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epitome of incomprehensibility
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The contents of
CZECH SEEDBEAD 10/0
VIALS approx. 40gm -
S/L TOPAZ MIX
dispersed widely on a dining room floor, courtesy of a stray elbow belonging to a red-haired young man writing a novel about King Arthur.
His sister looked up from her not-work. She'd been applying to jobs, writing about an alternate Arctic, and then tutoring until 9 PM, and now she deserved not-work in the form of creating little bead people while watching the "Cinema Snob" riff on Italian zombie movies.
She laughed as the beads scattered, but then ArthurAuthor said, "You left the thing wide open," meaning without a lid.
"But you knocked it over."
"But it was just standing there, like, in the open," like he didn't have any words left over.
She was too tired for proper punctuation in recounting dreams, but she was able to enunciate, "I'll slap you," quite well.
Blue eyes looked reproachful.
"I didn't mean it."
They negotiated how to round the beads up; for the next ten minutes they worked together, picking the outliers up one by one, sweeping the middle ones into a circle, and generally picking out the dust before returning them to the vial.
Then they resumed their separate activities.
In the other bead container, two of the opaque white beads were crusted brown. "Zombie beads," the sister thought involuntarily, then frowned. Now she'd dream about zombie beads, nauseating zombie beads, not pleasant raw shrimp that tasted like pâté.
Of course, the sparkly golden and brown beads in the vial were tinged with surreal horror: 10/0, anyone?
She had woken up in a panic attack after dreaming that 1:infinity (the colon indicating a ratio). Of course, it was true. Guilt about being a teenage domestic abuser did tend to balance out fear of eternity. Or zombies. Zombie elbows. King Arthur, James Joyce, Nova Scotia... The waves pulled her under, the hard, beady waves, undulating in high school memories spilling over into waking life.
The little bead people were singularly unimpressed.
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150112
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