Charlotte vs Style

Charlotte, sitting atop the bed “Indian Style”, looked about the room and thought that maybe she was being a little unfair to Clive. Every square inch of the decoration had been left to her and, as with most things left to her, it had wound up covered in Strawberry Shortcake paraphernalia – amongst other popular franchises from her childhood.

Gem and the Holograms posters (Ebay) covered the west wall while a mixture of Ms. Shortcake (Mostly Ebay, some from a car boot sale) and She-Ra (Presents from Clive) posters covered the East. The South wall had the dresser and the closet, both of which had an assortment of lunchboxes, action figures and the occasional, unusual artefact such as a My Little Pony Board Game or a Ninja Turtle. That last item often got used as evidence that not everything of Charlotte’s was explicitly feminine.

Picking her feet up with her hands, she swirled around on her bum to face the north wall. That held the only decoration that was contentious between Charlotte and Clive, a large oil painting of them making love. It had taken a good deal of marijuana to relax Clive enough to actually pose for the reference photo that her friend had used, but he’d been rather taken by the idea from the moment she’d proposed it. It was only once it actually hung on their wall that it occurred to Clive that visitors might wander in and see it. “Well the bedroom is our private space, they’ve no place to judge anything we have in here” she’d said to him “Besides, I’m sure their eyes will only be drawn to your winning smile”.

Since then, whenever Clive had talked about getting a lock on their bedroom door or maybe putting the painting away “just for a little while”, she would tease him and threatened to hang it up in the living room. “That’s where it is!” Charlotte yelled to an empty apartment. “I left the stupid thing in the living room…” she mumbled on her way down the hall and into a space which she’d let Clive define, for the most part. On the glass coffee table lay what she’d been seeking, a copy of Vogue which Devon had left behind the last time she’d been over. Clive was out with her now, no doubt making snide remarks between each other about everyone they saw over the rim of their martini glasses.

Charlotte knew Devon still hadn’t entirely approved of her being Clive’s girlfriend. Back when Clive had first introduced them to each other, Charlotte could see from the way Devon’s eyes moved up and down her body that every inch of her was being judged. Then again, the angle may have made Devon’s look seem worse than it was – Devon standing at a willowy 6’3 and Charlotte reaching 5’4 if she wore her thick soled sneakers with the Japanese cartoons along the side. The right side of the left shoe had a little boy being toilet trained, proclaiming that he wanted to be a “Pants Man!”.

Charlotte also knew that Devon had a habit of writing comments, notes and doodling along the margins of everything she read. This was her chance to see if there was anything past the mundane to discover in this “marginalia”, as Devon insisted on referring to it as. Twenty minutes later, Charlotte felt that she had only really gained a reminder of why she didn’t bother reading Vogue. Like most women, she didn’t have a frame that was suited to the latest fashions of New York, Milan and the other cities which she felt had become institutions simply by saying so enough times that everyone believed them.

The notes were mostly just catty remarks about various celebrities and models, with the occasional circling of something that Devon must have wanted to find an affordable knock off of. Some young Bulgarian woman in an ad for Clairol was dubbed “Horse Features”. A list of people Devon apparently needed to email was written in flat, robotic handwriting along the hem of a dress designed by a French man who seemed to have trouble buttoning up his shirt. Charlotte lay the magazine back on the table and sat back in the dark purple, suede beanbag chair she’d negotiated.

It was hard not to giggle a little at herself, thinking of what Clive would say about her looking for clues – though he’d probably refer to them as plot devices. It was such a gimmick with him, integrating storytelling into real life. Shrugging, Charlotte decided that she didn’t care what Devon thought anyways. If Devon was really Clive’s best friend then she’d not do anything to sabotage their relationships and, really, she’d try to get over her little prejudices.

Lost in thought as she had been, Charlotte’s shoulders tightened when she could hear the tell tale sounds of Clive scrabbling with the keys and Devon’s laughter, snorts and all. “In you go madam” Clive remarked as he held the door for his tall friend. As her long legs passed through the doorway, Charlotte crossed her arms to cover the Care Bear Cousin which adorned her lime green t-shirt.

Nathan the Non-Descript

His teal and honeysuckle yellow spaceship cutting through the dark void of space between his home on Mars and his University on Earth, Nathan Paxton looked about the vast piece of consumer goods which sheltered his wet little human body from having all the blood boiled out of it. As spaceships go, this one was alright. The on board AI which ran everything had a few tenacious pieces of ad-ware wedged in it, but otherwise did a competent job of helping Nathan out by facilitating all sorts of functions. It did everything the catalogue had promised – such as being able to record Nathan’s thoughts directly onto the inter-trans-pan-galactic-o-net. Turning to the microphone, Nathan seemed to recall that this process had once been referred to by some offensive term known as “bogging” or maybe “lerging”….at least until the great Minutia War in which a monomaniac by the name of Oliver Brackenbury had ignited galactic conflict for the express purpose of changing terms which got on his nerves.

Brackenbury’s campaign had been a long and strange one whose pinnacle had been the herding of every individual who misused the word “theory” in their arguments through a long tube – the wrong end of which lay in a six mile deep pit filled with rampaging, thick necked, salivating Coulter-Beasts. Conventional forces were unable to stop him but eventually a brave resistance cell cobbled together an ingenious plan. Utilizing the expertise of several physicists, cyberneticists and deus ex machinists, the resistance constructed a cunning trap for First Citizen Brackenbury (As he had eventually dubbed himself). A prosti-bot that was able to change its density and weight at will, in a range from 120 lbs to the approximate weight of Iceland. After being smuggled into his private chamber, the robot had set about crushing the First Citizen's pelvis into fine, pink and white powder when the opportunity had presented itself. Recalling this historical detail, Nathan exhibited the natural reaction of his gender by instinctively shivering in horror at the image.

Yet this paled in comparison to the archival footage of the First Citizens cremation. A handful of file photos revealed that before his crusade, Oliver Brackenbury had been a slender young man – somewhat over six feet tall and a shade under two hundred pounds. But within the first week of his biblio-fascist regime he had swollen to 450 pounds and, mysteriously, grown a foot taller. When the Firemen came to douse his body in napalm, they discovered that he had swollen to approximately two metric tons in weight and was roughly the size of a modest cottage. A cell sample, taken just before the burning, revealed that his every cell membrane had become utterly saturated with a strange cocktail of brandy, vodka martinis and righteous indignation. This is suspected to be the reason that his body, lit some five hundred years ago, continues to burn to this day and has been harnessed to provide electricity for several million home entertainment systems across the Earth.

“Sometimes a man just has to do what needs to be done” he said to an empty bridge “There, that’s suitably authoritative without really saying anything”. Nathan was trying to think of what to do when his author rapidly lost interest in his current situation and decided to scrap the story. Nathan wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve being tossed into literary limbo or to be the subject of such ham-fisted post-modernist tripe…but here he was, frozen in amber (and grey matter), floating somewhere between thoughts of what the author was going to cook for dinner tonight and a dormant flashback to a particularly callipygian young woman he’d seen on the tube three weeks prior. His eyes boggled at this strange fate, but only because the image amused the author as he allowed Nathan one final thought.