Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 53

Corona Gale, 0.1.1

Note: this is an alpha release of Corona Gale. Much like Sprites, Jets, and Elves, it only exists as a first act with no ending and has a lot of rough edges. You can see other chapters by following the Corona Gale tag. 

Two cups of tea sat on the counter, bags dropped in only seconds before, water piping hot still, milk, sugar still left to pour in. He had left them here to go splash some water on his face. It was early. No light came through the windows. She was still too asleep for any alarms but a shove. 

Next to her on the wooden lacquered nightstand, there was an alarm clock, black, analogue, with hands that glowed in the dark. She had bought it as a joke, because it was her second one. The original sat just right of it, digital and glowing with green numbers, an army of buttons above and behind them to help out with settings and radio preferences. Sitting comfortably just behind the original was a third, this one a cute Japanese ball clock shaped like the head of a cat. To snooze, you had to pull a level in the back that slowly lifted up again to trigger the alarm every ten minutes. 

There were two other alarms, but they didn’t matter. What mattered is that her nightstand was just alarm clocks, 5 trinkets recognizing hearty ambition and futile practicality. She would buy a new one and within days her unconscious muscle memory would figure out the exact motion needed to not only hit snooze but disable the alarm entirely. She had no real power to stop it. At first, she had them trigger all at the same time, so she would need to exert some real effort to kill them all. Later, she scheduled them at 5 minute intervals. Nothing helped. There was no waking her without him actually putting his hands on her shoulders and pushing her off the bed and into the world. The first few times he had to do this he felt bad. Who pushes their girlfriend off the bed to wake her? It seemed cruel and abusive, but after a few days it became funny. After a few weeks it became sad. 

Sometimes, she would fall back asleep on the floor, curled into a pile of clothes she’d left on the floor the night before. If the winds were particularly rough, as they were this morning, her body would exert every effort to stay warm and asleep. 

“Come on,” he said. “Your tea is ready. I’m not coming back in here.”

She would moan, as if communicating some appreciation for his effort. But she wouldn’t move from the floor. Her phone had dropped off the nightstand and was now in her hair. It vibrated. She had email, and probably thirty other things. It kept happening. Her hand reached up, under a pillow covering her face, up and above and in the tangle of her curls she found the blasted thing. She held it up to her face, her eyes finally coming open, an inch at a time. Another alarm, one she had configured weeks ago and forgotten about. It was set to wake her up ten minutes after her normal time, but not every day. She was practicing with intervals. This one kind of did the trick. 

She shuffled out in her slippers and robe, both new, gifts from her boyfriend, for no reason. He handed her a cup of tea, bag out, milk and sugar in, quickly losing its heat. She had taken her time even with the slippers. 

“Thank you,” she said, barely seeing him. 

Her first real thought was, this is going to be hard. The tea struck her lips. A little dribbled past, a pair of droplets falling on her housecoat. Was she really going to do it before getting properly dressed? 

She sat on the couch as he turned on the news. She watched blankly, not really taking anything in. She contemplated. It was going to be tough on him. 

But maybe she didn’t have to do it! Maybe he would understand. Maybe he’d be the first guy to ever understand. She had to travel, and she had to be away, but she could come back! She could return to him after a few months. Maybe he loved her like that. Maybe they could call each other all the time, text constantly, and she could send him photos from her motel rooms. Maybe it didn’t have to be this way. 

“Hey, I have to say something,” she said. Shit. She’d begun. She was breaking up with him on autopilot. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t even really awake! It was like her half-dozen alarms woke up the wrong page of the script. 

“What is it?” He asked. “Oh, can I say you look really good this morning?”

“Oh, screw you,” she said. “I look terrible.” 

“No you don’t. And you know you don’t. And you know what? You know I know you know you don’t,” he said. She squinted at him, and kicked his foot a little with hers. 

He’d halted her. She had to leave tomorrow. She got the letter and burned it, over the stove in the middle of the night while smoking a cigarette and eating a hash brown. Why did they still send her letters? How was that possibly still the most secure way of doing business?

He took his finger and flicked her hair back behind her neck. “You look great. I wish I didn’t have to go to work in like, ten minutes.” 

Shit, she thought. She’d forgotten he had to work this morning. Well, that settled it. There was no way she could break up with him in ten minutes. How cruel would that be? “Yeah,” she said. “That’s really way too bad. Given three or four hours I could have really done something for you.” 

He laughed. “You prepare too much,” he said. “You gotta learn to live in the moment a little.”
She hated to admit it, but the son of a bitch actually did know her pretty well. They’d been together six months, long enough for her to feel comfortable leaving some of her alarm clocks and some clothes at his place. They had recently talked about moving in together. She fantasized about it, but knew it wouldn’t work. There was the fact that she was still lying about what she did for a living. There was the fact that she was going into a busy season, and she’d be away a lot, and would eventually run out of excuses on availability. 

He was under the impression that she worked for a major social media company, and that her job had nondisclosure agreements for kilometers. He asked her once if she was working on a fancy new phone. When he would get frustrated with Facebook, he asked her to take down the entire website, feeling like even if she didn’t work there she probably had some kind of access to those kind of switches. 

And then, of course, there was the whole living in the moment thing. Her job made that both impossible and a grand, high-drama joke. 

He was already half finished his tea when he sat down, but she was still surprised when he got up a second later and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ve got to jet, love.” He turned the corner in his apartment to his bathroom. She could hear him brushing his teeth, and she immediately felt the dread of responsibility. She’d never really tried keeping a long distance boyfriend because of the obvious downsides and frustrations. She would eventually have to explain things, and then she’d be a liar. But could she even explain it? Would he understand? 

No, of course he wouldn’t. Nobody would understand. It took her years to really get it. 

And then, how much would she have to explain before he was satisfied? Would she have to tell him about the clients? The missions? The secrecy? Would she have to tell him about all the lives she’d altered? Would she have to tell him how she can’t quit, even if she wanted to?

Would she tell him that this was her life, for better or worse, and if he wanted to be a part of it then he would have to accept her entirely, without questioning or expecting too much in terms of answers or flexibility? 

He was not the first guy she was torn about telling. There had been Sabin in 2010, then Khalid in 2008, and Scott in 2006. She came closest to telling Scott, but then bungled the entire thing. After that, it became easier. She knew what she had to do and it was just a matter of building up the courage. For some reason, that part was always difficult. And now, in 2013, with Ollie.

No, she had to do it now. She learned this lesson best with Khalid. Rip off the damn bandage. If she didn’t do it now, before he walked out that door, then she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to really do it. She put down her tea, tightened her rope, and stood, eyes open, a little sleep still on either side, but awake and determined to plunge in the knife. 

“Bye!” He said, the door closing. She ran towards it, but it was too late. He was gone.

She didn’t go after him. She bit her lip instead, and decided to face what kept her up half the night: she didn’t actually want to break up with this guy. She sipped the tea he made her. She sat on the couch in his apartment. Everything was comfortable. He was great. She said it all the time, in her head. He is great. 

But could she just leave town and text him? Would that be a jerk thing to do?

She hated thoughts like this, but there they were, right next to and behind and just slightly quieter than the real, good thoughts, the ones that were true. You cannot break up with this guy what is wrong with you. It was louder, but only just. And for how much longer would it hold? 

She put the tea cup in the sink, next to his, light beige stains on the bottom of both. She was trying to think of what she could wear. She’d rifle through the backpack. There’s got to be something in there, she thought, slowly sliding her way to the bedroom, around to the other side, close to the window, where she kept her things. She leaned down and opened the flap and found it light, and then found it empty, and then felt very curious. Where the hell was her overnight stuff? 

She texted him. 

—Hey. 

—What’s up? 

—Where’s my stuff? My bag is empty? 

—Check the middle drawer. 

—What? 

—hmm? :)

—You’re a jerk. 

—:)

He’d emptied out a drawer for her, and placed her things inside. Things had been folded, piled, and arranged. Her makeup sat on the left of everything, laid neatly. That son of a bitch. 
When she eventually left his house and made her way to hers, where she had a bag to pack and a handful of rent cheques to sign in advance, she was in a kind of love. She’d been in love half a dozen times, and some of them had progressed past this level, but it was this point she enjoyed every time it arrived. Sometimes, there is a perfect pop song, and it transcends product and becomes a moment you can play in your head over and over, tangling it with real memories and the present tense, allowing it to add a beat to your step. It is this perfect pop song that makes you believe that there’s something out there, something beyond the people who made and distributed the thing, something beyond the selfish and liberal reasons that there are things in the world. That’s the kind of love she was in. 

She held onto the feeling as long as she could, and it nearly kept until she got home and found a note on her door. This was her world, a world of things left for her to find, every new one a reminder that she didn’t live a normal life, could not fit into a regular schedule, and could not make it work with the current and great love of her life. 

Kate hated her job. 

Writing Practice, June 15 2015

He had her cornered. He really figured it would have gone the other way.

Kate looked into his liar eyes. Album looked back, his smirk appearing just to cause her to wince In annoyance.

"I don't want to meet you," she said. "I won't know you."

"All I said was 'good evening'," he defended, knowing damn well what he'd done outside of this moment.

InDesign tip: Fix breaks caused by brackets in a quote

Here's a nice simple one. When an author replaces a letter in a word inside a quote, they'll often surround the letter with brackets. Brackets won't automatically keep with connected characters in InDesign, however, so you'll end up with this nonsense: 

A word as simple as it, when written as [i]t, will unfortunately break. No author likes seeing this, so it's something you have to fix. It's something I've manually fixed (and had to look for) forever, until I tried this tiny stupid GREP trick:

[image error]

](wildcard for any letter), and apply a character style with "no break" checked.

Keeping this inside your body paragraph style will result in exactly what you'd hope to see:

Since I figured this one out, it's been an automatic inclusion into almost all my paragraph styles. 

Writing practice, June 12 2015

I need a name

For that feeling

When you wait on a crowded platform

Full of people with different belief systems

Mostly in the dogma of forming reasonable lines

And the train

Stops

And the door inches past you just far enough that you feel like its telling you as clearly as a train can

To go right back home

Writing Practice, June 11 2015

I’m heading out of town.

Why aren’t you taking me with you? 

I am. Just not in the way you want. 

Writing Practice, June 10 2015

I want to tell you something. I don’t know if I’m the person who should be telling you this. I don’t know if you should know. Maybe it’s because we’re not that close that I don’t know better than to just tell you. But I know this thing well enough. I know that what I will tell you is a powerful thing. I know that it might affect you deeply. You don’t want to sit down for this. You don’t want to be relaxed. If someone were to tell me this, I’d want to be ready to run. 

Writing Practice, June 9 2015

She sees through her tears, looking at me with a defeat. It is a new kind of defeat for her, built from exhaustion, bad news, more bad news. I feel she could collapse in this moment, from dehydration or despair. She's strong. I see the muscles in her shoulders when she breathes, slower now that all of it is out in the open. I've told her everything. The worst is over, if learning of it is worse than living with it. If not, then I guess it's just beginning. Those eyes. Bloodshot. Deep set. The kind that pierce through you, no matter how little you might know her. Not that she's of a kind. Not that there's anyone else with eyes like hers. Not that there's anyone else who now knows what she knows.

Writing Practice, June 8 2015

Dreamformercial 2

Don't learn how to drive.
Don't buy a phone.
Don't buy a microwave.
Just eat what they give you.
Don't try to plan for your future. 
Don't clean. Don't worry. Don't. 
You don't need the thing. 
It is nicer to want the thing than get the thing. 
Don't call this number. 
Don't pick up your phone. 
Don't remember your credit card number. 
Don't have a credit card number. Who gave you a credit card? Cut it up. 
Cut that up too. 
You'll be sad if you go along with this. 
I want you to know, for real, that this incredible offer will bring you nothing but grief. 
Are you awake? Are you
Don't. 

Writing Practice, June 6 2015

dreamformercial 1

Have you heard the word?

Call right now.

I don't have to tell you about Jesus.

Could you spare a minute to find out more about this special offer?

You know me from the Food Network.

Could you sign this? You'll get a free piece of premium Tupperware just for signing!

May I call your attention to the wisdom of this knife I have in my hand?

This Tupperware is really nice. You have no idea how nice.

Macadamia nuts. No, listen to me. Look me in the eyes. I have the truth you seek. Macadamia nuts.

Just plug this dingus into your car. Then you'll know. You'll know what's wrong. It's a very small dingus.

I saw the Tupperware in your cupboard. Your mother, how disappointed she must be. Just take this one piece. You'll be back for more. I know you. I know your values.

I shouldn't have to tell you that this pamphlet has all the answers. You know this pamphlet has all the answers.

I know your values.

If you cut meat with just a knife you bought at a store, you might as well give up now.

If you marry me, I'll take you away from all this.

I'm going to stand here next to a cardboard stand full of pamphlets literally all day. I have the patience of my convictions. No, I literally have nothing better to do. I'll slowly convince you, day by day, as you walk past me and give me a dirty look, that my patience is virtuous, and that you might one day also like some virtue, and then I will give you the pamphlet.

We're the same, you and me.

I would use this product even if they didn't pay me!

I am putting the Tupperware down. I am turning around. If the Tupperware is gone, I will not ask who took it. I will not look for the Tupperware. For all I know, a bird flew by and said to herself, "wow, what a deal!"

If it wasn't for this amazing offer I wouldn't be here today. This offer saved my life. Do you understand? I was in a very dark place. I was lonely, and depressed. I thought that nothing mattered. But, then. I saw the offer. And now I'm here, sharing the good word. The offer, it is real. And time is running out.

Marry me. I'll introduce you to my parents. They will see the Tupperware you've chosen and be very proud.

What would Jesus do with the information this dingus told him about his car?

We're not here for very much longer. Truly, none of us know how much time we have left.

This Tupperware. Great handfeel. Even when it's hot. Especially when its hot. It's been engineered to

Are you listening? Tell me you're there. I want to hear you. I want to help you. But I can't help you if you don't listen to what I have to say.

You have your credit card out. You know how this works.

Jesus would want you to be happy with this Tupperware.

This knife. You can cut Tupperware with it!

Okay, so it didn't work that time. But we're live! Things happen! I promise you, this dingus works. It speaks to your car. It makes you happier with the things you already have.

This knife can cut a car!

Take this pamphlet as proof of my devotion. Don't even read it. You'll read it later, when you are alone and it is late. Just take it for now. Just think about it. Shh. It's going to be all right. Go to sleep.

Wake up.

Go to sleep.

This knife cuts sleep!

Sent from my Windows Phone

Writing practice, June 5 2015

She throws a punch and it lands where she wants. She doesn't feel like a fighter so much as an archer. It's so hot under the lights, those big arena blowouts, she doesn't register impact in her knuckles, the skin of her opponent, the adrenaline emptying out. She's just hot. The sweat on her is light sweat, not fight sweat.

She jumps back, leaning on her left heel, the farthest party of her from her opponent. She escapes. Her opponent wasn't phased. Her first punch was true, but it was just one. And when she saw how little her opponent moved, her next move had to be retreat. Her heels worked for her. They balanced her enough inches away from an attempt on her mask.

She did not want to be punched. But she did not want to be punched so much as to avoid the fight. Avoiding the punch was its own reward. It meant points on a board, which came with its own priority set, but in boxing the impetus is so personal. Fewer hits from her opponent meant her face hurt a measure less. Imagine your face now, not hurting. You, like her, would do just about anything to maintain that feeling.

How many times did she have to punch her opponent? This was the question she had hoped one punch would answer. One punch didn't answer anything. The question now unfortunately became, how many punches before she knew how many punches? This was an odd question. It alluded to a nightmare scenario: She might never know the answer. She might punch this woman across from her with all she has. She might be down to her last punch and still not know. This is the most dreadful part of a fight. She had hit her with a proud force, found fine purchase, and was only left with the knowledge that her power wasn't enough to even unlock a potential end.

She was afraid to throw another punch.