Post by Hope on Oct 8, 2014 20:19:14 GMT -5
Was asked to share this. Easier than google docs.
This Title is Non-Toxic
She appeared as she left—in a whirlwind of contradictory expectation and unforeseeable
destruction. It was another day at an abandoned pavilion outside the library when I heard it. I had just
stood and readied myself to leave the quaint outdoor shelter, my mind otherwise completely absorbed
by an anthology of short-stories I had borrowed for the third time that year. It was a peaceful evening
broken only by the gun-shot like boom of a lightbulb smashing upon the ground in such a resounding
crash that it could only mean one thing. As I stood shell-shocked before the scene transpiring behind
my frozen form, I could only ponder whether or not it would be wisest just to flee.
“Did you hear that,” a feminine and child-like voice rang out from behind me, confirming my
fears in the existence of this particular gazebo invader. “It was like a thousand birds calling out for us!”
I turned with equal parts swiftness and reluctance as I swung my precious book out towards the
noisy specter behind me, but I just barely swiped its black binding against her long red hair—forcing
me to take two steps back so I could take in the scene in its entirety. She stood a mere two feet away
in her grass-stained white sun-dress; something she must have gotten out of a second hand store if not
her own grandmother's attic. The plain dress' only feature, a large ribbon as red as her hair, only helped
to accentuate her child-like qualities. But all the grass stains and dirt streaks and all the other signs so
normally associated with a Tom-Sawyer-aged rapscallion on the dress couldn't cause me to forget the
long history I had with the deceitfully old girl. And even as my eyes glazed over that poorly matching
dark-green tell-tale satchel she kept slung around her shoulder, I could feel a sort of defensive tingle
crawl up my spine. For here stood what should have been a mature young lady amongst the shattered
remains of the sole light bulb in the pavilion. A light bulb mounted ten feet up that the four-foot-six girl
was able to unscrew through some method of her own enchantment I never dared to question.
“Howdy!” she began happily, as though to reset the awkward conversation with a simple
word that managed to swiftly vent the unsettling mood that had begun to stagnate the otherwise fresh
air. But it wasn’t long before she had to crack a window lest she give into the suffocating vacuum of
tranquil order. “Whatcha eating there?”
“Sera! This isn’t a sandwich, it’s a book!”
“What do sandwiches gotta do with anything?”
“You—I mean—” I said, simply closing the dusty tome with my thumb where I was last
reading. After fifteen years you think I’d be used to her games. But there were still times where I’d
be too absorbed in the real world to remember to ignore them. The only option left to me was to be
selective about it, lest it aggravate her insanity further.
“So what's up?” I said before clearing my throat a bit, “Just making your usual mess of things?”
“I’ll have you know things were plenty messy before I came around,” Sera said before
backtracking to my more relevant question. “And if you must know this particular library has a great
music section!”
“I wasn’t aware they had installed a piano,” I shuttered as I recalled our little incident last week.
We went to a jazz club together when sometime during the first act I lost track of her. Twenty minutes
later we found ourselves both forcefully ejected and banned after Sera had managed to slither onto the
stage and crawled her way onto the large piano mid-song. Claiming to be enjoying the vibrations she
clung to the lid of the instrument in such a way that it wound up taking bouncer, performer and two
patrons to pry the kicking girl off. Admittedly, the musician probably wouldn't have been so angry if
she wasn't plugging her ears the whole time.
“Of course not silly,” Sera responded matter-of-factly. Pulling from her bag a spiral-bound
book of musical scores, she flicked open the pages to a piece that at first glance appeared as cluttered
and overactive as Sera’s own imagination. “You can’t expect artists to follow you as your walking
from class to class; how else could I have music wherever I want?!”
“What about that iPod got you for Christmas last year? Or the tablet you just had to have a few
weeks ago? Did you break those already?”
“Of course not!” she said, “In fact, I was using the iPad just before I found you!”
“Then what was the last song you heard?” I responded with disbelief, knowing she wouldn’t
be the bother putting on even a single track and that I had never seen her with the device since she first
opened it.
“I was listening to A Song of Ice and Fi—“
“An audiobook?” I cut her off, prepared for such a response. “So you used the iPad for?”
“C-checking my e-mail,” she said with a slight tone of embarrassment as she stealthy slipped a
pair of ear-buds out of her pocket and quickly stuffed them into her bag. “But I’d rather not sacrifice
my privacy just to prove myself to you.”
Knowing exactly what she was talking about I couldn’t resist at least once more acting the role
of the straight man to her foil-filled lifestyle.
“You know that’s meant for the blind, right? Would you prefer being blind?”
“Of course not!” she responded, an air of worry in her voice as she must have had pondered
the idea sometime in the past. Holding up her book one last time, she stuffed away her prop before
continuing. “Then how could I enjoy my music!?”
“You could try listening to it like a normal person,” I said despite knowing the line wouldn’t
even phase her.
“That’s boring,” she said playfully as she gracefully skipped over the shards of glass and around
to my half of the gazebo. “If you want to do whatever everyone else is doing, what’s the point of being
yourself? Our story doesn’t need two of the same characters—that’s just lazy writing.”
“Yeah well I don’t think we need to worry about anyone ‘reading’ us. Besides...its safer if
your ‘boring’.”
“You’ve never been more wrong,” she replied with a sudden serious fire in her eyes as she
skipped around me with tone that straddled the point where whimsy, melancholy and conviction fought
their timeless battle. “You’re nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” she continued, “a boring existence is an oxymoron. You can’t
be boring because doing so removes the individuality of self. If you can't distinguish yourself from
others, how can you claim you have an individual life? You’re a melting pot where expectation and
conformity simmer into a gray and tasteless paste.”
“So you think you’re the first to feel a song's beat or listen to the crash of an innocent light?”
“No,” she let loose a sigh, “But I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m something I’m not.”
“So you think yourself a philosopher?”
“Oh heavens no! All they do is read things that were meant to be written!”
“But they think.”
“Yeah, they think thoughts. Like everyone! I don't want to just mentally conjure or remember
a flower! I’m not just looking to be the first person who decides to eat a flower rather than simply
enjoy its smell. Nor the first to think of how or why the flower came to being. I want to be the first to
experience that flower in a way that’s so fundamentally new that I will learn more about its petals than
its own stem!”
There was another leak of awkward air between us as she ended her melodramatic speech:
A moment of uncomfortable silence as I fumbled around with my book and turned to stare at the
parking lot off in the distance. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her necessarily—just that the hedonistic
undertones of the selfishly seeking the unknown and unexperienced experience seemed so contrary to
the values of even the wisest philosophers.
“So only a few of us live our own lives, then?” I said as a red convertible left the lot.
“Nwo wone said it whould bhe eashy,” I heard between an unexpected slurred chewing noise.
A noise I came to dread as I swiftly turned to see a mischievous stream of red and white that left behind
nothing more in that otherwise empty pavilion than the shattered glass and a scrap of moist paper.
She had left as abruptly as she arrived. Serafima Dmitriev. That mysterious woman who refused to
experience things like anyone else I knew. That wild girl who'd appear and demand my attention only
to leave me alone with nothing but my book. Looking down in my hand I noticed my book appeared
untouched—save for my own thumb. Yet when I inspected the tome more carefully I saw the tell-tale
signs of her meddling: the next page had been ripped out of the thing and was now slowly traveling
down the girl’s digestive tract. The page now forever lost to the iron-clad stomach of that rapscallion
young girl.
This Title is Non-Toxic
She appeared as she left—in a whirlwind of contradictory expectation and unforeseeable
destruction. It was another day at an abandoned pavilion outside the library when I heard it. I had just
stood and readied myself to leave the quaint outdoor shelter, my mind otherwise completely absorbed
by an anthology of short-stories I had borrowed for the third time that year. It was a peaceful evening
broken only by the gun-shot like boom of a lightbulb smashing upon the ground in such a resounding
crash that it could only mean one thing. As I stood shell-shocked before the scene transpiring behind
my frozen form, I could only ponder whether or not it would be wisest just to flee.
“Did you hear that,” a feminine and child-like voice rang out from behind me, confirming my
fears in the existence of this particular gazebo invader. “It was like a thousand birds calling out for us!”
I turned with equal parts swiftness and reluctance as I swung my precious book out towards the
noisy specter behind me, but I just barely swiped its black binding against her long red hair—forcing
me to take two steps back so I could take in the scene in its entirety. She stood a mere two feet away
in her grass-stained white sun-dress; something she must have gotten out of a second hand store if not
her own grandmother's attic. The plain dress' only feature, a large ribbon as red as her hair, only helped
to accentuate her child-like qualities. But all the grass stains and dirt streaks and all the other signs so
normally associated with a Tom-Sawyer-aged rapscallion on the dress couldn't cause me to forget the
long history I had with the deceitfully old girl. And even as my eyes glazed over that poorly matching
dark-green tell-tale satchel she kept slung around her shoulder, I could feel a sort of defensive tingle
crawl up my spine. For here stood what should have been a mature young lady amongst the shattered
remains of the sole light bulb in the pavilion. A light bulb mounted ten feet up that the four-foot-six girl
was able to unscrew through some method of her own enchantment I never dared to question.
“Howdy!” she began happily, as though to reset the awkward conversation with a simple
word that managed to swiftly vent the unsettling mood that had begun to stagnate the otherwise fresh
air. But it wasn’t long before she had to crack a window lest she give into the suffocating vacuum of
tranquil order. “Whatcha eating there?”
“Sera! This isn’t a sandwich, it’s a book!”
“What do sandwiches gotta do with anything?”
“You—I mean—” I said, simply closing the dusty tome with my thumb where I was last
reading. After fifteen years you think I’d be used to her games. But there were still times where I’d
be too absorbed in the real world to remember to ignore them. The only option left to me was to be
selective about it, lest it aggravate her insanity further.
“So what's up?” I said before clearing my throat a bit, “Just making your usual mess of things?”
“I’ll have you know things were plenty messy before I came around,” Sera said before
backtracking to my more relevant question. “And if you must know this particular library has a great
music section!”
“I wasn’t aware they had installed a piano,” I shuttered as I recalled our little incident last week.
We went to a jazz club together when sometime during the first act I lost track of her. Twenty minutes
later we found ourselves both forcefully ejected and banned after Sera had managed to slither onto the
stage and crawled her way onto the large piano mid-song. Claiming to be enjoying the vibrations she
clung to the lid of the instrument in such a way that it wound up taking bouncer, performer and two
patrons to pry the kicking girl off. Admittedly, the musician probably wouldn't have been so angry if
she wasn't plugging her ears the whole time.
“Of course not silly,” Sera responded matter-of-factly. Pulling from her bag a spiral-bound
book of musical scores, she flicked open the pages to a piece that at first glance appeared as cluttered
and overactive as Sera’s own imagination. “You can’t expect artists to follow you as your walking
from class to class; how else could I have music wherever I want?!”
“What about that iPod got you for Christmas last year? Or the tablet you just had to have a few
weeks ago? Did you break those already?”
“Of course not!” she said, “In fact, I was using the iPad just before I found you!”
“Then what was the last song you heard?” I responded with disbelief, knowing she wouldn’t
be the bother putting on even a single track and that I had never seen her with the device since she first
opened it.
“I was listening to A Song of Ice and Fi—“
“An audiobook?” I cut her off, prepared for such a response. “So you used the iPad for?”
“C-checking my e-mail,” she said with a slight tone of embarrassment as she stealthy slipped a
pair of ear-buds out of her pocket and quickly stuffed them into her bag. “But I’d rather not sacrifice
my privacy just to prove myself to you.”
Knowing exactly what she was talking about I couldn’t resist at least once more acting the role
of the straight man to her foil-filled lifestyle.
“You know that’s meant for the blind, right? Would you prefer being blind?”
“Of course not!” she responded, an air of worry in her voice as she must have had pondered
the idea sometime in the past. Holding up her book one last time, she stuffed away her prop before
continuing. “Then how could I enjoy my music!?”
“You could try listening to it like a normal person,” I said despite knowing the line wouldn’t
even phase her.
“That’s boring,” she said playfully as she gracefully skipped over the shards of glass and around
to my half of the gazebo. “If you want to do whatever everyone else is doing, what’s the point of being
yourself? Our story doesn’t need two of the same characters—that’s just lazy writing.”
“Yeah well I don’t think we need to worry about anyone ‘reading’ us. Besides...its safer if
your ‘boring’.”
“You’ve never been more wrong,” she replied with a sudden serious fire in her eyes as she
skipped around me with tone that straddled the point where whimsy, melancholy and conviction fought
their timeless battle. “You’re nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” she continued, “a boring existence is an oxymoron. You can’t
be boring because doing so removes the individuality of self. If you can't distinguish yourself from
others, how can you claim you have an individual life? You’re a melting pot where expectation and
conformity simmer into a gray and tasteless paste.”
“So you think you’re the first to feel a song's beat or listen to the crash of an innocent light?”
“No,” she let loose a sigh, “But I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m something I’m not.”
“So you think yourself a philosopher?”
“Oh heavens no! All they do is read things that were meant to be written!”
“But they think.”
“Yeah, they think thoughts. Like everyone! I don't want to just mentally conjure or remember
a flower! I’m not just looking to be the first person who decides to eat a flower rather than simply
enjoy its smell. Nor the first to think of how or why the flower came to being. I want to be the first to
experience that flower in a way that’s so fundamentally new that I will learn more about its petals than
its own stem!”
There was another leak of awkward air between us as she ended her melodramatic speech:
A moment of uncomfortable silence as I fumbled around with my book and turned to stare at the
parking lot off in the distance. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her necessarily—just that the hedonistic
undertones of the selfishly seeking the unknown and unexperienced experience seemed so contrary to
the values of even the wisest philosophers.
“So only a few of us live our own lives, then?” I said as a red convertible left the lot.
“Nwo wone said it whould bhe eashy,” I heard between an unexpected slurred chewing noise.
A noise I came to dread as I swiftly turned to see a mischievous stream of red and white that left behind
nothing more in that otherwise empty pavilion than the shattered glass and a scrap of moist paper.
She had left as abruptly as she arrived. Serafima Dmitriev. That mysterious woman who refused to
experience things like anyone else I knew. That wild girl who'd appear and demand my attention only
to leave me alone with nothing but my book. Looking down in my hand I noticed my book appeared
untouched—save for my own thumb. Yet when I inspected the tome more carefully I saw the tell-tale
signs of her meddling: the next page had been ripped out of the thing and was now slowly traveling
down the girl’s digestive tract. The page now forever lost to the iron-clad stomach of that rapscallion
young girl.