Recent Posts

He was batty. Completely off the planet. But he was there, and she couldn’t do this alone. Was this what her nursing home patients felt like when she was sitting with them, waiting for the inevitable? No one wants to die alone. Especially not in the middle of a game of charades.

His mum, his dad, 911-like-she-had-specified, a park ranger anyone!

Then he was suggesting she take a deep breath and she would have huffed with exasperation if she had any air to sigh with. Maybe she was having an allergic reaction to the flowers? It had never happened to her before, but maybe? Or maybe a bee went in and stung her in the throat and she somehow didn’t notice. She fixed him with her best nurse stare and thought –really hard- at him. If ever there was a time to be telepathic this was it.

Then get me a bag then.

She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and tried to re-breathe like she would instruct someone having a panic attack (which honestly was kind of where she was at right now) but re-breathing only really worked if you could breathe in the first place. She was certain it was impossible to do CPR on yourself, but she tried the initial steps of a first respondent anyway- she checked her mouth for obstructions (nothing in there, and she could move her tongue out of the way easily, so that wasn’t it) and tilted her head so her airway was clear (which was daft, because she had been fine until she’d stepped up to the flowers.

The flowers. She cast an accusatory glance at them and stumbled a few steps away from them. Maybe they were anti-mutant poison flowers, brought in by a psycho gardener intent on cleaning out the population. She didn’t want her headstone to read RIP Zinnia, killed by a flower. That was super lame!

"Oh yeah, yeah I've seen her. You guys are dating? No more speed dating for you then. Can't imagine you miss it, once was more than enough for me."

No more speed dating indeed, she was glad for it. There were just too many men there that reminded her of one ex or another. She lived in fear while there that someone at one of the tables would be her actual ex. But that, thank heavens, had not come to pass.

“Not even a tiny bit.” She agreed.

You needed more than a minute between buzzers to actually get to know someone and whether they would be a good match for you. You needed hours making costumes and watching movies and then a big ol’ absence to really be sure what you wanted.

"Yeah I'll come wi- Wait you know Rowan?”

The wheels were madly turning, she could tell. She wondered if she said she knew Maya and Jude whether his head would pop right off. Aww. Rowan remembered her. She grinned at the character he had given her. It was one of the nicer names people had called her, and from such a small one it could hardly be called racism. When it was a 50year old man on the other hand… she pushed that thought away.

“I imagine I am, although I haven’t actually sewed up any stuffed animals in a while. Mostly just stuffed vests.”

He had stopped to stare at her while he processed that she might be known to his step-puppy and she took over leading the way towards the kitchen. If she could remember where it was. At the very least it had to be inside, so she started there.

“We met at the park one time when Maya couldn’t find them. So I accompanied them back here and we had hot chocolate. Well, Jude and I had coffee, and the floor had a lot of hot chocolate really. But I think some maybe made its way actually into Rowan’s mouth instead of all over his face.”

She grinned. Mess was just synonymous with kids.

“How are they, by the way?”

All three of them, she hadn’t seen them since before she left for placement, and she imagined Rowan had grown a fair bit since then. She led them confidently down the wrong hallway for some time before she finally looked around and realised she didn’t know where she was.

“Er, I’m lost.”

This place was just so big, and it felt like the floorplan changed depending who was traversing it. Weird.

Oh thank goodness, he did remember her. She ducked inside the gate and fell in beside him, the bouquet shuffled between her hands as she stowed her phone away. She didn’t blame him for not immediately recognising her- they had only met briefly, in a relatively dim place. And she didn’t have any massive posters of her head about the city.

"So, who's Chief? Unless you mean Sam? The X-men's leader?"

She felt a tiny twinge of recognition…she was pretty sure Rowan had mentioned Jude stealing a Sam’s car… if it was the same Sam, and that was the leader of the x-men no wonder he was on graffiti-scrubbing duty instead of being a ‘real’ X-man. She felt the distinct urge to chuckle, but she managed to subdue it into a little snort.

“No, Jac. Big, rainbow-prawny type. You’d know her if you saw her. She works security here sometimes.”

Where precisely she was unsure. It was a big place. When she’d seen the gathered group at the gate she had though she might’ve run into her girlfriend there, but no luck.

“I’m going to take these to the kitchen and find a vase, feel like a coffee and some company? Alternatively Rowan clued me in to where the good hot chocolate is- the one with mini-mallows.”

She was reasonably confident she could find her way to the kitchen again. Besides if she got lost she could just follow some hungry-looking kid.

You don’t has to!” Oh-ho, so that’s how it was, was it? She ducked her head to hide her grin as the prawn stumbled through her embarrassment. Zinnia doubted that Jac could make her uncomfortable. Unless maybe if she sat on her.

Jac rumbled through her explanation reassuring Zinn that all was well in antenna-land. She winced when the door-crunching was mentioned. That sounded awful. Although by the sounds of things this was perhaps an avenue to be explored. The antennae that is, not the door slamming.

She knelt, one hand gripping the face mask ready to apply it- the other reaching out to touch Jac’s chin to encourage her to look at her.

“Hey. I mean to.” She grinned. “And I don’t mind the shirtlessness at all.”

If fact if she was bolder she might have offered to join her. That may have been a bit too much though. She was taking it slow, she re-reminded herself. But not too slow! She tugged the hem of the singlet playfully, and met with no resistance, helped to free the secondary appendages.

Freedom!

“Yeah, light please.” She pulled the mask over her face and her voice became muffled by the plastic and the hiss of air as it began its work. “Can you see in the dark? No fair!”

Missing out on looking at the rainbows was made better by being able to snuggle the rainbows.

“Can I hold your little hand?”

Specifying which type of hand she wanted to hold was not something she’d ever clarify either. Jac was just a big ol’ bundle of surprises.

The steady, mechanical whirr of her breathing apparatus formed the background noise for most of her dreams. Sometimes it was the bustle of a busy street, sometimes the drone of bees in a field of wildflowers. Tonight it was a bubble machine. Thousands of bubbles had already been blown by the time she arrived. Though, where she had come from was not clear and if she stopped to think about it the bubbles clouded over her view until she was distracted by the swirling rainbow on the surface of each glistening, impossibly large bubble. When you prodded them they wobbled, and made little giggling noises as they scurried away, but they didn’t pop.



She plunged her head into a larger bubble- trying to fill it up with oxygen to see if it would behave differently, but the inside was made of ice. Her breath clouded about her eyes in a thick mist. The mist swirled and finally cleared to show an ice covered street. She knew this street. The bubbles continued swirling and giggling above her head but she ignored them, gliding across the ice on skates towards the stairs. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t stop herself. She dug in her heels, but it only served to make the skates shriek against the road beneath the ice.



The squeal of the kettle was abruptly shut off and she burned her fingers on the steam. He hated when it made a noise. But yet he demanded tea. She looked at her hands which were carefully measuring sugar and cream into a delicate china tea cup. They were shaking. The swirl of tea mixing with cream was the swirl of mist and the screaming skates drew her ever closer to the top of the stairs. The bubble machine was working harder and harder and the bubbles grew ever larger, landing all around her, on her, within her.



The top of the stairs and he was laughing and the skates were screaming and so was she but it was drowned out by the giggling bubbles, the largest of which was spreading within her abdomen, taking over her, pushing all the vital organs out of the way. She needed those. To live.



The sharp blade of the skate sliced the top step and it bled. She was falling. The tea was spilling. For every step she hit on the way down another bubble burst into hissing snakes until finally she was the bubble that popped. The teacup smashed. The laughing dulled to a throbbing in the back of her mind. In the forefront protestors although they had no faces and they were crying out in a language she didn’t understand.



She was cold and the ice was running up her legs and through her mind and most of all it was where her bubble wasn’t. It was over now, part of her knew it. Part of her knew the worst was yet to come. There was blood on the snow and echos of her textbook gore.



A giant clock loomed above the deflating bubbles but its hands were broken and it was trying to tick but every time the minute hand lifted if fell back with a dull slap like rubber gloves being thrown into the bin. Tick-slap. Tick-slap. The bubble machine droned on but all the mix was gone. The clock twitched lifelessly and the snow melted away to show the bare brown earth with not a blade of grass or a snowdrop to be seen. The husks of the bubbles lay scattered about like discarded saran wrap, the rainbows leeching off to become oil slicks on the street. A voice pierced the hum of the bubble machine and the clock’s slowed hiccoughing.



”You have to leave him.”



It was the knowledge that she had that woke her and she pulled the mask away from her face, silent sobs shaking her. Her arms clutched her stomach as she fought to keep the bile down. It was just a dream. Just a nasty, wicked dream.

For every ‘Dis okay?” there was a matching murmur of agreement and Zinnia’s own fingers found their way across the dips and cracks along the shell pieces. Jac seemed most responsive to touches to the softer skin between the harder carapace sections so this was where her fingers explored, careful not to be pinched between in any moments of movement. Her arms weren’t wide enough to stretch fully around the barrel chest of her couch mate, but she fit snugly in the enormous lap.

They would definitely win a gold for sure- but how could they be judged? It would seem their technique would have to be shared with someone else. Zinn for one was not interested in going back to standard lips. Ever heard the phrase ‘new and improved’? That was Jac’s kisses.

“Well you know what they say about practice and perfect. 10 outta 10”

And this was pretty much perfect.

Except she kind of wished she had brushed her teeth. Just a little.

She could just see the sillouhette of her friend against the pale backdrop of the living room wall and with her mouth currently occupied with Zinn’s neck in all tickly glory she had to find a new target. An antenna presented itself as Jac’s head tilted and she gently nommed it. It was impossible to tell how sensitive different bits were- so she exercised extreme caution to keep teeth well out of the picture.

Her eyes adjusted slowly and she blinked them into focus as Jac suggested sleep. Zinnia might have protested, but since the prawn had already agreed to stay the night, there was no point in delaying the inevitable. Was she sleepy? Yes, under all the thrill of energy and the disappointment at the prospect of hiding her face away in her sleeping mask she was sleepy.

“Mmmhmm.” She agreed. “The couch folds out- I’ll grab a blanket.”

It was warm enough that they probably didn’t need one, but being curled up under the covers was so much nicer. She lingered a moment within the lap, planting a few more kisses on the exposed underside of Jac’s neck before hauling herself up to brush the aforementioned teeth and retrieve her CPap machine. She pointed out the lever to fold out the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. After a couple minutes grinning at herself in the mirror (not only to ensure she got every tooth) she emerged in a longish shirt with the CPap machine tucked under her arm. A minor wrangle with the powerpoint behind the couch and a light blanket retrieved later and she was ready for cuddle time. Sleep would perhaps follow.