In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
@pumpkin-lith! Look at this! This could totally be tied into the thing I was telling you about with the CCs!
These are all so vivid and dramatic, like scenes from some ASOIAF type epic
and then there’s the last one
@shadow-spires tell me too!!!
Tag: writing
Imagine being a human in an alien crew in space and leaving with bright blue or pink hair and the color fades and everybody on board wonders WHY you are losing your colors??? Is it the lack of greens? Are you sad? Angry? They just don’t know??
“Human-Kelly may we have a moment of your time?”
Kelly pauses in her inventorying of the photo-synth plates she’ll be installing after today’s cycle ends. “It’s just Kelly, hellot-Halzar, you don’t have to acknowledge my species every time we talk.” She smiles. “That’s not considered rude for us.”
“Very well hu—Kelly. Erm. May we have a moment of your time?” Many eyes blink earnestly at her.
“Sure. What’s up?”
hellot-Halzar considers. “May we discuss the structural nature of the ship interior and gravity-derived reference values at a later date? At this moment we would like to inquire as to the nature of your corporeal change.”
“Yeah sure—wait my what?”
“There is a mess hall wager.”
“About my –?”
“Concerning your strands,” hellot-Halzar says, gesturing.
“My….hair.” Kelly runs a hand through it. It’s purple as of two ship days ago. “Ok?”
“We wish to know whether the colour change signifies mood, nutritional intake variance, or ….erm….whether your mating season status has changed.”
“My mating season status, huh?” Kelly lifts an eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“Did Jerry put you up to this?”
“Human-Jerry refused to answer our questions about your strands, citing some phenomenon known to your homeworld as ‘famine in missed eek’.”
Kelly snorted. “Tell Jerry he can shove his archaic ideas about ‘feminine mystique’ where M-series stars don’t shine. As for your bet: sorry, it’s none of the above. I changed my hair because my last box of dye was about to expire and because I felt like it.”
hellot-Halzar considers. “chinret-Zer wins then, by technicality: that reason falls within acceptable parameters for ‘mood’.”
“I suppose it does.” Kelly pauses. “Who bet on the ‘mating season’ one?”
“Hmm?” hellot-Halzar had already turned to go and deliver the verdict. They turn one set of eyes back. “Oh that would be Drannuc. He said he smelled a difference in you.”
“Delightful,” Kelly says, instead of explaining menstruation and how that can affect mood, diet, and that technically it correlates to what most of the species on the ship would consider a mating season.
“Next time, instead of betting, maybe just ask questions? And not Jerry. He’s a jerk.”“Reclassifying human-Jerry as jerk-Jerry. We will approach you with all human queries from now on,” hellot-Halzar says and then continues on their way.
Probably for the best, she thinks with a lopsided grin, and then continues sorting the photo-synth plates to install on her space walk tomorrow.
“Reclassifying human-Jerry as jerk-Jerry”
Pure. There is no other word.
do u guys ever look back at a piece of half-done writing and think ‘this could be brilliant. this could be my mona lisa. my starry night. my idris elba’ but you have absolutely no drive to finish it despite an unfaltering desire to see it finished
my idris elba
The reason that you don’t finish it – or at least that I struggle to finish things – is that it locks the work into its final form. As long as it’s unfinished it still has that limitless potential to be stunning. When you finish it, that’s it, only the things you put into it are actually in it, the potential dissipates, it has to stand on its own. And that’s scary, because usually you discover the thing is not as perfect as your dreams of it imagined it could be.
BUT very often for me that initial fear and disappointment fades pretty quickly. A few weeks after I finish a story that didn’t feel ‘right’ to me just after finishing, the fantasy of the story fades and only the story remains. And usually I find it’s actually pretty neat. So there’s that.
I want more Jewish protagonists who have nothing to do with the Holocaust. Let us have cool powers and prophecies and regular lives and /stories/. Rabbis who fight Cthulu or something idk.
Judaism doesn’t begin and end with our persecution.
@bethagain‘s superb tags for this:
#omg THANK YOU#this#plus if I have to hear about one more fictionalized Holocaust story#my people’s nightmare is not your Academy Award fodder#and it is NOT entertainment#bring on the Cthulhu fighting rabbis!#post-apocalyptic minyans!#cozy mystery stories set around a neighborhood synagogue full of quirky characters#romances that don’t involve Jewish Doctors that Your Mother Will Love#maybe Jewish plumbers and car mechanics#or idk ballet dancers#cave
explorers who lose track of the days and get into a huge fight 1000
meters below the ground about whether tonight is shabbos#astronauts sneaking mezuzahs onto spaceships and sticking them up next to the airlocks#passover on a pirate ship#superheroes who keep kosher#and have to juggle crime fighting with helping their kids study for their bar and bat mitzvahs#practicing their haftorah with them in the shadow of the bat-signal#a super-villain who decides to convert#and the rabbi makes them apologize for their crimes and start doing mitzvahs before she’ll even consider it#because supervillain and tikun olam are pretty much polar opposites#and that’s how the rabbi from the little shul on the corner ends up saving the whole city#so yeah#bring on the Jewish protagonists!
Emotional abuse works like this:
You are screamed at, and then, not knowing any better, you stand up for yourself.You think this is a way of being strong. You think this is a defense tactic.
But this only provokes more screaming. Going silent provokes more screaming too, but usually it keeps the threats to the minimum. It keeps it just at screaming and not: a shove down the stairs, or order to pack your stuff and get out.
So you learn how to go silent. How to play dead. How to cry without making a noise. How to swallow noise. How to wipe your cheeks, get out of the car, and go about your day. How to dismantle the lump in your throat so you stop choking in the grocery store. How to perk up when people look at your straight-line brows and teeth-sucking frown and say, smile! How to go into a corner and hide in your head.
You learn.
And when the screaming has stopped, when the two of you are in the car or out to dinner and they’re all smiles, all asking for favors, all questions, you are still sucking on your shaky-shouldered anger. You are still hurt and annoyed and want to ask them, how? How can you speak to me like that? How can you pretend you did not say those things? How can you have forgotten?
But you’ve learned. So you listen to, “Can I borrow your key”s and “how was your day”s and you go silent. You play dead. You swallow the noise. And sometimes it doesn’t matter who is speaking to you, it doesn’t matter if they’ve told you “stop talking or I’ll do something I’ll regret,” it doesn’t matter if they’re a friend, it doesn’t matter if their criticism is constructive, it doesn’t matter. You’ve learned. Any sort of speaking, any raising of the voice, any insult and you play dead.
Good girl.
Good Girl, Lora Mathis (via lora-mathis)
sending love to anyone who been in an environment of abuse for so long that they have lost sight of what is normal behavior and what is abuse
(via lora-mathis)
Glorious Creatures
Here is a retelling of the Medusa myth that I’ve been working on for a few months, and thought I would post the full first draft on International Women’s Day. It is not one of my usual comedy retellings; it’s a reinterpretation of the original myth. I’ve put most of it under a cut, because it’s quite long, and there’s also some context / points of discourse under the cut as well. It’s something a bit different from my usual fare and I’m quite nervous about sharing it, but I think it’s ready.
TW: rape
The most striking thing about the absence of light is that
it illuminates the presence of sound. I hear the man moments before anyone else
would, before he has even entered the cave. He is light of foot, and I know he
is trying to conceal himself, treading softly and slowly. I hear him anyway. I
hold my breath, willing the darkness of the cave to overcome him with fear and
drive him out, but the footsteps come closer. He is the worst sort of man,
then. He is brave.He is brave, and he is in danger.
Shrinking back against the cave wall, hoping to make myself
even more invisible than I know I already am, I cry out. “Don’t come any
closer! I don’t want to hurt you.”The footsteps stop.
I hear a sharp intake
of breath, a shaky exhale. He is scared, then, but like any brave man he is
concealing it. If I tried, I could probably hear his heart. It would be racing.“Who are you?” asks the man, after he has caught his breath,
voice carefully measured.I wonder if he has seen my statues, the ones that line the
entrance to the cave like watchmen. I wonder if he knows that I put them there,
out of my sight, because I could not bear to see them motionless.“I’ll tell you,” I say. I hear him take another step, and I
recoil. “Please don’t come any closer,” I beg. “I’ll kill you!”Silence. “I thought you said you didn’t want to hurt me?”
He is so brave, and I am so afraid of hurting him. “I don’t.
Please, please; go back to the entrance of the cave, and I’ll speak to you from
here. I’ll give you whatever you’ve come for, and you’ll leave in peace, I
promise.”There’s enough blood on these hands already, I think. Blood
turned from red to grey, hardened and lingering in veins long since rendered as
stone. I wonder if those statues still have hearts.After a moment, I hear the man withdraw, and I release a
breath I hadn’t known that I was holding. “Thank you,” I say. When I can tell
that he’s retreated to a safe distance, I inch forward; not close enough to see
or be seen, or to remove the shroud of total darkness that the cave has granted
me, but close enough to feel as though we inhabit the same space. “I told you
that I would tell you who I am, and I will. I’m Medusa.”He’s too far away for me to hear his heartbeat any more. I
can only hear my own.“I’m Perseus.”
The eye of the Gorgon turns mortals to stone. That’s all I
know. I’ve always known, from the moment I opened my eyes and saw nothing, that
everything had been taken from sight. The halls of my childhood were lined with
marble statues, and I could touch, but could not look. I grew up in a temple,
and the statues were beautiful, carved of gods by human hands.I live amongst another kind of statue now. We cannot always
live in temples.All my life has been leading up to longing. It builds up
behind me, a trail of desire in my wake, and I wonder what it would be like to
live. Atlas’ burden is only the world. I wish that were all I carried on my
shoulders. I wish I bore nothing but the crust of the Earth and all the hollow
things in it. I wish I were weighted down by nothing but the elements and the
spaces between the beginning and the end. Atlas meets the eyes of the world,
and I cannot.The living wait outside, and I
am within and without. I hold death’s glare in my gaze, and I am powerless.
There is a periphery between seeing and being seen which I dare not cross. To
behold is to be held, and my hands are empty. For fear of being seen, I have
never looked.
I can hear the sound of a stone being thrown against the
outside cave wall; dropped, picked up, thrown again. The sound of a man growing
bored. The sound of a man who wants to leave, but cannot.Most men who come here get neither the choice nor the
chance.“Why are you still here?” I ask, after hours of hearing that
same stone, that same heartbeat I’ve always heard.“I need to talk to you.”
“It’s not safe,” I tell him.
“Not even if I stay out here?” he asks, and sighs. “I’m not
trying to hurt you. I need your help.”I wonder why he thinks I am afraid of him hurting me, and
not the opposite.“Look around you,” I say, presuming that he’s in the same
place as my statues. If he’s right by the mouth of the cave, he isn’t alone. I
have seven statues there; all with swords and shields once gifted to them by
the gods, now made of stone; helmets forged of bronze by master blacksmiths,
now crumbling. One man wears armour made by Hephaestus himself. He is as still
as the rest of them. “Do you really think I can help you?”For a few brief seconds, there is nothing.
“I know you can,” he replies.
I pledged my services to the
gods when I was a child. I chose Athena. My mother begged me not to leave her. Athena will ruin you, she told me. She won’t keep you safe. I will. Stay with
me.My mother had two other
daughters, each by a man she had never wanted to lie with, and I wondered how
my mother could promise to keep me safe at all when she had been in so much
danger all her life.I lived in the house of Athena
until I bled for the first time, and then his name.
cocked & loaded [dwayne johnson/vin diesel]
okay, so if i were to write the academy award-winning and world peace-establishing screenplay where Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and Vin Diesel slowly fall in love, this is what it would look like:
- vin and dwayne would be bitter Rival Agents for an intelligence agency. both would be up for a Big Promotion. they would both be working together (but against each other) on something something black market mafia. the mafia would be involved. they would be VERY CLOSE to cracking this case.
- whoever cracks the case gets the promotion! because things like this are always very clear-cut in movies. and whoever gets the promotion is the Better Agent, and it’s settled forever.
- what they don’t expect is when they finally go in to make the Big Bust on The Family is that the Big Players will still be at large–and there will be a BABY.
- the baby will fall into agency custody, and will require surveillance in a remote safehouse.
- “i need YOU TWO to pretend and be this baby’s GAY DADS to protect the baby and keep The Family off our tail while we close in on them,” says Head Intelligence Captain Lupita Nyong’o.
- dwayne and vin and baby are begrudgingly moved to a suburb of provincetown, massachusetts. cut to shot of a FOR SALE sign being pulled down, a ford fusion hybrid pulling up behind a moving van. dwayne and vin step out. they are both wearing muscle shirts and mirror-lensed aviators. dwayne grabs a baby bag, throws it over his shoulder. vin grabs the car seat out of the back, and both of them walk-slow motion up the side walk to their new 800k beach house.
- here’s what they expect: passive aggressive co-existence for a couple of weeks, where they try to be the Better Dad in a bid for the promotion they both want. dwayne will go jogging with the baby every morning!! vin will wear her in a sling when he goes to the farmer’s market and smiles at the vendors while feeling up avocados and selecting fresh caught filets of fish!!
- here’s what they don’t expect: their next door neighbors are going to be Channing Tatum and Idris Elba and their five beautiful, interracial babies. they are the perfect Gay Family, but “also,” dwayne says, pushing vin inside from where he’s been grilling steaks and drinking MILLER out of a CAN in broad daylight for the Real Gay Family to see and call over from their patio!!! “these guys are the REAL DEAL. they’re gonna know something’s up! i know we’ve had our beef, but we gotta step our game up and work together if we’re gonna make this operation work.”
- “you’re right,” vin says. he’s nodding, looking at a ground, but then up and meeting dwayne’s gaze. “you’re RIGHT.” they’re gonna make this partnership work!!! they are going to be the BEST GAY DADS.
- CUT TO: vin and dwayne staring at the king sized mattress in the master bedroom. “i can just–” vin says, but dwayne grabs him by the shoulder and shakes it playfully. “no man,” he says. “it’s all in or nothing.”
- CUT TO: them jogging together with baby playfully squealing from her stroller early in the morning.
- CUT TO: vin playfully feeding dwayne grapes at the farmer’s market. “it’s all or nothing,” he repeats, raising his eyebrows (???? eyebrow folds? idk man). dwayne rolls his eyes and TAKES THE BITE.
- CUT TO: channing tatum in monogrammed shorts and pink polo and boat shoes on their front door step with one of his many perfect, precious toddlers on his shoulders, asking them to dinner. “uh yeah,” dwayne says, cool as a cucumber. he’s not freaking out (he’s totally freaking out!!). “we’ll bring the wine.”
- “we’ll bring the wine?” vin repeats, in a hushed voice so the neighbors and baby don’t hear them fighting. “do you know anything about wine? they probably have a second house in france! i haven’t had anything that didn’t come from a box since–since ever! what were you thinking?” “i panicked! it seemed like the right thing to say!”
- TIRES SCREECH as the ford focus hybrid drifts into the whole foods parking lot.
- they show up out of breath, foreheads glistening, with baby in her favorite babybjorn, feet kicking from the day’s excitement of wine shopping. vin, wheezing, passes a bottle of red and a bottle of white.
- “oh, a chateau coutet barsac,” idris says with a chuckle, showing the label to channing. “remember that time–?” and oh my GOD, they have inside jokes!!
- (”we don’t have any inside jokes!!” dwayne whispers when they immediately excuse themselves halfway through a tour of the house. “that’s because you are the least funny person i know!” vin replies. “god, i hate you!!!” they both probably hiss at each other.)
- the worst and best part of the night is when they’re serving the roast veg salad, and channing says with the best intentions, “so, how did you two meet?”
- “uh,” vin says.
- “the gym,” dwayne says. which, actually turns out to be true. they look at each other, smile soft and genuine for once at each other, REMEMBERING. before they were BITTER RIVALS, they met at the academy gym and were GYM BUDDIES. they used to have FUN trying to beat each other’s PR on the treadmill, they used to LOVE shit talking each other when they spotted each other bench pressing, they used to snap towels at each other’s asses in the locker room and totally not check each other out or anything!!! and then they were both accepted to the same position at work and they stopped being friendly for whatever reason. they stop smiling, they look away from each other. “anyway.”
- “we met building houses for habitat for humanity,” idris offers, because of COURSE THEY DID.
- the second worst part of the night is when channing mentions during the dessert course that two weeks from now is the annual May Day Homeowner’s Neighborhood Block Party Crab Cookoff, and maybe dwayne and vin would like to host to get to know everyone else in the neighborhood!
- vin has had like, three more glasses of wine than everyone else, and with aid of liquid confidence, shrugs his shoulders and leans back in his chair and says, “yeah, man, we’d love to.”
- “’yeah, man, we’d love to?’” dwayne repeats when they’re walking home, baby asleep in her bjorn.
- “sorry, did you want me to give ourselves away? what happened to being the best? we’re trying to be believable!”
- “yeah,” dwayne says, watching vin strip off his shirt and pants and toss them over his shoulder into their spare hamper before crawling into their bed. it’s routine. they both have their sides of the bed. “believable.”
- the bedroom is quiet as they face away from each other at the edges of the mattress. eventually dwayne asks, “do you remember why we stopped being friends?”
- for a second he thinks maybe vin’s gone to sleep. but he turns over. “no,” he says. “or yeah, maybe. as soon as i realized we would both be seeing action, it became too much of a risk. friendship. it was easier to lose you as a friend on my terms than lose you as a friend because you got your dumbass killed.”
- they decide to be friends again. you know, for the baby. for work. whatever.
- they get so caught up in planning the May Day Homeowner’s Neighborhood Block Party Crab Cookoff, making inside jokes and ignoring the increasing casual physical intimacy between them that they don’t realize they are BEING WATCHED.
- the mafia is HERE and they want their BABY and they want dwayne and vin DEAD.
- the M.D.H.N.B.P.C.C happens and everything is going according to plan, and they are about to have dwayne judge the bisque portion of the competition, but no one has seen dwayne anywhere!!!!
- are there warehouses in provincetown??? is there a bad part of provincetown??? anyways, that’s probably where the mafia took dwayne. vin is FREAKING OUT, how does he save dwayne??? how does he protect the baby, who they are using dwayne as ransom for??? who will judge the bisque portion of the crab cookoff???
- idris puts a hand on his shoulder. he’s been watching the entire time. “i’ll take the baby into our panic room–” OF COURSE THEY HAVE A PANIC ROOM, “and channing will judge the bisque portion of the crab cookofff. you go save your man.”
- CUT TO: vin getting geared up to go out and kick some mafia ass, entering their walk-in closet and grabbing GUNS and a BULLET PROOF VEST and lacing up his L.L BEAN MEN’S GORETEX LEATHER BOOTS.
- vin takes out the entire warehouse-or-whatever of mafia lackeys and comes across dwayne tied up and blindfolded.
- “who’s there!” dwayne demands, like he’s ready to fight despite himself. vin takes three strong steps forward and grabs him by the back of the head and pulls him in for a kiss. “guess who,” he replies. dwayne smiles.
- just then the Final Boss shows up as dwayne is being untied and like, something dramatic happens or whatever, but it’s okay. they die or go to jail or something, it doesn’t really matter, because dwayne and vin are in LOVE and they’re gonna adopt the hell out of that baby.
- CUT TO: a month later. Head Intelligence Captain Lupita Nyong’o is disappointed when vin won’t accept his promotion.
- “i would,” he says, heavily decorated for saving dwayne in the field and taking down the mafia family. “but the code of conduct says that it would be a conflict of interest if i was my husband’s supervisor.” BAM! THE END. THEY’RE MARRIED. WORLD PEACE UNLOCKED. DONALD TRUMP IMPEACHED. EVERYONE LIVES HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
Sometimes I think back on the time I spent working as a barista, and it seems SO STRANGE to me that “coffee shop AU” has become synonymous with narratives that are low on conflict, high on wholesome romance. During the year I spent working at a coffee shop:
- A coworker of mine took a bunch of psychedelics, walked through some strangers’ plate-glass door, and threatened them with a bowie knife, leading to his arrest and imprisonment (and, needless to say, a late opening for the coffee shop that morning).
- Another coworker, an ex-military type with a young wife and a new baby, decided to smoke up for the first time ever with two other mutual coworkers, in the back of one of their trucks; and ended up having a three-way with them which ended his marriage.
- I had a nervous breakdown, stopped being able to eat food or hold conversations, and ended up sleeping on my coworker’s couch for three weeks before she finally called my parents to come collect me.
- Multiple store managers were fired for embezzlement. (Reminder: this was within the space of a single year.)
- Yet another coworker, who was seventeen at the time, started dog-sitting for a couple of regulars in their (I’m guessing) early 50s, and ended up in an ongoing creepy and incidentally illegal ~relationship~ with them both.
- Various employees discovered, in the course of cleaning the bathrooms: couples fucking in the bathrooms; junkies passed out in the bathrooms; drunks puking in the bathrooms; both adults and children weeping in the bathrooms; a woman bleeding all over the bathroom from a gash in her throat (??); a dude standing in the middle of the bathroom floor and pissing in the opposite direction from the toilet, so that when the employee opened the unlocked door she got piss all over her (????).
- The owner of the bridal shop across the street was exposed as both abusive toward her employees and also cooking the books, which led to my coffee shop taking on a couple of untrained and weirdly conservative bridal shop workers for a few months while the bridal shop was shuttered and sold to new owners. Later the larcenous former bridal shop owner came down with some horrible disease which caused her to lose both her hands.
- There was a regular universally referred to as “Sketchy Steve,” who came in at 7am for a three-shot latte with room for Seagrams 7, and dealt drugs to all us baristas. I actually, at one point (I cannot believe I was this stupid), went inside Sketchy Steve’s house, and allowed him to spend like half an hour showing me his collection of découpaged outlet plates and also soliciting me for sex while I uncomfortably yet studiously declined.
- Right before I started, the store manager had walked off the job in the middle of a shift, and ¾ of the employees had walked out after him. None of them ever returned.
Like, working on the front lines of food service was the most operatically sordid professional experience I have ever had, and one of the most surreal; and it is hilarious to me that THAT, of all jobs, is the one that has come to stand for soft-focus domestic romance in fandom circles.
This is the Coffee Shop AU we deserve.
Oh my god this is so accurate. My coffee shop’s regular drug dealer is named Caramel Chris; a name given to him by our baristi but that he has run with and now exclusively goes by.
This morning a woman high on (I think) meth sternly lectured me about it wasn’t cool that I took her stuff (I did not), put a crowbar on the counter, knocked over some trash cans, and left. We’re keeping the crowbar. It’s the company’s crowbar now. So I guess I kind of did take her stuff after all.
Baristi see some shit.
guess what I’m writing next y’all
A love story where the two protagonists just refuse to fall for each other even though the plot keeps pushing for it.
As Sergio saw Cate across the crowded ballroom, their eyes met for just one moment, one shining moment where time stood still and–
“Ugh,” grumbled Sergio, “Not this shit again.” The dashing Castilian swordsman nabbed a glass of champagne from a passing tray held by a servant, downed it in one swig, and grabbed another in one fluid motion. An instant later, he chugged a third.
On the other end of the ballroom, Cate ground her teeth. All this month, she’d run into this one Spanish duelist over and over again in a number of increasingly contrived seeming coincidences. So far, she’d not been the least impressed by his lithe, muscular build or his silky-smooth Iberian accent; likewise, he wasn’t at all enraptured by her smoky, come-hither eyes or her hair, which cascaded down her back in fiery red tress–
“Oh, please, by all the saints, shut up!” snapped Cate, startling a nearby baron and his courtesan. The portly nobleman loomed affronted for a moment before Cate demurely curtseyed and said, “Apologies, monsieur, but the Narrator, he…”
She was unsure of how to finish the sentence. The baron, however, seemed to understand. “Think nothing of it, madame,” he said, smirking, “Last week I had to deal with a pack of rowdy Musketeers, a smuggler, and a handsome Scotsman. I understand how he can be.”
The ungrateful, ugly pig of a baron went back to his booze and his strumpet, wallowing in the indulgence that an oppressed populace had squeezed from the–
“What?!” exclaimed Sergio, somewhat offended, “Don’t take your feelings out on the Baron le Croix! He’s a fair man, by all accounts, and a quite generous ruler, at that. Just because I haven’t bedded that English girl–”
All at once, his thoughts returned to that rainy night at the Chateaux, sheltered under an awning in the rose garden, her sodden garments clinging to her heaving bos–
“No! They are surely not returning to that awful, damp, evening!” snapped Sergio at the air. Cate had somehow managed to be pushed, by the strange Brownian motion of parties, next to Sergio. She seemed to remember the indignities of huddling together during a thunderstorm and flushed. Sergio coughed nervously and averted his eyes. His gorgeous, dark eye–
“It’s not going to happen,” muttered Cate, into her third glass of champagne, “So stop pushing for it.”
Look, this is supposed to be a love story. I have one job to do in this lousy tale, it’s stupid, but I’m going to do it. Okay? Now can we all just get with the program and fall in love with each other?
“No!“ exclaimed both star-crossed unlovers. Sergio immediately slapped his forehead. “By God, this is intolerable,” he said, “I beg your pardon, milady, but I’m simply not interested.”
“No, no, it’s fine, I assure you, sir,” said Cate, giving him a flatly sympathetic look, “I’m betrothed already, anyway.”
“Oh? To whom?”
To an evil, vain, awful textile merchant who’ll treat her like prop–
“To a kind, intelligent man with good business sense,” said Cate through gritted teeth. “Harry does obsess over his hair, but…honestly I think that’s rather cute. My parents arranged the marriage when our estate’s finances fell through. We’ve gotten to know each other since, and I believe we both find it a rather agreeable pairing.”
“Ah! Well, then, best of luck to you,” said Sergio, relieved.
This isn’t right. This isn’t fair. All hard work trying to get you two to fall in love: the shipwreck, the highwaymen, the rival suitors–
“Yes, because that’s the best way to kindle love: repeated physical and psychological trauma,” snarked Sergio, around a mouthful of hors d’ouvres.
Quiet, you. This is my best shot at being promoted out of trashy romance stories–
“Trashy!?” exclaimed Cate, offended.
Sorry, sorry, not….trashy, per se, more….popularly acceptable–
“I’m not trashy…”
Oh Lord, this is going nowhere. Look, whatever, you two, go off to your boring, humdrum lives doing whatever it is you were before I tried to inject a little passion into your meaningless existence, alright? I don’t care anymore. I give up. I’m gonna go make two new protagonists. Maybe these ones won’t whine so much.
“Is he gone?”
“I hope so, we’re almost out of champagne.”
You are an anonymous professional assassin with a perfect reputation. You lead an ordinary life outside of your work. You’ve just been hired to kill yourself.
My first thought is that the middle man I use–calls himself ‘Leader’, real name Brett Thompson, 46, balding, lives in PA–has uncovered my identity. Why else would I be staring down at a picture of my own face? I think it’s a warning, that he knows about the Sanchez job, and I nearly reach for my go bag.
Then I see the client’s name.
Vi Larson, the file tells me, male, 32, computer analyst.
I close the manila folder, tossing it away from me. The whiskey sour’s gone warm in my hand, but I drink it down anyway, eyes distant. I don’t need to read any more of the file. I can fill in the gaps well enough.
Funnily enough, this betrayal is just as sharp and unpleasant as the first one, the one that got me into this business in the first place.
“You at least owe me a crime of passion, you bastard,” I mutter into my drink. I close my eyes and sigh, willing away the stinging in my heart. I knew that my relationship was in trouble, but this is just cold.
In a way, I can’t believe it. Is a divorce really that hard? But, no, I know Vi. He’s methodical, analytical, and competent. If anything, hiring an assassin with a reputation like mine is right in line with his personality. Nothing but the best, even in the murder game.
I should be flattered, really. My rates aren’t cheap. Whatever I did to make him send this in–and he did, there’s his social security, his fingerprint, everything–it must have been killer.
I set my glass down on the counter and tuck the folder under my arm. I need to think and I do my best thinking in the tub. Vi won’t be back from his “business” trip for another three days, during which I’m supposed to kill myself.
As I head up the stairs, I can’t help but laugh. Finally, after three years of marriage, my husband does something interesting. And it breaks my fucking heart.
——————————————
He wants me to make it painless but horrific. There’s a script in the document, something that’s more common than people think, and it’s hard to read it, even surrounded by bubbles and soothing music.
“Your husband sent me. Said he needed to shed some dead weight.” I snort at the pun and close my eyes, resting the file against my face so it doesn’t get wet. Unfortunately, the tears do that anyway.
“Fuck,” I say. “You bastard.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 