Irony -- Short circa Summer 2006

As promised many moons ago, I am going to start posting some of my short stories and scraps. Please let me know what you think.Irony by VD DeVau...Ronnie ate the apple in small deliberate bites. Her stomach clinched and released with each swallow. It didn’t taste like much, but she wasn’t used to eating. Funny things you can stop getting used to doing.Her arms ached and her legs were jelly when she tried to get up off the cot. Some tubing in her nose kept her from sitting up farther than the nurse had adjusted the makeshift hospital bed. Her vision was as keen as ever and in the dark she could see Pearson lying almost too still on the next cot. She waited to make sure that his chest was rising and falling before she threw the apple core at him.Pearson kept right on sleeping. She didn’t risk calling out his name. Too many people packed too close together, she didn’t want any of them to wake up if she could help it.The room was a drab green; she remembered that from yesterday when they had wheeled them in from the operating room.Ronnie touched the lump just underneath the swell of her right breast. The device was firm to the touch but she was not sure of its shape. Her fingertips told her it was oblong and thicker than her thumb, but her fingers weren’t to be trusted. The tips of them had been sliced to pieces and scarred over so many times that her sense of touch had begun to atrophy. She used her palm. It was cylindrical and harder than her fingers suggested. Metal she deduced. A battery her brain screamed.Getting caught raiding the court holding area should have meant death. Personally she’d taken four pulses from the Policia’s gun before she fell and knew that Pearson had taken more. The burnt meaty smell of her own body reminded her of death. Dead would be nice. A thought attached to no forethought, only the past, Ronnie pulled at the tube in her nose and couldn’t bear breathing whatever they were pumping into her when she couldn’t even die.Death would be nice.There were two ways to kill irony - with a better joke or a foreigner. A better joke canceled out the effect of the proceeding attempt, and a foreigner didn’t usually understand the subtleties involved in the ironic. Ironic people were harder to kill, but the weapons were similar. Ironic borns could be hurt but the amount of force required to break their bones and dismember them could only usually be generated by some older Ironic. Foreign weapons had held, for a time, the promise of Ironic death but Ronnie still hadn’t known anyone who’d actually succumbed to a laser or bio-wep the soft-folk from elsewhere had brought along with them from over the horizon.Ronnie could dream of death. Of nothingness. Of course she couldn’t speak of the nothing, that was heresy. Ironics were reincarnated. They all knew it for true. Many lives were led with the same soul. As close to immorality as they were, they all hoped for more time.Ronnie had only lived this one long life and already she thought she had lived too long. Pearson was on his third, and he was done.The plan had been simple, break into the soft-folk building, and get murdered.But they were both still alive.The implant under her breast hummed to life. A barely noticeable revolution that she knew she could pretend wasn’t happening and because she didn’t know what was happening, it was best to pretend.She would snap Pearson’s neck. The thought crept into her mind both suddenly and surreptitiously. She would end him even if it meant being alone here in a green field hospitalwith soft-skinned people who knew nothing of irony or Ironic people. She would at least set Pearson free if she could. And if she was not enough of his superior to kill him at least by attempting she would feel better.Ronnie took the tubing out of her nose and could not find a place to set it down. The machine it was attached to was all triangular tops and round sides. She settled with placing the tubes on the floor and crept over to get a hold on Pearson’s neck.~~~~~~~© VD DeVau....

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Irony -- Short circa Summer 2006

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