Welcome.
I’m a high school student.
You can call me Jonathon8.
And yes – I am.
If you’re new here, I recommend you Start From The Beginning. Saves time.
If you’ve been here before, recent posts are listed at the bottom of the page. You know your way around.
Let the carnage begin – and don’t say I didn’t fucking warn you…
– Jonathon8
Time is a great fucking motivator. You realise that, right? When you’re finite, you get shit done or you grow old regretting it. Your curse, boys and girls. And you even go on about what you could accomplish if you had all the time in the world – if you could, like, live forever, oh, the stuff you’d achieve, yeah? But you’re missing the fucking point.
When you’ve got forever, why the hell do it now? You lot have downtime in your lives, sure: slack-ass periods of apathy that might stretch into ellipses, but no matter what, yours are sped up by the next due date, scheduled event, birthday…
Ours – ours are fucking page breaks. Blank chapters. Stagnate things suspended in the slow roll of time when even the reappearance of an old acquaintance, or the consequent rush and fire of food-lust and satiation doesn’t seem to colour the void. The impetus for action, for anger – for hunger – winds down to quiet and stillness.Our kind of deadlines are gastronomical, not figurative, and even they start getting drawn thin at times like this.
Walking slumber. Reeling on through the infinite, the humdrum, the creak of time. Waiting, Waiting for something to wake us from the winter of our discontent. Something to pierce the torpor, rip into inertia, tear through the animate sleep of the dead, and warm me back into livelihood.
Actually…
I’ve made myself kinda hungry just talking about this shit.
Huh.
Seriously.
Hungry.
Well, fuck.
It’s been a while.
Go figure.
So…
Who wants to meet me for a drink?…
It’s the short cut. The one behind the corner shop that dips down through a strange stretch of scrubby urban wasteland and creeps out under the one working streetlight on that back road. Even at night, the path is clear enough from here – a thin, pale dragline with the welcome beacon of light diffusing the farther end.
Between here and there though is the blur of indistinct twilit shapes on either side. They’re probably just tree skeletons clutching at each other overhead, or dead kitchen appliances and dismembered shopping trolleys, or bare-branched bushes harbouring a feral cat or mouldering midden or the broken remnants of a drunken binge.
It’s tempting to stop and look back about halfway down. The stolid reassurance of the shop’s back wall and the battered garbage bins and the quiet empty path behind.
However, while looking back, what lies in front is no longer in sight.
A quick glance forward is enough to guarantee there is nothing ahead but the stillness and the shadows and the cold street light ahead.
Of course, one should never discount the shadows though. You see – you’re not the only one who likes to make short cuts.
We do too.
And this won’t take long…
Silent night, holy… shit, people. How the fuck do you do this Christmas thing, year in, year out? For once I’ve been totally and unwittingly embroiled in the whole holiday spirit and good will stuff – yet another ‘perk’ of housesharing, apparently.
Last Christmas I had lost my best friend, all my cash, most of my fucking dignity and had been bitten by a psychotic blood-hungry maniac. Spent the holiday season licking my wounds for a while. happy times. Merry bloody Christmas.
Anyway, Kane’s mom is away visiting her sister this year, so it’s a self-proclaimed orphans’ Christmas in our dysfunctional fraternity. Grae swears he can cook turkey (but as I prefer the other white meat, I’ll be suffering from a mysterious bout of something I’ll invent tomorrow morning). Nik put up the Christmas tree, hung a string of lights, and opened a beer. Since then, our festive conifer has also been festooned with random cooking utensils that Grae will look for in the kitchen and in vain later, a pair of shorts, and the Christmas reindeer novelty head (that Nik neatly pilfered from the poor, sweating, costumed employee at the mall yesterday) is perched with lop-sided precariously on the highest bough.
Underneath is a pile of badly wrapped presents that I sure as hell couldn’t afford to buy but found myself being fucking guilted into. Never had to do the Christmas shopping thing before: naturally I left it to the last possible minute, and I tell you, my wallet bled even more than my most recent dinner date.
So about two hours ago, I’m killing things (on PS3 – relax, will you?), Kane is eating his weight in his namesake candy, Nik is poppping corn but throwing so much of it at Grae (who is being nauseatingly sentimental on the phone to the latest girlfriend) that we have indoor snow that crunches when you walk.
Buzzer goes.
Paper-rock-scissors dictates Nik has to answer it, not me. He mumbles into the intercom, presses the release button, and goes to the door to wait.
“Who the hell is here at this time of night?” Kane says, lazily, sweeping tape and wrapping-paper scraps ruthlessly from the coffee table so he can put his feet up. “Better not be your Amazon, Grae. She’s been over, like, every evening this week?”
Grae demonstrates rapidly and graphically in excellent mime exactly where Kane could shove that particular comment, while still cradlling his phone (and hence the lady in question) under his chin.
Nik comes back, looking surprisingly meek and subdued for him. Just behind is the unexpected guest.
“Hey, Jonno?”
I pause the game and look up.
“Yeah – it’s your uncle, man.”
Tall, impeccably dressed as ever – and even when the dude is standing in our chaotic apartment (surrounded by four scruffy open-mouthed teens, ensconced on a carpet of popcorn, and beside the Christmas tree with the reindeer head bowing down rakishly at him), those eyes and teeth are still… well.
Still all the better to consume you with. I mean – what the fuck do you say at a moment like that?
So I just stood up, brushed myself down a bit, and said:
“Hey, Py.”
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Musings of a High School Vampire 