| CassandraAvery | Date: Saturday, 2011/05/28, 1:26 AM | Message # 1 |
 Development
Group: EWA Roster
Messages: 12
Status: Offline
| Open stretch of sun drenched highway; the kind you see in movies about big, tough men on cross country motorcycle road trips. The sky is unblemished and limitless and David Avery has the driver’s side window of his cookie-cutter, suburban, SUV rolled all the way down….some vaguely familiar rock song from the 70’s on the radio station. If it wasn’t imperative that he have his eyes open, David probably would have closed them both and tilted the seat all the way back to soak everything in. The sound of David’s cell phone vibrating furiously on the passenger’s seat shakes him from his reverie and he clicks the small button on his Bluetooth earpiece to answer. Yes, David is one of those douchebags who wears his earpiece into places like the grocery store, Best Buy, and the 7-11 when he absolutely doesn’t need to. He’s also the guy who turns the volume all the way up so everyone can hear the person on the other line.
“Hey hunny! Just got back from the grocery store. You wanted chicken for dinner tonight, right?”
David fumbles an answer. He’s not going to be home for dinner, actually.
“Yeah, you know…uh, babe…I was going to grab some dinner with Mike at the uh….pub tonight.” David grits his teeth. He’s a horrible liar and everyone knows it. Amy sighs on the other end. There is a loud thudding noise, like grocery bags being dumped down angrily on a kitchen counter.
“Jesus, David. I don’t know why you insist on doing this all the time.” Amy knows better. David only lies when he’s doing something that involves his younger sister, Cassandra.
Amy thinks Cassandra is a waste of time and Cassandra thinks Amy is a frigid, pear-shaped, bitch.
“She’s my sister. I don’t see what’s wrong with taking my sister out for a nice dinner once in a while to catch up.”
“She’s a tight-lipped, foul-mouthed alcoholic, David. Where are you going to take her that serves a liquid dinner, hmm? And she doesn’t want to talk to you! I thought we both agreed that you weren’t going to do this anymore.”
David is something of a spineless man. He’s a terrible liar he’s too afraid to ask his closed-off wife for sex, so his browser history is full of redtube visits at 4am on a Tuesday. His wife likes to use the royal “we”, so it sounds like David is in on decisions that get made. He’s not.
“She’s the only family I have. I’m not going to just abandon her.”
“….I’m going to pretend like you didn’t just say that to your wife while your son is playing video games in the next room.”
“Well….you know what I mean. Like….blood family.”
*CLICK*
David fumbles with the buttons on his earpiece for a second before he realizes Amy has hung up on him, the usual way she ends conversations that aren’t geared in her favor. David, wrapped in his usual cloud of obliviousness, shrugs and puts on his blinker for exit 13B.
In less angry environment, some 30 minutes past exit 13B, Cassandra Avery lounges peacefully on the second floor of an almost too large suburban home. It’s sparklingly new and seems barely lived in. All the floors are hardwood and tile. Everything is cold, but everything is clean. Cassandra is sprawled out on said wood floor, wiggling her bares toes on the dark-stained oak, hair fanned out behind her like a mermaid. Her eyes cast over the high, vaulted ceiling and the slowly spinning fan with the wide white paddles, whirring room temperature air throughout the empty abode. Cassandra sighs and heaves herself up into a sitting position. On the floor next to her are a half empty bottle of long-necked beer and a tidy pile of white paper. The papers bear tiny, cramped type and several signatures. Cass seems to have forgotten she put them there. She takes a healthy swig from the bottle and stands, stretching all the rest out of her muscles on tip-toe. Cassandra’s wearing an oversized black t-shirt that fits her like a short dress. The bottom hem has come partly unraveled and there are holes in the sleeves. The lettering on the back is barely visible; it might once have spelled out something with a capital C…
Cassandra stands in a long hallway that leads into a den which is occupied only an unnecessarily large desk and one black office chair. The first floor is lonely. The second floor would suffer the same fate if not for all of the framed, poster-sized pictures on the walls and the shelves and shelves of memorabilia. It almost feels like the only part of the house that anyone ever took care to arrange with purpose. Cassandra approaches one of these massive, hanging glass frames, finger nails tapping on the beer bottle still held loosely in her hand. The poster is a snapshot of a large man with shoulder-length brown hair standing in a wrestling ring, holding a title belt; a moment of triumph. A large logo with the letters CEW appears in the corner. The rest of the posters are variations on a theme featuring the same protagonist. Cass gets closer to the frame, her reflection coming back distorted and cloudy. She places her open palm on the cool surface and closes her eyes.
Nothing but the semi-silence of the ceiling fan. Cassandra takes her hand from the frame and places a finger on the side of it. With green eyes wide, almost curious, she gives it a push with her index finger. The picture wobbles on its singular hook and threatens disaster. Another shove and another, each more purposeful and forceful than the last. On the third push, the beautifully preserved memory sails from its resting place and crashes fantastically onto the cold wood floor. Glass splinters in all directions. The silence is ruptured. Cassandra doesn’t flinch. She eyes the mess interestedly, detachedly. The glass pieces crunch under her feet as continues to run her finger along the wall, coming to each new portrait and giving it a firm swing. Each falls with a similar crash, contributing to the small pond of glass strewn over the floor. You could spend the whole day cleaning a mess like that and there would still be small glass surprises lurking under furniture, waiting to make you bleed. The shelves of action figures, of cased replica title belts, they have to come down too.
Cass swills the rest of her now luke-warm beer and extends her hand out with the bottle in her grip towards the shelves. Like a perverted Swiffer, the bottle catches all of the well kept and organized pieces of plastic, leather, and glass and sends them crashing. When no longer useful, the empty beer bottle follows suit. It lands on one of the posters of the handsome brown-haired man and makes the image of his face soggy with residual booze. One item remains standing on the now empty shelf, a small picture frame. It houses a candid snapshot of a happy couple. The man is the same one from the ruined posters. He’s looking off past the camera person, in the middle of saying something with a smile on his face. Next to him is a bright-eyed, beaming Cassandra with her face in profile, forehead touching the man’s cheek. Cassandra slides the picture from the back of the frame, stone faced. She waves it idly back and forth, as if trying to convince a polaroid to develop faster. Cass reaches behind her ear and extracts a cigarette from its hiding place. She fishes a lighter from her bra though the top of her t-shirt…like a true class act, she muses to herself.
One drag. Two. Clouds of smoke floating over the damaged trophies. Cass crunches back over the glass and crouches down to fish the pile of white papers from the mess, almost as an after-thought. She rips the candid snapshot in half, leaving the part with the man’s face to be discarded with its brothers. She holds the tip of her lit cigarette to the corner of her own self-image and watches it bubble, melt, and disintegrate. The burnt offering drifts to the floor, to consume the other images with its fiery contagion. Cassandra walks slowly to the end of the hallway. In her head, she’s singing “Do The Evolution”. She moves past a bathroom where there is only shampoo for men in the shower and a man’s blue toothbrush by the sink. In the hall closet rests out-of-season men’s outdoor coats and winter boots. On the kitchen table downstairs, mail bearing the name “Aaron Crabill”; his voice on the greeting on the answering machine.
Midway in her descent down the stairs, the doorbell rings. Pausing only half a beat, Cass spies a shadow moving in front of the distorted decorative glass bordering the front door. In no rush, she sheds her oversized black shirt and takes her jeans and tank top from the banister where she had left them to hang, re-adorning herself in a blink. She pulls the door open to be greeted by David’s stupidly grinning face. Her own remains unchanged.
“Hey Cassie! You ready to go??”
A dead-eyed response of the silent variety.
“Ok, great! Why’d you have me meet you here? Is AC home??”
David gets a little excited. Cass senses his star-struck anticipation. She moves past him outside without so much as a blink of acknowledgment. David turns to catch up with her.
“So, where do you want to go?? Hey…..what smells like smoke??”
Beyond you. Utterly.
Message edited by CassandraAvery - Saturday, 2011/05/28, 1:41 AM |
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