FOTD, Blue Raspberry 15: Warm Strangers
Title: Warm Strangers
Main Story: In The Heart
Flavors, Toppings, Extras: FOTD (eisegesis: an interpretation that expresses the interpreter's own ideas, bias, or the like, rather than the meaning of the text.), blue raspberry 15 (a procession), malt (nathskywalker's easter egg, pocky chain, butterscotch, caramel, hot fudge, whipped cream.
Word Count: 1200, not counting song titles.
Rating: PG.
Summary: Snapshots of relationships.
Notes: For the Lillith Fair challenge to write a story based on a song by a female artist. As per usual, I went overboard; this is based on the album Warm Strangers by Vienna Teng. Also, a meta use of the FOTD, because I'm an English BA.
Feather Moon
Hugh's daughter is so fragile. She looks it; her skin translucent as porcelain, her features delicate as glass. Hugh knows it; he tries to protect her, to keep her wrapped in wool.
Joanna doesn't know what she can do, between Hugh's determination and Olivia's fear. She thinks Olivia views her as an interloper, at least with unease. But she... she looks at this fragile girl with her large eyes and her father's hands, and she wants only to set her free.
She knows it's not possible.
But this is the child she will never have, and she wants to try.
Harbor
They took care of each other, Gina and Olivia. When one of them got dumped, the other was there with tea and chocolate. When one of them flunked a test, the other was there with reassuring words and study help. But then college ended and the world changed, and they drifted away on separate currents.
And then, miraculously, those currents converged and like nothing happened they are friends again, guarding each other's backs, providing shoulders to cry on, hands to hold, safe havens in a world that is sometimes very dark.
They have safe harbor. They won't leave it again.
Hope on Fire
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Cecily asks, one idle summer evening, watching fireflies dance on the breeze.
Gail shrugs, stretching out her long legs, scratching a mosquito bite on one calf. "I don't know. President, maybe. What about you?"
Cecily laughs. "You don't mess around."
Gail shrugs again. "I want to fix the world. Can't help that."
"Yeah, fair enough." Cecily leans back, looks up at the stars. "I don't know. I don't want to fix the world. I just want..."
Gail looks up. "Want what?"
She stretches her arms wide, embracing the sky. "Everything."
Shine
Summer is diagnosed when she is five, and Ivy realizes then that Summer will never have it easy.
Ivy does have it easy. She makes friends well, she's smart, she's quick on her feet. Summer is... well, Summer is smart, scary smart, but she doesn't understand people, and Ivy knows that in the world they live in, intelligence means less than nothing if you're strange.
So she makes a silent promise to the little girl who shares her blood-- she will help her. However she can. She will help her shine.
Because they are sisters, and that's what sisters do.
Mission Street
There are days when Danny feels like her whole life is a mistake. Moving to New York-- mistake, the city is cold and lonely, so far from Michael. Leaving the Navy-- mistake, she knew what she was doing there. Leaving home-- mistake, she might not have been loved but she was safe. Being born...
But she isn't alone. There's Nathan. And there's Olivia, shy little Olivia who's been where she has. Olivia who gets tipsy on three beers and giggles herself pink. Nothing like her friends in the Navy. Not much like anything she's known.
Most days, she's happy here.
My Medea
It's so hard to remember why she brought the girl at all.
Well, all right, she knows the primary reason-- to hurt Hugh, and oh, how she must have succeeded. She wishes she could have seen his face when he came home, when he saw. When he realized.
But she couldn't, and now she's stuck with a useless child who cries at night, a baby who stubbornly refuses to toughen up. Strength is important. Control is important. Yvonne has never known anything more surely than that, and the idiot girl has neither.
She doesn't know why she even bothers trying.
Shasta (Carrie's Song)
She's a mother. She's trying to adjust to that.
She's a mother, because there is a child inside her, a baby growing in her belly. It's so difficult for her to comprehend. Beneath the taut skin of her abdomen, below the stretch marks and the popped belly button, there is another human being.
Her family disapproves. Very quietly, but they do. She knows they'd rather she made a different choice. To their credit, it is out of love for her that they wish this.
It's love that tells her she can't choose any differently.
She's a mother now, after all.
Homecoming (Walter's Song)
Danny sits with Ivy, drinking bad beer, watching Aaron and Nathan fish. It's really boring. Danny's almost asleep.
"This is the life," Ivy says drowsily, from next to her. "Nothing to do, just good beer and plenty of bug spray and family. The parts of it you like, anyway."
"I don't like my family," Danny says, bluntly. "Except for Michael, of course."
Ivy gives her an odd look, then says, "Oh," and "You count as family now, you know. For us."
"Oh," Danny says. Then, "Well, okay. I don't like some of my family."
"Can't win 'em all," Ivy says.
Anna Rose
Leah is her daughter, as Andy is Ivy's son. It's not that they don't parent their children equally, and Gina loves her children equally. It's just that... well, Leah is her daughter.
She volunteers to put Leah to bed, so Ivy and Andy can keep playing Go Fish. She leaves them to their cutthroat competition and carries her little girl to bed, lays her down among her butterfly sheets and tucks her faerie blanket under her chin.
Leah is so small, thumb in her mouth, her red hair curling against her cheek.
Her tiny miracle.
She watches her daughter sleep.
Passage
Two little girls with curling brown hair, sisters, four years apart. Two little girls who shared a room, because their house was small. Two little girls with two bunk beds, two dressers, two toy chests. Two little girls who smothered in the smoke, a long time ago. Two little headstones in the grass.
That is the story people know. But this is their story too:
There were two little girls who loved each other, and their parents and their brother. They fought, as sisters do. They were very different, as sisters are.
But they loved each other.
Never forget that.
The Atheist Christmas Carol
Her children have all grown up, now.
Ivy left her long ago, spiritually if not geographically. But Summer... Gail thought she could hold on to her youngest, her baby, a little longer. She thought Summer might stay.
But no. Summer has gone the furthest. Summer has just shown her parents politely out of her new apartment in Georgetown. Summer has grown up with a vengeance, and the more Gail thinks of her as small, the taller she grows to compensate.
Her little girl is gone. They all are.
Gail rests her head against the car window and bites back tears.
Green Island Serenade
She can see the baby on the sonogram screen, a fuzzy black-and-white picture of moving limbs, a rounded skull, a beating heart. The baby. Her baby.
No, Maria reminds herself, not her baby, not yet, because the baby is still inside Arelie, and Arelie is looking at the screen too, a sort of desperate longing in her eyes. For a moment, Maria is terrified-- suppose Arelie changes her mind? She still could. She still has that choice.
"You'll take care of her," Arelie says, without looking away from the screen.
"I will," Maria says, with the intensity of a vow.
Main Story: In The Heart
Flavors, Toppings, Extras: FOTD (eisegesis: an interpretation that expresses the interpreter's own ideas, bias, or the like, rather than the meaning of the text.), blue raspberry 15 (a procession), malt (nathskywalker's easter egg, pocky chain, butterscotch, caramel, hot fudge, whipped cream.
Word Count: 1200, not counting song titles.
Rating: PG.
Summary: Snapshots of relationships.
Notes: For the Lillith Fair challenge to write a story based on a song by a female artist. As per usual, I went overboard; this is based on the album Warm Strangers by Vienna Teng. Also, a meta use of the FOTD, because I'm an English BA.
Feather Moon
Hugh's daughter is so fragile. She looks it; her skin translucent as porcelain, her features delicate as glass. Hugh knows it; he tries to protect her, to keep her wrapped in wool.
Joanna doesn't know what she can do, between Hugh's determination and Olivia's fear. She thinks Olivia views her as an interloper, at least with unease. But she... she looks at this fragile girl with her large eyes and her father's hands, and she wants only to set her free.
She knows it's not possible.
But this is the child she will never have, and she wants to try.
Harbor
They took care of each other, Gina and Olivia. When one of them got dumped, the other was there with tea and chocolate. When one of them flunked a test, the other was there with reassuring words and study help. But then college ended and the world changed, and they drifted away on separate currents.
And then, miraculously, those currents converged and like nothing happened they are friends again, guarding each other's backs, providing shoulders to cry on, hands to hold, safe havens in a world that is sometimes very dark.
They have safe harbor. They won't leave it again.
Hope on Fire
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Cecily asks, one idle summer evening, watching fireflies dance on the breeze.
Gail shrugs, stretching out her long legs, scratching a mosquito bite on one calf. "I don't know. President, maybe. What about you?"
Cecily laughs. "You don't mess around."
Gail shrugs again. "I want to fix the world. Can't help that."
"Yeah, fair enough." Cecily leans back, looks up at the stars. "I don't know. I don't want to fix the world. I just want..."
Gail looks up. "Want what?"
She stretches her arms wide, embracing the sky. "Everything."
Shine
Summer is diagnosed when she is five, and Ivy realizes then that Summer will never have it easy.
Ivy does have it easy. She makes friends well, she's smart, she's quick on her feet. Summer is... well, Summer is smart, scary smart, but she doesn't understand people, and Ivy knows that in the world they live in, intelligence means less than nothing if you're strange.
So she makes a silent promise to the little girl who shares her blood-- she will help her. However she can. She will help her shine.
Because they are sisters, and that's what sisters do.
Mission Street
There are days when Danny feels like her whole life is a mistake. Moving to New York-- mistake, the city is cold and lonely, so far from Michael. Leaving the Navy-- mistake, she knew what she was doing there. Leaving home-- mistake, she might not have been loved but she was safe. Being born...
But she isn't alone. There's Nathan. And there's Olivia, shy little Olivia who's been where she has. Olivia who gets tipsy on three beers and giggles herself pink. Nothing like her friends in the Navy. Not much like anything she's known.
Most days, she's happy here.
My Medea
It's so hard to remember why she brought the girl at all.
Well, all right, she knows the primary reason-- to hurt Hugh, and oh, how she must have succeeded. She wishes she could have seen his face when he came home, when he saw. When he realized.
But she couldn't, and now she's stuck with a useless child who cries at night, a baby who stubbornly refuses to toughen up. Strength is important. Control is important. Yvonne has never known anything more surely than that, and the idiot girl has neither.
She doesn't know why she even bothers trying.
Shasta (Carrie's Song)
She's a mother. She's trying to adjust to that.
She's a mother, because there is a child inside her, a baby growing in her belly. It's so difficult for her to comprehend. Beneath the taut skin of her abdomen, below the stretch marks and the popped belly button, there is another human being.
Her family disapproves. Very quietly, but they do. She knows they'd rather she made a different choice. To their credit, it is out of love for her that they wish this.
It's love that tells her she can't choose any differently.
She's a mother now, after all.
Homecoming (Walter's Song)
Danny sits with Ivy, drinking bad beer, watching Aaron and Nathan fish. It's really boring. Danny's almost asleep.
"This is the life," Ivy says drowsily, from next to her. "Nothing to do, just good beer and plenty of bug spray and family. The parts of it you like, anyway."
"I don't like my family," Danny says, bluntly. "Except for Michael, of course."
Ivy gives her an odd look, then says, "Oh," and "You count as family now, you know. For us."
"Oh," Danny says. Then, "Well, okay. I don't like some of my family."
"Can't win 'em all," Ivy says.
Anna Rose
Leah is her daughter, as Andy is Ivy's son. It's not that they don't parent their children equally, and Gina loves her children equally. It's just that... well, Leah is her daughter.
She volunteers to put Leah to bed, so Ivy and Andy can keep playing Go Fish. She leaves them to their cutthroat competition and carries her little girl to bed, lays her down among her butterfly sheets and tucks her faerie blanket under her chin.
Leah is so small, thumb in her mouth, her red hair curling against her cheek.
Her tiny miracle.
She watches her daughter sleep.
Passage
Two little girls with curling brown hair, sisters, four years apart. Two little girls who shared a room, because their house was small. Two little girls with two bunk beds, two dressers, two toy chests. Two little girls who smothered in the smoke, a long time ago. Two little headstones in the grass.
That is the story people know. But this is their story too:
There were two little girls who loved each other, and their parents and their brother. They fought, as sisters do. They were very different, as sisters are.
But they loved each other.
Never forget that.
The Atheist Christmas Carol
Her children have all grown up, now.
Ivy left her long ago, spiritually if not geographically. But Summer... Gail thought she could hold on to her youngest, her baby, a little longer. She thought Summer might stay.
But no. Summer has gone the furthest. Summer has just shown her parents politely out of her new apartment in Georgetown. Summer has grown up with a vengeance, and the more Gail thinks of her as small, the taller she grows to compensate.
Her little girl is gone. They all are.
Gail rests her head against the car window and bites back tears.
Green Island Serenade
She can see the baby on the sonogram screen, a fuzzy black-and-white picture of moving limbs, a rounded skull, a beating heart. The baby. Her baby.
No, Maria reminds herself, not her baby, not yet, because the baby is still inside Arelie, and Arelie is looking at the screen too, a sort of desperate longing in her eyes. For a moment, Maria is terrified-- suppose Arelie changes her mind? She still could. She still has that choice.
"You'll take care of her," Arelie says, without looking away from the screen.
"I will," Maria says, with the intensity of a vow.