[Inspired by "Sukie in the Graveyard" by Belle & Sebastian- yes, I'm that sad. These are my NaNo characters, though, so I'd like to know what you think. ^_^]
When Sukie was a kid, she liked to hang out in the graveyard...
“You said you wouldn’t look.”
His jeans were the last to go- faded and torn at the knees in the way that was so hopelessly trendy and devoid of all logic. Or, at least, that was what Sukie thought.
He was cross, reasonably so. But it was a hilarious thing, indeed.
“Off, Carl. They need to be off, sometime before daybreak, preferably…”
They had been doing watercolors in class the day Mr. Gibbons had tapped her shoulder, holding up her last painting- a still life. Flowers. Purples and blues, reds and yellows, blended in what she thought to be an aesthetically pleasing way.
She had been standing at the sink, washing her brushes, feeling her fingers begin to go numb under the hot water. And in his horribly cocky, annoying way he had tapped his foot and held the picture up like someone else’s Kleenex and uttered the simple line: Shock me.
It was a slightly bitter memory for her here in the graveyard, probably owing a little to the fact she was drinking the dregs of hours-old coffee through a straw- Dairy Queen coffee, no less. Carl’s. And sitting somewhere hard and full of dead people at an ungodly hour probably had something to do with it.
She set the cup down and continued grating a black crayon against the paper: a grave rubbing of Ada Deere, 1876. A pioneer woman, probably- a sodbuster.
Sukie dropped her Midnight Magic and turned round to check if he had died of shock or boredom or lack of sleep.
“I’ll have to do a whole lot of looking fairly soon. Get used to it.”
“I hate you.”
“You lost a bet.”
This, admittedly, she had somewhat cheated him out of. It had gone like this:
CARL: This isn’t a good idea.
SUKIE: Why?
CARL: He’s Rex “Flaming Lips” McGee. There is no way you will be able to beat him.
SUKIE: I bet you I will.
CARL: I don’t like gambling.
SUKIE: Yes, you do.
And then she had won- twenty-four wasabi peas, five minutes without water, sitting in the far back booth of the New Prague Runza. In the newspaper, she was crying- but that was mostly the horseradish. Flaming Lips was crying because of defeat.
A sigh and the sound of a zipper broke her nostalgic reverie. “And just think of how you’re furthering my art career. I’ll make millions, and people will know how gorgeous you really are.”
He was silent for a moment, fiddling with his belt.
“Yes. And how cold.”
He was bluffing. It was May- May- for goodness’ sake. Seventy degrees, humid but dusty and rainless. Drought weather.
A few more sideways strokes finished the rubbing, and she took a moment to pick the black wax from her fingernails. He cleared his throat. “You know I don’t want to do this?”
They looked at each other for a moment in a manner akin to two outlaws meeting for a duel in the town square. He was standing with a visible pout upon his face, clothes in a bundle at his feet- which she took with a smirk and sat upon. A precaution.
“I’m aware.”
“What if someone sees?” He was suddenly nervous, clearly nervous- eyes wild and his finger at the corner of his mouth, waiting to be chewed. Certainly not proper outlaw behavior.
“What’s the population density of Nebraska?”
He looked upward, pondering. “Ten per square kilometer.”
“It is two in the morning and we are in a cemetery. What’s the population density in this particular square kilometer?”
Silence. “Are we counting night-haunts, or not?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Carl.”
She left him standing for a moment, crouching, arms crossed over his chest, and dug through her bag for her pad and her pencils. Carl watched with contempt as she took her time, laying them out in order of thickness on the parched ground in front of her.
An owl hooted from one of the cottonwoods hanging over the rusted fence. He jumped.
“How can you be so…so calm? You must admit this is a little creepy, and…what if someone finds us and thinks…thinks we’re…”
Sukie looked up. “You’re gay.”
“They wouldn’t know that- people talk, Sukie. I could lose my job.”
“’Shift Manager of the New Prague Dairy Queen’- that title of honor and stature?”
He looked crushed. She silently thanked God for making him shut up- but stopped abruptly when he muttered, “I can’t even moon you now.”
“For God’s sake, no one will see you. No one. I promise.”
It was admittedly a little awkward to see your best friend naked- but that was a mere human emotion easily overcome.
Perhaps more easily overcome if he had some sort of embarrassing birthmark she could mock, but he had none.
“Put your hand on that one,” she said, pointing to a tall headstone that had been weathered into a lump by wind.
“Which one?”
“Stepan Monroe.”
He let out an ultrasonic squeak of something like terror. “Please, don’t give them names.”
“His mother gave him that name.”
“Don’t call him by his mother’s name.”
Deadpan. “Don’t be ridiculous, Carl.”
He reached out hesitantly, looking down at with mistrust, as though it would leap up and bite him. Sukie took the opportunity to take out her flashlight- or rather, her brother's. Charlie’s. It was big and plastic and yellow, stained with dark, sticky spots of juice and who-knew-what else, and its oversized buttons, when pressed, changed the color of the light filter. She pointed it at Carl and switched back and forth between green and red at a pace fast enough to induce seizures, until he groaned and covered his eyes.
“Please, can we just get this over with?”
“I’m trying to find the proper lighting.”
“There is no lighting, Sukie, it’s-“
“You can’t rush art.”
He seemed to have nothing to say to that, and stood there, gazing anywhere but Sukie.
She set the flashlight on her bag and aimed it somewhere above his head, so that the light caught his hair and cast strange, long shadows down upon his arms. The image blurred as she squinted her eyes, taking it from one direction, then another….
If that wasn’t shocking, she didn’t know what was. Morbidity and nudity- those perhaps the most fascinating –ity words contained within a dictionary, and she had them standing before her.
A quick oval for the head, quick lines for his back and his arms, preliminary shading along his shoulders.
All of a sudden, something dark flitted into her peripheral vision.
He shrieked and leapt backwards, causing Sukie to draw a great pencil spike through his head. A small, furry object barreled past- a raccoon.
“Chill, Carl.”
“What…what was that?”
“Your mother.” She waved her hands. “Back to position- I’m almost done with the basics.”
“The basics?”
“Yes, you know- the easy bits.”
He glowered. “I know what-“
They both went oddly silent, staring at each other, eyes wide, ears straining to hear. There was a voice, coming from somewhere- disembodied. It sounded a bit like Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher, all m’s and no sense.
Carl hunched over and scuttled behind Sukie, holding her shoulders. Her own heart was pounding, every cricket chirp painful to hear. Carl’s hands were sweating through her shirt.
Leaves rustled. Twigs broke. The voice grew closer and closer, breathing very loudly- like some sort of sinister bogeyman. Pant, pant, pant, until it seemed to be directly in front of them...
“Oh, fuck,” the bogeyman said, in a very masculine, British voice. “My camera’s broke, again…”
A second monster- a woman. Scottish. “You still getting sound?”
“Wait, got to tap it a bit…ah, yes, yes. We’ve got sound.”
“Take Stuart’s; he’s not using it.”
More rustling. “Everyone ready?”
Mumbles of assent. “Good, and we’re live in four, three, two, one…”
Carl’s cheeks were ashen, Sukie's merely frozen. “I’ve the distinct feeling that these are only monsters of the figurative type,” she said.
His nails dug into her shoulders.
A light flickered on farther down the row, illuminating a short, blonde woman. Every single piece of flyaway hair on her head shone brilliantly in the lighting as she began to speak. “We welcome you to New Prague, Nebraska, where the Most Haunted crew hopes to capture paranormal activity, right here in the Deere family graveyard...”
Another man stepped into the spotlight. He glanced up the row, briefly, and caught Sukie’s gaze with an odd smirk upon his face before she continued talking. “Our in-house psychic, David Wells, has agreed to come along tonight as we attempt to bridge the gap between our world and the spirit world. David, are you getting anything…anything ghostly?”
“Oh, yes, this place is very much alive,” he said. “Loads of activity…I don’t think they’ll make any move to hide from us tonight, Yvette.”
“Would you like to tell us a bit about the spirits you’re picking up on?”
“There’s one…a girl, a young girl. Asian, I think- she’s trapped here. She was…” He trailed off in a dramatic way and held his fingers to his temples, focusing on the ground. “She met here for a lover’s tryst, the year, oh, let me think- very recent, I believe. And her lover exposed himself.”
Sukie liked this man.
“Exposed himself?”
“Er, yes…as a mass murderer. An outlaw- like Billy the Kid, if you’ve read up on American folklore…cowboys, and all of that.”
Or rather, she loved him.
Sukie could feel something being tugged out from under her- Carl’s jeans. She was too horrified to move, all her muscles suddenly atrophied and molded into their current position.
“Don’t move, Carl.”
“I…hate…you…” he murmured, pulling his pants back on as discreetly as he could. She was still sitting on his shirt and his belt.
If she had been living in a cartoon, a lightbulb would have appeared over her head- glaringly bright; tungsten filaments pulsing. David glanced back once more. She winked, not entirely certain if he could see it. It takes two to tango.
“Revenge,” she began to hiss over and over again as she slowly rose to her feet. “I want revenge…”
Four cameras, a grinning psychic, and an unwitting late-night show host whipped around. “Revenge,” Sukie began again. “My lovely, I want revenge...”
“My God,” said David. “That’s her- she’s right there!”
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life- a full manifestation of a spirit!”
They crept forward at an alarming rate, filling the row like a buffalo stampede.
Sukie turned round and curled her fingers into claws, and walked with them above her head, moaning for dramatic effect. “Carrrrl, my love, where arrrrre you?”
He was on his hands and knees, crawling forward at a speed previously thought humanly impossible. His jeans weren’t buttoned completely, and they dragged behind him, leaving a very wide blue trail.
“I will come for you by light of the moon! I will rip you limp from limb and leave you to bleed, naked and ashamed…”
The camera crew stopped moving.
“D’you…d’you think it’s in its right mind, David?” the first bogeyman asked.
“I think it’s quite possibly sinister.”
“What do you mean?” Yvette tugged at the sleeve of his coat.
“It’s of a demonic origin.”
“Demonic…origin?”
David held his arms out to prevent the sound man on the far end from running ahead after Sukie. “We need an exorcism- has anyone got a mobile? I’ll call the Father…”
Sukie ducked behind a headstone and turned into another row and crawled as fast as she could until she ran into Carl, who was curled on his side in the fetal position.
“I. Hate. You,” he panted.
“Yes, but just think…” she patted his head in the way that he hated. “Their ratings are going to rock, and it’s all because of us.”
“Let me repeat: I-“
She clamped his mouth shut with her hand. “We are doers of good deeds, Carl. We are givers.”
So just keep in mind the part about 'Good job!' and forget the rest. Cheers again - 