thai m zoofquesque (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
impactings) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2012-01-01 01:28 am
impactings) wrote in rainbowfic2012-01-01 01:28 am
white opal #5, alice blue #6, opera mauve #17
tags that need to be added: author tag (thai), story tag (tempus transit), color tags.
Name: Thai
Title: when the gods draw straws
Story: Tempus Transit
Timeline: 0.4 (the fourth day of a nonapplicable month [December fourth, unknown year])
Colors: White Opal #5 - Solitude; Alice Blue #6 - six impossible things before breakfast; Opera Mauve #17 - conductor
Supplies and Materials: None
Word Count: 2251
Rating: PG
Warnings: Pre-piece character death, Bone paterfamilias being a dick.
Cinnamon Bone was homeschooled; not that you can be taught what you've always known. She knows how to make a fan of cards appear from midair, how to coax a dove from the belly of a handkerchief, how to make thousands of glass shards fly over the crowd and splash as water drops on their faces. She doesn't know how to solve for x = 17y + 82, and she doesn't know what the capital of Bulgaria is. That doesn't matter, though. What matters is the dirt falling onto her sister's coffin and that she didn't know how to save her.
Her father’s hand is heavy on her shoulder. It is raining. December fourth. It should be snowing, but global warming, she supposes, is coating their town with its thick breath, and the droplets that slide into the high collar of her black-and-grey-striped dress are cold. But they aren’t cold enough.
They’re colder than the skin of her three-years-younger sister, who always had been three years younger, but now she’s going to be four years, five years, ten years younger. Marianne will not play her violin when Cinnamon turns a sphere of metal into water, fire, into a single perfect orb of glass, into a rippling crimson ribbon that melts into wine when placed around the neck of a lovely young woman from the audience.
Marianne is gone, Cinnamon realizes. Overhead, behind her, the bell of the church tolls dolefully. It is four in the afternoon. The sun is already beginning to flee from the sky; it doesn’t want to be a part of this.
“Stop crying,” her father says.
His voice is gruff. Cinnamon isn’t crying. She lifts a gloved hand, touches the droplets of water on her face. She licks them from her fingertips. No salt. Only rain.
She doesn’t point this out to her father.
December fourth. It was Marianne’s birthday two months ago. She made her a cake, a real one, not a figment like the wine-ribbons or the doves that were so perplexed at being made into handkerchiefs. It had purple candles on it, Marianne’s favorite color. Between the two of them they ate it in the early hours of the morning, when their father was sleeping. They had to eat it quietly and carefully in the kitchen of their trailer.
Their trailer, which is really only Cinnamon’s trailer now, sits outside the cemetery. It is not quite garish, but Cinnamon feels it is inappropriate to travel in, especially to watch the burial of half of its act. The trailer is black, with the elaborately made-up and digitally-corrected faces of Cinnamon and Marianne painted on either side. Their expressions are mysteriously blank, though a small smile – also digitally added – curls the corners of their mouths. Their hair is the same gingery reddish shade, though in real life Cinnamon’s was brighter than Marianne’s, and they seem almost to be two heads of the same person.
In spindly letters above their faces, THE BONE YARD is perched precariously, as if waiting to fall off of the sign at any time. It is the only spot of color besides their flaming hair and their eyes (Cinnamon’s green, magnified by computerized hand to an almost emerald shade – Marianne’s blue, deepened into a sapphire hue by the same), a reddish heliotrope that floats against the black.
It is the same color of the candles that were in Marianne’s birthday cake. Cinnamon let her choose the color. More accurately, Cinnamon fought with their father until he let her choose the color.
She jumps when his hand descends upon her shoulder again, flinching when she feels him lean towards her face. He only bumps his lip against her cheekbone, muttering gruffly, “I’ll be in the trailer,” and then stumps off across the graveyard. The scrape of his three-day-old stubble smarts on Cinnamon’s cheek, and she presses the back side of her gloved fingers to it, biting her lip against the sting.
There are two gravediggers filling in the hole where her sister will lie for the rest of time. One is female, with a surprising shock of green hair poking from her cap. She is androgynous, masculine, with a pointed face pulled into a tight and concentrated frown. The other one, a man, is much older. A salt-and-pepper beard is smeared haphazardly across his face; he has forgotten to shave. He doesn’t approve of his coworker. Cinnamon knows from the determined way they do not speak to each other, the methodic fashion in which they ignore each other while they seal her sister into her earthy bed.
Her father is being unusually generous in allowing her to have this moment alone with her sister and her gravediggers.
Cinnamon wonders what he wants from her.
She straightens. The veil of her hat shifts back from her face without being bidden. Cinnamon’s umbrella stands perfectly balanced beside her, and she takes it up now, swirling it above her head to fend off the rain that has begun, as rain does, to fall harder.
The green-haired gravedigger – Angelica, Cinnamon thinks, and then no, that is her sister’s name; she’s Martha, but she makes people call her Mart – straightens up too, squinting at Cinnamon. The man – Arthur, and that’s easy to get – continues working, though he shoots Cinnamon a wary look.
“Good afternoon,” Cinnamon says. As if they have met at a cocktail party, one of the many celebrations her father seems to like to throw after her performances. She has a dim memory of a twelve-year-old Marianne getting drunk at one of these parties, an even dimmer memory of clutching a heaving little girl to her chest after midnight while her father’s voice, booming with laughter he doesn’t show around his daughters, rumbles below the floorboards. In the graveyard she twirls her umbrella, the silvery baubles around the edges clinking together.
Her performance smile is not needed here. Her face is perfectly blank. It is the face she puts on for her father, or for cameras when they spring upon her like predators.
Martha, Mart, purses her lips. “Hey.”
Arthur keeps working. No matter. Cinnamon doesn’t need two to be an audience. Two to perform, of course, but one only needs one to make more.
She speaks softly. Habit. Her voice is hoarse; she has been silent the past week, while her sister lay in the morgue, blue lips painted red and gingery lashes being thickened black so that everyone might distinguish each spidery sweep as she sleeps in her coffin. Cinnamon tilts her head. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”
Arthur pauses at that. He puts his shovel down, turning to stare at Cinnamon. He recognizes her. A flicker of pride rises in her chest, but is quenched. She should not be proud of this talent. It is a way to make a living. Nothing else.
Martha just scowls at her. “The hell you on about?”
Arthur nudges her. Martha glances at him, mouth opening, but he shakes his head. He has an accent that Cinnamon cannot quite place. “She’s a Bone girl, Mart. Ain’t you heard of them?”
“Nah.”
Arthur chuffs. Cinnamon laces her fingers neatly together, waiting. “The Bone Yard, girl, they’re magic girls. Go all across the country with some nuthouse of a caravan – I think?” He shoots a questioning look at Cinnamon, who inclines her head. He is correct. “Do all sorts of illusions and trickery and the like, but I’d swear to you, this is real – ”
Martha snorts. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Cinnamon waits.
Martha turns to her, knocking the cap on her head slightly askew with a stray gesture. “Listen, kid, we’re a bit busy here. There’s a funeral for some drowned kid over in the next block in an hour, and we’ve got to fill this in because fu—” She catches Arthur’s eye. Hastily, “—freaking Jeremiah didn’t come in today—”
She is about to say something else. Cinnamon scratches her ear lightly, musing to herself. These earrings are not a good choice; they are too heavy, too glittery. Black they are, but they weigh on her ears.
Martha makes a choked sort of noise. Arthur gives her a look of concern. Cinnamon waits.
“Umbrella!” Mart finally says, and Cinnamon allows herself a smile. The umbrella twirls once, the handle twisting on Cinnamon’s shoulder, and then collapses, sinking into a thick expanse of cloth. Cinnamon wraps the dark shawl around her shoulders, shivering a little. Arthur gives her a look of mingled respect and awe.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mart says. “You told me. Jesus Christ, that was—”
The fear is gone from her voice. Her eyes are shining with childish wonder, and Cinnamon notices with a pleasant shock that they are a rather lovely shade of brown. Arthur’s are grey, and they gleam with pride from under his beetling brows. As if she is his own daughter, as if he has been waiting to see this day for a long, long time.
“That was so cool!” Mart finally bursts out, and Cinnamon’s smile widens. She extends a hand. A raindrop plops into the palm of her glove. Instead of soaking into the fabric, it sits there, a tiny lake in the palm of her hand. Slowly, more raindrops join it, and the drop grows until it is an orb of water at her fingertips.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she almost whispers, gently, as if speaking louder will break the sphere. “Cinnamon and Marianne Bone are proud to present to you these, the finest of illusions, the most mystic of tricks. False reality. We invite you to pull back the curtain of what you believe to be normal and now – just for now – see the world as it is, as it was, as it might be.”
The words are music to her tongue. She has said them thousands of times, to thousands of people. The reaction is always the same. Bated breath. Arthur and Mart are no exception.
Her hand begins to move. The orb rolls along her arm, curls around her neck in a watery pendant. With a thought, it twists up, writhing along her face. Another thought. It is a snake, pale blue, with jewel-bright eyes that stare unseeingly into the sky.
It wraps itself around her neck, pressing its scaly cheek against Cinnamon’s jaw. Quietly, so quietly she doesn’t think even the snake can hear her, she murmurs, “Welcome to the Bone Yard.”
Here is where Marianne begins playing, where her own whispered voice echoes through the speakers as the violin starts up with a cry, and here is where the snake dissolves into thousands of golden feathers, fluttering down to Cinnamon’s feet, where they glitter in the mud. More raindrops plop onto the backs of her hands; they burst into flame. Green, blue, silver, purple. Mart’s eyes are wide with awe.
The fire seems to burst up from Cinnamon’s hands, a blazing inferno of colors, and then birds almost like rainbow hummingbirds explode from the flames, trilling as they fly away. They fall to raindrops once they’re out of sight, washing the earth with life.
The golden feathers have become golden seeds; as Mart and Arthur watch, they begin to grow golden vines, silvery thorns rising from them as they grow. They wrap around Cinnamon’s wrists, beautiful bindings, and she crosses her arms across her chest. The vines continue to grow, curling around her body, pressing painless thorns against her cheek. They feel like cool fingers, and salt stings her eyes for the briefest of moments before it passes.
They bloom, black roses spilling from the vines, and the umbrella-shawl bursts free of its illusion, cawing furiously as it rises towards the sky to join the crows that have been here since the very beginning. The black heads of the roses thud lightly to the ground. Cinnamon lets them; lets the vines keep her snared for a few more moments, and then she steps forward. They wither to nothing.
She has three roses in her hand.
“But it’s only me now,” Cinnamon says, quietly. “Marianne is no longer part of the act.”
Mart and Arthur both take a rose. They are black, with golden stems, and when Mart carefully tests the point of a silver thorn it does not pierce. They won’t die, Cinnamon thinks. Not unless someone works very hard to kill them. They will live for years and years, and maybe they will bloom by headstones of their own someday. Both gravediggers look at her with awe and wonder.
Did we really just see that? they are thinking, Cinnamon knows.
She steps forward with the last rose. It is white, its stem silver. It has no thorns. Carefully, she lays it in her sister’s grave. She will not be here again.
“Good afternoon,” she says, by way of goodbye, as if she’s met these gravediggers at the cocktail party at which her far-too-young sister got very, very drunk. And then Cinnamon walks away, out of the wrought-iron cemetery gate and towards the trailer where she will never eat cake with Marianne again.
She leaves her umbrella to make friends with the crows in the trees. She doesn’t think she will need it.
Name: Thai
Title: when the gods draw straws
Story: Tempus Transit
Timeline: 0.4 (the fourth day of a nonapplicable month [December fourth, unknown year])
Colors: White Opal #5 - Solitude; Alice Blue #6 - six impossible things before breakfast; Opera Mauve #17 - conductor
Supplies and Materials: None
Word Count: 2251
Rating: PG
Warnings: Pre-piece character death, Bone paterfamilias being a dick.
Cinnamon Bone was homeschooled; not that you can be taught what you've always known. She knows how to make a fan of cards appear from midair, how to coax a dove from the belly of a handkerchief, how to make thousands of glass shards fly over the crowd and splash as water drops on their faces. She doesn't know how to solve for x = 17y + 82, and she doesn't know what the capital of Bulgaria is. That doesn't matter, though. What matters is the dirt falling onto her sister's coffin and that she didn't know how to save her.
Her father’s hand is heavy on her shoulder. It is raining. December fourth. It should be snowing, but global warming, she supposes, is coating their town with its thick breath, and the droplets that slide into the high collar of her black-and-grey-striped dress are cold. But they aren’t cold enough.
They’re colder than the skin of her three-years-younger sister, who always had been three years younger, but now she’s going to be four years, five years, ten years younger. Marianne will not play her violin when Cinnamon turns a sphere of metal into water, fire, into a single perfect orb of glass, into a rippling crimson ribbon that melts into wine when placed around the neck of a lovely young woman from the audience.
Marianne is gone, Cinnamon realizes. Overhead, behind her, the bell of the church tolls dolefully. It is four in the afternoon. The sun is already beginning to flee from the sky; it doesn’t want to be a part of this.
“Stop crying,” her father says.
His voice is gruff. Cinnamon isn’t crying. She lifts a gloved hand, touches the droplets of water on her face. She licks them from her fingertips. No salt. Only rain.
She doesn’t point this out to her father.
December fourth. It was Marianne’s birthday two months ago. She made her a cake, a real one, not a figment like the wine-ribbons or the doves that were so perplexed at being made into handkerchiefs. It had purple candles on it, Marianne’s favorite color. Between the two of them they ate it in the early hours of the morning, when their father was sleeping. They had to eat it quietly and carefully in the kitchen of their trailer.
Their trailer, which is really only Cinnamon’s trailer now, sits outside the cemetery. It is not quite garish, but Cinnamon feels it is inappropriate to travel in, especially to watch the burial of half of its act. The trailer is black, with the elaborately made-up and digitally-corrected faces of Cinnamon and Marianne painted on either side. Their expressions are mysteriously blank, though a small smile – also digitally added – curls the corners of their mouths. Their hair is the same gingery reddish shade, though in real life Cinnamon’s was brighter than Marianne’s, and they seem almost to be two heads of the same person.
In spindly letters above their faces, THE BONE YARD is perched precariously, as if waiting to fall off of the sign at any time. It is the only spot of color besides their flaming hair and their eyes (Cinnamon’s green, magnified by computerized hand to an almost emerald shade – Marianne’s blue, deepened into a sapphire hue by the same), a reddish heliotrope that floats against the black.
It is the same color of the candles that were in Marianne’s birthday cake. Cinnamon let her choose the color. More accurately, Cinnamon fought with their father until he let her choose the color.
She jumps when his hand descends upon her shoulder again, flinching when she feels him lean towards her face. He only bumps his lip against her cheekbone, muttering gruffly, “I’ll be in the trailer,” and then stumps off across the graveyard. The scrape of his three-day-old stubble smarts on Cinnamon’s cheek, and she presses the back side of her gloved fingers to it, biting her lip against the sting.
There are two gravediggers filling in the hole where her sister will lie for the rest of time. One is female, with a surprising shock of green hair poking from her cap. She is androgynous, masculine, with a pointed face pulled into a tight and concentrated frown. The other one, a man, is much older. A salt-and-pepper beard is smeared haphazardly across his face; he has forgotten to shave. He doesn’t approve of his coworker. Cinnamon knows from the determined way they do not speak to each other, the methodic fashion in which they ignore each other while they seal her sister into her earthy bed.
Her father is being unusually generous in allowing her to have this moment alone with her sister and her gravediggers.
Cinnamon wonders what he wants from her.
She straightens. The veil of her hat shifts back from her face without being bidden. Cinnamon’s umbrella stands perfectly balanced beside her, and she takes it up now, swirling it above her head to fend off the rain that has begun, as rain does, to fall harder.
The green-haired gravedigger – Angelica, Cinnamon thinks, and then no, that is her sister’s name; she’s Martha, but she makes people call her Mart – straightens up too, squinting at Cinnamon. The man – Arthur, and that’s easy to get – continues working, though he shoots Cinnamon a wary look.
“Good afternoon,” Cinnamon says. As if they have met at a cocktail party, one of the many celebrations her father seems to like to throw after her performances. She has a dim memory of a twelve-year-old Marianne getting drunk at one of these parties, an even dimmer memory of clutching a heaving little girl to her chest after midnight while her father’s voice, booming with laughter he doesn’t show around his daughters, rumbles below the floorboards. In the graveyard she twirls her umbrella, the silvery baubles around the edges clinking together.
Her performance smile is not needed here. Her face is perfectly blank. It is the face she puts on for her father, or for cameras when they spring upon her like predators.
Martha, Mart, purses her lips. “Hey.”
Arthur keeps working. No matter. Cinnamon doesn’t need two to be an audience. Two to perform, of course, but one only needs one to make more.
She speaks softly. Habit. Her voice is hoarse; she has been silent the past week, while her sister lay in the morgue, blue lips painted red and gingery lashes being thickened black so that everyone might distinguish each spidery sweep as she sleeps in her coffin. Cinnamon tilts her head. “Would you like to see a magic trick?”
Arthur pauses at that. He puts his shovel down, turning to stare at Cinnamon. He recognizes her. A flicker of pride rises in her chest, but is quenched. She should not be proud of this talent. It is a way to make a living. Nothing else.
Martha just scowls at her. “The hell you on about?”
Arthur nudges her. Martha glances at him, mouth opening, but he shakes his head. He has an accent that Cinnamon cannot quite place. “She’s a Bone girl, Mart. Ain’t you heard of them?”
“Nah.”
Arthur chuffs. Cinnamon laces her fingers neatly together, waiting. “The Bone Yard, girl, they’re magic girls. Go all across the country with some nuthouse of a caravan – I think?” He shoots a questioning look at Cinnamon, who inclines her head. He is correct. “Do all sorts of illusions and trickery and the like, but I’d swear to you, this is real – ”
Martha snorts. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Cinnamon waits.
Martha turns to her, knocking the cap on her head slightly askew with a stray gesture. “Listen, kid, we’re a bit busy here. There’s a funeral for some drowned kid over in the next block in an hour, and we’ve got to fill this in because fu—” She catches Arthur’s eye. Hastily, “—freaking Jeremiah didn’t come in today—”
She is about to say something else. Cinnamon scratches her ear lightly, musing to herself. These earrings are not a good choice; they are too heavy, too glittery. Black they are, but they weigh on her ears.
Martha makes a choked sort of noise. Arthur gives her a look of concern. Cinnamon waits.
“Umbrella!” Mart finally says, and Cinnamon allows herself a smile. The umbrella twirls once, the handle twisting on Cinnamon’s shoulder, and then collapses, sinking into a thick expanse of cloth. Cinnamon wraps the dark shawl around her shoulders, shivering a little. Arthur gives her a look of mingled respect and awe.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Mart says. “You told me. Jesus Christ, that was—”
The fear is gone from her voice. Her eyes are shining with childish wonder, and Cinnamon notices with a pleasant shock that they are a rather lovely shade of brown. Arthur’s are grey, and they gleam with pride from under his beetling brows. As if she is his own daughter, as if he has been waiting to see this day for a long, long time.
“That was so cool!” Mart finally bursts out, and Cinnamon’s smile widens. She extends a hand. A raindrop plops into the palm of her glove. Instead of soaking into the fabric, it sits there, a tiny lake in the palm of her hand. Slowly, more raindrops join it, and the drop grows until it is an orb of water at her fingertips.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she almost whispers, gently, as if speaking louder will break the sphere. “Cinnamon and Marianne Bone are proud to present to you these, the finest of illusions, the most mystic of tricks. False reality. We invite you to pull back the curtain of what you believe to be normal and now – just for now – see the world as it is, as it was, as it might be.”
The words are music to her tongue. She has said them thousands of times, to thousands of people. The reaction is always the same. Bated breath. Arthur and Mart are no exception.
Her hand begins to move. The orb rolls along her arm, curls around her neck in a watery pendant. With a thought, it twists up, writhing along her face. Another thought. It is a snake, pale blue, with jewel-bright eyes that stare unseeingly into the sky.
It wraps itself around her neck, pressing its scaly cheek against Cinnamon’s jaw. Quietly, so quietly she doesn’t think even the snake can hear her, she murmurs, “Welcome to the Bone Yard.”
Here is where Marianne begins playing, where her own whispered voice echoes through the speakers as the violin starts up with a cry, and here is where the snake dissolves into thousands of golden feathers, fluttering down to Cinnamon’s feet, where they glitter in the mud. More raindrops plop onto the backs of her hands; they burst into flame. Green, blue, silver, purple. Mart’s eyes are wide with awe.
The fire seems to burst up from Cinnamon’s hands, a blazing inferno of colors, and then birds almost like rainbow hummingbirds explode from the flames, trilling as they fly away. They fall to raindrops once they’re out of sight, washing the earth with life.
The golden feathers have become golden seeds; as Mart and Arthur watch, they begin to grow golden vines, silvery thorns rising from them as they grow. They wrap around Cinnamon’s wrists, beautiful bindings, and she crosses her arms across her chest. The vines continue to grow, curling around her body, pressing painless thorns against her cheek. They feel like cool fingers, and salt stings her eyes for the briefest of moments before it passes.
They bloom, black roses spilling from the vines, and the umbrella-shawl bursts free of its illusion, cawing furiously as it rises towards the sky to join the crows that have been here since the very beginning. The black heads of the roses thud lightly to the ground. Cinnamon lets them; lets the vines keep her snared for a few more moments, and then she steps forward. They wither to nothing.
She has three roses in her hand.
“But it’s only me now,” Cinnamon says, quietly. “Marianne is no longer part of the act.”
Mart and Arthur both take a rose. They are black, with golden stems, and when Mart carefully tests the point of a silver thorn it does not pierce. They won’t die, Cinnamon thinks. Not unless someone works very hard to kill them. They will live for years and years, and maybe they will bloom by headstones of their own someday. Both gravediggers look at her with awe and wonder.
Did we really just see that? they are thinking, Cinnamon knows.
She steps forward with the last rose. It is white, its stem silver. It has no thorns. Carefully, she lays it in her sister’s grave. She will not be here again.
“Good afternoon,” she says, by way of goodbye, as if she’s met these gravediggers at the cocktail party at which her far-too-young sister got very, very drunk. And then Cinnamon walks away, out of the wrought-iron cemetery gate and towards the trailer where she will never eat cake with Marianne again.
She leaves her umbrella to make friends with the crows in the trees. She doesn’t think she will need it.