Secondary Author's Note
(4-12-13): Yet another tame Pretty Maids excerpt
that I can actually keep. Also one of my most popular (for the ending,
according to my fans on Inkpop). My
husband said it would make a good showcase piece. I agree.
Original Author's Note:
I wasn’t going to do another excerpt, but the thing with her outfit...
non-conformist for the win! Anywho, yeah—that's how my somewhat infamous
couple, Katie and Jack from Pretty Maids All in a Row, met. My husband said I
should post this because it's fairly tame, well-written, and he likes the thing
with the matches.
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Once upon a time, a very long time ago,
there was the bottle, made of dark brown glass like crystallized dried blood,
full of noxious poison.
Then, there was the belt, thick and
leather and strapping, that had the dark gift of turning white flesh blood red,
and then dark violet and storm black.
And after a princess spent many years of
dancing a malevolent tango with these two deviant partners, a shy prince with
scars on his face and a rictus grin introduced Kate to the third partner, the
blade...
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
First thing's first—the beginning.
For a long time
after the Donovans were murdered, there was nothing but sepia-toned grief.
Everything had
a strange, old movie quality to it, as if heartache could only be shown
properly in the light from a silver screen. Her life felt like a movie, like
everything was scripted, everything rehearsed and fake. If you poked at it too
hard, everything would fall apart at the seams, crumble like a sand castle in
the surf. Everything would just dissolve. All gone.
Her parents
were laid off. That's what started the spiral. With only David to take care of,
it didn't make sense to keep the Madisons on as hired help. So they were
"let go."
That's what you
do when you let someone you were holding onto plummet from the edge of a cliff—let
go. That's what you do when you want to forget everything about someone, forget
they even existed and that they meant everything in the world to you, just
because they broke your heart—let go. That's what you do when the people in
your life become superfluous, despite how very much they need you and you need
them—let go.
The Madisons
had been let go, and her father hadn't been able to get work again. Because
they'd worked for the Donovans. Because the Donovan family had made enemies
with their war on poverty and crime, and those enemies were vindictive and
spiteful. Those people weren't able to let
go.
Matthew Madison
had turned to the bottle. Alcoholic sedation, fermented tranquilizer to
suppress the thoughts circling like sharks, murder the feelings of inadequacy,
resentment, frustration, impotent rage, the blackest of hatreds for the family
that had once been like blood.
Then Cambria
Madison, Kate's mother, had found work as a maid. Not the lucrative, dignified
work she'd enjoyed at Donovan House, but still, it kept the heat on in the
winter and food on the table. They were only evicted once. Her parents refused
to let on that they might need help from Ian and David.
Then her mother
had gotten pregnant, and miscarried. Gotten pregnant again, and miscarried a
second time. Managed to catch pregnant one more time, and carried to term.
Twins. Both dead. Postpartum depression had set in. She'd been too sickly to go
back to work.
Her father had
started smoking again. Her mother had turned to the burning sweet smoke of
whiskey in her mouth to chase away the ever present tang of amniotic fluid and
prenatal blood that haunted her every waking, sober moment.
Drunkenness
hauled both of the elder Madisons down into alcoholism—and slow, liquidated
suicide—pulling the trigger on the bottle, millimeter by millimeter.
Her mother
died. Easy as pie in the night. Slipped through the fingers of life with a
drink and some aspirin, and a very deliberate slamming of her head on the concussive
corner of her dresser.
Kate had been
twelve.
First day of
school at Asphodel Private Academy had been the day after her mother's funeral.
Her father was brimming with burning alcohol in his blood, slowly poisoning
himself to death. Kate was still soaked, water-logged with unshed salt water
grief. She'd shivered and stared at everyone, hollow-eyed and skeleton-thin.
Her gaze had been iced death.
I want to be
the Grim Reaper, she
thought sluggishly, trudging up the stairs towards the entryway doors of her
new school. Ferrying the dead. My mother could be on my boat...
She tripped
almost absently over her plum purple Vans. She'd get hell for wearing them
instead of her uniform shoes, but her mother had bought them for her. Years
ago, centuries ago, but still, they were her last gift from her mother. She'd
wear them until they fell apart and dropped off her bleeding, blistered feet.
I want to
deal death, she added
as an afterthought as she went through the doors.
Kate saw the
teachers eying her obvious disregard for dress code. Gray, pleated skirt was
stiff with sewn-on patches, for Rainbow Brite and Spawn, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Faerie
Tale Theatre, and Hello Kitty, the Care Bears and Marilyn Manson. Sleeves
of her white button-down blouse rolled up punkette-esque, and the buttons
weren't simple white circles. Each was different—a skull, a genie's magical
lamp, a broken heart, a globe, a Tinkerbelle charm, a jack-o-lantern. She's
slung a belt with silver studs around her bony waist. She actually wasn't sure
about that one...if it broke the rules or not. It was very sedate.
I want to
destroy the world, she
thought recklessly, suddenly, and had to bite back a giggle. She'd had that
thought before, at her mother's funeral. She wanted to destroy everything,
watch it all burn, watch it turn to ash. She wanted so much...
And they knew
it. Her nightmares told her that sick, obnoxious truth every night. They stared
at her, eyes wary, like a prey animal watching a vicious predator. They knew
what she wanted, knew that she longed to strike a match and watch it burn,
light something up and give birth to dancing blazes all around, orange and
crimson and vermilion and hot sparking electric blue kissing the world into
pyrotic asphyxiation. The eyes of her teachers and all her classmates told her
they knew it and only one person didn't look at her like she was a sick freak
with a lust for charred society.
"What do
you want?" She demanded, staring up at burning viridian eyes. Everything
was so lucid and strange, dreamy mist and temporally fluid. Hadn't she been in
front of her locker on the first day of school ten minutes ago? Now she was
nowhere. Nowhere but in front of those eyes.
"Got any
matches?"
"It's
against school rules to carry matches," Kate replied to the strange boy
with the blazing eyes. She wondered if he stared at the sun in his spare time.
He looked almost blind.
"That's
not what I asked you," the boy said, and walked away.
Kate thought
she might've fallen a little in love just then.
