who: @sloedownwulf
coffee. coffee. coffee. she's had so much fucking coffee. The eggs and the sausage come and she doesn't touch them because the smell of the grease turns her stomach. She needs to write... something. Anything. A.J.'s fronting the bill for her school loans, the gallery opening... now that some of the dust from the absolute, well, wreck of the last week is starting to settle... all of that's reminded her that she hasn't fucking created anything. And they're not going to hang a poem of hers up in a gallery. Nobody's going to buy a one-off vignette of hers and hang it on a wall. That's not the reason she enjoys writing, and it never has been - but the barbs from her mother, real, and the jokes from A.J., in good nature but no less painful to hear, have her feeling some type of way about how useless that fifty thousand dollar piece of paper has become.
But its fucking hard. It's so fucking hard to write. To focus. She can't sleep because she still hasn't stopped being afraid that the world she wakes up into is going to be the real one, where she's being eaten alive. And the fucking... the sound. Everything bothers her. Things she's never noticed before. The hum a light gives off - the fucking awful sounds of a restaurant full of people stuffing meat and eggs and syrup down their fucking mouths. What started as brainstorming has turned into incoherent scribbling that she can't even read, and when the booth next to her scrapes silverware on ceramics it sends a shiver down her spine so intense that she snaps the pen in her hand in half, spilling indigo all down the palm of her hand. Autumn stands, abrupt, slaps... what, one, two, three tens down for her two eggs and sausage and coffee that she hasn't touched, and rushes out, shouldering past a waitress with a cursoy, grumbled apology on her way out. The outside light hits her eyes like a truck - even the colors seem off somehow. She's got hours to kill until she has to go pick A.J. back up, so she decides to just walk, rounding the corner to cut through an alley behind the diner and get back to the park where she's left the rental. She stops dead in the alley, sun overhead beating down on a shaggy, mangy brown hulk not fifty yards away, snarling and growling and staring at her. She feels her breath catch when she sees it tip its head down, tearing a hollow into a body underneath its paws, muzzle all slick and red. She recognizes the body, because its her. The beast snaps a barking grunt at her before it plunges its head into the cavity, and Autumn feels everything well up and out of her, spilling half-drunk coffee out of her guts and into a corner of the alley. When she looks up, though, it's just her and the daytime air. Then she hears somebody call out to her from behind, and she stands, shaking her head, trying to act like nothing that just happened happened. Pre-emptively, she puts an ink-stained hand up to the stranger "I'm fine, just... I'm fine."
