Astrid Magnussen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_oleander) wrote2020-10-06 06:31 am
white_oleander) wrote2020-10-06 06:31 am
Entry tags:
Outside of Covent Garden Flowers; Tuesday Midday [10/06].
As Astrid approached the flower shop, she stopped, staring at the door. There were two girls she’d never seen before sitting there outside. Older girls, fresh faces, no makeup. One wore a vintage-style dress with little flowers, her sandy hair in a bun with a chopstick stuck in it. The dark one had on jeans and a pink cotton turtleneck. Black clean shoulder-length hair..
The vintage-dress girl stood up, squinting into the sun, her eyes the same gray as her dress, freckles. She smiled uncertainly when Astrid walked up.
“Are you Astrid Magnussen?” she asked.
Astrid eyed them with suspicion. A lot of strange things could happen here in Fandom, but none of them seemed as mundane as two strange young woman asking for her specifically by name, which made it worse, almost more nerve-wrecking than the usual Fandom fanfare.
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m Hannah,” she said. “This is Julie.”
The other girl smiled too, but not as widely.
Astrid was positive she'd never seen them before. It was a small school, they couldn't have been classmates, and they were too young to be social workers.
“Yeah, and?”
Hannah, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, looked over at dark-haired Julie for encouragement. Suddenly, Astrid became aware of what she must seem like to them. Hard, street. She'd started wearing a little eyeliner lately, pretty much ever since that party when she'd got first got back (are you goth now?). Her shirt black polyester shirt, her heavy black boots, a small cascade of silver earrings, from when she'd pierced her ears when she was bored, her tattoo peeking out from under the sleeve of her shirt. Astrid had learned by now, whatever she hung from her earlobes or etched into her flesh, she was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir her up, she always came to rest on the bottom.
“We just came to meet you, to see, you know, if there was anything we could do,” Hannah said.
“We know your mother,” Julie said. She had a deeper voice, calmer. “We visit with her in Corona.”
Her children. Ingrid's new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. Astrid had been back and forth between Fandom and foster care for years now, she had starved, wept, her body felt like a battlefield, her spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege or a goat demon's caldera, and now she was being replaced by something unmutilated, something intact? Something that apparently traveled through time and across the country just to find her...
“We’re at Pitzer College, out in Pomona. We studied her in Women’s Studies. We visit her every week. She knows so much about everything, she’s really incredible. Every time we go she just blows us away.”
What was Ingrid thinking, sending these college girls? Was she trying to grind Astrid into talc, flour for some bitter bread? Was this the ultimate punishment for her refusal to forget? “What does she want from me?”
“Oh, no,” Hannah said. “She didn’t send us. We came on our own. But we told her we’d send you a copy of the interview, you know?” She held up a magazine she had rolled in her hands, blushed deeply. In a way, Astrid envied that blush. Astrid didn't think she could blush like that anymore. She felt old, gnawed pliant and unrecognizable as a shoe given to a dog. “And then we thought, you know, now that we knew where you lived, we could—”
She smiled helplessly.
“We thought we’d come and see if we could help you or something,” Julie said.
Astrid saw that she scared them. They thought her mother’s daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. Ingrid didn’t scare them, but Astrid did.
“Is that it?” she asked, holding out her hand for the magazine.
Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. Ingrid’s face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.
Astrid sat down next to Julie on the infamous stepped streets. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. Astrid opened the piece, flipped through it. Her mother’s gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography.
“What do you talk about with her?” Astrid asked.
“Poetry.” Hannah shrugged. “What we’re reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn’t even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that’s just incredible.”
The transformation of the world.
“She talks about you,” Julie said.
That was a surprise. “What’s she say about me?”
“That you’re, you know, at a school. She feels terrible about what’s happened,” Hannah said. “For you most of all.”
Astrid looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeup-less faces, trusting, caring. And she felt the gap between them, the same gap she felt with most people, all the things she wouldn’t be because she was who she was. When she graduated from here, she wasn’t going to a place like Pitzer, that was for sure. She was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so her mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. Astrid tried to see Ingrid through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did her mother suffer? She forced herself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? Astrid really couldn’t say.
“So you thought you’d come out and what?” Astrid asked. “Adopt me?”
She laughed but they didn’t. Astrid had grown too hard, maybe she was more like her mother than she thought.
Julie gave Hannah a told you so look. Astrid could see this had been the sandy girl’s idea. “Yeah, well, sort of. If you wanted.”
Their sincerity so unexpected, their sympathies so misplaced. “You don’t think she killed him, do you,” Astrid realized.
Hannah shook her head, quickly. “It’s all been a terrible mistake. A nightmare. She talks all about it in the interview.”
Astrid was sure she had. She was always at her best with an audience. “Something you should know,” Astrid told them firmly. “She did kill him.”
Hannah stared at her. Julie’s gaze fled to her friend. They were shocked. Actually shocked; Astrid almost couldn't believe it. Julie stepped protectively toward her gauzy friend, and Astrid felt suddenly cruel, like she’d told small children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed. But they weren’t small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn’t know the first thing about.
Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.
“That’s not true,” Hannah said. Shook her head, shook it again, as if she could clear my words out of it. “It isn’t.”
She was asking Astrid to tell her it wasn’t.
“I was there,” Astrid told her. “I saw her mix up the medicine. She’s not what she seems.”
“She’s still a great poet,” Julie said.
“Yes,” Astrid agreed. “A killer and a poet.”
Hannah played with a button on the front of her gray dress, and it popped off in her hand. She stared at it in her
palm, her face stained red as beet borscht. “She must have had her reasons. Maybe he was beating her.”
“He wasn’t beating her.” Astrid put her hands on her knees and pushed herself into a standing position. She felt suddenly very tired.
Julie looked up at her, brown eyes serious and calm. Astrid would have thought her more sensible than Hannah, less likely to have been taken in by Ingrid’s spell. “Why’d she do it, then?”
“Why do people kill people who leave them?” Astrid asked. “Because they feel hurt and angry and they can’t stand that feeling.”
“I’ve felt that way,” Hannah said. The mid-day light of the sun was touching the curly escaped ends of her hair, making a frizzy halo around her fair head.
“But you didn’t kill anyone,” Astrid said.
“I wanted to.”
Astrid looked at her, twisting the hem of her vintage dress with the small flowers, the front gapping open where the button fell off, her stomach was rosy. “Sure. Maybe you even fantasized about how you would do it. You didn’t do it. There’s a huge difference.”
A bird somewhere sang, maybe in a rooftop nearby, maybe from inside the flower shop itself, a spill of liquid sound.
“Maybe not so big a difference,” Julie said. “Some people are just more impulsive than others.”
Astrid slapped the magazine against the leg of her jeans. They were going to justify her some way. Protect the Goddess Beauty no matter what. They were willing to forgive her anything. “Look, thanks for coming, but I have to get to work."
“I wrote my number on the back of the magazine,” Hannah said, rising. “Call if you, you know. Want to.”
Her new children. Astrid stood there on the steps in front of the flower shop and watched them go back, probably to a car waiting for them at the end of the causeway. A useless, pointless journey, across time, across the country, just to leave again with disappointment.
[[ NFI, as it goes straight into the proper shop post here. That Astrid had people looking for her to talk about her mother is A-OK, but if the specific details could be NFB, it would be appreciated. Taken and modified slightly from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. We're finally out of Chapter 27! Huzzah! ]]
The vintage-dress girl stood up, squinting into the sun, her eyes the same gray as her dress, freckles. She smiled uncertainly when Astrid walked up.
“Are you Astrid Magnussen?” she asked.
Astrid eyed them with suspicion. A lot of strange things could happen here in Fandom, but none of them seemed as mundane as two strange young woman asking for her specifically by name, which made it worse, almost more nerve-wrecking than the usual Fandom fanfare.
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m Hannah,” she said. “This is Julie.”
The other girl smiled too, but not as widely.
Astrid was positive she'd never seen them before. It was a small school, they couldn't have been classmates, and they were too young to be social workers.
“Yeah, and?”
Hannah, pink-cheeked with embarrassment, looked over at dark-haired Julie for encouragement. Suddenly, Astrid became aware of what she must seem like to them. Hard, street. She'd started wearing a little eyeliner lately, pretty much ever since that party when she'd got first got back (are you goth now?). Her shirt black polyester shirt, her heavy black boots, a small cascade of silver earrings, from when she'd pierced her ears when she was bored, her tattoo peeking out from under the sleeve of her shirt. Astrid had learned by now, whatever she hung from her earlobes or etched into her flesh, she was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir her up, she always came to rest on the bottom.
“We just came to meet you, to see, you know, if there was anything we could do,” Hannah said.
“We know your mother,” Julie said. She had a deeper voice, calmer. “We visit with her in Corona.”
Her children. Ingrid's new children. Stainless as snowdrops. Bright and newborn. Amnesiac. Astrid had been back and forth between Fandom and foster care for years now, she had starved, wept, her body felt like a battlefield, her spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege or a goat demon's caldera, and now she was being replaced by something unmutilated, something intact? Something that apparently traveled through time and across the country just to find her...
“We’re at Pitzer College, out in Pomona. We studied her in Women’s Studies. We visit her every week. She knows so much about everything, she’s really incredible. Every time we go she just blows us away.”
What was Ingrid thinking, sending these college girls? Was she trying to grind Astrid into talc, flour for some bitter bread? Was this the ultimate punishment for her refusal to forget? “What does she want from me?”
“Oh, no,” Hannah said. “She didn’t send us. We came on our own. But we told her we’d send you a copy of the interview, you know?” She held up a magazine she had rolled in her hands, blushed deeply. In a way, Astrid envied that blush. Astrid didn't think she could blush like that anymore. She felt old, gnawed pliant and unrecognizable as a shoe given to a dog. “And then we thought, you know, now that we knew where you lived, we could—”
She smiled helplessly.
“We thought we’d come and see if we could help you or something,” Julie said.
Astrid saw that she scared them. They thought her mother’s daughter would be something else, something more like them. Something gentle, wide-open. That was a riot. Ingrid didn’t scare them, but Astrid did.
“Is that it?” she asked, holding out her hand for the magazine.
Hannah tried to straighten out the curl of the magazine on her flowered knee. Ingrid’s face on the cover, behind chicken wire, on the phone in the seclusion room. She must have done something, usually you get to be at the picnic tables. She looked beautiful, smiling, her teeth still perfect, the only lifer at Frontera with perfect teeth, but her eyes looked weary. Contemporary Literature.
Astrid sat down next to Julie on the infamous stepped streets. Hannah took a seat a step down, her dress flowing in a curve like an Isadora Duncan dance step. Astrid opened the piece, flipped through it. Her mother’s gestures, flat of palm to forehead, elbow on the ledge. Head against the window, eyes downcast. We are larger than biography.
“What do you talk about with her?” Astrid asked.
“Poetry.” Hannah shrugged. “What we’re reading. Music, all kinds of things. She sometimes talks about something she saw on the news. Stuff you wouldn’t even think twice about, but she gets some take on it that’s just incredible.”
The transformation of the world.
“She talks about you,” Julie said.
That was a surprise. “What’s she say about me?”
“That you’re, you know, at a school. She feels terrible about what’s happened,” Hannah said. “For you most of all.”
Astrid looked at these girls, college girls, with their fresh makeup-less faces, trusting, caring. And she felt the gap between them, the same gap she felt with most people, all the things she wouldn’t be because she was who she was. When she graduated from here, she wasn’t going to a place like Pitzer, that was for sure. She was the old child, the past that had to be burned away, so her mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from ash. Astrid tried to see Ingrid through their eyes. The beautiful imprisoned poetic soul, the suffering genius. Did her mother suffer? She forced herself to imagine it. She certainly suffered when Barry kicked her out of his house that day, after sleeping with her. But when she killed him, the suffering was somehow redeemed. Was she suffering now? Astrid really couldn’t say.
“So you thought you’d come out and what?” Astrid asked. “Adopt me?”
She laughed but they didn’t. Astrid had grown too hard, maybe she was more like her mother than she thought.
Julie gave Hannah a told you so look. Astrid could see this had been the sandy girl’s idea. “Yeah, well, sort of. If you wanted.”
Their sincerity so unexpected, their sympathies so misplaced. “You don’t think she killed him, do you,” Astrid realized.
Hannah shook her head, quickly. “It’s all been a terrible mistake. A nightmare. She talks all about it in the interview.”
Astrid was sure she had. She was always at her best with an audience. “Something you should know,” Astrid told them firmly. “She did kill him.”
Hannah stared at her. Julie’s gaze fled to her friend. They were shocked. Actually shocked; Astrid almost couldn't believe it. Julie stepped protectively toward her gauzy friend, and Astrid felt suddenly cruel, like she’d told small children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed. But they weren’t small children, they were women, they were admiring someone they didn’t know the first thing about.
Look at the hag Truth for once, college girl.
“That’s not true,” Hannah said. Shook her head, shook it again, as if she could clear my words out of it. “It isn’t.”
She was asking Astrid to tell her it wasn’t.
“I was there,” Astrid told her. “I saw her mix up the medicine. She’s not what she seems.”
“She’s still a great poet,” Julie said.
“Yes,” Astrid agreed. “A killer and a poet.”
Hannah played with a button on the front of her gray dress, and it popped off in her hand. She stared at it in her
palm, her face stained red as beet borscht. “She must have had her reasons. Maybe he was beating her.”
“He wasn’t beating her.” Astrid put her hands on her knees and pushed herself into a standing position. She felt suddenly very tired.
Julie looked up at her, brown eyes serious and calm. Astrid would have thought her more sensible than Hannah, less likely to have been taken in by Ingrid’s spell. “Why’d she do it, then?”
“Why do people kill people who leave them?” Astrid asked. “Because they feel hurt and angry and they can’t stand that feeling.”
“I’ve felt that way,” Hannah said. The mid-day light of the sun was touching the curly escaped ends of her hair, making a frizzy halo around her fair head.
“But you didn’t kill anyone,” Astrid said.
“I wanted to.”
Astrid looked at her, twisting the hem of her vintage dress with the small flowers, the front gapping open where the button fell off, her stomach was rosy. “Sure. Maybe you even fantasized about how you would do it. You didn’t do it. There’s a huge difference.”
A bird somewhere sang, maybe in a rooftop nearby, maybe from inside the flower shop itself, a spill of liquid sound.
“Maybe not so big a difference,” Julie said. “Some people are just more impulsive than others.”
Astrid slapped the magazine against the leg of her jeans. They were going to justify her some way. Protect the Goddess Beauty no matter what. They were willing to forgive her anything. “Look, thanks for coming, but I have to get to work."
“I wrote my number on the back of the magazine,” Hannah said, rising. “Call if you, you know. Want to.”
Her new children. Astrid stood there on the steps in front of the flower shop and watched them go back, probably to a car waiting for them at the end of the causeway. A useless, pointless journey, across time, across the country, just to leave again with disappointment.
[[ NFI, as it goes straight into the proper shop post here. That Astrid had people looking for her to talk about her mother is A-OK, but if the specific details could be NFB, it would be appreciated. Taken and modified slightly from White Oleander by Janet Fitch. We're finally out of Chapter 27! Huzzah! ]]