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What is a Rutabaga?
"I don't know, for the love of God!"
"Listen, man, it's not up to me. But we are going to start jamming toothpicks under your fingers. And not those new plastic ones. The ones we used yesterday that just bent and didn't go under your fingernails at all. Stupid dental hygienists, improving on something that was just fine the way it was. Really bugs me, sometimes."
"I think those might have been those new floss things you guys were trying to use... I tried it once... it's like some plastic needle you're supposed to thread between your teeth."
"Really?"
"Yeah." He wiggled his fingers. "They're, you know, new."
"What you think of 'em?"
"Well...," his fingers waved again. Somewhere, deep down the corridor from the room they were in, the tinny sound of music drifted towards them with one hand trailing along the wall as it slinked along, looking for a window or something on to the outside.
"Oh come on, man. Look, if it sucked, it sucked, right?"
"Well, it didn't suck. It was just... well, like floss. Except it had this needle part at the beginning to make it easier to get it in between your teeth, I suppose."
"Yeah? And was it?" He gestured at his teeth with the knife he was holding in his left hand.
"Not really, to be honest with you." The knife waved some more.
"Really? That sucks, man. Marketing hype got you, did it?"
"Not really. It was free, with this grocery card I was using."
He dropped the knife he was holding in his left hand, almost spearing his left foot, and then bouncing across the floor at an awkward angle that almost coincided with the bound man's feet. He wasn't, as you might have guessed, a lefty, and he wouldn't have been distraught at the loss of his left foot, but the clanging steel against tile jolted him back into the room. The scent of burning tinsel wafted down the hall, poking its head in each of the rooms as it went, looking for the music, which had stopped at some point.
They both looked at the knife, which had settled by a leg of the chair.
The man, now knife-less, shrugged. "Well, nothing lost, anyway, right?"
"Right. Thing is. Look. I don't think what you were using yesterday was that floss. Whoa, whoa." He held up the fingers on both his hands. The rope made a slight creaking noise against the chair and chafed that little bit more. "Ehm... look."
"What?" It came out like 'whart?', which he hadn't intended.
"Ehm, I don't know. I was trying to buy some more time."
"For what?"
"You know, I'm not sure."
The now knife-less man swung quickly out the door and the other man could hear his heels echoing down the hall, like he was chasing the burning tinsel smell, chasing the music.
disclaimer:
Continuing our "Is it from one of the Sane Magazine novels or not" series, this one may or may not star one of the main torturers from the tinsel factory in the ground-breaking Time, a novel.
Nice, huh?
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