Her Heart of Gold: Glow

According to the sluggishly ticking clock hanging above the door to the store, it's five o'clock.  But the young woman pulling down the protective grating knows that the clock, like many things out there, is brimming with accidental lies.  Her mobile phone is attuned to the atomic clock and that claims the clock shaved off an extra quarter of an hour.  Time had gotten away from her again with the clock attempting to thieve what she had missed.

Her understated black heels are a clicking counterpoint to the clock. The weak February light that streams between the tightly packed buildings looming over the little shop glints off of her bronze name tag.  She is convinced that no one reads it, let alone remembers what is imprinted by the precise stamping machine.  The shop is one of glass and glittering items; compared to the precious stones and metal encased in the elegant cabinetry, she knows that she and her uniform do not stand out in the least.  To do that was to detract from the wares and it wasn't her that the clients were shopping for; this shop was not for that.

But now is after-hours.

The young woman, her hair neatly pinned back in a bun that resembles a knot of wood with its coloration and shape, gives the glass cases a final spritz and polish to prepare them for the morning.  The shop was painstakingly decorated in such a way as to encourage the perception of sufficient space, cleaned regularly to welcome customers.  In the Court Quarter of the city, most of the shops shared the same dimensions and similar window shapes; any way a business could find to stand out was of critical advantage.

The rooms sequestered behind the 'Employees Only' sign are a hybrid of a workshop and a makeshift break room that could easily support a person staying for a few nights.  This was often the case for a small jewelry shop that had a small range of clientele which would make unusual demands.  It was better for the business owner to make small repairs in-house rather than send out for services he and his trained associate could provide.  Like the tastefully tiled area of the shop which welcomed customers, the back areas were cleaned regularly.  Unlike the determinedly welcoming place beyond the nondescript door, break area managed to amass the sort of clutter that comes with living rather than urging to purchase.

The working desk, the sofa and the small table between were findings rescued from the verges on trash day.  It results in a weathered and mismatched appearance very much at odds with the shop and breathes of different personality.  The desk is cluttered, the couch welcoming with an extra pillow nestled on top of a folded woolen blanket, and the little round dining room table in between them was hosting a pile of mail.

Most of the mail was to her employer but one on the top was addressed differently.  The girl looks down at it, carefully manicured fingers reaching out to cover the name until only her nickname peered out at her. 'Tani.'  She can take a moment to marvel at the way the pearly robin's egg blue of the envelope made the natural tan of her hands stand out, accentuated the manicure that was mandatory in this sort of shop.

"Finally," she breathes, her thoughtful expression clearing into a pleased half-smile.  It was the letter she had waited years for, the engraved invitation more than one mutual friend had made affectionate bets about.  Her fingertips drag to the top left corner of the envelope before she flips it over.  On the back were clear instructions to RSVP before August.

Tani turns away from the table, pausing to use it to steady herself as she steps out of her heels.  The floor feels unforgivingly cold through the leggings but after the shoes it's a relief.  It wouldn't take her long to change into more comfortable clothing before she settled in at the work station.  Nice professional clothing for reasonable price was difficult to come by so she saw no reason to put her uniform at risk.

Once Tani takes the time to change clothing and grab a snack, she settles herself at the workstation both she and her employer used to make repairs to pieces brought to them by clients.  Rarely would they work with things to make unique pieces.  As she scans the board in front of the desk to decide on which instrument to begin with, she rubs her fingertips together.

In the end, she drags out a weighty hunk of metal that has a pair of straight and shallow troughs in it.  It was like iron beneath her now-warm fingertips.  It was made of a dense metal, as weathered as any grandmother's finest cast-iron skillet.  Like the rough-hewn marble work surface that was actually a salvaged off-cut, the heavy mold was also a rescue.  Her employer had no more need of it but Tani saw no reason to dispose of it.  It, like the battered desk and couch, had been given another chance.

Consideringly, she plucks one of their steak knives from the kitchen from its secret spot beneath the desk organizer, turning it over in her hands as she stares at the mold. The metal blade glints with a strange warmth beneath the glow of the old yellow bulb that hangs above the table.  

With a quirked smile, she twists the instrument so that the metallic shark teeth meet her skin and presses it roughly into the meaty part of the palm.  To make sure, she folds her fingers around the sleek steel.  The smile morphs almost instantly to a pained hiss as the flesh parts but as she pulls the sharp implement from her hand, she can only hope the shallow gouges were enough.

Welling from her palm are not the bright red of blood but steaming droplets of glowing metal.  It lights her brown eyes strangely in the small space, promises to catch fire to anything unprepared for it ferociously.  Tani knew that it would cool quickly in the air, turning her hand so it was palm down above the marble and deliberately pressing a thumb into the softness near the teeth-marks of the knife to encourage more flow.

The key was to bleed her gold into a straight line without spattering it and that takes concentration.  This was the best gift she could think to give them.  Her friends would need bands for their vows.  They were only starting and had about as much as any young married couple would have. . . so Tani would provide.  It would take time to process the gold into her desired shape, repeatedly subjecting it to heat and pressure until it was the right size for the intended, to polish it appropriately.  

Tani had until August.  She had time.

*~*~*

Book Reviews in Brief: Part One

Let it not be said that my little Kobo Touch doesn't get a good workout.  In fact, it's been used so constantly that I sometimes fear the little device is near the end of its life. . . sometimes he rebuffs my advances to turn him on.  Repeatedly.

Girls hate to be ignored.  

So eventually the Kobo flickers up, grudgingly.  I suspect he knows that if he doesn't put out, he can get out.  I would move on and find another reader.  Sadly, sometimes it has to fall by the wayside because life just insists on being dealt with.  But, with winter thundering down in the form of storms and nights that hover haltingly above zero, it's come back as part of my evening and weekend routine.  It keeps me warm and curled up in a comfy place.  Or would be, were it not for my chosen reading material.

I've recently finished The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey and have moved on to Bird Box by Josh Malerman.  I know, right?  Not exactly idea stuff to read right before going to sleep.  Particularly Josh Malerman's book. . . But each of the books are teaching me by example.  And I really do like that.

M.R. Carey's descriptions strike me as more poetic in some places.  They evoke strong imagery for me.  It means that when he uses science in his book to back up what goes on, it catches me by surprise and makes me more appreciative.  You see, my original degree is a biology degree.  So when someone brings me literature that uses something that is at least plausible at a stretch, I become excited.  Someone has done some homework!  Just how much homework?  You'd have to read it to know for sure.  Me?  I'm more than a little tempted to do a bit of digging for myself and see how well he covered himself in science (I'd admittedly a bit rusty and the fun part about science is that we continuously edit it).

Personally, I find M.R. Carey's approach to be one of the more challenging (and also one of the most increasingly popular).  It gives great flexibility but there's not much space for being lazy there.  He pulls this off because each of the characters has, to me, a unique voice.  I never really forget whose eyes I'm seeing through.

Josh Malerman's novel, on the other hand, is more sparse.  But the sparseness, to me, serves a function.  I could attribute it to any number of things, from the narrator's viewpoint to it simply being how Mr. Malerman writes.  However, Josh Malerman's book has its strength in what is not shown and that is quite different to The Girl With All the Gifts, which in my opinion has strength in measured reveal, using more than one viewpoint to widen the reader's understanding of the world and what goes on.

Two different books, two different subject matters, two different approaches.  One's strength is in well-paced reveal.  The other is extremely talented on not giving you anything and letting what I think of as instinctive imagination do the work (Instinctive imagination: The part of you that probably worked fabulously well when humans were still struggling tribes, huddled around the fire and scared of anything that moved in the dark).  And between them?  A lot of space to learn and experiment.  If you want to learn a little more about what to do to creep people out, I think I can suggest Josh Malerman's Bird Box.  I'm about halfway through and seriously had to not stop just anywhere before going to bed.

I am a grown-ass woman.  And I couldn't go to bed because this book was at a point where I was sufficiently creeped out that I had to continue the trip until I found a spot that wasn't the sort of thing that could trigger nightmares.  It's like the literary opposite of "are we there yet?"  I've never had a book do that to me before. . . but to be fair, this is the first time I've read something that seems to be dedicated solely to the gift of sleepless nights.

. . . I'll let you know how that goes!


Edit:

Wanna peek at the books I'm babbling about?  I'll make it easier!

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Getting Lost in a Good Book

New sunlight streams through the glass window, a scant eight minutes and some odd seconds old.  It manages to batter its way through the grime-coated glass, providing a slant for motes to swirl along on their way to the tiles.  When the unwary motes finally elect settle, they would be camouflaged by the color of the tiles but not by the grout that bound them all together.  The grout is what betrays the floor as being far older than the sunlight, carrying the patina of countless footsteps.

The walls that the sunlight creeps along each cycle are likewise weathered.  Warm and gentle the sun may seem just now, seasons of it have scorched the white walls and wooden shelving.  Should the furniture ever be moved, the pieces would leave behind shadows of their shadows.  It was a silent testament of how long they had stood sentry, carefully cradling books of all sorts on any surface that might be worth holding them inside the shop.

Some footsteps -most footsteps- have been human, though it has been some days since any had paced along the corridors of the shop defined by the windows and walls.  It was those guilty footsteps, caked with winter mud, summer sands that have brought age more quickly to the commonly-traveled lanes inside the shop, searching for their literary soul mate of the moment.  

Scattered with the motes and evidence of hard wear and weather are light, glinting strands of orange and cream fur.  This is the result of the current sole resident of the shop, a shaggy ginger tom.  The evidence of him is strewn widely through the repository that is brimming with books of various size, color and subject matter.  Though not remarkably large for a bookstore or for people, the area is more than large enough for him, plush pink paws traipsing lazily over the most settled of dust motes.  He has spent much of his time here, and much of his time other places.  But for the now, the ginger tom is here, shepherding the slates of sunlight across the floor.

The shop's front door claims that they would be open Monday through Saturday, eight o'clock sharp to a dull six o'clock evening time.  Despite these promises the door remains locked on a sunny Tuesday, but that is of no surprise to the ginger tom.  He has lounged in the silence for three days without Old Ray coming to refresh his water or scrap dish, with the odd interruption of people trying to open a door that is sealed to them.  "On vacation," the humans would say.

"Not so," the ginger tom would retort with a laughing twitch of his tail.  But no one notices the twitch.

Many days had Old Ray spent with his books, enjoying the thrill of the hunt as he stalked this edition or that to add to his collection.  This is what drew the ginger tom at first, made the tom acknowledge Old Ray.  Old Ray understood the hunt.  And though he understood nothing else, that in itself was enough.  Likewise, the ginger tom never understood Old Ray and how he could surrender the prey he had so tenaciously brought to his home.  And surrender he did, with the ring of the old register and a smile at the people who made the purchase.

But Old Ray had not set the register to ring for days.  The ginger tom paced by a half open book that had tumbled heedless to the floor, pausing in his leisurely locomotion.  Sniffing at the crinkled pages, folded beneath the heavy binding like a multitude of broken wings.  The last place where Old Ray's scent of spice, his favorite cologne lingered, both on the pages and on the tom's extended whiskers.  The knowledge of what happened to Old Ray was there.  Scent, soul and somebody lost along the vellum-filled volumes.  They took bits of time from people, bits of their hearts.  And eventually. . . possibly one day. . .  their whole selves.

Many people's stories end with abrupt lines like 'cause of death: Car accident.'  Others listed in familiar obituaries that the tom often lounged on are more like 'quietly, surrounded by loved ones.'   Old Ray's would be something different, a secret from the people who could not feel the warm breezes wafting through the shop's pages and ruffled the silver hairs on the ginger tom who would shortly go his own way.  Once he was done shepherding the shop's sunlight.

"And he was never heard from again."

Little Lambs

Mary may have had a little lamb, but not all lambs are white.  Some are mottled like Blue Heelers (a point of irony if you know what heelers are for.  Sort of a reversal of the wolf in sheep's clothing), some are tawny like wheat ready for thrushing.

Some are like soot, set to grow into black sheep.

Here we have just such a one.  Either willfully or unwillfully abandoned by the mother, the result is still the same.  We had a young lamb without a mother.  Alyce and Suzie call him 'Woolie.'

Peachy McCrockPot: The Early Days

I call him 'Peachy McCrockPot.' 

It's mostly because I wholly believe we should all have at least a rough idea of where we're going in life. 

The other lamb kept on premises is a plain, nondescript white among sheep-kind.  This is probably just a ruse, to be quite honest.  The nondescript sheep had been unfortunately singled out some weeks ago from the same herd as Peachy McCrockPot by an excitable dog.  You see, when dogs get excited about sheep, they tend to bark. . . or to want to hug the sheep.  

With their teeth.

Obviously, the older lamb survived the experience, probably because whatever canine exercising his wiles had no idea what to do with a sheep once he caught it around the throat (how we managed to transport and keep the animal alive is something of a story in itself).  End result?  Two sheep on premises.  Yet again we have a naming inconsistency between the Alyce/Suzie faction and myself.  They call him 'Lucky' which is true enough.  I call him Colonel WoolyBritches on account of the expression that he had when he realised we had finally effectively fenced him (for the time being).

There's scientific evidence suggesting that sheep can feel rage.  Seeing that expression as we walked away?  I can believe it.  So never quite believe that lambs are docile and sweet.  Just because they don't have much in the way of defense capability doesn't mean that they aren't capable of more than meekness.

We might just be harboring the ruminant incarnation of Hitler.

And as for Peachy?  Don't worry about him.  He's growing into a bona fide bruiser of a ram.  All the better for my crock pot.

Get me my pick-axe. This ice is thick!

I'm Kelly.  And I'm supremely confused by all of the gadgets and widgets on this thing.

So, I suppose that's my ice-breaker!

It's always amazingly awkward to talk about yourself and I do much better with answering questions. . . or randomly remembering bits and pieces of my childhood (which is actually quite entertaining if my parents are to be believed even ten percent of the time)!  I mean, who the hell brings home homeless people for dinner?

. . . that would be me.

The general plan is that I'll come by regularly (at least once a week) with a sacrifici--ceremonial offering to the Blog Gods!  Whether I write or offer you up a recipe-idea of how to cope in a kitchen without a stove sort of remains to be seen.  But hopefully writing!  It's not as tasty but certainly more entertaining for me.

This is Kel, signing off!

P.S. I'm also a fan of justified format.  Blame my mother.