ext_238129 (![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png)
sassafras28.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
31_days2007-03-10 03:41 pm
sassafras28.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2007-03-10 03:41 pm
[March 10][Original Fiction]:Good For The Soul
Title: Good For The Soul
Day/Theme: March 10. look into their eyes, and you'll see what they know: everybody dies
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13
“Do you want anything?” he asked, and touched the place on his cheek where he’d been cut. It was still a brilliant crimson, but was no longer wet and only ridged faintly. Like Braille, perhaps, or some other raised-up language.
Betty shook her head sharply and folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands under her elbows as if very cold. Eddie shrugged and ordered a small stack of pancakes with syrup on the side. He pulled a stack of orange jam packets towards him and absent-mindedly tore off their paper lids while he waited.
She stared at him at he carefully spread the orange jam on each individual pancake, starting from the middle and studiously pressing outwards. He offered her one, hanging off the end of his fork and she shook her head again, face expressionless.
“What now?” she asked, as he drizzled a precise amount of syrup over the stack. He shrugged.
“We go somewhere else. We need some fresh air, babes.”
She watched him as he munched appreciatively on a soggy triangle of cake and jelly and dark syrup. “Like where?” she asked flatly, he swallowed with difficulty and shrugged again.
“I was thinking somewhere cold, I could do with some cold, how about you?” together, they looked out the diner’s huge windows at the endless, arid expanse of desert, the dust rippling distantly on the horizon, the huge, unknowable blue of the sky.
“Yeah,” she answered softly, “cold.”
“But we can’t go like this,” he pointed out, chasing a stray blog of orange around his sticky plate. There was a long, high mirror over the back of the bar that Betty found faintly unnerving. She was not under the impression that people greatly wanted to watch themselves eat. She stared into it now, and saw her severely foreshortened hair, black with singeing at the ends, the huge bruise coming up on her forehead. It was dark, small and blue now but she knew it was sprawl out green and vomit-yellow. If she were to smile, she knew she would see a small gap where her tooth was missing.
“No,” she said, staring meditatively at the battered face in the mirror, “we can’t go like this.”
“The waitress,” Eddie said quietly, without turning his head away from his plate. Betty watched her out of the corners of her eyes. She was, it was immediately clear, very hung over. Her hair, knotted up on top of her head was greasy and unwashed. Her face was tallow-colored and sullen, she had a ring of pale brown bruises around her bare ankle and when she bent to pick up a dirty plate, Betty could see a little collection of fresh bruises on her upper arm. A deep rich purple they were, and fingerprint shaped.
“She’s not as pretty as Elisabeth,” Betty pointed out, Eddie nodded.
“Elisabeth was a good find,” he agreed, “but we’re in a hurry now.”
“And for you?” Betty asked, casting a careful eye around the sparsely populated diner.
“The boy in the corner booth,” he said, skating a bit of pancake around the syrup-y outside rim of the plate.
“Young,” Betty pursed her lips. The boy in the corner booth was probably still in high school. He was wearing a letterman’s jacket anyway, and had the enviable tall, impenetrable build of young athletes. His eyes were gray and troubled, his hair was very blonde, nearly white. He stared down at his empty plate and rooted his hand around in his pocket.
“Fifteen dollars says he’s got a gun in that pocket,” Eddie whispered in her ear, she smiled for the first time in what felt like a long time.
“You don’t have fifteen dollars,” she teased.
“I won’t need it,” he smiled in that sideways way he had and popped the last of the pancakes into his mouth. She would miss his face.
She touched the waitress’ arm, just with two fingers, as she bent to pick up Eddie’s plate. The woman looked at her and for a moment her hazy eyes focused clear as a knifepoint on her. For just a second, half a second maybe, she was afraid. But this passed very quickly.
As Betty led the waitress to the single bathroom, Eddie followed, and along the way, ruffled the boy in the corner booth’s white hair. His face registered a brief anger as he stood up to follow them.
“Oh, someone was unkind to you,” said Betty later, looking at the sprawled body of the waitress, naked and somehow childlike. “Kick to the ribs,” Betty tisked, touching the angry weal with her bare, painted toe, “cut with…a beer bottle?” she traced the red cuts on the soft inside part of her arms. “Well, I can promise you that no one’s going to cut you up any more,” Betty smiled, the waitress rolled her eyes desperately, drunkenly, helplessly. “That’s a fair trade, right honey?”
“You owe me fifteen dollars!” Eddie said cheerfully from a nearby bathroom stall. Betty didn’t answer, could only concentrate on the slick chill of the cold bathroom tile underneath her, the dull, thrumming ache in her side.
“My name is Laura,” she said, wincing as she slid into the passenger seat of a rust-colored pickup truck.
“I’m Robin,” he answered, and she squinched up her nose. “I know,” he said, and laughed. His new laugh was higher, less sexy and more joyful. She undid her hair, it was stick and heavy against her neck, she had a feeling it would be a pretty color, a clear teak-brown, when she washed. The cuts on her arms had begun to bleed and stick to the inside of her shirt.
Robin rolled the driver’s side window down as they picked up speed, Laura watched her face in the side view mirror. Robin’s white hair shifted and blew about his head as he drove, and he smiled faintly at the horizon. “This isn’t bad,” she said, pursing her beige lips, waggling her dark eyebrows. She reached out to touch Robin’s hair, it was light in her hands, soft as bird’s down. “I could get used to this,” she smiled.
He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close to him. He had a new, soapy smell, and underneath it a familiar animal, dead-leaves scent. He smiled his new smile and pulled her face up to meet his. He tasted like syrup and thick orange jelly.
***
Elisabeth Gardner remembered the flickering sunlight between the blinds in the window of her Kansas City apartment. And so she did not move when the florescent lights above her began to skitter and jump. She remembered the thick, medicinal taste of fifteen or thirty or a hundred and four blue sleeping tablets sliding one after another down her throat, so the bitter, burning vomit sensation in the back of her throat did not disturb her. In the end, it was the noise that woke her and opened up her eyes. The groaning, shuffling, shifting of a fellow human in abject misery.
For a moment she thought only “some drunk,” as she stared at the naked man vomiting spectacularly into a beige toilet. And then there was a great lurching in her own innards. She did not make it to the toilet.
“Jesus,” she muttered miserably, sitting up and shuffling away from the sick. Her face found the cold porcelain of a washbasin and she pressed against it gratefully. It was only then that she registered her surroundings. For a single wild moment, she was sure she was in hell. Apparently her mother and her childhood priest were right about the punishment for suicide, because not even in her wildest dreams had she ever thought that maybe Heaven was a truck stop bathroom.
And she had to be dead right?
“Are we dead?” she asked the naked man, who’s head had almost vanished into the toilet basin.
“I wish,” he muttered, echoing slightly.
Elisabeth took a deep breath, if she was not, in fact, dead, then this whole situation was more complicated than she supposed. She thought she’d be better prepared to deal with it with some clothes on, and she was in luck because someone had left what appeared to be a uniform, neatly folded, in the sink. It was made for a taller, slenderer individual, but as it was basically a smock, she was able to wrestle it on. Looking around, she found the room otherwise bare, except for a rumpled pile of men’s clothing.
“Where are we?” she asked the man, who raised his head wrathfully out of the toilet. He was haggard and handsome and dark-haired, he had a yellow streak of vomit in the corner of his mouth.
“Seriously, do I look like a know…anything? About anything?”
“Aren’t you wondering what you’re doing here? Naked in a truck stop bathroom?” she stepped over to the window and looked out, there was nothing there but endless desert and blue skies. The man shrugged.
“Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, hell, I’m just hoping I don’t end up with chlamydia again.”
“We’re in the desert,” said Elisabeth, who had never seen the desert except once when she was small and her family had gone to the Grand Canyon. All she remembered was red, red, red. The man said nothing to this, and only crawled over to the pile of clothing.
Elisabeth faced herself in the mirror. Her face was bruised and damaged, her hair was shorter…burnt, somehow, it looked. She remember the feeling of sunlight on her closed eyelids, the slick plastic of the pill bottle in her hands. She remembered the face of a woman she’d never met and her voice saying “well, if you’re not using it…”
Elisabeth Gardner opened her eyes.
“I’m going out there,” she told the man on the floor, “to find out what happened.” He nodded, halfway into his jeans, and said nothing. As she opened the door, Elisabeth already knew how the desert sun would feel against her face, burning fierce and red, red, red. She smiled.
Day/Theme: March 10. look into their eyes, and you'll see what they know: everybody dies
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: Original
Rating: PG-13
“Do you want anything?” he asked, and touched the place on his cheek where he’d been cut. It was still a brilliant crimson, but was no longer wet and only ridged faintly. Like Braille, perhaps, or some other raised-up language.
Betty shook her head sharply and folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands under her elbows as if very cold. Eddie shrugged and ordered a small stack of pancakes with syrup on the side. He pulled a stack of orange jam packets towards him and absent-mindedly tore off their paper lids while he waited.
She stared at him at he carefully spread the orange jam on each individual pancake, starting from the middle and studiously pressing outwards. He offered her one, hanging off the end of his fork and she shook her head again, face expressionless.
“What now?” she asked, as he drizzled a precise amount of syrup over the stack. He shrugged.
“We go somewhere else. We need some fresh air, babes.”
She watched him as he munched appreciatively on a soggy triangle of cake and jelly and dark syrup. “Like where?” she asked flatly, he swallowed with difficulty and shrugged again.
“I was thinking somewhere cold, I could do with some cold, how about you?” together, they looked out the diner’s huge windows at the endless, arid expanse of desert, the dust rippling distantly on the horizon, the huge, unknowable blue of the sky.
“Yeah,” she answered softly, “cold.”
“But we can’t go like this,” he pointed out, chasing a stray blog of orange around his sticky plate. There was a long, high mirror over the back of the bar that Betty found faintly unnerving. She was not under the impression that people greatly wanted to watch themselves eat. She stared into it now, and saw her severely foreshortened hair, black with singeing at the ends, the huge bruise coming up on her forehead. It was dark, small and blue now but she knew it was sprawl out green and vomit-yellow. If she were to smile, she knew she would see a small gap where her tooth was missing.
“No,” she said, staring meditatively at the battered face in the mirror, “we can’t go like this.”
“The waitress,” Eddie said quietly, without turning his head away from his plate. Betty watched her out of the corners of her eyes. She was, it was immediately clear, very hung over. Her hair, knotted up on top of her head was greasy and unwashed. Her face was tallow-colored and sullen, she had a ring of pale brown bruises around her bare ankle and when she bent to pick up a dirty plate, Betty could see a little collection of fresh bruises on her upper arm. A deep rich purple they were, and fingerprint shaped.
“She’s not as pretty as Elisabeth,” Betty pointed out, Eddie nodded.
“Elisabeth was a good find,” he agreed, “but we’re in a hurry now.”
“And for you?” Betty asked, casting a careful eye around the sparsely populated diner.
“The boy in the corner booth,” he said, skating a bit of pancake around the syrup-y outside rim of the plate.
“Young,” Betty pursed her lips. The boy in the corner booth was probably still in high school. He was wearing a letterman’s jacket anyway, and had the enviable tall, impenetrable build of young athletes. His eyes were gray and troubled, his hair was very blonde, nearly white. He stared down at his empty plate and rooted his hand around in his pocket.
“Fifteen dollars says he’s got a gun in that pocket,” Eddie whispered in her ear, she smiled for the first time in what felt like a long time.
“You don’t have fifteen dollars,” she teased.
“I won’t need it,” he smiled in that sideways way he had and popped the last of the pancakes into his mouth. She would miss his face.
She touched the waitress’ arm, just with two fingers, as she bent to pick up Eddie’s plate. The woman looked at her and for a moment her hazy eyes focused clear as a knifepoint on her. For just a second, half a second maybe, she was afraid. But this passed very quickly.
As Betty led the waitress to the single bathroom, Eddie followed, and along the way, ruffled the boy in the corner booth’s white hair. His face registered a brief anger as he stood up to follow them.
“Oh, someone was unkind to you,” said Betty later, looking at the sprawled body of the waitress, naked and somehow childlike. “Kick to the ribs,” Betty tisked, touching the angry weal with her bare, painted toe, “cut with…a beer bottle?” she traced the red cuts on the soft inside part of her arms. “Well, I can promise you that no one’s going to cut you up any more,” Betty smiled, the waitress rolled her eyes desperately, drunkenly, helplessly. “That’s a fair trade, right honey?”
“You owe me fifteen dollars!” Eddie said cheerfully from a nearby bathroom stall. Betty didn’t answer, could only concentrate on the slick chill of the cold bathroom tile underneath her, the dull, thrumming ache in her side.
“My name is Laura,” she said, wincing as she slid into the passenger seat of a rust-colored pickup truck.
“I’m Robin,” he answered, and she squinched up her nose. “I know,” he said, and laughed. His new laugh was higher, less sexy and more joyful. She undid her hair, it was stick and heavy against her neck, she had a feeling it would be a pretty color, a clear teak-brown, when she washed. The cuts on her arms had begun to bleed and stick to the inside of her shirt.
Robin rolled the driver’s side window down as they picked up speed, Laura watched her face in the side view mirror. Robin’s white hair shifted and blew about his head as he drove, and he smiled faintly at the horizon. “This isn’t bad,” she said, pursing her beige lips, waggling her dark eyebrows. She reached out to touch Robin’s hair, it was light in her hands, soft as bird’s down. “I could get used to this,” she smiled.
He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close to him. He had a new, soapy smell, and underneath it a familiar animal, dead-leaves scent. He smiled his new smile and pulled her face up to meet his. He tasted like syrup and thick orange jelly.
Elisabeth Gardner remembered the flickering sunlight between the blinds in the window of her Kansas City apartment. And so she did not move when the florescent lights above her began to skitter and jump. She remembered the thick, medicinal taste of fifteen or thirty or a hundred and four blue sleeping tablets sliding one after another down her throat, so the bitter, burning vomit sensation in the back of her throat did not disturb her. In the end, it was the noise that woke her and opened up her eyes. The groaning, shuffling, shifting of a fellow human in abject misery.
For a moment she thought only “some drunk,” as she stared at the naked man vomiting spectacularly into a beige toilet. And then there was a great lurching in her own innards. She did not make it to the toilet.
“Jesus,” she muttered miserably, sitting up and shuffling away from the sick. Her face found the cold porcelain of a washbasin and she pressed against it gratefully. It was only then that she registered her surroundings. For a single wild moment, she was sure she was in hell. Apparently her mother and her childhood priest were right about the punishment for suicide, because not even in her wildest dreams had she ever thought that maybe Heaven was a truck stop bathroom.
And she had to be dead right?
“Are we dead?” she asked the naked man, who’s head had almost vanished into the toilet basin.
“I wish,” he muttered, echoing slightly.
Elisabeth took a deep breath, if she was not, in fact, dead, then this whole situation was more complicated than she supposed. She thought she’d be better prepared to deal with it with some clothes on, and she was in luck because someone had left what appeared to be a uniform, neatly folded, in the sink. It was made for a taller, slenderer individual, but as it was basically a smock, she was able to wrestle it on. Looking around, she found the room otherwise bare, except for a rumpled pile of men’s clothing.
“Where are we?” she asked the man, who raised his head wrathfully out of the toilet. He was haggard and handsome and dark-haired, he had a yellow streak of vomit in the corner of his mouth.
“Seriously, do I look like a know…anything? About anything?”
“Aren’t you wondering what you’re doing here? Naked in a truck stop bathroom?” she stepped over to the window and looked out, there was nothing there but endless desert and blue skies. The man shrugged.
“Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, hell, I’m just hoping I don’t end up with chlamydia again.”
“We’re in the desert,” said Elisabeth, who had never seen the desert except once when she was small and her family had gone to the Grand Canyon. All she remembered was red, red, red. The man said nothing to this, and only crawled over to the pile of clothing.
Elisabeth faced herself in the mirror. Her face was bruised and damaged, her hair was shorter…burnt, somehow, it looked. She remember the feeling of sunlight on her closed eyelids, the slick plastic of the pill bottle in her hands. She remembered the face of a woman she’d never met and her voice saying “well, if you’re not using it…”
Elisabeth Gardner opened her eyes.
“I’m going out there,” she told the man on the floor, “to find out what happened.” He nodded, halfway into his jeans, and said nothing. As she opened the door, Elisabeth already knew how the desert sun would feel against her face, burning fierce and red, red, red. She smiled.