Joined: 28 Jan 2008
Posts: 53
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(OOC - A prelude to a scene that occurred recently... it is my way of giving my warmest thanks to those who pushed it to come about [you will remain anonymous], as well as to hopefully show, that every person who gets involved in this sim can have meaningful experiences like this one. The beauty is in the struggle to get there.
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The light from the beaten up barrel brushed its fingers through the hair of the gathered shadows. His coat sloughed off shoulders as he hunched across the way, concentrated on his task. Orange and yellow flames glinted off glass frames as this one’s fingers worked.
There was not much the casual observer could say about him. A bum working in his space; nearby the foil packaging of Fungi-Stix ™ (Now in Great Meat flavors like Kidney, Liver, and Tripe… Fungi Stix™, Almost Like a Vegetable, but an Array of Diverse TASTE!) lay half-opened. Some cardboard boxes had been drug out of the pair of containers that were green statues under the overhang, not far from the Legit Co.: Fine Imports warehouse, and arranged like a hovel. Faint murmurs from those above uncurled bat wings before they drifted downward for insects waiting in peoples’ ears.
This one wasn’t listening.
Two Faber pencils were fished out of a coat pocket. He set the four spools up in a line, like standing stones on the asphalt, thread removed from them like topsoil. Rotated the one on the end just so, so it looked exactly like the others. “What’s the dice say?” he murmured, before he turned his back toward his hovel to unearth other little treasures he collected these past weeks. From dumpsters, from the occasional abandoned storefront that left their doors open, waiting for ghosts to conduct their business. The worn brown coat rustled with the sound leaves make when raked across a lawn.
…Is sad. In his mind, the little girl’s voice came out of the sea of others. Her crocodile tears reflected on a hallucinatory shard of glass that twirled past giant, steampunk gears; they trundled despite missing a number of grinning teeth.
Next to the spools, he set an empty Kleenex box that had seen better days. Even with the lackluster sun, time and chemicals had eaten away its skin into a faded wash. The man’s skinny fingers dangled then shook, in order to get the few pieces of tape off his digits, sticking the strips on the edges of the box like diving boards. Frowned like a jester as his glazed expression assessed what was in front of him. Something wasn’t right. He scooted around, crawled into the rabbit hole, duct taped boots fixed at an acute angle as he rummaged.
Oh no?? oh NO??…YOU.. don't think I TOUCH… her OFTEN ENOUGH? A spasm bunched in his left shoulder, and he crumpled inside the tight space that was his home.
“What you do,” he murmured to himself. These few words, then others jutted their hardness past his lips, dropping like stones out of his mouth as they had when he first said them, “with this one, not matters.” Propping himself up again on elbow, he reached out into the seeming emptiness, fingers dug under the blanket, passed over the single tarot card whose face couldn’t be seen even by this one. “What you do, with your daughter…makes all difference.” They latched onto a rectangular piece of cardboard a little over a foot in length.
A few pieces of paper tacked up in the bowels of the hovel fluttered as this one backed out, boots splayed awkward in order to not destroy the neatness he had arranged outside. Blinked twice at the rectangle piece of cardboard as he resettled, like a monk in a scriptorium. He flipped it several times before laying it flat. Took both pencils, laying each perpendicular to the long side on either end. The man bent his face forward. The tape was torn off the box of Kleenex as he applied two pieces to each pencil, securing them firmly. The kinetic movement, of doing this, of repetition, was reassuring.
This is a fucked up place. People get fucking skinned alive, tossed down the sewer like rancid meat. Happiness? It’s shoved so far up its asshole it can’t shit itself out.
My advice?
Stow away. Leave and don’t come back. If you can’t, fucking learn how to swim.
One by one, the spools were unearthed from their guardian stance. Fingers long as spider’s legs slipped them through the ends of the pencils that jutted out on either side of the cardboard. Spun each one, to make certain. He flipped the base, setting the cardboard down carefully onto the asphalt. The spools made a neat clack. He canted his chin right to left, a brief pause to muss his hair, before this one took a dull razor blade to the Kleenex box. Shaved slivers fell like confetti.
…Wanted to see it, but they went…BANG-BANG! He paused as the little girl’s chubby finger and thumb stuck out at him near the gas station, before it balled into a tiny fist. The fire burning in the barrel, the asphalt, the cold wind melted away. He was in a field with her. He watched as she giggled, did a handstand; at once, all the autumn-ripened grain rippled, then split in envy of her auburn locks.
He continued to shave the Kleenex box, rounded its sides. Didn’t register the two prostitutes who stopped with a pliant eagerness, to watch his fingers move, before they too, slipped into the night for what other hands knew to do; groping, or curled into a fist.
Once he was finished, he glued the Kleenex box on top. Then, this one plucked a scrap of paper; it was the kind from before the wars, when paper with thickness, with heft, was used to write meaningful things on. The man had found it stuffed in the inside jacket of an old issue of Violent Cases, by Gaiman and McKean. Using a palm, he laid the paper flat, and scribbled with a pen. Folded the paper as if it were his own laundry, before it was stuffed into the driver’s seat of the makeshift toy. A cardboard, Cadillac automobile.
Somewhere, a little mag-lite of happiness flicked on. |
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