The Mad Giggler on :
Sweet! Now I need to get going on my story.
Monday, June 25. 2007A Birthday Party
It was early evening, and the sky had shrugged off the violent blue of the day, assuming instead a bleached, purplish color which made the evening star seem too bright and too large. Down the middle of the street, in an erratic pattern, came a young girl. Anyone observing her would find her progress strange, as she walked in unpredictable, sideways jolts, and sometimes came to a complete stop before choosing a new path. At one point she stopped, sighed loudly, and looked upward at the dimming sky, which held no sources of light except the bright star that blazed at her like a shrewd eye, and the dim remaining glow of the vanished sun. She then studied the ground for a moment, and purposefully stepped forward in a diagonal direction. There she stopped, studied the ground again, and again stepped forward in a not-quite-straight direction. In this manner she wove her way slowly forward, and the pattern that emerged was that while she never left the middle of the road, she also never stepped on any crack in the worn and battered asphalt.
Finally, she came to a stop in the center of the street. Or, more accurately, the streets. She had come to a place where the road forked in a Y-shape, and come to a stop in the exact center of the three streets that yawned away into the growing dusk. There was no traffic here, no cars driven by men eager to get home to the picture-perfect dinners prepared by their housewives, no young women with baby strollers casually walking, and no children playing. The girl tossed her blunt-cut, shoulder length blond hair back from her face and removed her backpack. Her eyes flickered uneasily toward the grassy area directly in front of her, and then darted away. She didn't let herself look too long at the gravestones there; they always looked like teeth to her, almost glowing in the fading light. From her backpack, she pulled a piece of white chalk. Bending down, she drew a quavering circle between herself and the left-hand fork of the Y-intersection. She filled it with two dots and a wobbly line, and the result was an upside-down, squashed-looking face. It seemed to peer dimly down the road. Turning, the girl then drew exactly the same thing again, but this time facing the right-hand fork. And lastly, she turned completely around and drew a third face, this one facing down the long road she had come down. Next, she carefully pulled three foot-long branches of coniferous leaves out of her pack. Each branch was speckled with bright red berries. She carefully set them down above her white faces, each branch looking like a hat. And last, she pulled from her backpack a rustly plastic bag which said "Farnsworth's Food and Drug" on the side in pink letters. Inside, dripping with blood, was a freshly cut rump roast. This she set down in the center of the three faces, so that it was in the exact center of the three roads. This done, she stood up and squared her scrawny shoulders. "At the meeting of the two worlds, this I offer, Trivia," she said into the still evening air, "Queen of Ghosts, with favor look upon me." She stood for a moment, her mouth set in a grimly satisfied line, and then she turned back the way she had come. This time the light was much dimmer, and she had a difficult time getting over to the sidewalk, where she breathed a sigh of relief. Here, the cracks were much more manageable. She started forward at a jog, her eyes on the sidewalk, and when she had gotten about 100 yards away from the crossroads she yelled, still running, "And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" She did not notice, because she never turned around, the long and lean black shape that followed her home. Trackbacks
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The Mad Giggler on :
Sweet! Now I need to get going on my story.
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