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 Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 6:48 pm
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Posted: Sat May 16, 2009 6:43 am
**I think he's lying**
Fish was finally beginning to emerge from his pain-pill-induced stupor. After arriving at the hospital, whatever they’d given him made him black out. The last thing he remembered was getting dizzier and dizzier in the ER waiting room until he finally passed out in a chair by the nurse’s station. Clearly some time had passed, because the more Fish woke up, the more he was aware that he was lying on his own bed in his own bedroom with a light blue cast on his left arm, which still hurt.
Also, his father was sitting next to the bed, and Prosper did not look particularly happy.
“Fish,” said Prosper, in a voice that was tired and a bit worried but not entirely angry, “What happened?”
Fish looked down at his hands, finding the cast incredibly interested, and deliberated over which lie to tell. Surfing down the banister would not go over well, he suspected. “I tripped,” he said, very deliberately. “My shoe was untied and I fell down the stairs and I landed funny.”
“Right in front of Ylaine,” said Prosper, and Fish nodded. The girl was in his Studio Art class of seniors, and while other teachers were always indicating that she was top of her class, her artistic skills, while they showed sophistication, were not the sort of inspired brilliance he had come to expect some his more intelligent advanced-level students.
However, judging from the foul mood that Ylaine was in for the rest of the afternoon, Fish’s fall had not simply been an accident.
Fish frowned at the cast on his arm. “How long do I hafta wear this for?” he demanded.
“The doctor said you can have it off in a month,” Prosper informed him. Fish groaned.
“Aw man, that’s like half of June!” he groaned.
Prosper chuckled sympathetically and got up. Fish looked over and saw his sister standing in the doorway.
“Aw, man, Feely,” he groaned, “Did you come to make fun of me, too?”
“No,” said Ophelia. Prosper whispered something to her as he left the room, and she nodded to him. She crossed the room and sat down at the foot of the bed.
“What really happened?” she asked, smiling conspiratorially at him. “Because I doubt you had time to take off your shoes before you fell down the stairs.”
Fish hesitated for a moment before telling her everything. “I surfed down the banister!” he exclaimed. “It was so cool! I went so fast! I was gonna make it all the way to the end, too! But then I lost my balance and stupid Ylaine was there.”
He made a mock-disgusted face. Ophelia ruffled his hair.
“You’re not gonna tell dad, are you?” Fish asked, wincing sheepishly at her. Ophelia looked affronted.
“Me? Tell dad?” she asked. “No way. I need this a collateral in case you ever catch me doing something I’m not supposed to do!”
Fish looked shocked. “You never do anything wrong,” he accused, because it was more or less true.
“Sure I do,” said Ophelia, winking at him. “I just never get caught.”
She laughed and left Fish to try to imagine what on earth she could have possibly ever done wrong in the way of misbehaving. He couldn’t imagine Ophelia breaking rules unless it was to, say, save someone’s life. Maybe, he suspected, she had only said it to make him feel better. Yeah, that had to be it.
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Posted: Mon May 18, 2009 8:32 pm
PRP Casting Nets - Fish and Crowley discuss shenanigans they can get up to once the cast comes off. They sneak out of class to look up videos of le Parkour and decide that when they are badass traceurs, their soundtrack will be better than the video's.
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Posted: Tue May 19, 2009 7:29 pm
PRP Paper Aeroplane - Fish is stuck inside coloring while everyone else goes to recess. He meets Jasper and Lucien, a most dichotomous pair of brothers. Crayons get thrown.
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 6:39 pm
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Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 6:41 pm
PRP Preliminary Journeys in the Realm - Fish dreams about a strange underwater city and a statue. Galleai joins him in the form of a literal catfish. They encounter two mysterious figures. Galleai tells him to wake up. He never learned her name.
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Posted: Fri May 22, 2009 9:34 pm
**Look in a Book**
The strangest thing about the dream was that Fish was not entirely sure it had been a dream. Well, in one sense, of course it had been a dream because he fell asleep and he went somewhere else and wasn’t that what dreaming was? But on the other hand he had fallen asleep and he had gone somewhere else, and that wasn’t really dreaming at all, wasn’t it? The bit with the catfish thing was admittedly weird – he’d had the distinct sense that it was something entirely separate from his own mind, but at the same time he’d gotten the sense that the catfish thing belonged there even less than he did…
Furthermore, Fish could not in his entire life remember ever having that sort of lucid dream. Ever. His dreams were always directed. He watched helplessly as his body played out whatever sort of strangeness his subconscious had in store for him.
Whatever it was, whatever associated weirdness he had experienced the night before, it kept Fish distracted all through morning lessons. He alternately drifted off into confused thought, frantically scribbled down dates and names about this history of the Barton Regulars, and dozed off only to wake with a start a few minutes later. When the teacher released them to go to the library for free reading time, it came as a relief.
Remembering the columned buildings from his ‘dream’, Fish found himself wandering the mythology section. Most of the books were big and dusty and too complicated for him to read, and he learned how to recognize these and avoid them. Some of the books didn’t have pictures, and they were also a disappointment because Fish was not very good at deciphering blocks of text.
At the end of the row, he came across a book that piqued his interest. It had a big temple sort of structure on the front cover with the exact kind of columns he’d seen in his dream. He wrinkled his brow in concentration and read the title.
“An illustrated guide to: Greek Gods”
Illustrated, Fish remembered, meant that it had pictures. He sat down right there in the middle of the mythology section to flip through the book thinking that, just maybe, there would be some sort of clue connecting the architecture.
The Greeks, apparently, had gods of all sorts of things. They had a god of death and a god of grain and a god of fire and a god of the future who got his liver picked out every day. (There was a picture for that one, and it was gross. There were pictures for everything, but that one set the standard for yucky.)
Fish kept flipping pages, only half paying attention because he had not yet found anything useful. He paused every so often to read a sentence or two where a picture caught his eye, and passed gods of knowledge, sun, moon, and sleep. None of them seemed to have anything to do with his dream. He flipped another page, and froze with a sense of déjà vu.
The picture was of a powerfully-built man with wild hair. He held a trident. Fish recognized him – it was the same man as in the statue in his dream. He looked to see what the book said about the man.
“Poseidon was the god of the ocean. His brother Zeus was king of the gods, and his brother Hades was king of the underworld.”
All that was fine and dandy and even made some semblance of sense in context. What confused Fish was how it had wound up in his dream in the first place, because usually you learned about something first and dreamed about it later, not the other way around.
He closed the book and put it back on the shelf, no less confused than when he had begun his search.
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Posted: Wed May 27, 2009 9:25 am
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Posted: Sat May 30, 2009 12:16 pm
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Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 8:33 am
**Making it Sound Cooler than it is**
A little over a month after the cast went on, it got taken off and Fish was pronounced ‘Healthy and Normal’. The whole car ride home he spent flexing his wrist and boggling at the tan line and the fact that it was now noticeably thinner than his other hand. The doctor said that was what happened when you broke it – it was in a cast and you couldn’t use it so the muscles kind of went away. But they’d be back soon enough.
“And I still have the whole summer left!” he said happily, bouncing in his seat in the back of his father’s little two-door hatch-back. This bouncing made the car rattle a bit as it chugged its way up the road towards Tidewater – clearly it had seen better days. Prosper looked at him in the rear-view mirror.
“Just don’t break it again,” he said.
“I won’t!” said Fish, who thought that having his arm in a cast for the first three real weeks of summer had thoroughly sucked. “Dad, have you ever broken a bone?”
Prosper laughed grimly. “Several.”
“How?” asked Fish.
“General wear and tear,” shrugged Prosper. They pulled up to a stoplight and he turned around in his seat, pointing to his crooked nose. “See this?” he asked
“Yeah,” nodded Fish. He and Ophelia had always wondered how their father had broken his nose. Sometimes they placed bets on it. Fish stood to win a pack of bubblegum and some gold if space pirates had captured him. “How’d that happen?”
Prosper sighed. “Someone punched me in the face.”
“Boring!” sighed Fish, who had really been hoping for space pirates. Someone honked behind them. “Green light, Dad.”
Prosper turned his attention back to the road and drove.
“Who punched you in the face?” asked Fish. Maybe there were still space pirates involved somehow. Prosper laughed at his enthusiasm.
“An old painting rival,” he said. “I was being disagreeable.”
“Is that all?” asked Fish, clearly underwhelmed. Where were the pirates and epic fights? “Feely said you were cooler than that.”
Prosper laughed. “I’m glad to know your sister has such a high opinion of me.”
“Was it a bar fight?” asked Fish. That was Ophelia’s bet. If it was a bar fight, he had to do her chores.
“That was the second time,” laughed Prosper.
“You broke your nose twice?” asked Fish. Prosper nodded.
“So, what have we learned from all this?” he asked.
“That you are totally awesome!” cheered Fish. Prosper chuckled.
“I was thinking something more along the lines of ‘Breaking bones is bad, don’t do it,’” he replied.
“But you make it sound so cool!”
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Posted: Wed Jun 24, 2009 5:14 pm
PRP Headstrong - Fish encounters Vox alone at the pool. For a while things look like they might turn violent, but Fish gets the kelpie out of the water. In the end, an understanding is reached and the boys agree to tolerate each other.
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Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:26 pm
PRP Brethren - Fish and Crowley do Parkour and become blood brothers.
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 5:16 am
PRP Beach Bunnies - Fish and Darsh meet up on the beach. Darsh's swim trunks are really purple.
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Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 5:18 am
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Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2009 7:24 pm
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