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Coral Singer
"Laaaaa la laaaaaaa loh-oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhhhhah-owwwww~~" the noises trailed off down the hallway.
And somewhere, down the hall, applause broke out. "It was probably the television," she thought. It was always the dam television.
At the tender age of six, she was whisked from her home, as they did in those days. Off to join the Orange Revolution. The leanest, meanest academy in Bratislotsova[1] for all sorts of things.
And she was made to choose.
The girl was made to stand in a line with dozens of other children of about the same age. As they all stood there, in the rather cramped lobby of their new home, a withered old woman, who looked like the girl imagined a prune would look like, if it had arms, legs, and a little bun of grey greasy hair on top, came up and down the line, picking children out seemingly at random, and sending them off to their assigned rooms with a sharp snap of her wrist. She held a napkin, folded slightly, in her hand that did the snapping, which accentuated the motion with the most violent snaps the girl had ever heard.
The little girl looked ahead at the little old woman's head, which she held down while she paused, looking down at her napkin.
"what do you choose?" said the woman. Or so the girl thought.
"Sorry? Pardon?" said the girl.
"what do you choose?" said the woman. She definitely said it this time. The napkin quivered slightly. The girl didn't remember any of this for any of the other kids. She looked around at her peers, who all studiously avoided her gaze. That or they all suffered from the very same affliction that seems to have suddenly struck the old woman. Man, she hoped it wasn't like anything in the air, maybe they were feeding nerve gas into the air ducts, and she was the last to feel it and it was only a matter of minutes before it took hold of her nervous system and her head, too, would sink to her chest. Her mom always said she was quite tough, and had had a curious expression about surviving nerve gas. Maybe it wasn't just a saying, the girl was thinking now. Man, she was forgetting her real parents already... her memories of them fading like mist, like odourless and colourless nerve gas, in fact.
The old woman stomped her very rough hobnail boot down on the girl's foot and glared up at her. "choose!"
Well, she knew right then and there that ballerina was out.
But what else was there?
In the end, it all came down to [2]... coral singer!
Now, now she knew that it wasn't actually a coral singer at all, it was a choral singer, but it all sounded the same, and besides, sometimes she'd go out there in a coral pink dress. But then, well, then she was six. Hell, boys are flighty and sometimes stupid at six...
And anyway, tonight she was going on stage... tonight she was going to knock 'em dead, literally.
Because under those lovely folds of coral pink and bluish bows, inspired by that picture of the reef somewhere, she had a VEPR II 308 Rifle with a 10 round magazine, and five more magazines where that came from. Which was, in case you weren't paying attention, in the folds of her dress.
Possibly to be continued...
footnotes:
[1] Name changed to protect the fiction. Sure.
Inspiration drawn from (albeit after the actual naming of the fictitious country that may or may not resemble an actual country, or at least the actual representation that a certain someone may have in their mind when they think of an actual country, which, it turns out, is fictitious in itself) bratwurst, and slot machines. No, the ficitious country is not Reno. Least of all because they don't take children away from their families at young ages to become top athletes in Reno and the lack of country-hood that Reno possesses (or fails to possess, in the case of positive country-ness). The colour orange is used in relation to this country because the fictitious or real country that this country may or may not be based on is certainly not affiliated with the colour orange in any way, at least insofar as the author knew.
[2] She had so many thoughts. As six year old girls do. They've got a lot on their minds, they do. And it seemed like her thoughts were sort of floating, like butterflies. Or like all those little bits of glittery dust in the ocean she'd seen in a National Geographic once, drifting down in rays on to the pink and blue coral...
disclaimer:
Thanks for everything, we'll see you next week.
Tiger.
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