Fic: (last creative writing assignment of the year)
Title: In Which Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort Writes About a Roll of Film That She Has Obtained Sur -- Surrept -- Surry -- Um, By Circumstance
Fandom: none
Word Count: 741
Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort has a history of putting on her rose-tinted glasses and sinking so far down into the chair of life that she trips other people up. She never takes the initiative. Ever. She doesn't mean to let opportunity slip away, it just kind of ... does.
She lost her first child when the latter was just an infant. Her son had dislodged the baby gate, and, as these things tend to happen, found the staircase and fell right down it. The base was pure, white-washed marble, and his head smashed right open like an overripe melon, little shards of soft baby skull poking through his skin and Zoe replays the scene in her head, because she can't not and it's all really sad.
Her second child choked on a peach.
Her third knocked himself unconscious in the bathtub and drowned.
Her fourth survived to be five years of age only by the grace of God for all the intense mothering Zoe lavished on him, before getting into the rat poison.
She watched the fifth like a hawk, to no avail and he wound up the hood ornament to a 1979 Jaguar. Her sixth was all but confined to the same room she was in at all times, and maybe that's what killed him.
There was no seventh son. Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort had given up.
"We have no manner of luck at all," her husband said, pressing his lips to the crown of her head and it would have been a tender moment, if not for the fact the undertaker hobbled up to them at that moment and asked them if they would just like to buy an entire wing of the cemetery, the rate they were going.
"I have Oprah on speed-dial," goes the bearded lady behind the checkout at the one-hour photo place in the grocery store where Zoe works, and Zoe thinks this sucks something horrible.
Then the bearded lady gets mugged in the parking lot, has an asthma attack, and dies, and Zoe gets her job, and maybe this wasn't so bad, because okay, she still sees the same amount of incredibly stupid or strange people as she did at the check-out, but at least there’s the tempting probability of blackmail that came with the one-hour photo department.
But while she's at the one-hour photo counter, Zoe learns something rather interesting. Hope, in and of itself, takes up a part of a person that really can't be filled by anything else. It plants itself right under one's lungs the instant one is born and grows or withers depending on how far one reaches in one's life. Hope cannot be confused with any other feeling.
Zoe, at that sixth funeral, reached inside herself and tore her hope out by the roots.
But nature hates a void. And no void is more obvious than the void of the hopeless.
The instant Zoe lifted her hands to the sky and just gave up, nature rushed in to fill the gap that had been left, and she discovers this at three in the morning in the bin of disposed film canisters and negatives.
"What the--" she goes, and scoops the baby out. He squirms sleepily, and she tucks him against her chest in the way women do when they've handled a great many babies in their lives. She has heard stories about unwanted babies being dumped into trash bins and floated down rivers, but there is something calculated about abandoning an infant in the waste of a one-hour photo place.
"Do you think, if I ever bothered to put this down on paper, that anyone would believe me?" Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort says to her husband, later, as the two of them perch upon their sofa with legs intertwined. In her arms, the baby screams for all it was worth, cheeks rosy and eyes furious and daring them to do something, and she has to repeat herself because her husband couldn’t hear her.
He thinks about it. "Well, so long as you have proper pronoun-verb agreement, I think people will believe anything you say. Look at what happened to OJ."
Her seventh son takes a shuddering breath, and starts screaming again.
Zoe smiles.
Fandom: none
Word Count: 741
Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort has a history of putting on her rose-tinted glasses and sinking so far down into the chair of life that she trips other people up. She never takes the initiative. Ever. She doesn't mean to let opportunity slip away, it just kind of ... does.
She lost her first child when the latter was just an infant. Her son had dislodged the baby gate, and, as these things tend to happen, found the staircase and fell right down it. The base was pure, white-washed marble, and his head smashed right open like an overripe melon, little shards of soft baby skull poking through his skin and Zoe replays the scene in her head, because she can't not and it's all really sad.
Her second child choked on a peach.
Her third knocked himself unconscious in the bathtub and drowned.
Her fourth survived to be five years of age only by the grace of God for all the intense mothering Zoe lavished on him, before getting into the rat poison.
She watched the fifth like a hawk, to no avail and he wound up the hood ornament to a 1979 Jaguar. Her sixth was all but confined to the same room she was in at all times, and maybe that's what killed him.
There was no seventh son. Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort had given up.
"We have no manner of luck at all," her husband said, pressing his lips to the crown of her head and it would have been a tender moment, if not for the fact the undertaker hobbled up to them at that moment and asked them if they would just like to buy an entire wing of the cemetery, the rate they were going.
"I have Oprah on speed-dial," goes the bearded lady behind the checkout at the one-hour photo place in the grocery store where Zoe works, and Zoe thinks this sucks something horrible.
Then the bearded lady gets mugged in the parking lot, has an asthma attack, and dies, and Zoe gets her job, and maybe this wasn't so bad, because okay, she still sees the same amount of incredibly stupid or strange people as she did at the check-out, but at least there’s the tempting probability of blackmail that came with the one-hour photo department.
But while she's at the one-hour photo counter, Zoe learns something rather interesting. Hope, in and of itself, takes up a part of a person that really can't be filled by anything else. It plants itself right under one's lungs the instant one is born and grows or withers depending on how far one reaches in one's life. Hope cannot be confused with any other feeling.
Zoe, at that sixth funeral, reached inside herself and tore her hope out by the roots.
But nature hates a void. And no void is more obvious than the void of the hopeless.
The instant Zoe lifted her hands to the sky and just gave up, nature rushed in to fill the gap that had been left, and she discovers this at three in the morning in the bin of disposed film canisters and negatives.
"What the--" she goes, and scoops the baby out. He squirms sleepily, and she tucks him against her chest in the way women do when they've handled a great many babies in their lives. She has heard stories about unwanted babies being dumped into trash bins and floated down rivers, but there is something calculated about abandoning an infant in the waste of a one-hour photo place.
"Do you think, if I ever bothered to put this down on paper, that anyone would believe me?" Zoe Abigail Zebenieva Williams-Fort says to her husband, later, as the two of them perch upon their sofa with legs intertwined. In her arms, the baby screams for all it was worth, cheeks rosy and eyes furious and daring them to do something, and she has to repeat herself because her husband couldn’t hear her.
He thinks about it. "Well, so long as you have proper pronoun-verb agreement, I think people will believe anything you say. Look at what happened to OJ."
Her seventh son takes a shuddering breath, and starts screaming again.
Zoe smiles.