-for the halloween exchange-
Fishing, Like Drowning Worms; by in the jungle dances
author's note- cap'n han solo here, and this is for my lovely tash! i swear, i went molly-weasley-ballistic when i found out i'd gotten you, tashy. you are one of the most supportive, remarkable people i know. have an amazing halloween, you cool-cat, you. prompts at the end.
*to clear up any confusion, sections in this fanfic without dates at the top signify the present-day!*
rated t for rigorous language, disclaimed, and enjoy!
Being or not being—scarcely a flurry of white plumage and suspended golden garlands, but rather wintry earth and bitter roots while above, against a backdrop of churning cerulean, someone spills a coffee and a newborn with a cherry face is discarded like rubbish ciggies.
At five, I suppose, 'being' is sensibly naught because the only things of any importance in your life are stuffed bears and being able to tie your shoes.
But I get tall and stocky and older, and Ma explains that on a dusty gray morning, I was the discarded, cherry-faced baby; one progeny of piquant punch and a mistake.
It makes sense, now, I tell myself, trying to seem apathetic under her burdened green eyes. She's all legs and has bountiful hips that are lost on me. Her hair is brown and gauzy, fine like thread or paper.
So I scoff, "You're fucking retarded." It's a despicable thing to say, and her lids dither, the extensive brown hairs beading, runny eyes massive and derelict, as if beseeching. Profanities swing, palpitating against my tongue and then clouting whatever it can snatch.
I tell her maybe I'm tired of being. The door whistles as it slams.
1994; autumn
"Oh Christ!"
He spills coffee on his khakis and it seeps onto his legs. "Shit, Merri-Lee, I need a napkin!"
Merri-Lee is sapped of all color, and her cheeks, hallowed, are interspersed with red spots that factually sag as she reaches for the tower of napkins by the espresso machine.
He pats himself dry, his fingers scrabbling as he presses the paper squares to the scalded places on his skin.
He swears and Merri-Lee aches with weariness. "Dylan's in the other room; watch your mouth."
And it all happens very quickly then— he makes to slap her, his hand raised and his face distorted with rage and purple at the temples, before Merri-Lee secretes a strident cry and little Dylan snivels awake.
"Damn, you woke the baby?" He screams, mustache bristling.
Merri-Lee can feel her own eyes stream, and the depiction of the toneless room becomes filmy through liquid grief.
He's flushed crimson and begins to unfasten the knot of his tie. "Why is it so hot?" He grouses to himself, avoiding Merri-Lee exclusively. "God, I hate autumn."
Merri-Lee won't disclose it, especially not to herself, but she hates him.
I'd have liked to declare the train something glamorous— a tea garden in one car (with European women, no less) and a ballroom in another; that sort of thing.
I could have written back home to Ma and described slinky gowns and grave rouge on frosting cheeks, statures so slender they qualified as floss.
But regrettably, the successions of cars were oxidized and the textile of the seat caused inflammation on the nape of my neck. The man beside me rasped into the sleeve of his dowdy suit and walloped his scarlet nose free of bottlenecking congestion.
I'm beginning my letter and winding the inscription 'dear Ma' across the page and abruptly I'm beleaguered with the attention of my real Ma, who might share my portly thighs and coiled carroty hair.
Her name is Merri-Lee Marvil and she lives in the Carousel Capital of the World, Binghamton— that is the scope of my information. I'm going to find her.
Just as the man to my right initiates another round of mimicking seismic activity, I can feel the pulse of a finger kissing a spot on my shoulder, and fleetingly my gaze catches untamed, snaking hair and uncomplimentary irises.
1995; autumn
"Kendra got us tickets to Cats." Merri-Lee's hands are busy, sluicing water across dinner plates. He's reading the paper, decorous-like, tea dregs poised on the trimmings of his mustache.
"What's that?" He scoffs, placing the Press and Sun Bulletin on the table. "Felonious teenagers in leggings?"
Merri-Lee gnaws the inside of her cheek deliberates flinging the plate at his face. "It's a Broadway show," she retorts, drying her hands. "It's about cats."
"Merri-Lee, you know I hate Broadway." He chortles and brings the newspaper to his pastel face, runny eyes gorging an article about cell phones. "You can take the baby."
"Dylan's two," Merri-Lee states in a monotone. "And they cost—"
Black coffee streaks his newspaper after his paws pan the table. "Damn it, Merri-Lee!" He bawls, fair eyebrows smearing his forehead, lips spitting, and impaling fingernails in his palms. "I don't want to think about the cost!"
Merri-Lee's throat contracts; his contempt is repulsive. "Why won't you do anything with me? Go places with me?" She howls. "Why can't you be tolerant, and rational, and god damn—"
"I'd rather you hate me for everything I am than have you love me for something I can't be!" He screams, eyes untamed, his lips spattering dribble against the carpet tiles.
Merri-Lee is choked. Dylan is going wild in her nest.
"And I can't go to the fucking show, Merri-Lee," he mutters, tense, retracted back facing her. "I have an interview next week. PowerHouse Books is becoming conventional and I have to drive Brooklyn in November. And still, the word has it that Nokia is developing the first phone with wireless email." He jabs his finger into the cell phone article on the seedy paper. "This is the important stuff, Merri-Lee— the imperative things. Not a Broadway show about cats."
He stands and she feels like he's searching her with his watery stare. "Oh." She sounds weak, morose.
"I think I'll spend the night at William's," he says curtly. "I'll, uh, call you." And he's vanished, head off like the autumn foliage dwindling from brushwood, and unrequited.
"Forgive me, but you're in my seat."
His manner is placid; his pitch formal-like and civil— so unlike my impassive blasphemes, run-together lingo, and muddling terminology.
"Forgive me, but you're wrong." An impertinent curse word is on the apex of my tongue but I garrote it down (he's easy on the eyes, as boys go).
Undeterred, he reaches for his ticket. Then, peering down at the digit on the arm of the seat, he ties his eyebrows. "But—"
I flourish my ticket and he slips it from my clutch, examining the two. "I was right, wasn't I?" I stipulate indignantly. "I'm G12."
"Oh." His expression is sheer. Sporadically blinking, he returns my ticket. "You were right." Coloring, he stares at the floor. "My apologies."
"I knew I was right. Stupid fucker," I add in undertone, breathy. I sound spiteful, I grasp quickly, like a little horror from the pages of a chilling Halloween chronicle. Humiliated, I look away.
He struggles with an appearance to play on his lips before alighting on jaded. "Well a tip of the hat to you, then."
He has no hat, so I scoff, "How clever." Masticating the inside of my cheek, I level my gaze with his strange, derogatory eyes and speculate, "Where's your seat, then?"
With an ultimate fleeting look down at his ticket, he says, "G13."
1996; autumn
Merri-Lee used to fancy a quaint pastel house and a picket fence. She would expect him home every night punctually at six, and then they could dine collectively as a family. Dylan would inherit her cream pearls and they would subsist blissfully as one in that quaint pastel house.
She would breathe an existence of simplicity; drawn pallid curtains and green tea, a sound job, swinging her baby girl in her arms, his supple pucker against her cheekbone…
Unsurprisingly, she'd never expected an annulment to come out of their marriage. It was an ugly term.
It was an abrupt business, even a little reckless on his part. He'd smoothed the papers on the table, pressing the creases level with his thumb, and asphyxiated his mustache with coffee as he downed what sloshed in his mug.
"You want a divorce?" Merri-Lee spat, going icy at her fingertips. She didn't love him— he was outrageous. But a split was something else entirely.
Crumble, her world went. It routed her organs and bruised her freckled countenance.
"Merri-Lee…" He sounded strained, but weary. He left the words hanging and turned away. It took ages before she recognized the curt, terse twist of his right hand beside his left. He removed his ring and let it whirl on the table.
"What about Dylan?" Merri-Lee breathed delicately, her throat tapered.
"Don't you want her?" He appeared startled; his bulky eyebrows skipped.
And it was then that Merri-Lee decided life was like a rose— engaging, barbed, beautiful, fragile, heady, and sadly transitory. So she shook her head, because achieving simplicity would be easier without the constant aide memoire of her failure of a life.
Dylan woke and cried, the snivels choked. "What a gem," he complained to himself, his intonation saturated with weighty nuances of sarcasm.
It was just like him to stipulate a divorce in autumn.
His name is Cameron Fisher, he tells me. "Like fisherman." This is abruptly what I settle on dubbing him because it's enormously fulfilling to drawl.
"What brings you to Binghamton?" He speculates gently, screwing all-about in his seat. "The sports? Ostinigo Park? The Bundy Museum?"
I have a go at a snicker, but it surfaces as a grunt. "It's going to seem fucking crazy," I caution. He twitches some at the curse and I feel nearly culpable. "I'm going to find my mother." It feels real, then, when I say it.
I let fly into my tale of slow-motion loping into each other's arms (she'd smell like the blueberry ice cream I was so devoted to, and her hair would spin in endless silken scarlet). Dylandylandylan, she would voice tenderly. I'm so sorry.
He listens without grating commentary, which is nice. He is nice.
"Your fantasies are lovely," Cameron notes in prim tones.
I shrug and fiddle with the folds of my jacket. "What about you, Fisherman? Meeting up with some lucky gal?" The words leave vinegary trails in their wake, though inadvertent.
"Not unless the convention has one to offer," Cameron cogitates.
"Anime?" I speculate, incredulous.
"Unquestionably," he beams.
He's beautiful and I'm fat, but maybe I'm a bit fond of him.
2003; autumn
It's been a stretched six years, protracted enough for her to find a boyfriend named Len Rivera and to weasel her way into a cubicle at the Aging and Disabilities Center for the Health and Human Services. It pays fine.
Merri-Lee drinks coffee in the morning and, recollecting him, she undergoes feeling unreservedly powerless until Len kisses her cheek. Len's terrific, he really is.
She takes off one luminous afternoon to work when an obtuse asshole in a Jeep veers off around her. Taken by surprise, Merri-Lee souses herself in searing coffee. "Shit!" She screams, painted fingernails fumbling against the pasty buttons of her blouse.
Pulling over, she daubs flimsy napkins against the baked places—her breast, her neck, her collarbone. Then she reclines and her head lolls back to catch her breath.
After a long while, Merri-Lee decides to pry open her eyes. She sets her coffee down with a grave exhale, and just as she's about to switch gears, something catches her eye down the street.
There's an elfin girl with big red hair and she's faltering across the cobblestones with her mother's hand sheathing her own.
Dylan would be nine now, Merri-Lee thinks.
The girl is wearing a blushing pink tulle and a golden circlet that presses her spirals, a rotary rod cutting space in one little grasp. Is it Halloween already?
Dylan used to love Halloween, Merri-Lee thinks.
"Where exactly do you plan on going?" Cameron asks just as the train screeches to an end. For the first time today, he sounds aggravated.
"I expect I'll stroll around until I see her," I rejoin smartly, making to stand.
Cameron looks at me weirdly. "That's ridiculous!" He exclaims. "What if you get lost?" He stands incisively in my way. Then he crouches until his sallow, twisted expression is level with mine, and I can flavor his salty breath on the peak of my tongue. "Do you want me to go with you?" His tenor is lipped with a stiff frame.
"Oh," I pipe as my voice catches. "Why would you do that?"
He flattens his spine and reaches for his baggage. "The convention doesn't start until five, Dylan."
And so we're off.
X
There's a nice restaurant on the corner of Madison and Hungerford that serves crab. I have just one hundred dollars of crinkled paper in my pocket, and I'm so relieved when he offers to pay that I don't even call him 'Fisherman,' but purely Cameron.
We ask the patrons around us if they've ever heard of a Merri-Lee Marvil, ma'am,and that we really would appreciate any little piece of information, thank you. They all look arrogantly amused, dubious and pitying, and when the crab is delivered on ironstone china squares I cannot swallow a thing.
"Fisherman, this is stupid," I carp under my breath as Cameron stows his maw. "We'll never find her."
Cameron scoffs, tweaking with the bulky rag tucked into his collar. "Oh, don't be like that. Of course we will."
The waiter comes with the bill; he's a giant with massive hands and round frames. As Cameron reaches for his wallet, he asks, "Excuse me, Sir, do you happen to know someone named Merri-Lee Marvil?"
He glances at us apprehensively in turn. Then the crooks of his eyes rumple, and vigilantly, he says flatly, "She's my wife."
2008; autumn
Merri-Lee is at her desk when Kendra lifts her painted face over the partition and grins audaciously.
"Merri-Lee, darling," she croons, flapping her dense, groomed eyelashes. "Len's in the lobby. He wants to talk to you."
It's the way Kendra natters— the flighty lapse of her r's, the skirmishing clash of her lips when she pops her b, the drag of her ee, the lunge of her trill —that vexes Merri-Lee to no end. Pushing herself from her desk, she offers Kendra a wintry smile and saunters away.
Len is waiting with his hands shoved in his pockets, so incongruous beside chandeliers and flower-patterned carpeting.
Her life amalgamates with a fairytale when he gets down on his knee and swallows unnervingly. Then the ring encloses her finger and it's so much nicer than the first one. The gem is luminous and cut into lozenges, and the band is engraved with MLR. It takes her a minute to decipher: Merri-Lee Rivera. Well, why not?
She converts to a pathway of, "It's beautiful-I love it-I love you."
For the first time in forever, she doesn't deliberate over Dylan. Not even a bit.
Over his tea, Len Rivera has only just completed burbling the address of her agency when I grab Cameron's hand and lug him out the door.
"Thank you, Mr. Rivera!" Cam feels obliged to holler, staggering behind my hazing feet. He tugs away once we've turned the corner. "Dylan, that was rude."
I don't stop running. "I'm about to see my mother, Fisherman!" I sound both enraged and rapturous. I'm sprinting now, and my eyes have gathered Binghamton dust and distort the image of the winding streets. My chest heaves, and I burn ubiquitously like there are matches in my veins.
I want her to seize me and cling to my slack pallid skin as we rock this way and that until I'm dizzy and I have to pull away. She will giggle, and I will bite my lip. Then she will tell me that she loves me.
I keep running, and Cameron chases behind.
fini
a/n: i know it's abrupt, but that's how i wanted it to be. if i was to write a 'real' ending, merri-lee would not have been accepting of dylan; she would have wanted to move on from her past life, from her daughter. and that, tash, is not the kind of ending i wanted for this oneshot. but, you can go ahead and assume that the anime-loving, convention-attending cam fisher end up together. huzzah for that.
and i hope you thought it was okay; as i'm revising it now i have low expectations.
prompts: autumn, tea garden, simplicity, 'i'd rather you hate me for everything i am than have you love me for something i can't be.'
-han