A hundred violins are like a curtain of knives.
"...I -told- you, I don't know that yet. Uh-huh. I got the gears turning, but no one's home, y'know what I mean? Exactly. ... What a JOKE. I thought I made it CLEAR it was about the N. O. circuit. Weeell, THAT I can explain...right..."
A growling grunting meow...clicking of tiny pointed claws. Amber cattish eyes watched the feline trot away from their skewed position. Conversation cut short -again-, because the overweight puss had to take an innocent piss.
Pink hair lightly brushed a polished wooden floor...Haruhara Haruko was flopped lazily over the back of a chair. Her legs kicked idly over the back, and her head stretched down to see the world right-side-up-upside-down. Housekeeper Haruko, avoiding labor while the Little Prince Curry simmers. The household was more or less deserted, the grandfather piddling somewhere with a dirty magazine, the father making breads, Ta-kun at school(or under the bridge, really)...and Canti passed by, laundry in hand--that kafkaesque dimestore wire halo attached to his head again. Naughty, naughty Sameji...
Nothing amazing. Nothing at all.
"OOOOOuuugh!" Haruko rolled unceremoniously off her chair, thudding onto the floor. Rooting through the mail seemed like a good idea. Maybe taking in an old Steve Reeves movie---not to join the rest of the occult. Marlon Brando was a better idea.
Motorcycles. Vroom, vroom.
A spidery hand reached over, groping blindly across the floor. She could hear the conversations downstairs. Vehicles passing like distracted bees. Squeaking cart wheels from women coming home from shopping. Dogs baying at school children. A balloon floating away.
Boring.
Gunh.
"Found you."
A Rickenbacker bass guitar 4001. Bright blue.
"Paul McCartney." Gunh. "You should have picked up the violin."
Haruko rolled onto her back. She took the pale beige left-handed guitar handle into her arms, it's blue body resting on her stomach. The subtlety of a hand like Van Halen, dancing across the six strings of an ax is overplayed, over commercialized and under appreciated. And every time a monkey with a mohawk picks up a guitar, all the metalheads with grungy, 'technogrooved soulless slushed' metal dream things have a mental deathy explosion. Hey Jude is still a song people tap their fingers to in hotel elevators. Songs like that cut like knives; you forget the words, but it's still there, scarred in like the song that never ends.
Even underdeveloped, it was a nice cut. At least he knew how to swing the bat.
Clink--kint--clinkclackclink---
Her wrist. The Alarm. Atomsk. Atomsk, Atomsk, Atomsk.
Haruko was up and out the door. With a vicious start, her yellow Vespa jumped to life. She snapped her goggles across her eyes and grinned like a woman gone mad.
"Strike three! OUT!"