Yellow Moped, Hit Me Again
This is a story I wrote to enter in a contest, but I missed the deadline. They had a ridiculous 600 word limit, so it's pretty darn short. FLCL is the best, so here you go. It was hard to sum the story up in so few words, but here it is! Let me know what you think. Thanks a bunch. Enjoy!
It was an ordinary day in an ordinary town in an ordinary life when everything changed, yet stayed exactly the same. White smoke poured across the river, polluting the orange air as it did every day. I dallied with Mamimi as always. It was strange being both the object of affection and boredom of an experienced older woman. Her big pouty lips were always puckered to kiss, but also to whisper that she didn't love me — she loved my brother. There was something pathetic in both of us, chaining us together. We had both been left behind in an ordinary world; all we had was each other. But I hated her for that — reminding me that I was trapped and how I had as much of a chance of being a baseball star as she had of being a famous photographer. It was sickening.
My ordinary life changed by an ordinary chain of events.
Mamimi asked to share my drink, with a flirtatious glance and sway of her short skirt. But I looked at her face and all I saw were her huge grubby lips – the lips that had kissed my brother – lips that I didn't want on my drink. But Mamimi was my responsibility, my brother's leftovers, his abandoned pet. Rather than answering such a simple question, I threw the drink out into the road, sick of the situations I found myself in.
At the speed of light, an explosion of pink rocketed down the road. It happened so fast — a yellow moped spun out of control upon contact with the bottle. It bowled me over and struck my head, knocking me literally, head over heels in love. As I looked up at the driver from under the screeching tires, I knew I both loved and hated her. It was as though I always knew she would break my heart.
An ordinary boy like me had never seen such an exotic beauty. Her hair: short and sharp, pink and bright. Her eyes: huge and gleaming in extraterrestrial light. She was the spirit of adventure itself. She stepped forward, guitar clinging to her curves. She tossed aside her goggles, and her scarf waved in the wind. She was no ordinary girl — no Mamimi.
Somehow, her voice was even higher strung and more annoying than Mamimi's. Her posture was lazier; her manners even more insulting. She was revolting and enchanting all at the same time.
The way she looked down at my unconscious body and her lack of concern…yet how she knelt down and breathed air into my lungs — our first kiss…I knew our fates had intertwined.
And thus, my adventure began. Haruko, as she was named, was a terror. A maneater, she hunted the town and tore it apart. But at the end of the day she always came back to me, a 12-year-old boy, innocent and susceptible.
She took everything I had and left me to die, yet … she gave me something no one else could — proof that there was a world outside my own; that there were monsters and universes grander than I could even imagine. That proof was worth loving and selling my soul. I gave up all I had just to be hers. But it never meant a thing. I was only a boy.
So, she left. She left me in hell. But that was fine. I had loved, loved without chains, unrestrained, if for only once in my lie.
She left and everything became ordinary again. Smoke rolls across the river and I walk across the bridge with friends, searching for a yellow moped to hit me again.