challenge 4, prompt 2
Watchman, What of the Night?
the holyinnocent
Bad Girls, Helen/Nikki, post-series 3
Challenge 4, Prompt 2
483 Words
Notes: At last, reading Nightwood has some sort of payoff. :)
Night has gone on too long.
She’d written it on a flyleaf of Nightwood in letters of tamed hieroglyphics, serifs black and bitter-sharp, obviously at some point during her incarceration. But when?
The edges of the pages are brittle-brown, steeped in age like a forgotten teabag, threatening disintegration under Helen’s gentle, intrusive thumb. She remembers the bag of books, this one included, that Nikki carted away from Larkhall, and the day following Nikki’s release when she went through the bag-gleefully, sitting on the living room floor in her bathrobe, not unlike a child at Christmas-tasting and testing the new liberties that came with being a lover. You’ve a naked woman waiting for you and all you want to do is look at bloody books, Nikki had teased.
Arguing the literary merit of Trollope, however, had proven an unexpected aphrodisiac.
Helen ruffles Nightwood’s pages again, glances out the window. Frost indicates winter’s arrival, a line graph etched on the windowpane, a seasonal report: The first quarter showed a giddy surge of love, the second quarter indicated steady growth but dissatisfaction with certain habits (coffee grinds in the sink, dirty underwear left in the bathroom), and the third quarter had resulted in this timely yet risky merger.
Such metaphors were unavoidable when one lived with a businesswoman.
Like a first-year art student, evening dutifully inks in the window, filling out the pane within white frames with a scattering wash of gray blue that darkens and deepens in the worker-bee flurry of passing seconds. In a neat reversal of fortune-perhaps too neat for her liking-she is the one watching and waiting now, waiting for someone to release her from night.
It would be like this, Helen knew-Nikki’s work at the club translated into late nights and coming home at 4 a.m. with the smell of alcohol and smoke wedded to her clothes and her skin-yet always blessedly sober and happily tired, content to sprawl on the couch with her head in Helen’s lap and patiently listen to Helen’s recount of her day which, Helen thought, always paled in comparison to the never-ending dramas of the club: The bartender’s latest affairs. The fights over football. The melodramatic flinging of drinks into faces.
Helen places the book on the coffee table-a reminder to ask Nikki about the line, a reminder to herself about the precarious tyranny of night, fortune, fate. She would have resented this topsy-turvy turn of her life with anyone else, and at that realization she smiles ruefully; she has always been hobbled by that particularly Scottish love of a routine. It was her turn at the night watch now. She did not mind. She would endure it as long as necessary. Because both the past and the alternative were always too horrible for contemplation.
And because you are now a reality. You are no longer a thought.
the holyinnocent
Bad Girls, Helen/Nikki, post-series 3
Challenge 4, Prompt 2
483 Words
Notes: At last, reading Nightwood has some sort of payoff. :)
Night has gone on too long.
She’d written it on a flyleaf of Nightwood in letters of tamed hieroglyphics, serifs black and bitter-sharp, obviously at some point during her incarceration. But when?
The edges of the pages are brittle-brown, steeped in age like a forgotten teabag, threatening disintegration under Helen’s gentle, intrusive thumb. She remembers the bag of books, this one included, that Nikki carted away from Larkhall, and the day following Nikki’s release when she went through the bag-gleefully, sitting on the living room floor in her bathrobe, not unlike a child at Christmas-tasting and testing the new liberties that came with being a lover. You’ve a naked woman waiting for you and all you want to do is look at bloody books, Nikki had teased.
Arguing the literary merit of Trollope, however, had proven an unexpected aphrodisiac.
Helen ruffles Nightwood’s pages again, glances out the window. Frost indicates winter’s arrival, a line graph etched on the windowpane, a seasonal report: The first quarter showed a giddy surge of love, the second quarter indicated steady growth but dissatisfaction with certain habits (coffee grinds in the sink, dirty underwear left in the bathroom), and the third quarter had resulted in this timely yet risky merger.
Such metaphors were unavoidable when one lived with a businesswoman.
Like a first-year art student, evening dutifully inks in the window, filling out the pane within white frames with a scattering wash of gray blue that darkens and deepens in the worker-bee flurry of passing seconds. In a neat reversal of fortune-perhaps too neat for her liking-she is the one watching and waiting now, waiting for someone to release her from night.
It would be like this, Helen knew-Nikki’s work at the club translated into late nights and coming home at 4 a.m. with the smell of alcohol and smoke wedded to her clothes and her skin-yet always blessedly sober and happily tired, content to sprawl on the couch with her head in Helen’s lap and patiently listen to Helen’s recount of her day which, Helen thought, always paled in comparison to the never-ending dramas of the club: The bartender’s latest affairs. The fights over football. The melodramatic flinging of drinks into faces.
Helen places the book on the coffee table-a reminder to ask Nikki about the line, a reminder to herself about the precarious tyranny of night, fortune, fate. She would have resented this topsy-turvy turn of her life with anyone else, and at that realization she smiles ruefully; she has always been hobbled by that particularly Scottish love of a routine. It was her turn at the night watch now. She did not mind. She would endure it as long as necessary. Because both the past and the alternative were always too horrible for contemplation.
And because you are now a reality. You are no longer a thought.