In which Sophya thinks there ought to be a limit on how often you were allowed to be existentially redecorated. And we meet Crimp.
Day 5
2nd day of the storm.
Sophya flicked the pen up, tilted her head at the letters, and chewed on her bottom lip. No, this isn’t right, she thought and set the pen back down to turn the small s bigger and bolder and positively fat.
2nd day of the Storm, it read now. Better.
Her eyes fixed on the top of the page. Five days? Really? Only five days?
The pen’s butt end found its way into Sophya’s mouth. She chewed on it, her mind absent.
SIN insisted that it’d been no more than that since the crash; rather than the hundred-something which Sophya had expected, because there was no way someone’s life could get so quickly turned around twice in a single mortal lifetime.
Honest, there ought to be a limit on how often you were allowed to be existentially redecorated.
Her teeth clicked down on the pen once more.
・・・ “Darling,” SIN purred from where she was curled up next to Sophya’s elbow; an echo of how this had all started: in Sophya’s small room in front of a fake viewport, surrounded by all she owned. Back then she’d not known how she’d been one positive message away from ruining her life.
Today, she sat in V’s room. At V’s desk. None of which was right.
・・・ “You have got no idea where this pen has been.”
Mildly horrified, Sophya slipped the pen out of her mouth and put it to work instead, its tip scratching over the cheap paper.
And once she started, it seemed like she might never stop. That she’d keep writing until her hand fell off or— more likely —she’d run out of pages. And the more she wrote, the more of the unthinkable happened: the perpetual tightness in her chest unknotted; like a badly bundled length of wire being slowly pulled apart.
She wrote about the Jack of Hearts. About the Well (The Cataract, SIN complained). About Pete and the crash and then Pete again.
After three paragraphs about him, she wondered if maybe she was spending too much time on a boy she’d hardly known.
No. She spent too little on everyone else, she decided, ashamed how she’d forgotten all their names.
Three pages filled.
Then another.
And another.
Her fingers grew tired. Her neck— still wrapped in the collar —got heavy. But she couldn’t stop yet. She’d only gotten started. And she’d only just now caught up.
I’m ready to admit that sleeping in a bed is better than sleeping on a lumpy sofa, she eventually wrote. even if there’s a second person in the room with me and I’m not sure how to cope with that.
Sophya raised her eyes from the page. They landed on the stacked bunk bed, with its stubby ladder (one rung played host to two headbands looped around it) and crumpled sheets hanging off its edge. Her bed, the one at the bottom, had neatly folded sheets and a fluffed-up pillow. Then she shifted in the seat and looked to the door. Voices snuck under it. And noise. Lots of noise. Cartoon violence, she assumed, which had been on all morning now that Sophya had been given a place to retreat to and there was no longer a need for silence in the living room.
And retreat she had.
She didn’t belong out there, after all.
Where do you belong?
Back to the page.
Writing. Reading. Dreaming. 