Marjorie's Margarine: Part 2


Marjorie woke up with a vicious headache and a slab of margarine in her hands. It was not a pleasant situation to find herself in, (seeing that men whose mouths split open are chasing after her and she was accompanied by a precocious, bloodthirsty child prodigy turned Dark Lord of Macabre) and she was beginning to feel that she would very much like to go away and hide somewhere, just as long as the whole family tree of Mr. Looming were not hot on her slightly greasy tail. Tail, figuratively, of course.

She glanced at the prone figure on the floor, who, despite the 10 other available and beautifully decorated rooms, refused to sleep somewhere in one of those aforementioned designer rooms. Writes would not sleep anywhere but in his room, and she would not sleep alone for fear of the Leering Men of the World.

The prone figure stirred, and bit his fingers. Three out of five of his left hand were halfway between his lips and teeth, a most odd way of sleeping she thought, before seeing him bite them several times during the night, always lightly, never hard enough to draw blood –he never tasted during his sleep. It made him cough in the mornings, if he did.

She coughed a little, put the margarine on the bedside table and threw off the light blue bedcovers, for despite his fondness for blood, his favourite colour was, and always will be, a robin’s egg blue. Writes was not the kind to dress in black and prophesy death and destruction, though he had been sorely tempted to several times throughout his childhood, just so his father would notice more of him instead of that infernal laptop.

It was only when he had his own infernal laptop did he realize that his father wasn’t ignoring him, his father was simply a helpless victim of technology.

Marjorie walked to the floor length windows (also tinted a cool, dark blue, with heavy curtains that smelled of mothballs) and peered out. She saw nothing, but when it comes to nothing, she knew that sometimes, just sometimes, it was heck everything. Everything meaning creatures from the black depths of Creepy 101 with an extra degree in Lurking for Experts.

She considered waking Writes, and telling him the whole story of what she learnt, and worst of all, how he can help. She padded in bare feet softly over to him and caught sight of his sleeping face. He was one of those guys who, when awake, looked as if the world were on his shoulders, but when asleep, slept with the child-like peace of one who has nothing to worry about and the a nice taste in his mouth. Nice taste for him being his own flesh. And blood. But no blood. Made him cough.

She changed her mind, and let him sleep instead. She picked up her tattered clothes (he lent her some of his old stuff, he really was rather too thin for his age and macabre tastes) from the floor and puzzled over them for a while, wondering if she could possibly fix them.

She poked her fingers ruefully through the enormous holes in her shorts and decided on negative –no hope for those old 501s then. It was then that he shifted from his uncomfortable position from the floor, snorted and woke up with a “Wha-?” His hair stuck out at the sides (it was curly, long and black, and had no resemblance to anything remotely in the style of the new millennium, more like the outdated, unruly mop of a child star of the 1800s) and a few curly hairs lay across the towel, in disguise as a pillow.

She turned to him and smiled –a strange smile that one made simply because one did not know what else to do with one’s lips. He stared, blinked and lifted his eyebrows.

“If I had harboured hopes that you would be but a dream, I am sorely mistaken,” he said, in somber tones. “Perhaps once you have finished telling me whatever gruesome tale you wish to share you may take to your heels and flee.”

A wild laugh stuck at her throat at the way he spoke, like a book with a really bad writer. “Do you –pfft- always talk like that?”

He frowned. “If you mean to ask, do I converse with others as in a book, or a crime mystery, yes, I always do, and I see no wrong in that.” He spotted an ant on the floor and squashed it. He flicked it aside, and turned his eyes back onto her.

Her smile grew wide, and she said: “Alright, fine. I need to tell you three things and you will have to act upon them, or end up as brain-bait.”

He puzzled over that for the quietest of moments. “Alright.” He didn’t want to be brain bait. He was, in all circumstances, very fond of his brain. He knew quite a number of people who would not share his sentiments, but nonetheless.

She blew a lock of dirty brown hair away from her forehead and took a deep breath.

“You have a brain that these creatures want. The creatures are idea-eaters. They eat ideas.”

She said these words with the air of one who has just dropped a dungbomb.

He stared. “They eat ideas.”

“Yes, they eat ideas.”

He continued to stare. “And this is dangerous… how?” he asked, all book-talk forgotten at the
ludicrousness of the situation.

She shook her mane of mouse-brown hair. “No no, you don’t get it. They eat ideas –but not just
ideas. They eat the thoughts and musings of a person and it dissipates. Poof. Dead. Gone.” She snapped her fingers.

He frowned. Hard. “You can’t eat ideas.”

“Oh yes you can, if you were those guys. They eat brains. Brains have ideas. If they eat ideas and imagination and thought and fancy, then where will we all be? Can you imagine if they ate the ideas of the great minds of the Earth –think gates or jobs.”

“Bill and Steve?”

“Yeah that gate and that job,” she said, with a roll of her eyes. “Ideas are so much more important than you think. How do you think I ended up throwing exploding margarine –“she
broke off.

He peered at her face, which suddenly had a shadow cast upon it. “You were born of an idea, weren’t you?” he asked with unerring sharpness. She looked up quickly, and her mouth hung open. She closed it quickly. “Yeah.” She savagely spat that word out. “Yeah I was. From the ideas of one twisted writer with nothing much to do, who eventually had an unfortunate encounter with one of them.”

He stood up from his cross legged position on the floor. “So why do they want my brain?” he asked, beginning to pace around the room, nibbling at his fingers as he did so, and drawing more blood than he ever did before –a sure sign of frustration.

“They want your ideas. Your more bloodthirsty ideas,” she declared. “See, sometimes they don’t swallow all of the ideas they eat. They chew it up, distort it, and save it for later. The same way you would save a gum, for example.”

“Some of the best ideas they have distorted have been the worst for everyone everywhere –but don’t go blaming them for Hitler. That one they didn’t have to distort anything,” she snorted.

“They distorted the ideas which were meant to be good –for instance, computer viruses were supposed to be little ‘bugs’ that automatically fixed the problem areas in your computer, with artificial intelligence, but they distorted it to do the exact opposite.”

It was now his turn to roll his eyes –he himself had created some of the most catastrophic viruses ever in the dead of the night and sold them to eager anti-virus companies, who would make fortunes coming up with anti-viruses. It was all a man-made scam, no need for creatures with big mouths or black teeth.

She sensed his doubt and pressed on. “It doesn’t matter now, they were always small-scale. Nothing deadly, nothing fatal. But they want a change, and your ideas can help them do just that.”

She looked downward. “They want to kill imagination. For good.” She held up her hands quickly as he opened his mouth to ask why. “Don’t ask why, if I knew, I’d be scrambling in the opposite direction as soon as I can, and never give a damn. I only fear it’s something more dastardly than just their greed for ideas. I don’t know who is involved, but I am going to find out.”

Marjorie picked up the slab of oozing margarine. “I hate my name,” she said despondently.

Surprised by her sudden shift in behavior, he stopped pacing, stared at her for a bit and went to his laptop.

“Well, then I’ll just delete everything from my computer. No more ideas,” he said, confident it will work.

She lifted her head for a second, stared at him, and burst out laughing, so hard she felt her sides cracking.