oh look! it’s….Teaser Tuesday again!

Funny how it just keeps coming around like that.

This’ll probably be the last for a bit (yes, I know, I’ve said it before), while I get my shit together on WIP6, the UF – that one’s finally off the ground and going very well, wahoo!

This bit is from my contemporary fantasy, tentatively titled RED NOISE, and shelved until further notice. In the last teaser from this piece Our Dubious Heroine, Raina Waltham, had just had her first full-blown synesthetic experience, and beat a man to death with a stapler in her office. She’s in a psychiatric ward now.

***

“Describe this for me, Raina, please. Can you?”

She refused the couch on the grounds that it was too Hollywoodish, but the chair she had defiantly chosen instead was stiff-backed and poorly upholstered. She eyed the couch now, after two weeks of sore hips, and wondered how Dr. Capin would interpret such backpedaling. Patient appeared indecisive and confused. Patient was restless. We had a major breakthrough today. Patient propositioned me.

He was sort of cute. And she hadn’t seen action in more years than it was worth counting. But he thought she was nuts.

She was nuts.

Proof of that, if further proof was needed after she’d beaten a man into a coma with a hand stapler, lay in the mirror on the far wall, which wasn’t a mirror. This was the office where the good doctor met the dangerous ones.

Leaning perilously close to the crazy person, Dr. Capin reached out to tap a familiar block of cramped words on notebook paper, and Raina sighed. Nothing was private in this place.

“I was half asleep when I wrote that, Dr. Capin.”

“Nevertheless, I’m interested. Specifically in the mention of numbers here…’the blue tens were always angry’….what did you mean by that?”

“Doctor, I was talking about stuff from, like, kindergarten. I believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and all sorts of shit back then. Don’t expect it to make sense, ok?”

“But it does make sense, Raina. Tell me…” He held up a sheet of numbers that looked like they’d been copied out of a phone book. “What color are the nines?”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Yellow,” Raina said slowly, trying without success to figure out what the catch here was.

“Ah.”

His satisfaction, as he set the sheet down and leaned back, was burnt orange. She doubted this particular piece of information would improve his opinion of her. She crossed her ankles and willed the traffic-cone shapes falling from his lips to go away. The colors were coming back, filling the room. Raina breathed in slowly and sat on her hands. The doctor didn’t have a stapler on his desk: smart man. “Ah what?”

“Tell me…” Nothing good ever began that way in this room. “Do you really think I printed this in color? A sheet of numbers? Why would I do that?”

She looked at him in bewilderment, noting absently the way the thinning turf of his hair gleamed in the sunlight from the window: it was such a normal sight it eased a knot in her shoulder just to look at it. His hair made no sound, had no smell, didn’t tickle or scrape against her skin. It was soothing hair.

Oh man, she was crazy.