RE: Vox Mentis
04-27-2017, 08:42 PM
Spoiler
(05-06-2015, 11:08 PM)☆ C.H.W.O.K.A ☆ Wrote: »Go get 'im, girl!
(05-06-2015, 11:39 PM)Crowstone Wrote: »maybe you should relax on the sexy stuff until you're sure no one will get hurt.
Okay, okay, no sexy stuff. Something innocuous, maybe. You decide to buy him flowers. You'll just buy flowers and a card and if he's not at the hospital when you drop them off, that's fine. You'll just leave them.
You sweat over what to write, settle on THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY TOOTH, stare at it in horror, and go back to the store for a new card. On the second attempt, you go dignified.
THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME.
ELISE JACKSON.
Maybe it's not completely dignified. Because you can't resist writing saving me. Or supplying your full name. But you don’t include a phone number. You manage that.
You drive to the hospital, the flowers on the passenger seat with air blasting at them to fend off the heat. The woman at the front desk thinks you're there for an appointment, which you guess is logical, given the brace, and once that's straightened out, says, “Did you want to see him or just leave these?” You panic and say, “Just leave them.”
You get as far as the doors. “Is he here, though?”
The woman looks at you like she's seen it all a million times before and says, “I’ll see.” She picks up the phone. You wait and try not to feel fourteen years old. The woman replaces the receiver. “I’m sorry.”
In the car, you grip the wheel and berate yourself. What would Eliot think? He would be ashamed. He’d tell you to get used to Broken Hill, because the way you're acting, you're never coming home. You might as well buy a house and get a couple of dogs and marry Danny the paramedic and live here forever.
“Oh, Jesus,” you say, because that is atrocious.
You sweat over what to write, settle on THANK YOU FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY TOOTH, stare at it in horror, and go back to the store for a new card. On the second attempt, you go dignified.
THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME.
ELISE JACKSON.
Maybe it's not completely dignified. Because you can't resist writing saving me. Or supplying your full name. But you don’t include a phone number. You manage that.
You drive to the hospital, the flowers on the passenger seat with air blasting at them to fend off the heat. The woman at the front desk thinks you're there for an appointment, which you guess is logical, given the brace, and once that's straightened out, says, “Did you want to see him or just leave these?” You panic and say, “Just leave them.”
You get as far as the doors. “Is he here, though?”
The woman looks at you like she's seen it all a million times before and says, “I’ll see.” She picks up the phone. You wait and try not to feel fourteen years old. The woman replaces the receiver. “I’m sorry.”
In the car, you grip the wheel and berate yourself. What would Eliot think? He would be ashamed. He’d tell you to get used to Broken Hill, because the way you're acting, you're never coming home. You might as well buy a house and get a couple of dogs and marry Danny the paramedic and live here forever.
“Oh, Jesus,” you say, because that is atrocious.
Schazer Wrote:You know what they say; it's counter-productive to wait for ambulances at the bottom of cliffs. Or something.
Go find yourself a nice cliff, preferably with a nice sea view and good beach access, and find yourself some daredevil-aspirant with shitty footing.
Metaphorically speaking, of course. It's not like there's any beaches in this blasted hellscape, but at least getting another look at the car might alleviate your stir-crazy. Make you know it wasn't a dream.
You become Pavlovian to the bell that jangles whenever someone opens the Tangled Threads door but it's never him, and after a few days you understand that it never will be. He saw the flowers for exactly what they were: an awkward, juvenile attempt at romance. You feel angry at yourself, and him for making you act like that. Because, to be fair, he caught you in the middle of a trauma. You hadn’t been yourself. Who is he to judge? He's a nobody in a dinky, nothing town and he doesn't even have a proper ambulance. And his hair is old-fashioned. The only reason you’d even looked at him twice was he had no competition. You itch for a boy to walk in, someone young and cute and stupid. You stew behind the counter and tidy racks until everything is the same.
At noon, you walk to the local burger place and stand in line behind the miners - not muscular guys in sleeveless shirts with picks and sexy soot stains, like you might expect, but fat truck drivers and crane operators who smell like oil. Hardly anyone actually goes into the mines anymore. That part is automated. And there's hardly anything to go into: For the most part, the mines are great open-cut quarries that look like meteorite craters. The town surrounds a huge one, separated from it by a towering wall of mullock, which is the stuff they dragged out of the ground that wasn’t worth anything but had to be put somewhere. No one seems to find this strange, living in a town shaped like a doughnut, slowly filling the edges of the hole with crap. You want to ask why they didn’t move the town about five miles north, or south or east or west, for that matter, any random direction. But you can predict the response: They would say, Because this is where it is. Australians are very practical, you've found. They do things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It's refreshing and genuine but sometimes leads to situations like building a town around a hole. Originally you'd thought the name Broken Hill was a joke, part of the perverse humor that leads them to nickname people with red hair Bluey. Because besides the mullock, the place is as flat as a mirror. But apparently there was a hill once. It had been mined away.
You inhale stale sweat and cigarettes until you reach the counter, then eat your burger at a table outside, watching traffic. Everything that passes you've seen before. You turn your head, testing your neck, and your eyes catch something.
The paramedic van. Parked across the road.
At noon, you walk to the local burger place and stand in line behind the miners - not muscular guys in sleeveless shirts with picks and sexy soot stains, like you might expect, but fat truck drivers and crane operators who smell like oil. Hardly anyone actually goes into the mines anymore. That part is automated. And there's hardly anything to go into: For the most part, the mines are great open-cut quarries that look like meteorite craters. The town surrounds a huge one, separated from it by a towering wall of mullock, which is the stuff they dragged out of the ground that wasn’t worth anything but had to be put somewhere. No one seems to find this strange, living in a town shaped like a doughnut, slowly filling the edges of the hole with crap. You want to ask why they didn’t move the town about five miles north, or south or east or west, for that matter, any random direction. But you can predict the response: They would say, Because this is where it is. Australians are very practical, you've found. They do things quickly and purposefully and to the absolute minimum standard required. It's refreshing and genuine but sometimes leads to situations like building a town around a hole. Originally you'd thought the name Broken Hill was a joke, part of the perverse humor that leads them to nickname people with red hair Bluey. Because besides the mullock, the place is as flat as a mirror. But apparently there was a hill once. It had been mined away.
You inhale stale sweat and cigarettes until you reach the counter, then eat your burger at a table outside, watching traffic. Everything that passes you've seen before. You turn your head, testing your neck, and your eyes catch something.
The paramedic van. Parked across the road.