NOTE: I'm a part of a livejournal community called Runaway Tales, which is a community for original fiction challeges. We have "flavors" (lists of word or phrase prompts, usually in groups of 30) and "toppings/extras" (things like different mediums, focusing a story on the villian, 5,000+ words, and less than 100 words.) We call anything less than 100 words a "pocky." I decided to write this story in a format we call a "pocy chain."
Each one of these scenes is literally EXACTLY 100 words. (There is no "or less" in a PC.) Getting things down to 100 words really makes you think about which ones are important. I hope you enjoy. I realize I'm not sure which character the focus is on here. I hope they both have layers.
Voila.
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There’s nothing sane or normal about Rylie Somewhere. She’s got caged animal eyes, and there’s something almost feral in her slinky posture.
Where she’s neon signs and cigarette smoke curled around her face like vapid quotation marks, he’s origami flowers and promises of better days and smells like flannel and sunshine.
There’s nothing well-adjusted or wholesome about the crook of her smile, or the twists of her labyrinth thoughts, but he can’t help but get tangled up in her anyway, in the threads of her insane life.
When they met, she was a gypsy with a fifty in both shoes.
Each one of these scenes is literally EXACTLY 100 words. (There is no "or less" in a PC.) Getting things down to 100 words really makes you think about which ones are important. I hope you enjoy. I realize I'm not sure which character the focus is on here. I hope they both have layers.
Voila.
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There’s nothing sane or normal about Rylie Somewhere. She’s got caged animal eyes, and there’s something almost feral in her slinky posture.
Where she’s neon signs and cigarette smoke curled around her face like vapid quotation marks, he’s origami flowers and promises of better days and smells like flannel and sunshine.
There’s nothing well-adjusted or wholesome about the crook of her smile, or the twists of her labyrinth thoughts, but he can’t help but get tangled up in her anyway, in the threads of her insane life.
When they met, she was a gypsy with a fifty in both shoes.
&&&
He’s got this best friend who is all those things Rylie isn’t; sweet and teasing and well-adjusted. Her name is Zia and mostly she shies from calling Rylie by name.
She does this by not talking about her at all, but occasionally she can’t avoid it, and calls her “the problem child.”
When Nolan asks her about it, half offended and half amused, she tells him that one of them have to be the sane one, and he’s not stepping up to the plate.
She makes sense, but sometimes she wears that black dress and he forgets how to breathe.
&&&
In December, she cuts him out of her life, because he wants to be her knight in shining armor, her Hosea, and she’s never been comfortable being anybody’s anything.
If life is a game, Rylie’s a perpetual cheater, and if feelings were a draft, Rylie moves to Canada every time they get remotely close.
But she’s a botched abortion, so when life deals her a bad hand (two little lines on a stick she paid eleven dollars for) she thinks that it’s maybe she can let him be her rescue one more time.
She doesn’t know what else to do.
&&&
The first night she stops by, needing a place to stay, and scratching at her wrists like she’s tweaking, he hasn’t seen her in seven months.
He’s not even sure how she got his new address. Nolan shoves everything out of the guest bedroom that he uses as a library while she sleeps, regardless.
He tells Zia in an email, because she’ll find out soon enough, and she responds in all caps, with no punctuation. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ARE YOU STUPID SHE’S BASICALLY EVIL, etc.
Thanks for your support, he writes, amused. She’ll be there at the welcome party.
&&&
She decides she’ll only stay for eight months, let him keep her in his little narrow yellow house until then, when she gives it away and it becomes someone else’s squirmy problem.
Anything more than that would be selfish.
She hadn’t expected for him to treat her like glass, to hold her in his hands like a butterfly-perch, careful not to make her uneasy about where she stood.
She’s a planner, logos with no pathos. She doesn’t have to account for feelings, other than how they factor into how other people react. Except, he’s throwing a wrench into her cogs.
&&&
She doesn’t know any other currency to use after he makes so many adjustments for her to move into his life, so after he throws her a housewarming party, like some kind of newlyweds, she crawls into his bed, attaching her mouth to his, and down his jaw, jugular…
“What are you doing?” he splutters, pushing her away.
She’s confused, because hello isn’t it obvious, and he’s a guy, so instead of taking his question at face value, she asks, flippantly, “Why not?”
“It wouldn’t be the same for you,” he says, and she has trouble getting warm all night.
&&&
She’s got a “killer” last name, just made to be written in lights or on CD covers, but Rylie’s only a Somewhere because her mom thought her stripper name would make a great real name, and so when she tells her friend Delia that she thinks about changing it, she gives her a blank look.
“Are you crazy?”
She gets lost in her head for a moment, because Delia sounds just like Him, all teasing terms of endearment and amused glances.
She thinks about the parasite she didn’t evict from her stomach, smirks hatefully at herself. “I guess I am.”
&&&
He leans over her stomach sometimes to talk to her unborn spawn. It makes her feel something like heartburn but with an added uncomfortable dimension.
“What are you doing?” she snapped, the first time. Soft emotions, soft words, all they do is make her itchy.
“Don’t you think she gets bored in there?” He asked her, big eyes wide, and mouth twisted around a friendly smile, no irony.
“She?”
“I’ve got a feeling,” he said, winking.
She put a hand to her stomach, not yet bulging, but something and shrugged. Her tone was lifeless when she scoffed. “I doubt it.”
&&&
Mama Somewhere used to put her on the porch with a coloring book and a half-circle of mosquito candles when she had clients inside, and Aunt Lucy couldn’t babysit, for hours at a time. Sometimes, she was exhausted and forgot about her.
Rylie learned how to pop her bedroom window by the time she was seven, just in case.
She told him that once, to hurt him when he was being all precious and stupid, and kind of regretted it, in a vague, practical sense. He pulled her into a hug, silently.
She still can’t stand the scent of Citronella.
&&&
By the time her stomach is finally beginning to get round, stretching her t-shirts and forcing her sweaters open like curtains framing her tummy, Nolan accidentally calls her baby a “she” at least three times a day.
Rylie’s still firmly using “it” so she thinks maybe he’s attempting to humanize it.
He says he has a feeling, shrugging apologetically when she glares at him after ever instance.
She knows, though, that it’s a boy. She tells him that and he raises an eyebrow. “Maybe,” he concedes, with a doubtful look.
It has to be. It’s hard to break a boy.
&&&
“I just need her for a few hours,” he finds himself pleading into his phone.
Zia sighs. “No way, Retard,” she jibes affectionately. “I wouldn’t even trust her with a flour baby. Think of the mess.”
“Zeeeee,” he drags out. “She’s pregnant! She probably has … instincts.”
Zia laughed. “Nolan, are you trying to test that out?”
He drummed his fingers against the kitchen table, waiting for her arrival. He lowers his voice to a hush. “She’s not keeping her.”
“You’re trying to change her mind,” Zia breathed. “This can not end well.”
&&&
“This is Zia’s niece,” he tells her, when she comes through the door.
“Ew,” is al she says, a reflexively. Hopefully he’ll think she’s joking.
He laughs, so he must.
“You want to hold her?”
“No,” she says, but she finds the thing pressed into her arms anyways.
“… She’s like a little person.”
Nolan’s amused. “She is a little person.”
She proceeds to spit up on her shoulder.
“Will you get me a clean shirt from the top drawer?” she asks, definitely not freaking out, and he can’t help but think that this is kind of a big deal.
&&&
“Would you hate her any less if she wasn’t so gorgeous?” Delia asks her, and Zia has a fleeting urge to smother her with a pillow.
“You mean if she wasn’t a vile seductress?” Zia corrected, and got serious. “You’re not supposed to be the level-headed one, D.”
Delia arched a perfectly sculpted eyebrow.
“Yes, yes, don’t be stupid. Whether she’s hot or not, she’s still an incubus. Succubus?”
“Incubi are men,” Delia confirmed absently.
“Right. When did you get smart?”
“Hey,” she scoffed, “I’m more than a pretty face. Give her a chance, and she might be, too.”
&&&
Zia brings pizza as a piece offering, one night, after Nolan tells her about the Baby Incident.
She doesn’t invite Delia, because for some reason she actually likes Rylie, in an unrestrained isn’t life peachy kind of way, instead of the way Zia tolerates her for Nolan’s sake.
He is going to get his heart broken, and someone has to pick up the pieces.
Except, there are moments in the middle when she witnesses them playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who’s doing the dishes, or playing these stupid games that Nolan made up, like fingershooting, that she almost doesn’t mind her.
&&&
“Let me keep her.”
He startles her so badly – in the middle of breakfast, no less! – that she almost falls out of her chair. He freaks out for a few minutes, before she assures him that she’s just fine, and so is her unborn.
“Number one: totally a boy. Number two: are you insane!?!?”
Nolan keeps staring at her, pretty lucid for being a crazy person.
“I –” he swallows, hard, “I think I’d be a good dad.”
“I know you would,” she says, and her throat feels shredded, like she’s talking around shards of glass. “That’s not the problem.”
&&&
She hasn’t wanted to know the entire pregnancy the gender of her baby (and she’s not an it anymore) because of this feeling.
She can’t give away a girl.
They’re fragile and so easily screwed up, with actions or with words or with looks.
“Your maternal instincts are better than mine, I guess,” she tells him, dark curls plastered to her sweaty face, from a hospital bed.
Rylie can’t get her to latch on and they might both burst into tears at any moment.
He picks her up, tickling her baby cheek with his finger. She sucks on it immediately.
&&&
She leaves her firstborn child in his arms and buys a train ticket.
It’s bee a month and she’s no good at this and she can’t ever make her shut up.
She can’t stay. And she can’t leave. And her heart wants her to do the things that will be the hardest for her, and so she does what she always does: she dodges the draft.
Except, he’s been her center of gravity for far too long.
At the first stop, she buys a ticket back with the emergency fifty she’s kept in her shoe since she was a kid.
&&&
She breezes back into his house past midnight, and only realizes when she’s halfway to her room that the door isn’t locked.
He’s asleep at a kitchen chair, little Norah resting against his shoulder, a bottle still in his hand.
“Hey,” she murmurs, pulling him gently from sleep.
“Hey,” he says, before he’s even got his eyes open – like responding to her is second nature to him now. Then,
with his eyes blinking away sleep, “Hey!”
He looks down at the sleeping bundle in his arms, a sleepy grin on his face. “Mommy’s home.”
Maybe she’s ready for this war.
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