#and there's a Wall Slam™ next week!

[naranjapetrificada]

Me: You will not placate my concerns about the whole Izzy storyline with cute gentlebeard moments, Mr. Jenkins!

Also me: Ed's! Shoulder! Shimmy! 🥹

[poetunias]

music monday no. 3!

I have decided that this is actually going to be A Thing (TM) so I made a banner! Every Monday I’ll post a short drabble/flash fic/poem loosely inspired by a song - and this week, it’s mxmtoon’s “fever dream.”

(you can find the first 2 “music mondays” posts under the tag #music-monday!)

words: 603

apartment spirits

She left her sanity in the suburbs, right behind the evergreen outside her mother’s house, by the one brick in the wall that was more pink than red.

She grabbed her suitcases and moved them up to the sixth floor alone, arms full, waking up the next morning with sore limbs and a weary heart. Before she’d gone to sleep, she’d tacked an empty to-do list to the fridge, the only decoration her apartment had. Unpacked boxes haunted her room, ghosts of her past life and her only society.

On her first day, she hurried into work five minutes early, the slam of glass doors shattering her hastily patched nerves. She’d spilled coffee on herself, surprised by the jerking of the subway, and she greeted her new boss with a hand hiding the stain. When the day was over, she lay in her sleeping bag, staring at the ceiling and smelling the blandly fresh scent of new apartment and Lysol until midnight.

The first picture went up a few weekends later, an old Christmas photograph full of red and green and yellow lights and smiling faces and festively patterned pajamas. She stuck it in the middle of her wall like some feature point of an experimental art gallery and she laughed a little every time she looked at it, crooked and lonely on a big blank wall.

She got two days off for Thanksgiving. Her mother came to pick her up in their old sedan and they drove home silently, staring out of windows to the monotonous landscape. She was asked constantly about her life, and she shut the questions down by tiredly leaning her head against the door.

When they got home, she sat on the living room couch, quietly running her fingers over the stains and remembering. Her mother called her for dinner and they ate their turkey together, the TV providing background noise to their quiet meal. The warmth of the oven, the heavily adorned walls, the bright scent of honey and vanilla and rosewater perfume filled her mind as she fed herself, ignoring her mother’s worried eyes and reassuring hand.

Her childhood bed was too soft, the heating system too noisy, her mother too quiet. She awoke more tired than she had gone to bed, disoriented and disgruntled, the smell of fried eggs and bacon both comforting and all too rich. She managed to slip a thankful smile on her face at breakfast and make small talk and take the dishes from her mother’s hands, a tentative apology. 

She returned to her apartment that weekend in a purgatory of her own invention, unsure of how to address the lonely picture and her dimly lit cubicle. She got through the month without any more coffee stains and only slammed the door twice. Christmas was a distant but looming cloud on the horizon and she was tired of nervously awaiting it, tired of staring at boxes. She sipped tea in pajamas and wondered why she was tired of not doing anything, too tired to do anything.

Two Saturdays before Christmas she woke up and popped open a box and took out a vase and a lamp. She went shopping and bought a poinsettia and a gift for her mom and a box of cheap chocolates for her boss and a discounted advent calendar for herself. She forgot wrapping paper and tissue paper and bags and tags and she didn’t open another box until January. But when she fell asleep that night, smelling her strawberry shampoo, excited for the next day yet too tired to be, she was happy in the moment.