OC Blabber
Lou picked the movies. A month ago she had lain awake ruling them out: an hour and a half in the dark next to it, with nothing to do but think. Now she bought two tickets for a Wednesday matinee of a Christmas film about a divorced couple snowed into...
The trees leaned against a chain-link fence at the back of a supermarket car park, under a string of bare bulbs that buzzed in the cold. They were tied up in netting like something that had been caught. A man in a hat with ear flaps sat in a shed...
At ten past four Calvin was sitting on the edge of Leigh's bed in the dark, looking for his other sock. He found it under the chair by the window, where the blind didn't quite meet the frame and a bar of orange streetlight came through and lay across the...
Theo had stood in the wings of perhaps two hundred shows. He knew where to put himself: far enough back that the follow spot didn't catch him, close enough to the stagehand's headset to hear the calls, at an angle where he could see her face and the first rows...
The elevator didn't stop at a hallway. Lou had been bracing for one the whole way up: a corridor, a door, a mat, some kind of threshold where she could stand for a second with her gym bag and make a decision. Instead the numbers climbed to the top, the...
Lou had picked ice skating because she couldn't think of anything less demonic. She had lain awake on Tuesday night going through the options with the cat asleep on her feet. The movies were too dark, too quiet, an hour and a half sitting next to it in the black...
Lou woke at three because the cat was standing on her chest. It did this most nights. Usually she pushed it off and went back to sleep. Tonight she lay with its weight on her sternum and its tail across her face and found that she was already awake. She...
The studio was on the fourth floor of a building that used to be a printworks. When the drum room was quiet you could still smell ink in it, a faint metallic sweetness under the coffee and the carpet glue. Lou had been in there since nine. By the time...
The meeting at the label ran until eleven. Theo drove her home through the rain, the wipers going and the city smeared gold across the windshield. The radio was on low, tuned to a station he kept for traffic. Between the reports it played old songs nobody had asked for,...
She did her hair three times before it stopped looking like her. The first two times it still fell the way Morgana's hair had fallen in every photograph, heavy and to one side, shading an eye. The third time she pulled it back into a low knot at her neck,...
