Summary: Yoh's hapless rhetorical skills get a kick in the pants (figuratively) from Manta and (almost literally) from Anna. But does the help actually improve his writing?
Written: From 8/21 to 8/22/07.
Rating: T for coarse language and romantic themes.
Notes: I felt a little guilty about taking so long to write #10, so here's #11, just a day later. It may take a few days for the next, though; classes have begun in earnest. Let me know what you think of it!
Everyday Miracle
Kiss #11
"I love to take naps. If I was in charge, I would—"
"You mean, 'were.'"
"What?" Yoh looked up from the paper in his hands and saw Anna, a fist perched on the waist of her black skirt, looking impatient and deadly.
"You're speaking in the subjunctive tense, so you have to use the past participle of the verb. Not 'was,' but rather 'were.'"
"'Subjunctive'? 'Participle'? Anna, what are you talking about?"
The sheet of paper parted company with Yoh and found itself in Anna's white fingertips. She picked up a red pen from the table and crossed out his 'was', adding to the network of crimson lines that crosshatched his manuscript. "Honestly, this is embarrassing. You spend half your time hanging out with Manta, and he's one of the smartest kids I know. Why doesn't any of it ever rub off on you?"
He sighed and looked down at the floor, seeing Anna's slippers tapping out an annoyed rhythm from the corner of his eye. "I…I asked him to help me write this, actually, but he's late…"
A derisive laugh prefaced her response. "Help you write that, my ass. More like you're going to piss away the afternoon miniature golfing and spitting off highway overpasses." She saw Yoh's affronted expression and relented slightly, but not by much. "Well, whatever. You're taking away from my TV time. Just remember that if you don't get a decent paper written, you will fail. And I don't associate with failures."
From behind Yoh, several sharp raps echoed down the hall. "That must be him, finally."
"Come in," Anna called, in a tone that completely contradicted the nature of her offer. A jarring creak resonated in the hallway, followed by a subdued slam and footsteps. "Manta," she continued in a tone no less glacial, "this know-nothing is all yours. Prove me wrong and teach him something."
Manta quaked in his small shoes and gave a deep bow, although Anna had already left the room. "I'll do my best, Anna-san." He climbed into the now vacant chair before Yoh and placed a thick tome upon the table. The taller boy made sure he could hear the television from the other room before he spoke.
"'Anna-san'? She's not your slave driver," he joked with a sheepish smile.
"I know, but…Your fiancée, she scares me sometimes, in all honesty."
"You're not the only one. If I don't get a good paper done soon, I swear she's gonna slip cyanide into my toothpaste."
His diminutive friend chuckled at that. "You've already got something written? That's good."
"Well," he replied, pushing the heavily revised draft across the table, "it's something. But it's no good."
Manta scanned the paper quickly, taking in each line rapidly, every now and then giving a noncommittal grunt or wobble of the head. "So, the 'everyday miracles' you're writing about are sleep and naps?"
He was answered by a gaping yawn. "Yep," and he stretched his arms behind his pointy hairdo, "they really are, you know, I feel so refreshed after a good night's sleep, and without naps, I'd die of boredom at school."
Stubby fingers pried open the gargantuan book on the table and flipped through its pages quickly. "I'm not going to argue that point. I like to nap as much as the next guy. Hell, I could use a good nap, seeing as how my dad's making me take extra cram school. It sucks like a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner." He continued as Yoh laughed, "But…I think there's really only so much you can say about sleeping and naps. After all, when you're asleep, your brain more or less shuts down. I think you'd be better off writing about something you can describe in more detail, something profound, poetic…" Suddenly his frenetic flipping stopped, and the pages came to rest. "This, for example."
The page displayed a deep red, amorphous blob, textured in places with blue lines, white ridges, and adorned with four tubular appendages roughly at right angles to each other.
"Is this…a heart?"
Manta smiled. "It's an everyday miracle." His finger trailed down the page now, and he was reading aloud interesting factoids as he found them: "At rest, the average heart beats 72 times per minute, or just about 2.7 million times in the average lifetime. Those heartbeats will pump about 9 million liters of blood through your veins every year! Think of it, it never stops beating, not even when the rest of you takes a nap."
Yoh was still fixated upon the picture on the opposite page, but he nodded slowly. "That's pretty cool, actually. Without it, none of the other organs would get any oxygen. Plus, like you said, it's always going, no matter what!"
"The ancient Greeks thought the heart was the body's control center, even though we know today that it's the brain that's in charge. But people still consider the heart to be the foundation of emotions—especially love."
"Yeah! Like the way it beats faster when you get excited? I see why the Greeks might have thought that…" Yoh picked up his draft, flipped it over and began to jot some ideas down. "Hmm… 'Center of emotions,' 'Never stops beating,' 'Beats faster when excited'…This is good stuff! Thanks, Manta!"
"Always a pleasure to help." He hopped off his chair and began pushing it in, but Yoh stopped him.
"Whoa, whoa! Going somewhere already?"
Manta made a face. "My dad wants me to come home right after cram school. I think you met him before?"
"Oh…" Yoh recalled that the one time he and Manta's father had been in the same room, he had to restrain an urge to stagger off his gurney and strangle the little autocratic son of a—
"Yeah…Sorry, Yoh. I'll see you at school tomorrow. Good luck with finishing the paper!"
Yoh returned his wave and sat down. Despite the fact that he was sitting before a blank sheet once again, this time he felt energized. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling his own heart thumping, letting it inspire him, and then put his pencil to the paper. The heart in each of our chests is an Everyday Miracle because…
"…over nine million liters of fresh blood to your vital organs every year!"
Anna crossed one of her legs over and stretched slightly, stifling a yawn.
"Sorry, Anna. I'm not much of a writer."
She shrugged. "I didn't mean anything by the yawn. I'm just a bit tired, is all."
Lines of eagerness appeared on Yoh's expression. "So, what do you think so far?"
"Eh. It's not Dickens, but it's not bad either. Continue, if you don't mind."
He swallowed and continued. "Ahem. When we get tired from our everyday routine, we get headaches, our eyelids sag, our backs hurt, but the heart keeps on chugging! Even as we dream, even when our brains are too exhausted to think clearly, our hearts continue to beat. Its—oops, hang on…" Yoh added an apostrophe to the draft. "It's truly a miracle."
"I still think you could have picked something a little less gross. What about sunrises, plants, electricity?" She smirked. "Or even the miracle of you writing a half-decent paper."
One of the pages in Yoh's hands drifted to the floor in his shock. Even backhanded comments from Anna were rare, and he knelt to retrieve the page, trying to hide his blushing.
"Now, don't get bigheaded. It's all right so far, but if it's got a weak ending, the rest doesn't matter."
With a hint of hesitation, he ruffled the papers and read aloud in an unconfident voice, "When the rest of the body is exerted physically, it wears out. The lungs heave in exhaustion, the legs twitch with fatigue, the entire body drips with sweat. Years of daily twenty-five-mile runs with weights strapped to my arms and legs have taught me that—"
"Very subtle, Yoh." Her words were sardonic and her tone icy, but Anna looked almost entertained by his editorial aside. "But I think you're going to have to cut that part out."
The abrading noise of graphite on paper filled the room as he trimmed the relevant line from his narrative. "Where was I…drips with sweat. The body wants to stop. It wants to sit down and have a drink of water, or maybe take a short nap. But the heart, unlike the rest of the body, wants to work harder! It pounds more and more…How do I spell 'furiously'?"
"Huh?" Anna's mouth was open slightly, and she looked a bit dazed, staring at the wrinkled sheets in Yoh's hands with intense eyes. "Oh…don't worry about it. I'll check your spelling later. Keep reading."
"If…if you say so. Are you okay, Anna?"
She gave an uneven nod. "Yeah."
"Alright…It pounds more and more furiously. It goes faster the more the body wants to slow down! It's like a drumbeat keeping time for the rest of the band, the metronome"—Anna gave a slight gasp at his vocabulary, but he had already continued on—"of the human body's symphony. But physical activity isn't the only thing that can increase heart rate. The ancient Greeks believed the heart to be an everyday miracle too: They believed the heart functioned as the center of all thought, because of the way it quickened, seemingly in response to excitement, to fear, to all emotions, really. Today we know the brain really is the organ in charge. Nonetheless, the heart—"
"Yoh." Anna uncrossed her legs and clasped both her hands around one of her knees. "Did Manta write this for you, or something?"
"Well…he did give me the idea to write about the heart. But I took it from there."
"No…you don't have it in you…or at least I've never seen you write anything nearly as slick before…" Maybe it was the way the orange afternoon sunlight played on her face, but she looked a little pink in the face as she blustered, "I…have to admit I'm a bit impressed, Yoh. Writing about the heart must've really inspired you or something."
"Maybe," he ventured weakly, but Anna gestured him to continue. "Um, let's see…Nonetheless, the heart continues to this day as the seat of all emotion. Devastation makes our chests feel heavy and helpless. Excitement causes our pulse to flutter, fear sends blood thumping into our temples, and then there is love—"
The abruptness with which Yoh had stopped reading aloud did not go unnoticed. Nor did his sudden move to hide the papers behind his back. Anna squinted at him suspiciously, leaning forward aggressively, the azure beads around her neck rattling with distrust. "Yoh, your essay is incomplete?!"
Her accusation froze in midair above his head, crystalizing and pelting him with flecks of snow; he gave an involuntary shudder. "No, I…I just think I can cut this last part out here, I ramble a little. No sense in reading it to you if it sucks, right?"
"I don't need to see bullshit in order to know it by its smell," she countered, just as icily. "Everything you read so far is probably the best damn thing you've ever written in your life. You're hiding something from me. Now out with it."
Yoh's resolve withered along with his shoulders; he knew there was no denying Anna's request. Every tendon in his tensed arms resisted him as he withdrew the papers from behind his back, smoothed out the creases deliberately, and sighed in resignation. "And then there is love, the most powerful emotion of all. Love is a multifaceted thing," he read, his voice shaky and stumbling, "an Everyday Miracle in itself, albeit one that is unique to each couple. There is a hand, blotched red with fury, that strikes fear into my heart when it rears up for a slap. There is a slender back, draped in a lovely black dress, that makes my heart stop beating every time it walks away from me in disappointment. And there is a face, with frightening angry ebony slits for eyes, deep creases of frustration upon its brow, and luscious lips opened wide, bellowing insults and remonstrations, and as I take it all in, I feel my chest burning with gloom and self-pity."
Yoh took a few deep breaths then, seeing Anna's unmoving, stoic figure above the top margin of the draft he was holding with unsteady hands. "But it is during those rarefied moments when I take that hand within mine, when that back turns around and greets me warmly, when that face is relaxed, the eyes opened wide with delight and gazing into mine, the brow smooth as the flawless cheeks, the lips smiling sweetly—that is when my heart palpitates strongest and I am left utterly breathless. That hand, that back, that face, all belong to my fiancée Anna, and so does my heart. In that fashion, she, and not my heart, is my Everyday Miracle."
Yoh lowered his head in shame at what he had just read, feeling distinctly hot behind the ears, but in one fluid motion Anna leapt off her seat, relieved Yoh of the draft and placed it on the table, and clasped both her hands behind his neck.
"I told you it was awful! Don't strangle me, Anna, I'll just edit it out like I said…" Then he realized that no choking was imminent, and he looked, bewildered, at her, but she simply said:
"You'll have to edit it, but only because you didn't write in this part."
Anna's slender lips planted themselves upon his, and she could smell shaving cream wafting from his cheeks. She felt his pulse against her chest and her fingertips upon his neck, beating faster now, and as she slid her tongue between his teeth an indescribable heat diffused through his back, and she felt against her arms, felt it as surely as she could feel his spiky hair grazing her face, and then an identical rush surged through her chest…Yoh tightened his arms around Anna's midriff and felt her peachy, tingling skin, felt little ripples of adrenaline shoot through his fingertips where they glided across her back, and she pulled back slightly with a satisfying smack.
"Well, it's too bad you can't take this approach with all your classes."
Yoh laughed in Anna's arms, and they held each other close for a long while, basking in the everyday miracle that is all too often taken for granted…
