[Chapter 1]
Just Another Remedy


DAMAGE. DOOM. dark.
They say it’s the fall from (assumptions of) glory that makes you feel alive.
And yet….


here this, this Woman was.
Falling.
F a l l i n g.
DYING.
chisel a crack in your mouth,
and paint a landscape with your regret and shouts.
roll tape and decode the moans,
ventilate the scandal from these locked up mouth holes.

And she hadn’t even gotten the glory yet.
(SHE NEVER WOULD)
And when she finally hit the bottom — glory-less, spouting r e d.
(SHE WOULD LAUGH).
(she would laugh RED and COLD.)

Because she didn’t see it coming.
Veronica grinned, and blinked slowly, savoring the complete enclosure and safety that her eyelids provided. Her aspirations whipping about in her ribcage, snarling at being caught in a venus fly trap.

FAILURE.


She didn’t even attempt to keep the disdain – the utter disappointment (more D’s, I love it) from her face. There

probably wasn’t a DIPLOMATIC (or delicate) bone in her utterly average body. Where does she expect to get,

with all that plainness?




We’ll have to teach you a lesson.
Don’t worry.
(we’ll rip the heart out.)
"Special Me", Veronica perked up, a gentle smile lilting across her lips, pleased with her plans and ambitions. "I’m gonna be special, somebody, great at…something." (She dreams of ascending her normalcy – but that simply isn’t natural, a dull pigeon parading as an eagle. We can’t all be special, darling PIGeon, if we were all great then no one would be, oh my pleasant p i g.)

She couldn’t see it – in her eyelids – in her rage.
Brown and Dull feathers
(not golden fur)
dropping from the sky, raining lies.
I wish you could see it. It’s beautiful.

She was entirely too assuming (Despicable), too sure of herself and her potential to worry about the crippling average- ness of herself as she sat with her head cocked just slightly to the left, her fists clenched in determination. (Disastrous)

She sat at her desk, the monotony of high school sucking her right in. She didn’t stand out, she forever blends right

in. (Dreary, Dull, Destined TO f a i l). Her eyes narrow in concentration, her manicured hands ($5.52) gripping a pencil,


struggling to form cohesive patterns on the paper, eyes gleaming in the sickly fluorescent light,
green silver (&slivers) sharp (&shards) accusing (h u n g r y).

She can be an Artist. A Graphics Designer, an Illustrator…
But her hands do not agree, they do not cooperate.

Scratch that. She can do something else then.

Dropping her pencil, she runs her fingers through her hair. Medium length, medium consistency, medium shine. Nothing special, nothing to get her on commercials for shampoo. Fingers idly rub her jaw, average size and thickness, nothing particularly ugly or attractive. Just – Bleh Blah Boring.
(with a face like that you’re never going to make it big.)

She sat still, though not tense, as she pondered her future. Like a shark, she imagined, attracted out of the probable scent of fresh opportunity to a kill, and her own stupidity and instincts. She would find a way to rise above the crowd. She would stand out.

But even with her passionate determination, doubt still ate at the lining of her stomach, making her squirm momentarily, and frown in a thin line, biting down on her tongue until she tasted red.
(Hmm. Sharks like blood. Maybe now she’d go into a frenzy?)

It tasted like metal in her mouth, like rusty Listerine.
OH, PITY, I LOVE IT!
How entertaining.

The teacher called on her, she answered correctly. 50-50 chance. For once she’d won, a small victory, a small ascension above her fellows. She smiled toothily, her voice sweet as sunshine, laced with S i C K.

Her voice was smooth and silky, and the image that was immediately interjected into her mind was that of a snake. Sliding along on crushed velvet. But she’d tried singing with it, with her serpentine tones, and she held no misconceptions about its s u c c e s sfullness.
It was a hiss, a FAIL.
Find something
She was good at everything.
Great at nothing.

As she turned away from the teacher, her eyes open wider – wiLdEr. She could be a Scientist, a Great Mind, an Inventor and Creative thinker. But she had studied the material, and still not known the answer when called on. She had guessed. And more times than not she had guessed incorrectly when called on. Could one instance, a stroke of luck, sway her into believing she was a genius of some sort?
YES.

(Bless her).


(Heart of gold and shattered glass).

But in a mere course of a single class period, she’s forced to realize this small selection of peers’ general superiority when it comes to sheer knowledge and mental capacities. Drifting into her own (surely Duly Demented) fantasies, Veronica ignored these facts, her deeply normal movements falling onto muffled, inattentive eyes.

Maybe she was just nervous –
being pathetic, subordinate, absolutely average and all.

She was 100% regular in every way, despite her best efforts,
and it hit her Hard Hard – and softred to the core.
(F A S T F O R W A R D.)
(This is a transition, to something surprising but not surprising.)

[Chapter 2]

Oh, oh, haven’t you heard?
There’s a girl in a cage making love to a switchblade.
There’s a girl behind bars milking abandoned cars.
There’s a nun in shackles building bombs out of bibles.

She was;;
Anguished – only for herself.
Happy – only for him.
Worried – because of the darkness

And lonely. Ever so lonely, she with her luscious, numbing darkness. She was lonely, yes, yes, because Johnny, her trusty, lusty Johnny was leaving her. It made her bitter, bitter and bubbly like aspirin on an empty stomach. And cold cold cold, like butter on pavement. Delicious.


OH, PITY, I LOVE IT!

“Stupid, stupid JOHNNY! stupid, I hate him! I love it!” She giggled unstably, both at the irony and contrast in her statement to the all-listening darkness, and the fact that when the sun rose like it did every brilliant bright cheery morning – she would run, careening and half blind back to her hideaway in her head. And Johnny would be gone.

Just that morning – can you imagine
just a measure of hours ago
she and Johnny had entered this desolatedingydetested world of Death
(ha, another D!).

They’d woken up, after a _____ night of ooh-la-la, and decided to get up and keep on living.
It’d been so so so bright, it had been horrible, really.

But now, oh yes, now she was alone, and it was darkness darkness.

While for some, nighttime was a sad time, for Veronica, this night, it was the tolling bell for freedom. For some, it was the end of yet another day, either of accomplishment or of wasting away. The last few hours of capability before another twenty-four hours of what is sure to be your pathetic life ticked away. For her, it is the opposite. She loved the luscious, lovely darkness. For the dusk and the darkness, killing the sun with the sharp points of stars and the violent violent curved side of the crescent moon. OH, PITY, I LOVE IT!

He’d walked away from her, just like he always did.
But Veronica, she was nothing, she was baggage, and now she knew it.
Just like she always did.

You see, he didn’t need her. Not anymore. Perhaps once, who knows how long ago. In his own sick repressed way, he had needed her for a time.
Stupid.
She had needed him.
Veronica sobbed, flailing her fingers and pale arms in the empty air.
She wasn’t really stupid. She had loved him for a time.
But lying was the only language he knew.
(F A S T F O R W A R D.)
(This is a transition, to something surprising but not surprising.)

A tiny, monstrous, M a s s i v e plus sign.
Pregnancy
test of Despair.

“Stupid!”
She screamed it again, and laughed, not a snicker this time, but a pleased crowing of tones, ranging up and down the scale in a mishmash of musical assault.

“Oh, no, dear dear Johnny,” She sighed, falsified melancholy dripping from every carefully-crafted syllable of regret. “You must just hate me now, loathe me now.” Such tangible sadness coated her voice, that she just couldn’t resist a mocking smile as she glared up at the much-abused picture of her former lover. “You must just loathe me now, making you care for this parasite. Poor Johnny.”

Veronica could see the moon through her window, and with a pitiful stare leaking out of her eyes, the muddy
brown color practically glowing, the color seemed to slide down her cheeks in shiny lines to make her pillow
soggy as cereal that’d been in milk too long.

Lying was the only language she knew.
But what she’d considered falsifying, now truer than r e d!
OH, PITY, I LOVE IT!
Turning to her side with a cackle, Veronica reaches for the phone, and calls her trusty, lusty Johnny.

Pity, pity.
Pity poor Johnny.

Oh, pity, I love it.

[Chapter 3]
You'll never see your wife and children again,
so tell us what it was going through your head,
when you looked into their eyes,
and said "no thanks I'll take the hooker instead"

Of course.
He'd left her.

She’d had the child, he’d stuck around for a time.
But now he was gone, estranged, a vivid and discontinued actor in the soap opera of her life.
The ratings are dropping, dropping.
And the child is crying.