Re: The Butterfly Loss (ML Adult) Ch. 27 p.4 28Feb08
Posted: Thu May 15, 2008 2:18 am
Hi, I'm only late, but ... only by about 18 minutes. That's still pretty good, right? I mean, it's not like I went to sleep again. Right?
My thanks to:
RiceKrispy
Katydid
DMB
Alien_Friend
Trulov
Aurorabee
Roswell4Life - nice screen name.
Jo - yeah, that Tess is pretty damn evil, ain't she?
uw51
Cereth
Behrluv32 - Okay, you don't really have tar, right?
Heavenli24
JojoTheOrange - Seriously. Loving the screen name.
Chelle - my only ally. In oh so many ways.
Luna_Seer
Synera
Cocogurl
L-J-L 76
Skynet
Carter13
Bettylove8 - I seriously love your story. When are you updating again?
Alien614
Raemac
Kristy
Ti88
Emz80m
Zanssoulmate08 - you evil, sadistic, incredibly lucky little witch. IT WAS YOUR CHALLENGE! How come everyone's blaming me?
Paper
Dreamerfrvrp3 - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Dreamer_6
Wench on a Leash
Tears_Of_Mercury
Sirio
Lurkers
Thanks for all the support, everyone!
The Butterfly Loss
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Remember. Breath.
I feel the earth move under my feet,
I feel the sky tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down.
-I Feel The Earth Move
Carole King
Anna stood in front of the bathroom mirror with her shirt pulled up, resting over the swell of her belly. She knew she wasn’t huge – her stomach was barely the size of a small cantaloupe – but that wasn’t what she was looking at. She was trying to see if there was anything going on inside the tummy.
She was looking for little glowing hands.
It sounded crazy. She knew it sounded crazy. If she didn’t see something soon, she would begin to believe that she was crazy. That she’d just imagined those tiny handprints in the mirror after the photo shoot, now over two weeks ago.
But at the same time, she knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“Anna!” Cynthia called through the closed door. “Are you okay in there?”
Startled, Anna shoved her shirt down. “Yeah! I’m fine,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, you’ve just been in there for a while. We were getting worried. You sure everything’s okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll be right out.” Anna looked at herself in the mirror. “Keep it together,” she told herself. “You’re fine. You’re fine.” Her pep-talk complete, she exited the bathroom and went back to work.
Twenty minutes later Mabel walked in through the café doors from her Sunday morning services and errands. After checking in with Thom, who was always the de-facto manager whenever Mabel was gone, she pulled her stool in from the back room and set up her usual perch, keeping her eye on customers and staff alike. No one and nothing escaped her omniscient gaze.
After another ten minutes, Mabel called Anna to her. “What’s up,” she said.
“You workin’ too hard?”
“What?” Anna asked.
“You lookin’ pale, honey.”
“I think I’m all right.”
Mabel shook her head. “You need a break, you let me know.”
“I’m fine, Mabel,” Anna said, smiling at her in a way that tried to say, ‘Quit worrying.’ Mabel gave her a dubious look, but she backed off anyway.
“You’re so laid back with this whole pregnancy thing, Anna,” Cynthia said to her as they filled up sodas at the fountain.
“Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve got Mabel to worry about everything.” Anna smiled at her, and Cynthia laughed as she turned to deliver the drinks.
Anna had found that as time went on, she stopped counting her shifts by the hours. She worked so often, picking up the slack here, filling in there, that counting the hours probably would have depressed her anyway. Instead she started measuring by customers. Three customers at Table 12, the closest table to the kitchen, and one customer at Table 1, the booth by the window, later, Mabel’s son Dylan came flying into the café. His perfect professional demeanor was destroyed by the sheen of sweat that shone on his head and pooled at the neck and arms of his blue T-shirt.
“Where is she?” he yelled, a jubilant grin on his face.
“Boy, what on the Lord’s green earth are you yellin’ about?” Mabel yelled right back with a voice that could be heard a block away. But Dylan had already spotted Anna. He ran to her, still yelling incoherently, circled his arms around her hips and twirled her into the air. Startled and the smallest bit scared, Anna pushed her hands across Dylan’s chest, forcing him to put her down. But he didn’t remove his arms.
“Dylan, wha—”
“I sold the pictures!” Dylan gasped, his lack of breath finally catching up to him. “I sold those pictures to that pervy mag and,” he gasped again, “the graphics editor called. He loved them! He handed them off,” Dylan wheezed for a second, but shook his head when Anna offered him some water, “to another editor who wants more! He wants,” Dylan coughed, “he wants you to do some modeling for them! He wants you to come in next week for a fitting. A thousand bucks!” Dylan looked down at her with a smile that practically took up the entire restaurant. But his joy began to turn to worry as Anna continued to stare dumbly at him. “Anna, didja hear me?”
Anna didn’t say anything.
“Honey?” Mabel said as she walked up to the pair, putting her hand on Anna’s shoulder.
“A … a th-thousand dollars?”
Dylan’s face relaxed and the joy returned. “Yes! A thousand dollars. More if they want you back again after that.”
But Anna couldn’t think that far ahead yet. “A thousand dollars? As in, dollars?!”
“Yes, yes!” Dylan laughed. “It’ll take a few days, at least one for fitting and another day or two for shooting, but yes! A thousand dollars.”
“I … I …”
“Git her over to the table, now!” Mabel ordered, and Dylan, like the rest of the staff in the dining room, rushed to obey, leading Liz to the nearest empty table so she could sit down.
“Water!”
“I … can’t. I can’t do it.”
“What?!” Dylan screeched.
“Anna, what?” Cynthia asked with astonishment.
“I can’t do it. It was supposed to be a one-time thing.”
“Anna, darling,” Dylan chuckled, “I don’t think you heard me. A thousand dollars!”
“I tell you, I can’t do it!” Anna insisted excitedly.
“A’right, everybody calm down,” Mabel ordered. “Dylan, sit down and eat something, boy. Get some meat on those bones. Cynthia, you and me’re gonna take Anna upstairs. Now.”
No one thought of disobeying her orders for an instant.
“I can’t do it,” Anna kept mumbling as Cynthia and Mabel helped her up the stairs. “I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s fine, honey, just don’t faint again,” Mabel told her.
That was Mabel, ever the voice of reason and common sense.
Anna was near panic. A thousand dollars … maybe more. She could go to a doctor again, make sure everything was all right with the baby. But what if somebody else saw hands glowing through her stomach? Anna might not know much about having babies, but she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to see glowing hands. If somebody else saw, she’d have to explain it. And if she couldn’t explain it, then something might happen to her. To her baby. And she couldn’t let anything happen to her baby.
“I can’t do it,” she said again after Mabel sat down next to her on the sofa in the apartment upstairs, the one that usually doubled as a resting place for some of the employees on the night shifts.
“No one’s saying you have to, honey. All you have to do right now is drink this,” Mabel instructed her, holding a glass of water that Cynthia had fetched to her lips. Liz drank as instructed. “Good. Now, honey, you know you can’t get all upset like that. It’s not good for the baby. Dylan shouldn’ta behaved that way. You feelin’ better now?”
Anna nodded. “Yes, I’m all right.”
“Good. Why don’t you rest up for a while? You can finish your shift later.” Anna started to object, but Mabel wouldn’t hear of anything else. “It ain’t like I don’t know where to find you when I need ya.” With a smile, she ushered Cynthia back downstairs. “And honey,” Anna turned to look at Mabel as she stood at the top of the stairs, “remember. Breath.”
Anna took her time to relax. She sat on the couch a long time, staring into space and thinking. Now and then the sound of customers laughing loudly, of dishes clanging in the kitchen, of Mabel’s deep contralto drifted up to her. She looked around at the living room. A pile of sheets, used by whoever had slept on the pull-out couch the night before, sat in a corner near the stairs. She looked through the door to the bathroom and stared at the cupboard under the sink, where, nestled in among the cleaning supplies and extra rolls of toilet paper, a box of individually wrapped toothbrushes sat. Was this the sort of place that would be good for a baby? At least one of the diner employees slept here each week, usually closer to one a night. More on the weekends. Having a screaming baby in the next room while they were trying to sleep wouldn’t exactly be good for morale.
On the other hand, where could she go? Even if she took the money, Anna had quickly realized that even a thousand bucks didn’t last too long. She bought only necessities for herself, spent almost nothing on food since she worked so much at the diner, and had saved up nearly seven hundred dollars after paying back Mabel for the clothes and shoes. But that was already changing with her pregnancy. She’d started to look at cribs, strollers, blankets, bottles, clothes, and maybe a monitor for when she was downstairs. Seven hundred dollars was barely going to cover all that. Seventeen hundred dollars, though, might be enough to find a place somewhere. A studio, maybe.
But was that wise? After all, Anna didn’t really know anything about taking care of a baby, and something told her maternal instinct would only take her so far. She’d meant to go to the library and borrow some books, but she’d been running ragged at the diner lately, and then was spending an awful lot of time looking in the mirror searching for glowing hands. The library had sort of fallen off her list of Things To Do. Living above the diner would give her plenty of experienced mothers to learn from. Many of the other waitresses in the diner had kids who could advise her. And if she ever did anything wrong, Mabel would undoubtedly let her know it. Not to mention she’d be guaranteed a babysitter any time she needed it.
But would it be fair to leech off of their kindness like that? All the waitresses had their own jobs and their own kids to take care of. It wouldn’t be right to use her co-workers as sitters like that. It wasn’t exactly in their job description. And they had their own kids to take care of.
Plus, would it really be a good idea to have other people looking after her baby all the time? Anna knew only one thing for certain, and that was that the baby she carried inside of her wasn’t exactly normal. That didn’t change her feelings for her child; in fact, it only made her love the baby even more. She knew that she was all this baby had to protect it against the world, against people who would want to hurt her baby. And there would be people, she knew. Monsters, more like. Anna would be responsible for making sure that no one knew, that no one ever suspected, that her baby might not be normal. And since she was already experiencing glowing hands and the baby hadn’t even been born yet, that might not be an easy task.
But all this was in the future. The problem she had to deal with now was, whether she should pose for these pictures. In God knew what.
Unconsciously Anna ran her hand over her tummy. Her baby was healthy, she could tell, and resting. Anna nodded. Rest sounded like a very good idea. Slowly she walked back to her soft, warm bed. She curled onto one side and pulled her legs up and drifted into sleep in the fetal position.
Inside her belly, her baby fell asleep in exactly the same position.
~*~*~
TBC
My thanks to:
RiceKrispy
Katydid
DMB
Alien_Friend
Trulov
Aurorabee
Roswell4Life - nice screen name.
Jo - yeah, that Tess is pretty damn evil, ain't she?
uw51
Cereth
Behrluv32 - Okay, you don't really have tar, right?
Heavenli24
JojoTheOrange - Seriously. Loving the screen name.
Chelle - my only ally. In oh so many ways.
Luna_Seer
Synera
Cocogurl
L-J-L 76
Skynet
Carter13
Bettylove8 - I seriously love your story. When are you updating again?
Alien614
Raemac
Kristy
Ti88
Emz80m
Zanssoulmate08 - you evil, sadistic, incredibly lucky little witch. IT WAS YOUR CHALLENGE! How come everyone's blaming me?
Paper
Dreamerfrvrp3 - HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Dreamer_6
Wench on a Leash
Tears_Of_Mercury
Sirio
Lurkers
Thanks for all the support, everyone!
The Butterfly Loss
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Remember. Breath.
I feel the earth move under my feet,
I feel the sky tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down,
Tumbling down.
-I Feel The Earth Move
Carole King
Anna stood in front of the bathroom mirror with her shirt pulled up, resting over the swell of her belly. She knew she wasn’t huge – her stomach was barely the size of a small cantaloupe – but that wasn’t what she was looking at. She was trying to see if there was anything going on inside the tummy.
She was looking for little glowing hands.
It sounded crazy. She knew it sounded crazy. If she didn’t see something soon, she would begin to believe that she was crazy. That she’d just imagined those tiny handprints in the mirror after the photo shoot, now over two weeks ago.
But at the same time, she knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“Anna!” Cynthia called through the closed door. “Are you okay in there?”
Startled, Anna shoved her shirt down. “Yeah! I’m fine,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, you’ve just been in there for a while. We were getting worried. You sure everything’s okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll be right out.” Anna looked at herself in the mirror. “Keep it together,” she told herself. “You’re fine. You’re fine.” Her pep-talk complete, she exited the bathroom and went back to work.
Twenty minutes later Mabel walked in through the café doors from her Sunday morning services and errands. After checking in with Thom, who was always the de-facto manager whenever Mabel was gone, she pulled her stool in from the back room and set up her usual perch, keeping her eye on customers and staff alike. No one and nothing escaped her omniscient gaze.
After another ten minutes, Mabel called Anna to her. “What’s up,” she said.
“You workin’ too hard?”
“What?” Anna asked.
“You lookin’ pale, honey.”
“I think I’m all right.”
Mabel shook her head. “You need a break, you let me know.”
“I’m fine, Mabel,” Anna said, smiling at her in a way that tried to say, ‘Quit worrying.’ Mabel gave her a dubious look, but she backed off anyway.
“You’re so laid back with this whole pregnancy thing, Anna,” Cynthia said to her as they filled up sodas at the fountain.
“Why shouldn’t I be? I’ve got Mabel to worry about everything.” Anna smiled at her, and Cynthia laughed as she turned to deliver the drinks.
Anna had found that as time went on, she stopped counting her shifts by the hours. She worked so often, picking up the slack here, filling in there, that counting the hours probably would have depressed her anyway. Instead she started measuring by customers. Three customers at Table 12, the closest table to the kitchen, and one customer at Table 1, the booth by the window, later, Mabel’s son Dylan came flying into the café. His perfect professional demeanor was destroyed by the sheen of sweat that shone on his head and pooled at the neck and arms of his blue T-shirt.
“Where is she?” he yelled, a jubilant grin on his face.
“Boy, what on the Lord’s green earth are you yellin’ about?” Mabel yelled right back with a voice that could be heard a block away. But Dylan had already spotted Anna. He ran to her, still yelling incoherently, circled his arms around her hips and twirled her into the air. Startled and the smallest bit scared, Anna pushed her hands across Dylan’s chest, forcing him to put her down. But he didn’t remove his arms.
“Dylan, wha—”
“I sold the pictures!” Dylan gasped, his lack of breath finally catching up to him. “I sold those pictures to that pervy mag and,” he gasped again, “the graphics editor called. He loved them! He handed them off,” Dylan wheezed for a second, but shook his head when Anna offered him some water, “to another editor who wants more! He wants,” Dylan coughed, “he wants you to do some modeling for them! He wants you to come in next week for a fitting. A thousand bucks!” Dylan looked down at her with a smile that practically took up the entire restaurant. But his joy began to turn to worry as Anna continued to stare dumbly at him. “Anna, didja hear me?”
Anna didn’t say anything.
“Honey?” Mabel said as she walked up to the pair, putting her hand on Anna’s shoulder.
“A … a th-thousand dollars?”
Dylan’s face relaxed and the joy returned. “Yes! A thousand dollars. More if they want you back again after that.”
But Anna couldn’t think that far ahead yet. “A thousand dollars? As in, dollars?!”
“Yes, yes!” Dylan laughed. “It’ll take a few days, at least one for fitting and another day or two for shooting, but yes! A thousand dollars.”
“I … I …”
“Git her over to the table, now!” Mabel ordered, and Dylan, like the rest of the staff in the dining room, rushed to obey, leading Liz to the nearest empty table so she could sit down.
“Water!”
“I … can’t. I can’t do it.”
“What?!” Dylan screeched.
“Anna, what?” Cynthia asked with astonishment.
“I can’t do it. It was supposed to be a one-time thing.”
“Anna, darling,” Dylan chuckled, “I don’t think you heard me. A thousand dollars!”
“I tell you, I can’t do it!” Anna insisted excitedly.
“A’right, everybody calm down,” Mabel ordered. “Dylan, sit down and eat something, boy. Get some meat on those bones. Cynthia, you and me’re gonna take Anna upstairs. Now.”
No one thought of disobeying her orders for an instant.
“I can’t do it,” Anna kept mumbling as Cynthia and Mabel helped her up the stairs. “I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s fine, honey, just don’t faint again,” Mabel told her.
That was Mabel, ever the voice of reason and common sense.
Anna was near panic. A thousand dollars … maybe more. She could go to a doctor again, make sure everything was all right with the baby. But what if somebody else saw hands glowing through her stomach? Anna might not know much about having babies, but she was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to see glowing hands. If somebody else saw, she’d have to explain it. And if she couldn’t explain it, then something might happen to her. To her baby. And she couldn’t let anything happen to her baby.
“I can’t do it,” she said again after Mabel sat down next to her on the sofa in the apartment upstairs, the one that usually doubled as a resting place for some of the employees on the night shifts.
“No one’s saying you have to, honey. All you have to do right now is drink this,” Mabel instructed her, holding a glass of water that Cynthia had fetched to her lips. Liz drank as instructed. “Good. Now, honey, you know you can’t get all upset like that. It’s not good for the baby. Dylan shouldn’ta behaved that way. You feelin’ better now?”
Anna nodded. “Yes, I’m all right.”
“Good. Why don’t you rest up for a while? You can finish your shift later.” Anna started to object, but Mabel wouldn’t hear of anything else. “It ain’t like I don’t know where to find you when I need ya.” With a smile, she ushered Cynthia back downstairs. “And honey,” Anna turned to look at Mabel as she stood at the top of the stairs, “remember. Breath.”
Anna took her time to relax. She sat on the couch a long time, staring into space and thinking. Now and then the sound of customers laughing loudly, of dishes clanging in the kitchen, of Mabel’s deep contralto drifted up to her. She looked around at the living room. A pile of sheets, used by whoever had slept on the pull-out couch the night before, sat in a corner near the stairs. She looked through the door to the bathroom and stared at the cupboard under the sink, where, nestled in among the cleaning supplies and extra rolls of toilet paper, a box of individually wrapped toothbrushes sat. Was this the sort of place that would be good for a baby? At least one of the diner employees slept here each week, usually closer to one a night. More on the weekends. Having a screaming baby in the next room while they were trying to sleep wouldn’t exactly be good for morale.
On the other hand, where could she go? Even if she took the money, Anna had quickly realized that even a thousand bucks didn’t last too long. She bought only necessities for herself, spent almost nothing on food since she worked so much at the diner, and had saved up nearly seven hundred dollars after paying back Mabel for the clothes and shoes. But that was already changing with her pregnancy. She’d started to look at cribs, strollers, blankets, bottles, clothes, and maybe a monitor for when she was downstairs. Seven hundred dollars was barely going to cover all that. Seventeen hundred dollars, though, might be enough to find a place somewhere. A studio, maybe.
But was that wise? After all, Anna didn’t really know anything about taking care of a baby, and something told her maternal instinct would only take her so far. She’d meant to go to the library and borrow some books, but she’d been running ragged at the diner lately, and then was spending an awful lot of time looking in the mirror searching for glowing hands. The library had sort of fallen off her list of Things To Do. Living above the diner would give her plenty of experienced mothers to learn from. Many of the other waitresses in the diner had kids who could advise her. And if she ever did anything wrong, Mabel would undoubtedly let her know it. Not to mention she’d be guaranteed a babysitter any time she needed it.
But would it be fair to leech off of their kindness like that? All the waitresses had their own jobs and their own kids to take care of. It wouldn’t be right to use her co-workers as sitters like that. It wasn’t exactly in their job description. And they had their own kids to take care of.
Plus, would it really be a good idea to have other people looking after her baby all the time? Anna knew only one thing for certain, and that was that the baby she carried inside of her wasn’t exactly normal. That didn’t change her feelings for her child; in fact, it only made her love the baby even more. She knew that she was all this baby had to protect it against the world, against people who would want to hurt her baby. And there would be people, she knew. Monsters, more like. Anna would be responsible for making sure that no one knew, that no one ever suspected, that her baby might not be normal. And since she was already experiencing glowing hands and the baby hadn’t even been born yet, that might not be an easy task.
But all this was in the future. The problem she had to deal with now was, whether she should pose for these pictures. In God knew what.
Unconsciously Anna ran her hand over her tummy. Her baby was healthy, she could tell, and resting. Anna nodded. Rest sounded like a very good idea. Slowly she walked back to her soft, warm bed. She curled onto one side and pulled her legs up and drifted into sleep in the fetal position.
Inside her belly, her baby fell asleep in exactly the same position.
~*~*~
TBC