Fic Orphans: Looking for Home

[sjames_centre]

Moon suggested this- so here goes....

I don't have a lot of WIPs- I tend to get obsessed with finishing once I start, but these three linger on the shelf. Any others I lost when my computer crashed on the weekend.

1) Birthday Story (part of about 5 pages so far)

It was a kitten two years later. It had one eye and half a tail and a name that would embarrass any cat, but it crawled out of its gift-wrapped hatbox up onto Hutch’s shoulder and purred a promise in his ear that only he could hear. Each day it hunted mice and birds, and spent each night curled on the pillow by Hutch’s head. His friend Christopher, two months younger and three inches taller, told him a cat was a girlie sort of pet. “Boys have dogs, don’t your aunt know nothing?” Chris shook his almost ten year old head in disgust. “A cat . . . jeez, Kenny . . . at least change its name to something decent.”

 

“You can’t just change someone’s name. Anyway, my dad says it’s his name that makes him a good mouser. It’s like he’s got something to prove.”

 

“He’s only got one eye,” Chris added stubbornly. “He’s not even a good cat.”

 

“It keeps him on his toes. He’s got to keep moving to get the whole picture.” Hutch didn’t tell him how he felt that way sometimes too, that he was seeing only half the world at a time, and that danger lurked in the part he could never see.

2) From a five things story (I have two things so far....)

 

When his Aunt Mary offered to sell him the car, big and blue and with enough chrome to outfit a hundred bathrooms, he had to tell her—hands in his pockets and dragging one shoe across the braided rug in her living room—that he had no money to buy it. She offered a payment plan, ten dollars a month for ten months, but his father said no to that too. Hutch would’ve been happy if he’d just said “no” and left it at that, but nothing was ever that simple in the Hutchinson home. Instead, he received a lecture about the evils of credit and the sin of living beyond one’s means. While his father talked, Hutch imagined how he might finally convince Darla to do “it” with him if he could offer her the enormous back seat of the De Soto to do it in. He imagined her dark hair fanned out against the cracked white leather, her bare legs wrapped around his hips . . . His father ended that fantasy by stating that the car would stay with Aunt Mary until Hutch had the money, and that was that. Hutch retreated to his room, and between cold showers and long visits to the bathroom, between reading The Three Musketeers and wishing he was old enough to leave school and get a real job, he worked on a plan. One that let him earn the most money in the shortest time, and that would get him the car before Darla lost interest and decided to offer her virginity to Billy Bracken instead of him. Billy’s father owned a shiny new Cadillac, and Hutch knew that loyalty and devotion were not two of Darla’s best qualities. He was familiar with Darla’s two best qualities, having been allowed to slip one hand under her blouse at the movies one Saturday night during the long chariot scene in Ben-Hur.

3) older guys story

 

When my partner died, I died too.
He was dead the minute he hit the ground, it just took two months to make it official. The death certificate said
multi-organ failure brought on by septicemia and pneumonia. That was a lie. 
He died because someone shot him in the back. Four times.

He never woke up. Not even for me. The doctors warned me he probably wouldn’t, not after the second stroke. 
But I never really believed them, despite what I said. I always thought we’d get our big moment, the one that would 
make lies of all their predictions. I thought he’d open his eyes and smile at me, that we’d get to spend the rest of our lives testifying 
how love could make miracles happen. How prayer could move mountains. Maybe it can. Maybe I just picked the wrong God to pray to. 
Either way, none of it—the praying, the wishing, the waiting, the deal I put on the table, his life for mine—did any good.