely irreverent with company. You are an honest to goodness specimen of what they like to call a “good kid”, if that kid’s grandmother didn't scrub the toilet of that bitch who heads up Community Planning.
--
You are not actually fluent in Spanish, and you’re smart, very smart, and they hold you back a year, and try for another, and they want to teach you how to spell ‘tomorrow’. They try to teach you values. They don’t notice that you know, because there’s one class for all of you, and abuela, she speaks pretty good now, but then --
And your teacher pretty much hates you because you laugh at her all the time.
This is not a Lifetime movie, because Lifetime movies star borderline pathological, carefully enunciating little white kids.
You have a tía who has too many boyfriends, and you don’t know where your mom is, but you’re not screwed up. You don’t have a death wish, you don’t try and slit your wrists, and though you have chorizo for breakfast you live in suburbia.
This is not the barrio. You’ve never seen the barrio. A barrio?
How do you say it?
Whatever.
--
Imagine:
Five boys and five rickety wheeled bicycles. One speed.
They mow lawns for the summer (that's what they're good for), and keep their savings in shoe boxes, and then they go shopping. They take the bus and buy one way tickets.
Five grubby hands still puffy with baby fat, pushing quarters together in packs of four. The counter is covered with them, circles that jingle as they’re swept into cupped palms. The same shiny metallic as what Mr. Peterson rolls out from the back. One size fits all. Something to grow into.
Something to be, and they fall into line without thinking -- triangular bird pattern. Frantically pumping legs and tight determined elbows. A slight totter - here and there - but these are early September calves, and they could hold up bicycles twice as top heavy.
Five rickety bicycles that are made to be rickety, made cheap but oddly sturdy - the type a boy could drop to the ground as he took off running, and pick up later with no fear of an empty patch of asphalt. Still by the side of the road until he came looking.
The kind that would still ride after that toss; the same meandering front wheel and handle bars, same undentable frame.
The kind of bike that could make a boy into the kind of boy who’d ride one.
--
This is the punchline:
They beat you long before you beat them, because (again) you live in surburbia. The poor as fuck side, sure, but still. There are no Crips, no Bloods, and 18th Street may have passed through once, for one night, at the Camalot motel.
You were not born a vato.
You were just the hired help’s kid.
You get your idea from cheesy chain metal and fake pleather jackets and Saved By The Bell. You’ve seen Weird Science ten times, on the afternoon ABC matinee.
You’ve seen enough to know that the hero will never be anything like you, and it’s not just about the color of your skin.
You think, the Hell’s Angels have painful, gnarled faces, but no one sticks their head in the toilet at school.
And it works, it fucking works. They think you’re dangerous.
---
It is a joke, but not a joke, because - listen.
They win.
--
It's a joke, it's a laugh, and then it isn't.
It isn't, more and more, because this is what happens when they believe you. This is what happens when you weren't there, you never met that lady, and they show up to your house and break abuela's favorite vasos, tear her mattress, your mattress, and you know that you did this.
This is what happens, and it stops being funny, because you think, "okay, then".
--
Five boys, and then there are more of them. Not men, not quite, but there's that thick inky smell of old gravel and garages. It's everywhere -- in the gaps between their knuckles, sunk deep into their shoes, socks, pants. Worked in.
Long hours over hoods, crawling into cabinets, back doors, and they buy tougher jeans and wider boots, with deep sand-scraping treads.
Damp stacks of money and maybe a bit of blood on one or two hands. Busted lips, nothing broken.
Yet.
Because this is the punchline:
The bikes get bigger, and meaner, and won't stay where they stand. Shivering. Hard, delicate shells, and you couldn't leave, even if you wanted to. You don't know how to want to.
Thick chrome coating, low throated rumble, and they know when you're coming. You're not a surprise to anyone.
You never stood a chance.
Her method is to ask herself questions. (What is truth? What is fate? What is its opposite?) Not really my style, exactly. I usually have this one line - and it can be anywhere in the story - and I'm so fucking in love with this ONE LINE that I build a whole world around it.
But so I thought - what the hell? I'll try anything once. Okay, no line. Only questions.
I walked over to Weevil, right smack at the start of good ol' Veronica Mars 1x1, and asked how the hell he got there.
First dip into a new fandom. *crosses fingers*
This Is Not Ironic
by Silvia Kundera
It started out as a joke, because (honestly) could it ever have been anything else?
Eleven years old, and the TV snapping and crackling in time to the bug zapper on their tight backyard porch. Low hanging, time weathered wood that showers down splinters and two feet of grass -- not the sort of yard for summer, even at dusk, and it’ll be years until that’s a place for beer and glossy scrap metal.
Better, instead, to be crouched down low and peering up at the television. Knees tucked up tight to his stomach, and a crick in his neck, and he’s getting ideas.
Abuela’s in the kitchen, and then she’s not. She’s behind him with a large hand pressing warmly from one cheek to the other, and a mug brushing the tips of his toes. Thick hot chocolate, with bitter cinnamon flicks, and the warmth in his stomach curls up to the top of his head. When he calls Chardo he can feel the red in his face; it glows.
He says, “They won’t know this from nothing, they won’t -- No, see, just us. Only we’ll get it.”
---
Consider:
Eleven years, and you can remember maybe half of them. Yellow and big soft red tinged flickers of memory - everything in primary colors. Kind of blurry.
They’re not bad; they’re bright and shining and absolutely fucking gorgeous in that way things can only be to you when you’re young enough to have the answer to everything.
It’s not a Lifetime movie.
You have no mother to beat you.
You truly, sincerely, don’t miss your father. You don’t really think of him.
You think of spindly legged lizards that drop their tails when you catch them, and the spiders making drawings in your bushes. You think of high speed chases on the news, and all the things that didn’t actually happen but could’ve.
You dream that you are the fastest cowboy of all cowboys, and you hold hard onto to that bucking bronco in your sleep. You have more cousins than you can possibly count, and at some point during each week you will be able to track back and know you’ve given them one hug each. You sing along with family to the radio, with terrible laughing voices, because that’s what you do with family.
You don’t know how to break a nose. You have never stolen a candy bar. You are both polite and cutely irreverent with company. You are an honest to goodness specimen of what they like to call a “good kid”, if that kid’s grandmother didn't scrub the toilet of that bitch who heads up Community Planning.
--
You are not actually fluent in Spanish, and you’re smart, very smart, and they hold you back a year, and try for another, and they want to teach you how to spell ‘tomorrow’. They try to teach you values. They don’t notice that you know, because there’s one class for all of you, and abuela, she speaks pretty good now, but then --
And your teacher pretty much hates you because you laugh at her all the time.
This is not a Lifetime movie, because Lifetime movies star borderline pathological, carefully enunciating little white kids.
You have a tía who has too many boyfriends, and you don’t know where your mom is, but you’re not screwed up. You don’t have a death wish, you don’t try and slit your wrists, and though you have chorizo for breakfast you live in suburbia.
This is not the barrio. You’ve never seen the barrio. A barrio?
How do you say it?
Whatever.
--
Imagine:
Five boys and five rickety wheeled bicycles. One speed.
They mow lawns for the summer (that's what they're good for), and keep their savings in shoe boxes, and then they go shopping. They take the bus and buy one way tickets.
Five grubby hands still puffy with baby fat, pushing quarters together in packs of four. The counter is covered with them, circles that jingle as they’re swept into cupped palms. The same shiny metallic as what Mr. Peterson rolls out from the back. One size fits all. Something to grow into.
Something to be, and they fall into line without thinking -- triangular bird pattern. Frantically pumping legs and tight determined elbows. A slight totter - here and there - but these are early September calves, and they could hold up bicycles twice as top heavy.
Five rickety bicycles that are made to be rickety, made cheap but oddly sturdy - the type a boy could drop to the ground as he took off running, and pick up later with no fear of an empty patch of asphalt. Still by the side of the road until he came looking.
The kind that would still ride after that toss; the same meandering front wheel and handle bars, same undentable frame.
The kind of bike that could make a boy into the kind of boy who’d ride one.
--
This is the punchline:
They beat you long before you beat them, because (again) you live in surburbia. The poor as fuck side, sure, but still. There are no Crips, no Bloods, and 18th Street may have passed through once, for one night, at the Camalot motel.
You were not born a vato.
You were just the hired help’s kid.
You get your idea from cheesy chain metal and fake pleather jackets and Saved By The Bell. You’ve seen Weird Science ten times, on the afternoon ABC matinee.
You’ve seen enough to know that the hero will never be anything like you, and it’s not just about the color of your skin.
You think, the Hell’s Angels have painful, gnarled faces, but no one sticks their head in the toilet at school.
And it works, it fucking works. They think you’re dangerous.
---
It is a joke, but not a joke, because - listen.
They win.
--
It's a joke, it's a laugh, and then it isn't.
It isn't, more and more, because this is what happens when they believe you. This is what happens when you weren't there, you never met that lady, and they show up to your house and break abuela's favorite vasos, tear her mattress, your mattress, and you know that you did this.
This is what happens, and it stops being funny, because you think, "okay, then".
--
Five boys, and then there are more of them. Not men, not quite, but there's that thick inky smell of old gravel and garages. It's everywhere -- in the gaps between their knuckles, sunk deep into their shoes, socks, pants. Worked in.
Long hours over hoods, crawling into cabinets, back doors, and they buy tougher jeans and wider boots, with deep sand-scraping treads.
Damp stacks of money and maybe a bit of blood on one or two hands. Busted lips, nothing broken.
Yet.
Because this is the punchline:
The bikes get bigger, and meaner, and won't stay where they stand. Shivering. Hard, delicate shells, and you couldn't leave, even if you wanted to. You don't know how to want to.
Thick chrome coating, low throated rumble, and they know when you're coming. You're not a surprise to anyone.
You never stood a chance.