fandomtownies | Groovy Tunes, Tuesday

Current Mood: grumpy

Entry tags:

Groovy Tunes, Tuesday

Alice set the music queue to random, and was fully prepared to consider Queen's "Fat-Bottomed Girls" to be a personal insult from the agents of chaos and/or the store itself against the current shape and condition of her body, except that:

A: her bottom was much the same condition as it always had been; the bump was concentrated in her center front

B: Freddie Mercury seemed largely complimentary on the subject.

She still skipped to the next track rather quickly, and felt inclined to be somewhat cross for the next hour.

(open/ocd-free/same warning as the last post: out and about for a few hours, will reply once home)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Perhaps it was just a result of having spent the day being a responsible business manager today, but Ariel decided that she'd swing on over to Groovy Tunes when she was finished at Pixie Dust, since it was Tuesday, and she was pretty sure that Miss Liddell was in on Tuesdays. She hadn't gotten a chance to meet the latest manager of the shop (probably a good thing, considering how many shifts she habitually missed out on to explore new places), and she had a very responsible choice to discuss with her.

"Hello." She smiled at the young woman behind the counter. "You're Miss Liddell, right?"

"I am!" Alice said, offering a somewhat awkward curtsy to the other red-haired girl. The one whose hair was considerably more red than Alice's; Alice's hair was brown with bits of red mixed in, while Ariel's looked like red ought to, when one thought of red as a proper color. "Miss Liddell, rhymes-with-fiddle, but you may call me Alice, rhymes-with-palace. Though I say that half less often. I've been called 'Miss Luh-DELL' a few times, but 'Alice' is much harder to botch. It's Ariel, isn't it?"

"That's right," said Ariel, holding back a little bit of a laugh, but it manifested in an amused smile on her face. She offered a curtsey back, just because she never needed an excuse to curtsey, especially not when the opportunity just showed up. "Ariel, rhymes-with-...uh...burial."

It was a little dark, but it was the first thing to come to her mind, since A was followed by B. Either way, that wasn't why she hopped in today. "I wanted to know if there were any other shifts available so I can switch mine. Mondays are..." She paused again, trying to find the right word, since she didn't exactly want to come out and say that they interfered with exploring new places, or to bring attention to the fact that she usually didn't even show up for work at all on Mondays, "not working very well for me."

Alice didn't mind dark. Alice's mind was usually a dark place.

"There are plenty of shifts," Alice said, drawing herself up again. "Though you can't have mine, and Lindsay and Seifer are possibly attached to theirs. You'd have to ask them, though if you chose to engage in some sort of violent deathmatch to determine the fate of those days, that would be entirely between all of you. Unclaimed days thus far would seem to be Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, if any of those argue less with your temperament. It's awful when a day is disagreeable."

"Hmm, violent death match," Ariel said, as if considering that option against those contenders, "I'm pretty scrappy, but I think they'd win those ones. Thursday, though, sounds pretty good. I don't think I even have any classes that will conflict with it."

"I haven't any classes at all," Alice said, as though this were a matter of great secrecy. "I graduated last year. Though I believe Lady Ghanima said I could help to teach her class about hats. I don't know that I'm very knowledgeable about hats, beyond the bare fact that I like them. Thursdays, then?"

Alice's mind did not walk in lines, but loops and circles and whirls.

"Thursdays," Ariel agreed with a nod. "And I like hats too; they're fun. What's it like being graduated?"

"A bit shapeless," Alice admitted with a frown. "I've no idea what comes next. I feel like I'm wandering from one stage to the next. Like I'm in the midst of Act III, where someone scrawled 'fill this in later,' and waiting for Act IV to start. I suppose it's different for everyone. I hadn't much to go back to, which didn't help. What's waiting for you?"

"Really?" Ariel asked, looking a little worried for Alice, before tackling the return of the question. "Well, I still have a while to go, but I was thinking afterwards, I would go be a marine biologist or a treasure hunter...But..." She bit her lip, knowing there was a positive side to wrangle up somewhere, "at least, if you don't know what's coming next, there could be a lot of really great surprises ahead, right?"

"There ... could," Alice said, allowing somewhat charitably that that was, in fact, somehow possible. She didn't find it to be likely, but Alice's life didn't often choose surprises which were favorable, so she felt she had earned the right to be suspicious. "One wishes one knew where one stood. Mightn't you be both? A marine biologist who hunts for treasure?"

"Oh, definitely," Ariel agreed with an excited bounce, but a softer smile, since she didn't feel Alice was quite yet on board with the surprises as surprises may be ship. "But I'll have to figure out if I want to go to school and start studying right away, or if I want to just go treasure hunting for a bit before the studying part. And, hey, you've got at least a couple ideas of where you stand, right? You run a music shop and you're going to be a mother soon. That's got to be really exciting, though I can see how it can be scary, too. I mean, I'm not a mother, but there's that weekend where your possible future kids show up, and, man, it is a little scary, but also...kind of neat, too."

Boy, Ariel sure hoped she called the pregnancy thing right and that Alice wasn't just suffering from a few too many cheeseburgers.

The lovely thing about Alice was that, had Ariel been wrong, she probably would have mistaken that comment as somehow being a mistaken tarot prediction or something.

As it was, Alice frowned down at her midsection as if it was actively plotting against her.

"I'm going to be a dreadful mother," she said. "It can't be helped. I was just as bad with the future children. Would you think it to be a terrible thing if I left her somewhere with a note? She'd have her father, and it would be a very nice note. And a pleasant note and a loving father might be a much better option than a damaging sort of crazy mother, one feels."

If the note was insufficient, Leto could always tell the child she'd fallen down a well or something. No, wait, Arrakis was a desert planet. Eaten by a sandworm. There. Solved.

"I think it all depended on where you left her," Ariel said with a thoughtful frown, not much liking the idea, but not exactly feeling it was in her place to say so. "But how do you know you'll be a terrible mother? I mean, I wasn't much good with my kids, either, but I have feeling that, when the time comes, when I'm ready, if any of them really are my future kids, I'll be ready when the time comes. You can never really know until it happens."

"I suppose one can't," Alice said, picking idly at a piece of cat hair on her shirt. Might the child be allergic to Dinah? That was possibly too convenient an excuse to be hoped for.

"I ... suppose I'm a terrible mother because I can't afford to be a good one," she continued. "I'll care for her, and then I'll lose her, and I'll go mad again. I can't go mad again, so I can't be her mother."

Alice Logic 101: We're All Mad Here.

Ariel was wondering if this conversation might be something a little over her head, but, well, she reasoned that if anyone could handle being over their heads, it was a mermaid.

"Then...don't lose her?" she suggested. "I mean, hey, even when I tried to get lost, Daddy still found me, and he had six other daughters on his hands, too. One shouldn't be so difficult to keep track of."

The smile Alice offered was wry, almost brittle; forced, perhaps, by a wish that she could have been speaking of anything so simple.

"Where I have lost, I softer tread,
I sow sweet flower from garden bed,
I pause above that vanished head,
And mourn.

"Emily Dickinson," she said. "Who was alive the same time that I was, though her works were published much later. It wasn't time-travel; she wrote her poems privately and after her death, someone else collected them. I hope that would have been all right with her. I didn't mean to confuse the matter with euphemisms. I'm not usually so timid. My family died in a fire when I was seven."

"I'm sorry," said Ariel, with a great deal of genuine sympathy, and looking like she'd reach over and give Alice a hug if there wasn't a counter between them. "I can't imagine losing my whole family like that..."

There was a slight pause, a concerned and thoughtful pause before her sympathetic eyes turned a little curious. "But what would that have to do with losing your baby?"

Alice gave the child a pat, one that she hoped was in some way conciliatory.

... bump. She was going to remember that the parasite was a bump, and not make a slip like that again.

"Patterns," she said. "Fear. History repeating itself. Loving, losing, and other words that start with L-O. Lowing, perhaps, but that's only really in that one Christmas carol so perhaps we'll leave it out. Thursdays, then? I should write that down perhaps."

She was fussing with the paperwork, now. To be honest, Alice was happy to have the counter in the way. It gave her an excuse to keep Ariel physically at arm's-length. Because she very much wanted a hug, and that frightened her. She was very hug-friendly lately. That was new, and she didn't like it at all.

Could she blame the ch-- ... bump?

Ariel definitely recognized an attempt to change the subject when she saw one; it was a device she used pretty often herself, but she still seemed a little reluctant. "History doesn't always repeat itself," she offered mildly, almost conversationally. "Otherwise, nothing new or interesting would ever happen. And the only thing you can count on is change. I mean, people don't even keep the same shift at music shops sometimes!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Groovy Tunes, Tuesday

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject