harpy: bored, lazy and... generally bored, actually.
creator, and highly sporadic updater, of themetaphorazine.
residing at present in London, UK.
putting scraps of fic and fic ideas/rambles here because, well, they needed a home: archives are here. first. second when they're done, they go to the ff.net account. everything else is in the journal. c&c would be great.
contact: metaphorazine at hotmail dot com
This 'fic log' kept extant due to the charming pitas.
currently reading: books: the vision of piers plowman: john langland satyrica: petronius the french revolution: (thomas?) carlyle
manga: godchild: yuki kaori (vol 2) clover: ohkawa/apapa(clamp) d n angel: yukiru sugisaki (vol 5)
currently watching: initial d read or die fruits basket
currently hearing: sento amor: david daniels toxicity: system of a down balcalogo: amon tobin madonna: ...and you will know us by the trail of dead no strings attached: nsync
currently playing: final fantasy vii - stuck on a ship. and i can't move, dammit. i need a patch.
current hair colour: pink/orange.
currently going all fangirlie over: asmodeus faye valentine souma shigure saionji kyouichi hilde schbeiker oruha takahashi ryousuke ono kazushi technomancy ('...!')
current pairings of choice: xu/quistis ffviii anthy/akio sku
object shorts seven: glasses (150 words)
Her spectacles never felt clean. Always a slight fuzzing around things, tiny whitish smudges that wiped away smoothly and then returned within a few seconds. Or sometimes a mist, his sour breath - tobacco, indefinable rotting of old food, not clean like dead leaf matter - hot on the cold glass, blinding her with droplets of steam. Through the dirty lenses his face was distorted, mauled by anger. His words garbled themselves into nonsense.
When she smiled, her eyes creased up. He thought she could not see him, in those brief few seconds of politeness, never noticed she was squinting through the tiny cracks, bringing him into sharp focus. She noticed things more when there was an obstruction of some kind, specks of dust or the blackness when the shutters close.
Look at me, for God's sake!
He was stupid to think she paid no attention. She saw it all.
eight (cont)
fandom: angel sanctuary
Whichever gods gave her that sight, they were not benevolent like the suffering man whose blood stained the wood of each crucifix was supposed to be: they were cruel to her, gave her nothing but the smooth stares of girls in the hallway too content in their disbelief. No, maybe they believed but were too scared to admit it. She liked that thought: it belonged to the Ruri of home and not the Ruri of school.
The Ruri of school was scared to believe, too, was prepared to ignore the sight for the sake of a quieter life. She should never have mentioned that she could see auras, never have thought that it might make people like her, make her special. No-one is supposed to be special, we should all be the same. All those girls with the same uneven auras, the same futures of dull marriages to husbands they never see, working as office ladies and having affairs with other husbands who their wives never see, and then giving birth to children just like them, a family obligation that they never have time for: they were what Ruri was supposed to be, would get what Ruri was supposed to have. Factory-made lives, scuffed at the edges with the endless wear and tear of what the neighbours think and the cost of living space. Ruri was supposed to want one of those.
The gods - whichever gods they were, whichever gods she believed in - hated her. They made her different.
Different enough to long for something different, different enough to trail along behind the sparkle that was Sara, her endless kindnesses and the bright trails of the unknown that fluttered about her shoulders. Sara shone, and so did Setsuna, not just that lightness of foriegn blood but a certain brilliance, in their eyes and sparking away in the air about them. Being with Sara was like staring too long at the lamp in a late night's studying, her sight clouded by fluorescent afterimages that hung in the air, her eyes poised on the edge of tears. Ruri could not stop.
God, white noise, worship, white noise, heaven.
The stranger's touch had felt like Setsuna's. Where was the CD?
The computer was already on: she must have pressed the button when she came into the room, so used to immediately sitting down to get her homework done before anything else. That sounded like a logical explanation. Good working habits now meant doing lots of overtime at her office job in the future meant a pat on the back from her superiors at work meant possibly a raise meant more overtime and more pats on the back and more resentment from those who never learnt to work as hard as Ruri did. The Ruri of school would become the Ruri of work with very little difficulty, so long as the Ruri of home did not interfere.
Interference would block the signal, after all. God wanted her to be a good girl, the nuns at school said, God wanted her to fit in and do her work and not think about these silly things any more, Ruri, you will only get into trouble, like the trouble that girls got into when they started meeting up with older men. The Sun Goddess, her grandmother said, wanted us all to be good subjects. Like the subjects of experiments, the rats that older girls squealed about dissecting in science. Like the subjects of sentences, who seemed like they were in charge but had to follow every grammatical rule. No-one would tell Ruri what the gods who made her see auras wanted her to do, and she was sensible enough not to ask any more.
Her schoolbag lay ignored, and Ruri put the CD in.
And suddenly everything was different: it was shining, foriegn, and it was something to believe in.
object shorts six: heroine (230 words).
(maybe you're that good you could tell me how i feel inside)
I knew you were special. I chose you, after all.
You held out little chubby hands, and I reached my own ones back to you, and you took them, trembling. Your face was scrunched and red because you had been crying, had not yet learnt how to cry with your face flat and let the tears slide down, glassy.
You would, soon enough: it is one of the first lies women learn to tell. They rigidly control the twitching corners of their mouths, the bloodflow to their skin, and make themselves into portraits in oils that no saltwater can harm. Women weep, they do not cry. And you, you had bawled, had folded yourself in on yourself and dragged one filthy arm across your face, tears and mucus collecting there and then wiped away on your ragged-hemmed shorts.
And I had thought it absurd that I had no problems with the livid blood that stained my clothing, no problems at all, and yet some trained instinct in me had recoiled at the snot drying fast like snail-slime on your arm. I helped you up, feet kicking at the mud-mixture that clung desperately to your toes, and one of your hands stayed, small and warm in my own cold one.
"'sokay," you said, in answer to some question I could not remember asking, "it's over."
I looked around, and it was.
objects: two
The idea is: take an object, be it song or book or any other physical thing, and write it for a character. Not as in 'here's my cat. she's really cute. watch her purr.', as in what it makes you think of to do with them. Write it: it's a short, so write until you stop, then edit or add until you reach a suitably appropriate number of words. 100, maybe, or 333, or 250.
It came to me in a dream: piece of paper handed to me and i read it even though it was written in some language like Aramaic that I didn't understand, and then it burned up in my hand, a hot grey-blue flame that didn't sear or scar my skin, and i promptly forgot what was on it. But if I had remembered, it might have been something like this.
on your off nights you go to clubs, smoky dark places where faint pink lighting turns the burninglow on the end of each cigarette into copper pyrites. earnest young men run callused thumbs over the necks of guitars and mutter into microphones about the way her skin looks under electric lighting, and you lean forward and think about catching their eye.
you don't know why.
drinks are expensive, and you always forget to sip them slowly: after the second you think of your wallet, wince, and resolve to drink no more this evening. after the third, you tilt your head forward and let your hands fist in your own hair, conditioned strands sliding smoothly through the soft skin that webs between your fingers. maybe someone looks over at you then, stares at the curvature of your vertebrae, the smooth line of bunched muscle in your back. maybe they think you just another drunk, slumped and comatose.
when the last shy boy with floppy hair has unshouldered his acoustic and left the stage, the audience weave and shout themselves into dancefloor formations. you pick up your jacket from the floor and brush overpriced beer from the cuffs, then go home alone.
(elliott smith: everything reminds me of her, 200 words)
blogs I read, reverse alphabetised for no other reason than my perversity:
