 | Entrance | Main | Wiki | List of forums | The Writings |
[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaN
Rating: 0.00 Uploaded by: Created: 2007-11-08 03:53:21Keywords: Gold Dust chapter 4The ballet company called Livia the next morning and, luckily for the Polish girl on the line, Livia had felt awful about disconnecting it and at midnight re hooked it. The ringing found Livia sitting cross legged on the floor. She had fallen asleep with her face pressed against the wooden floor, and when she ran to the telephone, an angry red line had appeared along the side of her jaw.
“Wheamawaaa?” Livia opened and closed her mouth a few times, but she couldn’t get any coherent words to form.
“What?” asked the heavily accented girl.
“Damn it,” Livia groaned into the phone, smacking the heel of her hand to her forehead, “can’t make sentence properly.”
“Well, when you can, we need you to come to the studio, please,” she asked, sounding slightly concerned.
“Oh,” Livia didn’t think she could go to the studio, she had drug problems to deal with. What was a good excuse? She racked her brain and finally came up with one that she felt guilty about using, but worked marvelously. “I’m really sorry,” she said, and the tremble in her voice wasn’t exactly acting. “I can’t come in today, my dad is in the hospital and I have some family issues to deal with.”
The last time that Livia had used the excuse “family issues” was in fifth grade, when her mother died, murdered by a drug addict in the streets outside the apartment. She really hoped that she would never have to use that excuse that way again, but things weren’t shaping up too well.
“Oh! That’s ok then, I think,” the girl paused for a few moments, trying to form the correct sentences. Livia remembered this same reaction from fifth grade as well. People never knew what to say when someone’s family was in danger. To be honest, Livia wouldn’t know what to say either.
“Yeah,” After a pause, Livia just hung up the phone. She began to do some stretches, but then she stopped. What was she stretching for? It was just a habit, the exercises and routines. She turned back to the kitchen, where she had been for the entire night, and saw the work she had done spread in front of her. It did not look like much progress. She swore in frustration and stomped into the bathroom.
Livia took her rumpled sweat clothes off and let them drop to the floor. A lady bug flew around near the ceiling, bumping into the light fixture that attracted it. Not wanting to shower with a bug in the room, but not wanting to kill it for fear of bad luck, she had to shoo it out of the room with a washcloth and perfume. Bad luck was not something that she couldn’t use.
The shower curtain had rubber duckies on it and it had been that way since Livia could remember, although she knew that her parents had put them up when she was two and a half. She pulled the curtains closed and turned on the water.
“Dear god in heaven!” She bellowed and leapt out of the shower, which was extraordinaril
The scent of rosemary soap filled the small, steam filled bathroom and Livia breathed it in gladly. She loved the scent of Rosemary, it reminded her for some reason of typewriters, her mother’s sweaters, and staying home from school when it snowed too much. She leaned against the tiled wall for a few moments, not thinking of anything, and felt the sideways slipping sensation in the middle of her head that happens when you are starting to fall asleep. Taking this as her cue to get out before drowning, she turned the water off and stepped out onto the mat.
Taking care not to slip and fall, Livia wiped the fog off of the one mirror in the room. In the hand shaped smudge, she looked older. The worry lines that she could usually ignore stood out on her face, which was less tan than usual.
Livia realized what she looked like all of a sudden, a drug addict. The worst thing was that she could very well be a drug addict without knowing it. She had come to terms with the fact that her father probably had been addicted to the pretty gold dust that she despised so much for several months at least, and was prepared to take drastic measures to separate herself from it before she became totally dependant herself.
Two hours later, Livia dragged the only gold dust free suitcase that she could find down the stairs. It was packed with toiletries, clothing, money, and, most importantly of all, her father’s police log book. After she had put the piles in the kitchen into their correspondingl
Now she had hailed a taxi cab at the corner and was sitting in the backseat, staring out the window as her neighborhood passed her buy in the sort of blur that takes over the world when someone can’t quite figure out what time she is currently existing in. It might well have been morning or mid-afternoon, Livia couldn’t tell.
The hotel was nearer than Livia remembered from the one time she had stayed there before, a few years ago when there was supposedly a problem with rats in the apartment building. After an exciting two nights spent in the splendor and adventure that children associate with hotel rooms, she and her father returned to the apartment to find out the whole alarm was just a couple of teenage boys in a boarding school nearby with a cell phone and too much time on their hands. The DiMarias were the only people in the building who found this amusing, and although Livia had waited for several months to see if any more amusing calls were placed to the concierge, she was disappointed and had forgotten about it until she walked into the lobby for the second time in her life.
Her boots slid slightly on the polished marble floors, and she gripped her suitcase heavily as she made her way to the front desk. A tired looking man sat on a swivel chair playing with a slinky didn’t look up when she rested her elbows on the counter, and she rang the bell to get his attention.
“Yes, ma’am?” He asked, sounding polite but bored out of his skull. The slinky fell to the blotter with a sad, defeated sound as he picked up a pen and clipboard to sign Livia into a room.
“I made a reservation a couple of hours ago,” she explained, showing her unused driver’s licence as identification and taking out the wad of cash that she had taken from the bank three mornings ago. That money had been meant for a new pair of ballet slippers, but they would have to wait. At the moment, a hotel room with a desk, television, and no gold dust in sight was Livia’s number one priority.
There was wet bronze paint in the elevator that carried Livia and her suitcase up to the third floor. For a moment, she had panicked when she saw something shimmering on the sleeve of her jacket, thinking that it was that accursed dust, but she relaxed when she saw the streak she had made in the interior of the elevator. It was really a pain, she mused, getting so worked up about something so common. Too much was gold in the city.
“Man down!”a boy who looked to be eight or nine years old shouted as he crashed into Livia’s side on the fourth floor. Somehow, she had forgotten to get off when the door opened. The boy wore a cowboy hat on his straw colored hair, and a toy gun stuck out from the holster on his side.
The doors shut behind the boy, and Livia wondered if his parents knew that he was playing in the elevator. She tapped her foot awkwardly, not wanting to strike up conversation with the cowboy who had now pointed his gun at her and was trying his best to do an impressively evil laugh.
“I’ve got you know, wrangler,” he said, stumbling a bit over his fake leather chaps as he circled Livia with his gun drawn. “The boys and I, we knows ya stole them cattle from me paw,”
“Do you know?” Livia tried her best to seem mildly interested while not inviting a full fledged war inside the little box that had stopped moving and would open its doors within a second.
“Yes’m!” He declared, and dove out the doors the moment they opened, rolling into the booted feet of a woman that Livia recognized all too well.
“Hold the door!” Katrina said to her, and ran into the elevator before Livia could get off. She blocked the exit with her arm and pressed the button for the fifth floor, and then immediately following that, the door shut button with a slightly bent pointer finger. The doors slid shut with a ding and Livia found herself still in the elevator, once again traveling to the incorrect floor with a person she didn’t particularly feel like having a conversation with.
“Oh, hello Livia,” Katrina said, recognizing her elevator riding companion for the first time. “I trust you are feeling well?” When Katrina saw Livia opening her mouth to answer, she continued. “Of course, I say this only as mere polite conversation. I happen to know for a fact that you are not doing well, and that you aren’t entirely pleased to see me.”
When Livia didn’t deny this, there was a moment or two of thick silence. In her mind, Livia saw her father making the “awkward turtle” with his hands, something that had always made her laugh. Now her mouth only twitched slightly at the corners.
A slight tremor that rocked the elevator as it reached a halt at the top floor of the building reminded Livia of something, and she pressed the close door button as Katrina began to get off, trapping the fortune teller the same way Katrina had trapped her.
“I have a question for you, Katrina,” Livia said.
“Well, ask away my dear, because I sure could use the activity,”
“Why did you say that there would be an earthquake? There was no earthquake yesterday, nothing at all. There wasn’t anything on the news about it, and I certainly didn’t feel anything.”
“Just because you didn’t feel it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Katrina said haughtily, and opened the doors again. Before Livia could speak, she stepped out of the elevator and left Livia quite alone.
Finally, Livia stepped out onto the third floor with her luggage and room key in hand.She walked along the row of identical doors and stopped in front of one that didn’t match the contemporary design of the hotel. It was large and made of the darkest oak wood that Livia had ever seen. A huge brass door knocker rested solidly in the middle of an intricately carved design that Livia couldn’t quite make out.
For some reason that she couldn’t quite divine, Livia walked up to the door and rested her hand against the surprisingly warm wood. She could feel a pulse coming from behind the door, and she brushed her fingertips against the brass, ornate, handle. The metal made a creaking noise, and the hinges popped slightly as the door swung open.
Nothing! Nothing? Nothing. Livia couldn’t believe it herself. How could nothing be behind a door? It wasn’t just blackness either, it was pure nothing. There was no space, no stars, no air, no nothing. It blew Livia’s mind, the sight, or lack thereof, in front of her. After a few agonizing moments of brain busting weirdness, she shook the shock off and slammed the door. It made a hollow, mournful sound.
“Oh, shut it,” Livia said to it, trying to bring herself back to what she perceived to be reality. She looked at the room number on her key and walked the seven doors down the long and carpeted hallway to the door that she should have been looking for in the first place.
The room that she had payed vast amounts of money for turned out to be quite as Livia expected. An oatmeal colored carpet was squishy and comfortable under her feet, and a queen sized bed with a graphic comforter and crisp white pillows was in the middle of the room, facing the television that was over a set of drawers. There was even a desk with an official looking notepad and a phonebook on it.
After her clothes were unpacked but not unfolded and her suitcase stowed away in the closet by the small but clean bathroom, Livia opened the drawer in the bedside table to get out the Gideon’s Bible. She wasn’t particularly religious, although her mother had been extremely Catholic, but Livia and her father had always read the bible in hotel rooms, just for fun.
It wasn’t there, and she stared in disbelief at the light wooden and empty interior of the drawer, dumbstruck. This didn’t make any sense, there was a bible in every hotel room, everyone knew that! There was a phone on the bedside table, she noticed, so she picked it up. A dial tone sounded very loudly in here ear.
The card next to the phone instructed her to dial 1 if she needed to talk to hotel personnel, so that was just what she did. A cheerful voice answered.
“Hi, um, I don’t have a Gideon’s bible up here, and I need one to be delivered as soon as possible,”
“A what?”
“A bible. You know, one of those books that talk about God, Jesus, Jonah, Hellfire? Any of this ringing a bell?” Livia hadn’t meant to be so sarcastic, but she couldn’t believe that the woman on the line hadn’t understood her right away. No bible in the drawer meant bad luck for the DiMarias. When Livia’s mother had been hit by a car outside of a hotel. That hotel had needed new bibles and had ordered them from a company that employed people who didn’t know how to drive really well. It had been the delivery truck that hit Mrs. DiMaria.
“Jeesh, calm down,” the person at the desk said. “I’ll have one sent up, if it’s that important. Just don’t kill yourself about it.”
Livia snorted at the irony after she hung up. Hotels sure were fun!