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disclaimed for haetrs
im not a ninja ok
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The Life and Times of Stephannie Mayor
By Piratez0mmbier0b0tz
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When Stephannie Mayor was six years old, she wanted to be an astronaut. She wanted to leave the Earth and the siblings that crowded her house, travel to the moon and its garish, alien mountains, its dried seas, and leave her footprint on regolith. She wanted to reach for a barren black sky, and becoming chilled, long for home, wherein commonplace, irate screams and thudding around of feet would greet her, and the hundreds upon thousands of stars would again be in her imagination, and two or four or nine would blink in the skies.
When Fenny was six, the stars in her room used to glow. (She didn't realize, back then, that the stars didn't show when one left the Earth, and did not know of regolith.)
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When Fenny was twelve, she pretended that she was Elizabeth Bennet hiking through the mud to Bingley's estate. The rain fell from filthy, alluring skies, from a mixture of mud and clouds, and cast an eerie, sepia color upon the world about her. Her shoes were only slightly grubby because of a soaking splash here and there from a stray puddle, and she carried an umbrella over her head, apparently boasting word of an obscure corporation, its lettering mostly scratched out and displaying only "App"—but the adrenaline touched her breast, and her breath, and the grip on the handle of the half-broken piece of shit.
When Fenny was twelve, she also flipped through the television once, and came across a show wherein a man with a bowl haircut and pointed ears seemed to try to say to a discriminating extraterrestrial hoard, "fuck you." She began to watch idly, then half a year later found herself crouched by the shelves at the back of her Blockbusters, going through clear cases with Sharpie scrawled hastily upon them.
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When Fenny was fourteen, she found herself attracted to someone who slid down the handrails of her school, tripped into a trashcan full of papers, gum, and a banana peel, which hung of the idiot's shoulders after emergence. After listening to laughter that sounded like bells to her deceiving right ear and a chattering chipmunk to her disparaging left, she forced herself not to think about it.
When Fenny was seventeen, sometime late in July, she woke up to the sound of droning crickets (a chorus, uncaring), and her heart thudding like the footsteps of siblings upon worn, creaking floorboards in a bored, clattering house. She began to pray often inside her head.
Someone told her that those things happened.
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When Fenny was twenty, she rented a video one day, out of restlessness, irritation. As she watched two little girls chase after cute, spidery soot creatures out in a yard full of flowers and a forest lazing not far from their quaint little house; as she watched the sisters huddle beneath a peachy umbrella, beside a huge, fluffy animal with a friendly visage; as she watched a bus cat leap through rain and forest, she remembered walking home years ago, at the age of twelve, pretending that she was Elizabeth Bennet.
She thought then, "Goddammit.
Goddammit goddammit goddammit."
—For no particular reason.
(Someone told her that those things happened. She didn't think about it again.)
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When Fenny was seventeen, some days she was hateful, and some days despondent.
Years later, when her first baby was birthed, she discovered that she loved her dearly.
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When Fenny was twenty-seven, she began to watch what might be termed 'animu' one morning, while carrying dishes over from the dining table, glancing upon a boy in a silly hat and clothing sitting upon a hill with a yellow mouse thing, eating a red cartoon herring.
She picked up a graphic novel with the picture of a sparkling boys on the cover and Times New Roman text on the inside, and not long after, she began to read fiction online, by young girls and women, and thought back to when she was seventeen, and despondent.
She thought, "I could write that." And she did, for a little while—of young men with pale faces and gaunt abs, of ridiculous tragedies, of slashes against the wrist and amidst one another. She found it all rather wry.
When Fenny was twenty-seven, she thought of becoming an attorney. Then she laughed into the air one day, for no apparent reason. (For those things happened.)
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When Fenny was thirty, she had a dream about herself and a vampire from out of Terry Pratchett's most recent novel.
She reflected the next day, pouring a sixth spoon of sugar into her lemonade, that it might've been wiser not to have poked into a particular quiz site the evening before, inanely curious. She mused on the storyline of one that she had taken, written by a thirteen-year-old girl—a stumbling piece of first person narrative—and she mused, also, on a shitty library book that her daughter had left lying on top of the television, wherein the author had explicitly placed himself inside his own fiction.
She found her dream a little ludicrous, and the morning after rather laughable. But the vampire, she thought distractedly, was utterly marketable.
When Fenny was thirty-two, she began her rise to fame.
She was flabbergasted (inside her head; remembered pretending, long ago, beneath the rain).
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A little after twilight, Stephannie Mayor caught a glimpse of the skies through browning, half-slit blinds as she stepped into the kitchen.
She stared at the vague blackness beyond, and reminisced that when she had been six years old, she'd wanted to be an astronaut.
Then she remembered a man with a bowl haircut and pointed ears, and thought, "Godammit.
"Godammit godammit godammit."
—For no particular reason at all.
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End
The Life and Times of Stephannie Mayor
Otherwise Known As
An Introspective into
How Nerds Really Really Want to See
Other Nerds Masterminding Stuff
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idk what your talking about
forevermore
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