Fiction Friday #22

NaNoWriMo Part 5

Well, this is it for the NaNoWriMo thing as an actual NaNoWriMo thing. I failed even more spectacularly this year than last year, but that's okay; I knew it would happen like that. I'll probably come back to this at some point, but there are other bits of fiction I want to write more/first.

Here goes, it's the beginning of a chapter or section called:

Durden

One of the things that Tyler hated were malls. Either they're freshly cleaned and smell of disinfectant or they haven't been cleaned for a while and they stink like too many monkeys in a cage. Some people believed that they were for convenient shopping, but how could that be when there are eight stores, with different names, that sell the exact same clothes and three stores that sold games and all the so called music stores sold the same fifteen new albums and displayed DVD, not CDs, in the windows?

There was no variety at any mall, anywhere.

Tyler saw them only as locations built for too large parking lots where people could go inside and still convince themselves that they were going "out." They weren't out, though. "Out" was someplace more interesting than Forever 21 or Pottery Bar. "Out" was some activity that wasn't all about money. "Out" was some food that wasn't timed by a machine so it was exactly the same as all the other hundreds of convenient locations. "Out" was people talking about more than the thing in the window or what's on sale or what's new or the slowness of the escalator. Most people rarely, if ever, did "out."

And yet, here he was sitting in the food court on the second floor, sucking on a frozen coffee-like drink, in a mall. At least it was the open mall on K Street, so it didn't carry the stink of too many people crammed into too small a place trying to spend money as quickly as they were sweating. Not that he was comfortable there, but the gas heat lamps really kept the chill out of the air.

"Durden!" he heard and looked around him. No one. It had to be for him, though. No one had a nickname as stupid as this one.

"Durden!" he heard again, but still didn't see anyone.

"Down here, fucker!"

Tyler looked down into the kids’ play-pit and saw Krystia. She'd cut her hair short and dyed it some sort of fiery orange since the day before, but she was the only person he knew who would call anyone a fucker in public where little kids were in earshot. Most of his friends would only do that in front of their own kids, but leave the rest of the world's kids to be tormented by their own parents. Krystia never had that problem. She figured that the world was fucked up as it was, so who was she to pretend it wasn't? That was one of the things that Tyler liked best about her. Well, that and how every so often she came over to his place, licked his entire body, and rode him until they both burned off a Thanksgiving dinner, but didn't want anything crazy in return.

He stood up and said, "I'll be right down."

"Hurry up," she said, "or I may have to fuck one of these giant plastic animals! The rhino's horn's getting me hot!"

Tyler hurried, but didn't run, to the nearest way down, real stairs. He could hear Krystia screaming the Sex Pistols's "God Save the Queen" behind him. He smiled. She was always doing shit like this. Some days she got a crowd that thought she was doing some sort of performance art and started tossing money at her feet. Once she stood on a corner outside of Kaiser singing the word "bullshit" to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" for an hour; she made fifty bucks. Most of the time, though, people just walked a wide path around her. She'd never been arrested for any of it, though. I guess people figured that she was like the homeless guy down the block by The Crest Theater, only she was cleaner, was supposed to have breasts, and was white; those sorts of things always made people more comfortable.

He got to her just as she, with her eyes closed, was screaming, "NO FUTURE FOR YOU! NO FUTURE FOR ME! NO FUTURE! NO FUTURE FOR YOU!"

When she finished, he put his hand on her shoulder. She spun around and took up her generic Bruce Lee stance.

"You want to watch out, little Durden," she said. "I can, very much, kick your ass onto the rhino's horn." He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. She smiled her overly toothy smile and asked, "So, what the fuck am I doing here?"

He led her away from the kids' play pit and said, "Well, you saw what my dad did?"

"Who hasn't? How often do you get to see the fuckin' president have a breakdown? Hell, he's crazier than Regan and Thatcher combine."

"He is."

"So?"

"That's all, really."

"Bullshit," she said, poking his arm. "I call bullshit on you!"

"Ow!"

"You want something." She hit him where she had been poking him.

"Yeah, okay, I do." He tried to fight her off, but it was hard with the drink in his hand.

"What" -- punch! -- "do" -- punch! -- "you" -- punch! punch! -- "want?"

"Help." Tyler backed away from her.

"With what?"

"Shopping?"

"Fuck," she said, and kicked him in the shin.

The things he would put up with to keep his friend with benefits thing going.