Meet Thera!
--
“Look at her!”
“What does she think she’s doing?”
“Shh, she might hear you.”
A crowded had gathered at the end of the breezeway. A handful of students stood clustered around the end that opened to the courtyard, whispering loudly to themselves and sending excited and fearful glances toward something that stood just out of Shadrack’s point of view. He pushed through them, intent on using the courtyard as a shortcut to the library, only to stop dead when he realized what had caught his peers’ fascination.
Thera– dirty barefoot mountain girl Thera, now nearly a woman– was standing in the gazebo, reclined against its wall. She had been eyeing the students, who were very poorly hiding their ogling glances, with a certain wariness, but when she saw Shadrack her gaze gained a devilishly glint. She seemed to unfold before him, like a carnivorous flower opening itself to invite a fly in, straightening herself and sauntering toward him. Shadrack stood in absolute horror as the group of students behind him buzzed with exclamations.
“Shadrack,” Thera purred. He looked her straight in her strange black eyes, glared furiously, then shoved past her and stormed toward the library. She followed at a much more moderate pace.
The path to the library passed through several low hanging trees, and when he thought no one could see them, Shadrack stopped and turned to her.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
She cocked her head to the side and took her time looking his tense form up and down in great amusement.
“Are we getting along with the other boys and girls, Shadrack dearest?” she asked sweetly. Shadrack narrowed his eyes and mimicked her actions, openly assessing her appearance.
Her feet– though now sporting sandals– were still covered with scabs from the thistles that grew over graves, and the marks went all the way to the hem of her worn gray skirt. Her hands, laying casually on her hips, were covered in small little cuts, and her fingernails were still cracked and discolored from grave soil and blood and magic. Shadrack shuttered inwardly.
Her hair was darker and duller than it had been and hung in an unstyled veil around her shoulders. Her skin, like her hair, was discolored from too much time spent working under a magicking moon. It was so transparent that Shadrack could clearly make out the intricacies of the veins of her temple.
Yet, in the end, it was her face that always frightened him most, more than her fading shadow. She had the normal purplish circles around her pitch-colored eyes that marked one of Them, but it was the almost hungry, feline look they held that made him uneasy. And the twitching smiling, like he was an especially entertaining pet, irritated him to no end.
“If that’s all you’re here for,” he said, “then I should get going.” He turned to leave and she pursed her lips.
“Wait,” she called after he’d taken several carefully paced steps. “I need to talk to you.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “I’m getting along quite fine with the other boys and girls, thank you,” he said and made to leave again.
“Shadrack,” she answered, clearly annoyed. “I need to talk to head of research.”
Shadrack stopped and stared at her incredulously. “I’m sorry,” he replied, “I don’t think I heard you correctly. You need to talk to who?”
Thera bit her lip and suddenly looked unsure of herself. “The head of research. It’s important.”
“You do realize,” said Shadrack, “That our head of research is the head of research for the entire kingdom, right?”
Thera wrinkled her brows in such a way that clearly said, “So what?” Shadrack couldn’t help it. He began to laugh.
“You?” he managed to say. “You think you can get an audience with him?”
She tilted her head back haughtily, gazing coolly back at his mocking expression through hooded eyes. “And why couldn’t I?” she asked coldly.
“Thera,” answered Shadrack, bemused, “you are the witch living in the dark forest. You are the monster lurking in the woods that villagers warn their children. You are the thing that goes bump in the night. What would the head of research want with you?”
Thera arched her eyebrows, head still tilted back so that she looked at him over her pointed chin. “Society needs fuel to progress. I just inherited an entire estate full of fuel.”
Something deep within Shadrack turned very cold. It was true several forms of very powerful magic relied on that, but those rituals were not widely used. If it were employed more often, the practical uses of magic would increase substantially, and yet…
“You do realize that’s insane, right?” he said. “No one’s going to go along with that. It’d be easier on you to not even try.”
He expected those words to have some effect on her arrogant expression, but Thera’s face just broke into a wide smirk. “Are you saying you can’t get me an audience, Shadrack dearest?”
Shadrack scowled. “Of course I can. I’m just saying it’s not going to work out on your end.”
Her smirk didn’t change. “I’ll be the one to worry about that,” she said with a note of finality and then walked away the way they’d come. Shadrack watched her, dumbfounded, with the sense that underneath her moon-white skin, something was boiling.
---
And here's a conversation ABOUT Thera.
--
“You’re being ridiculous,” Shadrack chided, trying to hide his panic behind a mask of annoyance. “You know I’d spend more time with you if I could–”
“You mean if you weren’t spending so much time with that freak?” She hissed back, violently smashing away at the eye of newt with the flat of her knife. Shadrack considered pointing out that those were meant to be pulverized, not smashed, but thought better of it.
“I know, I hate talking to her too, but…” Shadrack edged around the table and put his arm around her shoulders. “We have the weekend, right?”
She shrugged his arm away and pulled some type of root toward herself and began chopping.
“That reacts poorly with iron,” Shadrack said quietly. “You need to use a bone–”
The sound of the knife against the granite slab become more resolute and she glared intensely down at her work. Shadrack backed away.
When she finished with the root, she calmly placed the knife on the table and turned to look at him with a stony face.
“This weekend,” she said, “You are taking me out somewhere nice.”
Shadrack brightened. “The park–”
“No,” she cut in firmly. “You are taking me somewhere that costs money. When you’re not studying, you’re working, and you say you need that job, but all you spend money on is fancy new tools and vanity items.”
“But I need those things!”
“No, Shadrack, you need some down time. With me.”
Shadrack squirmed under her harsh gaze for a few moments, rearranging vials of pickled vegetation on her workbench. “Are you sure the park isn’t–”
“SHADRACK!” She threw her arms up in defeat and picked the knife back up, cleaning it with her apron. “If you really need the money, maybe I should get a job too. Lord knows I don’t have anything better to do with you always out. Or maybe I should sell all my jewelry– you think it’s too gaudy anyway.” She stared down at the knife, her face reflected fuzzily in its blade. “Or maybe,” she continued, her tone gaining a hysterical note, “I should cut off a few of my fingers and sell them–”
“You want to talk to Thera?” Shadrack exclaimed, appalled. “But she’s so abrasive and rude! And she has horrid fingernails! In fact, she–”
“ARGH!” She screamed, throwing the knife at the ground. Shadrack gawked at her and she glared heatedly back at him.
After a long, tense minute, he said hesitantly, “But sweetie, Thera really is–”
“We’re over, Shadrack!” she bellowed, and left him standing quite confused in alchemy lab number six.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
Umbilical.
I DON'T KNOW WHAT THE SHIT THIS
but i think i bungled whatever the hell was was point at the end LOL
--
I notice my shirt is too tight when I can clearly make out my bellybutton. I stare at it in the blurry reflection in the car window. This melon-baller scoop is proof I am human. That I was born. This is proof I was once a mass of translucent cells incubating in my mother’s womb.
One day maybe I will have my own mass growing inside me.
I run my finger around the rim of my bellybutton, through the thin cotton. How would that feel? A taught, bloated stomach, like a balloon grown under the skin. And then inside– some alien thing, writhing, growing, turning. Feeding.
I stick my finger into the twisted hollow where I was once connected to my mother.
I imagine going in further, pushing my entire hand under my skin. I imagine the squish of yellow fat and the palpations of skin as I drum my fingers against my stomach. Intestines under my hands like fresh pasta. Warm. Safe. I could reach up into my chest, bent over with my forearm plunged into my belly up to the elbow, and wrap my own aorta around my finger. I could press my thumb against my heart and feel myself live. I could pinch my lung and feel it expand under my fingers as I inhale.
I could pull my bellybutton open further, I could put both hands inside, and I could rearrange my spaghetti-intestines however I want. I could push them all up to the top, wedged against the stomach and the pancreas, and feel gravity drag them back down as I straighten up. I could take them out and string them across my arms like Christmas lights. I could reach all the way back and push aside my kidneys and trace my spine, outlining one vertebra at a time. Could I feel the nerves trails out, I wonder?
I wonder what kinds of contortions I would have to do to reach all the way up to the tip of the spine and tap on the base of my skull.
If I had a little alien mass inside, I could take out my womb and look at it. It would be like a water balloon. I could turn it inside out at there would be blue latex fused with the inside wall of my uterus. And there would be my little alien baby in a bath of runny jello, connected to me with a latex-flesh-umbilical chord.
I could pull the chord feel and toss the little alien aside, or I could pinch its little head and crush it, or I could toss the entire balloon away. Or I could not. I could tuck it back away in its upside down home, to feast on me some more. Or I could not. It’s mine. The blue latex is mine. I could. I might.
My hands drift from my navel up across my breast, around my neck, to the hollow of the base of my skull. My eyes are blurry in the window. Mine mine mine.
(the file also has the incomplete "Hands." and "Feet.")
but i think i bungled whatever the hell was was point at the end LOL
--
I notice my shirt is too tight when I can clearly make out my bellybutton. I stare at it in the blurry reflection in the car window. This melon-baller scoop is proof I am human. That I was born. This is proof I was once a mass of translucent cells incubating in my mother’s womb.
One day maybe I will have my own mass growing inside me.
I run my finger around the rim of my bellybutton, through the thin cotton. How would that feel? A taught, bloated stomach, like a balloon grown under the skin. And then inside– some alien thing, writhing, growing, turning. Feeding.
I stick my finger into the twisted hollow where I was once connected to my mother.
I imagine going in further, pushing my entire hand under my skin. I imagine the squish of yellow fat and the palpations of skin as I drum my fingers against my stomach. Intestines under my hands like fresh pasta. Warm. Safe. I could reach up into my chest, bent over with my forearm plunged into my belly up to the elbow, and wrap my own aorta around my finger. I could press my thumb against my heart and feel myself live. I could pinch my lung and feel it expand under my fingers as I inhale.
I could pull my bellybutton open further, I could put both hands inside, and I could rearrange my spaghetti-intestines however I want. I could push them all up to the top, wedged against the stomach and the pancreas, and feel gravity drag them back down as I straighten up. I could take them out and string them across my arms like Christmas lights. I could reach all the way back and push aside my kidneys and trace my spine, outlining one vertebra at a time. Could I feel the nerves trails out, I wonder?
I wonder what kinds of contortions I would have to do to reach all the way up to the tip of the spine and tap on the base of my skull.
If I had a little alien mass inside, I could take out my womb and look at it. It would be like a water balloon. I could turn it inside out at there would be blue latex fused with the inside wall of my uterus. And there would be my little alien baby in a bath of runny jello, connected to me with a latex-flesh-umbilical chord.
I could pull the chord feel and toss the little alien aside, or I could pinch its little head and crush it, or I could toss the entire balloon away. Or I could not. I could tuck it back away in its upside down home, to feast on me some more. Or I could not. It’s mine. The blue latex is mine. I could. I might.
My hands drift from my navel up across my breast, around my neck, to the hollow of the base of my skull. My eyes are blurry in the window. Mine mine mine.
(the file also has the incomplete "Hands." and "Feet.")
Friday, August 19, 2011
JUNIPER LIVES!! (or... no wait...)
“Juniper?” Mariano caught my wrists, his face horrified. “What are you doing?”
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
“I know, but…” I pulled my hands from his. “It’s just…” I inhaled deeply and willed my voice not to crack. “I can’t believe I’m related to that man. And now I don’t know what to do with myself, and it just… it just all came out.”
I shrugged and accepted that I probably sounded completely insane. Mariano slowly raised his arm and put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll go to NAME OF ORG,” he said. “And you can figure out what you want. It’ll be okay.”
On impulse, I hugged him. He took a step back, startled, but returned it. On our way to NAME OF ORG, neither of us mentioned it.
Mariano took me to a hotel on the beach, which grew out of ten or twelves trees bending and stretching themselves. Instead of normal rooms, the hotel just had halls and halls of gates.
“I want to try something,” he said. He picked a random door and had me stand in front of it.
“Imagine a mountain,” he said. I did. “It’s very steep. It’s a faded green from shurbs and grass. There are more mountains around it. And in the middle of these mountains is a lake. The lake is very still and large. It’s not quite round but close enough.”
“Is there snow on the mountains?” I asked.
“No.” I was disappointed, but I removed the snow from my mental imagine. Mariano continued, “The mountain is completely hollow. Inside, there is a secret base filled with laboratories. The only way to get into the secret base is through a metal door at the edge of the lake. I want you to focus on that door, okay?”
“Alright,” I said. I imagined that that door was this door, th on in front of me, and that it would open up the to the lake and the mountains. I opened the door.
On the other side, there was a lake not exactly like the one I had imagined, but close enough. Mountains rose up around it. “Neat,” I said.
“Nope,” said Mariano. “Try again.”
It took eight more tries before I openned the hotel door to the right mountain lake.
“Fantastic!” Mariano cried and led me through. We closed the door, turned around, and Mariano opened it again to reveal the ‘secret base’ inside the mountain.
The walls and ceiling were dull metal sheets with fluorescent lights. Periodically there would be large windows showing off strange rooms which I supposed were the labratories. One looked like a medieval alchemist’s workshop, and another had walls of buttons and blinking lights like something out of an old science fiction movie. The end of the hall opened into a large room covered with computer screens and panels of switches and keys. A man was typing furiously in front of the largest screen, and a man and a woman sat at a table in the middle of the room. They were building a card pyramid.
“I’m back!” Mariano announced. The card pyramid collapsed and the three people looked up. The first man continued typing, his face toward us instead of the screen.
“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward me.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Mariano said and sat down at the table. “This is Juniper. Juniper, that’s Liang–” He pointed to the man who went back to squinting at the compter screen. “And these are Pandora and–”
“Tupaqyupanki,” the other man interrumpted, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Don’t call me Tupaq. I don’t know why that’s funny, but some day I will figure it out, and Mariano will suffer.” He said this all very seriously. My eyes widened.
Pandora snorted. “Tuki’s just upset he can’t find anyone who can say his name.”
“Oh,” said. “Um, nice to meet you. May I sit down?”
“No,” Tuki drawled, “we make poor confused newly deads stand as a form of purgatory.”
I decided to interpret that as, “Why yes Juniper; after all, you’re our welcome guest!” I sat down next to Pandora. She looked about my age, I thought, maybe a year or two older. She was small, with long, black hair. She watched me hang my bag on the chair with brown, almond eyes.
Tuki, on the other hand, looked like he was maybe five years older. He was shorter than Mariano, but well built with dark caramel skin and glossy black hair.
“Where’s old Minestrone?” Mariano asked, propping his feet on the table. Tuki, who was sitting across from him, gave his boots a withering glance.
“Off thinking deep thoughts or whatever it is philosophers do,” Tuki answered.
“Hmm,” Mariano hummed.
“More importantly,” said Pandora, “why did you bring her back with you?” She jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Couldn’t find a relative,” Mariano said, then kicked his feet off the table, leaned over and started on his own house of cards.
“Really now,” Tuki said dryly.
“Well, we did,” Mariano explained, “but Juniper thought he was a jerk.”
I turned red. Pandora laughed.
“Hey,” she said, elbowing me good naturedly, “I think that about these two everyday and I still have to live with them.” Tuki flicked a card at her, and the motion caused Mariano’s card house to collapse.
Pandora gathered up all the cards and delt them for spades.
“So,” I said after I’d lost my third game, “is Liang the only one who does work around here or what?”
“No,” Mariano protested at the same that Liang called over, “Yes.”
“Liang’s in charge of data analysis,” Pandora said. “The three of us do field work.”
“Are you peer advisors too?” I asked.
“Suuure,” Tuki said.
“No seriously,” I said. “Mariano can’t be the only one. To be effective you’d need lots of workers.”
“Well, um,” said Pandora, “There are more people, but they’re out now, doing… work.” She started dealing again. “Tuki and I do more specialized stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know,” Tuki cut in. “We just go out, separate confused youths from their support networks, then force peer advisors on them. It’s all one big conspiracy.”
I gaped at him and he smirked back.
Before we finshed our fourth game, the man Mariano had called ‘Minestrone’ waltzed in. He was dressed in a white toga and had a neatly trimmed, sand-colored facial hair.
“Mariano!” he said jovially and slapped him on the back. “You brought a friend.” He grinned at me, inviting and friendly.
“This is Juniper,” Mariano said. “She’s a bit of a special case…”
Mariano explained my situation.
“Ah, that happens sometimes,” the ‘Minestrone’ said. “Nice to meet you, Juniper. You can call me Menestheus.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said and shook his hand.
He told me I was welcome to stay for as long as I wanted, and told Pandora to take me to find a room. As we left the room, I heard Mariano say, “We need to talk.”
Pandora led me to an elevator and took me to “the very top.” (The button next to it was labeled “almost at the very top.”) After a very awkward ride in which Pandora fixed her hair in the mirror-plated wall, we found ourselves in a tiny round corridor with polished wound floors and neon green wallpaper.
“This floor is for girls,” Pandora said. “For some reason we let Tuki pick the colors. Tuki is not a very nice person.”
There were only four, firehydrant-red doors lining the little corridor. Either there were female employees living elsewhere or ORG NAME was not an equal opportunity employer.
“This one is the least offensive, I think,” Pandora continued and let me into a decent sized, bee-themed bedroom. Everything was black and yellow, and the comfortor on the small bed had a bee pattern. There was a lopsided honey-comb shaped beanbag chair in one corner. The desk was a bright-pink flower: an actual one, facing upward and flat, with a can of writing utensils balanced on its golden center.
“It’s… nice,” I said. Pandora shook her head.
“Don’t ever let Tuki design anything for you. He will go out of his way to make it painful for everyone. There was actually a merry-go-round bedroom that was in constant motion, with little rainbow ponies running around and neighing. Completely uninhabitable.”
I stared at her. “I’d like to see that, actually,” I said.
“Can’t,” she answered with a shrug. “I redid it for my room forever ago.”
I tentively sat down on the bed. It was comfortably soft. I dropped my bag on the floor; Minerva clinked against it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Er– I mean, with ORG NAME, not… you know…”
Pandora laughed and pulled out the striped chair from the flower-desk. It had six legs.
“You don’t have to tiptoe around the whole death issue here,” she said. “Most people are over it. And if they’re not, well, screw ‘em.”
I nodded. She flipped a strand of hair over her shoulder and started twiddling it.
“I don’t actually remember dying,” she went on, “or being alive at all. I don’t even remember my real name.”
“Not even your name?” I repeated, shocked. She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal.
“I didn’t even have one for a while. Tuki just called me ‘you’ for years. But Menestheus, being who he is, suggested Pandora.”
“So you knew Tuki before ORG?” I said. She nodded.
“Tuki and I used to wander around together. I don’t have any memories where I didn’t know who Mr. Tupaqyupanki is.”
“How old is Tuki?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t really know that either,” Pandora admitted sheepishly. “He doesn’t remember much about life. He’s got to have died at least five hundred years ago, though– somewhere in the Andes, he thinks.”
“And have you been with him that long?”
“No, I… I’m not really sure. Maybe a hundred years, living time. It’s hard to keep track if you’re not being vigilant. But we’ve just been traveling around together for so long… until we met Minest– Menestheus, of course.”
“And when was that?” I felt prying, but I was genuinely interested.
“Oh, I don’t know… twenty years ago, maybe? The ORG was pretty new then. Minest–Menestheus had just found this mountain, ready-made with labs and stuff. And it ‘resonated’–” she made finger quotes “–with Tuki or something, so we signed up, moved in, and Tuki started decorating everything horribly.”
“And where’s Menestheus from?” I asked. I wanted to ask about Mariano, but there was probably a reason he avoided talking about himself, so I had chickened out.
“Ancient Greece, of course,” replied Pandora in a duh voice. “He was a philosopher, and now he has all these great ideas for research. And for whatever it is Mariano does, of course.”
I mentally battled two questions. First, I wanted to know why a Greek man would go by an Italian nickname and stroll around in a Roman toga. Second, I continued wanting to ask about the elusive Mariano. After remembering Tuki had been sporting a pair of cargo pants, I decided fashion choices of the dead were not worth analyzing.
“And where’s Mariano from?” I asked, giving into temptation.
“No idea,” Pandora answered flippantly, crushing my hope with a wave of her hand. “He showed up a few years ago and went and schmoozed and charmed everyone, including Minestrone.”
She then announced she needed to get something out of her room and sauntered out.
I laid down on my bed. What was I going to do with myself? For all I’d seen, I didn’t actually understand how this place worked. I’d barely met any people. At home I knew what I was supposed to do: finish high school, go to college, find a useful degree I didn’t hate.
What did dead teenagers do?
I curled into a ball. My borrowed skirt ended a few inches above my knees; I started to absently scratch my lower thigh there.
“Juniper?” A deep voice echoed around my room. I yelped in surprise. “This is Menestheus. Could I speak to you privately?”
“I, um…” I said, looking around the room. Did I have a microphone to talk into or something? I tried talking to a wall. “Sure, why not?”
“Excellent,” the voice answered. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just around. What an odd PA system.
He told me where to meet him and I went to the elevator and pressed the button labeled “exact midpoint,” as instructed. The button next to it said, “The floor that smells like fish.” I decided to avoid that floor if I could.
The exact midpoint was a cafeteria. It was a wide, open room: along the the back were various centuries’ worth of kitchen tools, and on the opposite side of the room were a handful of square tables. It was lit with natural light from the floor-to-ceiling window over looking the lake outside. I found this perplexing, as there was no sign of a window from the outside.
Menestheus was seated at the table closeted to the window, a tray with all the accoutrements for teatime set before him. I sat down across from him, shoulders tense.
“Hello sir,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me out and taking me in. If you need anything done, I’d be happy to help out.”
Menestheus chuckled and leaned back casaully. I relaxed.
“No need to thank me, Miss Gard,” he said. “Mariano told me your story.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess it’s not normal to reject family like that…”
“It happens all the time; we’re always putting up newly deads,” he said and winked knowlingly. “Does sharing blood truly necessitate love?”
“Well no, but…” I mumbled something about ensuring one’s genetic code spread.
If bringing me to ORG was normal, then why had Tuki and Pandora acted like it was strange? Did they really enjoy being as contradictory as possible? Why was I trying to defend familial love using genetics to an ancient Greek philosopher?
“Have some tea,” the man offered. He served us both and offered me a plate of cookies. I took one politely.
We chatted pleasantly for a while, and I told him how I’d died and the adventures I’d had with Mariano. He told me about the Athens of his youth. He described the acroplois and the parthenon and his home to me, with all the detail of a painting. He told me about philosophical arguments he’d had.
“You must count yourself lucky to have such vivid memories of your life,” I said. “Since Pandora and Tuki can barely remember anything at all.”
“I do,” he agreed solemnly. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
I gave him a brief summary of what I’d told Barry.
Afterwards I said, “May I ask what’s going to happen to me here?”
He stood up and walked slowly to the window, staring down at the smooth lake. He looked quite dramatic, with his toga and regal posture.
“Do you know what we do here?” He asked.
“I know you run a peer advising program for newly deads,” I said slowly. “But I guess you must do more.” I thought of all those labratories.
“Much more,” he said. “Death offers a lot of opportunity, Miss Gard.”
“If you say so, sir,” I said.
“The peer advising program is Mariano’s pet project,” Menestheus explained. I nodded. “My goal is something much greater.”
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He continued staring down at the lake, his expression hard as though deep in thought. I had the vague feeling he was purposely putting on a show. (no shit, junie)
“Sir?” I said. “What are you researching?”
“The link,” he said, “between life and death.” He looked me in the eyes expectantly.
“That sounds really interesting,” I said, having no idea what he meant.
“What, Miss Gard, is the difference between living and dying?”
“A pulse?” I tried, then pinched myself under the table for much a smartass reply.
“Did you know,” Menestheus continued, strolling back over to the table, “that people only come to life when they have died?” He didn’t sit. I felt he was trying to intimidate me and remained silent. “The truth is only apparent in hindsight.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. He smirked back at me.
“ORG’s goal is to bring all the opportunities of life to the dead.”
I thought “I still don’t understand” wasn’t a valid response and would make me look stupid. I hesitated, then said it anyway.
He looked thoughtful, as if my comprehension failure was baffling. He sat down and took another sip of tea.
“Miss Gard, you have noticed that we use computers here, haven’t you?” I nodded. “And we have elevators and coffee makers and blenders.” My eyes darted over to the mess of kitchen supplies on the other side of the room. They also had modern stoves and toaster ovens and Tuki wore cargo pants.
“But most of you are very old,” I said slowly.
He smiled wryly at me. “Exactly. We want to bring all the modern advances of the living to the dead, more quickly than they’re dispersing now.”
I thought of the library and their horrible information storage system. Spreading technology seemed like a worthy aim, but I tried to imagine bringing a toaster to everyone who had ever died or explaining the internet to early H. sapiens.
“Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit lofty?” I said.
Menestheus sighed. “Miss Gard, I will admit something to you. I regret my life. I regret not setting more ambitious goals for myself.”
I blinked, surprised. “But you made it sound so beautiful.”
He shook his head. “In the end, history hasn’t remembered me. I wasn’t Plato or Aristotle or Socretes. I never did anything daring. I never did anything worth remembering.”
“You found it worth remembering,” I said. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, Miss Gard,” he said.
“I don’t understand what this has to do with that stuff about ‘the truth is only apparent in hindsight,’” I went on, swirling the contents of my teacup without paying much attention to it.
“I’m lucky in that I remember my life,” he said. “I can remember the best parts and the worst parts. And now, with ORG, I’m fixing my regrets– I’m aiming high and I will be remembered among the dead forever. But Tuki and Pandora will never have the opportunity to fix regrets.” (i hate this entire conversation DIE DIE DIE)
“Oh,” I said. My mind struggled to put what he was saying together. Modern technology would mean better information storage and easier access to new information and more efficient communication. “You want people to have more tech… so they can remember their lives? So they can have the good memories and fix any regrets?” (WHAT THAT'S STUPID STOP PULLING STUFF OUT OF YOUR ASS MICHELLE)
“Life is precious,” Menestheus affirmed. We stared at each in silence for a few moments, then he started asking me for details about my life– to learn about new advances, I supposed. I told him everything he wanted to know.
I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself (especially to someone who was trying to change the afterlife forever), but he seemed intrigued by everything I had to say. It seemed like hours had passed (although time was horribly relavent here) when he finally said,
“Now I should tell you want you’ll be doing to earn your keep here, Miss Gard,” he said. “You’ll be spending a lot of time with Liang.”
“Why Liang?” I asked.
“Liang will record anything new you have to say about the living world,” Menestheus. “I suspect not much has changed since Mariano arrived, but we want to be as up-to-date as possible.”
“Right,” I said. Again I found myself wondering just how old Mariano was.
“And you’ll be taking up some chores to keep the headquarters running,” Menestheus continued. “Cleaning, some paperwork– things like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
He told me he’d send for me when I was needed and we said our goodbyes. I retreated to the elevator and thought about what he’d said as I ascended.
Menestheus made a lot of claims I couldn’t quite agree with. I thought trying to keep up with the living world was a good idea, but I didn’t think it could solve everyone’s problems, nor did I think it was the key difference between life and death. And what was all that about people only coming alive when they were dead? Maybe Menestheus was a bit batty, having existed so long.
(juniper make better feedback on crazyman mk thanks?)
What would I be like, centeries from now? Would I remember anything at all?
The elevator doors opened, and I found a very strange sight in the neon green room. Pandora was in the corridor outside, chasing a small white creature.
“Is that a unicorn?” I asked, befuddled.
“Shut up and help,” she weezed. The little horse probably only came to my waist. It was quick, agile, and doing a very good job of dodging Pandora as she lunged after it. She managed to get her arms around its neck, but it wrenched free and she went toppling forward, her long hair splaying everywhere.
Having sufficient time to recover from the absurdity of the situation, I helped Pandora tackle the unicorn. I managed to get my arm over its back and my other hand tangled in its mane, while she demonstrated the equine equivalent of a half-nelson. The animal bucked twice and continued to rampage around the courridor, dragging us with it.
“What’s going on?” I yelled into course hair.
“Uurrrgh,” Pandora replied and dug her heels into the floor. The horse eventually slowed to a rest, although I doubted it had anything to with Pandora’ efforts.
“Okay,” she panted, smoothing her hair with one hand and fisting the unicorn’s mane with the other. “Thanks. They do that sometimes times.”
Another horned horse stuck its head out from behind her door, which had been left open a jar. This one was pink. She yelled a few angry words at it and it retreated back inside.
“It’s like the universe is conspiring to withhold explanations,” I said as Pandora led the tiny white unicorn back into her room, slamming the door behind her.
In my room I remembered Pandora mentioning the merry-go-round Tuki had made with real, miniture horses. Apparently she hadn’t been that annoyed with them afterall.
I sat down at my flower-desk and tried to think about my conversation with Menestheus more, but I was distracted by other thoughts. What would redecorating my room entail? Would I even be staying here long enough for it to matter? Why were the elevator buttons labeled like that? Why bother with an elevator and different floors at all if you could just link a bunch of rooms to the same gate?
Oh, I thought. So that’s why there’s only four doors on this floor.
I sat there for a very long time, mentally mulling over what I dubbed “ponder-tangents.” In the end, I managed to make very few conclusions.
Eventually I was summoned to go meet with Liang. He was still in the first room I’d encountered in ORG: the one where I’d played cards with Pandora and Tuki. He had moved to a new computer, however, and I dragged a chair from the card table over to him.
“You called?” I said.
He pushed his rolling chair back from the screen and reached above his head in a deep stretch. His dark hair stuck up as if he ran his hand through it frequently, and his button-up shirt had a coffee stain on it.
“Juniper, right?” he said. “I need you to answer a few questions.”
“Right,” I said. He asked me several basic questions, such as my full name and my birth and death days, and entered then on the computer. He asked where I had lived and and with whom I had lived. He asked for their names and ages.
“Why do you need to know?” I asked after I’d told him.
He shrugged. “Just formalities. What’s the most recent advance in the field of medicine?”
“I… I really don’t know. Sorry.”
“What about in any of the other sciences?”
“I don’t know. We only really talked about established things in school,” I explained.
“Hmm.” Liang typed something brief. “Why don’t you tell me about recent events, then.”
“Umm…” I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My parents watched the news during breakfast, and I tried to remember what was on the day of my death. I spluttered out something about a tree falling across a major road during a storm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought and reached up and pulled at my hair with one hand. If Liang noticed, he didn’t care enough to show it.
“I see,” Liang said. He didn’t type anything and considered me for a moment. I started to braid my hair, and he watched without comment. Finally he said, “Who is the current leader of your country?”
I answered, and he asked me a series of questions about contemporary politics. I wasn’t as savvy as I would have liked, but I thought I did a decent job of telling him what he wanted to know.
When he was done quizzing me, Liang produced a ruler and carefully measured the diameter of the hole through my skull.
“The faster it closes,” he said, “the faster we know we’re losing your connection to your body. We can then also gauge how fast time is passing in the living world. Has it changed much since you died?”
I ran my fingers around the smooth edges. It didn’t seem like it had changed. Before, I had managed to squeeze my boney forearm though it, so I tried that again. I wiggled my fingers at Liang from the other side of my head.
“Nope,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “It means times is passing slowly.”
He led me down the hall to a supply closet and pointed to a mop and bucket.
“The floor with the cat skeleton has truly filthy floors,” he said. “See what you can do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, picking up the mop. “The floor with the what?”
Liang sighed and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “The cat skeleton. I’d throw it out, but that’s what it’s called in the elevator…”
He turned and shuffled away before I could ask him why they didn’t just change the name then.
I mopped all the rooms I could find on that floor. It seemed to be a labyrinth of rooms of random themes: one had a handful of fishless aquariums and another had stacks and stacks of maps. The largest room was full of mirrors and inexplicably featured a full cat skeleton, displayed in a glass box on a podium in the room’s center. When I finished mopping, I dusted the mirrors and the glass case.
I kept myself busy cleaning and lost track of time. I ran into a few other employees, but they didn’t have much to say to me and for the most part the vast rooms of ORG were empty. I wondered about that– why was the afterlife so empty?
I asked Liang about that, and he replied by handing me a bag full of clothes he’d procured for me.
Tuki found me and handed me a file to run to Menestheus.
I slept for the second time since dying. It was a strange, habitual action. I never actually physically felt tired, although I was sure I had been wandering around the compound for at least three or four days. But my mind was going off on more and more ponder-tangents, and after he found me carefully studying the bristles of a broom, Liang suggested I take a nap. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember it.
I awoke to knocking. There was no intermediate feeling of drowsiness between the state of sleep and waking, so I hopped up and answered the door as energetically as if I’d already been awake.
“Good morning!” Mariano greeted when I opened the door. He appraised the pajamas I’d barrowed from Pandora. They were fuschia. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I leaned against the doorway and grinned teasingly. “I fail to see the point,” I said, “in using temporal greetings when time runs according to whim. Look, I can make it evening: And will you be having the stake or the chicken at dinner?”
“Ha,” Mariano answered. “You make fun of it now, but you know you like it.” I shrugged and continued grinning. “And you’ll like what I want to show you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
I shut the door for privacy and rooted through the pile of clothes I’d obtained. Liang either had a very strange sense of style or had been very lazy with his shopping, as it seemed he had raided a series of high school locker rooms to produce gym clothes of varying colors.
Ignoring the morbidity of it, I put on the clothes in which I’d woken up dead.
“Okay then,” Mariano said when I emerged from my room. He was eyeing the tears around the right calf of my lucky jeans.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following him into the elevator. He pressed the “very bottom” button. Oddly, it was at the top.
“For a walk,” he said.
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
“I know, but…” I pulled my hands from his. “It’s just…” I inhaled deeply and willed my voice not to crack. “I can’t believe I’m related to that man. And now I don’t know what to do with myself, and it just… it just all came out.”
I shrugged and accepted that I probably sounded completely insane. Mariano slowly raised his arm and put a hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll go to NAME OF ORG,” he said. “And you can figure out what you want. It’ll be okay.”
On impulse, I hugged him. He took a step back, startled, but returned it. On our way to NAME OF ORG, neither of us mentioned it.
Mariano took me to a hotel on the beach, which grew out of ten or twelves trees bending and stretching themselves. Instead of normal rooms, the hotel just had halls and halls of gates.
“I want to try something,” he said. He picked a random door and had me stand in front of it.
“Imagine a mountain,” he said. I did. “It’s very steep. It’s a faded green from shurbs and grass. There are more mountains around it. And in the middle of these mountains is a lake. The lake is very still and large. It’s not quite round but close enough.”
“Is there snow on the mountains?” I asked.
“No.” I was disappointed, but I removed the snow from my mental imagine. Mariano continued, “The mountain is completely hollow. Inside, there is a secret base filled with laboratories. The only way to get into the secret base is through a metal door at the edge of the lake. I want you to focus on that door, okay?”
“Alright,” I said. I imagined that that door was this door, th on in front of me, and that it would open up the to the lake and the mountains. I opened the door.
On the other side, there was a lake not exactly like the one I had imagined, but close enough. Mountains rose up around it. “Neat,” I said.
“Nope,” said Mariano. “Try again.”
It took eight more tries before I openned the hotel door to the right mountain lake.
“Fantastic!” Mariano cried and led me through. We closed the door, turned around, and Mariano opened it again to reveal the ‘secret base’ inside the mountain.
The walls and ceiling were dull metal sheets with fluorescent lights. Periodically there would be large windows showing off strange rooms which I supposed were the labratories. One looked like a medieval alchemist’s workshop, and another had walls of buttons and blinking lights like something out of an old science fiction movie. The end of the hall opened into a large room covered with computer screens and panels of switches and keys. A man was typing furiously in front of the largest screen, and a man and a woman sat at a table in the middle of the room. They were building a card pyramid.
“I’m back!” Mariano announced. The card pyramid collapsed and the three people looked up. The first man continued typing, his face toward us instead of the screen.
“Who’s that?” he asked, nodding toward me.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Mariano said and sat down at the table. “This is Juniper. Juniper, that’s Liang–” He pointed to the man who went back to squinting at the compter screen. “And these are Pandora and–”
“Tupaqyupanki,” the other man interrumpted, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Don’t call me Tupaq. I don’t know why that’s funny, but some day I will figure it out, and Mariano will suffer.” He said this all very seriously. My eyes widened.
Pandora snorted. “Tuki’s just upset he can’t find anyone who can say his name.”
“Oh,” said. “Um, nice to meet you. May I sit down?”
“No,” Tuki drawled, “we make poor confused newly deads stand as a form of purgatory.”
I decided to interpret that as, “Why yes Juniper; after all, you’re our welcome guest!” I sat down next to Pandora. She looked about my age, I thought, maybe a year or two older. She was small, with long, black hair. She watched me hang my bag on the chair with brown, almond eyes.
Tuki, on the other hand, looked like he was maybe five years older. He was shorter than Mariano, but well built with dark caramel skin and glossy black hair.
“Where’s old Minestrone?” Mariano asked, propping his feet on the table. Tuki, who was sitting across from him, gave his boots a withering glance.
“Off thinking deep thoughts or whatever it is philosophers do,” Tuki answered.
“Hmm,” Mariano hummed.
“More importantly,” said Pandora, “why did you bring her back with you?” She jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Couldn’t find a relative,” Mariano said, then kicked his feet off the table, leaned over and started on his own house of cards.
“Really now,” Tuki said dryly.
“Well, we did,” Mariano explained, “but Juniper thought he was a jerk.”
I turned red. Pandora laughed.
“Hey,” she said, elbowing me good naturedly, “I think that about these two everyday and I still have to live with them.” Tuki flicked a card at her, and the motion caused Mariano’s card house to collapse.
Pandora gathered up all the cards and delt them for spades.
“So,” I said after I’d lost my third game, “is Liang the only one who does work around here or what?”
“No,” Mariano protested at the same that Liang called over, “Yes.”
“Liang’s in charge of data analysis,” Pandora said. “The three of us do field work.”
“Are you peer advisors too?” I asked.
“Suuure,” Tuki said.
“No seriously,” I said. “Mariano can’t be the only one. To be effective you’d need lots of workers.”
“Well, um,” said Pandora, “There are more people, but they’re out now, doing… work.” She started dealing again. “Tuki and I do more specialized stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know,” Tuki cut in. “We just go out, separate confused youths from their support networks, then force peer advisors on them. It’s all one big conspiracy.”
I gaped at him and he smirked back.
Before we finshed our fourth game, the man Mariano had called ‘Minestrone’ waltzed in. He was dressed in a white toga and had a neatly trimmed, sand-colored facial hair.
“Mariano!” he said jovially and slapped him on the back. “You brought a friend.” He grinned at me, inviting and friendly.
“This is Juniper,” Mariano said. “She’s a bit of a special case…”
Mariano explained my situation.
“Ah, that happens sometimes,” the ‘Minestrone’ said. “Nice to meet you, Juniper. You can call me Menestheus.”
“Nice to meet you too,” I said and shook his hand.
He told me I was welcome to stay for as long as I wanted, and told Pandora to take me to find a room. As we left the room, I heard Mariano say, “We need to talk.”
Pandora led me to an elevator and took me to “the very top.” (The button next to it was labeled “almost at the very top.”) After a very awkward ride in which Pandora fixed her hair in the mirror-plated wall, we found ourselves in a tiny round corridor with polished wound floors and neon green wallpaper.
“This floor is for girls,” Pandora said. “For some reason we let Tuki pick the colors. Tuki is not a very nice person.”
There were only four, firehydrant-red doors lining the little corridor. Either there were female employees living elsewhere or ORG NAME was not an equal opportunity employer.
“This one is the least offensive, I think,” Pandora continued and let me into a decent sized, bee-themed bedroom. Everything was black and yellow, and the comfortor on the small bed had a bee pattern. There was a lopsided honey-comb shaped beanbag chair in one corner. The desk was a bright-pink flower: an actual one, facing upward and flat, with a can of writing utensils balanced on its golden center.
“It’s… nice,” I said. Pandora shook her head.
“Don’t ever let Tuki design anything for you. He will go out of his way to make it painful for everyone. There was actually a merry-go-round bedroom that was in constant motion, with little rainbow ponies running around and neighing. Completely uninhabitable.”
I stared at her. “I’d like to see that, actually,” I said.
“Can’t,” she answered with a shrug. “I redid it for my room forever ago.”
I tentively sat down on the bed. It was comfortably soft. I dropped my bag on the floor; Minerva clinked against it.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “Er– I mean, with ORG NAME, not… you know…”
Pandora laughed and pulled out the striped chair from the flower-desk. It had six legs.
“You don’t have to tiptoe around the whole death issue here,” she said. “Most people are over it. And if they’re not, well, screw ‘em.”
I nodded. She flipped a strand of hair over her shoulder and started twiddling it.
“I don’t actually remember dying,” she went on, “or being alive at all. I don’t even remember my real name.”
“Not even your name?” I repeated, shocked. She shrugged as if it weren’t a big deal.
“I didn’t even have one for a while. Tuki just called me ‘you’ for years. But Menestheus, being who he is, suggested Pandora.”
“So you knew Tuki before ORG?” I said. She nodded.
“Tuki and I used to wander around together. I don’t have any memories where I didn’t know who Mr. Tupaqyupanki is.”
“How old is Tuki?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t really know that either,” Pandora admitted sheepishly. “He doesn’t remember much about life. He’s got to have died at least five hundred years ago, though– somewhere in the Andes, he thinks.”
“And have you been with him that long?”
“No, I… I’m not really sure. Maybe a hundred years, living time. It’s hard to keep track if you’re not being vigilant. But we’ve just been traveling around together for so long… until we met Minest– Menestheus, of course.”
“And when was that?” I felt prying, but I was genuinely interested.
“Oh, I don’t know… twenty years ago, maybe? The ORG was pretty new then. Minest–Menestheus had just found this mountain, ready-made with labs and stuff. And it ‘resonated’–” she made finger quotes “–with Tuki or something, so we signed up, moved in, and Tuki started decorating everything horribly.”
“And where’s Menestheus from?” I asked. I wanted to ask about Mariano, but there was probably a reason he avoided talking about himself, so I had chickened out.
“Ancient Greece, of course,” replied Pandora in a duh voice. “He was a philosopher, and now he has all these great ideas for research. And for whatever it is Mariano does, of course.”
I mentally battled two questions. First, I wanted to know why a Greek man would go by an Italian nickname and stroll around in a Roman toga. Second, I continued wanting to ask about the elusive Mariano. After remembering Tuki had been sporting a pair of cargo pants, I decided fashion choices of the dead were not worth analyzing.
“And where’s Mariano from?” I asked, giving into temptation.
“No idea,” Pandora answered flippantly, crushing my hope with a wave of her hand. “He showed up a few years ago and went and schmoozed and charmed everyone, including Minestrone.”
She then announced she needed to get something out of her room and sauntered out.
I laid down on my bed. What was I going to do with myself? For all I’d seen, I didn’t actually understand how this place worked. I’d barely met any people. At home I knew what I was supposed to do: finish high school, go to college, find a useful degree I didn’t hate.
What did dead teenagers do?
I curled into a ball. My borrowed skirt ended a few inches above my knees; I started to absently scratch my lower thigh there.
“Juniper?” A deep voice echoed around my room. I yelped in surprise. “This is Menestheus. Could I speak to you privately?”
“I, um…” I said, looking around the room. Did I have a microphone to talk into or something? I tried talking to a wall. “Sure, why not?”
“Excellent,” the voice answered. It didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular, just around. What an odd PA system.
He told me where to meet him and I went to the elevator and pressed the button labeled “exact midpoint,” as instructed. The button next to it said, “The floor that smells like fish.” I decided to avoid that floor if I could.
The exact midpoint was a cafeteria. It was a wide, open room: along the the back were various centuries’ worth of kitchen tools, and on the opposite side of the room were a handful of square tables. It was lit with natural light from the floor-to-ceiling window over looking the lake outside. I found this perplexing, as there was no sign of a window from the outside.
Menestheus was seated at the table closeted to the window, a tray with all the accoutrements for teatime set before him. I sat down across from him, shoulders tense.
“Hello sir,” I said. “I wanted to thank you for helping me out and taking me in. If you need anything done, I’d be happy to help out.”
Menestheus chuckled and leaned back casaully. I relaxed.
“No need to thank me, Miss Gard,” he said. “Mariano told me your story.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess it’s not normal to reject family like that…”
“It happens all the time; we’re always putting up newly deads,” he said and winked knowlingly. “Does sharing blood truly necessitate love?”
“Well no, but…” I mumbled something about ensuring one’s genetic code spread.
If bringing me to ORG was normal, then why had Tuki and Pandora acted like it was strange? Did they really enjoy being as contradictory as possible? Why was I trying to defend familial love using genetics to an ancient Greek philosopher?
“Have some tea,” the man offered. He served us both and offered me a plate of cookies. I took one politely.
We chatted pleasantly for a while, and I told him how I’d died and the adventures I’d had with Mariano. He told me about the Athens of his youth. He described the acroplois and the parthenon and his home to me, with all the detail of a painting. He told me about philosophical arguments he’d had.
“You must count yourself lucky to have such vivid memories of your life,” I said. “Since Pandora and Tuki can barely remember anything at all.”
“I do,” he agreed solemnly. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
I gave him a brief summary of what I’d told Barry.
Afterwards I said, “May I ask what’s going to happen to me here?”
He stood up and walked slowly to the window, staring down at the smooth lake. He looked quite dramatic, with his toga and regal posture.
“Do you know what we do here?” He asked.
“I know you run a peer advising program for newly deads,” I said slowly. “But I guess you must do more.” I thought of all those labratories.
“Much more,” he said. “Death offers a lot of opportunity, Miss Gard.”
“If you say so, sir,” I said.
“The peer advising program is Mariano’s pet project,” Menestheus explained. I nodded. “My goal is something much greater.”
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He continued staring down at the lake, his expression hard as though deep in thought. I had the vague feeling he was purposely putting on a show. (no shit, junie)
“Sir?” I said. “What are you researching?”
“The link,” he said, “between life and death.” He looked me in the eyes expectantly.
“That sounds really interesting,” I said, having no idea what he meant.
“What, Miss Gard, is the difference between living and dying?”
“A pulse?” I tried, then pinched myself under the table for much a smartass reply.
“Did you know,” Menestheus continued, strolling back over to the table, “that people only come to life when they have died?” He didn’t sit. I felt he was trying to intimidate me and remained silent. “The truth is only apparent in hindsight.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. He smirked back at me.
“ORG’s goal is to bring all the opportunities of life to the dead.”
I thought “I still don’t understand” wasn’t a valid response and would make me look stupid. I hesitated, then said it anyway.
He looked thoughtful, as if my comprehension failure was baffling. He sat down and took another sip of tea.
“Miss Gard, you have noticed that we use computers here, haven’t you?” I nodded. “And we have elevators and coffee makers and blenders.” My eyes darted over to the mess of kitchen supplies on the other side of the room. They also had modern stoves and toaster ovens and Tuki wore cargo pants.
“But most of you are very old,” I said slowly.
He smiled wryly at me. “Exactly. We want to bring all the modern advances of the living to the dead, more quickly than they’re dispersing now.”
I thought of the library and their horrible information storage system. Spreading technology seemed like a worthy aim, but I tried to imagine bringing a toaster to everyone who had ever died or explaining the internet to early H. sapiens.
“Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit lofty?” I said.
Menestheus sighed. “Miss Gard, I will admit something to you. I regret my life. I regret not setting more ambitious goals for myself.”
I blinked, surprised. “But you made it sound so beautiful.”
He shook his head. “In the end, history hasn’t remembered me. I wasn’t Plato or Aristotle or Socretes. I never did anything daring. I never did anything worth remembering.”
“You found it worth remembering,” I said. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, Miss Gard,” he said.
“I don’t understand what this has to do with that stuff about ‘the truth is only apparent in hindsight,’” I went on, swirling the contents of my teacup without paying much attention to it.
“I’m lucky in that I remember my life,” he said. “I can remember the best parts and the worst parts. And now, with ORG, I’m fixing my regrets– I’m aiming high and I will be remembered among the dead forever. But Tuki and Pandora will never have the opportunity to fix regrets.” (i hate this entire conversation DIE DIE DIE)
“Oh,” I said. My mind struggled to put what he was saying together. Modern technology would mean better information storage and easier access to new information and more efficient communication. “You want people to have more tech… so they can remember their lives? So they can have the good memories and fix any regrets?” (WHAT THAT'S STUPID STOP PULLING STUFF OUT OF YOUR ASS MICHELLE)
“Life is precious,” Menestheus affirmed. We stared at each in silence for a few moments, then he started asking me for details about my life– to learn about new advances, I supposed. I told him everything he wanted to know.
I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself (especially to someone who was trying to change the afterlife forever), but he seemed intrigued by everything I had to say. It seemed like hours had passed (although time was horribly relavent here) when he finally said,
“Now I should tell you want you’ll be doing to earn your keep here, Miss Gard,” he said. “You’ll be spending a lot of time with Liang.”
“Why Liang?” I asked.
“Liang will record anything new you have to say about the living world,” Menestheus. “I suspect not much has changed since Mariano arrived, but we want to be as up-to-date as possible.”
“Right,” I said. Again I found myself wondering just how old Mariano was.
“And you’ll be taking up some chores to keep the headquarters running,” Menestheus continued. “Cleaning, some paperwork– things like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
He told me he’d send for me when I was needed and we said our goodbyes. I retreated to the elevator and thought about what he’d said as I ascended.
Menestheus made a lot of claims I couldn’t quite agree with. I thought trying to keep up with the living world was a good idea, but I didn’t think it could solve everyone’s problems, nor did I think it was the key difference between life and death. And what was all that about people only coming alive when they were dead? Maybe Menestheus was a bit batty, having existed so long.
(juniper make better feedback on crazyman mk thanks?)
What would I be like, centeries from now? Would I remember anything at all?
The elevator doors opened, and I found a very strange sight in the neon green room. Pandora was in the corridor outside, chasing a small white creature.
“Is that a unicorn?” I asked, befuddled.
“Shut up and help,” she weezed. The little horse probably only came to my waist. It was quick, agile, and doing a very good job of dodging Pandora as she lunged after it. She managed to get her arms around its neck, but it wrenched free and she went toppling forward, her long hair splaying everywhere.
Having sufficient time to recover from the absurdity of the situation, I helped Pandora tackle the unicorn. I managed to get my arm over its back and my other hand tangled in its mane, while she demonstrated the equine equivalent of a half-nelson. The animal bucked twice and continued to rampage around the courridor, dragging us with it.
“What’s going on?” I yelled into course hair.
“Uurrrgh,” Pandora replied and dug her heels into the floor. The horse eventually slowed to a rest, although I doubted it had anything to with Pandora’ efforts.
“Okay,” she panted, smoothing her hair with one hand and fisting the unicorn’s mane with the other. “Thanks. They do that sometimes times.”
Another horned horse stuck its head out from behind her door, which had been left open a jar. This one was pink. She yelled a few angry words at it and it retreated back inside.
“It’s like the universe is conspiring to withhold explanations,” I said as Pandora led the tiny white unicorn back into her room, slamming the door behind her.
In my room I remembered Pandora mentioning the merry-go-round Tuki had made with real, miniture horses. Apparently she hadn’t been that annoyed with them afterall.
I sat down at my flower-desk and tried to think about my conversation with Menestheus more, but I was distracted by other thoughts. What would redecorating my room entail? Would I even be staying here long enough for it to matter? Why were the elevator buttons labeled like that? Why bother with an elevator and different floors at all if you could just link a bunch of rooms to the same gate?
Oh, I thought. So that’s why there’s only four doors on this floor.
I sat there for a very long time, mentally mulling over what I dubbed “ponder-tangents.” In the end, I managed to make very few conclusions.
Eventually I was summoned to go meet with Liang. He was still in the first room I’d encountered in ORG: the one where I’d played cards with Pandora and Tuki. He had moved to a new computer, however, and I dragged a chair from the card table over to him.
“You called?” I said.
He pushed his rolling chair back from the screen and reached above his head in a deep stretch. His dark hair stuck up as if he ran his hand through it frequently, and his button-up shirt had a coffee stain on it.
“Juniper, right?” he said. “I need you to answer a few questions.”
“Right,” I said. He asked me several basic questions, such as my full name and my birth and death days, and entered then on the computer. He asked where I had lived and and with whom I had lived. He asked for their names and ages.
“Why do you need to know?” I asked after I’d told him.
He shrugged. “Just formalities. What’s the most recent advance in the field of medicine?”
“I… I really don’t know. Sorry.”
“What about in any of the other sciences?”
“I don’t know. We only really talked about established things in school,” I explained.
“Hmm.” Liang typed something brief. “Why don’t you tell me about recent events, then.”
“Umm…” I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My parents watched the news during breakfast, and I tried to remember what was on the day of my death. I spluttered out something about a tree falling across a major road during a storm. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought and reached up and pulled at my hair with one hand. If Liang noticed, he didn’t care enough to show it.
“I see,” Liang said. He didn’t type anything and considered me for a moment. I started to braid my hair, and he watched without comment. Finally he said, “Who is the current leader of your country?”
I answered, and he asked me a series of questions about contemporary politics. I wasn’t as savvy as I would have liked, but I thought I did a decent job of telling him what he wanted to know.
When he was done quizzing me, Liang produced a ruler and carefully measured the diameter of the hole through my skull.
“The faster it closes,” he said, “the faster we know we’re losing your connection to your body. We can then also gauge how fast time is passing in the living world. Has it changed much since you died?”
I ran my fingers around the smooth edges. It didn’t seem like it had changed. Before, I had managed to squeeze my boney forearm though it, so I tried that again. I wiggled my fingers at Liang from the other side of my head.
“Nope,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “It means times is passing slowly.”
He led me down the hall to a supply closet and pointed to a mop and bucket.
“The floor with the cat skeleton has truly filthy floors,” he said. “See what you can do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, picking up the mop. “The floor with the what?”
Liang sighed and ran a hand through his already mussed hair. “The cat skeleton. I’d throw it out, but that’s what it’s called in the elevator…”
He turned and shuffled away before I could ask him why they didn’t just change the name then.
I mopped all the rooms I could find on that floor. It seemed to be a labyrinth of rooms of random themes: one had a handful of fishless aquariums and another had stacks and stacks of maps. The largest room was full of mirrors and inexplicably featured a full cat skeleton, displayed in a glass box on a podium in the room’s center. When I finished mopping, I dusted the mirrors and the glass case.
I kept myself busy cleaning and lost track of time. I ran into a few other employees, but they didn’t have much to say to me and for the most part the vast rooms of ORG were empty. I wondered about that– why was the afterlife so empty?
I asked Liang about that, and he replied by handing me a bag full of clothes he’d procured for me.
Tuki found me and handed me a file to run to Menestheus.
I slept for the second time since dying. It was a strange, habitual action. I never actually physically felt tired, although I was sure I had been wandering around the compound for at least three or four days. But my mind was going off on more and more ponder-tangents, and after he found me carefully studying the bristles of a broom, Liang suggested I take a nap. If I dreamed, I didn’t remember it.
I awoke to knocking. There was no intermediate feeling of drowsiness between the state of sleep and waking, so I hopped up and answered the door as energetically as if I’d already been awake.
“Good morning!” Mariano greeted when I opened the door. He appraised the pajamas I’d barrowed from Pandora. They were fuschia. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I leaned against the doorway and grinned teasingly. “I fail to see the point,” I said, “in using temporal greetings when time runs according to whim. Look, I can make it evening: And will you be having the stake or the chicken at dinner?”
“Ha,” Mariano answered. “You make fun of it now, but you know you like it.” I shrugged and continued grinning. “And you’ll like what I want to show you,” he said. “Get dressed.”
I shut the door for privacy and rooted through the pile of clothes I’d obtained. Liang either had a very strange sense of style or had been very lazy with his shopping, as it seemed he had raided a series of high school locker rooms to produce gym clothes of varying colors.
Ignoring the morbidity of it, I put on the clothes in which I’d woken up dead.
“Okay then,” Mariano said when I emerged from my room. He was eyeing the tears around the right calf of my lucky jeans.
“Where are we going?” I asked, following him into the elevator. He pressed the “very bottom” button. Oddly, it was at the top.
“For a walk,” he said.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
ANOTHER JUNIE-THING
Can't tell if I like this or not. D: It might be more effective when contextualized in the flashback-inducing heart-to-heart, but eeeeh.
(but mostly who REALLY cares about dramatic teen romances?)
--
In tenth grade I got myself elected vice president of our debate club. I might as well have been the president, however, as our was always skipping meetings in favor of an ACT prep course and studying for her AP classes.
Logan had matriculated into my school again, and so he was forced to stay after school with me during meetings. He usually went to the computer lab, but it wasn’t always opened to students and sometimes he’d sit in the back of our room and make faces at me.
Jennifer was also a freshmen. I knew her through debate club, although she hadn’t officially joined and only attended meetings to “see what it was like.” She was always there when Logan came.
Months passed and she eventually joined. She won an award at the district’s debate tournament. The following year she ran for secretary and got the position. A week before thanksgiving break, she caught me in the bathroom between classes and told me she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Can’t stand what anymore?” I asked, washing my hands. To my surprise, she began to cry.
“L– L– Logan,” she managed to sob out. I frowned.
“Yeah, Logan’s an ass,” I agreed. She just cried harder.
“Has he been nasty to you?” I asked, wiping my hands on my pants. There were never any paper towels. “I know he has the maturity of an eight-year-old, but he’s not a bad guy. He probably doesn’t mean it–”
“No,” she howled. “He won’t– he’s not–” She said something that didn’t make any sense.
I put an arm around her shoulders in an attempt to comfort her. “What’s he not doing?” I asked gently.
“He won’t like me back,” she sniffled.
My mind screeched to a halt. It had never occurred to me that girls could be attracted Logan of all people. He was– he was– ew.
“Come again?” I said, just to be sure I was hearing her right.
“I’ve asked him out four times now,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “He just won’t give me a chance.”
The first bell rang, indicating we only had two minutes to get to class. I bit my lip. “Oh, that sucks,” I said.
“Could you– could you talk to him?” she asked me meekly. She looked so miserable I agreed.
After dinner, I cornered Logan in the hall. “Did you know Jennifer has a mad crush on you?” I asked, grinning.
“Oh no,” Logan said and turned and power walked in the opposite direction. I followed, and he sped into a run. He barreled into the living room, but found his way blocked by the couch. He stopped and I ran into him, sending us both toppling over the back of the couch.
“What are you doing?” Matthew said, pausing the video game he was playing with Chris.
“Logan’s got a girlfriend,” I sang, rolling over and sitting up properly.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Logan whined, mimicking my actions. “She’s more like a stalker.”
“I’m too young to hear this,” said Chris and unpaused the video game. The sound of dramatic shouts and punching noises filled the room.
“What’s she been doing?” I asked.
Logan winced. “She just… she’s always talking to me.”
“Aw, poor you,” I said. “How dare she talk to you.”
He frowned back at me. “I wouldn’t mind her talking to me if that’s all she did. But if I talk back, she thinks that means something and that there should be more, and then she asks me out and I have to say no and she cries.” He paused. “Why do girls always cry?”
I shoved his shoulder. “We don’t always cry.”
“Nope,” said Chris over the din of his game, “some very special ones just have panic attacks and braid their hair.”
I looked for something to throw. There wasn’t anything. “You’re a brat,” I said. “And you used to be a huge cry baby.”
Chris shrugged.
“Do you like someone else?” I asked Logan.
“Not really.”
“Then why not take her out on one measly date? You might like it.”
“Or,” replied Logan, getting to his feet, “I could have zero interest in her and not.” He stalked off to his room. I joined my other brothers sitting on the carpet.
“Can I play?”
“No,” they chorused.
I founded Jennifer at lunch the next day.
“I tried, but he’s just not interested,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”
She was silent as she slowly unpacked her lunch and spread it across the table. She didn’t cry like Logan said she would, but she stared at her tupperware salad as if it were somewhere very far away.
“Why not?” She asked. Her voice cracked.
I didn’t know what to tell her. “He’s not worth it,” I said finally. “Trust me. He has like no personal hygiene.”
To my surprise, she glared at me, her noise and eyebrows wrinkling.
“You know, everyone tells me that. That– that if a boy doesn’t like me back, he’s not worth my time, that he doesn’t deserve me,” she said, her voice steadying as it filled with anger. “Hasn’t anyone thought that maybe I pick who is worthy of my time?”
“But–” I started. What was the point in getting upset over someone you couldn’t have?
“And I find it very insulting,” she went on, her eyes moving from mine back down to her salad, “that other people think they can judge what’s right for me and– and who I like.” The pitch of her voice rose hysterically. “I know it’s just to make me feel better, but it makes me feel worse.”
I hesitated, then reached over and took one of her hands in mine. “Sorry, sorry,” I shushed. “I just– I mean, Logan’s a nice guy, but he’s my brother and it’s hard for me to, uh” –I tried to think of the most political way to put it– “visualize the situ–”
“Tell me honestly,” Jennifer said. “What’s wrong with me? Am I not pretty enough? Not funny enough?”
I pulled my hands away from her and started scratching the inside of my wrist nervously under the table.
“I don’t think,” I said slowly, “there’s anything wrong with you. Logan said he didn’t mind talking to you. He’s just not interested in dating you.” It sounded stupid, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to explain it.
She slumped back in her chair as if hope has left her and taken her spine with it.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
“Go on with your life?” I tried.
“Is there a way to make someone love you?” she asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
I drove Logan and myself home after picking Mathew up from tennis practice. Logan managed to find the most annoying radio station and turned the volume up to ridiculous levels. I turned it off.
“So Jennifer’s really torn up about you,” I said conversationally.
From the back seat, Mathew groaned, “Not this again.”
“I told you, I’m not taking her out,” Logan said and shifted to stare out the window. “Just because she likes me on creepy stalker levels doesn’t mean I have to like her back.”
I raised my eyebrows at the road ahead. “You were serious about the stalker thing?”
Logan snorted. “Of course not. She just… why does she keep trying?”
“Yeah,” Mathew chimed in, “Why would anyone try to ask out Logan, much less continuously?”
“Shut it,” Logan said at the same time I asked, “What exactly don’t you like about her?”
“Geez,” Logan said, leaning over to turn the radio back on, “Why are you so obsessed with this? Can’t I just not like her?”
“I figure if you had a girlfriend, you’d be around less to bug me less,” I retorted.
“Why are you going this way?” Mathew asked. “Mom wanted us to pick up ground beef for dinner.”
I swore and did an illegal U-turn. I never brought up Jennifer again to Logan because what was I supposed to do? Guilt him into loving her?
(but mostly who REALLY cares about dramatic teen romances?)
--
In tenth grade I got myself elected vice president of our debate club. I might as well have been the president, however, as our was always skipping meetings in favor of an ACT prep course and studying for her AP classes.
Logan had matriculated into my school again, and so he was forced to stay after school with me during meetings. He usually went to the computer lab, but it wasn’t always opened to students and sometimes he’d sit in the back of our room and make faces at me.
Jennifer was also a freshmen. I knew her through debate club, although she hadn’t officially joined and only attended meetings to “see what it was like.” She was always there when Logan came.
Months passed and she eventually joined. She won an award at the district’s debate tournament. The following year she ran for secretary and got the position. A week before thanksgiving break, she caught me in the bathroom between classes and told me she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Can’t stand what anymore?” I asked, washing my hands. To my surprise, she began to cry.
“L– L– Logan,” she managed to sob out. I frowned.
“Yeah, Logan’s an ass,” I agreed. She just cried harder.
“Has he been nasty to you?” I asked, wiping my hands on my pants. There were never any paper towels. “I know he has the maturity of an eight-year-old, but he’s not a bad guy. He probably doesn’t mean it–”
“No,” she howled. “He won’t– he’s not–” She said something that didn’t make any sense.
I put an arm around her shoulders in an attempt to comfort her. “What’s he not doing?” I asked gently.
“He won’t like me back,” she sniffled.
My mind screeched to a halt. It had never occurred to me that girls could be attracted Logan of all people. He was– he was– ew.
“Come again?” I said, just to be sure I was hearing her right.
“I’ve asked him out four times now,” she said, wiping tears from her face. “He just won’t give me a chance.”
The first bell rang, indicating we only had two minutes to get to class. I bit my lip. “Oh, that sucks,” I said.
“Could you– could you talk to him?” she asked me meekly. She looked so miserable I agreed.
After dinner, I cornered Logan in the hall. “Did you know Jennifer has a mad crush on you?” I asked, grinning.
“Oh no,” Logan said and turned and power walked in the opposite direction. I followed, and he sped into a run. He barreled into the living room, but found his way blocked by the couch. He stopped and I ran into him, sending us both toppling over the back of the couch.
“What are you doing?” Matthew said, pausing the video game he was playing with Chris.
“Logan’s got a girlfriend,” I sang, rolling over and sitting up properly.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Logan whined, mimicking my actions. “She’s more like a stalker.”
“I’m too young to hear this,” said Chris and unpaused the video game. The sound of dramatic shouts and punching noises filled the room.
“What’s she been doing?” I asked.
Logan winced. “She just… she’s always talking to me.”
“Aw, poor you,” I said. “How dare she talk to you.”
He frowned back at me. “I wouldn’t mind her talking to me if that’s all she did. But if I talk back, she thinks that means something and that there should be more, and then she asks me out and I have to say no and she cries.” He paused. “Why do girls always cry?”
I shoved his shoulder. “We don’t always cry.”
“Nope,” said Chris over the din of his game, “some very special ones just have panic attacks and braid their hair.”
I looked for something to throw. There wasn’t anything. “You’re a brat,” I said. “And you used to be a huge cry baby.”
Chris shrugged.
“Do you like someone else?” I asked Logan.
“Not really.”
“Then why not take her out on one measly date? You might like it.”
“Or,” replied Logan, getting to his feet, “I could have zero interest in her and not.” He stalked off to his room. I joined my other brothers sitting on the carpet.
“Can I play?”
“No,” they chorused.
I founded Jennifer at lunch the next day.
“I tried, but he’s just not interested,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”
She was silent as she slowly unpacked her lunch and spread it across the table. She didn’t cry like Logan said she would, but she stared at her tupperware salad as if it were somewhere very far away.
“Why not?” She asked. Her voice cracked.
I didn’t know what to tell her. “He’s not worth it,” I said finally. “Trust me. He has like no personal hygiene.”
To my surprise, she glared at me, her noise and eyebrows wrinkling.
“You know, everyone tells me that. That– that if a boy doesn’t like me back, he’s not worth my time, that he doesn’t deserve me,” she said, her voice steadying as it filled with anger. “Hasn’t anyone thought that maybe I pick who is worthy of my time?”
“But–” I started. What was the point in getting upset over someone you couldn’t have?
“And I find it very insulting,” she went on, her eyes moving from mine back down to her salad, “that other people think they can judge what’s right for me and– and who I like.” The pitch of her voice rose hysterically. “I know it’s just to make me feel better, but it makes me feel worse.”
I hesitated, then reached over and took one of her hands in mine. “Sorry, sorry,” I shushed. “I just– I mean, Logan’s a nice guy, but he’s my brother and it’s hard for me to, uh” –I tried to think of the most political way to put it– “visualize the situ–”
“Tell me honestly,” Jennifer said. “What’s wrong with me? Am I not pretty enough? Not funny enough?”
I pulled my hands away from her and started scratching the inside of my wrist nervously under the table.
“I don’t think,” I said slowly, “there’s anything wrong with you. Logan said he didn’t mind talking to you. He’s just not interested in dating you.” It sounded stupid, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to explain it.
She slumped back in her chair as if hope has left her and taken her spine with it.
“What do I do now?” she asked.
“Go on with your life?” I tried.
“Is there a way to make someone love you?” she asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
I drove Logan and myself home after picking Mathew up from tennis practice. Logan managed to find the most annoying radio station and turned the volume up to ridiculous levels. I turned it off.
“So Jennifer’s really torn up about you,” I said conversationally.
From the back seat, Mathew groaned, “Not this again.”
“I told you, I’m not taking her out,” Logan said and shifted to stare out the window. “Just because she likes me on creepy stalker levels doesn’t mean I have to like her back.”
I raised my eyebrows at the road ahead. “You were serious about the stalker thing?”
Logan snorted. “Of course not. She just… why does she keep trying?”
“Yeah,” Mathew chimed in, “Why would anyone try to ask out Logan, much less continuously?”
“Shut it,” Logan said at the same time I asked, “What exactly don’t you like about her?”
“Geez,” Logan said, leaning over to turn the radio back on, “Why are you so obsessed with this? Can’t I just not like her?”
“I figure if you had a girlfriend, you’d be around less to bug me less,” I retorted.
“Why are you going this way?” Mathew asked. “Mom wanted us to pick up ground beef for dinner.”
I swore and did an illegal U-turn. I never brought up Jennifer again to Logan because what was I supposed to do? Guilt him into loving her?
Monday, May 16, 2011
Pointless story is pointless!
From the DeadGirl universe.
--
When I was twelve I finally worked up the nerve to ask out the boy I liked. I suspected he only agreed because I offered to pay for it all, but it was my first date and I was too giddy to care.
I had liked this boy for months. His name was Dallas, and he had green hair and piercing, making him the coolest boy I knew. I spent a lot of time planning and preparing for our date. I carefully saved my allowance so I could pay for tacos and two movie tickets. I picked the opening weekend of a superhero movie. I thought all boys liked movies like that because Logan and Matthew were obsessed with them, and I thought I would look cool for knowing things about superheroes, even if it was only through my brothers.
I put on a dress and tried to style my hair.
My dad drove us to the mall. He didn’t say anything to us, but he kept grinning at me in the rearview mirror. I sat in the back with Dallas and tried to ignore him. I nervously asked all sorts of question to which Dallas gave monosyllabic answers. I think one of the questions was, “Have you ever tried eating butter raw?”
I spent a lot of time denying ever eating a stick of butter. My dad snickered quietly.
At the mall, I bought movie tickets first.
“In case it sells out,” I said. It was opening weekend. I hoped this made me seem well put-together and desirable.
I led him to my favorite Tex Mex place. I liked it because it was away from the noise of the food court and they had an entire salsa bar.
“I don’t like Mexican food,” Dallas said. He had his hands in the pockets of his baggy pants and had a casual, slouched posture. I thought he was so very cool.
“Okay,” I said brightly. We ended up ordering McDonald’s at the food court. At least I’d have some spare change at the end of this, I thought.
“Are those chicken nuggets?” he asked when we sat down.
“Uh… yes?”
He shook his head and picked the pickles off his hamburger. I sank a little in my chair. What self-respecting sixth grader ordered chicken nuggets? Those were for kids.
(I still order chicken nuggets.)
Then disaster struck.
“Juniper! Hey sweetheart!”
My mom was waving at me from across the food court, all three of my brothers in tow. She was expertly balancing a tray of sub sandwiches in one hand. I pretended not to hear. Dallas, however, looked up.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
I concentrated very hard on opening a packet of ketchup. “Who?” I said.
“There’s a woman calling for you,” he said. “Is she your mom?”
“I don’t hear anything,” I answered and very carefully squeezed ketchup over my french fries.
“She’s coming over,” Dallas said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Chris picking his nose.
I refused to look up until Mom was looming over me and Matthew was poking my shoulder.
“Hi, I’m Juniper’s mother,” Mom said brightly and reached out to shake Dallas’s hand.
“Hey,” Dallas greeted, looking perplexed. “I’m Dallas.”
“Mooom,” I whined. “Leave us alone.”
“Nonsense,” she said, pulling a chair up to our table. “I like meeting your friends.”
“Yeah,” said Logan, flopping down into the seat next to mine. “You’re too young to date without a chaperone.” I kicked him.
“So, Dallas,” said Mom as she passed out sandwiches to the ravenous pack of trolls I happened to be related to. “How did you convince your mother to let you dye your hair?” Her tone was disapproving.
“Mooom,” I whined again, but she ignored me.
“Well,” said Dallas, patting his hair. “She’s not really into it, but I was with my Dad over winter break, and then she let me keep up with it…”
Mom had a miniscule frown on her face.
“So why are you here, Mom?” I said loudly, desperate to change the subject. I was ignored.
“And the piercings?” Mom asked. He had two in each ear and an eyebrow ring.
“Ha-ha-ha,” I said mechanically, raising my voice even more. “Aren't they cool, Mom? You should go get Logan’s ears done. Right. Now.”
Logan choked. Mom slapped his back on reflex but didn’t turn from Dallas.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not letting Juniper pierce her ears until she’s thirteen. And she’s most certainly not getting a tongue or a nose piercing.”
“Mom,” I wailed. Dallas was shifting back and forth in his chair, looking truly uncomfortable.
“I just thought you should know,” Mom said.
I decided to change my tactics. I turned Chris. “You’re a poop face,” I said. Chris burst into tears.
“Juniper!” Mom scolded, but her attention was redirected to the crying four-year-old.
“Maybe we should go to the movie now,” Dallas muttered even though he hadn’t finished his burger yet.
“What movie?” Matthew asked. I told him. An evil grin spread across Logan’s face and my stomach dropped.
“Oh good,” said Mom as she pulled the blubbering Chris into her lap. “That’s what we’re seeing too. We can come with you!”
Dallas picked up his tray and tried to escape. Mom intervened, “You didn’t finish your food. Sit back down and eat.”
Dallas wavered for a moment, apprehensive. The he shrugged and sat back down nonchalantly. He focused on his food and not on the troupe of Gards he’d been suddenly caught with. I was impressed with his ability to remain so cool and aloof when my mom was telling him off and bouncing Chris on her knee.
“Apologize to your brother,” she snapped. I wanted to shrink down to the size of a french fry and drown myself in ketchup. I mumbled an apology.
After a few intense moments which probably only seemed intense to me, Chris calmed down and Mom said, “Are you wearing make up?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I announced quickly and stood up. Then I realized escaping to the bathroom would mean leaving Dallas alone with them. I sat back down and put my face on the table, whimpering.
“Are you okay?” Dallas asked, sounding highly disgusted to me.
“Yes,” I answered shrilly. There had to be a way to escape this madness. I started scratching my bare calves.
“Juniper,” said my mother through a mouthful of sandwich, “eat your chicken nuggets.”
I sat back up and stared at my stupid, childish chicken nuggets. I should have told Mom the details of the date and made her swear not to show up, instead of some vague explanation about “hanging out at the mall.” I should have realized my brothers would want to see the new movie too. There had been a million ways to avoid this situation and now I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to extract ourselves.
“Eat, Juniper,” Mom commanded and tried to push a chicken nugget into my mouth.
“Mom,” I groaned and turned my face away. Dallas was watching me in such away that made me turn red with shame. “I– I still have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “And Dallas does too.” I grab his arm and pulled him after me, mentally rejoicing at the prospect of touching him.
“Sorry,” I said after we’d escaped the food court.
“You have ketchup on your face,” he said. “And I’m still hungry.”
We went back to the Tex Mex place and I bought him a fried ice cream with the last of my money. I slipped into the bathroom and wiped the ketchup off with a wet paper towel.
“Maybe they have tickets for a different time,” I said to my reflection.
They didn’t. I had spent too much time rattling off more awkward questions to Dallas as I dragged him window shopping, and my family was waiting for us in the theatre.
“We saved you seats!” my mom called over the preview. Several people looked annoyed.
The only seats left were off to the side and not very good, so I lead Dallas to sit with my family. Also, I hadn’t even eaten half of my lunch and was starving. I asked Mom for money to buy popcorn.
“This is why you have an allowance,” she whispered back, but handed over a ten anyway. I had to crawl over Dallas to get out and accidentally elbowed him in the face. As I left, I heard Logan say, “Did Juniper tell you about how she ate a whole stick of butter once?”
I almost turned back around and screamed at Logan. Fortunately, his loud question was answered with a chorus of SSHHH! and I convinced my feet to take me to the concession stand and back.
I spent the whole movie scratching at my calves, worrying about Chris getting scared and starting to cry or Logan trying some stupid prank or Mom yelling at us to cover our eyes during a sex scene. But nothing happened and as we walked out I was even brave enough to try to hold Dallas’s hand. He pulled his away and shoved them back in his pockets. Mine were probably butter-slimy from the popcorn.
“Juniper!” Mom suddenly said, horrified. “What did you do to your legs?”
I looked down. My calves were red and bleeding in several places. It wasn’t the first time I’d done something like this, but it was the first time it had been severe enough for someone to notice.
“I guess my skin’s really dry…” I said. Dallas was wrinkling his nose as he stared down at my legs. I had wanted him to notice my legs, but not like that.
“Come on, Dallas,” my mom said, frowning down at me. “I’ll take you home. Juniper needs some first aid.”
And so ended my first date. Dallas never wanted to talk to me again. I had been devastated. Now, it was funny, and Mariano laughed with me over it.
--
When I was twelve I finally worked up the nerve to ask out the boy I liked. I suspected he only agreed because I offered to pay for it all, but it was my first date and I was too giddy to care.
I had liked this boy for months. His name was Dallas, and he had green hair and piercing, making him the coolest boy I knew. I spent a lot of time planning and preparing for our date. I carefully saved my allowance so I could pay for tacos and two movie tickets. I picked the opening weekend of a superhero movie. I thought all boys liked movies like that because Logan and Matthew were obsessed with them, and I thought I would look cool for knowing things about superheroes, even if it was only through my brothers.
I put on a dress and tried to style my hair.
My dad drove us to the mall. He didn’t say anything to us, but he kept grinning at me in the rearview mirror. I sat in the back with Dallas and tried to ignore him. I nervously asked all sorts of question to which Dallas gave monosyllabic answers. I think one of the questions was, “Have you ever tried eating butter raw?”
I spent a lot of time denying ever eating a stick of butter. My dad snickered quietly.
At the mall, I bought movie tickets first.
“In case it sells out,” I said. It was opening weekend. I hoped this made me seem well put-together and desirable.
I led him to my favorite Tex Mex place. I liked it because it was away from the noise of the food court and they had an entire salsa bar.
“I don’t like Mexican food,” Dallas said. He had his hands in the pockets of his baggy pants and had a casual, slouched posture. I thought he was so very cool.
“Okay,” I said brightly. We ended up ordering McDonald’s at the food court. At least I’d have some spare change at the end of this, I thought.
“Are those chicken nuggets?” he asked when we sat down.
“Uh… yes?”
He shook his head and picked the pickles off his hamburger. I sank a little in my chair. What self-respecting sixth grader ordered chicken nuggets? Those were for kids.
(I still order chicken nuggets.)
Then disaster struck.
“Juniper! Hey sweetheart!”
My mom was waving at me from across the food court, all three of my brothers in tow. She was expertly balancing a tray of sub sandwiches in one hand. I pretended not to hear. Dallas, however, looked up.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
I concentrated very hard on opening a packet of ketchup. “Who?” I said.
“There’s a woman calling for you,” he said. “Is she your mom?”
“I don’t hear anything,” I answered and very carefully squeezed ketchup over my french fries.
“She’s coming over,” Dallas said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Chris picking his nose.
I refused to look up until Mom was looming over me and Matthew was poking my shoulder.
“Hi, I’m Juniper’s mother,” Mom said brightly and reached out to shake Dallas’s hand.
“Hey,” Dallas greeted, looking perplexed. “I’m Dallas.”
“Mooom,” I whined. “Leave us alone.”
“Nonsense,” she said, pulling a chair up to our table. “I like meeting your friends.”
“Yeah,” said Logan, flopping down into the seat next to mine. “You’re too young to date without a chaperone.” I kicked him.
“So, Dallas,” said Mom as she passed out sandwiches to the ravenous pack of trolls I happened to be related to. “How did you convince your mother to let you dye your hair?” Her tone was disapproving.
“Mooom,” I whined again, but she ignored me.
“Well,” said Dallas, patting his hair. “She’s not really into it, but I was with my Dad over winter break, and then she let me keep up with it…”
Mom had a miniscule frown on her face.
“So why are you here, Mom?” I said loudly, desperate to change the subject. I was ignored.
“And the piercings?” Mom asked. He had two in each ear and an eyebrow ring.
“Ha-ha-ha,” I said mechanically, raising my voice even more. “Aren't they cool, Mom? You should go get Logan’s ears done. Right. Now.”
Logan choked. Mom slapped his back on reflex but didn’t turn from Dallas.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not letting Juniper pierce her ears until she’s thirteen. And she’s most certainly not getting a tongue or a nose piercing.”
“Mom,” I wailed. Dallas was shifting back and forth in his chair, looking truly uncomfortable.
“I just thought you should know,” Mom said.
I decided to change my tactics. I turned Chris. “You’re a poop face,” I said. Chris burst into tears.
“Juniper!” Mom scolded, but her attention was redirected to the crying four-year-old.
“Maybe we should go to the movie now,” Dallas muttered even though he hadn’t finished his burger yet.
“What movie?” Matthew asked. I told him. An evil grin spread across Logan’s face and my stomach dropped.
“Oh good,” said Mom as she pulled the blubbering Chris into her lap. “That’s what we’re seeing too. We can come with you!”
Dallas picked up his tray and tried to escape. Mom intervened, “You didn’t finish your food. Sit back down and eat.”
Dallas wavered for a moment, apprehensive. The he shrugged and sat back down nonchalantly. He focused on his food and not on the troupe of Gards he’d been suddenly caught with. I was impressed with his ability to remain so cool and aloof when my mom was telling him off and bouncing Chris on her knee.
“Apologize to your brother,” she snapped. I wanted to shrink down to the size of a french fry and drown myself in ketchup. I mumbled an apology.
After a few intense moments which probably only seemed intense to me, Chris calmed down and Mom said, “Are you wearing make up?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I announced quickly and stood up. Then I realized escaping to the bathroom would mean leaving Dallas alone with them. I sat back down and put my face on the table, whimpering.
“Are you okay?” Dallas asked, sounding highly disgusted to me.
“Yes,” I answered shrilly. There had to be a way to escape this madness. I started scratching my bare calves.
“Juniper,” said my mother through a mouthful of sandwich, “eat your chicken nuggets.”
I sat back up and stared at my stupid, childish chicken nuggets. I should have told Mom the details of the date and made her swear not to show up, instead of some vague explanation about “hanging out at the mall.” I should have realized my brothers would want to see the new movie too. There had been a million ways to avoid this situation and now I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to extract ourselves.
“Eat, Juniper,” Mom commanded and tried to push a chicken nugget into my mouth.
“Mom,” I groaned and turned my face away. Dallas was watching me in such away that made me turn red with shame. “I– I still have to go to the bathroom,” I said. “And Dallas does too.” I grab his arm and pulled him after me, mentally rejoicing at the prospect of touching him.
“Sorry,” I said after we’d escaped the food court.
“You have ketchup on your face,” he said. “And I’m still hungry.”
We went back to the Tex Mex place and I bought him a fried ice cream with the last of my money. I slipped into the bathroom and wiped the ketchup off with a wet paper towel.
“Maybe they have tickets for a different time,” I said to my reflection.
They didn’t. I had spent too much time rattling off more awkward questions to Dallas as I dragged him window shopping, and my family was waiting for us in the theatre.
“We saved you seats!” my mom called over the preview. Several people looked annoyed.
The only seats left were off to the side and not very good, so I lead Dallas to sit with my family. Also, I hadn’t even eaten half of my lunch and was starving. I asked Mom for money to buy popcorn.
“This is why you have an allowance,” she whispered back, but handed over a ten anyway. I had to crawl over Dallas to get out and accidentally elbowed him in the face. As I left, I heard Logan say, “Did Juniper tell you about how she ate a whole stick of butter once?”
I almost turned back around and screamed at Logan. Fortunately, his loud question was answered with a chorus of SSHHH! and I convinced my feet to take me to the concession stand and back.
I spent the whole movie scratching at my calves, worrying about Chris getting scared and starting to cry or Logan trying some stupid prank or Mom yelling at us to cover our eyes during a sex scene. But nothing happened and as we walked out I was even brave enough to try to hold Dallas’s hand. He pulled his away and shoved them back in his pockets. Mine were probably butter-slimy from the popcorn.
“Juniper!” Mom suddenly said, horrified. “What did you do to your legs?”
I looked down. My calves were red and bleeding in several places. It wasn’t the first time I’d done something like this, but it was the first time it had been severe enough for someone to notice.
“I guess my skin’s really dry…” I said. Dallas was wrinkling his nose as he stared down at my legs. I had wanted him to notice my legs, but not like that.
“Come on, Dallas,” my mom said, frowning down at me. “I’ll take you home. Juniper needs some first aid.”
And so ended my first date. Dallas never wanted to talk to me again. I had been devastated. Now, it was funny, and Mariano laughed with me over it.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
AmBROsia has evolved into OH GOD THIRTEEN PAGE MONSTER AND i"M NOT EVEN DONE HELP
1. I added the scenes leading up to and including Persephone's "abduction."
2. I added a bit to the end of the last scene I posted.
3. I did some half-assed research to figure out who Persephone might hang out with and who witnessed the abduction besides Helios. (Helios just sort of witnesses everything.) In some places it says she was with and bunch of nymphs and Artemis and Athena (yet none of these ladies did anything to intervene? really?), and then I found one myth where her friend Cyane tries to stop Hades and gets herself turned into a fountain/well/some sort of water work. (You're a swell man, Hades.) Arethusa is a nymph/devotee of Artemis I picked randomly off a list. YAY.
4. The thing about the mirror and shadows I pulled out of my butt and is ungrounded in mythology (rule of cool?). It's late. I'll probably regret it in the morning.
5. Why is this so fun?
--
Hades had noticed her, of course, in the way that everyone noticed Persephone. Demeter’s precious daughter was a beast of a child. Demeter called her free-spirited and dressed her up and did her hair. Quite a few gods called her a wild child, as she flirted and teased and twirled her hair as it messily fell out of her mother’s carefully crafted braids. Hades, having only spoken to her once, was more inclined to call her an uncouth gremlin.
He didn’t spend much time on Olympus, but he showed up for the bigger parties and gatherings for the sake of maintaining face. For this particular reunion, Aphrodite and Hephaestus were renewing their wedding vows. Again. Apparently Aphrodite thought this would make up for her frequent bouts of infidelity.
(Hera, goddess of marriage, was standing in the middle of things looking quite peeved. Hera hated infidelity.)
Having exchanged the usual pleasantries with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon, Hades retreated to a far corner of the room and watched the divine inhabitants of Greece work their mayhem. Personally, he was hoping Zeus would get a little too distracted by a nymph and Hera would snap. The woman always knew how to put on a good show.
Persephone, clutching a silver goblet and giggling impishly, leaned against the wall a little ways done from him and let Hermes pin her there with one arm. The boyish god smirked down at her.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” he teased. Demeter was notorious for trying to hide her (not so) little girl away and failing.
“I don’t know,” Persephone answered, arching her back against the wall. “What do you think?”
“I think,” Hermes said, pressing his face against her hair so Hades could barely hear him, “Mrs. Grain-in-her-panties would never let her baby go out in such a scandalous attire.”
Persephone giggled again and tilted her body away from the messenger god. Her robes were indeed rather scandalous– too tight and too short.
“Did Aphrodite help you with your wardrobe again?” Hermes asked and tried to press his lips to her cheek again. Persephone ducked away, spinning away from him in a way that showed off far too much leg. Hades looked away in distaste. (Not that he’d been watching, of course.)
“No,” Persephone purred back. Hades wasn’t looking, but there was no mistaking the mischievous lilt in her words. “I found it in a puddle of mud. It’s a bit small, don’t you think?”
There was a long pause from Hermes. Hades was shocked too– was she a goddess or goat farmer? He turned his face so he could size up her dress from the corner of his eye. Yes, it was definitely made for some prepubescent girl, and that was definitely a faded mud stain on her back. And definitely some mud in her hair– what had this girl been doing?
“Haha,” said Hermes halfheartedly. “You’re such a tease.” He made to wrap his arms around her, but she thrust her goblet into his face.
“Get me some more ambrosia?” she asked sweetly. “Or ask Dionysus for some wine. You know how I hate talking to him.”
Obviously displeased, Hermes took and the goblet and headed away. Hades wondered if his position as messenger god and affected his mind in such a way he couldn’t refuse running other people’s errands.
Hades tried to ignore her. His eyes swept the rest of the room: Aphrodite was making a great show of fawning over her crippled husband, although she did nothing to thwart Ares patting her on the behind as he passed. Zeus watched the couple proudly, chatting with Poseidon and Athena as Hera fumed silently next to him. Demeter was far, far on the other side of the room, absorbed in some conversation with a few nymphs and Artemis, which was probably how Persephone ended up over here. She’d inevitably be caught, of course. Even now, Apollo’s eyes were lighting up as he caught a glimpse of her.
Persephone did not notice. Or at least Hades hoped she didn’t notice anyone watching her, as she was picking wax out of her ear with an unpleasant snarl on her face.
Apollo looked a bit taken a back, but he still went to the spread of refreshments and started filling to glass of ambrosia. It wasn’t just any day you could talk to (try to fee up) the strangely charming (hellion) goddess.
Hades didn’t care what the young goddess did with her spare time, but when she peeled back the top of her robe to start picking grass out of her bust, he felt that as the older and more mature one, he should step in.
“Persephone,” he said smoothly, stepping out from the shadows of the corner he’d been occupying. “Daughter of Demeter.”
She blinked up at him, unsurprised at his appearance. Had she known he was there the whole time? “Hades,” she answered, “Son of Cronus.”
Apollo stopped in his tracks, a glass of golden liquid in each hand. He looked extremely confused.
Persephone and Hades stared each other down for a few moments, then she shrugged and went back to picking grass from her dress.
(What had she been doing?)
Hades had no idea what to say to her. So he went with, “Does your mother know you’re here?” and wanted to kick himself.
Persephone snorted. “You mean you weren’t eavesdropping?” she asked.
Hades raised his eyebrows. “You mean you were purposefully making a fool of yourself in front of me?”
She let go of the top of her gown and it snapped back into place (sort of). “Well I can’t go over there,” she whined, gesturing to the other side of the room, “and make a fool of myself.”
Hades glanced over and saw Demeter still engaged in conversation and Apollo nervously shifting from foot to foot.
“Why make a fool of yourself at all?” he asked.
Persephone sneered back at him. “And do what? Sit around and let mother do my hair and pick who I talk to and what I do?”
Hades considered her for a moment. She sounded exactly like a child and was rebelling in the most immature way possible. He tried to think of a way to explain this to her without sounding like a grumpy old man.
When he thought of nothing, she tossed her (muddy) hair back haughtily and said, “I’m an adult. I’ll do what I want.”
As she turn on her heel and sauntered toward Apollo, Hades called after her, “You want to behave like an uncultured goat farmer?”
Hermes was attempting to lure her away from Apollo with a bottle of something that was definitely not wine when Hades figured out what he should have said when she complained about her mother. He let out a heavy sigh. He really did need to learn how to carry on a normal conversation.
He gave his regards to Aphrodite and Hephaestus, said goodbye to his brothers and left before Demeter realized her daughter was taking bottle shots of Dionysus’s moonshine (but stuck around in the doorway a bit when Hera slapped Aphrodite and raged about the sanctity of marriage, most of which seemed to be directed at her husband).
Many years passed before he saw her again.
--
Persephone’s hair was still neatly piled on top of her head, which meant it was early. Arethusa, one of Artemis’s attendants, was helping her tie together flower chains. They would end up decorating all the women gathered, and Persephone would inevitably end up destroying hers. Cyane was sitting a ways away on a river bank, trailing her toes in the water.
“Cyane,” Persephone suddenly called over. The nymph looked up. “Aren’t you bored?”
Cyane shrugged. “I’m happy just thinking about Anapos.” Cyane and the river god and a thing going on.
“Well, I’m certainly bored,” Artemis announced, stretching her legs in front of her. “Anyone up for a hunt?”
Arethusa dropped her flower chain and perked up. Persephone rolled her eyes. Bah, attendants.
“Nooo,” the nature goddess answered, “I had an even better idea.”
Artemis eyed her wearily. “If you try to set me up with someone again,” she said, “I really will shoot you in the head with my arrow.”
“It’s nothing like that.” Persephone squirmed and accidentally smashed a pile of unused flowers with her hand. Arethusa stared mournfully at it. “There’s a bacchanalia tonight.”
Arethusa recoiled in horror at the very idea and Artemis leapt to her feet. “No!” she yelled. “Do you even know what they do at those things?”
“Have lots of fun?” Persephone answered innocently.
“No,” Artemis hissed, “They have– the have– orgies.” It seemed to pain her to say it. She was, after all, one of the virgin goddess. At the mention of sex, Arethusa yelped and jumped up to hid behind her mistress.
Cyane giggled.
Persephone stood up as well. “They also have tons of great drinks,” she defended. “And sometimes they rip wild animals apart. You like ripping animals apart.”
Artemis narrowed her eyes and the younger goddess. “Be that as it may,” she said, “Bacchanalia are a completely unsuitable atmosphere for anyone of your background.”
“Except Dionysus,” Persephone countered and scratched her scalp. A braid fell from the mass on her head. “You don’t have to participate in the orgies, Artemis. I just want to dance and have a little to drink. Are you in, Cyane?”
Cyane considered it for a while. “It’ll be at night,” she said, hesitant. Persephone rolled her eyes. Cyane had this bizarre paranoia of falling into pits she couldn’t see in the dark. She could comfort her… or she could make a lewd joke.
“I’m sure you can spend one night without your boyfriend,” Persephone drawled.
“Will you leave with me if I don’t like it?” Cyane wanted to know. “Or if I think there are deep pits around?”
Persephone frowned, opened her and then closed it again. Finally she shrugged and said, “Fair enough.”
Artemis considered telling Demeter. The goddess of the harvest would probably be able to put a stop to this madness, but Persephone was perfectly capable of sneaking out anyway as she had that time she’d gone cattle tipping with Apollo’s herd or that one disaster on Mount Olympus. Also, the last time Artemis had warned Demeter about her daughter, Persephone had been furious with her and they had been on rocky terms for over a month.
“You’re going to go whether I do or not,” Artemis said. Persephone grinned cheekily back. The huntress sighed. “I guess I’ll go,” she said, “but no orgies.”
Persephone squealed in delight and grabbed Cyane to lead her in a sloppy dance. All her braids fell and she managed to get all sorts of grass stains on her dress.
She told Demeter she was going to stay with Artemis for the night. Demeter, who still thought her daughter was fourteen and like to engage in giggly pillow fights, thought this was a fantastic idea. (Persephone did, in fact, still engage in pillow fights, but not that kind of pillow fight.)
Artemis guessed she would need back up for when the party inevitably got out of hand and managed to recruit Athena to come with them.
“It would be wiser,” Athena remarked dryly, “to stop her from going at all.”
“Shut up,” Artemis answered. “You try stopping her when she gets a stupid idea.”
Not even Persephone was cruel enough to force the terrified Arethusa to accompany them, so they arrived as a party of four. To the nature goddess’s chagrin, Dionysus noticed them straight away.
“Hey Sephs,” he called and threw an arm over her shoulder. He was already pretty far gone. “I knew you’d show up for one of these eventually.” She awkwardly pulled at her skirt as he eyed the two goddesses accompanying her. “How’d you get the virges to come?”
It took a moment for her to figure out “virges” meant and why he was drunkenly laughing at his own joke. Athena raised a fine eyebrow and Artemis put her hands on her hips.
“I came to rip apart wild boar with my own hands,” she announced. Dionysus’s chortles stopped abruptly and Persephone managed to shrug his arm off.
“Huh, Arty…” he said and squinted at her. “Yer more like a bro than Apollo, you know that?”
Artemis snorted and Athena promptly asked about the cultural significance the festivities held for the nearby towns, and if he approved of the recent movement for more secrecy and the banning of males, and what precautions (if any) did he take to avoid poisoning via the consumption of raw meat?
With the wine god sufficiently distracted, Persephone made a beeline for the bonfire. Revelers we hooting and dancing around it, passing bottles between themselves. Cyane and Artemis followed her.
It took some prodding a nudging to get Artemis to drink anything, but eventually the huntress was tipsy enough to let go and dance with her, hollering and laughing like the rest of the revelers. Cyane, being Cyane, stayed quite no matter what and no one was really sure how intoxicated she was. Athena continued interrogated Dionysus, which the sadist part of Persephone enjoyed immensely.
“I have an idea,” Persephone whispered (yelled) to her comrades.
“What?” Artemis yelled back.
“Follow me!” Persephone called, bumped into a group of dancers, and then staggered away from the mass of people around the fire.
Under more lucid conditions, no one in their right minds would follow Persephone after she yelled “I have an idea!” and then asked to be followed, but these were not lucid conditions, and so Artemis and Cyane found themselves crawling under Dionysus’s tent along with their friend.
The tent was pitched far enough away from the fire and revelers not be noticed, but close enough that Dionysus didn’t have to do too much work to drag more alcohol to his party. It was a sort of storage room and, Persephone reasoned, he was obviously keeping all the best drinks for himself.
They crashed around a bit before she picked out what she deemed to be the strongest and pushed it into Artemis’s arms. The huntress sniffed it.
“I don’t know,” Artemis said. “I want to remember ripping a boar apart.” She passed the bottle to Cyane.
“But,” the nymph protested, “I mean, it was fun, but you’re already really wasted, Persephone.”
Persephone sighed dramatically. “If we we’re meant to occasionally get drunk off our ass,” she said, “then my sweet mother Demeter would not have invented fermentation.”
That sentence was cohesive enough that Cyane took a swig and passed it back to Persephone who took her own lengthy sip.
“Whatever,” said Artemis, “I’m going to go start me a boar-hunting frenzy.”
She left, and Persephone and Cyane sat down behind the tent and set about finishing their bottle.
--
It was an unusually slow night in the Underworld. Hades was bored and so he dug out his old mirror that let him view the mortal world. It was not a particularly useful artifact: it only showed whatever happened to be above where the hold was standing.
Hades strolled through his kingdom, occasionally glancing in the mirror in hopes of finding anything interesting. Sometime close to dawn, he found her.
He didn’t realize who it was at first. It was two girls, running and falling over themselves in a field, obviously inebriated. That was interesting, but not the type of interesting he was looking for. He was Lord of the Dead; he was above spying on drunk girls. (Nevertheless he kept his eye on the mirror as he kept walking.)
Then, as the blonde one stopped to pick a wedgie, he realized who it was. He stopped and gawked at the mirror. She really was the same as an uncultured goat farmer. No, worse.
Now that he knew who she was, if she managed to get herself eaten by a fury or something he was going to feel responsible. And she was immortal, so she’d live through the whole digestive process. He winced at the idea and made up his mind to offer her a hand. He went to the stables and prepared his chariot.
The sky of the underworld was always black, as it was an uneven sheet of rock. He drove his chariot upwards, and with a mighty crack the sky parted to reveal the dusty blue of the heavens, Helios on his own chariot somewhere just short of the horizon. The hooves of Hades’s horses thundered against solid ground and the death god erupted from the earth in a storm of otherworldly shadow.
While this was all normal routine for Hades, he supposed he should have taken into account that it was normally considered terrifying for the general populace.
“AAAAH!” the two girls shriek. Yes, it was definitely Persephone and some nymph.
“Ladies,” Hades greeted and stepped down from his chariot. “I think it’s time for you two be to getting home.”
“RUN!” Persephone screamed and sprinted away, only to trip soon after. “Help, he’s got me!”
“Persepony!” the other girl, a nymph, slurred. “I’ll save you!” And she slammed her shoulder into Hades.
“Um,” said Hades. “I think you should calm down and listen–”
“I think,” the nymph bit back, “You should fall into a dark pit because it’s dark and you can’t see in the dark.”
This made no sense. “What’s your name?” Hades asked. The girl’s eyes widened.
“Goo idee!” she said.
“What?” Hades asked.
“Goo idea?” the girl tried again.
“Tell me where you live,” Hades said. “I can give you a ride–”
“SABE YOURSELF, PERSELFINY,” the nymph yelled and turned herself into a well.
Hades stared at her, nonplussed. “That was uncalled for,” he said. “Here, turn yourself back and I can–”
“MONSTER,” Persephone screamed and tackled him. She ended up mushed ineffectually against his chest.
“I’m just trying to help,” Hades explained, recoiling as he tried to push Persephone away from himself. One his horses stomped its hooves and a shadow escaped into the night, cackling as it went. Persephone made a strange hiccupping noise, although Hades wasn’t sure if it was from fright (he really wasn’t supposed to let those thing loose– they caused nightmares) or from her efforts to push him into the well.
Persephone let out a deranged sort of screech and ran. Not seeing anything else for it, Hades chased after her.
The sun was peeking over the horizon when he finally managed to grab her by the elbows and drag her kicking and screaming into his chariot. She sounded like she was trying to curse him in a language she had made up on the spot.
He tried to drive her home, using one hand to work the reigns, but restraining her with one arm proved too difficult and she threw herself from the speeding chariot. It was remarkable she wasn’t injured (not really; she was a goddess after all), and Hades wasted another fifteen minutes or so wrestling her back into the chariot. Another shadow escaping into the breaking day.
The Lord of the Dead had had enough. He wasn’t going to drive this lunatic across half of Greece. The ground broke upon again, and Hades descended into his dark kingdom with the screaming daughter of Demeter.
He took her to the first building he could find and gruffly told its tenants they were being relocated for a few days. They scurried away in fright. For some reason people tended to fear him.
He dragged Persephone into a bedroom and sat her on the bed.
“Sleep,” he commanded.
She tried to spit in his face, and saliva dribbled down her chin.
“You’re a real beauty queen.”
“Bastard,” she replied, then slumped over snoring.
Shuddering, Hades retreated to his castle. He couldn’t wait to get the hooligan of a goddess out of his kingdom.
--
When she awoke, she thought for sure Artemis had actually shot her in the head. She groaned and curled into herself, the blankets twisting around her waist.
Persephone didn’t remember how she had gotten home, but she had a massive headache and her whole body ached and her mouth felt like sand and her feet were freezing. The first three problems were the usual symptoms of a bacchanal gone awry, but why would mother let the warmth of spring wane like that? Was it some sick form of corporal punishment?
She spent a few hours wallowing in self pity and the strange bed she was fairy sure wasn’t her own. The headache marginally subsided and she dared to force her eyes open. They were crusted over and she flicked the dry goo away.
The room was dark, thank Zeus. The walls and floor were smooth, polished stone. It was all continuous, without the ordered cracks of tiles. There was no furniture besides the bed she was sprawled across.
She laid staring at the ceiling and wondered if she was hallucinating. This seemed probable. She had partaken of Dionysus’s personal store, after all.
She was thirsty. She imagined a glass of sweet, cool ambrosia and wondered why her hallucinated room didn’t provide her with it immediately.
She wondered if her hallucination came with servants to bring her water at the least. She opened her mouth to call, but it was so dry she felt as if the action opened cracks down her throat.
Wincing, she managed to roll her body off the bed and stand unsteadily. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders (why was it so cold?) and reassessed the room with blurry eyes. Nope, still no imagined glass of delicious ambrosia.
She found a door (it had probably been there the whole time, she thought in hindsight) and staggered into an equally dimly lit hallway. Still no magically appearing glasses of ambrosia.
She wandered around the hall until she found another door which led to a large, empty room. This one had a window, although the landscape outside was only slightly brighter than inside. She climbed (fell) out the window and her bare feet (and knees and palms) met soft, black glass.
This was definitely the most gothic hallucination she’d ever had.
She thought maybe the servants were outside milking to cows (because what else would they be doing?), and milk would make her not thirsty, so she continued to walk. She thought she saw people in the distance, so she walked toward them, forgot there were there, and veered directions.
Eventually, feeling only slightly more lucid, she found a river.
Persephone was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t navigating a hallucination but rather an actual, bizarre place. Still, she was incredibly thirsty and there was water right here. She knelt down and cupped her hands. She took a sip.
It was unbearably satisfying. She bent further and put her face to the water, drinking freely. Yes, it was too satisfying to be a deranged figment of her imagination. When her throat stopped feeling like it was coated in salt, she should go and… and…
She was still sore. And tired. And she should really… she should…
She should lay down and take a nap. The grass was soft.
--
Hades’s throne room was as grand as he could imagine it to be. Admittedly, Hades wasn’t the most imaginative god there was, but he thought he had done a good job with the vast, cavernous room full of shadows and things going bump in the eternal night. Torches along the wall allowed for ominous lighting, and his throne was on a raised platform and decorated with polished black skulls.
The whole scene was frightening even without the fiercely-featured Lord of the Dead glaring at you from his skull-throne, so to was no wonder the servant boy was quaking before him.
“She drank WHAT?” Hades bellowed at him, having stood threateningly.
The servant boy was graveling impressively. He was on his knees with forehead pressed to the floor. The poor kid was new.
“We– we found her by the River Lethe,” the boy squeaked into the stone floor.
“And who was watching her when she did this?” Hades demanded. The boy flinched and mumbled something. “Speak up,” Hades snapped.
The boy lifted his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hades let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his temples.
“And you’re sure she drank from it?”
“She doesn’t even remember her name.”
Hades slowly sank into his throne. Great, just great. There wasn’t a curse in Greece strong enough for this situation.
“You can get up now,” he told the boy and dismissed him.
He decided to visit her. He might as well assess the situation before he dumped it on Demeter. Unless of course, he could fix it before he returned the wayward goddess to her mother.
Hades pondered possible solutions as he descended staircase after staircase. In the Underworld, buildings were built down rather than up due to a lack of space above ground. Persephone had be taken to the very bottom floor, where rooms could be kept warmer.
He founded her seated primly on a couch, picking threads off her ruined robes. Her hair was doing its best impression of Medusa. He waved her attendant out of the room.
“Hello,” he said cautiously.
“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously, eyeing him up and done.
“The real question is,” he said, “who are you?” He then mentally slapped himself for sounding like an agora-reject philosopher.
“Kore,” she answered promptly.
“Kore?”
“Yep,” she said with one of her mischievous grins. “Now you tell me your name.”
“Hades,” he answered flatly. “Do you know where you are?”
She cocked her head to the side, grin unwavering. “I’m on a couch, dear Hades.”
Hades pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you,” he said, “or do you not remember who you are, how you came to be here, and your life in general?”
Hades had listened to a lot of farfetched stories. As Lord of the Dead, he had been obligated to sit through explanation after explanation of why so-and-so should not be punished for life crime, why this person she be let to return to the living world, and so on. He was fairly patient when it came to nonsense.
But Persephone, as she babbled on about her life as a traveling lyrist, playing catchy tunes for happy children and once leading a rat infestation out of a suffering village, really took the cake.
“After I broke the cheese-making record,” I finished, “I fell into a deep sleep and woke up in that field. And now I’m here.”
“That’s… lovely,” Hades answered.
“You’re not a very fun person, are you?” she said and rolled onto her feet. In two steps, she was standing toe to toe with him, smirking up at him through gold eyelashes. “And a little scary too, I think,” she purred.
“Aletta,” Hades called over Persephone’s last syllable, wrenching his face away from her. The attendant reappeared. “She smells like mildew.”
--
dhsjkfhdjksfhj Per$ephone stop being easier/more fun than Juniper plz.
2. I added a bit to the end of the last scene I posted.
3. I did some half-assed research to figure out who Persephone might hang out with and who witnessed the abduction besides Helios. (Helios just sort of witnesses everything.) In some places it says she was with and bunch of nymphs and Artemis and Athena (yet none of these ladies did anything to intervene? really?), and then I found one myth where her friend Cyane tries to stop Hades and gets herself turned into a fountain/well/some sort of water work. (You're a swell man, Hades.) Arethusa is a nymph/devotee of Artemis I picked randomly off a list. YAY.
4. The thing about the mirror and shadows I pulled out of my butt and is ungrounded in mythology (rule of cool?). It's late. I'll probably regret it in the morning.
5. Why is this so fun?
--
Hades had noticed her, of course, in the way that everyone noticed Persephone. Demeter’s precious daughter was a beast of a child. Demeter called her free-spirited and dressed her up and did her hair. Quite a few gods called her a wild child, as she flirted and teased and twirled her hair as it messily fell out of her mother’s carefully crafted braids. Hades, having only spoken to her once, was more inclined to call her an uncouth gremlin.
He didn’t spend much time on Olympus, but he showed up for the bigger parties and gatherings for the sake of maintaining face. For this particular reunion, Aphrodite and Hephaestus were renewing their wedding vows. Again. Apparently Aphrodite thought this would make up for her frequent bouts of infidelity.
(Hera, goddess of marriage, was standing in the middle of things looking quite peeved. Hera hated infidelity.)
Having exchanged the usual pleasantries with his brothers Zeus and Poseidon, Hades retreated to a far corner of the room and watched the divine inhabitants of Greece work their mayhem. Personally, he was hoping Zeus would get a little too distracted by a nymph and Hera would snap. The woman always knew how to put on a good show.
Persephone, clutching a silver goblet and giggling impishly, leaned against the wall a little ways done from him and let Hermes pin her there with one arm. The boyish god smirked down at her.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” he teased. Demeter was notorious for trying to hide her (not so) little girl away and failing.
“I don’t know,” Persephone answered, arching her back against the wall. “What do you think?”
“I think,” Hermes said, pressing his face against her hair so Hades could barely hear him, “Mrs. Grain-in-her-panties would never let her baby go out in such a scandalous attire.”
Persephone giggled again and tilted her body away from the messenger god. Her robes were indeed rather scandalous– too tight and too short.
“Did Aphrodite help you with your wardrobe again?” Hermes asked and tried to press his lips to her cheek again. Persephone ducked away, spinning away from him in a way that showed off far too much leg. Hades looked away in distaste. (Not that he’d been watching, of course.)
“No,” Persephone purred back. Hades wasn’t looking, but there was no mistaking the mischievous lilt in her words. “I found it in a puddle of mud. It’s a bit small, don’t you think?”
There was a long pause from Hermes. Hades was shocked too– was she a goddess or goat farmer? He turned his face so he could size up her dress from the corner of his eye. Yes, it was definitely made for some prepubescent girl, and that was definitely a faded mud stain on her back. And definitely some mud in her hair– what had this girl been doing?
“Haha,” said Hermes halfheartedly. “You’re such a tease.” He made to wrap his arms around her, but she thrust her goblet into his face.
“Get me some more ambrosia?” she asked sweetly. “Or ask Dionysus for some wine. You know how I hate talking to him.”
Obviously displeased, Hermes took and the goblet and headed away. Hades wondered if his position as messenger god and affected his mind in such a way he couldn’t refuse running other people’s errands.
Hades tried to ignore her. His eyes swept the rest of the room: Aphrodite was making a great show of fawning over her crippled husband, although she did nothing to thwart Ares patting her on the behind as he passed. Zeus watched the couple proudly, chatting with Poseidon and Athena as Hera fumed silently next to him. Demeter was far, far on the other side of the room, absorbed in some conversation with a few nymphs and Artemis, which was probably how Persephone ended up over here. She’d inevitably be caught, of course. Even now, Apollo’s eyes were lighting up as he caught a glimpse of her.
Persephone did not notice. Or at least Hades hoped she didn’t notice anyone watching her, as she was picking wax out of her ear with an unpleasant snarl on her face.
Apollo looked a bit taken a back, but he still went to the spread of refreshments and started filling to glass of ambrosia. It wasn’t just any day you could talk to (try to fee up) the strangely charming (hellion) goddess.
Hades didn’t care what the young goddess did with her spare time, but when she peeled back the top of her robe to start picking grass out of her bust, he felt that as the older and more mature one, he should step in.
“Persephone,” he said smoothly, stepping out from the shadows of the corner he’d been occupying. “Daughter of Demeter.”
She blinked up at him, unsurprised at his appearance. Had she known he was there the whole time? “Hades,” she answered, “Son of Cronus.”
Apollo stopped in his tracks, a glass of golden liquid in each hand. He looked extremely confused.
Persephone and Hades stared each other down for a few moments, then she shrugged and went back to picking grass from her dress.
(What had she been doing?)
Hades had no idea what to say to her. So he went with, “Does your mother know you’re here?” and wanted to kick himself.
Persephone snorted. “You mean you weren’t eavesdropping?” she asked.
Hades raised his eyebrows. “You mean you were purposefully making a fool of yourself in front of me?”
She let go of the top of her gown and it snapped back into place (sort of). “Well I can’t go over there,” she whined, gesturing to the other side of the room, “and make a fool of myself.”
Hades glanced over and saw Demeter still engaged in conversation and Apollo nervously shifting from foot to foot.
“Why make a fool of yourself at all?” he asked.
Persephone sneered back at him. “And do what? Sit around and let mother do my hair and pick who I talk to and what I do?”
Hades considered her for a moment. She sounded exactly like a child and was rebelling in the most immature way possible. He tried to think of a way to explain this to her without sounding like a grumpy old man.
When he thought of nothing, she tossed her (muddy) hair back haughtily and said, “I’m an adult. I’ll do what I want.”
As she turn on her heel and sauntered toward Apollo, Hades called after her, “You want to behave like an uncultured goat farmer?”
Hermes was attempting to lure her away from Apollo with a bottle of something that was definitely not wine when Hades figured out what he should have said when she complained about her mother. He let out a heavy sigh. He really did need to learn how to carry on a normal conversation.
He gave his regards to Aphrodite and Hephaestus, said goodbye to his brothers and left before Demeter realized her daughter was taking bottle shots of Dionysus’s moonshine (but stuck around in the doorway a bit when Hera slapped Aphrodite and raged about the sanctity of marriage, most of which seemed to be directed at her husband).
Many years passed before he saw her again.
--
Persephone’s hair was still neatly piled on top of her head, which meant it was early. Arethusa, one of Artemis’s attendants, was helping her tie together flower chains. They would end up decorating all the women gathered, and Persephone would inevitably end up destroying hers. Cyane was sitting a ways away on a river bank, trailing her toes in the water.
“Cyane,” Persephone suddenly called over. The nymph looked up. “Aren’t you bored?”
Cyane shrugged. “I’m happy just thinking about Anapos.” Cyane and the river god and a thing going on.
“Well, I’m certainly bored,” Artemis announced, stretching her legs in front of her. “Anyone up for a hunt?”
Arethusa dropped her flower chain and perked up. Persephone rolled her eyes. Bah, attendants.
“Nooo,” the nature goddess answered, “I had an even better idea.”
Artemis eyed her wearily. “If you try to set me up with someone again,” she said, “I really will shoot you in the head with my arrow.”
“It’s nothing like that.” Persephone squirmed and accidentally smashed a pile of unused flowers with her hand. Arethusa stared mournfully at it. “There’s a bacchanalia tonight.”
Arethusa recoiled in horror at the very idea and Artemis leapt to her feet. “No!” she yelled. “Do you even know what they do at those things?”
“Have lots of fun?” Persephone answered innocently.
“No,” Artemis hissed, “They have– the have– orgies.” It seemed to pain her to say it. She was, after all, one of the virgin goddess. At the mention of sex, Arethusa yelped and jumped up to hid behind her mistress.
Cyane giggled.
Persephone stood up as well. “They also have tons of great drinks,” she defended. “And sometimes they rip wild animals apart. You like ripping animals apart.”
Artemis narrowed her eyes and the younger goddess. “Be that as it may,” she said, “Bacchanalia are a completely unsuitable atmosphere for anyone of your background.”
“Except Dionysus,” Persephone countered and scratched her scalp. A braid fell from the mass on her head. “You don’t have to participate in the orgies, Artemis. I just want to dance and have a little to drink. Are you in, Cyane?”
Cyane considered it for a while. “It’ll be at night,” she said, hesitant. Persephone rolled her eyes. Cyane had this bizarre paranoia of falling into pits she couldn’t see in the dark. She could comfort her… or she could make a lewd joke.
“I’m sure you can spend one night without your boyfriend,” Persephone drawled.
“Will you leave with me if I don’t like it?” Cyane wanted to know. “Or if I think there are deep pits around?”
Persephone frowned, opened her and then closed it again. Finally she shrugged and said, “Fair enough.”
Artemis considered telling Demeter. The goddess of the harvest would probably be able to put a stop to this madness, but Persephone was perfectly capable of sneaking out anyway as she had that time she’d gone cattle tipping with Apollo’s herd or that one disaster on Mount Olympus. Also, the last time Artemis had warned Demeter about her daughter, Persephone had been furious with her and they had been on rocky terms for over a month.
“You’re going to go whether I do or not,” Artemis said. Persephone grinned cheekily back. The huntress sighed. “I guess I’ll go,” she said, “but no orgies.”
Persephone squealed in delight and grabbed Cyane to lead her in a sloppy dance. All her braids fell and she managed to get all sorts of grass stains on her dress.
She told Demeter she was going to stay with Artemis for the night. Demeter, who still thought her daughter was fourteen and like to engage in giggly pillow fights, thought this was a fantastic idea. (Persephone did, in fact, still engage in pillow fights, but not that kind of pillow fight.)
Artemis guessed she would need back up for when the party inevitably got out of hand and managed to recruit Athena to come with them.
“It would be wiser,” Athena remarked dryly, “to stop her from going at all.”
“Shut up,” Artemis answered. “You try stopping her when she gets a stupid idea.”
Not even Persephone was cruel enough to force the terrified Arethusa to accompany them, so they arrived as a party of four. To the nature goddess’s chagrin, Dionysus noticed them straight away.
“Hey Sephs,” he called and threw an arm over her shoulder. He was already pretty far gone. “I knew you’d show up for one of these eventually.” She awkwardly pulled at her skirt as he eyed the two goddesses accompanying her. “How’d you get the virges to come?”
It took a moment for her to figure out “virges” meant and why he was drunkenly laughing at his own joke. Athena raised a fine eyebrow and Artemis put her hands on her hips.
“I came to rip apart wild boar with my own hands,” she announced. Dionysus’s chortles stopped abruptly and Persephone managed to shrug his arm off.
“Huh, Arty…” he said and squinted at her. “Yer more like a bro than Apollo, you know that?”
Artemis snorted and Athena promptly asked about the cultural significance the festivities held for the nearby towns, and if he approved of the recent movement for more secrecy and the banning of males, and what precautions (if any) did he take to avoid poisoning via the consumption of raw meat?
With the wine god sufficiently distracted, Persephone made a beeline for the bonfire. Revelers we hooting and dancing around it, passing bottles between themselves. Cyane and Artemis followed her.
It took some prodding a nudging to get Artemis to drink anything, but eventually the huntress was tipsy enough to let go and dance with her, hollering and laughing like the rest of the revelers. Cyane, being Cyane, stayed quite no matter what and no one was really sure how intoxicated she was. Athena continued interrogated Dionysus, which the sadist part of Persephone enjoyed immensely.
“I have an idea,” Persephone whispered (yelled) to her comrades.
“What?” Artemis yelled back.
“Follow me!” Persephone called, bumped into a group of dancers, and then staggered away from the mass of people around the fire.
Under more lucid conditions, no one in their right minds would follow Persephone after she yelled “I have an idea!” and then asked to be followed, but these were not lucid conditions, and so Artemis and Cyane found themselves crawling under Dionysus’s tent along with their friend.
The tent was pitched far enough away from the fire and revelers not be noticed, but close enough that Dionysus didn’t have to do too much work to drag more alcohol to his party. It was a sort of storage room and, Persephone reasoned, he was obviously keeping all the best drinks for himself.
They crashed around a bit before she picked out what she deemed to be the strongest and pushed it into Artemis’s arms. The huntress sniffed it.
“I don’t know,” Artemis said. “I want to remember ripping a boar apart.” She passed the bottle to Cyane.
“But,” the nymph protested, “I mean, it was fun, but you’re already really wasted, Persephone.”
Persephone sighed dramatically. “If we we’re meant to occasionally get drunk off our ass,” she said, “then my sweet mother Demeter would not have invented fermentation.”
That sentence was cohesive enough that Cyane took a swig and passed it back to Persephone who took her own lengthy sip.
“Whatever,” said Artemis, “I’m going to go start me a boar-hunting frenzy.”
She left, and Persephone and Cyane sat down behind the tent and set about finishing their bottle.
--
It was an unusually slow night in the Underworld. Hades was bored and so he dug out his old mirror that let him view the mortal world. It was not a particularly useful artifact: it only showed whatever happened to be above where the hold was standing.
Hades strolled through his kingdom, occasionally glancing in the mirror in hopes of finding anything interesting. Sometime close to dawn, he found her.
He didn’t realize who it was at first. It was two girls, running and falling over themselves in a field, obviously inebriated. That was interesting, but not the type of interesting he was looking for. He was Lord of the Dead; he was above spying on drunk girls. (Nevertheless he kept his eye on the mirror as he kept walking.)
Then, as the blonde one stopped to pick a wedgie, he realized who it was. He stopped and gawked at the mirror. She really was the same as an uncultured goat farmer. No, worse.
Now that he knew who she was, if she managed to get herself eaten by a fury or something he was going to feel responsible. And she was immortal, so she’d live through the whole digestive process. He winced at the idea and made up his mind to offer her a hand. He went to the stables and prepared his chariot.
The sky of the underworld was always black, as it was an uneven sheet of rock. He drove his chariot upwards, and with a mighty crack the sky parted to reveal the dusty blue of the heavens, Helios on his own chariot somewhere just short of the horizon. The hooves of Hades’s horses thundered against solid ground and the death god erupted from the earth in a storm of otherworldly shadow.
While this was all normal routine for Hades, he supposed he should have taken into account that it was normally considered terrifying for the general populace.
“AAAAH!” the two girls shriek. Yes, it was definitely Persephone and some nymph.
“Ladies,” Hades greeted and stepped down from his chariot. “I think it’s time for you two be to getting home.”
“RUN!” Persephone screamed and sprinted away, only to trip soon after. “Help, he’s got me!”
“Persepony!” the other girl, a nymph, slurred. “I’ll save you!” And she slammed her shoulder into Hades.
“Um,” said Hades. “I think you should calm down and listen–”
“I think,” the nymph bit back, “You should fall into a dark pit because it’s dark and you can’t see in the dark.”
This made no sense. “What’s your name?” Hades asked. The girl’s eyes widened.
“Goo idee!” she said.
“What?” Hades asked.
“Goo idea?” the girl tried again.
“Tell me where you live,” Hades said. “I can give you a ride–”
“SABE YOURSELF, PERSELFINY,” the nymph yelled and turned herself into a well.
Hades stared at her, nonplussed. “That was uncalled for,” he said. “Here, turn yourself back and I can–”
“MONSTER,” Persephone screamed and tackled him. She ended up mushed ineffectually against his chest.
“I’m just trying to help,” Hades explained, recoiling as he tried to push Persephone away from himself. One his horses stomped its hooves and a shadow escaped into the night, cackling as it went. Persephone made a strange hiccupping noise, although Hades wasn’t sure if it was from fright (he really wasn’t supposed to let those thing loose– they caused nightmares) or from her efforts to push him into the well.
Persephone let out a deranged sort of screech and ran. Not seeing anything else for it, Hades chased after her.
The sun was peeking over the horizon when he finally managed to grab her by the elbows and drag her kicking and screaming into his chariot. She sounded like she was trying to curse him in a language she had made up on the spot.
He tried to drive her home, using one hand to work the reigns, but restraining her with one arm proved too difficult and she threw herself from the speeding chariot. It was remarkable she wasn’t injured (not really; she was a goddess after all), and Hades wasted another fifteen minutes or so wrestling her back into the chariot. Another shadow escaping into the breaking day.
The Lord of the Dead had had enough. He wasn’t going to drive this lunatic across half of Greece. The ground broke upon again, and Hades descended into his dark kingdom with the screaming daughter of Demeter.
He took her to the first building he could find and gruffly told its tenants they were being relocated for a few days. They scurried away in fright. For some reason people tended to fear him.
He dragged Persephone into a bedroom and sat her on the bed.
“Sleep,” he commanded.
She tried to spit in his face, and saliva dribbled down her chin.
“You’re a real beauty queen.”
“Bastard,” she replied, then slumped over snoring.
Shuddering, Hades retreated to his castle. He couldn’t wait to get the hooligan of a goddess out of his kingdom.
--
When she awoke, she thought for sure Artemis had actually shot her in the head. She groaned and curled into herself, the blankets twisting around her waist.
Persephone didn’t remember how she had gotten home, but she had a massive headache and her whole body ached and her mouth felt like sand and her feet were freezing. The first three problems were the usual symptoms of a bacchanal gone awry, but why would mother let the warmth of spring wane like that? Was it some sick form of corporal punishment?
She spent a few hours wallowing in self pity and the strange bed she was fairy sure wasn’t her own. The headache marginally subsided and she dared to force her eyes open. They were crusted over and she flicked the dry goo away.
The room was dark, thank Zeus. The walls and floor were smooth, polished stone. It was all continuous, without the ordered cracks of tiles. There was no furniture besides the bed she was sprawled across.
She laid staring at the ceiling and wondered if she was hallucinating. This seemed probable. She had partaken of Dionysus’s personal store, after all.
She was thirsty. She imagined a glass of sweet, cool ambrosia and wondered why her hallucinated room didn’t provide her with it immediately.
She wondered if her hallucination came with servants to bring her water at the least. She opened her mouth to call, but it was so dry she felt as if the action opened cracks down her throat.
Wincing, she managed to roll her body off the bed and stand unsteadily. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders (why was it so cold?) and reassessed the room with blurry eyes. Nope, still no imagined glass of delicious ambrosia.
She found a door (it had probably been there the whole time, she thought in hindsight) and staggered into an equally dimly lit hallway. Still no magically appearing glasses of ambrosia.
She wandered around the hall until she found another door which led to a large, empty room. This one had a window, although the landscape outside was only slightly brighter than inside. She climbed (fell) out the window and her bare feet (and knees and palms) met soft, black glass.
This was definitely the most gothic hallucination she’d ever had.
She thought maybe the servants were outside milking to cows (because what else would they be doing?), and milk would make her not thirsty, so she continued to walk. She thought she saw people in the distance, so she walked toward them, forgot there were there, and veered directions.
Eventually, feeling only slightly more lucid, she found a river.
Persephone was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t navigating a hallucination but rather an actual, bizarre place. Still, she was incredibly thirsty and there was water right here. She knelt down and cupped her hands. She took a sip.
It was unbearably satisfying. She bent further and put her face to the water, drinking freely. Yes, it was too satisfying to be a deranged figment of her imagination. When her throat stopped feeling like it was coated in salt, she should go and… and…
She was still sore. And tired. And she should really… she should…
She should lay down and take a nap. The grass was soft.
--
Hades’s throne room was as grand as he could imagine it to be. Admittedly, Hades wasn’t the most imaginative god there was, but he thought he had done a good job with the vast, cavernous room full of shadows and things going bump in the eternal night. Torches along the wall allowed for ominous lighting, and his throne was on a raised platform and decorated with polished black skulls.
The whole scene was frightening even without the fiercely-featured Lord of the Dead glaring at you from his skull-throne, so to was no wonder the servant boy was quaking before him.
“She drank WHAT?” Hades bellowed at him, having stood threateningly.
The servant boy was graveling impressively. He was on his knees with forehead pressed to the floor. The poor kid was new.
“We– we found her by the River Lethe,” the boy squeaked into the stone floor.
“And who was watching her when she did this?” Hades demanded. The boy flinched and mumbled something. “Speak up,” Hades snapped.
The boy lifted his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hades let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his temples.
“And you’re sure she drank from it?”
“She doesn’t even remember her name.”
Hades slowly sank into his throne. Great, just great. There wasn’t a curse in Greece strong enough for this situation.
“You can get up now,” he told the boy and dismissed him.
He decided to visit her. He might as well assess the situation before he dumped it on Demeter. Unless of course, he could fix it before he returned the wayward goddess to her mother.
Hades pondered possible solutions as he descended staircase after staircase. In the Underworld, buildings were built down rather than up due to a lack of space above ground. Persephone had be taken to the very bottom floor, where rooms could be kept warmer.
He founded her seated primly on a couch, picking threads off her ruined robes. Her hair was doing its best impression of Medusa. He waved her attendant out of the room.
“Hello,” he said cautiously.
“Who are you?” she asked suspiciously, eyeing him up and done.
“The real question is,” he said, “who are you?” He then mentally slapped himself for sounding like an agora-reject philosopher.
“Kore,” she answered promptly.
“Kore?”
“Yep,” she said with one of her mischievous grins. “Now you tell me your name.”
“Hades,” he answered flatly. “Do you know where you are?”
She cocked her head to the side, grin unwavering. “I’m on a couch, dear Hades.”
Hades pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you,” he said, “or do you not remember who you are, how you came to be here, and your life in general?”
Hades had listened to a lot of farfetched stories. As Lord of the Dead, he had been obligated to sit through explanation after explanation of why so-and-so should not be punished for life crime, why this person she be let to return to the living world, and so on. He was fairly patient when it came to nonsense.
But Persephone, as she babbled on about her life as a traveling lyrist, playing catchy tunes for happy children and once leading a rat infestation out of a suffering village, really took the cake.
“After I broke the cheese-making record,” I finished, “I fell into a deep sleep and woke up in that field. And now I’m here.”
“That’s… lovely,” Hades answered.
“You’re not a very fun person, are you?” she said and rolled onto her feet. In two steps, she was standing toe to toe with him, smirking up at him through gold eyelashes. “And a little scary too, I think,” she purred.
“Aletta,” Hades called over Persephone’s last syllable, wrenching his face away from her. The attendant reappeared. “She smells like mildew.”
--
dhsjkfhdjksfhj Per$ephone stop being easier/more fun than Juniper plz.
Dionysus: Putting the bro back in amBROsia!
I'm not really sure who to blame for this, but somehow I've come up with yet another girl's adventures in Deadland! Woohoo!
In this story, Persephone crashes a party thrown by Dionysus, steals his booze and has a one-person party out in some random field. When she runs out she goes a-frolickin' and Hades finds her. Thinking he'll be a good guy and let her crash at his place for the night (she is obviously Not Well), he takes her down to the Underworld.
NOTE: This is obviously the product of Too Much Ke$ha.
ALSO NOTE: Those who drink the waters of Lethe forget all.
--
When she awoke, she thought for sure Artemis had actually shot her in the head. She groaned and curled into herself, the blankets twisting around her waist.
Persephone didn’t remember how she had gotten home, but she had a massive headache and her whole body ached and her mouth felt like sand and her feet were freezing. The first three problems were the usual symptoms of a bacchanal gone awry, but why would mother let the warmth of spring wane like that? Was it some sick form of corporal punishment?
She spent a few hours wallowing in self pity and the strange bed she was fairy sure wasn’t her own. The headache marginally subsided and she dared to force her eyes open. They were crusted over and she flicked the dry goo away.
The room was dark, thank Zeus. The walls and floor were smooth, polished stone. It was all continuous, without the ordered cracks of tiles. There was no furniture besides the bed she was sprawled across.
She laid staring at the ceiling and wondered if she was hallucinating. This seemed probable. She had partaken of Dionysus’s personal store, after all.
She was thirsty. She imagined a glass of sweet, cool ambrosia and wondered why her hallucinated room didn’t provide her with it immediately.
She wondered if her hallucination came with servants to bring her water at the least. She opened her mouth to call, but it was so dry she felt as if the action opened cracks down her throat.
Wincing, she managed to roll her body off the bed and stand unsteadily. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders (why was it so cold?) and reassessed the room with blurry eyes. Nope, still no imagined glass of delicious ambrosia.
She found a door (it had probably been there the whole time, she thought in hindsight) and staggered into an equally dimly lit hallway. Still no magically appearing glasses of ambrosia.
She wandered around the hall until she found another door which led to a large, empty room. This one had a window, although the landscape outside was only slightly brighter than inside. She climbed (fell) out the window and her bare feet (and knees and palms) met soft, black glass.
This was definitely the most gothic hallucination she’d ever had.
She thought maybe the servants were outside milking to cows (because what else would they be doing?), and milk would make her not thirsty, so she continued to walk. She thought she saw people in the distance, so she walked toward them, forgot there were there, and veered directions.
Eventually, feeling only slightly more lucid, she found a river.
Persephone was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t navigating a hallucination but rather an actual, bizarre place. Still, she was incredibly thirsty and there was water right here. She knelt down and cupped her hands. She took a sip.
It was unbearably satisfying. She bent further and put her face to the water, drinking freely. Yes, it was too satisfying to be a deranged figment of her imagination. When her throat stopped feeling like it was coated in salt, she should go and… and…
She was still sore. And tired. And she should really… she should…
She should lay down and take a nap. The grass was soft.
--
“She drank WHAT?” Hades bellowed.
The servant boy was graveling impressively. He was on his knees with forehead pressed to the floor. The poor kid was new.
“We– we found her by the River Lethe,” the boy squeaked into the stone floor.
“And who was watching her when she did this?” Hades demanded. The boy flinched and mumbled something. “Speak up,” Hades snapped.
The boy lifted his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hades let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his temples.
“And you’re sure she drank from it?”
“She doesn’t even remember her name.”
Hades slowly sank into his throne. Great, just great. There wasn’t a curse in Greece strong enough for this situation.
“You can get up now,” he told the boy and dismissed him.
In this story, Persephone crashes a party thrown by Dionysus, steals his booze and has a one-person party out in some random field. When she runs out she goes a-frolickin' and Hades finds her. Thinking he'll be a good guy and let her crash at his place for the night (she is obviously Not Well), he takes her down to the Underworld.
NOTE: This is obviously the product of Too Much Ke$ha.
ALSO NOTE: Those who drink the waters of Lethe forget all.
--
When she awoke, she thought for sure Artemis had actually shot her in the head. She groaned and curled into herself, the blankets twisting around her waist.
Persephone didn’t remember how she had gotten home, but she had a massive headache and her whole body ached and her mouth felt like sand and her feet were freezing. The first three problems were the usual symptoms of a bacchanal gone awry, but why would mother let the warmth of spring wane like that? Was it some sick form of corporal punishment?
She spent a few hours wallowing in self pity and the strange bed she was fairy sure wasn’t her own. The headache marginally subsided and she dared to force her eyes open. They were crusted over and she flicked the dry goo away.
The room was dark, thank Zeus. The walls and floor were smooth, polished stone. It was all continuous, without the ordered cracks of tiles. There was no furniture besides the bed she was sprawled across.
She laid staring at the ceiling and wondered if she was hallucinating. This seemed probable. She had partaken of Dionysus’s personal store, after all.
She was thirsty. She imagined a glass of sweet, cool ambrosia and wondered why her hallucinated room didn’t provide her with it immediately.
She wondered if her hallucination came with servants to bring her water at the least. She opened her mouth to call, but it was so dry she felt as if the action opened cracks down her throat.
Wincing, she managed to roll her body off the bed and stand unsteadily. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders (why was it so cold?) and reassessed the room with blurry eyes. Nope, still no imagined glass of delicious ambrosia.
She found a door (it had probably been there the whole time, she thought in hindsight) and staggered into an equally dimly lit hallway. Still no magically appearing glasses of ambrosia.
She wandered around the hall until she found another door which led to a large, empty room. This one had a window, although the landscape outside was only slightly brighter than inside. She climbed (fell) out the window and her bare feet (and knees and palms) met soft, black glass.
This was definitely the most gothic hallucination she’d ever had.
She thought maybe the servants were outside milking to cows (because what else would they be doing?), and milk would make her not thirsty, so she continued to walk. She thought she saw people in the distance, so she walked toward them, forgot there were there, and veered directions.
Eventually, feeling only slightly more lucid, she found a river.
Persephone was beginning to suspect that she wasn’t navigating a hallucination but rather an actual, bizarre place. Still, she was incredibly thirsty and there was water right here. She knelt down and cupped her hands. She took a sip.
It was unbearably satisfying. She bent further and put her face to the water, drinking freely. Yes, it was too satisfying to be a deranged figment of her imagination. When her throat stopped feeling like it was coated in salt, she should go and… and…
She was still sore. And tired. And she should really… she should…
She should lay down and take a nap. The grass was soft.
--
“She drank WHAT?” Hades bellowed.
The servant boy was graveling impressively. He was on his knees with forehead pressed to the floor. The poor kid was new.
“We– we found her by the River Lethe,” the boy squeaked into the stone floor.
“And who was watching her when she did this?” Hades demanded. The boy flinched and mumbled something. “Speak up,” Hades snapped.
The boy lifted his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
Hades let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his temples.
“And you’re sure she drank from it?”
“She doesn’t even remember her name.”
Hades slowly sank into his throne. Great, just great. There wasn’t a curse in Greece strong enough for this situation.
“You can get up now,” he told the boy and dismissed him.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
DEADGIRL. From wherever I left off!
1. Some parts of this are super painful. Like. Super. DON'T JUDGE MEEEEEEEE
2. I think I'm going to rework the party scene and move it somewhere else. Or... I don't know. I need to think of wtf the point of that scene was. (There IS a point! ...I think)
3. I didn't proof read OR spell check this. I also didn't bother to edit in the italics for blogspot. Have... fun?
4. Last time, Juniper and Mariano had just escaped a demon library where some famous literary quotes attacked them...
--
The librarian appeared in the glass door on the oppsoite side of the room, as quickly and unexpectantly as dry lightning. He face was blank and her frail, creaking arms pushed against the bar. Mariano was at my side immediately.
“Yes, I think we should leave.”
In my rush outside and down the steps, I tripped over the decorative corpse’s foot and ended up on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. Jagged little pieces of the crumbling sidewalk cut into my palms. Except that the sidewalk was perfectly in tact, and what I had assumed was gravel from disrepair was gravel at all.
Mariano held out a hand to me. I stared up at him, aghast. I grabbed a handful of the white pieces covering the sidewalk.
“These are teeth,” I said, dropping a couple into his outstretched hand.
As soon as the words left my mouth, he was off the sidewalk and in the middle of the asphalt street, rubbing his hands on his pants as if I’d contaminated them.
“What kind of a sick place is this?” he moaned. I stood up and stepped off the sidewalk as well. “What happened to your evil clowns and undead pirates?”
He kept mumbling about the teeth and the liver-eating hawk and the library’s security system as he pried open a manhole and tossed the metal disc aside. I watched him curiously and began to ask what exactly was so fascinating down there, but the jerk had the nerve to push me into the dark little hole.
I belly flopped face down into some sort of liquid and assumed I’d ended up back in that sewer, but it smelled oddly of grapes. My whole front tingled from the impact, and a body spashed down beside me. I sloshed around and found a smooth surface with my feet and stood up. I found myself next to Mariano in a foutain filled with some sort of bright purple grape beverage.
The fountain was a glass basin the size of a small swimming pool, set in the middle of what I could only liken to a ballroom. The spouts of grape soda from the middle of the fountain caught the light from a wall made entirely of glass, and the ceiling several stories above us boasted an ornate crystal chandelier. From the top of a curving marble staircase, a man was yelling things at us.
“Why are you here?” he screamed, tugging at his thick black beard. “I had the skylights replaced! They said this would stop happening!”
“Hello!” Mariano waved merrily. I started to climb out of the fountain, dripping purple onto the tiled floor, but he stayed where he was, as if he didn’t mind sticky purple liquid seeping into his shoes. “I think the gate is somewhere in the air, not your ceiling!” He grinned at the man, who started down the stairs, wrining his hands as he went.
“I’m hosting a party in a bit,” he said. “And you’ve ruined the refreshment.”
I was staring down at my legs. The “refreshment” formed into little dew drops and rolled right off my jeans and shoes, as if I was waterproof. Mariano launched into a speech about something vaguely related to parties.
“I hope you plan on cleaning this mess up,” the bearded man said in a high pitch, interrupting Mariano, and I looked up guiltily from my puddle of purple.
“Do you have some um… papel towels?” I asked. Mariano lifted on leg out of the foutain and let the liquid drip back down into to, balancing himself easily on one leg. He stepped out with his now dry leg and let the other one drip clean over the fountain, effectively keeping the marble tiles spotless. Curse him.
“I don’t keep any of that rubbish,” The bearded man said, bustling over to me. “Go check check the linen closet, down that hall, second door on the left.” And he pushed me toward an open doorway. I obediently scampered over to it, listening to him round on Mariano with demands about getting that “blasted metal hole” removed.
The linen closet had a shelf stuffed with the fanciest towels I had ever seen. I hadn’t realize realized towels could be fancy before– but there they were, soft and monogramed and whiter than a dentist’s smile. I picked the one I thought looked the least elegant and brought it back to the ridiculous-sized room, where the bearded man was gesturing madly at the fountain to Mariano.
“What are you doing?” The man yelled when he saw me, and I exchanged a look with Mariano, who looked just as baffled as I was. “We don’t use the good linens on floors! Here, let’s get you a mop while your friend drains and refills the fountain.”
Next thing I knew, the man was dragging me out another door and down another hallway, which was decorated with a large mural of people lounging about in the nude. He halted before a door, withdrew a mop from behind it and shoved it into my free hand, as I was still clutching the towel.
“Um,” I said politely.
“Good gracious,” he said, blinking at me. “What happened to your head?”
“Oh, uh, I’m new,” I said, and he nodded. I was as amazed at the nonchalance of his acceptance of the hole in my head as I was that he’d taken so long to notice it. The man started tugging at his beard again. I belated realized I no longer had Minerva in my hands– the pipe must be in the fountain still. I’d have to ask Mariano to fish it out for me.
“They’ll be here any minute, would you mind waiting?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking he meant for me to wait while he left and did something prepatory in relation to his guests. Instead, I was was dragged into a kitchen large enough to keep a very large restaurant full of starving tigers happy. The counters were lined with trays of hor d’oeuvres. The man offered a tray of carefully arranged bite-sized quisches to me.
“Make sure you sirculate the garden as well,” he said. I tossed the towel over my shoulder and awkwardly took the tray in one hand. My wrist immediately began to ache in complaint. The man took another tray and hurried back toward the ballroom. I followed him him at a much slower pace, careful not to spill the quisches.
Mariano sat on the edge of the fountain, which was now spewing orange soda. He had Minerva in one hand. The bearde man thurst the tray in his face and Mariano took it in confusion.
“What’s this for?” He asked, peering down at the little plates of what looked like toast slathered with an orange paste and artistically top with some type of greenery.
“For serving to guests, of course,” the man snapped. “Make sure you circle the gardens too. Here they come!”
A horn sounded, and I jumped in surprise, sending the quisches sliding dangerously to one side of the plate. The was followed by some very relaxed sounding piano notes, from some unknown source but that seemed to permeate the entirity of the room, and the doors at the top of the stairs flung open. Laughing people dressed in brightly colored suits and hoop skirts and veils and ruffles poured in, men polishing watches and women hiding their mouths behind feather fans. I gawked and wondered why these people were being served orange soda of all things. They spilled over the staircases and flooded the room, easily bunching together in groups of four or five and circling up like chatty teenagers.
“Perfect!” the bearded man cried. “They are in much better arrangement than last time.” He marched off in the crowd.
“Is this normal?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Mariano answered. “Then again, nothing here really is. Want to check the party out?”
We left the trays sitting on the floor next to the fountain and I leaned the mop against it and folded the towel on the side. I put it down, looked at it, looked at the way the orange soda was fizzing up and sending little droplets everywhere, looked at how the towel was still perfectly and pristinely white, and then picked up the towel again and redrapped it over my shoulder. Mariano smiling teasingly in that way that sort of made me want to punch him in the face, but he didn’t actually say anything except to offer Minerva back to me, so he escaped my wrath. We went wondering about the room. No one seemd to notice us and I stared unashamedly.
“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
All the women looked the same. Different colored and cut dresses, different complexions, different hairstyles, but there was soemthing about all the sharp angles of their faces and easy, painted smiles that carried from one to the next. The men were just as bad, all strong-jawed and clean-shaven and standing with an easy but refined posture. Their colorful costumes stuck out sharply against the white marble room, but they all seem to match it perfectly in manner and mood. None of them looked at us as we passed by.
I followed Mariano’s back as he weaved around the guests, looking them up and down as they passed. No one seemed to notice his scrutiny. One woman burst into clear, purposeful laughter, as if she wasn’t laughing so much as saying “Here, look, I have found this funny, let me show you.”
“Well isn’t that delightful! Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
I stopped and stared. Mariano disappeared behind a group of gentlemen chatting about something which amused them enough to be animated, but not so animated as to seem course.
“Excuse me,” I said, timidly tapping the woman on the shoulder. “What did you say?” She didn’t make the slightest reaction.
“She had bought them in August, but she didn’t have well enough an excuse to wear them till October…” A woman with thick indigo skirts done up with lace of the same color was speaking and her carefully scupted curls bounced and she related her story through such a wide smile I could see all of her perfect teeth.
“Excuse me,” I tried again, louder. The woman in indigo kept going, and a man in an emerald suit made a humorous comment. Everyone tittered.
“Oh, Charlotte,” said the first woman again, “you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.”
“She bought them in August…”
I backed away and then craned my head around for Mariano. He was nowhere to be seen. I took a few steps over toward the edge of the room, inching along on tip-toe and hoping to catch a glimpse of his curly hair among the flattened and combed heads of the other men.
“Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
This time it was from another group, and a dark woman in an auburn dress with her hair pulled back in a complicated braid started on about buying gloves in August. I started walking faster. What was with this place?
I found the foggy glass doors outside, leading to the garden the bearded man had wanted me to make sure I circulated with the quische platter. The room suddenly seemed hot and muggy, so I pushed them open and wandered wide-eyed into the garden.
It was night here. The moon was full and bright and too close, like a romance movie or a painting, and the stars managed to arrange themselves into recognizable mosiacs– here a group of twinkling dots that formed the silhouette of a crab, there a bear, a woman. I would have spent more time gawking up at it, except that the garden was filled with enough flowers to match the guests inside, and little sparkling and glowing bubbles were drifting about in the air. Not soap bubbles, mind you– more like if you blew a bubble of chewing gum, but your gum was glittery and emitted a soft lavenderish light and bobbed along like a bouy. I suddenly had the need to know if they would pop like a soap bubble or collapse like a gum bubble if I thouched one, or maybe they were hard like marbles, or soft but firm like the bouncy balls you bought from machines for a quarter. I tried to grab one, but it just slipped through the gaps of my fingers. I tried again and again without much more results.
I stuck Minerva under my arm and cupped my hands together and went chasing after bubbles like that, dodging around overgrown plants on the tiny cobblestone paths of the garden. They still seemed to get through the crack in my fingers though, as if they somehow changed their form when my hand covered them, sifted through like smoke and then reappeared as a tiny glowing bubble before my mind could process what was happening.
Somehow as I was snatching at air, the towel slipped from my shoulder and landed on the ground, right on the edge of the path and half splayed across the muddy flower bed. I stared down at it in horror, having forgotten the bubbles. I picked up the towel and tried to brush it off, but the deed had been done– it was no longer white and would never been as white as it had once been. Frowning, I looked aound for a way I could get rid of it. I thought about hiding it in a rosebush, but can you imagine being a gardener and then finding a random towel in your rosebush? That would just be ridiculous.
Not that chasing floating glitter-bubbles wasn’t, I scolded myself and hurried back into the building. From the outside, it looked like a typical ivy-covered mansion– warm beige stones, three stories high and boasted complicated swoops in the red-tiled roof. Inside, the party was exactly as I had left it.
“Oh, Charlotte…”
I wondered who Charlotte really was.
Crossing the room and passing the fountain, I accidently bumped into a man in a gaudy scarlet suite, and he in turn elbowed the woman he was standing next quite hard, and she fumbled a bit on her heels but probably wouldn’t have fallen if not for the fact that no one had bothered to clean up the grape soda I’d dripped on the floor. She tumbled to the ground, and as I dropped Minerva and knelt down to help her, her conversation partner went on talking about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.
“Are you alright?” I asked and offered her my hand. She tittered at something about Mrs. Dover and smiled chattily at the ceiling from where she was laying in a puddle of purple on her back. The conversation of her little group continued as normal.
I tried to pull her up by her arm, but she just slumped back down on the floor, smiling and giggling at the right places as her friends went on blabbering about silk gloves. I thought about trying to clean her up, but the towel wasn’t for grape soda, it was so clean and fancy and pure, but I had already ruined it, so… I pulled the towel off my shoulder and tried to clean up the area around her so her pretty dress wouldn’t be too stained with grape soda and not seeing anything else to do, I walked stiff-legged away, Minerva in one hand and the brown-and-purple soiled towel in the other.
I found Mariano again, hands in pockets and conversing with the bearded man, who looked quite cross and rather short and unextraordinary compared to the glamour of the strange, beautifully dressed people who flanked either side of him, smiles set as if they’d been paused in the middle of a clever anecdote about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.
“It’s not so much that I think it’s wrong,” Mariano was saying, “so much as I think you’d have more fun with real people, you know? You can line all these guys up, and you can say they’re your friends and you can say that this is Charlotte, she’s twenty three and likes tennis and picnics, but you’re not really friends with them, are you?”
The man started yanking on his beard with such irritated force I thought he might pull it off all together. I came to stand at Mariano’s shoulder.
“I would bid you to know,” said the man, “that in life I had in fact maintain several friendships without personal acquaintance of the other, through an exchange of written correspondance, and they have been just as fulfilling– if not more– as any I might have experienced in flesh.”
“Well, yeah,” Mariano answered, “But you were actually talking to those people, in a manner of speaking. Exchanging ideas and jokes and what not. This people– you don’t know them. They’re not even real.”
The man huffed and twisted his beard in his hand. “People here are too wrapped up in themselves, or else they are too different from what I’d presume good company. I’d rather have friends who fit perfectly into what I see of the world. They cannot argue with me, or insult or betray me, and they are always the exact type of company I enjoy, polite and well-groomed, and I find their conversation agreeable.”
“Well, that’s the fun of friendship, isn’t it?” asked Mariano. “To be different people?”
The man snorted. “Different, yes, but not so much. I lived next to an Indian family for a number of years, and they were always cooking something or other, and the smell was so spicy it would burn your eyes as you walked by the house. Much better to stay with like-minded people who enjoy a decent meal, I think.”
“I like Indian food,” I said. The man turned his attention on me and stared as if I’d just remarked on the weather in the middle of a philosophical debate. “And I’d rather have burning eyes than listen to the same conversation over and over again. Surely you can find someone with more interesting stories to tell.”
“I would ask you of all people not to judge my social relations,” the man sneered, “as I have refrained from judging your discourtesy and generally coarse behavior. I am a well-respected man in these parts, and you should count yourself luckily to be privelege to my hospitality.”
Mariano letting out a barking laugh at that.
“Well respected by who? Your pretty imaginery friends?” He said with a mocking sort of smile.
The man turned back to Mariano, a dark glare painted across his face. “They may be synthetic people, but they are here and they are many, and they will support my opinions.”
I felt a dangerous sort of shift in the room, as the light chattering around us stopped and people turn to stare at us, faces frozen right in the middle of whatever they’d been saying. I unconsciously took a step closer to Mariano, who kept his hands in his pockets but seemed to tense and straighten his back. We stared at him for a few tense moments, being stared right back at by hundreds of unsentient eyes.
“Uh,” I said in attampt to break the awkward silence– was this how Mariano felt whenever he opened his mouth? “I, um. Here’s your towel back.”
I held it out to him, in all of its dirty and grape-scented glory. Mariano turned his head and tried to cover up his laughter with a very fake sounding sneeze. The beard man’s face twisted up as if I’d just offered him a very filthy looking toilet seat for breakfast.
“What sort of a joke is this?” He sneered and leaned back from the towel. The people at his sides didn’t make the normal shifts to perserve personal spaces as he backed into them.
“Well– I mean– you didn’t give me anything else to clean the floor up with, and you just left it.” I didn’t feel like I had to explain myself to him, but it was his towel and his ballroom fully of potentially malevalent synthetic people.
“Juniper,” Mariano murmured and took my elbow. He grip tightened on Minerva. “Let’s just go.”
As he led me back through the still ballroom and toward the doors into the garden, the bearded man called after us, “You are the worst waiters I have ever done business with!” As we ducked into the garden, the false people slowly began to reanimate.
“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes…”
Mariano paused three steps into the garden, taking in the moonlight plants and glitter bubbles floating lazily around in the starlight. He reach for one, but it bounced off his finger tips a drifted away.
I sighed. “Don’t even bother,” I advised.
“Oh well,” he said. “Onward!”
He guided me through the garden and climbed over a back wall, a feat which, after wrapping the disgusting towel around the back of my neck like a scarf, I recreated with much less grace and much more stubbling. It’s not like I’d never cilmbed a fence before; I’d just never climbed a decaying stone wall covered in moss and waxy vines, only to find a brightly lit desert on the other side when I jumped off.
“Huh?” I said, quickly followed by, “What?”
I turned around, expecting to see the jardin wall, but all that was there was the remains of some sort of building. The walls on this side had crumbled to the height of my waist, but the otherside was tall enough to boast the outlines of windows, and a chimney towered above us. The bricks were a dull beige color, and the ones that weren’t scattered in broken patterns across the ground were regularly formed. The desert extended beyond it, flat and white and with a seafoam green horizon. I blinked, looked up to make sure that yes, yes the sky was green, then turned back to Mariano.
“I’m pretty sure it was night on this side too,” I said. “It was dark on the other side of the wall. I saw it.”
He squinted at me like he was trying to analyze my face, or maybe the sun was in his eyes.
“Interesting,” he said.
“What? What’s interesting?”
He shrugged. “When you’re not expecting a gate, you can pass through it. But when you are, you change it so that it fits with what you think should be right. But if you don’t automatically change the gate when you’re not expecting it, that can’t be what you really think, can it?”
I had no way to articulate any feelings I had on that (assuming I understood what he was trying to say, which I don’t think I really did).
“Do you know where we are now?” I asked.
“I think so,” he answered. “I asked that guy where we were, but he didn’t seem so geographically-inclined.”
“Is anyone?” I answered, eyeing the skeleton of the building which apparently contained a mansion and starlit garden. “Does the layout of this place make sense to anyone? Does the timing make sense to anyone?”
“We’re working on it,” Mariano answered vaguely, then led me off in a direction he seemed to pick at random.
As we trudged along, Mariano began to speak more and more animatedly on the usual topics that concerned him, namely anything that did not personally involve himself. The land remained flat, and after we passed out of sight of the old building (too quickly, Mariano observed, adding that “no one can ever seem to get the perspective right”), there was nothing to break the strange green horizon. The sun glinted off the white sand, and for the first time since death I felt uncomfortably warm. I drapped the towel over my head to keep the sun off my face.
“Do dead people get sun burned?” I asked, cutting Mariano off in the middle of a rant about bicycle lanes.
He seemed genuinely puzzled for a few moments, then said, “I don’t think so… I’ve never been.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Have you gotten any tanner?”
He laughed good naturedly. “No. I don’t think I’ve changed at all really. No one does, unless they want to.”
“Unless they want to?” I repeated.
“Well, yes, you’re just a reconstruction of what you think you are, you know? So you’re not going change unless you make a conscious decision.” Whatever facial expression I made in regards to that must have indicated I had no idea what he was talking about, so he attempted to furtehr explain. “When you die, your mind puts you back together according to whatever image you have of yourself.”
“Right,” I said, recalling his earlier explanation of my change of clothes. “And when you apply that to your surroundings– that’s called building, right?”
He bobbed his head from on side to other, as if my answer had merit but was also completely wrong. “Building is putting anything together according to your mind. Anything with some self-consciousness can put itself together– even some animals. But some people can control that consciously too– they’re the ones who make houses and landscapes. Most people eventually learn to at least consciously change themselves, even if just a bit. After all, you know enough about yourself to recreate yourself a few years ago, right?”
“I guess…” I said. “Does that mean there are no old people in the afterlife?”
“Not really.” He grinned. “And even if you can’t change yourself, you could always get a builder to, for a certain price.”
“And if I don’t,” I said. “I’ll just stay like this? Does that means I don’t need food or– or air or anything?”
His grin widened, his teeth as white as the sand. His hazel eyes seemed greener against the strange sky and were lit up like I had just said the greatest thing in the world. I took that as a “no, of course not! Isn’t being dead fun?”
“But wait,” I said, another thought ocurring to me. “Why am I waterproof?”
His grin turned to amused confusion as his eyebrows wrinkled together. “Are you now?” he asked. Very amused confusion, as his voice shook with restrained mirth.
“Well, yeah. Not even my clothes get wet– are you laughing at me?”
“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out behind snickers, his shoulders quivering. “It’s just–” More laughter. “You’re so serious about how everything should go and– and–” He was holding his sides now. “You messed up on yourself.”
He was completely overcome then, and we had to stop walking as he bent over himself, clutching his stomach and laughing loudly.
“It’s not funny,” I said dully. He recovered himself and looked me in the eyes.
“Sure it is,” he said and we continued walking. “You refuse to see gates, but you forgot absorbancy, and for some reason you have a dirty towel on your head. That’s hilarious.”
A dark shape appeared on the horizon. Mariano said something about it being a bus stop, then attempted to engage me in a conversation about interesting people on public transports. The only story I had to offer was about the woman who had driven the elementary school bus and had decided my brother Logan was named Joseph Patrick.
A few minutes later the vague shape began to take form. It was a huge bulk of something organically soft and mushy, festering in the bright sun. It was mostly dark gray, but as we approached, I began to make out patches of pink with something white squirming and twisting within them.
Mariano fell silent and took me to stand several yards away from it, turning his back to it uncomfortably. I gawked up at it.
It was a whale. A whale. It was rotting slowly in the heat– giant, snakelike maggots wormed and curled their way through its flesh. Around it, the sky green wavering in the heat, just like the sea, somewhere tropical and warm and beautiful. And here was a whale, beached and dying and defying the natural beauty of the world. It was art. Yet– no– that didn’t make sense, objectively.
I sighed theatrically. “I suppose I should just give up asking at this point,” I said. Mariano made a queasy noise in the back of his throat and took a few steps further away from the whale.
We stood there for a while, waiting for the mysterious bus Mariano had mentioned. He stayed silent and stared down at his feet. I watched the maggot-worms burrow in the whale flesh for a while, but maggot-worms can only be interesting for so long.
“I makes me sort of sad,” I said.
Mariano glanced up at me. “What does?”
“This place…” I gestured vaguely around us. “It’s so pretty, and someone spent a long time making it, thinking about it, but then they just left it.”
Mariano’s eyes flickered over to the whale, and managed to arranged his face into a smile with noticable difficulty. “You think a rotting whale is pretty?”
“Well, not that,” I said. “But this whole scene– the desert, I mean– it’s sort of peaceful. But it’s sad because it’s empty.”
“Aside from the whale.”
I let out a short, hallow laugh. “Yes, aside from the whale. Why would someone create this beautiful landscape and then just leave it alone?”
Mariano shrugged and firmly turned away from the whale once again. “They probably moved on to something new. Who knows how old this place is?”
“But it obviously meant something to them if they went to all this trouble and finished!” I answered. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering, but obviously Mariano wasn’t getting it. “And then it was abandonned…” It was made beautiful and then abandonned with a whale carcus in the middle. My mind reeled for a few moments with artistic sounding notions: rebellion, counterculture, negative space– something like that?
But in the end Mariano was probably right: they got bored and gave up. It was the most reasonable explanation, anyway. So I moved on to another thought:
“There are billions of dead people– why haven’t we seen anyone else here?”
Mariano offered what I was sure was calculated to be the most unhelpful answer: “Obviously the attraction of decaying desert-whales was lost on the general public.”
I looked back at the whale. It probably didn’t mean anything. I told myself I should stop trying to impose significance where there was none.
Low rumbles eached our ears. In a whirl of white sand, our ride appeared. Mariano was handing me in before it even came to a complete stop.
“This is a stage coach,” I observed as Mariano pushes me up the step.
“Yes,” he said, and we sat down across from two dark men wearing nothing but loin cloths.
“You said ‘bus.’”
“Coaches are buses, didn’t you know?”
The compartment was dim and so small our knees brushed the two men sitting across from us. Mariano made a few attempts at friendly conversation, but they didn’t seem very impressed with him. I pushed back the thin curtain– oxblood, to match the seats– and stuck my head out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ebony horses pulling the conductorless carriage. They were the first animals I’d seen since dying.
I sat back down. The man across from me seemed nonplussed. “Are they built?” I asked Mariano. “The horses, I mean.”
“Yeah,” he said. “An actual horse would need a driver, you know?”
I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard not to bump my knees into anyone else. Mariano slumped against the side of the coach, angling his face so he could watch the scenery through the crack between the curtain and the window. I imagined the world changing like flipping through television channels: click! a desert; click! an ocean; click! the Himalayas. I wanted to look outside but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of possibly transporting us to the bottom of Lake Victoria or somesuch nonsense.
Eventually the coach stopped and we got off, though I didn’t understand how it knew we wanted to get off at this particular location. I forgot to ask when I saw our new surroundings.
It was a beach, as had been promised. There were all the usual furnishings of a beach: palm trees, exotic and bright flowers, sand. But the sand was black; sea shells of every color dotted it, all of the smooth and whole. The sea was a fiery orangey red, and instead of flow and ebb of the sea, it oozed and pooled and bubbled. On an island further out, a mountain slowly poured more of the lava-sea into the ocean. “Exotic” indeed.
Mariano fished the scrap of paper we’d stolen from the library out of his pocket. He studied it, then asked the air somewhere above his head, “Number twelve?”
A palm tree bent over, stretched out its fronds and grew itself into a small house with a wraparound pourch. The walls were the exact texture of the tree it had come from, as if someone has unrolled the bark from the trunk and wrapped the house like a birthday present. The roof was constructed from waxy green palm leaves.
A man leaned out the window and swore at us. He was young– probably in his midtwenties. His light hair was combed back and his face sported a more masculine version of my mother’s nose.
“And just who do you think you are?” he yelled, sneering.
“I’m Juniper Gard,” I said. “I think I’m your granddaughter.”
He stared, motionless for a few moments, then tripped over himself openning the door for us. He swore again and said, “You’re so young.”
He had us sit down around his dinner table and asked for my life story. I told him Mom had a degree in French but worked part-time in a bakery. I told him about my father and brothers. I told him how I died.
When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “Laurie must be crushed.” I stared down at my hands solemnly. Death had been an adventure so far, and I felt fine so far, but Mom had no way of knowing that. All she would know was that I’d died of head trauma or somesuch thing and that I’d never come home again. And, worst of all, the whole family wouldn’t be able to get together again for what was hopefully a long, long time.
And maybe Mom would think it would be never. And I couldn’t imagine how that must feel.
We were silent for a few moments after that statement, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Then Grandpa– Barry, I guessed I should call him, since he didn’t look much older than me– turned to Mariano.
“And what exactly are you doing here?”
Mariano brightened. “I’m Mariano,” he said, holding out his hand. Barry looked at it like he wasn’t quite sure what it was doing there. Still smiling, Mariano retracted it and kept going, “I’m just helping Juniper get adjusted. I can leave her here now, though, can’t I?”
Barry didn’t answer, but he narrowed his eyes suspiously. I sensed a lot of tension between them, but I wasn’t sure why. Nervously, I cleared my thought.
“But I’ll still be able to see you, right?” They both turned and stared at me in disbelief. Barry seemed slightly outraged. Perhaps he had some old fashion prejudice against young women squandering time with flippant males. “I–I mean,” I stuttered, “I don’t exactly have any friends here, and I’d be nice to know people my age.” I paused. “Unless you died a long time and are really fifty or something.”
Barry’s face settled into a small frown as I raised my eyebrows expectantly at Mariano.
“Not that long ago…” he said in a small voice. Then he abruptly sat up straight and waved at the wall behind me. “Hello! You must be Mrs. Palmer.”
I frowned and turned around. My maternal grandmother was still alive and well.
The woman leaning casually against the doorframe was gorgeous. She tall but delicate, with a slim figure and smooth face. Her auburn hair hung loosely around her waist, and she was sizing me up with honey brown eyes.
“Ah, Juniper…” Barry said, suddenly sounding nervous. “This is Serenity. She’s my, ah…”
“Death partner,” Serenity finished, arching an eyebrow at my grandfather. “Is this another relative, Barry?”
Barry started to open his mouth to answer, but I cut him off. “But you’re married,” I accused.
“I– not here I’m not,” Barry protested. He cursed again.
I scowled. “Grandma is still in love with you,” I said hotly. “She talks about you all the time, how handsome and gentle you are– how she misses you every day. She still wears her wedding ring, did you know that?” I stood up, digging my finger nails into my palms. Keep them still, I told myself. “It’s her prized posession because you gave it to her, and she vowed to love you forever, and she still does and you– you–”
During my speech Barry’s face moved from torn to hard, his mouth set in a grim line as he kept eye contact with me.
“Junie,” he said. “You don’t understand–”
“I think I do,” I snapped, then pushed roughly past Serenity and ran out of the house.
Seashells were crushed under my tennis shoes as I ran acroos the beach. I sat down at the shore, pulled my knees to my chest, and set about braiding my hair.
Not for the first time, I wished my hair was longer and thicker so I could do more with it. Braiding was theraputic: when I felt like I was losing control of my life, I needed to do something with my hands or else feel useless, and braiding hair was better than scratching up my skin. But my hair was naturally thin, and with a large portion of my head missing, it was even more so. I ran out of strands to braid quickly, and the urge to start ripping it out swelled within me. How could he do this? How could he be so disloyal to someone who loved him so much?
I took a deep breath and ordered my hands to disentangle themselves from my hair. I started rubbing my knees.
Juniper Marie Gard, I remember my mother saying to me, You are not a baby anymore. Stop being such a drama queen.
I stretched out my legs. The lava-sea lapped against my feet and ankles, feeling like bathwater. Since I was apparently water proof, I stood up and waded out to my waist.
Love doesn’t have to symmetrical, I reminded myself. No matter how much you dedicate yourself to someone, you can’t make them love you back. Barry probably had loved his wife in life, but now he was dead and things had changed. Finding a new love was normal. It was human.
I just…
Something sharp closed around my leg and pulled me under and started zipping me away. I screamed and my mouth filled with lava-water.
I didn’t need to breathe, and while my leg hurt and it wasn’t unbarable, so I wasn’t as panicked as I might have been under normal circumstances. I openned my eyes but all I saw was a wall of smoldering fire.
I probably should have expected something to attack me in an omninous sea of lava, like an angry sea turtle or a leviathon. I tried to kick whatever was holding onto me with my free leg, but when my foot made contact with something smooth but firm, the thing stopped swimming and started flailing me around. My back crashed against something rocky and I tried to pull my foot away, but the thing held on tight and I could feel my jeans and skin ripping.
I moaned in pain, but the sound was lost in the lava-water. I kicked some more at the thing and tried to catch a hold of the rocky bottom with my hands. The fear that maybe I’d be trapped like this forever and it was all because I was a silly drama queen who couldn’t deal with normal human occurrences poked at the back of my mind.
There current of the lava-water around me changed and the thing let go. A hand grabbed my forearm and pulled me up.
I started at Mariano, lava-water slowly dripping from my face. He was holding my pipe.
“You left this on the table,” he said. “I saw you go under, so I followed the splashing and ran after you… I guess I’m pretty lucky I didn’t accidently smack you with the pipe.”
He held out the pipe to me and I took it. “Minerva, I love you,” I said to it. Then a joked weakly, “And I guess I’m grateful to Mariano too, for saving me from and angry seaturtle.”
“An angry what?” Mariano asked, confused. We started back toward the shore. It was now pretty far away, but the lava-water appeared to be uniformly shallow. “You were attacked by a shark…”
“How uncreative,” I muttered. A shark, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Who in their right minds puts a shark in a sea of lava?”
Mariano shrugged. “It’s a sea of lava; what else are you going to put in it? Besides, it’s just a security system.” He explained I needed to be a resident or registered guest to go swimming. Security systems here were quite frightening, I thought, remembering the library.
I decided that if I ever got my own home here, I would have a lava moat with angry sea turtles. “And, like, gollums or something,” I explained to Mariano. He laughed.
“Feeling better, then?” He asked.
I stopped walking. We were almost to the shore and the lava-sea was only knee-deep. “I guess.” I sighed. “I just– I just wasn’t expecting that, and… I mean… I should have– it’s perfectly reasonable to find someone else when you’ve been separated for so long–”
“Juniper,” Mariano said quietly. “It’s okay to be upset.”
No, no it wasn’t, because it was reasonable, and I shouldn’t go villainizing family like that.
“I don’t think I can stay here,” I said. “Not right now. I need to get used to the idea.”
Mariano nodded. “I understand. But at least stay the night. Serenity invited us to dinner.”
I wasn’t aware there was enough of a coherent, linear system of time here to have dinner and guest spending the night. Mariano confirmed this as we meandered back to the house, having come on shore a good distance down the beach from it.
“Time is a man-made concept,” he said. “And it’s based on the rotation of the earth, so it stays consistent. Here? Not so much. People go about their business and dub particular moments ‘noon’ or ‘time to sleep’ at whim. How time runs relative to the living world is complicated and doesn’t really make much sense. It seems to be an average how much time everyone thinks has passed. Once a day took twelve years here, but 1996 passed in about forty minutes.” He paused. “We think.”
When, we got back to the house, Serenity made a big fuss about my leg. The bottom of my right pantleg was torn to pieces, and while I wasn’t actually bleeding, there were large pink indentations in my lower calf.
“Poor dear!” she said, and forced skirt and and mug of hot chocolate into my hands. I dutifully drank the chocolate, even though the weather was too warm for it, but politely declined the skirt.
“But your pants are ruined,” Serenity protested, refusing to take the skirt back from me. “I understand if you don’t like skirts, but I don’t think any of my pants will fit you…”
“No, no,” I reassured. “I’m really grateful for the offer, but my jeans are special to me.”
“Then take them with you,” she said. “You can get them repaired easily, but you’d just look silly walking around with them as-is.”
I didn’t know how to argue with that. I was trying really hard to stop being silly, so I changed into the skirt and my lucky jeans went into a canvas bag along with my towel and pipe.
The meal haphazardly designated as dinner was filled with awkward conversation. Serenity wanted to know about her partner’s living family, but as nice as she’d been to me, I felt uncomfortable talking about them with her and only gave vague answers to her queries. That strange tension between Mariano and Barry remained, and neither of them said much.
After dinner, Serenity showed me the spare bedroom and Barry very bluntly told Mariano, “You are under no circumstances sleeping under the same roof as my granddaughter.”
I thought this was hilariously old fashioned, but Mariano looked so forlorn as he marched out of the house I didn’t say anything.
After we’d all said goodnight, I climbed out my bedroom window and found Mariano sitting under a tree on the beach. At some point the sun had set and the seashells glistened in the moonlight.
“What’s up?” I asked and joined him.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I replied, blinking. “Serenity’s a sweetheart, but you saw how awkward we all were at dinner.”
“Where will you go?” he said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re my peer advisor– advise me.”
He didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared at the orange sea. “You can come with me,” he said finally. “Stay with the oragnization for a while. We could find you a job– what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said and leaned against the tree.
“Well, what did you want to do when you were alive?”
“Uh… finish high school?” I tried.
Mariano chuckled. “Haven’t given it much thought, have you?”
“No?” I suddenly felt silly and childish– I should have said something ambitious like defense attorney or pediatric cardiologist or professional figure skater. In truth I spent too much time imaging myself doing completely unrealistic things like DERP DERP DERP. My hands went to rub my knees, but I wasn’t wearing my lucky jeans anymore.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said. I picked up a shell and started fiddling with it, and he went back to staring at the lava-sea. Then he said, so softly I nearly missed, “I wanted to be a counselor.”
I put the shell down. “Like a shrink?” I asked.
“I wanted to work at a school,” he said. “But I guess that would be good too. I just wanted to help people.”
“Well, I think you’re doing a pretty good here,” I said brightly.
“Thanks,” he said, and he looked so sincerely thankful I didn’t know what to say.
The next morning, Barry pulled me aside while Serenity started on breakfast.
“I don’t like you hanging out with that boy,” he said.
“What’s wrong with Mariano?” I asked. “Don’t like your newly dead baby girl hanging with older boys?” I teasingly prodded him in the shoulder. He swore.
“I’m serious, Junie,” he said, not a hint of amusement in his voice. “I don’t want you to go with him. I don’t think he’s trustworthy.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled. “He’s my peer advisor. He saved me from a security shark yesterday. Is there something wrong with the organization he works for?”
“It’s the not ‘peer advisor’ part that’s the problem,” Barry said. He leaned toward me and said in a hushed whisper, “That boy is from the wrong sort.”
“The wrong sort?” I repeated. If there was nothing wrong with the peer advisor organization, then why shouldn’t I trust Mariano? He had been helpful, he’d gotten me here, he’d saved me.
“You know his… background,” Barry said. “I’ve met his type, and I don’t trust them.”
Had I been a wall, and had his words been a wrecking ball, I would have been completely destroyed. Really? That’s why he hated Mariano?
“What’s wrong with you?” I hissed. “Who cares where he or his family is from? He’s a person, and he deserves to be treated like one.”
I stomped away, back to the guest room. Barry called after me but I ignored him. I grabbed the canvas bag I’d left on the bed and swung it over my shoulder. I left, letting the door slam behind me.
“I know Grandma was really in love with you now,” I yelled at him as I stormed through the living room toward the front door. He was still in the corner, wringing his hands. Serenity watched me from the kitchen, startled. “I know because she never mentioned your sailor mouth or your stupid, unfounded prejudices.” I threw him the most furious glare I could muster. “Thanks for all your help, Serenity,” I said, and walked out onto the beach.
I approached the nearest palm tree and kicked it as hard as I could, holding in a scream. I had no words for the sheer outrage I felt toward my grandfather. I kicked the tree again and set about yanking at my hair. That stupid, ignorant, racist–
“Juniper?” Mariano caught my wrists, his face horrified. “What are you doing?”
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
2. I think I'm going to rework the party scene and move it somewhere else. Or... I don't know. I need to think of wtf the point of that scene was. (There IS a point! ...I think)
3. I didn't proof read OR spell check this. I also didn't bother to edit in the italics for blogspot. Have... fun?
4. Last time, Juniper and Mariano had just escaped a demon library where some famous literary quotes attacked them...
--
The librarian appeared in the glass door on the oppsoite side of the room, as quickly and unexpectantly as dry lightning. He face was blank and her frail, creaking arms pushed against the bar. Mariano was at my side immediately.
“Yes, I think we should leave.”
In my rush outside and down the steps, I tripped over the decorative corpse’s foot and ended up on my hands and knees on the sidewalk. Jagged little pieces of the crumbling sidewalk cut into my palms. Except that the sidewalk was perfectly in tact, and what I had assumed was gravel from disrepair was gravel at all.
Mariano held out a hand to me. I stared up at him, aghast. I grabbed a handful of the white pieces covering the sidewalk.
“These are teeth,” I said, dropping a couple into his outstretched hand.
As soon as the words left my mouth, he was off the sidewalk and in the middle of the asphalt street, rubbing his hands on his pants as if I’d contaminated them.
“What kind of a sick place is this?” he moaned. I stood up and stepped off the sidewalk as well. “What happened to your evil clowns and undead pirates?”
He kept mumbling about the teeth and the liver-eating hawk and the library’s security system as he pried open a manhole and tossed the metal disc aside. I watched him curiously and began to ask what exactly was so fascinating down there, but the jerk had the nerve to push me into the dark little hole.
I belly flopped face down into some sort of liquid and assumed I’d ended up back in that sewer, but it smelled oddly of grapes. My whole front tingled from the impact, and a body spashed down beside me. I sloshed around and found a smooth surface with my feet and stood up. I found myself next to Mariano in a foutain filled with some sort of bright purple grape beverage.
The fountain was a glass basin the size of a small swimming pool, set in the middle of what I could only liken to a ballroom. The spouts of grape soda from the middle of the fountain caught the light from a wall made entirely of glass, and the ceiling several stories above us boasted an ornate crystal chandelier. From the top of a curving marble staircase, a man was yelling things at us.
“Why are you here?” he screamed, tugging at his thick black beard. “I had the skylights replaced! They said this would stop happening!”
“Hello!” Mariano waved merrily. I started to climb out of the fountain, dripping purple onto the tiled floor, but he stayed where he was, as if he didn’t mind sticky purple liquid seeping into his shoes. “I think the gate is somewhere in the air, not your ceiling!” He grinned at the man, who started down the stairs, wrining his hands as he went.
“I’m hosting a party in a bit,” he said. “And you’ve ruined the refreshment.”
I was staring down at my legs. The “refreshment” formed into little dew drops and rolled right off my jeans and shoes, as if I was waterproof. Mariano launched into a speech about something vaguely related to parties.
“I hope you plan on cleaning this mess up,” the bearded man said in a high pitch, interrupting Mariano, and I looked up guiltily from my puddle of purple.
“Do you have some um… papel towels?” I asked. Mariano lifted on leg out of the foutain and let the liquid drip back down into to, balancing himself easily on one leg. He stepped out with his now dry leg and let the other one drip clean over the fountain, effectively keeping the marble tiles spotless. Curse him.
“I don’t keep any of that rubbish,” The bearded man said, bustling over to me. “Go check check the linen closet, down that hall, second door on the left.” And he pushed me toward an open doorway. I obediently scampered over to it, listening to him round on Mariano with demands about getting that “blasted metal hole” removed.
The linen closet had a shelf stuffed with the fanciest towels I had ever seen. I hadn’t realize realized towels could be fancy before– but there they were, soft and monogramed and whiter than a dentist’s smile. I picked the one I thought looked the least elegant and brought it back to the ridiculous-sized room, where the bearded man was gesturing madly at the fountain to Mariano.
“What are you doing?” The man yelled when he saw me, and I exchanged a look with Mariano, who looked just as baffled as I was. “We don’t use the good linens on floors! Here, let’s get you a mop while your friend drains and refills the fountain.”
Next thing I knew, the man was dragging me out another door and down another hallway, which was decorated with a large mural of people lounging about in the nude. He halted before a door, withdrew a mop from behind it and shoved it into my free hand, as I was still clutching the towel.
“Um,” I said politely.
“Good gracious,” he said, blinking at me. “What happened to your head?”
“Oh, uh, I’m new,” I said, and he nodded. I was as amazed at the nonchalance of his acceptance of the hole in my head as I was that he’d taken so long to notice it. The man started tugging at his beard again. I belated realized I no longer had Minerva in my hands– the pipe must be in the fountain still. I’d have to ask Mariano to fish it out for me.
“They’ll be here any minute, would you mind waiting?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking he meant for me to wait while he left and did something prepatory in relation to his guests. Instead, I was was dragged into a kitchen large enough to keep a very large restaurant full of starving tigers happy. The counters were lined with trays of hor d’oeuvres. The man offered a tray of carefully arranged bite-sized quisches to me.
“Make sure you sirculate the garden as well,” he said. I tossed the towel over my shoulder and awkwardly took the tray in one hand. My wrist immediately began to ache in complaint. The man took another tray and hurried back toward the ballroom. I followed him him at a much slower pace, careful not to spill the quisches.
Mariano sat on the edge of the fountain, which was now spewing orange soda. He had Minerva in one hand. The bearde man thurst the tray in his face and Mariano took it in confusion.
“What’s this for?” He asked, peering down at the little plates of what looked like toast slathered with an orange paste and artistically top with some type of greenery.
“For serving to guests, of course,” the man snapped. “Make sure you circle the gardens too. Here they come!”
A horn sounded, and I jumped in surprise, sending the quisches sliding dangerously to one side of the plate. The was followed by some very relaxed sounding piano notes, from some unknown source but that seemed to permeate the entirity of the room, and the doors at the top of the stairs flung open. Laughing people dressed in brightly colored suits and hoop skirts and veils and ruffles poured in, men polishing watches and women hiding their mouths behind feather fans. I gawked and wondered why these people were being served orange soda of all things. They spilled over the staircases and flooded the room, easily bunching together in groups of four or five and circling up like chatty teenagers.
“Perfect!” the bearded man cried. “They are in much better arrangement than last time.” He marched off in the crowd.
“Is this normal?” I asked.
“Not at all,” Mariano answered. “Then again, nothing here really is. Want to check the party out?”
We left the trays sitting on the floor next to the fountain and I leaned the mop against it and folded the towel on the side. I put it down, looked at it, looked at the way the orange soda was fizzing up and sending little droplets everywhere, looked at how the towel was still perfectly and pristinely white, and then picked up the towel again and redrapped it over my shoulder. Mariano smiling teasingly in that way that sort of made me want to punch him in the face, but he didn’t actually say anything except to offer Minerva back to me, so he escaped my wrath. We went wondering about the room. No one seemd to notice us and I stared unashamedly.
“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
All the women looked the same. Different colored and cut dresses, different complexions, different hairstyles, but there was soemthing about all the sharp angles of their faces and easy, painted smiles that carried from one to the next. The men were just as bad, all strong-jawed and clean-shaven and standing with an easy but refined posture. Their colorful costumes stuck out sharply against the white marble room, but they all seem to match it perfectly in manner and mood. None of them looked at us as we passed by.
I followed Mariano’s back as he weaved around the guests, looking them up and down as they passed. No one seemed to notice his scrutiny. One woman burst into clear, purposeful laughter, as if she wasn’t laughing so much as saying “Here, look, I have found this funny, let me show you.”
“Well isn’t that delightful! Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
I stopped and stared. Mariano disappeared behind a group of gentlemen chatting about something which amused them enough to be animated, but not so animated as to seem course.
“Excuse me,” I said, timidly tapping the woman on the shoulder. “What did you say?” She didn’t make the slightest reaction.
“She had bought them in August, but she didn’t have well enough an excuse to wear them till October…” A woman with thick indigo skirts done up with lace of the same color was speaking and her carefully scupted curls bounced and she related her story through such a wide smile I could see all of her perfect teeth.
“Excuse me,” I tried again, louder. The woman in indigo kept going, and a man in an emerald suit made a humorous comment. Everyone tittered.
“Oh, Charlotte,” said the first woman again, “you do always have the best anecdotes. Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.”
“She bought them in August…”
I backed away and then craned my head around for Mariano. He was nowhere to be seen. I took a few steps over toward the edge of the room, inching along on tip-toe and hoping to catch a glimpse of his curly hair among the flattened and combed heads of the other men.
“Do tell Mr. Gordon that one about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves…”
This time it was from another group, and a dark woman in an auburn dress with her hair pulled back in a complicated braid started on about buying gloves in August. I started walking faster. What was with this place?
I found the foggy glass doors outside, leading to the garden the bearded man had wanted me to make sure I circulated with the quische platter. The room suddenly seemed hot and muggy, so I pushed them open and wandered wide-eyed into the garden.
It was night here. The moon was full and bright and too close, like a romance movie or a painting, and the stars managed to arrange themselves into recognizable mosiacs– here a group of twinkling dots that formed the silhouette of a crab, there a bear, a woman. I would have spent more time gawking up at it, except that the garden was filled with enough flowers to match the guests inside, and little sparkling and glowing bubbles were drifting about in the air. Not soap bubbles, mind you– more like if you blew a bubble of chewing gum, but your gum was glittery and emitted a soft lavenderish light and bobbed along like a bouy. I suddenly had the need to know if they would pop like a soap bubble or collapse like a gum bubble if I thouched one, or maybe they were hard like marbles, or soft but firm like the bouncy balls you bought from machines for a quarter. I tried to grab one, but it just slipped through the gaps of my fingers. I tried again and again without much more results.
I stuck Minerva under my arm and cupped my hands together and went chasing after bubbles like that, dodging around overgrown plants on the tiny cobblestone paths of the garden. They still seemed to get through the crack in my fingers though, as if they somehow changed their form when my hand covered them, sifted through like smoke and then reappeared as a tiny glowing bubble before my mind could process what was happening.
Somehow as I was snatching at air, the towel slipped from my shoulder and landed on the ground, right on the edge of the path and half splayed across the muddy flower bed. I stared down at it in horror, having forgotten the bubbles. I picked up the towel and tried to brush it off, but the deed had been done– it was no longer white and would never been as white as it had once been. Frowning, I looked aound for a way I could get rid of it. I thought about hiding it in a rosebush, but can you imagine being a gardener and then finding a random towel in your rosebush? That would just be ridiculous.
Not that chasing floating glitter-bubbles wasn’t, I scolded myself and hurried back into the building. From the outside, it looked like a typical ivy-covered mansion– warm beige stones, three stories high and boasted complicated swoops in the red-tiled roof. Inside, the party was exactly as I had left it.
“Oh, Charlotte…”
I wondered who Charlotte really was.
Crossing the room and passing the fountain, I accidently bumped into a man in a gaudy scarlet suite, and he in turn elbowed the woman he was standing next quite hard, and she fumbled a bit on her heels but probably wouldn’t have fallen if not for the fact that no one had bothered to clean up the grape soda I’d dripped on the floor. She tumbled to the ground, and as I dropped Minerva and knelt down to help her, her conversation partner went on talking about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.
“Are you alright?” I asked and offered her my hand. She tittered at something about Mrs. Dover and smiled chattily at the ceiling from where she was laying in a puddle of purple on her back. The conversation of her little group continued as normal.
I tried to pull her up by her arm, but she just slumped back down on the floor, smiling and giggling at the right places as her friends went on blabbering about silk gloves. I thought about trying to clean her up, but the towel wasn’t for grape soda, it was so clean and fancy and pure, but I had already ruined it, so… I pulled the towel off my shoulder and tried to clean up the area around her so her pretty dress wouldn’t be too stained with grape soda and not seeing anything else to do, I walked stiff-legged away, Minerva in one hand and the brown-and-purple soiled towel in the other.
I found Mariano again, hands in pockets and conversing with the bearded man, who looked quite cross and rather short and unextraordinary compared to the glamour of the strange, beautifully dressed people who flanked either side of him, smiles set as if they’d been paused in the middle of a clever anecdote about Mrs. Dover’s new silk gloves.
“It’s not so much that I think it’s wrong,” Mariano was saying, “so much as I think you’d have more fun with real people, you know? You can line all these guys up, and you can say they’re your friends and you can say that this is Charlotte, she’s twenty three and likes tennis and picnics, but you’re not really friends with them, are you?”
The man started yanking on his beard with such irritated force I thought he might pull it off all together. I came to stand at Mariano’s shoulder.
“I would bid you to know,” said the man, “that in life I had in fact maintain several friendships without personal acquaintance of the other, through an exchange of written correspondance, and they have been just as fulfilling– if not more– as any I might have experienced in flesh.”
“Well, yeah,” Mariano answered, “But you were actually talking to those people, in a manner of speaking. Exchanging ideas and jokes and what not. This people– you don’t know them. They’re not even real.”
The man huffed and twisted his beard in his hand. “People here are too wrapped up in themselves, or else they are too different from what I’d presume good company. I’d rather have friends who fit perfectly into what I see of the world. They cannot argue with me, or insult or betray me, and they are always the exact type of company I enjoy, polite and well-groomed, and I find their conversation agreeable.”
“Well, that’s the fun of friendship, isn’t it?” asked Mariano. “To be different people?”
The man snorted. “Different, yes, but not so much. I lived next to an Indian family for a number of years, and they were always cooking something or other, and the smell was so spicy it would burn your eyes as you walked by the house. Much better to stay with like-minded people who enjoy a decent meal, I think.”
“I like Indian food,” I said. The man turned his attention on me and stared as if I’d just remarked on the weather in the middle of a philosophical debate. “And I’d rather have burning eyes than listen to the same conversation over and over again. Surely you can find someone with more interesting stories to tell.”
“I would ask you of all people not to judge my social relations,” the man sneered, “as I have refrained from judging your discourtesy and generally coarse behavior. I am a well-respected man in these parts, and you should count yourself luckily to be privelege to my hospitality.”
Mariano letting out a barking laugh at that.
“Well respected by who? Your pretty imaginery friends?” He said with a mocking sort of smile.
The man turned back to Mariano, a dark glare painted across his face. “They may be synthetic people, but they are here and they are many, and they will support my opinions.”
I felt a dangerous sort of shift in the room, as the light chattering around us stopped and people turn to stare at us, faces frozen right in the middle of whatever they’d been saying. I unconsciously took a step closer to Mariano, who kept his hands in his pockets but seemed to tense and straighten his back. We stared at him for a few tense moments, being stared right back at by hundreds of unsentient eyes.
“Uh,” I said in attampt to break the awkward silence– was this how Mariano felt whenever he opened his mouth? “I, um. Here’s your towel back.”
I held it out to him, in all of its dirty and grape-scented glory. Mariano turned his head and tried to cover up his laughter with a very fake sounding sneeze. The beard man’s face twisted up as if I’d just offered him a very filthy looking toilet seat for breakfast.
“What sort of a joke is this?” He sneered and leaned back from the towel. The people at his sides didn’t make the normal shifts to perserve personal spaces as he backed into them.
“Well– I mean– you didn’t give me anything else to clean the floor up with, and you just left it.” I didn’t feel like I had to explain myself to him, but it was his towel and his ballroom fully of potentially malevalent synthetic people.
“Juniper,” Mariano murmured and took my elbow. He grip tightened on Minerva. “Let’s just go.”
As he led me back through the still ballroom and toward the doors into the garden, the bearded man called after us, “You are the worst waiters I have ever done business with!” As we ducked into the garden, the false people slowly began to reanimate.
“Oh, Charlotte, you do always have the best anecdotes…”
Mariano paused three steps into the garden, taking in the moonlight plants and glitter bubbles floating lazily around in the starlight. He reach for one, but it bounced off his finger tips a drifted away.
I sighed. “Don’t even bother,” I advised.
“Oh well,” he said. “Onward!”
He guided me through the garden and climbed over a back wall, a feat which, after wrapping the disgusting towel around the back of my neck like a scarf, I recreated with much less grace and much more stubbling. It’s not like I’d never cilmbed a fence before; I’d just never climbed a decaying stone wall covered in moss and waxy vines, only to find a brightly lit desert on the other side when I jumped off.
“Huh?” I said, quickly followed by, “What?”
I turned around, expecting to see the jardin wall, but all that was there was the remains of some sort of building. The walls on this side had crumbled to the height of my waist, but the otherside was tall enough to boast the outlines of windows, and a chimney towered above us. The bricks were a dull beige color, and the ones that weren’t scattered in broken patterns across the ground were regularly formed. The desert extended beyond it, flat and white and with a seafoam green horizon. I blinked, looked up to make sure that yes, yes the sky was green, then turned back to Mariano.
“I’m pretty sure it was night on this side too,” I said. “It was dark on the other side of the wall. I saw it.”
He squinted at me like he was trying to analyze my face, or maybe the sun was in his eyes.
“Interesting,” he said.
“What? What’s interesting?”
He shrugged. “When you’re not expecting a gate, you can pass through it. But when you are, you change it so that it fits with what you think should be right. But if you don’t automatically change the gate when you’re not expecting it, that can’t be what you really think, can it?”
I had no way to articulate any feelings I had on that (assuming I understood what he was trying to say, which I don’t think I really did).
“Do you know where we are now?” I asked.
“I think so,” he answered. “I asked that guy where we were, but he didn’t seem so geographically-inclined.”
“Is anyone?” I answered, eyeing the skeleton of the building which apparently contained a mansion and starlit garden. “Does the layout of this place make sense to anyone? Does the timing make sense to anyone?”
“We’re working on it,” Mariano answered vaguely, then led me off in a direction he seemed to pick at random.
As we trudged along, Mariano began to speak more and more animatedly on the usual topics that concerned him, namely anything that did not personally involve himself. The land remained flat, and after we passed out of sight of the old building (too quickly, Mariano observed, adding that “no one can ever seem to get the perspective right”), there was nothing to break the strange green horizon. The sun glinted off the white sand, and for the first time since death I felt uncomfortably warm. I drapped the towel over my head to keep the sun off my face.
“Do dead people get sun burned?” I asked, cutting Mariano off in the middle of a rant about bicycle lanes.
He seemed genuinely puzzled for a few moments, then said, “I don’t think so… I’ve never been.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Have you gotten any tanner?”
He laughed good naturedly. “No. I don’t think I’ve changed at all really. No one does, unless they want to.”
“Unless they want to?” I repeated.
“Well, yes, you’re just a reconstruction of what you think you are, you know? So you’re not going change unless you make a conscious decision.” Whatever facial expression I made in regards to that must have indicated I had no idea what he was talking about, so he attempted to furtehr explain. “When you die, your mind puts you back together according to whatever image you have of yourself.”
“Right,” I said, recalling his earlier explanation of my change of clothes. “And when you apply that to your surroundings– that’s called building, right?”
He bobbed his head from on side to other, as if my answer had merit but was also completely wrong. “Building is putting anything together according to your mind. Anything with some self-consciousness can put itself together– even some animals. But some people can control that consciously too– they’re the ones who make houses and landscapes. Most people eventually learn to at least consciously change themselves, even if just a bit. After all, you know enough about yourself to recreate yourself a few years ago, right?”
“I guess…” I said. “Does that mean there are no old people in the afterlife?”
“Not really.” He grinned. “And even if you can’t change yourself, you could always get a builder to, for a certain price.”
“And if I don’t,” I said. “I’ll just stay like this? Does that means I don’t need food or– or air or anything?”
His grin widened, his teeth as white as the sand. His hazel eyes seemed greener against the strange sky and were lit up like I had just said the greatest thing in the world. I took that as a “no, of course not! Isn’t being dead fun?”
“But wait,” I said, another thought ocurring to me. “Why am I waterproof?”
His grin turned to amused confusion as his eyebrows wrinkled together. “Are you now?” he asked. Very amused confusion, as his voice shook with restrained mirth.
“Well, yeah. Not even my clothes get wet– are you laughing at me?”
“I’m sorry,” he managed to get out behind snickers, his shoulders quivering. “It’s just–” More laughter. “You’re so serious about how everything should go and– and–” He was holding his sides now. “You messed up on yourself.”
He was completely overcome then, and we had to stop walking as he bent over himself, clutching his stomach and laughing loudly.
“It’s not funny,” I said dully. He recovered himself and looked me in the eyes.
“Sure it is,” he said and we continued walking. “You refuse to see gates, but you forgot absorbancy, and for some reason you have a dirty towel on your head. That’s hilarious.”
A dark shape appeared on the horizon. Mariano said something about it being a bus stop, then attempted to engage me in a conversation about interesting people on public transports. The only story I had to offer was about the woman who had driven the elementary school bus and had decided my brother Logan was named Joseph Patrick.
A few minutes later the vague shape began to take form. It was a huge bulk of something organically soft and mushy, festering in the bright sun. It was mostly dark gray, but as we approached, I began to make out patches of pink with something white squirming and twisting within them.
Mariano fell silent and took me to stand several yards away from it, turning his back to it uncomfortably. I gawked up at it.
It was a whale. A whale. It was rotting slowly in the heat– giant, snakelike maggots wormed and curled their way through its flesh. Around it, the sky green wavering in the heat, just like the sea, somewhere tropical and warm and beautiful. And here was a whale, beached and dying and defying the natural beauty of the world. It was art. Yet– no– that didn’t make sense, objectively.
I sighed theatrically. “I suppose I should just give up asking at this point,” I said. Mariano made a queasy noise in the back of his throat and took a few steps further away from the whale.
We stood there for a while, waiting for the mysterious bus Mariano had mentioned. He stayed silent and stared down at his feet. I watched the maggot-worms burrow in the whale flesh for a while, but maggot-worms can only be interesting for so long.
“I makes me sort of sad,” I said.
Mariano glanced up at me. “What does?”
“This place…” I gestured vaguely around us. “It’s so pretty, and someone spent a long time making it, thinking about it, but then they just left it.”
Mariano’s eyes flickered over to the whale, and managed to arranged his face into a smile with noticable difficulty. “You think a rotting whale is pretty?”
“Well, not that,” I said. “But this whole scene– the desert, I mean– it’s sort of peaceful. But it’s sad because it’s empty.”
“Aside from the whale.”
I let out a short, hallow laugh. “Yes, aside from the whale. Why would someone create this beautiful landscape and then just leave it alone?”
Mariano shrugged and firmly turned away from the whale once again. “They probably moved on to something new. Who knows how old this place is?”
“But it obviously meant something to them if they went to all this trouble and finished!” I answered. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering, but obviously Mariano wasn’t getting it. “And then it was abandonned…” It was made beautiful and then abandonned with a whale carcus in the middle. My mind reeled for a few moments with artistic sounding notions: rebellion, counterculture, negative space– something like that?
But in the end Mariano was probably right: they got bored and gave up. It was the most reasonable explanation, anyway. So I moved on to another thought:
“There are billions of dead people– why haven’t we seen anyone else here?”
Mariano offered what I was sure was calculated to be the most unhelpful answer: “Obviously the attraction of decaying desert-whales was lost on the general public.”
I looked back at the whale. It probably didn’t mean anything. I told myself I should stop trying to impose significance where there was none.
Low rumbles eached our ears. In a whirl of white sand, our ride appeared. Mariano was handing me in before it even came to a complete stop.
“This is a stage coach,” I observed as Mariano pushes me up the step.
“Yes,” he said, and we sat down across from two dark men wearing nothing but loin cloths.
“You said ‘bus.’”
“Coaches are buses, didn’t you know?”
The compartment was dim and so small our knees brushed the two men sitting across from us. Mariano made a few attempts at friendly conversation, but they didn’t seem very impressed with him. I pushed back the thin curtain– oxblood, to match the seats– and stuck my head out the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the ebony horses pulling the conductorless carriage. They were the first animals I’d seen since dying.
I sat back down. The man across from me seemed nonplussed. “Are they built?” I asked Mariano. “The horses, I mean.”
“Yeah,” he said. “An actual horse would need a driver, you know?”
I spent the rest of the journey trying very hard not to bump my knees into anyone else. Mariano slumped against the side of the coach, angling his face so he could watch the scenery through the crack between the curtain and the window. I imagined the world changing like flipping through television channels: click! a desert; click! an ocean; click! the Himalayas. I wanted to look outside but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of possibly transporting us to the bottom of Lake Victoria or somesuch nonsense.
Eventually the coach stopped and we got off, though I didn’t understand how it knew we wanted to get off at this particular location. I forgot to ask when I saw our new surroundings.
It was a beach, as had been promised. There were all the usual furnishings of a beach: palm trees, exotic and bright flowers, sand. But the sand was black; sea shells of every color dotted it, all of the smooth and whole. The sea was a fiery orangey red, and instead of flow and ebb of the sea, it oozed and pooled and bubbled. On an island further out, a mountain slowly poured more of the lava-sea into the ocean. “Exotic” indeed.
Mariano fished the scrap of paper we’d stolen from the library out of his pocket. He studied it, then asked the air somewhere above his head, “Number twelve?”
A palm tree bent over, stretched out its fronds and grew itself into a small house with a wraparound pourch. The walls were the exact texture of the tree it had come from, as if someone has unrolled the bark from the trunk and wrapped the house like a birthday present. The roof was constructed from waxy green palm leaves.
A man leaned out the window and swore at us. He was young– probably in his midtwenties. His light hair was combed back and his face sported a more masculine version of my mother’s nose.
“And just who do you think you are?” he yelled, sneering.
“I’m Juniper Gard,” I said. “I think I’m your granddaughter.”
He stared, motionless for a few moments, then tripped over himself openning the door for us. He swore again and said, “You’re so young.”
He had us sit down around his dinner table and asked for my life story. I told him Mom had a degree in French but worked part-time in a bakery. I told him about my father and brothers. I told him how I died.
When I finished, he shook his head slowly. “Laurie must be crushed.” I stared down at my hands solemnly. Death had been an adventure so far, and I felt fine so far, but Mom had no way of knowing that. All she would know was that I’d died of head trauma or somesuch thing and that I’d never come home again. And, worst of all, the whole family wouldn’t be able to get together again for what was hopefully a long, long time.
And maybe Mom would think it would be never. And I couldn’t imagine how that must feel.
We were silent for a few moments after that statement, each of us lost in our own thoughts. Then Grandpa– Barry, I guessed I should call him, since he didn’t look much older than me– turned to Mariano.
“And what exactly are you doing here?”
Mariano brightened. “I’m Mariano,” he said, holding out his hand. Barry looked at it like he wasn’t quite sure what it was doing there. Still smiling, Mariano retracted it and kept going, “I’m just helping Juniper get adjusted. I can leave her here now, though, can’t I?”
Barry didn’t answer, but he narrowed his eyes suspiously. I sensed a lot of tension between them, but I wasn’t sure why. Nervously, I cleared my thought.
“But I’ll still be able to see you, right?” They both turned and stared at me in disbelief. Barry seemed slightly outraged. Perhaps he had some old fashion prejudice against young women squandering time with flippant males. “I–I mean,” I stuttered, “I don’t exactly have any friends here, and I’d be nice to know people my age.” I paused. “Unless you died a long time and are really fifty or something.”
Barry’s face settled into a small frown as I raised my eyebrows expectantly at Mariano.
“Not that long ago…” he said in a small voice. Then he abruptly sat up straight and waved at the wall behind me. “Hello! You must be Mrs. Palmer.”
I frowned and turned around. My maternal grandmother was still alive and well.
The woman leaning casually against the doorframe was gorgeous. She tall but delicate, with a slim figure and smooth face. Her auburn hair hung loosely around her waist, and she was sizing me up with honey brown eyes.
“Ah, Juniper…” Barry said, suddenly sounding nervous. “This is Serenity. She’s my, ah…”
“Death partner,” Serenity finished, arching an eyebrow at my grandfather. “Is this another relative, Barry?”
Barry started to open his mouth to answer, but I cut him off. “But you’re married,” I accused.
“I– not here I’m not,” Barry protested. He cursed again.
I scowled. “Grandma is still in love with you,” I said hotly. “She talks about you all the time, how handsome and gentle you are– how she misses you every day. She still wears her wedding ring, did you know that?” I stood up, digging my finger nails into my palms. Keep them still, I told myself. “It’s her prized posession because you gave it to her, and she vowed to love you forever, and she still does and you– you–”
During my speech Barry’s face moved from torn to hard, his mouth set in a grim line as he kept eye contact with me.
“Junie,” he said. “You don’t understand–”
“I think I do,” I snapped, then pushed roughly past Serenity and ran out of the house.
Seashells were crushed under my tennis shoes as I ran acroos the beach. I sat down at the shore, pulled my knees to my chest, and set about braiding my hair.
Not for the first time, I wished my hair was longer and thicker so I could do more with it. Braiding was theraputic: when I felt like I was losing control of my life, I needed to do something with my hands or else feel useless, and braiding hair was better than scratching up my skin. But my hair was naturally thin, and with a large portion of my head missing, it was even more so. I ran out of strands to braid quickly, and the urge to start ripping it out swelled within me. How could he do this? How could he be so disloyal to someone who loved him so much?
I took a deep breath and ordered my hands to disentangle themselves from my hair. I started rubbing my knees.
Juniper Marie Gard, I remember my mother saying to me, You are not a baby anymore. Stop being such a drama queen.
I stretched out my legs. The lava-sea lapped against my feet and ankles, feeling like bathwater. Since I was apparently water proof, I stood up and waded out to my waist.
Love doesn’t have to symmetrical, I reminded myself. No matter how much you dedicate yourself to someone, you can’t make them love you back. Barry probably had loved his wife in life, but now he was dead and things had changed. Finding a new love was normal. It was human.
I just…
Something sharp closed around my leg and pulled me under and started zipping me away. I screamed and my mouth filled with lava-water.
I didn’t need to breathe, and while my leg hurt and it wasn’t unbarable, so I wasn’t as panicked as I might have been under normal circumstances. I openned my eyes but all I saw was a wall of smoldering fire.
I probably should have expected something to attack me in an omninous sea of lava, like an angry sea turtle or a leviathon. I tried to kick whatever was holding onto me with my free leg, but when my foot made contact with something smooth but firm, the thing stopped swimming and started flailing me around. My back crashed against something rocky and I tried to pull my foot away, but the thing held on tight and I could feel my jeans and skin ripping.
I moaned in pain, but the sound was lost in the lava-water. I kicked some more at the thing and tried to catch a hold of the rocky bottom with my hands. The fear that maybe I’d be trapped like this forever and it was all because I was a silly drama queen who couldn’t deal with normal human occurrences poked at the back of my mind.
There current of the lava-water around me changed and the thing let go. A hand grabbed my forearm and pulled me up.
I started at Mariano, lava-water slowly dripping from my face. He was holding my pipe.
“You left this on the table,” he said. “I saw you go under, so I followed the splashing and ran after you… I guess I’m pretty lucky I didn’t accidently smack you with the pipe.”
He held out the pipe to me and I took it. “Minerva, I love you,” I said to it. Then a joked weakly, “And I guess I’m grateful to Mariano too, for saving me from and angry seaturtle.”
“An angry what?” Mariano asked, confused. We started back toward the shore. It was now pretty far away, but the lava-water appeared to be uniformly shallow. “You were attacked by a shark…”
“How uncreative,” I muttered. A shark, of course. Why didn’t I think of that? “Who in their right minds puts a shark in a sea of lava?”
Mariano shrugged. “It’s a sea of lava; what else are you going to put in it? Besides, it’s just a security system.” He explained I needed to be a resident or registered guest to go swimming. Security systems here were quite frightening, I thought, remembering the library.
I decided that if I ever got my own home here, I would have a lava moat with angry sea turtles. “And, like, gollums or something,” I explained to Mariano. He laughed.
“Feeling better, then?” He asked.
I stopped walking. We were almost to the shore and the lava-sea was only knee-deep. “I guess.” I sighed. “I just– I just wasn’t expecting that, and… I mean… I should have– it’s perfectly reasonable to find someone else when you’ve been separated for so long–”
“Juniper,” Mariano said quietly. “It’s okay to be upset.”
No, no it wasn’t, because it was reasonable, and I shouldn’t go villainizing family like that.
“I don’t think I can stay here,” I said. “Not right now. I need to get used to the idea.”
Mariano nodded. “I understand. But at least stay the night. Serenity invited us to dinner.”
I wasn’t aware there was enough of a coherent, linear system of time here to have dinner and guest spending the night. Mariano confirmed this as we meandered back to the house, having come on shore a good distance down the beach from it.
“Time is a man-made concept,” he said. “And it’s based on the rotation of the earth, so it stays consistent. Here? Not so much. People go about their business and dub particular moments ‘noon’ or ‘time to sleep’ at whim. How time runs relative to the living world is complicated and doesn’t really make much sense. It seems to be an average how much time everyone thinks has passed. Once a day took twelve years here, but 1996 passed in about forty minutes.” He paused. “We think.”
When, we got back to the house, Serenity made a big fuss about my leg. The bottom of my right pantleg was torn to pieces, and while I wasn’t actually bleeding, there were large pink indentations in my lower calf.
“Poor dear!” she said, and forced skirt and and mug of hot chocolate into my hands. I dutifully drank the chocolate, even though the weather was too warm for it, but politely declined the skirt.
“But your pants are ruined,” Serenity protested, refusing to take the skirt back from me. “I understand if you don’t like skirts, but I don’t think any of my pants will fit you…”
“No, no,” I reassured. “I’m really grateful for the offer, but my jeans are special to me.”
“Then take them with you,” she said. “You can get them repaired easily, but you’d just look silly walking around with them as-is.”
I didn’t know how to argue with that. I was trying really hard to stop being silly, so I changed into the skirt and my lucky jeans went into a canvas bag along with my towel and pipe.
The meal haphazardly designated as dinner was filled with awkward conversation. Serenity wanted to know about her partner’s living family, but as nice as she’d been to me, I felt uncomfortable talking about them with her and only gave vague answers to her queries. That strange tension between Mariano and Barry remained, and neither of them said much.
After dinner, Serenity showed me the spare bedroom and Barry very bluntly told Mariano, “You are under no circumstances sleeping under the same roof as my granddaughter.”
I thought this was hilariously old fashioned, but Mariano looked so forlorn as he marched out of the house I didn’t say anything.
After we’d all said goodnight, I climbed out my bedroom window and found Mariano sitting under a tree on the beach. At some point the sun had set and the seashells glistened in the moonlight.
“What’s up?” I asked and joined him.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I replied, blinking. “Serenity’s a sweetheart, but you saw how awkward we all were at dinner.”
“Where will you go?” he said.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re my peer advisor– advise me.”
He didn’t say anything for a few moments, just stared at the orange sea. “You can come with me,” he said finally. “Stay with the oragnization for a while. We could find you a job– what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said and leaned against the tree.
“Well, what did you want to do when you were alive?”
“Uh… finish high school?” I tried.
Mariano chuckled. “Haven’t given it much thought, have you?”
“No?” I suddenly felt silly and childish– I should have said something ambitious like defense attorney or pediatric cardiologist or professional figure skater. In truth I spent too much time imaging myself doing completely unrealistic things like DERP DERP DERP. My hands went to rub my knees, but I wasn’t wearing my lucky jeans anymore.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said. I picked up a shell and started fiddling with it, and he went back to staring at the lava-sea. Then he said, so softly I nearly missed, “I wanted to be a counselor.”
I put the shell down. “Like a shrink?” I asked.
“I wanted to work at a school,” he said. “But I guess that would be good too. I just wanted to help people.”
“Well, I think you’re doing a pretty good here,” I said brightly.
“Thanks,” he said, and he looked so sincerely thankful I didn’t know what to say.
The next morning, Barry pulled me aside while Serenity started on breakfast.
“I don’t like you hanging out with that boy,” he said.
“What’s wrong with Mariano?” I asked. “Don’t like your newly dead baby girl hanging with older boys?” I teasingly prodded him in the shoulder. He swore.
“I’m serious, Junie,” he said, not a hint of amusement in his voice. “I don’t want you to go with him. I don’t think he’s trustworthy.”
“Why?” I asked, baffled. “He’s my peer advisor. He saved me from a security shark yesterday. Is there something wrong with the organization he works for?”
“It’s the not ‘peer advisor’ part that’s the problem,” Barry said. He leaned toward me and said in a hushed whisper, “That boy is from the wrong sort.”
“The wrong sort?” I repeated. If there was nothing wrong with the peer advisor organization, then why shouldn’t I trust Mariano? He had been helpful, he’d gotten me here, he’d saved me.
“You know his… background,” Barry said. “I’ve met his type, and I don’t trust them.”
Had I been a wall, and had his words been a wrecking ball, I would have been completely destroyed. Really? That’s why he hated Mariano?
“What’s wrong with you?” I hissed. “Who cares where he or his family is from? He’s a person, and he deserves to be treated like one.”
I stomped away, back to the guest room. Barry called after me but I ignored him. I grabbed the canvas bag I’d left on the bed and swung it over my shoulder. I left, letting the door slam behind me.
“I know Grandma was really in love with you now,” I yelled at him as I stormed through the living room toward the front door. He was still in the corner, wringing his hands. Serenity watched me from the kitchen, startled. “I know because she never mentioned your sailor mouth or your stupid, unfounded prejudices.” I threw him the most furious glare I could muster. “Thanks for all your help, Serenity,” I said, and walked out onto the beach.
I approached the nearest palm tree and kicked it as hard as I could, holding in a scream. I had no words for the sheer outrage I felt toward my grandfather. I kicked the tree again and set about yanking at my hair. That stupid, ignorant, racist–
“Juniper?” Mariano caught my wrists, his face horrified. “What are you doing?”
“I– I–” I stuttered. I few strands of hair were caught between my fingers. Mariano slowly pulled my hands away from my head.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said calmly.
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