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Young Writers Society



You would cut somebody's head off (1)

by ChernobyllyInclined


I know, I know. You're tired of me wasting my brilliance on lame contests (no offense, Tiger; Tiger responds with a quick, "None taken"), but, you see, I have not located a direction, and therefore demand one to be given to me. Tiger has been so kind as to give me a somewhat amusing one. And I applaud her on her ability to see how dismally astonishing it is that Twilight even got published.

_____

The blood on my hand was beginning to change its mind. It had been red for a long time, and now it was slipping into a dull, perfectly dismal brown. I almost thought that it might blend into my skin, but then I decided it simply was not the right time to think that, so I put the thought away for later.

I was feeling good. But more in the Muse way than the Beatles way. Mostly because the girl I was in love with tried to kill me because she thought I was a vampire; although I suppose she might have had other motives. Like that my parents had decided to get married again, and that I had to be the best man because my dad had no friends. Or that my first year of college had, so far, only taught me fourteen things, and none of them good or useful.

“Heinrich?”

I hated it when people called me by my last name. It made me sound like Hitler, or Attila the Hun, or the boy who used to live at the end of my street who always drew swastikas on his garage door on the 4th of July. Because of this, I only replied with a short “Don’t call me that”, not wanting to give them, whoever they were, any reason to continue thier bad habit.

“Sorry, I don’t know your --”

“Ares,” I snapped.

“… You’re named after the Greek god of war?”

“No, I came first, fool.” Beginning to find the exchange amusing, and also somewhat curious as to why the amusing person persisted in standing behind me where I couldn’t see them, I looked up from my beautiful hand and glanced over my shoulder.

“Hello, Ares,” he said, grinning sheepishly. I don’t think professors should ever grin sheepishly, so I put this particular professor down on my “ask too many questions and subtly disrupt class at the worst times” list.

“Sorry, professor, I didn’t know it was --”

“No worries, no worries,” he said, waving a vaguely yellow hand. His clothes were old, and he had a way of hunching his shoulders that made him look endearing, and not like a sullen teenager at all. I had always wanted to be able to get away with endearing bad posture, and had never accomplished it; this made me dislike him more.

“Can I… help you with something?” I said lamely, unable to recall what an appropriate question might be.

“Well, actually,” he began, sitting down beside me on the stone bench and staring at his folded hands; “I just read your paper on the importance of developing good character, and I found it quite absurd, in a good way. It inspired me to question you further on where you might have imbued such outlandish knowledge -- if knowledge it can be called.”

I sighed. It could definitely be called knowledge. And I officially decided to stop being absurd in my philosophy class, if only to avoid situations like these. Luckily, my bleeding hand ended up being enough to spare me a conversation with someone who doubted what knowledge was.

“Christ!” he suddenly interjected, even though I had said nothing. Somehow it still sounded like an interjection. “What in God’s name happened to your hand?” His face had taken on an expression of juvenile disgust and alarm; an expression I found to match the hunch in his shoulders.

“It got cut,” I said simply, holding it up to the clear, golden light of late afternoon.

He tried to laugh, failed, and then cleared his throat in a thoroughly professional manner. “You couldn’t possibly be more clear, I suppose?”

What a decidedly pathetic way of trying to make me tell him something that I wasn’t going to tell anyone. “Was that not clear?” I said rudely, standing up and stretching in an even ruder fashion. “Someone cut it. Have a great day, professor. I genuinely look forward to class on --” But I was already walking away, and I had forgotten on what day our class met, so I just let my voice disappear; it wasn’t that hard. He didn’t follow.

The leaves of late Autumn laughed in their craggy way beneath my feet, and I was unpleasantly reminded of dead people laughing. Dead people can’t laugh, she had told me; they’re dead. Well, I knew dead people were dead. I also knew that it wasn’t me who was dead, or at least I thought I could be fairly certain. Dragging my mind away from a painful conversation, I gazed irreverently at a girl in clicking high-heels and a transparent t-shirt who was bouncing down the stairs out of the cafeteria in front of me.

“Nice shirt,” I told her, raising my already permanently surprised-looking eyebrows. She only sneered. It wasn’t a nice shirt, of course; that’s why she was sneering. She had probably gotten it at a garage sale. I should have known.

The windows on the building to my right were wincing in the sharp light of the falling sun, and the solid stone that surrounded them shone warm in a way that contradicted its cold, hateful existence. I wondered if those stones wished they could go to a place where it was quiet; if they missed the place they had been stolen from.

It wasn’t really that bad. It had even stopped hurting. I’m not a vampire, I told myself. Vampires don’t even go to college. I just assumed everyone knew that.

The next building was a pale blue, like an old Victorian mansion. Paint peeled down its sides like rain, and the windows had dark shadows under them, like blank eyes that wished they could close, but had given up long ago. I wondered what had hung there for so long that had recently been removed. I liked the way the sun had bleached everything else, but not been able to read those places. It gave me hope that maybe the sun wouldn’t catch me either, if I could be as clever as those blue walls.

A sign stood in the grass to the left of the concrete pathway. It read, “History and Art Building -- Where learning is fun”. What did they think this was? a preschool? Before I could remember if I had read that sign another time and had the exact same thought, someone tapped me in the shoulder and I winced, accidentally clenching my injured hand into a fist.

“Hello, Ares,” said the girl of my dreams.

“The sun hasn’t burnt me away yet,” I said through clenched teeth, turning to look at her. It was Friday, but she was clearly unaware of this fact. Everyone with any sense at all knew that you didn’t wear your glasses on a Friday; especially when you were talking to man you loved. Something that she wasn’t doing, unfortunately.

Ignoring my vampire comment, she took my hand and appraised it with some amount of satisfaction. “That’s what I thought. Look how fast it’s healing. One of the few things a vampire can’t hide is --”

“Not,” I said. “Not a vampire.” But I didn’t snatch my hand away. Her fingers were cold, and they felt good on my vaguely burning hand. I looked at her face. It was tilted towards the sun, the freckles on her straight nose lighting up like fireworks. Her eyes, behind her bothersome glasses, were a vivid gold, and her deliberately yellow hair was tied in a knot atop her head with a bright pink rubber band. I’d not seen any pink on her before.

“ -- is their ability to heal much faster than real people,” she finished, ignoring me again, almost more obviously.

“You hurt me,” I said childishly, wondering if something even more obvious than me not being a vampire might make her listen.

“Vampires don’t get hurt,” she snapped, dropping my hand and backing away.

“Exactly. I am hurt, therefore I am not a --”

“No, that’s not what I meant. They might get hurt, but they don’t feel hurt. They don’t feel anything, actually.”

“Then how can I be in love with you?” I groaned, running a hand through my dirty brown hair, forgetting it was in a pony tail and stopping.

“You aren’t,” she said angrily, pulling her glasses off with some violence and then cleaning them mercilessly with her baggy grey t-shirt. “You’re just saying that to throw me off the scent. Don’t think I’ve studied this for nine years for nothing. I know the --”

“Nine years?” I said, incredulity making me smile against my will; this was not a smiling situation. “You’ve been studying non-existent mythical creatures since you were nine years old?”

She paused, placing her glasses carefully back upon her ridiculous nose. “No. I wouldn’t do that.” And then she turned around, marching very decidedly back in the direction of the cafeteria. Well, that hadn’t been the most productive exchange we had had yet. She was clearly not effected by the fact that my hand was healing at a perfectly ordinary speed and that it would continue at the same speed until it was better. It was very difficult being in love with someone so delusional. But then I had to admit that only someone delusional would ever be in love with me anyway. So it was fair.

“Can I have my soul back?” I said to her retreating figure; or at least I think it was me who said it. A girl in leather boots and a rickety way of walking gave me a frightened look and made the mistake of trying to run. I had to laugh.

There was clearly something I was doing wrong. I had tried to prove I wasn’t a vampire with human logic, but since that hadn’t worked, perhaps vampire logic would be more effective. Of course I knew very little about said logic, so I decided to sit down and think about it. Not wanting to run into Professor Lame, (what was his real name?) I decided to go to my dormitory and hope that my roommate was out getting drunk like any sensible fellow would.

The sunset was red, and the clouds looked splattered with blood. Leaves, still foolish in the hope that winter would not come, clung hopelessly to trees trimmed in orange and brown. The light made everything look vaguely violent, and so I accidentally acted like a vampire and waited impatiently for night.

It was not until I reached the dorm building that I remembered my favorite pen sitting helplessly on the bench I had shared with the pathetic professor. I supposed I would have to choose a new a favorite, however disloyal this seemed. But I knew, as I focused on the impossibility of insulting a pen, that I was just avoiding the task of constructing vampire logic. All I knew of vampires was that they were immortal bloodsucking fiends who liked pretty girls. I also thought I remembered someone trying to make them good, but when I really considered it, I realized I must have dreamed such an absurd thing.

So if you’re evil and you can live forever, what kind of logic might you employ?

But there my profound thoughts were interrupted by a loud crash, followed by a sharp pain in my hand as I tried to use it to catch myself tripping on the rickety stairs. When I looked up I found a filing cabinet making a hole in the landing before me. It was sort of an elegant filing cabinet, and it did nothing to enhance the beauty of the pealing paint and flaking plaster surrounding me.

“That wasn’t meant for me by any chance?” I called up doubtfully.

“Dude!” rang a voice from above. “Did we kill you?”

I paused for a moment. Had they killed me? An odd question; but no, they had not. “No, no, I believe I am very much alive. But maybe next time you could just make sure there isn’t someone --”

“Yeah, yeah, for sure.” And then there was the sound of airy, high-pitched laughter -- a door slammed. I trudged up the last flight of stairs with my mind thoroughly blank.

The door to my fourth floor room said “I86” and someone had scratched U into the space beneath it. It seemed a lame attempt at humor, and perhaps not the best luck, but I didn’t mind it. I never locked the door, but Dustin did, on occasion, so I assumed he had not left to get drunk yet.

“Let me in,” I said dully, hitting the door with my good hand. There was a muffled scratching and then the sound of a window slamming, followed by cursing, probably caused by the window landing on something it hadn’t been intended to land on.

The door swung open. “You look like fuck,” said my dirty-mouthed roommate. “Like a fucking fuckhead who hasn’t gotten --”

“Got it,” I muttered, pushing past him. “I’m trying to find vampire logic.” And I threw myself onto my dirty bed, glancing absently at the bare walls and the broken lamp lying in a puddle of glass on the floor. Dustin slammed the door and looked at me with a kind of blank disinterest that I knew well. He looked like he was trying to impress someone, and I was not in a position to discern if it was going to work. His hair stuck up at odd angles around his drawn face, and I thought his features looked penciled in. I wasn’t sure why.

“Well, enough about you. Wanna come with me to get --”

“I would love to. But I have a previous engagement.”

“Did the vampire girl agree to go out with you?” he asked in a bored way as he stared at himself in the mirror.

“No. No. She thinks --”

“You’re a douche. I know, I agree.” And then he jumped over the sea of glass and pulled the door open. “See ya, dude.” The door slammed. I closed my eyes.

Nope. Bad people don’t need logic, because they have lies, or force, or other bad things. So it was of no use trying to be like a vampire to prove I wasn’t one. Yet I had already eaten in front of her, gotten a tan in front of her, not healed instantly in front of her. What else was there to do? I had to be missing something. I couldn’t exactly grow old. No, it had to be a trick. She was probably just trying to make me go insane because she liked me but she only went out with insane people. That seemed logical enough.

When I got up to go search for her it might have been useful to know my conclusion concerning her delusions was entirely wrong in every way.


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20 Reviews


Points: 825
Reviews: 20

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Thu May 28, 2009 12:45 pm
SheepMonoxide wrote a review...



Wow. You're a really awesome, great... fantastic writer!! xD
I can't even find anything to "nitpick". I love the language you use, especially when you compare walking on leaves to the laughing of dead people. Strange, but it's great. I can't wait to read the next chapter.
Though I agree with "LittleBitCold"; the title doesn't seem to make any sense. o.o Unless you explain the reason for it in later chapters.
Well, I'm off to read the next chapter. (Y)




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19 Reviews


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Tue May 26, 2009 11:32 pm
LittleBitCold wrote a review...



Yay!!! More Cher stuff

I absolutely looooooooved this... when are you putting on more??!?!

I don't really have any nitpicks, but i loved how Ares said all the stuff that i didn't expect, but he said it all wrong, and still made it sound cute. Does he really have long hair? I sort of want to know what he looks like better, although I liked the description of the girl of his dreams. Did you ever say her name?

PM when you put on more!!!! I want to know what happpens

P.S. The title makes no sense




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Mon May 25, 2009 6:49 pm
Sela Locke wrote a review...



Since you're too good of an author to really need any of the advice I usually give, I guess I'll have to humbly point out the nitpicks.

Look how fast it’s healing?


Minus the question mark. I feel like there was another one where you put a '?' where it shouldn'a been, but maybe you fixed that one. Another proofread'll fix the repetitions and stuff. But I'm being boring, and boring is stupid.

It definitely is a change from your normal style, Nu dear. I liked the beginning and the middle and the end, but then that might be because Ares reminds me of Colin. Which could is good or bad, an' I'm not sure which.

Meanwhile, I've Mariadelle to write and you're distracting me. I wonder, can someone really grind their teeth loud enough for an entire room to hear? Might mess with their enamel, or whatever that's called. Maybe Ares can get bitten by a vampire and then TA-DA! suddenly she's right. But then it doesn't matter because he can't love anymore and so he kills her. The end.


It would be just like you.

-SELA





The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.
— Shakti Gawain