(no subject)

[alexmegami]

I finished the story!

I'm not entirely happy with the ending, but I'll have time to work on it once I get further feedback in class, right? Assuming I even use this one for my final story...

Comments are not only welcome, they're appreciated and possibly even begged for. I am having a really hard time looking at it objectively, and I'm pretty sure it falls apart halfway through, but I don't know how to fix that.

Anyway, here we go:

Vicki's studio is dark, but she is so absorbed in the sculpture that she does not notice. It is a small statue, only two inches tall; she paints its hair, so detailed that each strand is separate. She sets it down to dry on a huge table, one tiny face among the many littered across the room. This is her millionth doll.

They have only taken her a few months to complete, a few months of shutting herself away from the world and its responsibilities. She is overwhelmed by how many there are, and chokes on bile and tears. Their tiny faces, drawn to be smiling, stare at her. Without understanding why, she flees into the muggy August night.

Aaron is waiting for her outside, the same way he has waited every night since the announcement was made. Sometimes, when she paints, she looks down out the window to see him, leaning against his Civic, waiting. If she doesn't come out by five in the morning, he leaves, but he's always there again at midnight, waiting.

She never asks where he goes. It doesn't matter, she knows; wherever he is, he is there because it fulfills some purpose. He smells of Old Spice and cooked rice, not entirely pleasant, but familiar. He wraps an arm around her neck and kisses her forehead.

"Oh, Vicki," he says. "You have to stop beating yourself up like this. It won't help."

She wants to shove him. His pragmatism is suffocating. Instead she sags against him, lets him hold her, thinks about her mother's smug smile and I-told-you-so attitude when Vicki showed her the engagement ring.

"I only have two thousand names," she says, hugging herself.

"I spoke to Ian and Melissa today. They're staying."

She nods. Only half of their university classmates are joining them; some of them think it's their duty to stay, some don't think it'll be as bad as Aaron predicts. Vicki wants to scream: Her fiancé has had people terraforming a planet in Alpha Centauri for the past three years for just this eventuality, this impending war. He has a spaceship nearing completion. This is not a venture they are undertaking lightly.

The car radio is talking about the Vicis revolutionaries again. Ever since they took over Madagascar, there has been nothing else in the news. America started up camps to contain them; China had them preemptively aborted, and threw out the ones that had already been born. Most countries stayed away from the subject entirely, the uneasy silence amplifying the sounds of race wars taking place in the streets.

Vicki stays inside most days, even when she isn't at the studio. Outside, she feels confronted, strangers' eyes following her, like they can see her for what she is. Street preachers shout that the Lord will open your eyes; the Lord will let you see the Vicis for what they truly are, with their hell-granted power. It takes effort to remain stoic, effort not to lunge at them. A year ago, she would have tried convincing them otherwise. But a year ago, she would have smiled at strangers, said hello, held doors for them. Now, she keeps her eyes to the sidewalk: contact makes her responsible for them. 'Are you one in a million?' She wonders. 'Am I?'

She spends two weeks compiling the list. Aaron helps, when he has an hour to spare. It starts with geneticists and engineers, scientists that Aaron thinks will be useful in the years ahead. When those contacts are exhausted, professors are whom they search for: the historians and librarians of the world. Doctors willing to leave are rather easy to find but farmers, Vicki discovers, have become a rarity. Boxes of takeout pile around them, uneaten as they cold-call. They argue over whether religious leaders are necessary or desirable, given the circumstances, and Vicki doesn't ask about the writers. She picks up the phone again and again, wondering if this next name will accuse her of being a druggie, a Scientologist, or a conspiracy theorist.

The final list is mostly comprised of their fellow Vicis.

She complains to Aaron on the last night that it isn't right. He shrugs. "People are allowed to make their choices, Vicki, even if they're wrong choices."

"But they're going to die."

"Petulance won't make them change their minds. It's no good thinking about it."

She gets up stiffly from her chair and kisses him goodnight. She wants to be ready for tomorrow.

They visit her mother the next evening. Aaron has set the day aside for Vicki; she appreciates the effort, but knows that he has probably worked overtime for weeks to allow for this. She meets with her mother alone.

"How was it?" Aaron asks when she returns.

"You know my mother," she says. "She disapproves."

"Why?"

There are so many reasons, and none of them are kind. She resents them for this: Aaron for asking, her mother for dredging up the memories, Natalie for sleeping with Aaron in the first place. "She thinks I'm settling," she says, finally. She doesn't tell him that her mother expected her to fail at this, too.

He places a hand on her thigh. "Have you changed your mind?"

She kisses his cheek for reassurance. "No. I didn't want her permission, anyway."

They hadn't had time to announce the banns, which Vicki would have preferred. Two of Aaron's friends meet them outside the large stone office. The ceremony inside is quiet and quick: five sentences, five signatures. Normally they couldn't have done this so quickly, Aaron tells her, but he knows someone who knows someone in the department. The honeymoon will have to wait.

Aaron is gone again that night. Vicki builds a raft out of Popsicle sticks, wedges six Life pieces into the slats and floats it in the tub. She wishes she'd paid more attention in first-year Ethics; maybe someone told her what the right choice was, and she just wasn't listening.

When Aaron comes home, Vicki is gone, but six plastic figurines rest below cold bathwater.

He finds her in her studio, kneeling among overturned tables and shattered pieces of ceramic. She looks like a wrung-out sponge, and the sea of destruction is what poured forth. Eyes stare up at him as he picks his way towards her; tiny hands reach out in despair.

"What?" He asks, crouching down next to her.

"I saved one," she repeats. "Is it the right one?"

He takes it from her, examining it in the fluorescent light. Like the others, it is only two inches tall; its face is sunny, and it holds a small pad of paper. "Yes," he says.

It is the first time they've spoken since Natalie.

He takes her to the dormitory before they leave. They want to say their final goodbyes to the ruins, and Vicki picks up a piece of the debris, "for memory". She realizes suddenly that she may never see this sight again, this historical monument to the breakdown of communication and she squeezes Aaron's hand, the stone between them smooth and warm.

"Ready?" He asks.



Especially towards the end, I feel like I've picked up a kind of frantic pace that I can't maintain. My images seem blotchy and ill-concieved, and I think I may have aspired too high. Serena suggested breaking up the exposition about the Vicis and scattering it throughout, to let the reader put together what's going on in the background. I'm not sure how that would work, and I'm not sure I shouldn't scrap the entire spaceship thing. I could probably dump it in favor of something a little more realistic.

Comments?