Erato's Musings

They had met by accident. Matthew had been assigned to room 21, but was put in room 12 because of a number-dyslexic nurse. Henna was properly in room 12. They sat in silence for hours, neither giving a large enough damn to make idle conversation.

"Henna," he said finally, speaking apparently to the wall. When neither the wall nor the girl responded, he went on speaking. "You had an allergic reaction to henna." His eyes rolled toward her. "Tramp stamp?"

"Oh. You're speaking to me?"

"Yes, you."

She woke herself from her blankness to look at him. He looked back at her from the next bed, that striking smile stitched ear to ear. "Hello, Henna girl. I'm Matthew. I've never failed at anything except dying."

“You bitch, you broke it.”

“I did not break it, and I’m not even convinced that it can be broken.”

Henna knelt on the cracked kitchen floor, cradling the strange creature’s head on her lap. She stroked its sleek head, running her palm from its odd funneling proboscis to its many-ridged flexible spine. Its body seemed so small, yet solid. Rigor mortis had set into it quickly, it seemed.

“Explain this, then,” Matt said, shaking the poor beast’s pronged tail at her. “Explain why this isn’t wagging with joy.”

“Maybe you broke it, think about that. I wasn’t in here either, maybe you killed it earlier and now you’re just trying to pin it on me out of guilt.” She paused to look down at the beast, and then back up at him. “What is it, anyway?”

A beat of silence followed her question as he sought the proper name of their peculiar felled friend. “Well, it’s… I remember seeing one in a really old housewife magazine. A vagum? A vagume? I think it’s called a vagume.”

“Legume?”

“That’s the one.”

“Are you trying to tell me that this is a peanut, and that it crawled into our kitchen to draw its last breaths?”

“Well. Yes.”

“I thought peanuts were smaller?” She had never actually seen one, and usually deferred to her much older and assumed to be more knowledgeable lover for matters of the unknown.

“Yes,” he said, now safe in the certainty that she had no better idea as to what it was, either. “Yes, it is.”

“Well, fuck,” she said, “crack the bitch open, I haven’t eaten since yesterbrekkie.”









y'all figured out what they're talking about, right?

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( Day Two )

( 1230 Words )

"We drove home in silence, and we lay awake on the bed until morning, side by side, occasionally touching toes just to be sure we still existed."

Therapy - An attempt at slam

All you need's a spiral
downward if you can
to land here
in this chair
with electrodes in your hair
being tested
being bested
by Sigmund Freud extraordiniare
to make you care
to make you bare
your mortal soul ---
to him.
It is his goal
to make you roll
right over in hot coal
rip you open
keep you roped in
til Ms. Freud can get you coping
get you hoping
for a change - within your life
And I don't play
when I say
that from what I've seen today ---
You need therapy, baby.

((which, of course, sounds much better aloud how it's supposed to be performed. and, of course, is far too short to be a proper slam entry, but i'm a first timer. ;) ))

( Joshua )

"In the future, we were supposed to be eating breakfast in pill form."

His head was bent low over his work, his shoulders filling with tension and releasing like pistons as he swept the flint back and forth through the dry grass. In the still silence of the meadow, the hydraulic hissing of back and forth, tension and slack, was almost audible.

"The Jetsons," Tuka said from the shade, bent over a solar calculator and a strip of white bark. "You're thinking of the Jetsons. Nobody in three dimensions promised pills."

Rotti hissed to a stop like an air brake, pausing to reboot before working himself into motion again, pushing the grass into a small pile to slash through with the shard of stone. "I was five when they took away all of the televisions. The Jetsons were as real as President Kito to me when I was five. More real, at least they didn't destroy whole countries before breakfast."

"Huh!"

"You're lying if you claim otherwise." Rotti's big green eyes clicked up to look at her, sorting her shape out in the spotting shadows that were draped over her back by the trees. They taped her into the background as into a scrapbook, trapping her for an instant in the bent pose of concentration with her knotted hair thrown back over her farther shoulder, her head tilted enough toward him that he could see her eyelashes batting over both eyes. "You're lying if you didn't think cartoons were real."

Tuka pressed her lips together, showing her distaste for his choice of conversations, then hit the enter key and looked up at him. "How hard is it to make a fire?"

The magic words of irritation spoken, a miniscule firework burst from the scrap of flint and choked the patch of grass in flames.

"About that hard," Rotti said, dropping the stones. Keeping his eyes on the little flame, he fumbled back on the ground, grasping a spear of fish to drop onto the growing fire, turning side to side to cook them evenly.

"Tuka, look," he said, eyes growing wide to reflect the entire scene in his pupils, "Tuka come here and look at this."

The flames engulfed the fish, first crackling as they dried the salty flesh and then hissing as it contracted, curling and splitting around the fillets of still white-pink meat.

"They aren't vitamin pills," Tuka said, leaving her calculations to join him at the fire, pressing her shoulder against his and taking his hand, "but I think they'll do for now."

( More writing. Like always )

( Under here )

[was trying out my new Alphasmart 3000 in the car. All of you NaNoers who suggested it to me, thanks a billion! It's MUCH better than longhand. ;) I'm bringing it on vacation with me in a couple days, must remember batteries... I may have more before I leave, otherwise I'll have a BIG chunk once I'm home.]

ShimmerRot: i have been having the weirdest dreams
widgetoc: oh?
ShimmerRot: yeah. o_O like really complicated dreams where i'm on this island and it's basically this cult. and i can't really explain most of it because there's too much "side stuff" i'd have to explain first, butthere's one part where i find a patch of wild carrots and eat one becasue i'm hungry, and the elders-types throw me in prison for a couple days, and tell me that if everyone on the island discovers that the place is basically riddled with food, the elders lose their authority over what to eat and what should be done
widgetoc: cool o_O write it into a story outline and use it. haha
ShimmerRot: oh, and there's this guy on the island (who they tell me is my brother, and we're not allowed to talk to each other) and at some point he sneaks into my dormitory and tells me this really long story about how he was on a flight with a bunch of people from his school and then he started vomiting blood and everything got so chaotic that the plane crashed on the island. and a distress signal was sent and they all got on a new plane and left except for my "brother" because the elder-types were supposedly healing him and hid him and said he died.
ShimmerRot: and i totally should. and it makes me want to sleep for like three days straight because it's SO FREAKIN INTERESTING. XD
widgetoc: LOL
widgetoc: Weeeird. write it down!
widgetoc: be the salvaor dali of writing. Who cares if it makes sense or not, just write the dream XD
ShimmerRot: XDD

This would be amazingly hard to try to sort out into a linear plot, mostly because I forget bits of my dreams and remember them later and get all mixed and messed up. But I really should start putting some of my more surreal dreams into writing. Most of the ones I've put in here, really. The one about the end of the world. The one about the big house. This one. The recurring one I had a few weeks ago.

I wonder how they'd look all written down.

( Innocence )

(nearly done with the stuff i wrote back in... February! XD i need to find my plot outline. eek.)

Word Count: 9,601