Well Aimed Chaos (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whitemage) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2013-08-19 08:07 pm
whitemage) wrote in rainbowfic2013-08-19 08:07 pm
Entry tags:
Bone #18; Fever Red #5; Fire Opal #16
Author: Ardy
Piece/story: Welcome Wagon/Blood Saint
Color: Bone 18 (next of kin); Fever Red 5 (jaundice); Fire Opal 16 (And got no peace)
Styles/Supplies: Graffiti (Fire Opal, Bone, and Fever Red for Summer of Whump)
Word Count: 1382
Ratings/Warnings: PG; Child losing parents
Note: Mystery and intrigue!
I twisted in bed, feeling myself rousing from sleep quite against my will. I wasn’t sure if it was the faint, rhythmic sounds of prayer or the smoke of sage that hit my senses first. Slowly, I began to realize where I was, and how I had slept a whole day and a night away, just like an abbreviated fairytale. My eyes fluttered open at the recognition. “GRAMMA!”
A deep brown face with deeper brown eyes turned to me, framed by silver wisps that had escaped the red ribbon plait going down her back. “Oh, good, you’re awake!”
“Whatareyoudoinginmyroom?”
She waved more smoke at me. “Are you hungry?”
Stubborn old woman, ignoring my questions.
“What’s going on?” There was a teeny voice floating in from the doorway. We both leaned to look at the small face that appeared.
“Oh, Sofie, it’s just your cousin Annie awake--she always was a little melodramatic, and not much of a morning person. She rises with the owls and not the doves, this one.” While pleasant, her laugh still counted as a cackle. A very mischievous cackle.
Tiny dark eyes widened and tiny hands clapped themselves on the tiny mouth. “Annie?! Oh! Aren’t you a famous Hollywood actress now?!”
“No, she was going to do Broadway--very good at drama all through school. She used to send me tapes of her plays.”
Leave it to relatives to dig up old wounds like long lost graves, and destroy your entire sense of self rattling the bones around. “Actually, I... gave that up to be an English teacher and author. Then wound up in nursing.”
“And a lot of good that has done, sending you scurrying down here to take up one of my rooms.” Granny Duskcrow moved to open the drapes, effectively blinding me.
I hissed, flailing with my hands. Sofie laughed.
“Oh, behave yourself. I’ll bring you breakfast.” She shuffled back out of the room, her house slippers smacking the floor as she went. With anyone else, the pokes and jabs into the places she went would have me in tears. But she always followed her chastisement with sweetness. My rumbling stomach reminded me of how important that was.
Sophie wandered the room, dancing and singing to herself as some small children seem to. They’re a bit like overgrown, wingless fairies sometimes. I let my thoughts drift over whimsical places, far less distant hidden away here in the mountains than they had seemed on the open river plane.
“Oh! You have such pretty dresses!” Sophie--meanwhile--had opened the closet and was weaving her little self through yards of black lace and tiers of dark cotton.
“What? She hung them up already?” My answer was a little absent until I actually looked, then wound up crawling out of bed pajamas askew to inspect them. “... Not all of these are mine.”
“They are now.” Sophie said dreamily, fingering the fabric and clearly dreaming of when she was grown up enough for them herself. “Granny said she was giving them to you--they were your mother’s, when she stayed here.”
Mama? In dresses like these? I was trying to imagine...
The stinging I had tried to escape in the apartment found its way back in a new form. I never thought I shared much of anything with my mother, who clung tightly and stubbornly to lost causes, only to rapidly toss them into the ocean of escapism like some painful token of an unfaithful lover. It’s not like I ever utterly burned out my body and soul only to break with reality and embark on a wild adventure to cure the madness--oh. Never mind.
“She left you books, too! Granny won’t let me read them, but the covers have these very elegant men on them. But poor dears, they look ill. Maybe their livers aren’t working.”
Sophie was spending entirely too much time around our elders. I wasn’t sure if the way she mimicked them was cute or odd. “What?”
Sighing, she brought me one: a cheap romantic thriller with a suave vampire staring out at the reader, smiling gruesomely over a fainting blonde in his arms. I was solidly and sordidly reminded of early high school. “He’s just pale because he’s undead. All vampires are like that.”
“What’s a vampire?”
“It’s a.... they...” The problem with children is while honesty is best, one never knows quite how much is enough and how much is too much. “They’re like bad spirits.”
Sophie screwed up her face, appraising me and the novel. “But they look kind of... I mean, he’s scary, but I kind of like him, too!”
Oh, Granny, by Mary’s sweet grace, please get back here with food. “Well... you’re supposed to. He’s not a real vampire, so it’s okay to like him. That’s why people like to read those books.” Because how do you explain wish fulfillment and sexual fantasies to someone this young?
Of course, there was only one piece of this she picked up on; her eyes widened. “Vampires are real?”
Oh, dear.
“... I don’t--”
“Of course not!” Granny bustled in a little louder and speedier than necessary, making me wonder how long she had stood there listening. I shot her a perturbed glance.
The look she gave me back was utterly withering and wiped the reproach from my face. I radiated ‘mea culpa’.
“And so we will not be discussing them anymore. Now, if you please, Sophie...” She set the tray on a side table. “Help me with the dining room and let Annie eat. We can make her clean the kitchen when she’s done.”
Sofie giggled conspiratorially at me, and I feigned horror. We watched her skip from the room, then Granny turned to me, catching me mid bite into huckleberry jam slathered biscuits.
“Sofie is a very special girl.” The terseness melted from her face, and I saw concern that made me twinge. “Just like you were.”
“... Like I was?” I wracked my brain, but still was confused. What did she mean? Having a mother who left me? Daydreaming for entire afternoons until everyone thought I was lost in the woods? Not being able to find a field that held my attention for 5 seconds, let alone build a respectable career? What was so special about me and how I grieved myself trying to romance the world?
“Like you are--I’m sorry--what I meant was, I am happy you came home. We need you here.” She wrung her hands. “I am old, and she is so young, and you better understand what she’s going through.”
My grandmother is a stalwart woman, full of wry humor and sharp wisdom who would have no qualms about kicking out all of John Wayne’s pearly teeth if he so much as looked at her wrong. Seeing her like this was unsettling, even if she had managed to be less cryptic. “... I don’t understand at all.”
She shook her head, stiffening back up. “She lost her parents, and it’s... caused her to retreat some. Into strange worlds of her own. You would know about that, in your own way.”
I screwed my face up. “Except rather than ‘lose’ them, I never truly had them to begin with. Oh, sure their bodies were there--”
She cut me off with a frown. “Josephine and Thomas passed on. Don’t cry about papercuts when the person next to you has lost limbs.”
I opened my mouth in protest, then closed it as the words sunk in. “Jo is dead?” And here I’ve been complaining about a spleen and some bad blood. “What happened?”
Grandma just shook her head, voice growing louder as she backed away. “So I’ll see you downstairs when you’re dressed.”
Josephine Baptiste was my only woman cousin, and close in age to me. She and her man had settled down to a quiet life in the mountains, the last I had heard. He tilled the land, she kept chickens: it was a nearly idyllic life, far away from stress and violence. My imagination was taking off with me, and my curiosity demanded answers.
I had asked for the burden of my own troubles to be eased, and the universe has a strange sense of humor sometimes. Strange, and sometimes cruel.
Piece/story: Welcome Wagon/Blood Saint
Color: Bone 18 (next of kin); Fever Red 5 (jaundice); Fire Opal 16 (And got no peace)
Styles/Supplies: Graffiti (Fire Opal, Bone, and Fever Red for Summer of Whump)
Word Count: 1382
Ratings/Warnings: PG; Child losing parents
Note: Mystery and intrigue!
I twisted in bed, feeling myself rousing from sleep quite against my will. I wasn’t sure if it was the faint, rhythmic sounds of prayer or the smoke of sage that hit my senses first. Slowly, I began to realize where I was, and how I had slept a whole day and a night away, just like an abbreviated fairytale. My eyes fluttered open at the recognition. “GRAMMA!”
A deep brown face with deeper brown eyes turned to me, framed by silver wisps that had escaped the red ribbon plait going down her back. “Oh, good, you’re awake!”
“Whatareyoudoinginmyroom?”
She waved more smoke at me. “Are you hungry?”
Stubborn old woman, ignoring my questions.
“What’s going on?” There was a teeny voice floating in from the doorway. We both leaned to look at the small face that appeared.
“Oh, Sofie, it’s just your cousin Annie awake--she always was a little melodramatic, and not much of a morning person. She rises with the owls and not the doves, this one.” While pleasant, her laugh still counted as a cackle. A very mischievous cackle.
Tiny dark eyes widened and tiny hands clapped themselves on the tiny mouth. “Annie?! Oh! Aren’t you a famous Hollywood actress now?!”
“No, she was going to do Broadway--very good at drama all through school. She used to send me tapes of her plays.”
Leave it to relatives to dig up old wounds like long lost graves, and destroy your entire sense of self rattling the bones around. “Actually, I... gave that up to be an English teacher and author. Then wound up in nursing.”
“And a lot of good that has done, sending you scurrying down here to take up one of my rooms.” Granny Duskcrow moved to open the drapes, effectively blinding me.
I hissed, flailing with my hands. Sofie laughed.
“Oh, behave yourself. I’ll bring you breakfast.” She shuffled back out of the room, her house slippers smacking the floor as she went. With anyone else, the pokes and jabs into the places she went would have me in tears. But she always followed her chastisement with sweetness. My rumbling stomach reminded me of how important that was.
Sophie wandered the room, dancing and singing to herself as some small children seem to. They’re a bit like overgrown, wingless fairies sometimes. I let my thoughts drift over whimsical places, far less distant hidden away here in the mountains than they had seemed on the open river plane.
“Oh! You have such pretty dresses!” Sophie--meanwhile--had opened the closet and was weaving her little self through yards of black lace and tiers of dark cotton.
“What? She hung them up already?” My answer was a little absent until I actually looked, then wound up crawling out of bed pajamas askew to inspect them. “... Not all of these are mine.”
“They are now.” Sophie said dreamily, fingering the fabric and clearly dreaming of when she was grown up enough for them herself. “Granny said she was giving them to you--they were your mother’s, when she stayed here.”
Mama? In dresses like these? I was trying to imagine...
The stinging I had tried to escape in the apartment found its way back in a new form. I never thought I shared much of anything with my mother, who clung tightly and stubbornly to lost causes, only to rapidly toss them into the ocean of escapism like some painful token of an unfaithful lover. It’s not like I ever utterly burned out my body and soul only to break with reality and embark on a wild adventure to cure the madness--oh. Never mind.
“She left you books, too! Granny won’t let me read them, but the covers have these very elegant men on them. But poor dears, they look ill. Maybe their livers aren’t working.”
Sophie was spending entirely too much time around our elders. I wasn’t sure if the way she mimicked them was cute or odd. “What?”
Sighing, she brought me one: a cheap romantic thriller with a suave vampire staring out at the reader, smiling gruesomely over a fainting blonde in his arms. I was solidly and sordidly reminded of early high school. “He’s just pale because he’s undead. All vampires are like that.”
“What’s a vampire?”
“It’s a.... they...” The problem with children is while honesty is best, one never knows quite how much is enough and how much is too much. “They’re like bad spirits.”
Sophie screwed up her face, appraising me and the novel. “But they look kind of... I mean, he’s scary, but I kind of like him, too!”
Oh, Granny, by Mary’s sweet grace, please get back here with food. “Well... you’re supposed to. He’s not a real vampire, so it’s okay to like him. That’s why people like to read those books.” Because how do you explain wish fulfillment and sexual fantasies to someone this young?
Of course, there was only one piece of this she picked up on; her eyes widened. “Vampires are real?”
Oh, dear.
“... I don’t--”
“Of course not!” Granny bustled in a little louder and speedier than necessary, making me wonder how long she had stood there listening. I shot her a perturbed glance.
The look she gave me back was utterly withering and wiped the reproach from my face. I radiated ‘mea culpa’.
“And so we will not be discussing them anymore. Now, if you please, Sophie...” She set the tray on a side table. “Help me with the dining room and let Annie eat. We can make her clean the kitchen when she’s done.”
Sofie giggled conspiratorially at me, and I feigned horror. We watched her skip from the room, then Granny turned to me, catching me mid bite into huckleberry jam slathered biscuits.
“Sofie is a very special girl.” The terseness melted from her face, and I saw concern that made me twinge. “Just like you were.”
“... Like I was?” I wracked my brain, but still was confused. What did she mean? Having a mother who left me? Daydreaming for entire afternoons until everyone thought I was lost in the woods? Not being able to find a field that held my attention for 5 seconds, let alone build a respectable career? What was so special about me and how I grieved myself trying to romance the world?
“Like you are--I’m sorry--what I meant was, I am happy you came home. We need you here.” She wrung her hands. “I am old, and she is so young, and you better understand what she’s going through.”
My grandmother is a stalwart woman, full of wry humor and sharp wisdom who would have no qualms about kicking out all of John Wayne’s pearly teeth if he so much as looked at her wrong. Seeing her like this was unsettling, even if she had managed to be less cryptic. “... I don’t understand at all.”
She shook her head, stiffening back up. “She lost her parents, and it’s... caused her to retreat some. Into strange worlds of her own. You would know about that, in your own way.”
I screwed my face up. “Except rather than ‘lose’ them, I never truly had them to begin with. Oh, sure their bodies were there--”
She cut me off with a frown. “Josephine and Thomas passed on. Don’t cry about papercuts when the person next to you has lost limbs.”
I opened my mouth in protest, then closed it as the words sunk in. “Jo is dead?” And here I’ve been complaining about a spleen and some bad blood. “What happened?”
Grandma just shook her head, voice growing louder as she backed away. “So I’ll see you downstairs when you’re dressed.”
Josephine Baptiste was my only woman cousin, and close in age to me. She and her man had settled down to a quiet life in the mountains, the last I had heard. He tilled the land, she kept chickens: it was a nearly idyllic life, far away from stress and violence. My imagination was taking off with me, and my curiosity demanded answers.
I had asked for the burden of my own troubles to be eased, and the universe has a strange sense of humor sometimes. Strange, and sometimes cruel.