Chapter 2: Tendril goes insane
Sep. 9th, 2003 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosThis was harder than Chapter 1, to be sure. The most overwhelming part is I have little prescience where all this is leading. But it's fun to be writing, to be going somewhere.
"Tendril!" her mother called. "You should be outside. Go play with your brother."
"Mom, I'm trying to finish writing an email to Nettles!"
Credenza Caixeiro rolled her eyes and slammed the egg timer down so hard it fell into three pieces. She swore under her breath and checked the time on the microwave.
"I need the computer," she said. "Now!"
"Just five minutes, please?"
Credenza breezed into the study where Tendril was working. Clack, clackity, clack! went her heals on the linoleum. She hadn't taken off her red pumps because they extended her sense of control into the home, the same control she felt at the office of her ad agency. She had work to do, and didn't want to be home at all. If it hadn't been for Tendril's fever, and the school nurse calling the office, Credenza wouldn't have to work from home this evening.
"I just have to finish telling him about my dream," Tendril explained.
"If you hate playing with your brother so much," she fumed, "Why do you spend so much time talking to another snivelling eight-year-old boy. You're twelve now. You should be playing with children your own age."
"And not my brother," said Tendril. "Who pulls the wings of butterflies, and hangs kittens by their tails from the clothesline. He is so disgusting."
Tendril stood up as her mother pulled the chair out from under her.
"At least let me send it, I'm almost done. I was just fixing some things"
Credenza grabbed her daughter's arm and yanked her away from the keyboard.
"Nettles writes poetry. How many boys write poetry?" Tendril asked. "Besides, he knows where Roke is."
"You better stop wasting your time with those silly fantasies of yours, missy. It's time you started to think about getting a job so you can earn your keep around here."
"Mom, you are so stupid. I can't work until I'm 14."
"Get out," Credenza said.
"You're such a jerk," Tendril said.
"And you stop mouthing off at me, missy, or I'll burn your books."
Tendril shuffled out of the office.
"Fever my foot," Credenza muttered.
She knew it was all an attention-getting mechanism.
She looked at the screen.
hey nettles I have to telll you about a this wild dream I had last nite. you were in it. I was riding in a car with my dad, which is kind of strange because he is deaf and doesn't drive and I never see him because mom is such a W. we were riding along a cuntry road somewhere I had never been. I saw a meadow and a river and then we came to a driveway with a white mailbx at the end abd you were standing there. dad said hey there's nettles which was strange because he doesn't know about you and idon't know what you look like, but it was you. The driveway led to some kind of cloud that was shimmering, and there was a bright light in front of it, but the light was some kind of person. not an alien or anything, just somone I couldn't see but it felt safe. then we all went in the back yard and you showed me this strange plant with a weird fruit on it, that was slimy and kind of moving. it was all different colours: vermillion, orange and aquamarine, really pretty. it kept yelling at you and me and the person in the light. for some reason dad could hear it, and it calmed right down when he came over. we found out it was scared and angry because something was coming to get it. anyway I have a fever and mom is being her usual self so I have to go now. chrysalis.
"That girl is insane," said Credenza, and deleted the message.
Tendril didn't go looking for her brother, Frond. She didn't feel very good. What she really wanted was to send that important message to Nettles and then go lie down and watch TV. But hanging around the house would only make things worse.
She had two friends on her street, but didn't feel like playing with anybody today. This was unusual. She wanted to be alone. Instead of going out the front door, she opened the sliding door of the townhouse and went into the back. All they had was a few cracked concrete patio tiles with thistles and ragweed growing between them. This little courtyard was enclosed, like a zillion other townhouses, between two slatted wooden fences that offered meagre privacy from the neighbours. Tendril didn't go into the back very often, because her brother was usually doing something mean to an insect or a rodent, and Tendril couldn't handle seeing meanness. But she knew for a fact that today Frond had gone with one of his friends to torment a neighbourhood Pekinese.
The end of their yard backed onto a drainage ditch. At one time this had probably been a pleasant stream, but the subdivision developers had turned it into a ditch with concrete in the bottom and a pitiful, slimy bit of water oozing along it. Tendril shambled along for a few minutes, listening to children and parents yell at each other in the other townhouses. She saw a boy with a cigarette lighter trying to set a rag doll on fire.
The stream drained into a round basin as large as the gymnasium at school. It was full of small, rough, white stones and had a dark, poisonous looking pool sitting in the bottom. Tendril found a flat stone and sat there for a few minutes, soaking up the September sun.
At the far side of the basin was a woods, and from the edge of the woods drained a second stream. This was a real stream, not a paved one. Tendril had never explored the woods; it just wasn't the sort of thing she had ever wanted to do. She would rather watch TV or listen to music with her friends, or write poems or draw pictures. She liked to make things out of yarn, felt and beads. She didn't know much about flowers because her mother never grew any, but her friend Nickel had a little garden of her own and would sometimes give Tendril a bouquet of pansies or snapdragons. Tendril liked those.
She noticed some small, bright flowers growing by the stream and decided to go investigate. They turned out to be trumpet shaped and no bigger than a thimble. They were orange and yellow. They were small but numerous on big luscious green plants that seemed to like the dark, mucky soil by the stream.
On top of these plants grew some kind of vine with wide, leaves that had five points each, like a webbed hand. Attached to the vine were small round spiny fruits, hollow like a balloon. Tendril knew what these were, because Frond and his friends liked to gather handfuls of them and throw them at her and her friends. They were wild cucumbers.
They were kind of neat. Tendril had never seen where they grew before. She thought it would be fun to collect a few and put them in Frond's bed. He would never guess where they came from. She started to pick them. She found three or four, then had to follow the vine to find some more.
With her hand, she felt her way down through the pretty orange-flowered weed, down toward the ground, and then her hand touched something soft and moist.
Under the leaves, something screamed. Tendril was so startled she leapt up, scattering the wild cucumbers. She ran back toward the pond, leaping like a mountain goat across the jumbled stones. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anything was chasing her, but there was nothing, so she stopped.
She stood in the sun for a moment, glancing around, looking back toward the townhouses, wondering if someone had followed her to play a joke on her. But she couldn't see anybody, and the houses were out of earshot. Well, if somebody was being murdered, she have heard the screams. But no doubt, this voice had come from close by, right under Tendril's fingers.
She couldn't stand not knowing what had made that sound, so she climbed carefully and quietly back over the stones. She saw the little cucumbers where she had dropped them, and started poking around near them, to find where she had been looking before.
"Leave me alone," snapped a voice. It was a child's voice, though whether a girl or a boy, Tendril couldn't tell.
She pushed back the leaves where the sound had come from.
It was another thing like in her dream, attached to the cucumber vine, but shaped more like a watermelon, with bright colours shimmering over its smooth, glutinous surface. The thing let out a sob.
"Go away," it said.
Tendril didn't say anything. She squatted there staring at it. She didn't know what bothered her more, the fact that this vegetable had just spoken to her, or that she had seen one like it the night before in her sleep. These things seemed far less disturbing in dreams than in reality.
She was afraid to speak to it. That would be insane. Maybe she was insane. Anything was possible, living in a household with a megalomaniac mother and a sociopathic brother who took pleasure in inflicting pain on anything helpless. Tendril was afraid something like this would happen sooner or later, that she would start to lose her fragile grip on reality.
But Tendril was annoyed about the whole thing. And she was not one to remain silent when things bothered her, even if she had to pay a price. Why should she care if people made fun of her for talking to a plant? Things were bad enough already.
"Don't worry," Tendril said. "Why should I care about a stupid vegetable?"
She let the leaves fall back into place, stood up and started to walk away.
"Wait!" it called tremulously. "I thought you were someone else. Come back."
"Forget it. I don't have time for this."
"Please come back. I'm all alone here. I'm almost ripe and...I'm afraid. The other people are coming back soon, and..."
"Shut up!" Tendril said. "I'm not interested."
She started to run. She fell once on the jagged stones and gashed her shin. She got up and ran up the drainage ditch. She started to cry. She hated her life.
As soon as the townhouse came in sight, she crouched down by the stream for a few minutes to dry her eyes and stop snivelling. Credenza Caixeiro would not care if her daughter cried, but if Frond saw, it would probably inspire him to do something especially mean.
Tendril wanted to see her dad, who she usually just called by his name. Crock Botham had only been 17 when Tendril was born. Credenza was twice his age, desperate to have children before it too late. That urge had, of course, turned out to be no more than a whim.
Crock still lived in the same rundown apartment building on the other side of the city. He wrote plays in sign language, which didn't make much money. He didn't own a car, and Credenza wouldn't take her to see him. Sometimes Tendril would meet him downtown and they would buy ice cream or go to see a matinee. A couple times she had even run away to visit him for the weekend. But her mother always managed to punish her direly for this, like the time she accidentally spilled laundry detergent in Tendril's goldfish bowl.
Sometimes the consequences were not worth the effort of trying to visit Crock. But he was the only one Tendril could think of who would let her talk about her strange dreams. Maybe he wouldn't make her feel stupid if she told him she had imagined a talking vegetable by the drainage pond. She had to talk to somebody or it would drive her crazy. Maybe she already was crazy, but not talking would make it worse. Much, much worse.
She crept back into the townhouse and tiptoed into the kitchen. The eggs were still boiling on the stove after more than half an hour. She could still hear Credenza working in the study.
Chucka-chucka-kalita-chuck-chang! went the keyboard.
Tendril went to turn off the burner, then thought better of it, and slipped out the front door into the street.
"Tendril!" her mother called. "You should be outside. Go play with your brother."
"Mom, I'm trying to finish writing an email to Nettles!"
Credenza Caixeiro rolled her eyes and slammed the egg timer down so hard it fell into three pieces. She swore under her breath and checked the time on the microwave.
"I need the computer," she said. "Now!"
"Just five minutes, please?"
Credenza breezed into the study where Tendril was working. Clack, clackity, clack! went her heals on the linoleum. She hadn't taken off her red pumps because they extended her sense of control into the home, the same control she felt at the office of her ad agency. She had work to do, and didn't want to be home at all. If it hadn't been for Tendril's fever, and the school nurse calling the office, Credenza wouldn't have to work from home this evening.
"I just have to finish telling him about my dream," Tendril explained.
"If you hate playing with your brother so much," she fumed, "Why do you spend so much time talking to another snivelling eight-year-old boy. You're twelve now. You should be playing with children your own age."
"And not my brother," said Tendril. "Who pulls the wings of butterflies, and hangs kittens by their tails from the clothesline. He is so disgusting."
Tendril stood up as her mother pulled the chair out from under her.
"At least let me send it, I'm almost done. I was just fixing some things"
Credenza grabbed her daughter's arm and yanked her away from the keyboard.
"Nettles writes poetry. How many boys write poetry?" Tendril asked. "Besides, he knows where Roke is."
"You better stop wasting your time with those silly fantasies of yours, missy. It's time you started to think about getting a job so you can earn your keep around here."
"Mom, you are so stupid. I can't work until I'm 14."
"Get out," Credenza said.
"You're such a jerk," Tendril said.
"And you stop mouthing off at me, missy, or I'll burn your books."
Tendril shuffled out of the office.
"Fever my foot," Credenza muttered.
She knew it was all an attention-getting mechanism.
She looked at the screen.
hey nettles I have to telll you about a this wild dream I had last nite. you were in it. I was riding in a car with my dad, which is kind of strange because he is deaf and doesn't drive and I never see him because mom is such a W. we were riding along a cuntry road somewhere I had never been. I saw a meadow and a river and then we came to a driveway with a white mailbx at the end abd you were standing there. dad said hey there's nettles which was strange because he doesn't know about you and idon't know what you look like, but it was you. The driveway led to some kind of cloud that was shimmering, and there was a bright light in front of it, but the light was some kind of person. not an alien or anything, just somone I couldn't see but it felt safe. then we all went in the back yard and you showed me this strange plant with a weird fruit on it, that was slimy and kind of moving. it was all different colours: vermillion, orange and aquamarine, really pretty. it kept yelling at you and me and the person in the light. for some reason dad could hear it, and it calmed right down when he came over. we found out it was scared and angry because something was coming to get it. anyway I have a fever and mom is being her usual self so I have to go now. chrysalis.
"That girl is insane," said Credenza, and deleted the message.
Tendril didn't go looking for her brother, Frond. She didn't feel very good. What she really wanted was to send that important message to Nettles and then go lie down and watch TV. But hanging around the house would only make things worse.
She had two friends on her street, but didn't feel like playing with anybody today. This was unusual. She wanted to be alone. Instead of going out the front door, she opened the sliding door of the townhouse and went into the back. All they had was a few cracked concrete patio tiles with thistles and ragweed growing between them. This little courtyard was enclosed, like a zillion other townhouses, between two slatted wooden fences that offered meagre privacy from the neighbours. Tendril didn't go into the back very often, because her brother was usually doing something mean to an insect or a rodent, and Tendril couldn't handle seeing meanness. But she knew for a fact that today Frond had gone with one of his friends to torment a neighbourhood Pekinese.
The end of their yard backed onto a drainage ditch. At one time this had probably been a pleasant stream, but the subdivision developers had turned it into a ditch with concrete in the bottom and a pitiful, slimy bit of water oozing along it. Tendril shambled along for a few minutes, listening to children and parents yell at each other in the other townhouses. She saw a boy with a cigarette lighter trying to set a rag doll on fire.
The stream drained into a round basin as large as the gymnasium at school. It was full of small, rough, white stones and had a dark, poisonous looking pool sitting in the bottom. Tendril found a flat stone and sat there for a few minutes, soaking up the September sun.
At the far side of the basin was a woods, and from the edge of the woods drained a second stream. This was a real stream, not a paved one. Tendril had never explored the woods; it just wasn't the sort of thing she had ever wanted to do. She would rather watch TV or listen to music with her friends, or write poems or draw pictures. She liked to make things out of yarn, felt and beads. She didn't know much about flowers because her mother never grew any, but her friend Nickel had a little garden of her own and would sometimes give Tendril a bouquet of pansies or snapdragons. Tendril liked those.
She noticed some small, bright flowers growing by the stream and decided to go investigate. They turned out to be trumpet shaped and no bigger than a thimble. They were orange and yellow. They were small but numerous on big luscious green plants that seemed to like the dark, mucky soil by the stream.
On top of these plants grew some kind of vine with wide, leaves that had five points each, like a webbed hand. Attached to the vine were small round spiny fruits, hollow like a balloon. Tendril knew what these were, because Frond and his friends liked to gather handfuls of them and throw them at her and her friends. They were wild cucumbers.
They were kind of neat. Tendril had never seen where they grew before. She thought it would be fun to collect a few and put them in Frond's bed. He would never guess where they came from. She started to pick them. She found three or four, then had to follow the vine to find some more.
With her hand, she felt her way down through the pretty orange-flowered weed, down toward the ground, and then her hand touched something soft and moist.
Under the leaves, something screamed. Tendril was so startled she leapt up, scattering the wild cucumbers. She ran back toward the pond, leaping like a mountain goat across the jumbled stones. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anything was chasing her, but there was nothing, so she stopped.
She stood in the sun for a moment, glancing around, looking back toward the townhouses, wondering if someone had followed her to play a joke on her. But she couldn't see anybody, and the houses were out of earshot. Well, if somebody was being murdered, she have heard the screams. But no doubt, this voice had come from close by, right under Tendril's fingers.
She couldn't stand not knowing what had made that sound, so she climbed carefully and quietly back over the stones. She saw the little cucumbers where she had dropped them, and started poking around near them, to find where she had been looking before.
"Leave me alone," snapped a voice. It was a child's voice, though whether a girl or a boy, Tendril couldn't tell.
She pushed back the leaves where the sound had come from.
It was another thing like in her dream, attached to the cucumber vine, but shaped more like a watermelon, with bright colours shimmering over its smooth, glutinous surface. The thing let out a sob.
"Go away," it said.
Tendril didn't say anything. She squatted there staring at it. She didn't know what bothered her more, the fact that this vegetable had just spoken to her, or that she had seen one like it the night before in her sleep. These things seemed far less disturbing in dreams than in reality.
She was afraid to speak to it. That would be insane. Maybe she was insane. Anything was possible, living in a household with a megalomaniac mother and a sociopathic brother who took pleasure in inflicting pain on anything helpless. Tendril was afraid something like this would happen sooner or later, that she would start to lose her fragile grip on reality.
But Tendril was annoyed about the whole thing. And she was not one to remain silent when things bothered her, even if she had to pay a price. Why should she care if people made fun of her for talking to a plant? Things were bad enough already.
"Don't worry," Tendril said. "Why should I care about a stupid vegetable?"
She let the leaves fall back into place, stood up and started to walk away.
"Wait!" it called tremulously. "I thought you were someone else. Come back."
"Forget it. I don't have time for this."
"Please come back. I'm all alone here. I'm almost ripe and...I'm afraid. The other people are coming back soon, and..."
"Shut up!" Tendril said. "I'm not interested."
She started to run. She fell once on the jagged stones and gashed her shin. She got up and ran up the drainage ditch. She started to cry. She hated her life.
As soon as the townhouse came in sight, she crouched down by the stream for a few minutes to dry her eyes and stop snivelling. Credenza Caixeiro would not care if her daughter cried, but if Frond saw, it would probably inspire him to do something especially mean.
Tendril wanted to see her dad, who she usually just called by his name. Crock Botham had only been 17 when Tendril was born. Credenza was twice his age, desperate to have children before it too late. That urge had, of course, turned out to be no more than a whim.
Crock still lived in the same rundown apartment building on the other side of the city. He wrote plays in sign language, which didn't make much money. He didn't own a car, and Credenza wouldn't take her to see him. Sometimes Tendril would meet him downtown and they would buy ice cream or go to see a matinee. A couple times she had even run away to visit him for the weekend. But her mother always managed to punish her direly for this, like the time she accidentally spilled laundry detergent in Tendril's goldfish bowl.
Sometimes the consequences were not worth the effort of trying to visit Crock. But he was the only one Tendril could think of who would let her talk about her strange dreams. Maybe he wouldn't make her feel stupid if she told him she had imagined a talking vegetable by the drainage pond. She had to talk to somebody or it would drive her crazy. Maybe she already was crazy, but not talking would make it worse. Much, much worse.
She crept back into the townhouse and tiptoed into the kitchen. The eggs were still boiling on the stove after more than half an hour. She could still hear Credenza working in the study.
Chucka-chucka-kalita-chuck-chang! went the keyboard.
Tendril went to turn off the burner, then thought better of it, and slipped out the front door into the street.
