Original -- Earpiece-Knife Assassins
Title: Earpiece-Knife Assassins
Rating: PG
Word Count: 860
Warnings: I'm not entirely sure what to say about this one... and my English major is showing.
Prompt: Exercise 4: write your character on a bad date for the Piece by Piece event at pulped_fictions
Summary: Jason didn't have a soul-mate.
Author's Note: Jason sort of crawled out of the vague character sketch-thought-thing I'd had, and then the rest kind of happened. It was late at night. I was fighting a cold. My guard was down. I still haven't done the first part of the event, so I'm skipping around, and my brain is a heap of neurons too numbed even to fizzle right now. XD
EARPIECE-KNIFE ASSASSINS
Jason was almost late for the reservation he’d made. The only reason he wasn’t legitimately late was that he’d heard they would just kick you out if you were more than ten minutes past the time you’d asked for, and he’d only made a reservation in the first place had been so that he could discreetly request a table by the door.
The only reason he had actually knuckled under to this whole blind date thing in the first place was because Paige had threatened to come over and poison his fish if he didn’t leave his apartment and go meet Sarah Simon, who had two first names and therefore could not possibly be his soul-mate.
Jason didn’t have a soul-mate. He did have a dimly-lit three-and-a-half-room apartment and a quartet of guppies named Gup Yours, Bubblegup, Forrest Gup, and Frank. Jason had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that all the soul-mate-worthy people were either dead, famous, or both, and none of them had two first names, and he didn’t really give a crap anyway. He had the best guppies in the entire city and might have been its best published author of something like crime-thriller fiction.
It was a small city. “City” was kind of a relative term.
“Fish homicide,” however, was not, so Jason dragged himself to the appointed bistro nearly on time, and he even shaved first.
A woman was waiting in the lobby alone, and odds were good she was Sarah Simon. She had extremely long, extremely straight dark hair, an unimpressive butt, and a vaguely intriguing green silk scarf that appeared to be trying to eat her starting with the neck.
“Jason?” she prompted, smiling warmly, as he entered and attempted to look lost.
“What gave me away?” he asked as he offered her the weakest handshake of her life.
“You look like Paige,” she told him. “Something in the eyebrows. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” Jason said.
He sized her up as they sat-close to the door, so that he could run for it if she turned out to be crazy. She had decent jeans, practical shoes, and very sharp-edged square glasses. As she considered the menu, he wondered if maybe they were sharp enough to hurt somebody with. What if he had an assassin who sharpened the earpieces of her glasses and stabbed them into people’s throats when they least expected…?
There was one novel in the bookstores with Jason Kelrich on the cover. He had poured his heart, his soul, his blood, his love, his passion, his energy, and a truly ungodly quantity of hours into it, and it had blossomed into a beautiful triumph.
The only problem was that now he had no heart, soul, blood, love, passion, or plot devices left, and all the hours in the world couldn’t make up the difference.
Earpiece-knife assassins might just have been an all-new low.
After they’d ordered, Jason selected a packet of fake sugar from the container by the ketchup and started playing with it. Sarah didn’t seem perturbed, which concerned him a great deal.
“Do you like Dostoyevsky?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said.
“Faulkner?”
“Yeah, quite a bit.”
This was worse than he had previously anticipated.
“Woolf?”
“Love her.”
He swallowed, worrying at the edge of the packet.
“Joyce?” It was his last resort.
Sarah adjusted her glasses and smiled a little. “Not a Joyce fan.”
There was a God.
He attempted to conceal his delight. “Shame. Probably the pinnacle of Modernism. You should revisit Ulysses; I’m sure you’ll find something revelatory. That one section where Molly’s stream-of-consciousness goes on for thirty pages without punctuation? Masterstroke. Speaking of strokes, if you’ll pardon the crude segue…”
Two minutes into a treatise on sex in James Joyce novels, Sarah held up a hand.
“Look,” she said, still so calm he was starting to think about cyborg assassins instead; “I’m pretty much broke right now, so if you take the check, I’ll tell your sister I had a great time, but there just wasn’t any chemistry.”
“Deal,” Jason said, and it was stupid, because now he liked her more than before.
He paused.
“I stopped reading the thing with Molly and the no-commas,” he said, which was true.
Sarah set both elbows on the table and folded her hands. “Paige said you write. Why don’t you tell me about your book?”
“That’s like asking a soccer mom to talk about her kids,” Jason cautioned, because Sarah Simon was kind of all right.
“I know,” she replied. “But I’ve heard people have starved to death waiting for service around here.”
By the end of the evening, Jason was down thirty bucks and up a promise of readership, which really didn’t even out at all. He’d sort of made a friend, though, which might have settled his accounts a little if he’d been more sentimental nowadays.
“I can’t believe she said yes to Faulkner,” Jason told Forrest Gup. “No one says yes to Faulkner.”
Maybe he could have an assassin whose secret weapon was referencing Ulysses.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 860
Warnings: I'm not entirely sure what to say about this one... and my English major is showing.
Prompt: Exercise 4: write your character on a bad date for the Piece by Piece event at pulped_fictions
Summary: Jason didn't have a soul-mate.
Author's Note: Jason sort of crawled out of the vague character sketch-thought-thing I'd had, and then the rest kind of happened. It was late at night. I was fighting a cold. My guard was down. I still haven't done the first part of the event, so I'm skipping around, and my brain is a heap of neurons too numbed even to fizzle right now. XD
EARPIECE-KNIFE ASSASSINS
Jason was almost late for the reservation he’d made. The only reason he wasn’t legitimately late was that he’d heard they would just kick you out if you were more than ten minutes past the time you’d asked for, and he’d only made a reservation in the first place had been so that he could discreetly request a table by the door.
The only reason he had actually knuckled under to this whole blind date thing in the first place was because Paige had threatened to come over and poison his fish if he didn’t leave his apartment and go meet Sarah Simon, who had two first names and therefore could not possibly be his soul-mate.
Jason didn’t have a soul-mate. He did have a dimly-lit three-and-a-half-room apartment and a quartet of guppies named Gup Yours, Bubblegup, Forrest Gup, and Frank. Jason had long since resigned himself to the knowledge that all the soul-mate-worthy people were either dead, famous, or both, and none of them had two first names, and he didn’t really give a crap anyway. He had the best guppies in the entire city and might have been its best published author of something like crime-thriller fiction.
It was a small city. “City” was kind of a relative term.
“Fish homicide,” however, was not, so Jason dragged himself to the appointed bistro nearly on time, and he even shaved first.
A woman was waiting in the lobby alone, and odds were good she was Sarah Simon. She had extremely long, extremely straight dark hair, an unimpressive butt, and a vaguely intriguing green silk scarf that appeared to be trying to eat her starting with the neck.
“Jason?” she prompted, smiling warmly, as he entered and attempted to look lost.
“What gave me away?” he asked as he offered her the weakest handshake of her life.
“You look like Paige,” she told him. “Something in the eyebrows. Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah,” Jason said.
He sized her up as they sat-close to the door, so that he could run for it if she turned out to be crazy. She had decent jeans, practical shoes, and very sharp-edged square glasses. As she considered the menu, he wondered if maybe they were sharp enough to hurt somebody with. What if he had an assassin who sharpened the earpieces of her glasses and stabbed them into people’s throats when they least expected…?
There was one novel in the bookstores with Jason Kelrich on the cover. He had poured his heart, his soul, his blood, his love, his passion, his energy, and a truly ungodly quantity of hours into it, and it had blossomed into a beautiful triumph.
The only problem was that now he had no heart, soul, blood, love, passion, or plot devices left, and all the hours in the world couldn’t make up the difference.
Earpiece-knife assassins might just have been an all-new low.
After they’d ordered, Jason selected a packet of fake sugar from the container by the ketchup and started playing with it. Sarah didn’t seem perturbed, which concerned him a great deal.
“Do you like Dostoyevsky?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said.
“Faulkner?”
“Yeah, quite a bit.”
This was worse than he had previously anticipated.
“Woolf?”
“Love her.”
He swallowed, worrying at the edge of the packet.
“Joyce?” It was his last resort.
Sarah adjusted her glasses and smiled a little. “Not a Joyce fan.”
There was a God.
He attempted to conceal his delight. “Shame. Probably the pinnacle of Modernism. You should revisit Ulysses; I’m sure you’ll find something revelatory. That one section where Molly’s stream-of-consciousness goes on for thirty pages without punctuation? Masterstroke. Speaking of strokes, if you’ll pardon the crude segue…”
Two minutes into a treatise on sex in James Joyce novels, Sarah held up a hand.
“Look,” she said, still so calm he was starting to think about cyborg assassins instead; “I’m pretty much broke right now, so if you take the check, I’ll tell your sister I had a great time, but there just wasn’t any chemistry.”
“Deal,” Jason said, and it was stupid, because now he liked her more than before.
He paused.
“I stopped reading the thing with Molly and the no-commas,” he said, which was true.
Sarah set both elbows on the table and folded her hands. “Paige said you write. Why don’t you tell me about your book?”
“That’s like asking a soccer mom to talk about her kids,” Jason cautioned, because Sarah Simon was kind of all right.
“I know,” she replied. “But I’ve heard people have starved to death waiting for service around here.”
By the end of the evening, Jason was down thirty bucks and up a promise of readership, which really didn’t even out at all. He’d sort of made a friend, though, which might have settled his accounts a little if he’d been more sentimental nowadays.
“I can’t believe she said yes to Faulkner,” Jason told Forrest Gup. “No one says yes to Faulkner.”
Maybe he could have an assassin whose secret weapon was referencing Ulysses.