Presenting to Sarah: Chapter 4

"People aren't posting enough," my friend Sarah tells me. "I know it's holidays, but..."

But.

"Something must be done about this." I say it to myself, but what can I do? I'm not in a writerly mood just now. So I go and read Sarah's blog, catching up on all the posts I've missed in the last few days since Christmas and my job hit me like a ton of bricks between the eyes of an especially disoriented moose. I found a really funny story on Sarah's blog, all about Fancy and her mother, Wisdom. "That's neat," I thought, "but I can't write a story just now."

Then it occured to me...

Sarah has read the first chapter of a story, and she (along with all the other Smudgettes in the writing club) didn't much like one of my main characters.

"He's so arrogant!"

"He's a unbeliever, and a senior in public high school!" I plead. "Give him a break! He gets better, honest."

They all gave me skeptical looks. "I'll send you the rest of what I have written," I said. "Then you'll see." But in the rush of Finals I never did.

So Sarah, this is just for you. It won't make sense to anybody else, unless that somebody has seen the first chapter. It's not the next chapter, because the next chapter needs a lot more work. But it's an excerpt from a later chapter which will--hopefully--make you like my poor Burn better.

Chapter 4: All That Common Ground

Burn dragged himself home that afternoon in a state of Friday Buzz. The feeling was composed of relief, a sense of freedom, and weariness. It rasped his nerve ends. He wanted to eat, to start something, and to go to bed... though not necessarily in that order. He was willing to bump sleep up a few notches.

Burn shrugged out of his pack and left it by the door. His home was clean, inviting, and nicely decorated. Mom went in for French Provencal. She also kept a garden. Dad came home most evenings, seldom traveled, and yet managed to hold down a good job in his real estate company. He’d been top seller for five years now.

Occasionally, it occurred to Burn that he didn’t come from a dysfunctional family, didn’t have many cold wars with his parents, and didn’t suffer from the abuses of a workaholic father or a gadding mother. Oh, they had their family quarrels. Mom disliked animals of all types, and wouldn’t let Burn keep so much as a dog. He didn’t mind any more. Girls were more fun. But Mom didn’t approve of his girlfriends. She called them parasites, or worse.

“What do you see in her, Jean?” his mother pleaded, after speaking with his latest for five whole minutes at Burn’s track meet or basketball game. Burn would flatten his mouth and keep silent. The string of girlfriends kept growing, and he wondered. Did some part of him agree with Mom’s assessments?

Well, she won’t be seeing Jess.

Dad reasoned with her, but he had his demands too. Certain chores were to be done regardless of his son’s academic or social pressures. John Mayberry felt that mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, taking out garbage, and being involved in drama or music or tutoring at the school built character. Burn had ceased to argue with him. What did it matter? One more year, one more summer, and he would be off to Harvard, Duke, or Princeton. Bernard hadn’t decided which, but he’d been accepted by all three, and that was proof enough right there that he was special.

Special. Blessed.

“Mom’s Catholicism rubbing off again,” he muttered, digging a coke out of the refrigerator. Burn got a bowl of grapes and draped himself across the recliner. He’d always enjoyed the sweet, tanging burst of fruit in his mouth: clean passion. Mom said it was France in him. Dad only grinned.

There was nothing on TV, only reruns. The summer smash had ended, and its dying jangles rubbed him wrong. Burn clicked off. He saluted the empty tube with his glass. One of Mom’s rules; you don’t drink soda out of a can unless you’re camping or something. Originally, her insistence had rankled. What difference did it make? But eventually Bernard learned that he, like his mother, preferred crystal to aluminum as an under-taste for his beverage.

Maybe that was why he liked RP. Burn loved beautiful things, not the way a woman would, for softness or luster, but as a man, for simplicity, or strength, or sheen, or perfect curve. He cared for the burning colors of his room, deep red, blue like a sapphire bursting…

In Illyrion, he could create his thoughts and make them real, because so many other people were also pretending their reality with him, and that made the magic stronger. Burn considered himself a realist, but somewhere in his soul there lingered a strong belief in magic… or whatever. Something. Maybe beauty was what he worshipped. It would explain his affinity for girls like Jess, who had little else to offer. Bernard was not blind to that, but he seldom allowed it to trouble him.

Jess was like the RP girls, flawlessly beautiful, just as they wrote themselves. At the moment, there was a craze among them for red hair. That would end, and there would be another for blond, then perhaps black. He’d seen the cycles before. These girls wrote themselves up as perfection, which was false advertising, naturally. So? As long as they played the part well, wrote well, convinced their evening’s lover that theirs really were the reddest lips and brightest eyes in on the nets, nothing else mattered.

Burn rose and crossed the room. He set his glass down, hesitated, and then put it in the sink. That would make Mom happy. Bernard liked to please his mother, because she was a real lady and there were few of them out there. And this didn’t conflict with his happiness. It only took a few seconds.

He snagged his pack from the hall and went upstairs. There was a sleek black lamp on the desk. Click – light brought out deeper shades of red-amber in the paint. Such richness usually motivated him to write… unless he was extremely tired. Friday Buzz didn’t amount to that.
The computer on his desk was black, too, and powerful. Not morbid by temperament, Burn found that black with pure lines held his fascination, probably for the same reason that he loved his mother’s crystal, or grapes, or intense colors. Clean passion. They were purity and profundity and life and meaning.

Meaning what? It was a question Burn always dismissed.

The flatscreen hummed to life. It displayed a scene from some Fancy-File program that had caught his attention years ago; of a woman, almost a girl, with black, lustrous hair and a peasant’s red blouse beneath her dark bodice. She leaned out the tavern window to speak to a handsome man below, mounted on his horse. Burn could sense the man’s frustration, dressed for a journey, leaving his sweetheart.

But it was the woman who kept this picture on his screen more frequently than any of the others in his vast files. She held her hand out to the man, pleading with him to stay, and there was so much sweetness in those dark eyes: sweetness… an increasingly rare quality. There had been a poem attached to the picture, all about moons and wind and a landlord’s daughter, and the highwayman; an old poem that mattered little to Bernard, though he liked its drumming cadence. Ah, but the woman! His mother was such a woman.

And Jess was not.

“Don’t make ‘em like they used to,” he muttered, angry for some reason. Burn touched the screen and another file bloomed beneath his fingers. He selected a scene of ocher-colored glass flattened by desert winds, and keyed it to show on the desktop. There. If they didn’t make them like that any more, what was the point of looking?

He pulled up a dictionary file. What did that weird femmie mean by calling his nickname “quaint”? Burn found the definition… and snorted with laughter. Old-fashioned? Yeah, right. She had wits, maybe, or at least sarcasm. She was also Monday’s problem.

Whenever Burn didn’t want to think about something, he’d assign it to another day. The History grade is Wednesday’s problem. Dad being mad about my breaking his power saw is Saturday’s problem. Dumping Sarah is Friday’s problem. How long ago was Sarah, anyway? Four girlfriends back? Five? Why didn’t his interest last longer?

Under his fingers, the flatscreen shifted to an internet program. Burn always thought of it as reaching out and finding the end of a rope, one that had mysteriously come loose from his great ship of fantasy. You catch hold and swing it back down to the deck, feel the salt wind in your hair, take command…

Magic. The nets were magic, and he could play them like a skillful wizard. Wizard? The word tumbled through his consciousness, collecting old memories and dark baggage.

“Why don’t you join us?” Gorgeous Marisa had asked the question, dressed in black, looking up at him out of silvery-dark eyes. Burn always noticed eyes.

“Sorry babe, not possible. My rents would have a fit.”

“But you believe in magic, don’t you?” She’d whispered it up at him, and her eyes drew him, but not like the landlord’s daughter. A fine chill ran down his spine.

“Do I?” Burn grinned down at her.

“There’s a meeting on Thursday. Midnight, behind the school. Oh please, Burn, you could be so much more with us…”

He’d gone. He’d been sickened by what he saw. There was a dark side and a light side to fantasy. White magic or black magic, or, some believed gray magic. Burn didn’t know the right terms, but, if you made magic synonymous with power, there were good ways and bad ways to use it. Burn preferred the clean stuff, though he wasn’t averse to dabbling in black waters, provided they sent pleasure through his senses and didn’t leave an obvious stain. Yet, overall, keep it on the nets. Real magic was too disturbing... if there really was a difference between black and white. Maybe this, like everything else, just wound up looking gray.

I’m a good kid, Burn told himself, angrily. I’ve got good parents and a good home. I’m talented. I’m somebody! I might mess around, but that’s part of growing up. It’s called exploring, for the information of all those freaks out there who are afraid of it.

It was a good day to be at sea. Burn zipped through page after page, reading the latest postings and making a mental judgment of each. Most were terrible, which left him smug. One or two passed muster, and Burn started tracking files on them. He wanted only the best in his guild… whenever they got around to making it. And how exactly was he going to work that out?
Monday’s problem.

On the popular Illyrion board, Burn ran across another new bit of writing. His brows rose at the number of viewings it displayed. Over seventy people had looked at this particular piece. That was more than even his work usually drew. Five replies had been made to it, all in the last twenty-four hours. Burn touched the screen again, and sat back to read.