{{With apologies in advance. Enjoy!}}
=Nostalgia=
To the strings accompanied by thumping beats swung wild arms as far as they would go, their owner was given a reasonably wide berth and funny glances. Scudworth didn't wear his best glitter coated jacket with fringes all the way up the sleeves to not show it off.
The other clubbers couldn't judge, with their sparkly flared pants posing a tripping hazard! He paid little thought, spare the snide internal monologues, towards them. They were unaware who he was to them, some his overachieving alpha nerd classmates, and an overzealous drunk sure to draw the cops to older patrons. Truthfully, Scudworth was just that strange.
He sang, -more like squawked- with the upcoming lyrics, "there lived a certain man, in Russia long ago!"
A few humoured him by taking up the callback role, just as tonally inept, but considerably more out of breath.
Then he spun, and spun, travelling across the checkered floor when the chorus hit, knocking into the crowd. A round of gasps resounded off the walls as the song continued, carefree. He wasn't hurt except in pride thanks to the clubber beneath him.
Her eyes narrowed, glinting under the strobe at him, scaring the profuse apologies from him.
Oh God, he just hurt one of the popular young women on campus! Scudworth merely rolled off of her and laid there staring at the ceiling, too stunned to get back up again.
She brushed off her outfit, not paying much mind to the jerk until her glance met his form again and her face scrunched with loathing. Never did Scudworth want to disappear into the scene of swaying bodies more than now.
"You! You're that cat Delilah never shuts up about," she spat. Then to herself as she split from the scene, "nasty taste in men."
He just stared on and around, ignoring the weightlessness in his limbs as he's moved to the side by complete strangers asking what drugs he took before coming here. Another voice almost lost to the crowd added that paramedics were coming.
That was why he spent the following nights fixing a toaster from the comfort of his bed.
=Blood=
They were lit by the gentle light of the television, shadows behind them as if hiding. Joan, Gandhi, Vincent, and a begrudging yet bored Cleo shared the couch. Okay, she laid down on it, forcing Vincent onto the armrest furthest from her face, and the others on the floor.
Joan picked out the documentary because she likes freaky things, and Gandhi did too, but less for the intellectual stimulation. Vincent held his middle, but watched on valiantly.
Cleo then looked at the screen, eyes wide with shock, "oh my God!"
"I'll never make friends with anyone who doesn't clip their nails." Gandhi said, drawing swift protective gestures with his hands.
On screen in greyscale, a bare and bloody hand pulled some suspiciously intact slices of bacon from the patient's stomach. The cut was shielded by the other hand.
"Right?!" Cleo interjected, "nobody who values a good manicure does this!"
Joan scoffs and almost shoots a one-liner when a warmth nudges itself beside her to ask, "this isn't real, right?"
"It's just a magic trick with a balloon full of dye and dead animals that people willingly fall for," Joan reassured Vincent. Then, "sometimes you can see it between their fingers like- there!"
A modern re-enactment in colour showed just that, and it was Gandhi's turn to dry heave as the surgeon rubbed the patient's stomach, leaving it unscarred yet discoloured with transparent smears of fake blood.
"I hear choking!" Abe's towering frame immediately filled in the door jamb, ready to perform the Heimlich maneuver.
Joan started, "he just needs a bucket-"
"That's a lot to dislodge! I'll get him to the sink!" Abe snapped, carrying off the smaller boy under his arm like a football.
"Dude, the G-man is fine!" The protests became muffled by the walls separating the rooms, and eerily resonant.
There's a pause. Vincent pressed closer to Joan like he wasn't already.
Cleo groaned as she sat straight up, "if that leprechaun pukes, I'd like to stay far away from the splash zone." Vincent flinches.
"Why are you here again?" Joan's hold on Vincent turns firm.
"It's my born purpose to assert my inner alpha bitch," Cleo said haughtily, "anything else bores me to death."
"Inner?" Joan scoffed, rolling her eyes hard enough to strike down ten pins. By a sliver she resists the urge to comment on Cleo's promiscuity stringing along two admirable lunkheads who'd be happier had she not poked their competitive fires.
"I'm trying t-to watch the program here!" Vincent cut in, forcing more anger than fear in his voice.
Joan arched an eyebrow. "You're not okay with this are you?" As though on cue, muffled argumentative noises emitted from the next room over.
"I need it for my art, Joan," Vincent said into the shoulder where his face buried itself, "how can you stand this stuff?"
Joan shouldn't have snickered, because it sends the wrong message, but she found it at least a little funny. Too late to hold back now. Recognition dawned on Cleo as she hid her smile in her hands and raucous laughter escaped.
Sprinting impossibly quick into the room, Gandhi asked, "there a comedy segment?" He deflated when he saw the screen display an interview with a magician of morbid tricks.
"Bra, don't leave me hangin'."
Vincent showed his face, mumbling, "I'm serious. How do you not feel your insides are torn up just watching this?"
Gandhi raised a brow as per those moments he got serious, looking into the shorter teen's incredulous eyes. He waits for the lightbulb to go on.
Vincent's eyes darted around the ceiling as if searching his brain until they land on Cleo, then Joan. Then it hits.
"Hell's bells, you guys!" He scrambled to stand and walk out for some fresh air, and to topple his already short self esteem for failing to glean the obvious. Cleo's laugh kicks up again.
"Did you forget he doesn't know you're not a vampire? I mean it's such an easy mistake to make!" Cleo almost fell off the couch as the end credits roll.
=Language=
When they were eight, Vincent impressed Joan more than he guessed he would in his head. It was antagonistic to him, but it played no role in his surprise for that lone memory.
She was impressed and fondly jealous that he was fluent in French, where she was expected to connect that much with her clone mother's heritage but didn't. She knew and loved her clone mother in the barest terms then, and later she pored over French history books from the library.
=Repeat & Rhyme=
Jack was nimble, talented and quick, but he burnt himself jumping a candlestick.
Rushed to the doctors and put to bed, he decided he liked football and singing instead.
=Scope=
One inhale of the sickening sweet raisin doobie lifted him from his body as life's revelations burned all the way down his lungs, then up and out with all his worries. The universe unfolds itself in him to name all the poetry and math of Cleo's perfection. The gates to infinitely flexible philosophy open up and he's aware he's a copy of someone before him. Was he his clone father? Does the energy coalescing into a consciousness return, even without its previous body's memories? If the self is all memories, then is he really himself?
The purple stuffed worm says life is like an oreo. A brief flash of light between two states of unknowable oblivion. He is infinite energy with or without mind, to soar for what feels like forever.
His hair all over stands and pulls up to fly, or flee. He climbs with a purpose the most solid thing he knows is real, to rejoin himself with love and show the crowned whipcracker his way to his own subjective joys. Joys driving to a purpose with love in mind.
He has risen higher and spreads his only remaining limbs for balance on the pillar. Electricity shoots through him and he drops with a snap across his legs, falling, flying, electrified. A hard and heavy stop pulls him away, rippling through muscle and skin.
He sees his face, almost halfway like a raisin on the body of an angel. It's faint, but a familiar voice echoes everywhere, and nowhere at once. The chorus ends, and his senses reclaim their normalcy.
All that, and he just says he looks like a jackass in those rainbow shorts.
{{The only interesting story behind a drabble I have is, I saw the fingernail surgery on tv when I was a child. I just barely remember it and wanted to avoid looking up stuff about fingernails as surgical tools in the supernatural sense to maintain a kind of fuzziness that was both inviting and eerie.}}