fragments/character sketches/beginnings
I don't care what you call them. Hell, you don't even have to read them, I'll be nice and hide them behind a cut.
These? These are why I don't write prose.
It’d be simpler to die, wouldn’t it Katie? I mean here you are, racing towards life in an ambulance…don’t you know how much these things cost? Ah well, add it to the pile I suppose. Just set it atop the student loans and old cell phone bills, who’s to notice one more wasted stamp, eh?
Shut up, mom.
oh, right, nice way to treat your mother. Don’t think I forgot the money you owe me, too.
Seriously mom, you’re not helping.
Oh, of course not! I’m just making you think about anything but that nasty wound what’s made you pass out. How the hell did you sever that artery, anyway? inner thigh…you weren’t doing anything nasty, were you?
MOM!
what? I’m just asking is all. my goodness, I know a thing or two about the birds and bees.
oh.my.god. you’re insane, you know that?
ME? I’m insane? oh, right, so says the girl talking to imaginary people in her head. humph.
She’s right, you know. Normal half-dead people don’t have silly arguments with their all the way dead mothers. Its weird, that’s what it is. I suppose now you’re all wondering how the hell I ended up half-dead, right? This isn’t a movie you say, quit skipping about. Begin at the beginning, and end at the end.
If the police actually punished people for driving like idiots, more than half the cars in LA would be gathering dust in an impound lot somewhere. I’m not talking about the normal, forgot to signal because my kid/dog/significant other/isthatbradpittohmygawd is distracting me idiots. How about the woman who props her legs up every morning and shaves on the dashboard? Or yanno, the asshole who just cut me off across 4 lanes, because he wanted to use the carpool lane. Uh, by the way, buddy, your immense ego does not count as a passenger. Just so you know.
Right, Katie. Way to stay on topic. In any case, I was just cut off on my way to a meeting, which is rather annoying but certainly not the end of the world. Only it sort of was, for me anyway. When I slammed on my brakes, I was plowed into from behind, you see. I wasn’t hurt or anything, but my car was rather smashed, and by smashed I mean obliterated. You can still see my bumper on the side of the 101, unless the ChiP has bothered to clean it off, which I’m sure they haven’t because they have terribly important car chases to engage in.
I’m quite sure you’ve all felt the painful smash and thud, the whipping round of your body; some of you may have even enjoyed the charming glasses-shattering explosion of an airbag, so I’m not going to bother. Suffice it to say that I missed my meeting, shall we?
As soon as the charmingly sweaty tow truck driver dropped me off at home I telephoned my business partner, Kylie. (yeah yeah, Katie and Kylie, I know. BELIEVE me, I know. It wasn’t my idea to have a twin, though, that was all thanks to in vitro fertilization) Rather than say hello, she began yelling, which I’d probably have done too, given the circumstances.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you forget? Are you hung over? Does this not matter to you? You are SUCH a fucking flake. Fuck.
…
well?”
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I was in an accident. A pretty bad one, actually”
“ohmygodareyouokayimsosorryimsuchabadsisterholycraphowcouldihaveyelledatyouareyouokayohmygod.”
“Kyle, I’m fine, but my car is more done than the deep-fried turkey mom tried in 1997. I’m sorry about the meeting, I really do know how important this one was. How did it go?”
“I’m coming over.”
“no, Kyle, really, I just want to relax and-”
-click-
Dammit.
There went that bath I was hoping for. I went in and changed my clothes; found my spare glasses, and treated the cuts on my nose with a bit of peroxide. Then I made myself a cup of tea, and settled in for an episode of blind date while I waited for Kylie to show up.
and
It was an indecently hot indian summer, and the ants came crawling across the white tile into the humid heaven of the master bath. They sought the source of the sweet and cloying scents that permeated the air, never realizing in their tiny ant brains that what they sought was a chemical poison far above them, on shelves of lacquered wood. Rows and rows of plastic and glass bottles lay on the cheap Ikea knockoff, and Molly’s white hand wandered amongst them, searching for the overripe peach perfume she wore on Wednesday nights.
She knew better than to complain about the heat that made her underarms drip onto the bleach spotted towel.
“Never complain about the weather” her grandmother had often told her “ Never complain, because God will always hear you and do you one worse. Never, never bitch about the heat, just smile and be glad that you’re not a corpse sweating it out in the morgue.”
The last time that Molly had complained about the weather was a nasty wet spring seven years ago; the sort of springtime that lacked hope. Flowers didn’t bloom without sunshine, but mildew did, in large patches on the walls of her bedroom. Late at night, when she’d snuck back in through the window, she stared at the shapes she found there, imagining whole other worlds in every streak and swirl. Fungus empires rose and fell there, hypnotizing her teenaged self into the fitful sleep that still endeared Molly to her infrequent lovers.
One rainy evening she had crept into a room fully lit, and found her mother sitting quietly on the bed. Before she had a chance to half-ass her way through some excuse or another, she was handed a slip of paper. Halfway through the deepest regrets, Molly knew this was her fault. She had complained about the rain to some boy or another(she never could remember his name after that night)…she had complained about the inconvenient rain, and God had killed her brother.
That night was the end of Molly’s romping, the end of the parade of boys, the end of childhood, and the end of being a screw up. It was the end of Molly, and the beginning of someone else. Upon scanning the official letter, her first desire was to scream and pound the floor in anger; anger at the bullets that had shattered his spine and opened up the back of his head, anger at the “other” that pulled the trigger, anger at the men who had sent him overseas, and most of all, a deep and abiding anger at her brother for leaving them to fight for some indefinable cause that neither she nor her mother had ever fully understood. Seeing the pain that twisted her mother’s face, Miss Molly sent that anger into the pit of her stomach, calmly removed her squishing shoes, draped her wet coat over the back of a chair, and went to make a pot of coffee.
Over the next two weeks, many more pots of coffee were made, arrangements handled, friends notified, a eulogy written, baths drawn, and painkillers dispensed. This new and improved daughter even deigned to call her father, leaving a cold and only marginally polite message on his answering machine, detailing the when and where of the funeral, along with a suggestion that he arrive late, stand in the back, and leave early so as not to disturb her mother. He did exactly that, though Molly was only certain of his presence after she found his name in the guest log, somewhere in the middle of the blank pages, with an old photo of their family at the lake, tattered and cut down to fit within a man’s wallet marking its place. She took the picture so that her mother needn’t see his scrawl and remember the checks that used to come regularly, but then slowed to a trickle and eventually stopped.
A tickling sensation brought Molly back to the present, and she glanced down to find an ant crawling over her hand as she white knuckled the desired vial. With a grunt of surprise, she shook off the past, and freely sprayed herself in the hopes of catching a future. Wednesday nights were rarely interesting, and often ended in awkward groping sessions in the parking lot outside her apartment. Wednesday nights guaranteed that she would not ask the groper in for a beer, because Thursday mornings were hellish, crowded with appointments and classes.
The doorbell rang finally, and Molly gave her chestnut hair one final shake before she opened the door to greet Adam, a pleasant faced young man with a bright future in structural engineering. He was painfully boring, but he did like to buy her dinner-and with a T.A.’s pay and a cupboard filled with ramen noodles, Molly knew better than to tell him so.
As a graduate student, Molly taught a few classes under the name of a once well known professor, who had discovered something or another to do with rats in a lab 30 -odd years before and had coasted into tenure shortly after, spending the intervening period taking credit for the hours of work that students did in his lab, writing grant proposals for various projects, and spending the majority of the money on a lovely house just north of campus, and the majority of his time traveling from one conference to another, reading papers written by his students, claiming much credit and doing very little to further the search for a cure to anything save his own boredom.
Molly did not mind this, as it gave her many uninterrupted hours in the lab, concerning herself with numbers, chemicals, and the feeding of rats, and generally letting her mind wander around in a circular fashion. In those quiet hours in the basement of the science building (which, not surprisingly, had been paid for by the grand-uncle of her friend the professor) she considered many topics, most of them revolving around herself, her relationships with men, the shoes she saw on sale last week, and whether or not her breasts were beginning to sag at the ripe old age of 25. (They were, most decidedly, not)
Occasionally, she graded essays, leaving sardonic comments in the margins for the students to puzzle over. Even more occasionally, she injected rats with poison and recorded the results on steel clipboards that miraculously stayed hand numbingly cold, even in early September. The chill proved very useful, shocking her awake when the radio turned to a drone, when the other lab-rats conversations had turned to a drone, when the incessant and pained squeaking had turned to a drone, when Molly found she was wandering around the room, with a zombie-like shuffle, wondering whether or not she herself was becoming a drone.
These mid-week date-nights had become a comforting routine ever since Adam had asked her out the previous spring. Every Wednesday, Adam picked her up at 8:10 on the dot, complaining each time that he simply couldn’t find parking in her neighborhood. He greeted her each time with a peck on the lips, a dispassionate kiss that smelt of the expensive aftershave his ex-girlfriend had picked out for him and which reminded Molly of leather and old wool sweaters, of bourbon and Cuban cigars. Adam was not rich, but he was what some called comfortable, with a family who worked hard and had remained resolutely middle class for the past two hundred years. Molly liked his sister, who was nearly as practical as she, and hated his mother because she had taken an immediate liking to her, and insisted that she was “one of the family” and ought to spend every waking moment with her tedious son.
“Hello, Adam” prefaced the dry pressure of his lips to hers
“Hello, Molly, You look lovely tonight. I thought we’d go to Stubrick’s, I’d like steak for dinner.” Adam took a cursory glance at Molly on the way to his car, not really seeking her approval, but appreciating the turn of her calves in the knee length dress she wore.
Something in Molly snapped then, and she felt the words come tumbling out before she could catch them to stuff them back inside. “No, Adam, I do not want to have any under-cooked, bloodied, boring meat tonight. I do not like that restaurant, and your mother is driving me batty, and no, I do not want to marry you, but I’d love to go out for sushi and then have violent breakup sex with you, only you’re much too boring to do something crazy like that, both in bed and out, so instead I must bid you good evening.”
“oh. well. okay. Sushi, you say? Maybe we can go to that place by the harbor, they have fish there.”
“Adam, no.” she said firmly “I can’t do this to you anymore. I am sure that there is a girl in a twinset waiting for you somewhere, a girl who wants nothing more than to have your babies and be polite to your boss, and wash your dirty socks, and make nice with your mother for the next 40-odd years, but that girl isn’t me. I’m sorry.”
As if to punctuate her speech, Molly set the key to his apartment on the roof of his Taurus, and walked away. Adam simply stared after her as she climbed into her beat up P.O.S. and puttered away, and he stood there, his hand on the passanger door for a good ten minutes before he shook his head, picked up the key and drove to his mother’s house for chocolate cake and comforting.
With a sense of freedom that bordered on dangerous, Molly pushed her car towards 60 and headed for the bars that filled downtown. She was in the mood to knock back a few more drinks than she ought to, and knew the perfect place to do it.
These? These are why I don't write prose.
It’d be simpler to die, wouldn’t it Katie? I mean here you are, racing towards life in an ambulance…don’t you know how much these things cost? Ah well, add it to the pile I suppose. Just set it atop the student loans and old cell phone bills, who’s to notice one more wasted stamp, eh?
Shut up, mom.
oh, right, nice way to treat your mother. Don’t think I forgot the money you owe me, too.
Seriously mom, you’re not helping.
Oh, of course not! I’m just making you think about anything but that nasty wound what’s made you pass out. How the hell did you sever that artery, anyway? inner thigh…you weren’t doing anything nasty, were you?
MOM!
what? I’m just asking is all. my goodness, I know a thing or two about the birds and bees.
oh.my.god. you’re insane, you know that?
ME? I’m insane? oh, right, so says the girl talking to imaginary people in her head. humph.
She’s right, you know. Normal half-dead people don’t have silly arguments with their all the way dead mothers. Its weird, that’s what it is. I suppose now you’re all wondering how the hell I ended up half-dead, right? This isn’t a movie you say, quit skipping about. Begin at the beginning, and end at the end.
If the police actually punished people for driving like idiots, more than half the cars in LA would be gathering dust in an impound lot somewhere. I’m not talking about the normal, forgot to signal because my kid/dog/significant other/isthatbradpittohmygawd is distracting me idiots. How about the woman who props her legs up every morning and shaves on the dashboard? Or yanno, the asshole who just cut me off across 4 lanes, because he wanted to use the carpool lane. Uh, by the way, buddy, your immense ego does not count as a passenger. Just so you know.
Right, Katie. Way to stay on topic. In any case, I was just cut off on my way to a meeting, which is rather annoying but certainly not the end of the world. Only it sort of was, for me anyway. When I slammed on my brakes, I was plowed into from behind, you see. I wasn’t hurt or anything, but my car was rather smashed, and by smashed I mean obliterated. You can still see my bumper on the side of the 101, unless the ChiP has bothered to clean it off, which I’m sure they haven’t because they have terribly important car chases to engage in.
I’m quite sure you’ve all felt the painful smash and thud, the whipping round of your body; some of you may have even enjoyed the charming glasses-shattering explosion of an airbag, so I’m not going to bother. Suffice it to say that I missed my meeting, shall we?
As soon as the charmingly sweaty tow truck driver dropped me off at home I telephoned my business partner, Kylie. (yeah yeah, Katie and Kylie, I know. BELIEVE me, I know. It wasn’t my idea to have a twin, though, that was all thanks to in vitro fertilization) Rather than say hello, she began yelling, which I’d probably have done too, given the circumstances.
“What the fuck is wrong with you? Did you forget? Are you hung over? Does this not matter to you? You are SUCH a fucking flake. Fuck.
…
well?”
“I’m sorry, Kyle. I was in an accident. A pretty bad one, actually”
“ohmygodareyouokayimsosorryimsuchabadsisterholycraphowcouldihaveyelledatyouareyouokayohmygod.”
“Kyle, I’m fine, but my car is more done than the deep-fried turkey mom tried in 1997. I’m sorry about the meeting, I really do know how important this one was. How did it go?”
“I’m coming over.”
“no, Kyle, really, I just want to relax and-”
-click-
Dammit.
There went that bath I was hoping for. I went in and changed my clothes; found my spare glasses, and treated the cuts on my nose with a bit of peroxide. Then I made myself a cup of tea, and settled in for an episode of blind date while I waited for Kylie to show up.
and
It was an indecently hot indian summer, and the ants came crawling across the white tile into the humid heaven of the master bath. They sought the source of the sweet and cloying scents that permeated the air, never realizing in their tiny ant brains that what they sought was a chemical poison far above them, on shelves of lacquered wood. Rows and rows of plastic and glass bottles lay on the cheap Ikea knockoff, and Molly’s white hand wandered amongst them, searching for the overripe peach perfume she wore on Wednesday nights.
She knew better than to complain about the heat that made her underarms drip onto the bleach spotted towel.
“Never complain about the weather” her grandmother had often told her “ Never complain, because God will always hear you and do you one worse. Never, never bitch about the heat, just smile and be glad that you’re not a corpse sweating it out in the morgue.”
The last time that Molly had complained about the weather was a nasty wet spring seven years ago; the sort of springtime that lacked hope. Flowers didn’t bloom without sunshine, but mildew did, in large patches on the walls of her bedroom. Late at night, when she’d snuck back in through the window, she stared at the shapes she found there, imagining whole other worlds in every streak and swirl. Fungus empires rose and fell there, hypnotizing her teenaged self into the fitful sleep that still endeared Molly to her infrequent lovers.
One rainy evening she had crept into a room fully lit, and found her mother sitting quietly on the bed. Before she had a chance to half-ass her way through some excuse or another, she was handed a slip of paper. Halfway through the deepest regrets, Molly knew this was her fault. She had complained about the rain to some boy or another(she never could remember his name after that night)…she had complained about the inconvenient rain, and God had killed her brother.
That night was the end of Molly’s romping, the end of the parade of boys, the end of childhood, and the end of being a screw up. It was the end of Molly, and the beginning of someone else. Upon scanning the official letter, her first desire was to scream and pound the floor in anger; anger at the bullets that had shattered his spine and opened up the back of his head, anger at the “other” that pulled the trigger, anger at the men who had sent him overseas, and most of all, a deep and abiding anger at her brother for leaving them to fight for some indefinable cause that neither she nor her mother had ever fully understood. Seeing the pain that twisted her mother’s face, Miss Molly sent that anger into the pit of her stomach, calmly removed her squishing shoes, draped her wet coat over the back of a chair, and went to make a pot of coffee.
Over the next two weeks, many more pots of coffee were made, arrangements handled, friends notified, a eulogy written, baths drawn, and painkillers dispensed. This new and improved daughter even deigned to call her father, leaving a cold and only marginally polite message on his answering machine, detailing the when and where of the funeral, along with a suggestion that he arrive late, stand in the back, and leave early so as not to disturb her mother. He did exactly that, though Molly was only certain of his presence after she found his name in the guest log, somewhere in the middle of the blank pages, with an old photo of their family at the lake, tattered and cut down to fit within a man’s wallet marking its place. She took the picture so that her mother needn’t see his scrawl and remember the checks that used to come regularly, but then slowed to a trickle and eventually stopped.
A tickling sensation brought Molly back to the present, and she glanced down to find an ant crawling over her hand as she white knuckled the desired vial. With a grunt of surprise, she shook off the past, and freely sprayed herself in the hopes of catching a future. Wednesday nights were rarely interesting, and often ended in awkward groping sessions in the parking lot outside her apartment. Wednesday nights guaranteed that she would not ask the groper in for a beer, because Thursday mornings were hellish, crowded with appointments and classes.
The doorbell rang finally, and Molly gave her chestnut hair one final shake before she opened the door to greet Adam, a pleasant faced young man with a bright future in structural engineering. He was painfully boring, but he did like to buy her dinner-and with a T.A.’s pay and a cupboard filled with ramen noodles, Molly knew better than to tell him so.
As a graduate student, Molly taught a few classes under the name of a once well known professor, who had discovered something or another to do with rats in a lab 30 -odd years before and had coasted into tenure shortly after, spending the intervening period taking credit for the hours of work that students did in his lab, writing grant proposals for various projects, and spending the majority of the money on a lovely house just north of campus, and the majority of his time traveling from one conference to another, reading papers written by his students, claiming much credit and doing very little to further the search for a cure to anything save his own boredom.
Molly did not mind this, as it gave her many uninterrupted hours in the lab, concerning herself with numbers, chemicals, and the feeding of rats, and generally letting her mind wander around in a circular fashion. In those quiet hours in the basement of the science building (which, not surprisingly, had been paid for by the grand-uncle of her friend the professor) she considered many topics, most of them revolving around herself, her relationships with men, the shoes she saw on sale last week, and whether or not her breasts were beginning to sag at the ripe old age of 25. (They were, most decidedly, not)
Occasionally, she graded essays, leaving sardonic comments in the margins for the students to puzzle over. Even more occasionally, she injected rats with poison and recorded the results on steel clipboards that miraculously stayed hand numbingly cold, even in early September. The chill proved very useful, shocking her awake when the radio turned to a drone, when the other lab-rats conversations had turned to a drone, when the incessant and pained squeaking had turned to a drone, when Molly found she was wandering around the room, with a zombie-like shuffle, wondering whether or not she herself was becoming a drone.
These mid-week date-nights had become a comforting routine ever since Adam had asked her out the previous spring. Every Wednesday, Adam picked her up at 8:10 on the dot, complaining each time that he simply couldn’t find parking in her neighborhood. He greeted her each time with a peck on the lips, a dispassionate kiss that smelt of the expensive aftershave his ex-girlfriend had picked out for him and which reminded Molly of leather and old wool sweaters, of bourbon and Cuban cigars. Adam was not rich, but he was what some called comfortable, with a family who worked hard and had remained resolutely middle class for the past two hundred years. Molly liked his sister, who was nearly as practical as she, and hated his mother because she had taken an immediate liking to her, and insisted that she was “one of the family” and ought to spend every waking moment with her tedious son.
“Hello, Adam” prefaced the dry pressure of his lips to hers
“Hello, Molly, You look lovely tonight. I thought we’d go to Stubrick’s, I’d like steak for dinner.” Adam took a cursory glance at Molly on the way to his car, not really seeking her approval, but appreciating the turn of her calves in the knee length dress she wore.
Something in Molly snapped then, and she felt the words come tumbling out before she could catch them to stuff them back inside. “No, Adam, I do not want to have any under-cooked, bloodied, boring meat tonight. I do not like that restaurant, and your mother is driving me batty, and no, I do not want to marry you, but I’d love to go out for sushi and then have violent breakup sex with you, only you’re much too boring to do something crazy like that, both in bed and out, so instead I must bid you good evening.”
“oh. well. okay. Sushi, you say? Maybe we can go to that place by the harbor, they have fish there.”
“Adam, no.” she said firmly “I can’t do this to you anymore. I am sure that there is a girl in a twinset waiting for you somewhere, a girl who wants nothing more than to have your babies and be polite to your boss, and wash your dirty socks, and make nice with your mother for the next 40-odd years, but that girl isn’t me. I’m sorry.”
As if to punctuate her speech, Molly set the key to his apartment on the roof of his Taurus, and walked away. Adam simply stared after her as she climbed into her beat up P.O.S. and puttered away, and he stood there, his hand on the passanger door for a good ten minutes before he shook his head, picked up the key and drove to his mother’s house for chocolate cake and comforting.
With a sense of freedom that bordered on dangerous, Molly pushed her car towards 60 and headed for the bars that filled downtown. She was in the mood to knock back a few more drinks than she ought to, and knew the perfect place to do it.