OC Blabber
There was no up in the place she came from. There was no down, no near or far, only the pressure, and the pressure was everything. It pressed from all sides at once and had been pressing for so long that the word long had worn away to nothing. It...
The first thing she learned was that a body hurts all the time. Not in the way the deep had hurt. The deep had been one pain, whole and everywhere, so complete that it had stopped being pain and become the shape of existence. This was different. This body hurt...
She discharged herself at dawn on the fifth day, against advice, with three cracked ribs strapped under a black hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that hid most of her face. The doctor had told her to rest for six weeks. The label had told her to have a statement...
The bathroom light in Calvin's flat had a buzz in it that came and went, and it was going now, a thin electric whine above the mirror like a mosquito that would not land. He had showered. He had shaved, carefully, twice along the jaw where he always missed a...
The ring light has three settings and Theo has tried all of them twice. He stands behind it in the penthouse living room with the remote in one hand and his phone in the other, and the phone is on speaker, and the voice coming out of it belongs to...
Theo sat down. He did it slowly, the way he had sat down in hospital waiting rooms four times in four years, and he brought the laptop with him without thinking about it and set it on his knees, open, the blue light from the screen on his hands. Forty-one...
Slice of Life intermission. Theo let himself in at twenty past eight with the code he'd used for four years. He was carrying a paper bag that had gone see-through at the bottom. The blinds on the east side were already up. She had never touched them before the hospital....
The water was warmer than the night. She had waited until after three. Theo had stayed over on the sofa, as he had a few nights since the stream, because the press had found the building and the building had found the press, and someone had to answer the phone...
Slice of Life intermission. The tomato had stayed. She had now eaten three sandwiches with it and said nothing, which Theo took as a verdict. He had moved tomato? to the top of his notes and deleted the question mark. It was the third week of August, and already hot...
The shop closed its doors for them for an hour. For most of that hour the girl who worked there was very good at her job. She brought dresses in the right size and carried away the wrong ones without being asked. When Naru came out in something green, the...
The water at the bottom was very still. She had laid it there herself, a little every day. Each day it settled and held, and the stillness had grown so complete that she had stopped noticing it, the way you stop hearing a sound that never ends. Then, without anything...
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,...
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,...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
