-- PINNED DOWN BY THE DARK && [nell]

Nell colored in the lines with a pink crayon, tongue poking out a bit, blending in well enough with the children that surrounded her. ”Nooo.” She blinked and turned to look at where the whine had come from, a boy sitting next to her with a pinched expression. ”Elephants are…they’re…they’re supposed to be grey!” He had trouble getting out his words, and she looked back down at the elephant she’d been coloring in. In some countries there are in fact pink elephants. She smiled as she thought of it, but wouldn’t lie to the kid. Because eventually he’d find out and he’d remember her as the lady who lied to him about elephants. She didn’t want to be the lady who lied about elephants. ”All right, all right, let me just…” As she reached for the grey crayon she heard the wail and peered over to find Ms. Kustack holding Rachel’s hand. She wiggled out of the tiny, plastic chair that she’d crammed her rear into and walked over to see what had happened. ”The back part of the truck closed on her finger.” Nell sighed as she picked up the girl, walking over to the bathroom in the back of the room while cooing, “Shh, shh.” She ran it under warm water. It didn’t actually do anytthing, but there was no real injury, she just wanted to calm the child. ”It’s gonna be all right, baby, it’s all right.”

Soon the hysterics quieted and the girl was sucking on her thumb. Nell turned off the faucet, then smiled at her, asking, ”Better?” Rachel nodded in quiet ascent and she dropped the girl down, turning off the bathroom light as she hurried back to play some more, as if completely forgetting the trauma of a pinched finger. Nell returned to her own business, found that her elephant had turned into a sort of brownish color, and looked at the boy who’d sat next to her with a lifted eyebrow. He simply giggled and returned to his picture, and she felt a warmth in her. After the day had ended, she noticed that The God of Small Things lay on Ms. Kustacks desk. Nell smiled. ”You should read it, ese, one of my favorites.” She would have lent the woman her own copy, but it looked like she had gone out and gotten it herself. During the conversation that marked the end of their day, Nell wanted to say a lot of things. What do you think of my father? Do you want to fall in love with him? Did you know that he can’t handle broken people? I hope there’s nothing wrong with you, because there’s already so much wrong as is. Would you trust him if I told you all the things that’s he’s done?

But she never said anything, and she carried the weight all the way home and into the house and she didn’t know how to unload it. If she should unload it and let Ms. Kustack know about the man Nell had set her up with. She smiled when Josh came down and kissed her, shrugging when he asked about work. She tried not to ramble on and on too much, even though she could talk for hours about every kid in that place and what they did that day, down to each movement. ”Lovely. Got yelled at for coloring an elephant pink. Blasphemy, I know.” She’d been told that kids don’t develop a personality until they’re older, but judging by how different ones colored, she begged to differ. Some kids would have appreciated a pink elephant, but Mark, clearly, did not. She guessed he was the realistic type, he was going to grow up and be an account or something similar, dabbling in logic and reason. She liked doing this, guessing at futures, making sure that they ended up comfortable and happy. ”Sounds horrifying,” she deadpanned when he spoke of his own day, remembering that she’d told Lark that she would like to teach a class about zombie survival with her English degree. Seemed it would be necessary. She’d like to do everything.

She joined Josh, dropping the messenger bag, hearing something metallic. What did I break? Nell thought about it for a moment before deciding that it was nothing, and told Josh, ”Sure.” She didn’t have anything against whiskey despite it tasting like rusty nails, but she decided to hop her way over to the cabinet to fish out the bottle of tequila, getting the shot glass. She had to force her bartender mind to keep away from mixing drinks. A good thing she wasn’t tired, it could take only one sip to knock a person down who’d had a long day. And she also had a full stomach, or at least full for her. ”Yeah,” she agreed as she poured the tequila after sitting back down, holding up the glass like a scientist with a beaker and watching it fill up. Nell wrinkled her nose as she swallowed it. She lent him an ear as he played with her hair, talking about getting a dog. It wasn’t necessarily random, at least not to her. ”I think sure. Dogs are cool.” She loved everything on god’s green earth, dogs were not exempt. ”I was thinking about birds myself. And butterflies. Harvesting caterpillars.” She poured another glass, again watching the clear liquid fill up. ”What kind of dog? Big or small? How old? Like…a puppy or an adult one?” She had a lot of questions, because for one, she’d never owned a dog before. And for another, she didn’t like making decisions that would affect the household.


[sorry for shit post. ><]

Josh didn’t seem too put off by the idea of birds, though he was questionable about the butterflies. She didn’t really understand why. They were good pets, didn’t take much to care for them and they passed on quickly. ”I guess the Tweety bird cartoons are true then,” she said. She knew Pablo liked to sit at windows and stare at birds when they passed by, as if formulating plans to get past the glass barrier. Nell didn’t know if she could trust him with birds, really. She blinked. ”I don’t mean keeping butterflies in the house, cariño,” she told him, a smile tugging at her lips. ”More out back, to make sure they stay around. Caterpillars are fuzzy, and their nests are neat.” They never had them in the city, they were new and foreign to her like most else on the planet. ”Butterflies only live for two weeks or less though.” She loved that about them, though, the transient life. They had to live out everything in just a short span of time, and she thought of them as inspiration. Living like butterflies. She shrugged. Nell rarely had reasons for a lot of things she did or wanted, she lived in the moment. ”Why not birds?” was the best she could come up with. They were cool, they flew around, they were animals. What was not to like about them?

Nell puffed out her cheeks in thought before blowing out the air and saying, ”How about both?” She didn’t have preferences, so why not? They had plenty of room, and that’s what she loved about the place. It didn’t feel like a house, and she knew that sometimes she could get a little claustrophobic in her old apartment. Especially when feeling stressed out, even though she rarely let that happen. ”Right away sounds good to me! Why wait? Let there be dogs!” She threw up her arms then, shaking the tequila in the bottle. Speaking of dogs, if she were one her ears would have twitched at the mention of games. A slow grin creeped over her face, quite close to an excited serial killer. She reached into one of the front pockets of her bag and took out her deck before moving around to sit on the other side of the table, placing the bottle next to her on the floor. She shuffled, pivot cutting the deck before triple weaving it. ”Let’s do crazy eights. Whenever there’s a gap between the two cards, drink the difference in shots. ¿Que en?” She really shouldn’t have been challenging Josh to a drinking game, but like pacing themselves, no one actually thought of stuff like that. She just wanted to play. She dealt out the deck. Even though the game usually needed more people, she played it between two before and it was just the same.

She listened to Josh as she dealt out the hand, seven to each, placing the deck between them on the table and flipping over the first card. She fanned out her hand, poking at the inside of her cheek with a tongue. ”I was thinking of working on Lucille,” she told him, organizing her cards out of habit even though she didn’t need to for this game. She was careful about that in bullshit, in case there were observant people around. ”Just got new spark plugs and a fuse block. And I still need to put in the coolant resevoir I got a while back.” It took quite a bit of money to fix up a junker and so she understood that it would take a while. She didn’t mind. The poor thing didn’t even have seats yet, though, nor did she have a hood ornament. She actually looked forward to the search, even though it would be rather difficult. She welcomed the challenge of it, but she would save that for last. She laid down a seven, lucky that she had it and didn’t need to take a drink. ”Added rule, you have to take a shot when you draw a card.” It seemed suitable for the game.

translation: you in?

Nell held up her finger to Josh, as if about to deliver a very important message. "Harvesting caterpillars, as I said," she repeated. "Their nests are easy to find if you know where to look. Or you can find butterfly eggs on leaves." They may have been in the city, but there was something that made it better than New York--one could actually find wildlife, there was the hiking trails and the mountains. She would have never been able to find the silken nests in America simply because there were no trees, but here there were limitless possibilities. "All right," she agreed with Josh when he mentioned the sun room tower. She'd been thinking of building a wooden bird cage, but that worked just as well. Her first bird was toucan, but then she remembered that they couldn't be kept as pets. Legally, at least. "Uh...Cockatiels are nice, I guess. It doesn't really matter." She waved her hand. She'd like to keep chickadees if it were legal, but she understood that native birds couldn't be kept as pets.

She nodded at him. It had been a little while since she'd gone to a shelter. And hell, maybe she was always in a shelter, but one for humans. Nell was used to it. "Yeah, sounds like a plan." Nell had never went looking for pets before, actually. Save for one instance. She didn't understand how one could choose the kind of pet they wanted until they actually met the animal. Well, she guessed some people may want small dogs for apartments and things like that, but they didn't have that concern. "Tomorrow, I s'pose." She wondered if her love all animals had something to do with her Earth nature, and maybe it did. She never really questioned it. She loved a lot of things. Pretty much everything, actually, and why should animals be excluded? Especially since or most of her life she'd mostly seen stray cats and dogs and pigeons. Everyone yearned for what they didn't have, and for her that was a lot of things.

She inspected her hand, keeping her eyes there as she focused. There was really no need, but she liked to focus. "Auto shops," she responded. Where else? She wouldn't be getting things to fix up a car with at a junkyard, that was rather counterproductive. And sure, there might be some friends who could give her some things she needed that they might have, but the only place to get things for cars were auto shops. Nell shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not." Did it matter? She really didn't care much about the drinking. She didn't focus much on drinking, anyway. Having a beer or two was just like having a soda. Tequila was hard liquor, but it was still the same concept. Just like she could gamble with Mike and Ikes or money. The gambling was the fun part, not actually getting the money. "What suit?" Nell questioned, looking at her hand. She didn't have another eight, so she knew she'd be playing a suit.

Nell was more than enthused to become the owner of butterflies and birds and dogs. It was nice to have things in general, though in the back of her mind there was the clicking of uncertainty, gears coming together to say that she belonged back in the past where she didn’t have anything. Who said she deserved a life like this, that she deserved to own anything when she was best at purging herself of anything good for her, burning it away? I did, she thought definiantly to wipe away these thoughts. ”I’m more impressed by their mohawks,” she commented. She wondered if that’s where people got it from. A lot of things seemed to come from nature, and she supposed that made sense. Nell decided she’d mull it over a little more when she wasn’t playing a card game. He called clubs, and so she tossed down a three, glanced at the tequila. One-hundred proof, how wonderful. It wasn’t too big a jump from eighty to one-hundred, but thanks to her ex-occupation, she knew how much that twenty mattered. Eighty could bring a six-foot man down with two shots. Nell had no hope, but she hid it well. It got difficult to stay in line when she found it hilarious, like she was hiding a secret.

Especially when she laid out on the floor, legs still crossed, arms at her side. Keeping her eyes on the ceiling, she shot back with a potentially witty, ”Least you beat me at…” For lack of a better argument, she ended with, ”Shut up.” It was hot, her face burned, and she held a card up in the air between her index and middle fingers, squinting at it. ”Ever notice… ever notice that the joker looks like Willem Dafoe?” A sudden epiphany for her, it started to freak her out, so she pulled herself up and shuffled it back into the deck, looking confused when the cards dropped from her fingers and then snorting. God, they were freaking slippery. When she got a good grip on them, Josh spoke and she held up the deck, fanned out cards. ”Lots of fiber, ya dig?” She was pretty sure. What were cards made of, anyway? As much as she loved them, this tidbit of information was unknown to her. In her mind, they were made of something with fiber. Cardboard, mayhaps. For a moment she was tempted to try it, but she remembered that she didn’t want to ruin her already half-destroyed deck.

Nell followed him out into the kitchen and pulled herself up on a counter, something she didn’t do thanks to manners. She held up a hand at his words. ”Just saying, holmes…brownies and cupcakes are not sustenence. Unless you have low blood sugar.” Nodding quickly, her words became fact with that gesture. She wrinkled her nose. ”That’s not right…” she murmured before meandering over to the cabinets for pots and pans. Not paying attention to the structure, she pulled out a sheet for brownies, alerted to her mistake when she heard the glatter. She held up her hands, as if the air itself would prevent any sort of collapse. ”No, no, stop,” she said haltingly, warily eyeing the cabinet, it was an animal about to jump at her if she wasn’t careful. They listened and she placed the pan on the counter, retrieving ingrediants with an intrepid determination. She was gonna provide for her man, these brownies were gonna get did. Soon enough the counter was cluttered with spoons and cups and bowls. ”You like paprika? I think this would taste good with paprika. Spice it up a little, give it some…dinamismo. Pizzazz.”


mmm.

Nell grimaced and tilted her head away, even though it was obvious she wasn't displeased. "Really? I'll think about it then." She'd seen chicks pull off mohawks, and they were also the chicks with septum piercings and tank tops and a sour look stuck on their faces. Who said she couldn't be that girl, though? She could be anything. It was something she'd been taught before she'd even been given the opportunity to do so. That's why her father and his parents had come to America--to be so much more. "Course you could," she told Josh, running her fingers through his hair and tufting up the top part as if to see how good it would be before patting it back in place. "A mini-hawk. Or a faux-hawk. Don't underestimate the versatility of a hawk." And if Josh ever took a fancy to it, she could get out the clippers. Hell, she was pretty good with hair. And salons were so expensive, at least for her and her frugality. She was sure Josh didn't have the same inhibitions.

Eating cards? Well, why not, why not? You could technically eat anything that you fit into your mouth. Technically, of course, and technical was all she needed to make a theory come to life. "But...maybe not mine, please. They were a gift, hombre." She bit he lip as she looked down at them, laughing at the cards in her hands, the numbers and the suits. Clubs, hearts, clovers, spades. She stared at the one on the bottom, the seven of clovers. So innocuous, it made her snort. Who cared about the seven of clovers? I do, she cooed in her head. Still laughing, she said, "Oh, shut up," at his comment about it being his life. "Not telling you not to do it." She snorted again. "That's a lot of not's." She spent a bit of time going over how to make that sentence better in her head as she fanned herself again. Alcohol and its stupid heat. She slipped the rubber band off her wrist to pull up her hair, the air against the back of her neck a foreign and amusing feeling.

She grinned, a triumphant sound coming from her throat. "Y'all better recognize. Check yourself...'fore you wreck yourself." She didn't think about how she really was magical, she was an elemental, for God's sake. She went to a freaking Academy for them. It took a second for her to remember that this had been going on for a while for the simple concept left her breathless for a few moments. Then another thing clicked, her mind swimming and working to connect everything. Nelly. Most people only called her that when they were patronizing her or being stupid. She missed the times when it was said with obvious affection, when it was with her sister and she even missed the times when it was just Nell out of anger. She missed a lot sometimes, and things liked to be picked up easier with alcohol seeping into her bloodstream, a trap for her thoughts. "I'm like a bird, I only fly away..." she chimed up with the song, not even connecting the name to her own. What was a name, anyway? It was a tag. She could change it any time she want. She could become Jorge Shepherd, all it took was some different papers.

She shook her head, the movement lasting a long while, and she realized this, so she started moving her head in other directions, up and down and side to side. "No, no, no, no, no," she told him. "No. That's not what we need for muy dinamismo." She looked at her mess on the counter, her gaze pensive and thoughtful. "What we need..." she whispered before booming, "We need car-a-mel!" Nell pronounced each syllable with a different inflection, for that dinamismo. She threw open the refrigerator. "Do we have caramel? Oh, caramel, where in Batman's name are you?" Where would one keep caramel anyway? I should no this, her thoughts deadpanned back to her like it was a Q&A. Nell was glad they had her back.

The Earth graduate squinted her eyes at Josh when he spoke about her cards being an endangered species. "I can buy more cards, due, they're not very endangered, are they?" She said the last part like a kid who'd just proven another kid wrong about Santa Claus. Conscious of her money, she tried to save as much as she could after the initial splurge. It wasn't something she could help, and any person who's normally broke can attest to that. Well, she could name a few friends who had better control. She wrinkled up her nose when she looked at the joker. "Would not want to eat Willem Dafoe. Think he'd taste like...leather." She tried to imagine it, and the train of thought was quite horrifying. Not because of the fact that it was cannibalism, but because it was cannibalism of Willem Dafoe. She puffed out her cheeks indignantly. "'S still a lot." Her s's went on for too long, which she also noticed, but made no comment on.

Nell sighed heavily. Oh music, she'd love to make it. And she could, if she tried in the future. She tapped a spoon against the counter rhythmically but with no purpose. "If only people cared more about covers. We have to write our own original stuff first. And then come out with a cover album." She punctuated the sentence with an mhmm. She blinked a few times, tilting her head to the side, and then tilted it back again, amused by this even though it was giving her a head rush. "Really? Emily Rose is who you thought of first? Not Regan from The Exorcist?" She sighed, lamenting his lack of movie knowledge. And then she thought of something. "The Last Exorcism, bro. Her name is Nell. It was about me." There was some shock in hearing her name on the previews when they came on television. She'd lift her head and look at it, confused at first. Of course, she then felt honored that her name was in a movie. It was surprising, considering she didn't think it was that common of a name.

She held out her arms when Josh came up with an answer before decisively abusing the counter. "Are you sure?" she teased. "Need to think about that more?" Nell licked the spoon that already had brownie batter on it. It was for the two of them, and they had the same germs. Or something. Even though they weren't related. She huffed when he amended himself. "You're a liar, Joshywa. How terrible of you." Getting her hopes up and all that. Not a very nice thing to do. But making them? Yes, she could definitely do that. "Get the sugar, then, ándale, ándale." It was something that only someone who grew up speaking Castillian, but she was prideful that she knew American Spanish. When she put the brownies in the oven, she asked, "Thirty minutes to bake, what do we do?"

Nell squinted at the cards, before her eyebrows shot up. ”Ooh, right,” she said slowly, remembering that she’d said they were a gift. She couldn’t buy another pack like them. Right. So maybe they were an endangered species. No, still doesn’t make sense. One-of-a-kind. ”Last of the Mohicans,” she murmured. The last of its race. Poor babies, they didn’t even know she bet. And already they were pretty damaged. She couldn’t help the fact that people enjoyed cheating. Nell held up her hands when it came to the matters of the record deal. ”If you fuck the system, then…what is there? Nothing.” Nell waved her fingers like she was demonstrating the emptiness. She stopped, a smile creeping over her face as she nodded slowly. ”Ahh, Indie label. Ha ha.” It seemed like an idea had crossed her mind, and she was rather content about it. ”I can play the harp,” she said. She’d never tried it, but it was a bunch of long strings that you strummed. Like a guitar, but not really. It seemed easier for that. Maybe because the people playing it made it look effortless, just gliding along the strings.

Nell shook her head, like she was offended about the fact that The Exorcism of Emily Rose was the movie he compared her to. The cinephile in her would not have it. ”Movie still sucked huevos.” She turned her thumbs upside down and blew a raspbery. She didn’t actually have a strong opinion on it, couldn’t think of a movie she actually hated. She wriggled when Josh poked her. ”Then you have horrible judgment,” she said, each word short and stern. ”Letting me into your home. I hope I break something the next time I start convulsing.” She forgot that she wasn’t actually possessed, and the prospect of her body contorting out of her control was very scary. She didn’t like to be out of control of herself, even though she was at this moment, in this second. He went on to state that his name is from the Bible, which he’d told her before so it wasn’t news to her. She paused for a long moment before saying, ”Oh, sorry, I was waiting for the second part of that.” Where did the Bible come from with this? They weren’t discussing name origins here. But she let Josh do his thing.

When he said the nursery rhyme, she bobbed her head. ”Yes,” she stated. ”Yes you are.” Like it wasn’t a joke that he had confused her about the goddamn caramel. It wasn’t a nice thing to do to someone in her state, no it was not. Nell took the sugar, her full attention on the pan now, making sure that she didn’t screw up. Because it was very easy to screw this up. But baking was easy otherwise, barring the time it took for brownies. Even after the half hour, they had to cool. Nell froze at his suggestion of what to do. She furrowed her eyebrows, her expression withdrawn. ”But I don wanna,” she muttered. Why would she want to kill anything? Why was he telling her to go kill things? Nell reluctantly followed. Jesus Christ, does he mean the cats? Her heart twisted for a moment in her chest. But then they were in Annabel’s room, and she sat close to the television, almost tempted to put her hands on the screen for a Poltergeist reenactment. When she heard Annabel regard her, she pointed to the screen, her finger almost touching it. ”What is this, ’mana? What’s that thing? And over there?” She moved her finger around, squinting in concentration.