SubvertTheSpace.com - The site of Bart Leib and Kay Holt

SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL - 22 tales

Inspired By Copenhagen
Between Now And Then
Turnabout Is Fair Play
Life Is A Game
Very Different Endings

Between Now And Then
Come Monday morning, Belle could tell just by the way people reacted upon seeing her, who among her fellow commuters and coworkers actually paid attention to the news. Most ignored her as completely as usual; she wasn't outwardly very remarkable, after all. There were those few, though, who froze for an instant and then continued along about their business more anxiously when they saw her. There were more of those people at work than on the trains, but they had enough in common with the strangers who recognized her that none of them had the guts to approach her. Not now that they knew she was a killer.

It had been self defense, of course. Even the judge and jury had quickly agreed. It was true that the incident had shocked her ordinarily peaceful neighborhood, and it had certainly been newsworthy, but… Belle wished that people would simply accept the court's verdict as the whole story, and stop looking at her like she was the criminal instead of the attacker she'd been forced to fight and kill on her front porch.

A little before noon, Belle's boss called her into his office. It was her first day back to work after her unfortunate time in the judicial spotlight, after all; there was likely much that had been put on hold in her absence that he wanted her to catch up with quickly. She resigned herself to taking work home with her for at least a couple of weeks, and walked slowly to his door past the furtive glances cast and brittle silence held by her coworkers as though she were oblivious to the tension that followed her.

"You wanted to see me, Mr. Cole?" Belle offered an apologetic smile when she noticed that his catered lunch was already laid out elegantly on his desk. "I can come back later, if you'd rather…"

Mr. Cole waved her in, and motioned for her to shut the door behind her as he ended a tense-sounding phone call. After he'd hung up, he groaned and scowled sarcastically. "Thos geniuses in Information Services have managed to remove me from the system again. I haven't done a thing all day except argue with them."

Belle said nothing, but shook her head in understanding and commiseration. IS was forever tinkering, and they inevitably squirreled things up for the rest of the staff when their little projects went awry. She doubted she'd been invited to a private conversation about her boss's technical troubles, so she didn't pursue that topic and rather waited for him to get down to business, as was his way.

She was surprised, though, when what he actually did was push one of the two paper-wrapped sandwiches on a plate across his desk toward her. "I hope you didn't already eat. I ordered you a vegetarian, just in case." He smiled, but didn't wait for her to accept or decline his offer; he just peeled back the paper on his own sandwich, clearly not a vegetarian one, and started eating.

"Thank you," said Belle, feeling pretty sure it would have been wrong to excuse herself yet, even if she had already eaten. She unwrapped one end of her 'vegetarian' and took a small bite. She had to ask, though, "Did you call me in here just to have lunch with you?"

Mr. Cole nodded, finishing chewing before speaking. "Mm-hm. I didn't figure you'd be very comfortable eating in the break room with all the slack-jawed yokels around here after what happened." He blinked suddenly and bopped himself in the forehead with the butt of his hand. "You must think I'm a bad host. I left the drinks in the bag."

Belle took one of the colas he fetched and used it to keep her mouth quiet for a moment while she processed the situation. She was under so much stress lately that her thoughts seemed reluctant to work together on any single task, but she did manage to deduce that her boss wasn't trying to take advantage of her, and as soon as she realized that it was probably safe to be alone with him in his cluttered office, she relaxed and actually tasted her food. "I, um…I appreciate that, thanks." The truth was that it hadn't occurred to her first in her tension addled state, and so without this intervention, Belle would probably have done as she usually did and gone to eat in the break room before it dawned on her what a bad idea that was.

They ate in almost easy silence for a little while, making polite eye contact and each occasionally glancing out the window that showed them what a gorgeous day they were missing by working in an office building. After a while, Belle gathered her wits together enough to ask another question. "So why…aren't you afraid of me? Everyone else seems to be."

Mr. Cole didn't laugh, and instead, he smiled so kindly that it choked Belle up, instantly. "Believe it or not, I have a pretty good idea what you're going through. It's not common knowledge, but… Well, when I came home from Viet Nam, a lot of people were pretty unhappy to see me, too." Here eyes went wide and her mouth gave a silent 'O' and he continued. "But not everybody was a jerk, and, you know, those few understanding people are part of why I've come so far in life since then. So…" he shrugged, "Here we are."

She sat very still for a few seconds before a tear spilled down her cheek and dashed itself on the back of her hand. He voice was hoarse when she finally said, "I keep telling myself that it'll all blow over eventually. I just have to outlast the rumors and the dirty looks…" Belle dabbed her eyes with her napkin and took a deep breath to keep from bawling.

"You're right, but between now and then, whenever you need some peace, my door's open." There was a pause, and then; "Was that as corny as it sounded to me? Jeez."

Belle laughed for the first time in weeks, and it didn't matter to either of them that for as long as she laughed, tears ran down her face. Afterward, and for most of the rest of the day, she didn't care about how people looked at her and her puffy red eyes; she just did her job like everyone else, and possibly a bit faster than them as nobody was eager to keep her waiting for a necessary signature or an answer to any questions she had.

Turnabout Is Fair Play
"It's been so long since all this started that you'd think I'd have forgotten some of the details by now. But no." River worked with her back towards her captive, but she paused now and then to flip between the pages of a pocket-sized tome and check her actions against those noted within it. "No, I remember it all. I suppose it might be easier to forget if so much of our history wasn't written in scar tissue across my body, eh?"

She paused again, now holding a small glass vial up to the morning sun and swishing it slowly in the light. The liquid inside shifted in color from white to pink to gold before becoming perfectly transparent. River smiled at the clear stuff, which was otherwise nothing at all like water, picked up a very sharp knife from where it lay on her impromptu outdoor worktable, and finally turned to face the man she had been fleeing and hiding from most of her life.

He was alert, but outwardly calm in spite of being tightly bound at the neck, elbows and wrists, and knees and ankles to a thorn tree. Apart from being tied up, the man was ordinary-looking in his middle age and possessed the type of slightly blunt facial features and very blue eyes which together suggested that he and River had similar origins out in the Far West. He didn't seem inclined to speak, but as he was gagged it was a moot point, anyway.

River continued talking, unbothered by her captive's non-reaction upon seeing the knife, the potion, or her scar-crossed face; she knew from years of experience that he had too much self-control to reveal much of himself except at his most heated moments. "After today, I'll be able to put all of that history behind me, forever. Once I'm through with you, in fact, it'll almost be like none of it ever happened to me at all."

While he watched, she rhythmically bobbed the knife point up, down, and in all the cardinal directions, summoning magic, before jabbing its sharp end deep into the tip of her left index finger. Blood ribbon-ed along the knife blade and she cast it aside in such a way that it became sheathed in the earth. Then she pressed her self-inflicted wound to the mouth of the vial and held it there as tightly as she could. The potion inside began to darken, but rather than gaining the color of her blood, the liquid turned inky black and syrup-thick.

River smiled at the man while she waited for the magic to finish with her. She said, "For years before it was true, you called me a witch. When you drove me from my village I didn't know a thing about magic except what warnings against it I'd heard in rumors and in Scripture. That's all changed, now." She shuddered then, and her eyes unfocused briefly as the potency of her spell reached its peak. Finally, there came a muffled reaction, it would have been a shout were he not gagged, as the man watched the magic draw the ugly scarring from River's face, down her neck and arm, and through her blood out into the vial. The potion seemed to boil inside its pretty confines, and with that significant transformation of River's face from ravaged to unmarred, the spell seemed to be complete.

Still holding the vial in her left hand, River used her right hand to explore all the formerly damaged places on her flesh that had been made like new, ending with a slow, quietly ecstatic caress of her face. She sighed hugely and happily, for not only were the scars vanished into the potion, they had taken with them all the immense and painful emotions that had been opened wide in her along with the original wounds.

She turned her attention back on the man, who was at last twitching against his bonds. "You've heard the old saying, 'The only thing to fear is fear itself'? Well, this potion is a bit like that." River drew nearer to him, confident that her doubled-double knots would hold him no matter how he struggled. "There is a very important difference between the contents of this vial and the contents of that phrase, and I'd like to know that you understand it fully before I lay this curse upon you." Now the man was writhing, his eyes wide and sweat drenching his clothes. "Listen now; 'The only thing to fear is the fear you've caused.' Do you grasp the difference?" She could tell by the way his struggles grew more desperate that he did.

There was no more point in talking, so River simply grabbed her captor by the throat to still his thrashing head and poured the fizzing, black potion onto his face. It spread over his features, wrecking them as it passed, and then it crept and grew across his skin until he was as covered in scars as she had been. All the while it changed him, he screamed as though he was enduring in moments the lifetime of tortures that those scars represented. When at last the darkness of the potion had sunk into his flesh and the violence of injury and healing was finished, he cringed against the thorn tree as away from his former victim as he could go within his bonds. He sobbed wretchedly, but River had no pity in her for him.

She picked up her knife and released her captive with a few careless slashes that severed the ropes she'd tied him with as well as leaving several nasty gashes on his limbs. He cowered and made as if to run from her, but he was too weak with terror to more than stumble several feet away before collapsing in the grass. River turned her back on him and returned to her impromptu worktable to pack up her supplies before finally striding contentedly away from the site of her revenge. Over her shoulder, she called to the cowering figure of her once-tormentor, "If you ever come near me again, I'll kill you on the spot." The sound of him being noisily sick with the very fear he had instilled in her for years only made River's smile brighter as she left behind her him and all the misery of her history with him.

Life Is A Game
I am Gamer!Sandy. My philosophy? 'Life is a Game.' Just like that, with the capital 'G', and everything. And everywhere I go, no matter I do, there's a little meter at the back of my mind keeping track of my imaginary experience point gains.

"How might one gain 'XP' outside of a Role Playing Game?" you might ask. Simple; vanquish your personal 'monsters', visit new places, and do heroic and/or villainous deeds, according to your character.

"But what deeds have you done lately, Gamer!Sandy? Where have you gone and what 'monsters' have you slain?" you may wonder. Well, I'll tell you…

I made two long journeys in the rain today, over difficult terrain, through woods and over rivers, to deliver and retrieve important documents worth possibly more to my questgivers than my life. On my way, I discovered a copper coin and a silver coin in the road, and I had to risk life and limb to retrieve them before a stampeding herd of mechanical nightmares could overrun me. I had an encounter with a pair of territorial 'honking birds', but I evaded them easily, and then I dodged my way through a crowd of pushy, queuing zealots who were all dressed in red. While I was out and about in the world, I traded with a caffeine vendor for a little something to replenish my energies - I gave him the coins I found, plus a piece of the green paper that is so popular and apparently scarce here in exchange for a bottle of dark, sweet power - it was a fair trade. Before returning to my usual save point in town, I poked my head into several restricted areas to 'ask for directions'. Maybe that's a cheap trick, but it's all I really need to do to gain the experience points for discovering new adventure locations.

Yes, life is a Game. It's often fun, but it's not all walking about, looking for treasures and fighting 'monsters'. Some of it is dull and repetitive, of course; you could go so far as to call it grinding. Currently, I am caught up in several seemingly pointless quests with final rewards that hardly seem worth the effort. I'd abandon them, but… Alas, they are prerequisites for some of the more interesting challenges that await me at higher experience levels. And since my quest log is full, sometimes I have to decline some of the newer, more fast-paced adventures that are offered to me, because unlike in a certain Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game I could name, in life, you can't abandon the quests you've taken on and expect to find them waiting for you when you return from other missions.

Very Different Endings
It was a tough month for Bethany. The first phone call came while she was sitting on a bus in rush hour traffic, and fortunately the bad news was not completely unexpected. Her grandfather had been very old and very ill for several years already, after all. Her first thought after hearing the news had been for her poor aunt, who had kept him at her home to care for him for so long; her second thought was focused on estimating the cost of plane tickets for her family of four to his funeral back east. She cringed at that, but otherwise didn't dwell too long on her small grief. Bethany had barely known him, after all.

The second phone call came while she was in the shower, a few days after her grandfather's funeral. Her husband rushed into the bathroom to give her the phone and hovered at the door just in case she needed anything. Bethany was dressed, out the front door and gone in their car less than five minutes later. The shampoo was still drying in her hair when she walked into the coroner's office, but she didn't care what she looked like as she was led into a refrigerated room to give her dear friend's corpse back his name. When the sheet was pulled back, Bethany's hot dread dissolved into a rain of heartbroken tears. Aaron had been depressed for years, in spite of his friends' and medicine's best efforts, and had finally fallen for suicide's empty promise.

In a way, Bethany had been waiting for the better part of two decades for the third phone call to come. When it finally did, a couple of weeks after Aaron's funeral, she was out with her husband at their favorite restaurant, and it ruined their meal and the first good mood Bethany had been in since burying her friend. She forbid her husband on the spot from traveling with her for her father's funeral, and insisted he keep the kids in the dark about where she was going and why. Ordinarily, they didn't lie to their children, but some secrets were best kept until after they were grown. She only needed to be gone a day, anyway, to put the man who was the source of most of her worst nightmares into a deep, dark, lonely hole in the ground at last. When asked, as his next of kin, if there was anything special she wanted added to the name and dates on his headstone, she kicked the coffin hard and replied, "An accidental death was too good for this monster."

MORE COMING SOON!

Back to the Sandyplex | Back to K's page | Back to SubverttheSpace