| |
Picture Credits:
Till Our Lives Burn Out
A Sailor Moon Fan Story
Chapter 003-First Things
(Part 3-ending)
“… A tea cup. A really nice one. Traditional Japanese, no handle, but with a lid.”
“An excellent idea. Let’s go to the workshop for a minute,” he said, as he led the way. “Do you want to do this tea cup in ceramic?”
“You know about cloisonné?” asked Hotaru.
“Yes, indeed. I’m set up for that. Here’s a piece I did a while back.”
He showed her a vase of his own design and she thought it was incredibly nice. She loved the way he’d mixed the colors and the shading was very well done.
“This is what I want to try.”
He looked surprised, and even impressed.
“Really?”
“Yes, Kuryakin-sensei.”
“You’re serious? You want to try a cloisonné teacup? I mean, look, these color gradients? They’re very hard to do right. The lattice framing is very tedious work. Even something as simple as a tea cup can be very involved …”
He discussed the whole process with her, and it did sound pretty complicated.
“Do you think you can manage something like this? I mean, if it’s from one of my students, it has to be perfect. Are you serious about this?”
She nodded, not because she had yet grasped how hard this would be, but because it was for Setsuna, and she had made up her mind to do something hard.
“All right, then. What kind of design do you want to put on it?”
“A swan,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” he smiled, remembering their first lunch together.
Then she shyly got out a piece of paper from her pocket, unfolded it and handed it to him. It was the design she wanted on the cup drawn in colored pencil. It was very well done.
“That’s very nice, Hotaru-chan,” he said. He could see this must be pretty important to her. “Okay then, as long as it doesn’t cut into your studies, we’ll try it. I like people who set high goals for themselves. Let me see what I have lying around here.”
He opened up some cabinets and got out a few boxes. As he rummaged through them, he said, “Okay, how about this? I’ll have to handle machining the underlying metal cup, and later on, the electroplating. We’ll start with a copper cup. I can do that this week end. We’ll use the laser engraver” – he indicated a big machine in the corner – “to put the pattern on it. The rest is going to be all you, kiddo. I can burn the pattern in deep so it’ll be easier to keep the framework sharp and clean. The cup enamel will be black, but we’ll add flowers, put a little border around the swan maybe? And use gradients and transparencies. Of course, we’ll electroplate the exposed frame with gold … no, wait, I’ve got a little platinum, that’ll look better, and then we’ll plate the inside of the cup with gold. Yeah.”
Hotaru was frowning now. He was talking about gold and platinum –what was he doing with stuff like that anyway?- and she had not thought anything about cost.
“Kuryakin-sensei, those are precious metals. I can’t … afford … much.” ‘Or anything, since I don’t have much in the way of pocket money.’
“Oh, please, Hotaru-chan, don’t even worry about that. First of all, it doesn’t take much to plate something, and I have a sufficient amount of scrap lying around. I do work like this all the time, for fun. I’m involved in a really challenging automobile restoration project right now, in fact. Second, if it’s a gift for someone, but especially your Setsuna-momma,” he said slyly, “it has to be the very best you can do, right?”
She nodded gratefully.
“Then consider it my contribution to a most worthy birthday present for a most worthy woman. Only don’t tell her, because this has to be from you.”
He began putting the boxes away, and Hotaru decided to try the direct approach.
“What do you think of her?” she asked, watching him closely.
“Of Miss Meioh?” he said, nonchalantly as he locked the cabinet doors. He paused for a minute, and she wasn’t quite sure why, but she wondered if he was summoning rigid control of himself.
“I think she’s a terrific person, and I wonder if you know how very, very lucky you are to have her as your guardian. I know of people, orphans like you, who weren’t nearly so fortunate. It’s very fitting that you want to do something difficult to show your love for her.”
“Can I make the flowers garnet red?”
“Like her eyes, huh? Absolutely, but let’s add some blue ones, like the ones I did on the vase.”
“Oh yes, that’ll be so nice.”
“You’ll have to practice a few things first. I’ll try to find a way to incorporate it into your lessons. We’ll work on it a little bit every day you’re here, and we should be able to get it done in time.”
“It’s okay if you have to cancel a field trip. I really want to make this right.”
“I won’t do that. The field trips are integral, very important to the way I work,” he smiled at her, and then led her down to the blue room. As they walked, she realized something. The few moments that he and Setsuna shared the other day notwithstanding, he would never explicitly reveal anything of how really felt about her, out of professionalism. Anything he did feel about Setsuna would have to be kept in check until he was no longer obligated. And in fact, Setsuna for other reasons would be under similar duress. Hotaru increasingly wondered if maybe, just maybe, Setsuna’s demand for discretion concerning ‘personal matters’ was about more than just protecting their identities as Sailor Senshi.
As to what she herself thought, she was beginning to fancy the idea of them together very much.
‘There is always something you can do.’
And so, the education of Hotaru Tomoe continued along these lines. Every day of lessons saw her mind getting sharper, her talents developing, her confidence building, and her art project nearing completion. Most important of all, there had been no more seizures. Every day she’d come home and explain all she’d learned to Setsuna who was always not only willing but highly interested to know what she’d been taught, and always with a quick inquiry into how her teacher was doing, and a self-reminder that, even though she was very busy now, she really needed to talk to Dr. Mizuno, and perhaps Ami, too. Then Haruka and Michiru would arrive for dinner, and a quiet evening at home –or not, depending on what they had going on. Hotaru would do her homework. If the next day was not a lesson day, she would have numerous review and preparatory sheets that she was specifically ordered not to start until the next day, but she would start them anyway. The Wednesday in between her Tuesday and Thursday lesson was often ‘a blah day.’ Either she would either tag along with Setsuna for the day, or sometimes go with Haruka and Michiru, while finishing up her review sheets, small projects, make note cards and otherwise keep herself occupied. The Friday after the Thursday lesson was filled with anticipation for the week end, but still it too was kind of ‘a blah day,’ until early afternoon when Setsuna’s classes were finished.
If the next day was a lesson day, she would often try to get to sleep early. At first, the area of town where Juku-PK was depressed her; but now it was beginning to grow on her. There was a park near by, though it was not one of the nicer city parks, and some of the neighborhood characters now recognized her, and given the tall and intimidating teacher she was walking with, there was no fear of anything bad happening even though the neighborhood was semi-rough.
Of all the things she was accomplishing, her teacher was most amazed by, and proudest of, her work on the tea cup. She patiently practiced painting color gradients and transparencies on small pieces of unbaked enamel, until she understood the way the paint would soak into the frit. Most difficult of all was learning how to lay down solder paste and the wire lattice. Flat surfaces were hard enough, but the cup was a curved surface. He would not allow her to begin work on the cup proper until he saw she knew what she was doing. She learned quickly, and one day he let her begin on the lid. Convinced by that she was going to be able to handle the rest, he let her proceed with making the cup. The framing pattern was pretty intricate for a first piece. The physical tedium of the work was difficult for her, and made her stiff and tired. Yet, his first obligation to her education notwithstanding, he let her do the day’s work on it first thing, so she could put her first, best energies of the day into it. Day by day, she whiled away at it, but kept up with her lessons just the same. The goodness of a labor of love shone through and Kuryakin found himself increasingly charmed by this quirky girl’s “shine” and her greatness of heart.
The day of the final firing for the cup, he had a surprise for her. So impressed was he with her work on it, he’d made a matching saucer to go with it. The center depression for holding the cup was plated in gold, and the depressions around it had a wreath of flowers duplicated from Hotaru’s work. When he showed it to her, he had been worried that she might see this as stealing her thunder, but Hotaru was genuinely, even unusually, happy about it. She insisted that his part in this be given as a separate gift from himself to Setsuna. When he seemed to balk at this, she got a sly look on her face. After a bit more wrangling, he finally agreed, though he now seemed nervous about the whole thing. So she ticked off another mental box under the heading “evidence he likes her.” In addition, she started to get the feeling that, push come to shove, there was nothing she couldn’t talk him into doing. As for the boxes under “evidence she likes him” quite a few of those had already been ticked off as well. It was all fun, in any case, because where her worries about the seizures had been, there was now an interesting future with many fun things ahead- she was sure.
When it was time to bake the enamel, he showed her how to do it, then had her put on some safety equipment, and guided her through it. She was very happy he let her do this because it meant one more thing in the process she could say she had done herself. After the cup had cooled, Kuryakin turned it down to a nicely tapered width on a lathe using diamond sandpaper pads. In full safety gear, she watched, and underneath her dust mask, her smile got bigger and bigger and the cup became smoother and shinier. She had done a really clean, even professional, job. She had finished well ahead of schedule, even before midterms. But most important of all, she, the Senshi of Destruction, had created something instead. Setsuna’s birthday was over two weeks away, on a Saturday. She beamed as she imagined presenting the gift to her and being able to say she had done nearly all of it herself.
Then he began the electroplating of the exposed metal in the frame. This was pure chemistry, so he lectured her on the details of the electrochemical process. She took notes, knowing this would be on a test at some point. The electroplating would proceed automatically, so they left the cup alone, and as they walked down to the blue room, she said, “For Christmas, I want to make a vase that my Setsuna-momma, Haruka-poppa, and Michiru-momma can all enjoy.”
“Okay, but a vase is going to be about ten times more work.”
“I want to do one just like the one you did.”
“You may not finish in time.”
“Oh yes, I will.”
“I believe you,” he said after half a minute of looking at her. “You really are something else, kiddo.”
She loved that look - that ‘clever girl’ look- he was giving her right now. As they got down to systematizing the notes she’d taken on the chemistry of metal plating, Hotaru wondered if she ever been happier in all her life.
Till Our Lives Burn Out
A Sailor Moon Fan story
Chapter 004-This is This and That is That
(Part 1a)
Epigraph:
Bonum est diffusivum sui
(The Good pours itself out.)
Thomas Aquinas
4a. Driving Miss Meioh
Early one Friday afternoon, Haruka and Michiru left to spend a weekend at a mountain resort in the north of Japan, where, so their ‘sources’ told them, the autumnal koyo front was on the move, and a spectacular leaf changing season was underway. They headed to the airport for the flight to Hokkaido, where they intended to rent a car, and drive to Asahidake Onsen, a small hot spring resort in Daisetsuzan National Park. In order to have plenty of time to enjoy the week end, they had decided to skip school and return home on Monday. Their private school allowed them a number of sick days, and since they were rarely sick, they intended to get the use of them in other ways.
“I wonder if they’ll notice that we always seem to be sick at the same time and usually on Mondays?” Michiru asked thoughtfully as their plane took off.
“I wonder if we really care,” said Haruka.
They looked at each other, and came to same silent conclusion:
‘Nah.’
Having been given sufficient warning, Hotaru’s tutor had adjusted his plans accordingly, and picked her up that Monday morning. He was always happy to do this, for reasons of which Hotaru had a pretty good grasp. If she was right, today he would be very chipper indeed; Setsuna was going to hitch a ride to classes with them. For that, he would need to pick them both up much earlier than usual, and he arrived a few minutes earlier still. Setsuna and Hotaru came out, and he greeted them and opened the trunk door so Hotaru could stash her violin, book bag, and brief case. Setsuna said she would keep her things up front.
“Very good. So, Miss Meioh, do you have a license?” he asked, very deferentially.
“Oh, um, yes, of course. Why?”
“Do you know how to get to K.O. using the Aqua-line?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Would you like to drive?”
She seemed puzzled by this.
“Why?”
“You use The Koneko-chan Taxi Service, and City Transit so often, I thought perhaps you might enjoy the change of pace.”
“If one is sufficiently well organized, and the transit employees are not utterly incompetent, it is easier to get around without a car. I prefer it because it allows me time to study while going to and fro.”
“I see. I wondered why you didn’t have a car.”
“In fact, I intended to peruse one of my textbooks en route, but ...”
“Um, I could read it to you as we go?”
“That is quite all right. Are you not worried about liabilities?”
“My insurance covers someone else driving and I’m not worried in the least, as I’m sure you’re very careful. Please,” he said, extending his hand toward the driver’s side door.
“I shall be happy to drive. It will be a nice change.”
“Wonderful. You’ll take us to K.O. and I’ll take over after that.”
She nodded, and he opened the driver’s side door for her. She got in, adjusted the seat, buckled up and started familiarizing herself with the controls for this vehicle. She started it up as Kuryakin helped Hotaru into the passenger side and buckled her in, and then after hearing another door shut, Setsuna put the vehicle in gear, said, “so then, here we go,” and began driving away. At once, Hotaru began eyeing her curiously.
“Setsuna-momma?” said Hotaru, with a little smile, after she’d reached the end of the drive to their secluded house, and was checking both ways for traffic.
“Yes, Hotaru?”
“You’ve forgotten something.”
She pulled out onto the road as she said, “Have I? I admit I am not Haruka, but this vehicle has an automatic transmission and the controls are simple enough.”
“Yes, you are driving wonderfully, but Kuryakin-sensei isn’t getting to enjoy it much.”
“Oh? Why not?” she asked. Then she looked in the rearview mirror and saw that she and Hotaru were the only ones in the van.
“Oh … oh, dear …”
She pulled over to turn around and was waiting for a couple of cars in the oncoming lane to pass when her cell phone started ringing. She got it out and answered it.
“Moshi, mosh … Oh, … I am … so sorry.”
“Quite all right, Miss Meioh,” said Kuryakin into his cell phone, as he strolled down the driveway to its junction with the main road. “I did sort of wonder what was going on for a moment, but then I realized I am easy to miss.”
“I am turning around, at once.”
“I’m not sure we should risk that,” he said, humorously. “Just wait right there. I can see you now, and I’ll be there in a moment.”
He made sure to get any amusement over this out of his system before reaching the van. This was a time to tread carefully. A minute (and twenty two seconds) later, she could see him in the rearview mirror, loping unconcernedly down the slope to where she had pulled off. She got out and said, “I am … terribly sorry. Perhaps you should drive.”
“No, no. I’m sorry that I put you in an unfamiliar situation and caused you embarrassment. I am perfectly confident you can get us – all of us- where we need to go,” he said as he ushered her back to the driver’s seat. This time she waited until she could see him in the rearview mirror sitting in the middle of the second seat, heard the side panel door slide shut, and heard him buckle up before putting the van in gear and taking off.
Using his pass, they took the Aqua-line toll route, the tunnel / bridge combination that crossed Tokyo Bay. The artificial island where the bridge ended and the tunnel began was called Umi-Hotaru, and he told his student he “liked her island very much.” Hotaru had, of course, noticed the name many times when driving the route with Haruka. The island was designed to remind one of the superstructure of a luxury ocean liner, and was quite aesthetically well done. After negotiating the turns, and the toll booth, it was time to ‘take the plunge’ into the tunnel under the bay. A few minutes later they passed under Kaze-no-to, another artificial Island, which housed the twin ventilation shafts that used Tokyo Bay’s constant winds to keep the tunnels supplied with fresh air. They emerged from the tunnel in the City of Kawasaki, and headed for Tokyo, where they arrived at K.O. University, just in time for Setsuna to make her first class. As she got out and he took over the driver’s seat, she apologized again for leaving him behind.
“Miss Meioh, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, as he handed over her book bag and briefcase. “I hope you have a wonderful and productive day. Have you got everything?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said with a tiny smile. “Hotaru, behave and do well.”
“Yes, Setsuna-momma.”
He closed the door, and he and Hotaru began the drive to his studio. After a few blocks had past, she looked at him.
“Kuryakin-sensei, may I ask you something?”
“Always, Hotaru-chan.”
“Didn’t you find that the least bit funny?”
Kuryakin checked the mirror to make absolutely certain no one at K.O. could possibly see them and then said, “Yes,” and started laughing quite heartily, as Hotaru joined in. The way his laughter trailed off with a wistful sigh tinged with the slightest hint of sadness was telling. That vague presence that Hotaru noticed with them from time to time was with them now, and she thought she might be starting to understand what it was.
“Okay,” he said firmly, “we’ve had our fun. Please, never tell her about this. As of now, none of it ever happened.”
“Yes, Kuryakin-sensei,” said Hotaru, as she debated whether this was worth ticking off another box.
Haruka and Michiru had a few hours to go before catching their flight back to Tokyo. Their sources had not lied, and the foliage was glorious. They’d had a wonderful weekend, hiking through the park, spending some time in the hot springs bath, and on Sunday, walking up the ropeway to the final station and then setting out for the summit of Mt. Asahidake. They made that two hour climb in half the time, and then rested and had lunch, and Michiru took pictures of Haruka sitting as close to the smoking volcanic vents as she dared to get.
Now they sat alone in the hot spring bath on Monday morning talking quietly.
“So you think ‘Chaos returning to everyone’s minds’ means that the way we fight could change?” said Michiru lazily. They had been talking about this, off and on, all weekend.
“I think it will require that the way we fight changes. In the past, we fought alone, and rarely saw each other. Now we’re all together, here, as a group, and we’ve even fought along side the Inner Planet Senshi. We will face challenges of a much more personal nature. I don’t really like it, but we might have to wrestle with ourselves more, and fight in ways we are not used to. Self-control will be as important as magical attacks.”
“Self-control?” Michiru said amusedly. “This, from someone who hits on anything remotely female?”
“Hey now, you asked what I thought. If you’re going to make light of it …”
Michiru put a lazy hand to Haruka’s face.
“So then, it will mean we have to be more sensitive to the things in the lives of those we care about?” Michiru asked.
“Possibly,” Haruka said, smiling. “I mean, we have to assume that in some way, Chaos is still an enemy that will attack any way it can. I don’t like sticking my nose in other people’s affairs, but that kind of knowledge might be necessary from time to time.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” said Haruka, “in order to understand the tensions inside a person that Chaos might amplify, or suppress.”
“Yes, I see,” said Michiru. “You’ve thought a lot about this.”
“Not by choice, Michiru. Not by choice.”
“Do you have something going on inside of you want to tell me about?”
“You’re the only thing going on inside of me,” she smiled. Then after a pause, she asked, “Does my flirting with others bother you?”
“No. Haruka, I don’t deceive myself into thinking you don’t really mean it. On some level, you do, but I don’t worry about it, because, ultimately, I trust you. And I trust … us.”
“Us?”
“That we are meant to be together, and that nothing can change that. I let you go, knowing you’ll come back before you would really do anything to hurt me.”
“If it ever does start to bother you,” Haruka said very tenderly, “promise you’ll say something. Okay?”
“I promise,” she replied, as she reached up and warmly kissed Haruka’s cheek. “But I don’t think that part of you can ever be changed.”
“Probably not.”
Later that morning, Kuryakin had left the Blue Room to get lunch ready, while Hotaru sat basking in the glow of some lamps she had brought in for decoration. She was also basking in the glow of the “coolest history lesson ever” as she started work on the review sheet for it.
This lesson was serious World History: far reaching, ancient extrapolations from genetics, archeology, linguistics, astronomy, paleoclimatology, and a host of other fields attempting to create a coherent picture of man’s wandering upon the earth. It covered all of the current scholarship on human migration patterns beginning with the origins of homo sapiens sapiens in east Africa about 160,000 years ago. There were many “this is what I think” comments from her tutor as well. If he weren’t such a genuine individual, she could think he enjoyed playing the iconoclast.
The first really fascinating part was the way one ice age had created a vast impenetrable desert belt stretching from the west coast of Africa all the way to the tip of Siberia around 85,000 years ago. It prevented any migration up the Levantine in the direction of Europe, and forced human migration out of Africa to follow the coastline of the Indian Ocean. The next fascinating part was the super eruption of the Mt. Toba volcano in Sumatra about 74,000 years ago, which created a caldera 50 by 80 miles, caused a volcanic winter that lasted six years, and accelerated an ice age that lasted for a millennium. Some scholars, scientists and researchers believed that the human population was reduced to less than 10,000 adults by this cataclysm. The thought of this struck a strangely familiar chord in her memory, and she wondered if a distant past self had been the responsible for that somehow. She was going to read several articles tonight covering the different positions taken by scholars within and across different fields concerning how accurate this was.
Also fascinating was the way in which the breaking of ice ages and global warm-ups helped the human race spread across the earth, the way recurring ice ages altered or slowed this progress, and how there were once little groups of humans trapped in icebound refuges during the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. The storyteller in her thought about what it was like to live during each of these times and could imagine some very interesting scenarios. The lesson had then morphed into a discussion of the Milankovitch cycles, and how they correlated with the ice ages. Always strong in Astronomy, Hotaru understood this very well. The review sheet would be filled out in short order.
Lunch awaited after that: Italian, to judge from the pleasant smell wafting into the room.
Setsuna was sitting in her office at Juuban Elementary, typing on her laptop computer. It had been a quiet few hours. Thankfully, the outbreak of sickness never materialized. She had one customer, a third grade girl who ate something for lunch that must have disagreed with her. No fever, just a sour stomach. She gave the girl an antacid and let her rest until she felt better. After taking care of that and her regular duties, there was time for her to work on her term paper. She had just finished the footnotes for a major analysis section, when, as often happened these days, she became distracted, and paused, looking thoughtful.
Hotaru had been taking lessons for over seven weeks now and it was clear that as far as her education was concerned, the tutor had been an excellent idea. He had filled out any gaps in short order. His plan to regiment and sharpen her mind to the point where she simply would not stress out at all during tests was going according to plan. She was learning as much as any school could teach her, and in 2/3rds the time. This boded well for the midterm exams she would take in the middle of next week. Hotaru seemed quite happy these days, too. Her periodic moodiness had evaporated, replaced by a sense of direction, purpose, expectation and even fun. Setsuna smiled at the thought of the very intense and studious look Hotaru got when working on those –well crafted, she had to admit - lesson pages: pencil in mouth -a habit she’d wish Hotaru could break- eyes flickering between a heavenward look of deep thought, sudden flashes of enlightenment, and gleeful, smiling determined attention to her papers as she scribbled away.
But it was not yet clear that they were getting to the root of the problem, whatever that was. The main point of hiring Kuryakin was that he seemed pretty sure he could solve that mystery. At times, Setsuna wondered if they hadn’t made too much of it, and that it was just something natural- insofar as anything for a Sailor Senshi could be. Still, even if it was natural, the problem was manifesting itself at ‘awkward’ times, and attracting unwanted attention. It would be best in every way, she reminded herself, to solve the problem, if it was a problem.
There was also a slight feeling of inadequacy that Setsuna had noticed lately. Turning Hotaru’s problem over to an outsider seemed tantamount to admission that, in some way, they had been insufficient to task of raising her. No one could have foreseen the problem, and even the Sailor Senshi had their limitations, but Setsuna missed the camaraderie of herself and Haruka and Michiru fretting over the needs of the burgeoning life in their care. In fact, the longer she thought about it, the more she missed it. She was well aware of her own motherly streak, a painful thing to have when she considered that she might never have a child of her own. She was the unofficial den mother of the Senshi, and in some ways, that was mothering enough to keep anyone happy. The school nurse job was, also, a wonderful outlet for it, but she had not quite appreciated how much she enjoyed even the hardest parts of raising Hotaru. She was actually quite grateful for the two or three times Kuryakin had praised them for how well behaved, intelligent and charming Hotaru was, and especially their liberality in accepting the responsibility in the first place.
And there were still the mystery – she was sure there was one- of the tutor himself. So many things about him just didn’t fit, but she had relaxed a bit in her desire to puzzle that out. The few half hearted attempts to get a hold of Ami Mizuno’s mother, or even to talk to Ami herself, had been buried under coursework and her duty at Juuban Elementary school. Whatever the causes, she was willing to let things lie for now.
A break was in order. She went down the hall and got some juice from the vending machines. As she cracked open the bottle, she heard the sound of an ambulance off in the distance, and … no, it was more than one. A lot more. She headed back to her office. It was 3:12 (and fifteen seconds) in the afternoon, and her phone was ringing.
The ambulances were headed to a bad multi-car pile up on Highway 1. It had involved seventeen vehicles including two tour busses filled with foreign tourists. The second wave of injured was already being routed away from an overflowing Juuban General Hospital to Juuban Secondary General, and an emergency call had gone out for any doctors and nurses, especially any who knew European languages, to get there at once. Setsuna spoke English, passable French and Spanish -as well as more than a few languages that weren’t around anymore- so she could be of some use to them. She’d told them she’d get there, right after she made a phone call.
Kuryakin and Hotaru were finishing a music lesson. He sat at the piano looking very satisfied that some progress had been made. She began packing up her violin.
“Kuryakin-sensei?” Hotaru asked as she loosened her bow.
“Yes?”
“Is it true that Mozart was a manic depressive?”
“I don’t know how anyone would ever prove that. It’s all conjecture at best. However, I certainly think it’s true that artists – and I mean the real thing, not the dilettantes, the wannabes who strike poses – suffer from what I like to call the ‘re-entry’ problem. Like a rocket, they soar up into the stratosphere of creativity, and sit like a god, creating their own universe. But what goes up, must come down. The higher you soar, the longer the fall. In the most ingenious of them all, the re-entry can be a crash and burn. Of course, there are exceptions like Mendelssohn, Dvorak, and Stravinsky. Our lives are contingent and so the mundane always intrudes. Mozart wrote, arguably, the finest music ever heard, and yet he had to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom. To judge from his music, especially his operas, no composer appreciated this irony of human existence better. His music encapsulates high and the low, the elite and the common, even, one might say, the angelic and the demonic, every range and depth of human feeling and circumstance. No one ever did it better than him.”
“Hmmm.”
“Okay, since I’m driving you home today we’ll need to pack up, and head out early.”
She finished putting her violin away.
“Now, midterms are coming up. We’ll start reviewing for them next time. You’ve come far enough on the vase, we’ll be able to leave off for a while and still finish on time. Oh, I have …”
He was interrupted by his cell phone ringing.
“Moshi, moshi? Oh, Miss Meioh,” he said brightly, “what can I … Oh?”
Hotaru looked up at him.
“Oh, that’s terrible … So bring her to the hospital, then? Yes, I can stay and watch over her until the Kittens arrive. No bother at all. You haven’t been able to reach them yet? No worries, I have nothing to do tonight that can’t wait. Truly, it’s my pleasure, Miss Meioh. We’ll leave right away … what’s that? Certainly, I’ll get her something to eat on the way. See you soon.”
“What’s happened, Kuryakin-sensei? Is something wrong with Setsuna-momma?”
“Oh, no, no. There’s been a very bad highway accident and Juuban Secondary General Hospital has put out the call for any available doctors and nurses to come help out. Miss Meioh, bless her heart, is rushing to save the day even as we speak, and so we’ll be spending some extra time together.”
This day began with the three of them together and it was going to end that way, it appeared. She would be some opportunities to ‘take notes’ and ‘check boxes’ tonight. It was a fun pastime, since she’d begun settling in her mind there was something between the two of them. That neither of them could admit it, for reasons good or iffy, made it even more fun. Hotaru felt like a combination of detective and clinical psychologist, or like a narrator doing voiceovers for a nature program where the ‘mating habits’ of the subjects are described.
(WORD LIMIT REACHED)
|
Help Us Stop Plagiarism -
Nearly all works at PnP are original. However a few people choose to plagiarize.
To check, choose a phrase from the work, then either drag and drop to the search box or copy and paste.
click on search and works at Google will be shown which match. Just to be sure, please do this before
you recommend or rate the work highly...
|
 |
|
|
|
Select a Random Work
from Stories
|
|
Welcome !
