(no subject)
3/2/05 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
minervasoloApparently sleep and I are no longer on speaking terms. I didn't fall alsleep until well past midnight last night, woke up a hell of a lot during the night and ended up getting up at about eight. This wouldn't have been so bad if I wasn't absolutely shattered to start with. I shall be descending on Boots later today to get my prescription, so I think I'll hunt down some Kalms or the like. Nice homeopathic sleep remedies that may only work psychologically.
Ooh, I have strepsils. Useful. Though I'm really no where near that bad (it's just a cold, to be honest, and lack of sleep). I sounded far more croaky on the phone to Mike than I actually am. I still have another hard-hitting lemsip to play with too.
Bored. Hmm. Time to post some writing soc games.
He'd been frying the bacon rinds for several minutes before he noticed a potential problem.
Okay, so maybe the fridge had whiffed a bit, but that was normal. It was a student fridge: it had sentient milk that closed the door for you if you forgot. Weird smells were to be expected.
Okay, so perhaps he should have noticed it was the bacon that smelt a bit off once the fridge had shut, but all anyone could ever smell outside the fridge was smoke. It was a student kitchen. The smoke never really dissipated, it just hung about to see if any new and unfamiliar smoke would drop by for a chat.
The smoke even provided a good excuse for failing to notice the distinctly green hue of the bacon. The question now was if it smelt like rotten bacon, and it looked like rotten bacon, would it quack like rottne bacon?
Actually, if it did quack even he, owner of a truly mighty student stomach, might be forced to start over and risk the eggs. Though some of the eggs quacked too.
He looked at the bacon, and he looked at the pad of paper next to the phone, ready for calling the pizza place.
The pen on top of the pad was brown. Like bacon. Well, most bacon.
If his friends got food poisoning that was up to them. If they saw the bacon was green, though, they might get carried away and leap to conclusions about where blame might possibly be placed.
He flipped the bacon out of the pan with a skilled manouevre, no less skilled simply because most of it ended up on the floor. Hey, dirt was brown too, right? Retrieving it, he whipped the lid from the pen and began his work of art.
When the rinds were sufficiently bacon coloured once more he dropped them back into the two week old grease that coated the pan and let them crackle. He was half tempted to add the eggs and claim omelette, but he thought that might have too many syllables for student cuisine. Bacon sarnies seemed best.
Okay, so maybe it did taste a little odd. Kinda plasticy in places. And, alright, his girlfriend was hospitalised for two weeks. The food hygiene standards agnecy were investigating, but suspicion had yet to fall on our daring chef. The milk, though, had had to be smuggled out of the country in the back of a lorry, and was now raising a family in the south of Spain.
"Hey," his housemated said, distracting him from his task of judging whether the quacks were loud enough to warrant calling the Chinese takeaway and ordering some pancakes. "Hey, do you know what happened to the pen lid?"
bacon rinds, pen lid
The building had been abandoned since the thirties, but it was still standing. Maybe it was the architecture. Maybe it was sentimentality. Maybe the owner was still alive, or the council was lazy, or the protestors kept getting in the way. Maybe it was folklore.
He lived there. He had a mess of matted brown hair that was indistinguishable from his brown matted coat. Once upon a time, those had been boots. The closest approximation anyone might make now, assuming they were surgically removed from his feet, were two stuffed kangaroo joeys. What people might mistake for a tie was actually a noose.
She lived there. She was claustrophobic, and spent her days crouched in the corner of the elevator, still stuck between floors, sobbing and panicking. Her hair and face had long since turned as white as her blouse.
They lived there. They were conjoined twins, sleeping on a large pale table in the basement, still wearing their green gown. The slab was pure white marble, but red spots decorated the ceiling above them.
He was the only mobile one, if he was honest with himself. He couldn't remember his name, but as he referred to the girl as 'Elevator' and the twins as 'Lab' and 'Tory', he called himself 'Lobby' when he was forced to call himself anything. He was the reason the building was empty now.
He wandered the ground floor, he wandered the stairs, he wandered the offices. He had nothing else to do. The dead want nothing and so do nothing. That was why the twins didn't wake.
He wanted nothing for himself, but it occured to him, walking up and down the stairs, the Elevator might want to leave the lift. He could hear her sobbing through the wall.
He couldn't enter the lift any more than he could pass through walls or fly. He could, however, open doors with his hands, climb steps with his feet and speak words with his mouth. There wasn't much different after death.
"Eleva- Uh, young lady?"
For the first time in a century the crying stopped.
He opened his mouth to continue, and realised there was nothing he could saw that the failed rescuers hadn't said. No words of comfort. He walked away, thinking.
The building was old now. The building was on the verge of falling down. He wrenched a thick pine door from its portal, coating the floor with plaster and mortar, and began to run. Up the stairs and BANG, into the wall. The whole building shook. Back against the opposite wall and forwards, BANG, revealing crumbling brick.
BANG. BANG. Metal doors. Dead fingers, dry fingers, prising and pulling.
Inside the corpse of a secretary, a poor girl forced to work by circumstances beyond her. Long dead. No sobbing.
She had been freed. He had granted her wish. He had sacrificed nothing to do so, true, but he had still done something to satisfy her wants, and hers alone, and that was a form of generosity. No one had ever shown such to him in life.
Maybe he had sacrificed something. The walls continued to crumble. The lift plunged down abruptly as the ceiling gave. It shook the foundations at the basement level.
No one was killed when the building collapsed - it had, after all, been abandoned since the thirties, and no one had been prepared for its collapse - but still, some bodies were found inside.
generosity, an old abandoned elevator
I have another fic I could stick up here, that I wrote to read at writing soc. Maybe I'll do that later. I feel like I'm having such an organised day, it's bizarre. Laundry and medication and meetings and lectures and seminars and people, oh my! ^_^
Ooh, I have strepsils. Useful. Though I'm really no where near that bad (it's just a cold, to be honest, and lack of sleep). I sounded far more croaky on the phone to Mike than I actually am. I still have another hard-hitting lemsip to play with too.
Bored. Hmm. Time to post some writing soc games.
He'd been frying the bacon rinds for several minutes before he noticed a potential problem.
Okay, so maybe the fridge had whiffed a bit, but that was normal. It was a student fridge: it had sentient milk that closed the door for you if you forgot. Weird smells were to be expected.
Okay, so perhaps he should have noticed it was the bacon that smelt a bit off once the fridge had shut, but all anyone could ever smell outside the fridge was smoke. It was a student kitchen. The smoke never really dissipated, it just hung about to see if any new and unfamiliar smoke would drop by for a chat.
The smoke even provided a good excuse for failing to notice the distinctly green hue of the bacon. The question now was if it smelt like rotten bacon, and it looked like rotten bacon, would it quack like rottne bacon?
Actually, if it did quack even he, owner of a truly mighty student stomach, might be forced to start over and risk the eggs. Though some of the eggs quacked too.
He looked at the bacon, and he looked at the pad of paper next to the phone, ready for calling the pizza place.
The pen on top of the pad was brown. Like bacon. Well, most bacon.
If his friends got food poisoning that was up to them. If they saw the bacon was green, though, they might get carried away and leap to conclusions about where blame might possibly be placed.
He flipped the bacon out of the pan with a skilled manouevre, no less skilled simply because most of it ended up on the floor. Hey, dirt was brown too, right? Retrieving it, he whipped the lid from the pen and began his work of art.
When the rinds were sufficiently bacon coloured once more he dropped them back into the two week old grease that coated the pan and let them crackle. He was half tempted to add the eggs and claim omelette, but he thought that might have too many syllables for student cuisine. Bacon sarnies seemed best.
Okay, so maybe it did taste a little odd. Kinda plasticy in places. And, alright, his girlfriend was hospitalised for two weeks. The food hygiene standards agnecy were investigating, but suspicion had yet to fall on our daring chef. The milk, though, had had to be smuggled out of the country in the back of a lorry, and was now raising a family in the south of Spain.
"Hey," his housemated said, distracting him from his task of judging whether the quacks were loud enough to warrant calling the Chinese takeaway and ordering some pancakes. "Hey, do you know what happened to the pen lid?"
bacon rinds, pen lid
The building had been abandoned since the thirties, but it was still standing. Maybe it was the architecture. Maybe it was sentimentality. Maybe the owner was still alive, or the council was lazy, or the protestors kept getting in the way. Maybe it was folklore.
He lived there. He had a mess of matted brown hair that was indistinguishable from his brown matted coat. Once upon a time, those had been boots. The closest approximation anyone might make now, assuming they were surgically removed from his feet, were two stuffed kangaroo joeys. What people might mistake for a tie was actually a noose.
She lived there. She was claustrophobic, and spent her days crouched in the corner of the elevator, still stuck between floors, sobbing and panicking. Her hair and face had long since turned as white as her blouse.
They lived there. They were conjoined twins, sleeping on a large pale table in the basement, still wearing their green gown. The slab was pure white marble, but red spots decorated the ceiling above them.
He was the only mobile one, if he was honest with himself. He couldn't remember his name, but as he referred to the girl as 'Elevator' and the twins as 'Lab' and 'Tory', he called himself 'Lobby' when he was forced to call himself anything. He was the reason the building was empty now.
He wandered the ground floor, he wandered the stairs, he wandered the offices. He had nothing else to do. The dead want nothing and so do nothing. That was why the twins didn't wake.
He wanted nothing for himself, but it occured to him, walking up and down the stairs, the Elevator might want to leave the lift. He could hear her sobbing through the wall.
He couldn't enter the lift any more than he could pass through walls or fly. He could, however, open doors with his hands, climb steps with his feet and speak words with his mouth. There wasn't much different after death.
"Eleva- Uh, young lady?"
For the first time in a century the crying stopped.
He opened his mouth to continue, and realised there was nothing he could saw that the failed rescuers hadn't said. No words of comfort. He walked away, thinking.
The building was old now. The building was on the verge of falling down. He wrenched a thick pine door from its portal, coating the floor with plaster and mortar, and began to run. Up the stairs and BANG, into the wall. The whole building shook. Back against the opposite wall and forwards, BANG, revealing crumbling brick.
BANG. BANG. Metal doors. Dead fingers, dry fingers, prising and pulling.
Inside the corpse of a secretary, a poor girl forced to work by circumstances beyond her. Long dead. No sobbing.
She had been freed. He had granted her wish. He had sacrificed nothing to do so, true, but he had still done something to satisfy her wants, and hers alone, and that was a form of generosity. No one had ever shown such to him in life.
Maybe he had sacrificed something. The walls continued to crumble. The lift plunged down abruptly as the ceiling gave. It shook the foundations at the basement level.
No one was killed when the building collapsed - it had, after all, been abandoned since the thirties, and no one had been prepared for its collapse - but still, some bodies were found inside.
generosity, an old abandoned elevator
I have another fic I could stick up here, that I wrote to read at writing soc. Maybe I'll do that later. I feel like I'm having such an organised day, it's bizarre. Laundry and medication and meetings and lectures and seminars and people, oh my! ^_^
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 3/2/05 11:48 am (UTC)The second one reminds me really powerfully of one of the stories from I Sing The Body Electric by Ray Bradbury, and a bit of a story from Swamp Foetus (possibly Self-Made Man, I forget which anthology) where a meat factory starts eating people. Good stuff.
no subject
Date: 3/2/05 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 3/2/05 12:52 pm (UTC)imsonia.insomnia.Kalms? Kalms! I laugh at your Kalms!
Going to talk to the pink cloud gods of planet nine now about why I haven't done my homework.
no subject
Date: 3/2/05 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 3/2/05 05:26 pm (UTC)