The exercise:
Some September Hindsight is on the table today.
Along with lots of grumpy people in town, apparently.
I actually told someone to kiss my ass as they were storming out of town hall this morning, which I think sums up the day pretty well. I guess all this smoke is getting to people.
Mine:
"Blood?" I asked, an involuntary step back putting a bit of space between us. Georgina laughed and closed the distance smoothly. I was still feeling wary but relaxed at her touch - relaxed enough to remember that blood offerings at Shinto shrines were not out of the ordinary. "I mean, right, blood."
"Just a little bit," she said with another tension erasing laugh. "Come on."
Georgina led and I followed in a daze that I blamed on the concussion. Looking back now, I suppose I should have suspected something. But give me a break, okay? It's not like I'd ever even gone to see a hypnotist, much less met one. And Georgina wasn't exactly dangling a pocket watch in front of my face and telling me I was feeling sleepy, all right?
I mean, just go ahead and try to convince me that you've heard of someone being literally hypnotized by somebody's laugh. What's that? Yeah, that's what I thought. So put that judge's wig and robe back in your dress up closet or Tickle Trunk or whatever you keep your very grown up and not at all juvenile costumes in - I'm speaking from experience here, obviously - and let me get on with my story.
"Give me your hand," she said, producing a blade from somewhere on her person. Which, okay, more than a little suspicious. But then she laughed again, seemingly at the expression on my face, and I held out my hand to her. "There we go. It's too late to turn back now."
Even to my muddled mind that sounded anonymous.
No. Omnivore?
That isn't it either.
Ominous! Nailed it.
"What does that mean?" I asked as she laid the blade against my wrist. I didn't even blink as I watched her. "Too late to turn back from what?"
"When a sacrifice is demanded," Georgina said, all signs of laughter and innocent mischief having suddenly vanished, "a sacrifice is given."
3 comments:
You told someone to kiss your ass?! That's not very... Canadian... of you :-p Which tells me that they utterly deserved it and that you'd probably been staying patient for a lot longer than was good for you all day, so well done on being so restrained, I think!
Heh, I like the mix-up with Omnivore, Anonymous and Ominous, that seems exactly right for our hero. And how this date at a shrine is somehow, without him doing anything at all, going from bad to worse. Oh, and I loved the reference to costumes!
Hindsight
Like an idiot I just stood there, thinking how dramatic and obvious... no, wait... ominous! that sounded. For about fifteen seconds until the pain in my wrist made its way up my arm, over my shoulder and tapped on my skull, waiting for my brain to put its dressing-gown on and answer the door. At which point it noticed that she'd actually sliced the knife across my wrist and held it up, sprinkling blood over lilac paper flowers and delicate origami cranes. She laughed, and my brain started to close the door and take its dressing gown off again, and I could almost feel myself shutting down the pain and choosing to ignore it.
"Just stay here," she said, and her voice was so musical and vibrant that I couldn't have refused if I'd wanted to. "Just wait here for a bit. An hour, say."
"Where are you going?" I asked, though the words were hard to find, and she didn't answer. When I looked around for her, she was gone.
Someone started screaming a little bit after that, but the short, muscular young man in the paramedic uniform told me that it was probably about twenty to twenty-five minutes later. He also told me that I was lucky that Georgina had cut across my wrist and not along it, as the blood had clotted quite a lot and limited the blood loss. The policeman, who came along in the ambulance as I was taken to yet another hospital, was much less sympathetic. I've only seen one Japanese anime in my life: Full metal alchemist but the policeman reminded me a lot of Roy Mustang: he was mostly calm, but when he started shouting even the paramedic cowered back a little. And he was very insistent on knowing why I'd tried to kill myself at a Shinto shrine.
"I didn't," I protested, and he stopped shouting, wiped white spittle from his lips, and glared at me. "I was with a nurse, she's called Georgina, and she wanted to make a sacrifice."
"And you agreed?" I could just tell that the shouting was about to start again; all of a sudden I had a flashback to Dad turning to the firemen and trying to wrestle the hose from them to turn on me instead of his burning house. With Hindsight, the correct answer was "No."
"Not really," I said, and the inside of the ambulance seemed to get a few degrees warmer. "I didn't know what she was doing."
"She cut your wrist with a knife and you didn't know what she was doing? Is this believable? Does this sound like a true story to you?"
"I think she'd hypnotized me...."
"You THINK? You can THINK now, but you couldn't THINK then?"
"I was sort of asleep--"
"No-one sleeps through someone cutting them up with a knife!"
"She told me it was ok--"
"Stop the ambulance! Stop the ambulance and roll this cretin into the gutter for the street-cleaners to dispose of! I say that this is ok, and he will surely agree with me. Especially if he THINKS about it! Sprinkle him with petals of the white orchid and ask the ancestors to protect his spirit, and I say that this is ok, and he will surely agree with me!"
"I don't feel so good...."
The doctor this time who visited me in the hospital bed told me that the policeman was waiting for me to be well enough to be interviewed, and when they saw my reaction they told me that he would wait another few hours.
"You have a concussion from somewhere," said the doctor, who had brown hair and brown eyes and spoke English nicely, "and blood loss from your wrist. The police tell me that they believe you were attacked, which you told them apparently, as they cannot find the weapon used to cut you."
"She was a nurse," I said. "Georgina."
"There are no nurses called Georgina in the hospital you were previously at," said the doctor, sounding quite serious. "We have, just to be sure, checked and there are no nurses called Georgina here either. And any nurse who visits you will have the policeman who is waiting to talk to you in the room at the same time. Ah, do not look so sad! This is for your own safety!"
Greg - when something has nothing to do with me, but someone is insisting that it does, and I try to explain that to them, and they only get more rude and more insistent, well... I suppose I would choose my words differently if I had the chance to do it again, but it felt right in the moment :P
Quite enjoyed where you took this. The policeman seems... rather in a bad mood. Probably all the time. I do like the new doctor though! Seems quite reasonable.
So. Three months left, somehow. Do end things in Japan, or bring our hero back home? To be honest, I've no idea at the moment how this tale is going to conclude, though I'm not feeling any great pressure to do so. It's been a bit of a different year but... well, that can be said about a lot of things.
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