Marjories' Margarine

This is a story title given to me by J about a year ago, during Industrial Training, when I hit a really bored point. Never got down to writing it, until this morning, when I could do no work and decided to write just to get the words flowing. I rather like how it turned out, though I don't think its all that original, but for now, here is Part One of Marjorie's Margarine.


Marjorie’s Margarine
A story about nothing at all, by Pauline Wong

Marjorie woke up to a vicious headache and a slab of margarine in her hands. It was not a pleasant situation to be found in, considering she had once been arrested for vandalism (she smeared expired margarine over a much prized painting by the darling of the town, Mary Han-Lee, who was twelve when she painted that picture of a dog with six tails, shortly before Mary’s body was found dumped in the sidewalk, chopped in three parts and half-rotting) and twice for possession of an illegal substance (codeine, which was banned due to its amazing effects on coughs as well as mental capabilities, she disguised it under the pretense of a carton of margarine tubs).

To be found waking up with a headache and a slab of greasy stuff in her tiny hands on a bed that was not even hers, and with a horrendously torn pair of jeans was most dodgy indeed. She hoped, and hoped, that the cops were not around. Better yet, she hoped her father wasn’t around.

She lifted herself from the bed and placed the margarine slab (incriminating stuff, that, she was beginning to think) on the table beside her. The table had only a vase with swirls of blue and a miserable rose as companions –she suspected a slab of margarine would hardly make a difference.

She went to the toilet (not hers, for sure, this is not her blue and green room at home, and her toilet was done in pink. This one was in a dull, faded grey) and searched through the cabinet with the cracked mirror for something to swat the headache away. She was sure she would not be able to figure out what to do next if she didn’t first get rid of this headache.

She was about to triumphantly extract a battered box of Panadol when a very large shadow loomed above her. Shit.

“Marjorie. Marjorie the Margarine Mayhem. What is it with you and that slimy stuff.”

It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t a statement, it was a proclamation of someone who said things just for the heck of saying it. She knew those kinds of people. They were the ones who looked up at the raining sky only to proclaim ‘awfully wet isn’t it.’

She had two words: Bugger it.

Marjorie turned around slowly, Panadol in clenched fist, headache now reaching epic proportions worthy of intense hospitalization. The man who stood above (quite literally; he was floating six inches off the ground, how nice for him, looming made easy for him, she was sure) her was a man she did not recognize. He had a flat, flaccid face and a most unpleasant sneer on his very chapped lips. He smelled like cigarettes and like cheap beer. She has never tasted or seen beer that was cheap, but she fancied if she did it would smell like this disgusting man.

Marjorie tightened her grip on the Panadol, and wished with all her heart she had not left the margarine slab on the table.

It would get so melt-y when and if she went back for it. Nothing is quite as bad as a melting slab of margarine when a solid slab of margarine was nasty enough. She liked margarine though, but that is a story for another day, and for a time when she wasn’t confronted by a large levitating man.

“But don’t mind me,” proclaimed this large man. “I don’t like margarine anyway. I like butter really. But you wouldn’t know. You like margarine. Did you know they have a story written about you called Marjorie’s Margarine.”

She began to wish she had a name like Ylondavasaki. Just so they can’t make a pun of her name with her weapon of choice.

“No I didn’t know that,” she said, and her voice was low, smooth and warm. In another situation it would have been a voice to melt the ears of men, but this man was not any ordinary man, and this was one of those bad situations. Voices like butter (haha) would not do a thing for times like this. Margerine, though, probably will.

“I came here to ask you to hand in what you have over there. By the corner. Black bag,” he said. Then he cocked his head one side and re-pondered his proclamation. “Not ask. Force.”
She took a sharp breath. “Black bag? What black bag? I have nothing on me. As you can see,” she gestured at her torn and ripped jeans, with bits of pinkish flesh showing through (yes, she had an odd pinkish colouring about her person, don’t go holding that against her –what did you think she would be? Yellow, like margarine? Overkill), “I have nothing on me, not even the jeans on my thighs.”

He looked at her and showed her his very black teeth. It was a stereotype, she supposed. If he was already leering and looming, it must be his teeth would be of an unnatural colour. A leery, loomy guy would not have perfect teeth.

“You don’t have it. You were robbed.”

She nodded, though that sent stars through her eyeballs. “I was robbed,” she affirmed. “I was also attacked.”

His grin, if possible, got even wider. Hmm. Too wide.

“If you won’t tell me, I will have to take it from you.”

She frowned. “Take -?”

And then his face split into two, black teeth and chapped lips and all and he lunged at her with his mouth impossibly wide open, aiming straight for her face.

Screaming, she ducked and rolled away from him, and he stumbled. Scrambling to her feet, she made her way to the bedroom, ignoring the bursts of pain behind her eyes, and made a wild grab for the bed-side table. Her hands slipped on the (DAMMIT) expectedly melted margarine slab as he grabbed her feet and began to drag her backwards.

With a grunt, she kicked out at him, and to her horror, he ate her shoe. “Damn you!” she shouted. “That’s my favourite shoe!” He went on grinning in that unnatural, horror-movie-esque way, and she saw with disgust that his tongue too, was black. Damn we’re just full of stereotypes here, she thought, as she continued to fight to escape his grip.

Her feet kept at the kicking (sans one side of her blue and white Nikes) and eventually, she felt his grip slacken, just for a split second and she slid out of his claws like (pfft) margarine. She made yet another wild dash for that (melt-y) slab of margarine, managed to grab hold on to it, and threw it with all her might straight into his mouth.

It disappeared like candy at a candy shop inside that black hole he called a face, but as soon as she pointed her middle finger at him, his face exploded, spraying her with bits of Looming Man.

“Bleargh.” She flicked a particular nasty bit away from her face, and mourned the loss of yet another perfectly good slab of margarine.

Groaning, she put her hands to her head and wished that the headache would go away. Remembering the Panadol, she made her way back to the toilet (amidst the remains of Mr. Leering) and found it, very much more battered and crushed now. She found one uncrushed pill, put it inside her mouth, and poured the remaining powdery bits into her mouth. Swallowing them dry, she thought. Ahek.

She looked around the scene of damage. Bits of nasty man? Check. Painkillers? Check. Clothes? Hmm. She looked under the bed covers, in the cupboard with the spoilt handle, under the bed itself –and spied a really ratty-looking pair of shorts.

It had stains on it. Stains that looked suspiciously like blood. Grimacing, she put them on, and with a flick of her hair, she picked up the box (containing a vial of blood and an address) she hid from sight and walked out the doors of the hotel.

****

Matthew threw his pen down and slammed his not-too-shabby fists against the flat top of his very expensive table.

Maybe slammed is too harsh a word. His table cost too much to be treated with such violence.

Let’s correct the mistake.

Matthew threw his pen down and gently tapped the flat surface of his very expensive table.

Better.

He chewed the edge of his fingers (not the nail, the finger) in a very precise, mechanical manner.
It helped him think when the words wouldn’t flow through, like it always did. That, and cussing as fluently as he can in the five languages he knew.

He proceeded to do just that and earned a yell from his father, who was in the other room, also trying to write, and also not getting any. Words, that is.

His father was a great playwright with so many awards under his belt that his son was surprised it still held up pants, and Matthew had, quite obviously, took after his fathers’ word-wizardry.

Matthew earned the nickname of Writes, pronounced ‘rights’, when he was 7, in the midst of composition class for young children. He earned it for the sole reason he dared to propose to his teacher at that time that ‘ebullient’ did not mean ‘bulbous’ and as such, cannot be used in that particular sentence; which, by the way, had three syntax errors and one grammatically dubious use of tense.

He was promptly told to leave the class and go out into the hall bearing the placard with the words: I am a Know-it-All. He went home, wrote a six-page short story, showed it to his father and equally as promptly was told he needed to take down the blood content a notch. Maybe two notches.

He also won his first short-story writing competition with that story, and forever solidified himself as Writes by winning every single writing competition he ever entered (with the help of his father, who would read and pronounce either ‘bloodthirsty’ or ‘passable for mass audiences’).

But behind his back people also called him Bloodlust Writes, thanks to his penchant for extremely vivid scenes of gore, blood and violence –brilliant, they were, but also disturbing.

This, however, did not mean he was a violent person by nature. He really was quite good-natured. Tall, and rather thin, cut with a hollow look to his cheeks and a dark, brooding gaze, he was not what one would even call handsome (nor attractive, nor charming, nor sensuous, nor any adjectives used to describe aesthetically pleasing males), he was simply what one would call ‘interesting’. He gave chills to the people who he wanted to give chills to and was good to the people who he wanted to be good to.

His father long gave up trying to get him to fill out that starved look (his father was a robust man with a hearty appetite and an extremely clever wit –his works were all acclaimed for its sharp writing and insanely intelligent wit) and chose to buy him clothes that were bright in colour and always 3 sizes too large.

But Writes (we shall know him as that) has always been a good sort of person (despite the bloodlust) and he never got into any trouble of any kind. In fact, he was all round nice, with a dry sort of humour and a great smile. He didn’t have black teeth, you will be glad to know.

He didn’t have any distinguishing talents besides writing, but that, as he often told himself in the dead of night on one of his nightly sojourns into the depths of his imagination, he never found to be worth of concern or worry. To him, all he needed were his words, his imagination and the perpetuity of the Internet and the computer.

Giving up the cussing meant going back to the fingers, and Writes did just that. When he felt a tang of metal on his tongue and a sharp pain through his fingers, he removed the injured finger from his mouth and moved on to the wounded digits’ next-door neighbor.

He rolled the taste of his own blood in his mouth –a horrifying habit his father had never been able to break him of. Writes liked the taste of his own blood, and he often bit himself just to lick away at his wounds, like a dog. He was still good natured though, albeit with a fetish for his own blood.

He even had 3 ex-girlfriends, all who left him within six months, which was just about the time they found out he liked to lick his own blood. And that he eventually wrote their deaths in effort to show them how much he liked them.

He had a lot of friends too, but they knew from the look in his eyes that when a writers’ block was on the way, the blood will soon be flowing. Then they left, but they returned when he was busy writing and was all-round good to be around.

Writes then felt a sharp buzz just inside his stomach somewhere, and frantically rushed to his laptop (a state-of-the-art machine that did everything under the sun except wash your laundry for you) and began to type away so furiously that his fingers groaned in protest. The pen lay on the table, forgotten. He never used it anyway. He only used it when he needed to think –then he would hold it in his hands and push it against his forehead until an indentation appeared and he got the words he needed.

His father, too, was silent in the other room, which meant he was asleep or writing.

Writes eventually got to the end of the story he had been working on for two months, and he was pleased with how it turned out. There was a minimal amount of blood (he was sure father would pronounce it ‘passable for mass audiences with stronger stomachs than most people’) and there was a brilliant twist to the plot he himself did not know he was going to write.

He dashed to his father and waved his manuscript under his nose and earned a playful slap on the shoulder.

“Here now m’boy. Slow down. What have you got there?” boomed his father. “Another one of your stories again? Heard you cussin’ like a sailor just now.”

Writes was 23, but his father always spoke like this –like a cheesy western advertisement for ‘family fun weekends at Tampa Bay’. Wherever Tampa Bay was. He suspects it’s in the States somewhere.

“Father. I may have stumbled upon a veritable goldmine here within these sixty six thousand words,” he said. He too, always spoke like that –like a book. “I believe that once it is published it will be the making of our fortune.”

His father laughed. “We made our fortune years ago, sonny. We have enough money to buy out a government and maybe even more!”

This was true. His father made obscene amounts of money each day writing speeches for people who needed great writers to prepare their speeches. He also made money from his plays, which were always to a full house and with the biggest names attached to it.

And Writes also brought in his fair share of the dough –he made money from writing dark, underground hit movies for those who are too rich to bother with making money, but were perfectly happy paying him to help them make beautiful, dark, disturbing and brilliant movies no one but a small handful ever saw.

“Nonetheless, have a read and see if it may be palatable for the audiences.” He left the papers in his father’s room, on his equally as expensive table. His father started humming ‘Flight of the Bumblebees’. Writes left the room.

He wandered into the kitchen (it took him a full fifteen minutes to get there, seeing his house was three and a half stories high and had 10 bedrooms) and tried to find himself something to eat. He beckoned one of the many black-clad staff bustling about, and proceeded to articulate himself (with his hands) that he wanted some food.

This he did with rubbing his stomach and pointing to his open mouth. It earned him giggles from the petite little creature that joined the staff of the household yesterday and a hunk of fresh-baked bread with hand-made strawberry jam.

He ate methodically, biting himself as he did so, just because he liked to.

His phone rang (another state of the art thing that did everything as well, except what his laptop cannot) and he answered a call with a very pleasant –

“Hello.”

“I am looking for a guy named Rights.”

“That would be me.”

“Prepare two slabs of margarine. Do it now, and don’t leave it out someplace hot. Leave it in
somewhere cool in that huge house of yours. When you hear someone at the door, open it, hand her the margarine, and find somewhere to hide.”

“I think that would make a great story plot. May I know with whom am I having the pleasure of being ordered around?”

“No. And just do it! Now!”

The phone went dead. Writes pondered his actions: as he could see, he had two options. Write a story on this phone call (he could see the starting… it would be about a girl named Marjorie, who did miraculous things with butter) or do as the harassed voice told him to.

Sighing, and licking off the last bits of blood, he proceeded to do as the voice had asked. He grabbed two slabs of margarine from the cupboard and left them by the side table (it had something that looked like Faberge eggs on it, but those he casually put aside), where it was relatively cool.

When he opened the door, he found out very quickly two things: he would like to go upstairs and taste more of his blood, write a book, and go promptly mad from the brilliance of the plot, and second, he would also like to bring along the girl standing there in front of him, and probably taste her blood too.

He reconsidered option number two when he saw her fling the margarine slabs at two men who looked like they came out of one of his own stories and they exploded.

“There. Thanks for the help, Rights.” She brushed her short shorts, sending out a small cloud of dust.

“Writes,” he corrected in a monotone, still staring at the lumps of sizzling meat.

“Yes, Writes then. Nice to meet you,” she cheerfully announced. “I am here to ask you for your
brain.”

Writes took his eyes from the remains of the creatures and frowned at her. “My brain.”

“Your brain,” she affirmed, eyes gleaming.

“May I ask why and what will you be doing with my brain?”

“Simple. I plan on using it as bait.”

“Bait?”

“Yes, bait. Why am I always affirming my statements?” she wondered out loud, and pulled at
imaginary lint (which turned out to be a body part). “Anyway. Bait for them. They want to eat
your brain so they can get information out of you. Well, maybe not eat so much as digest. Like a snake. Python. They swallow and di –“

“I know what a python does and how it eats.”

She smiled. “Great, then you would know what would happen and so it will be easier.”

He stared at her –her dirty brown hair, tangled in a bob around her face, he short shorts, her
odd pinkish skin, and her bright, gleaming eyes.

“Goodbye,” he said, and began to shut the door.

“Sure,” she said, as her face disappeared behind the ten thousand dollar mahogany door with inlaid gold. “But don’t you want to know why your brain is bait –it could be a story.”

He paused.

“I’m listening.”

She grinned, white teeth showing, eyebrows arched. “Invite me in, and oh yes. Don’t suck my
blood. You won’t like how I taste.”

He grinned back, showing white teeth, with exceptionally red gums.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”